As you watch The Spitfire Grill flicker by on the screen, it’s difficult not to ask yourself whether the writer-director, Lee David Zlotoff, honestly thought the movie he was making was a grand tragedy rather than a mere melodrama. Sure enough, as Zlotoff cautiously unfolds his sentimental tale–about a dreamy…
During a summer movie season dominated by a 300-pound celluloid gorilla named Independence Day, The USA Film Festival has offered a smashing August menu of sci-fi classics to remind moviegoers that once, not so long ago, the genre provided greater opportunities for audience involvement than thrills and chills. This is…
This is the time of year when Heifer Women insist on wearing white shorts that look like they were designed for Sumo wrestlers. What’s going on with this? Entire Wal-Marts are filled with human beanbag chairs stuffed into the kind of sportswear that only looks good on Gabriela Sabatini. In…
John Carpenter had big-studio backing after the sleeper success of his independent thriller, Halloween, yet his follow-up film, Escape from New York, had the same cheap, low-budget look of some cheesy B-movie made by a film-school geek–which, essentially, it was. The movie was pure silliness: Could any audience in 1981…
Although my father has hidden it well, his greatest parenting disappointment probably has been that a jock like him produced an offspring as indifferent to sports as his only son. Sure, the Olympics are great, rah-rah-rah for the college team and all that, but I must be missing something more…
Here’s a dirty little secret about film critics that won’t make an amusing bon mot at the next National Society of Film Critics dinner, unless you want Pauline Kael to introduce her cane to your head: Critics are herd animals by instinct. There are disagreements, to be sure; the next…
What are the seven most dreaded words in the history of civilization? Of course, you know what I’m talking about. “I need to talk about the relationship.” Wanda Bodine was on me about this last week. She left it on the answering machine. After a three-day drunk in Mexico, I…
The season began unspectacularly, with no sign of questionable new trends. Then slowly but surely, this summer’s insidious onslaught made itself known. First, Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor, an obese research scientist, discovers a “secret formula” through which he can re-create himself by transforming his own DNA. Next, in Multiplicity, Michael…
I don’t know what I expected Douglas McGrath to look and sound like after I had been told the writer-director of Miramax’s sterling new version of Emma was born and raised in Midland, Texas. But the last thing I imagined was the polite, dapper, dandyish man with the glittering eyes…
Have you noticed that the only people who know how to do anything are from other countries? These two Armenian brothers are the only guys I’ll let work on my car. I can never pronounce their names, so I refer to ’em as the Skinny Goofy One and the Stocky…
The era of the mom-and-pop video store has pretty much died in Dallas, with the thrilling exception of four stalwart independents: Tapelenders on Cedar Springs; Premiere Video at Mockingbird and Central; and Forbidden Books and Alternative Videos in Exposition Park. Genre is the operative word at each of these valuable…
Everyone thinks he was the first to adore Louise Fitzhugh’s remarkably sophisticated 1964 short novel, Harriet the Spy. As with sex or illicit drugs, your average adolescent must be turned on to Fitzhugh’s smart-aleck exploration of a lonely girl’s traumatic introduction to the consequences of honesty. I had a whip-smart,…
You ever get advice like this? “Gee, that’s a horrible story, Joe Bob. You should prob’ly just swear off women entirely.” That makes you feel great, doesn’t it? It’s sort of like hearing, “You seem to be a toxic individual. Everything you touch turns to dog doo-doo.” I mean, you…
Ticket buyers should know there is a controversial presumption behind Trainspotting, the remarkable new feature by director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge–that drugs are fun. Specifically, heroin. The synthetic morphine substitute that keeps creeping back into ’90s headlines–most recently, with the overdose death of Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Danny Melvoin…
A Time to Kill, like just about everything seeping from John Grisham’s popular pen, points up the author’s two weaknesses as storyteller: plotting, and everything else. In this fairly routine courtroom drama, a cocky young Mississippi attorney named Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey), craving success and adulation, agrees to represent Carl…
The Scottish accents are so thick in Trainspotting that for the first few minutes you’re not sure the characters are really saying what you’re hearing. Could it be–in the politically correct ’90s–that the central characters of a film are extolling the virtues of heroin addiction? Can these smart, interesting, vigorous…
Why is it that the people on airplanes who look like they have no jobs are always the ones who have to get off the plane immediately to get somewhere? Check out the guy with the six-day growth of beard carrying a paper sack full of greasy buffalo wings. As…
Peter Jackson’s brief resume as a writer-director is about as impressive as any independent filmmaker. Three genre films–Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead-Alive–preceded his art-house breakthrough Heavenly Creatures, but they all bespoke a peculiar, highly individualized voice. Whether you like his movies or not, you have to acknowledge how…
A month into its much-heralded summer release, Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame has begun a slow limp down the box-office ladder. Everybody who harbors ill will toward this film–and there are a surprising number who do–want to take credit for its (relatively) poor performance with the public. Southern Baptists…
Here it is, the review you’ve all been waiting for, the one in which Joe Bob compares Striptease (estimated budget, 40 million bucks) to Stripteaser (estimated budget, 40 bucks). Guess which one’s better. You already know, don’t ya? Striptease stars Demi Moore, who received $12.5 million for her performance and…
For me, there is no movie moment that has ever approximated the satisfaction I felt when, on my 12th birthday, I saw Death Star blown apart for the first time. In my mind, I was witnessing something that could only be called cataclysmic–tempered by the pure-adrenaline joy of seeing the…
Once again, the Hollywood Foreign Press Corps has forced us into a crisis situation, so I am announcing the winners of the 1996 Drive-In Academy Awards one week early. The late announcement this year was believed to be hampering peace efforts in both Bosnia and the Golan Heights, as otherwise…
