It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide –A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor–with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an especially profound film,…
To hell with PETA: They really should test producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies on animals before releasing them. Just unleashing them into theaters every few months seems so unhealthy, like spraying pesticide into the water supply or selling decaying fish to Chinese restaurants and calling it “pork.” Every few months, a…
Honestly now, have you, of late, found yourself enthralled by pleasing stimuli? Please, no nauseating responses like “Aromatherapy shifts my reality” or “After I get rolfed, my heart is more open to love.” Instead, think of the good, serendipitous stuff, the random intoxicants that bombard your subcutaneous organs. For example,…
Mike White, the writer and star of Chuck & Buck, has grown a little weary of all the intense scrutiny from writers who interview him for the film. But he’s sensible enough to know that it’s part of the press drill for a hot indie property. He also understands why…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent, and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old man-child who eats lollipops all day, takes refuge in…
For one moment–and that’s all you can stomach–really look at Eddie Murphy’s filmography. You will notice how his bad films (and most transcend that feeble definition, falling more often into the “wretched” category) far outweigh the good. You will see that those few good films–Murphy’s Holy Trinity of Funny: 48…
It’s a premise that’s bound to succeed. A young man living on the edge is trying to pull it all together while frequenting 12-step programs and holding down a job that seems calculated to drive him insane. Searching for a way out, he makes contact with a mysterious figure who…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title–What Lies Beneath–as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include: a glaringly improbable shift…
Twelve hours after seeing Loser, the only thing I could remember about it was Alan Cumming’s performance of “Willkommen” from the 1998 Broadway production of Cabaret–which isn’t technically even in the movie, since the scene is obviously spliced in to make it appear as though the film’s two would-be lovebirds…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews murdered in Auschwitz. In…
It has taken moviemakers and, more crucially, foot-dragging movie investors almost a decade to catch up with rave culture–the heady mix of secret warehouses, electronic music, designer drugs, and ecstatic dancing that has come to define the yearning and the restlessness of a generation. But now, the 5 a.m. faithful…
Kenneth Branagh’s latest adaptation of Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, is not swooningly wonderful; rather, it is simply quite nice. Kindly note the distinction: If the movie were a dinner guest, it would not be the brash charmer who transforms your party into a par-tay; it would be the crisply attired…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical auto-pilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood-chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen mythos…
Imagine being given a do-over, a free pass to correct yesterday’s mistakes and missteps. Perhaps you’d choose a different job, a different lover, a different life; perhaps you’d reinvent yourself altogether, since you have in your possession the gift of hindsight. You know where you went wrong last time; tomorrow,…
Why is the film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible that the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated in the title? Or was this an attempt to…
Is there a more bankrupt genre than the parody movie? Many movies nowadays are so painfully self-aware and referential that there often isn’t much left to make fun of, which is especially the case for Kevin Williamson-penned films like Scream and its clones, clichéd teen-slasher movies that were regarded as…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape–or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape–in Jesus’ Son, an uneven but often effective adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character known to his friends…
In his discomfiting 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind painted a none-too-flattering portrait of a post-Jaws Steven Spielberg. The author portrayed him as a raging egomaniac who wanted a writing credit on the film, though he contributed very little to the script. Indeed, the film’s most famous monologue,…
The press kit for The Perfect Storm contains the damnedest thing I’ve ever read. Right at the top, there is a “special request to the press” that reads, in full: “Warner Bros. Pictures would appreciate the press’ cooperation in not revealing the ending of this film to their readers, viewers…
Despite what many believe, it doesn’t come down to explosions, star power, or millions of greenbacks thrown at the producers. The true indicator of success for a summer movie is The Moment, that one memorable scene that sticks in your head, the one that Billy Crystal parodies the following spring…
So this is what Robert De Niro’s career has come to, starring in films in which he parodies his most familiar roles until he becomes the master painter urinating on his own beautiful canvases. Last year, it was pleasant and harmless enough: Analyze This was no Sopranos, but at least…
For most Americans, the social and political issues underlying Jose Luis Cuerda’s ButterflyButterflybBu may seem remote at best. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, and dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have stirred strong…
