We should be ashamed for overlooking the Vistas Film Festival last year, its first in existence. In our haste to cover those in Deep Ellum and Fort Worth, and in our haste to once more bury the USA Film Festival, this four-day celebration of Latin film fell between the cracks,…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…
According to Patrice Leconte, women live to be vulnerable, men thrive when they are in command, and the two genders can only find happy fusion once they’ve tasted each other’s fates…unless they capriciously kill each other. At least, this seems to be the director’s thesis in Girl on the Bridge,…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to…
Remember the Titans–based on a true story about how a football team brought together a segregated Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s–is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow, slam-bang filmography suggests: Flashdance, The Rock,…
It takes a special mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphorical or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing to suit…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood really wants to do–writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike–is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many, the notion that Sally Field–after Gidget and Sister Bertrille and “You like me…you really…
One of the benefits of being a famous television actor is that you’re allowed backstage, that roped-off wonderland most audience members believe to be an orgiastic utopia of groupies and booze. Little do fans realize how mundane it really is behind the velvet rope–cold cuts and bottled water, and musicians…
Much has changed for urban gays in the 21 years since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller–set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village–was derided by gay rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly designed to exacerbate…
American culture has not been kind to the ’60s. Outside of the extraordinarily resilient appeal of the pop music of the time, the period has become–for more than one of the several subsequent generations of college students–the embarrassing punch line to a bad joke. The movies have also not been…
In the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist, made for the BBC and available on The Exorcist 25th-anniversary DVD, director William Friedkin spends a great deal of time explaining why he excised certain scenes from his film, scenes author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty had…
I didn’t know about comedienne-actress Margaret Cho’s struggles with depression and drug and alcohol addiction, nor about her near-death from kidney failure brought on by extreme dieting. In fact, I didn’t know anything about her at all except that she had been the star of a short-lived television sitcom I…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical but sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on…
“This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
It’s unfortunate the title Being John Malkovich has already been taken, as it’s a far better one than Bait–and far more appropriate to boot. As Bristol, a computer expert and wily thief and cold-blooded killer, Doug Hutchison is the human sampling machine. His is a routine coddled together from the…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
So many intense themes run rampant in Joe Charbanic’s debut feature, The Watcher, that it’s tricky to keep up. For instance, a young lady who lives alone with her cat seems ominously doomed. Then there’s the gripping premise that borrowing from nihilistic wanker David Fincher (Se7en) or industrial scamp Trent…
At the age of 10, young Martin (Jeremy Kreikenmayer) is forced by his single mother to finally meet the father he had avioded seeing every year. Nothing wrong with that–at least on the surface; boys heading into adolescence need their fathers. Dad (Pierre Maguelon), as is often the case in…
There’s plenty of campaign rhetoric about working families, but who ever talks about one of the biggest problems of the working man today–massive corporate downsizing? In the era of record profits and welfare “reform,” all that matters is having any kind of job, whether or not it’s the one you…
Humans and their stories, my oh my. Somehow, the familiar themes just keep coming around, again and again, ad infinitum. Of course, most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the…
This is the beginning of The Way of the Gun you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker (Ryan Phillippe, sporting a pubic beard) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro, looking lost and dangerous), urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up…
It seems like he has always been there, this man whose presence is as inescapable as heat on the sun. He taught the children of the 1970s how to read, pronouncing letters until they formed words until they became sentences; they called him “Easy Reader,” because he made learning such…
