First, the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
A certain kind of movie lover adores anything and everything foreign–French romantic comedies, Chinese historical dramas, English studies of class conflict. This is a perfectly defensible bias to hold, since the cinema does nothing better than take the stories of distant neighborhoods and write them so large across the screen…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…
OK, we’re into the mopping-up phase now. It’s the fifth and final week of the Drive-In Academy Award nominations, and so far we’ve received a total of 34 ballots–54 if you count inmates. This is the kind of apathy that led to Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, we begin with the increasingly…
Make no mistake: Twin Town ain’t Trainspotting, baby. Even though on its poster–and soundtrack–two of its stars are posed in mid-lunge, crouching as though running from a Cannes jury aching to cram some prize down their throats…just like Trainspotting. Even though Twin Town’s executive producers directed (Danny Boyle) and produced…
In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My…
Yes indeed, it’s Dinosaur Week in the 1997 Drive-In Academy Award nominations, time for our annual recognition of those who have just made too goldurn many B movies. This has always been a popular category, even though Morgan Fairchild once won it three years in a row and her dominance…
Picking up the press kit for the new gay comedy-drama Love! Valour! Compassion!, I was primed to find a dictionary noting the multiple meanings of “queen.” Of course, this enterprise is too self-consciously tasteful to commit such a faux pas. Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning work has been called “one of…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Last week I belted down three whiskeys, grabbed a couple of ammo belts, and prepared to enter the Place of Unspeakable Darkness. Rhett Beavers wanted to go to… The Computer Store. Why do all the people in computer stores look like terrorists? Their hairdos stick out in 17 different directions,…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out–even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so it’s pleasant…
Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
I have this friend Donovan who has a thing for flight attendants. You’d realize why right away if you got a look at Donovan. He’s one of those Gucci-loafer-hanging-halfway-off-the-foot sorta guys. He’s got a Movado watch that’s so expensive it doesn’t have hands OR digital readouts OR anything else on…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in such films as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
I ran into Rusty Tisworthy down at the pool hall, where he normally takes up space by making bets on how many times you can twist the wingnut on the bottom of a Mixmaster. And Rusty started tellin’ this nasty story about the sex he had last weekend, and lemme…
When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multipart Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, the series producer, Joan Sullivan, said, “I think that great stories [like Tolstoy’s] are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was…
In Ellen Ousmano’s book Movies for a Desert Isle, in which film notables discuss the one movie they’d take along if stranded on…well, you get the picture…John Waters says, “I think I’d take a movie with me I’d never seen because that way it’d be a surprise.” Waters almost seems,…
What two words at a cocktail party are guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over and your brain start throbbing like you were just shot up with three quarts of Lithium? “School board.” Listen to me: I DON’T WANNA HEAR ABOUT IT! OK? I’m sure it’s important and everything, but…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from the Irish Tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly folk, and…
