It has been 24 years since Jaws changed the face of the film industry and made director Steven Whatshisname moderately well-known, and it’s probably safe to say that no aquatic horror film, let alone a shark film, will ever top it. So I’d like to think that director Renny Harlin…
Runaway Bride, the reunion of Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel; it only feels like one. In everything, there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Speed and Twister director Jan de Bont — an idea that should sound unpromising,…
International film critics who have raved about veteran French farceur Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game (Le Diner De Cons), only to qualify the goings-on in this serviceable but meringuey little chuckler as “cruel” and “punishing,” clearly haven’t taken in a comedy by American filmmaker Neil LaBute. In much the same…
Leslie Jordan, the 44-year-old veteran of TV sitcoms and dramas, is probably sick to death of hearing this, but the first thing you might whisper as he strides onto the stage is: “He’s so little.” Actors who make strong impressions often seem larger under the spotlight than they do in…
Most of us like to think of ourselves as flexible, to think of the stodgy “establishment” that rejects new ideas as a thing of the past, a thing that can’t keep up with rapid change, or at least a thing that we won’t subsidize with our own fleeting prejudices. But…
It’s not very hip for a grown man to say things like “happy little trees” and “pretty little mountains” — that is, if he wants to keep his street cred. Bob Ross — with his big ‘fro, unbuttoned shirt, and virtually narcotic voice — probably never even knew what street…
Do you have the sneaking suspicion that the grossly overhyped The Blair Witch Project is about to send a spate of college drop-outs flooding into the woods across from their parents’ homes with cameras and credit cards in tow? Or that a score of video-store clerks have forced their reluctant…
On Friday, it was announced that The Dallas Morning News’ publisher, Belo Corp., purchased a minority stake in the Dallas Mavericks: 12.38 percent of the team for $24 million. The deal also gives the newspaper 6.19 percent non-voting interest in The Arena Group, Tom Hicks and Ross Perot Jr.’s company…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Want to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
For anyone who may be considering Inspector Gadget, here’s the sole worthwhile gag; read this if you want to save 80 minutes and eight bucks. Intercut with the end credits, we see one of the heavies in the film, Sikes (Michael G. Hagerty), a minion of the evil supergenius Claw…
Roughly halfway through Edge of Seventeen, the hero of this romantic comedy-drama, a very likable kid named Eric (Chris Stafford), is confronted by his mother (Stephanie McVay) in the living room of their home. “Are you gay?” she asks him point-blank. And his point-blank answer is “No.” I can’t think…
Playwright Maria Irene Fornes said in an interview that during a post-production talkback she attended at the American Place Theatre for her in-and-out-of-the-chamber-room drama Fefu and Her Friends, she discovered that the men didn’t “get” the play. She wondered whether it had to do with the fact that women are…
And now on to a quieter, sturdier, more focused, if a bit overlong account of one woman’s grappling with the forces of church, literary reputation, professional sexism, and a love for someone not her husband. And it was written by a man, no less. I can’t claim that as any…
The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s circus is coming to town, and for the first time in more than 70 years, there’s going to be a grand circus parade. All the clowns, the acrobats, the gymnasts, and the sideshow stars will wind their way from Reunion Arena through downtown,…
It seems as if the ’70s became a joke around, oh, January 1, 1980. The things we associate with the decade — from leisure suits to avocado-green appliances to John Travolta — went quickly out of vogue when the ’80s began; free love turned into harsh ridicule. But in the…
The field has been barren for nearly 30 years, a plot of land in Fort Worth where only ghosts by the names of Duke Snider and Irv Noren and so many others play catch. You can see the baseball field only “in the mind’s eye,” says the man who owns…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only 13 features in his 46-year career,…
Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick had a star-crossed relationship — like two planets dancing in orbit with each other, achieving perfect alignment, then veering off into remote areas of the universe. They met in 1962, when they needed each other most: Stanley was preparing to make a movie about the…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters have shot their wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers” — thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such…
First, the good news: The title of the high school comedy/Gen-X nostalgia flick The Wood is not, despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself, and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb best…
