Since Chuck Jones is the subject of a tribute at the Dallas Museum of Art this weekend, I have an excuse to wax eloquent about how much joy his work has given me over the years. The legendary Warner Bros. animator’s distinctively rough draftsmanship and quirky sense of humor gave…
Those seeking an illustration of the media food chain’s numerous hypocrisies need look no further than the Hugh Grant affair. As you doubtless know, Grant was arrested last week in Hollywood for “public lewdness” with a prostitute in the back seat of a car. The ironies were irresistible: here was…
If you’re gonna make a gorilla flick, the gorilla’s got to party down. The gorilla’s got to do something. It’s either got to eat people, or else run around solving their problems. It’s got to be either a capitalist gorilla or a communist gorilla. There’s no such thing, in the…
First Knight, a new effort from Ghost director Jerry Zucker, purports to tell the tale of King Arthur’s ill-fated marriage to Lady Guinevere–a young English noblewoman who fell madly in love with the aging king’s most trusted knight, the young, virile, reckless Lancelot. Of course it makes hash of the…
A friend of mine who writes film criticism in another city was waxing rhapsodic the other day about Maria Maggenti, the New York-based writer-director of The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. “Oh, you’re just gonna fall in love with this woman,” she told me. “After I met…
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is an awfully long title for such a short, simple movie about first love. The lovers in question are two young women of different races and social backgrounds. One is Randy Dean (Laurel Holloman), a slender redheaded white girl who lives…
His ship might be damaged beyond repair and his longtime ambition to walk on the moon dashed forever, but Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, still can’t help dreaming. As he and his fellow crewmembers float in a damaged tin can miles above the world,…
If you go to the movies a lot, the music used in the latest trailer advertising First Knight might seem awfully familiar: a grandiose, brass-and-string-heavy bit of orchestration that rises in urgency and pitch until it resolves with a hopeful C major chord. This short snippet, referred to by filmmakers…
I was disappointed in the first two Batman movies. Despite moments of genuine craziness, dark wit, and visual brilliance, they didn’t move me emotionally, and I didn’t think much of them as entertainment, either. The problem was their director, Tim Burton. He’s an artist, not a showman; a visionary, not…
Bob “Ho-Hum” Dole can’t even come up with any NEW reasons to hate Hollywood. He could have written that speech in 1909. All these goldurn violent movies like Natural Born Killers are destroying our young people. All these goldurn sexy movies like Basic Instinct are corrupting our libidos. I guess…
I’m worried about the fate of Pocahontas, Disney’s 33rd animated feature. Of all the big-budget, feature-length cartoons released by Disney in the past six years, this one–about a romance between a Native American woman and a white man who arrived in the New World seeking to conquer the land and…
Usually, Harvey Keitel isn’t a man who enjoys promoting his movies. But he seems positively eager to talk about Smoke–even if that means having to talk about himself. By turns gregarious and evasive, thoughtful and emotional, he comes across in private conversation as more nimbly intelligent and self-effacingly mellow than…
Senate majority leader Robert Dole (R-Kansas) recently blamed rappers Ice-T and Snoop Doggy Dogg; Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born Killers; the Tony Scott-Quentin Tarantino picture True Romance; and other controversial artists and art for accelerating America’s alleged free fall into social chaos. The reasoning behind Dole’s selection of four very…
Think about the most wildly popular fantasy adventures of the past couple of years–everything from Jurassic Park to the spastic Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask–and it’s a given that what you’ll remember are single images: the tyrannosaurus rex bumping its nose against the clear plexiglass roof of a jeep where…
Have you heard this one? “Maybe if we have a baby, the marriage will get better.” So lemme get this straight. You’re takin’ a couple of people who are arguing every day about how much money to should spend on a pair of high heels, or whether the orange juice…
As of about 25 years ago, it wasn’t enough anymore for a director to be a resourceful hired gun–the kind of person who could be plugged into almost any project and somehow do solid work. According to the new common wisdom, true artists were turks like Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola,…
Here’s something worth cheering: this summer, two big-budget Hollywood adventure movies, Bad Boys and Crimson Tide, have broken the $50 million mark with African-American men in colorblind leading parts–Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as tough Miami cops in the former film, and Denzel Washington as a by-the-book nuclear sub commander…
I used to think that all the Madison Avenue guys who make commercials were pretty dang clever. I remember all those movies starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon where the advertising writer is really more brilliant than his job demands, and someday he’ll write the Great American Novel. And some…
In the 16 years since he made his screen debut, Mel Gibson has seen plenty of action. Part of what makes him so charismatic is his ability to take a licking and keep on ticking: enemies can beat him, shoot him, torture and humiliate him, but he always comes back…
Has there ever been a cop show on TV where the witnesses cooperate with the cops? Has this ever happened? I was watching “Law and Order” the other day, and they were investigating a rape, and every person they talked to would say, “I don’t know nothin,” or “I don’t…
In honor of the late, great Ginger Rogers, the USA Film Festival’s First Monday Classics series is screening one of the legendary hoofer’s most beloved musicals–The Gay Divorcee. The 1934 film is one of Rogers’ greatest teamups with Fred Astaire. The plot, as you might expect, isn’t really important. What…
At the American box office, hot weather means action heroes wisecracking their way through one elaborately staged disaster after another–all that we hold dear depending on their charisma and endurance. But this is a unique summer: the country is still reeling from allegations that the Oklahoma City federal building was…
