I've got some marvelous summer adventures planned. Among my ideas: 1) Hiking Squaw Peak during an electrical storm with a copper helmet strapped to my head; 2) Supplementing my income selling authentic Apache earmuffs at freeway off-ramps; 3) Checking with the IRS to see if I can continue writing off...
No question about it. Years from now, people will grill each other about it. "Where were you when you first heard the news?" And the response will go something like this: "Jeez, I was driving around in my car, I turn on the radio and I hear someone on there...
Brazilian director Bruno Barreto is best known on these shores for the lush romanticism of the Sonia Braga travelogues Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Gabriela, and in his country for teen fluff like The Boy From Rio. With the Oscar-nominated Four Days in September, he's likely to establish...
I attended The Heiress, a play about lost love, on Valentine's Day in the company of a couple of reformed bachelors. Until recently, each of us had bombed at romance, and had resigned himself to whatever the equivalent of male spinsterhood is. Our postplay discussion--about leading with your heart instead...
Back in the '60s and '70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action "family" comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio's latest film, Krippendorf's Tribe, is very much...
Most people take a job in the music business because they secretly want to be rock singers. Mary Lou Lord became a rock singer because she secretly wants a job in the music business. "I want to have a baby, I want to have a real life," says Lord, at...
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven't been served particularly well onscreen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but in...
It's been just two years since the Academy nominated the Italian film Il Postino (a.k.a. The Postman) for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The arrival of Kevin Costner's epic The Postman raises the possibility of confusion in the Oscar history books--a very slim possibility, a...
Nothing's more frustrating than interviewing a rock band en masse. Everyone clusters around your tape recorder and blurts out stuff all at once, but rarely does anyone say anything revelatory. Generally too inhibited to criticize or too diplomatic to take all the credit for the sounds, musicians tend to respond...
With all the brutal competition from the big-ticket films prior to the December 31 Oscar deadline, Hollywood has established a tradition in recent years of dumping lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the year. In 1997, it was the airplane "thriller" Turbulence; in 1996, Bio-Dome and Two If...
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more...
Wes Craven's Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response...
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is "a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat." Isn't this simply another way of saying, "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll gag"? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who's a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless...
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing...
Southwest Survey: The new Zagat guide to Southwestern restaurants is out, covering Arizona and New Mexico. The Valley section is reasonably thorough, but not always on target. Zagat doesn't employ its own critics. Instead, the guides rely on the recommendations of locals who eat out frequently, and an editor who...
You ordinarily wouldn't consider a cheese-loving Yorkshire inventor named Wallace and his mute dog, Gromit, the stuff of cinematic stardom. But in Toonland, where cults and corporations rise from the zany fiction of talking crickets, mice, ducks, moose, flying squirrels, the Simpsons and their heavy-metal cousins Beavis and Butt-head, just...
Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn't better. During...
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films--Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)--combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he...
Howard and Emily's wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official--and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She's...
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o'-lanterns in the discotheque's low light, they have the look of trashy royalty--exalted and...
Given our now fixed image of the press as ruthless invaders of privacy who hounded Princess Di into a premature grave, it hardly seems possible that once upon a time journalists and photographers actually worked in tandem to keep a celebrity's Satyricon private life out of their pages. And no...
Having been fixated all his life with both movies and insects, Mimic director Guillermo Del Toro recently offered his expert opinion on the subject of bugs, especially huge bugs, in the movies. "There are only two giant-insect movies that are really good," he said, modestly excepting Mimic, of course. "Them!...
