The first time I saw Annette Bening was in Valmont, Milos Forman’s adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. She played Madame de Merteuil, a part portrayed the previous year by Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons. Both actresses gave terrific performances, although they couldn’t have interpreted the role more differently: where Close’s…
How do you spot the people in the office who are indulging in Happy-Hour Nookie? Of course, we all know the answer to that one: The ones who never speak to each other in the office. The reason you can’t talk in the office if you’re in the middle of…
If you aren’t already familiar with the sound a Theremin makes, I’m not sure I can describe it to you. The Theremin was the first electronic musical instrument, and its eerie, plaintive squeal approximates a tone somewhere between a violin, a kazoo, and controlled microphone feedback. Because it has one…
The voice that comes across the phone line from New York City is fearlessly confident and authoritative–except when it becomes agitated or passionate about a certain point. At that moment, Agnieszka Holland’s language begins to speed up and she’s wont to stutter or repeat herself. Either way, her elegant Eastern…
Is it my imagination, or are there a whole lot of little kids gettin’ medicated every day? I hear about this drug Ritalin all the time. “Yeah, my kid’s on Ritalin. He was so hyperactive we had to give it to him to calm him down.” And you go: “Wow!…
While you’re watching Jodie Foster’s second directorial effort (she hit notes both gorgeous and discordant with Little Man Tate, her 1991 debut as a filmmaker), you might find yourself wondering exactly when you’ve seen a comedy-drama paced like this one before. Certainly, most people expect the laughs and the pathos…
I have a question. Whatever happened to the 40-hour work week? Didn’t we fight for, like, a hundred years to force all the greedy capitalists to give us a 40-hour work week so we could have all this hammock time we needed? I don’t know anybody who works 40 hours…
In the 1980 Woody Allen film Stardust Memories, a Martian descends upon the troubled hero Sandy Bates. Sandy is a movie director in crisis, full of doubts about everything from his creative output to the existence of God to the meaning of life. “If nothing lasts,” he asks in frustration,…
As Feast of July opens, we are introduced to a young woman named Bella (Embeth Davidtz) as she hikes across the rugged hillside of southern England. Obviously exhausted, she makes her way with great difficulty to a shelter where she begins crying out in agony. Soon the camera shows what…
You ever go to one of these groovy tourist towns like Santa Fe, N.M., or Sedona, Ariz., or Eureka Springs, Ark., where they sell genuine folk-art paintings of cows wading through a stream and necklaces with turquoise roosters painted on ’em? Wouldn’t you expect some 85-year-old Ozarks lady with wrinkly…
If you had any doubts that the Hollywood script factory has run out of things to say about serial killers, Copycat stumbles into theaters like a badly miscalculated pratfall. Indeed, everything about this unimaginatively directed, awkwardly structured, but expertly performed thriller suggests filmmaking by committee, too many hands converging to…
How’s this for a movie plot: two unlikely friends – one a responsible, buttoned-down dud, the other a bewildered, manic slacker – experience relationship dilemmas, take refuge in a sea of commercialism, and neatly resolve all their problems (ranging from the unexpected death of an acquaintance to run-ins with the…
Editor’s note: With this issue, Arnold Wayne Jones, a Dallas attorney and writer, joins the Observer as a regular contributor and film critic. There’s a joke about the movie business that gets revived occasionally in one form or another, usually following the latest success of Benji, or Lassie, or Mr…
A Roland Joffe film just wouldn’t be a Roland Joffe film without a flaming cart rolling uncontrollably through the town square; I’d swear there was one in The Mission, The Killing Fields, even, if I remember correctly, City of Joy. I’m at somewhat of a loss to explain why Joffe…
I have a question about “women’s studies.” Did you know you can get a Ph.D. in this? You can basically spend your whole life at a college proving how the reason the world is all screwed up is that there are too dang many men in it. People go to…
As if the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t have a big enough public-relations disaster after the O.J. Simpson murder case, along comes Strange Days, a futuristic action thriller whose entire convoluted plot depends on one act of racist violence by an LAPD cop. Judging by the unprecedented level of media…
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant almost scored another flop to go along with his last film–Even Cowgirls Get the Blues–based on the kind of advance notice his latest movie, To Die For, got before it hit Cannes. The audiences at that much-hyped Italian film festival have been known to commit sin–deluging…
According to its movie poster, Dead Presidents, the latest Hughes brothers film, is about “getting paid.” Truer to fact, the second outing by the brothered ones is as flat and senseless as the white faces printed on that poster’s pile of greenbacks. And when you read the film’s slogan, “Dead…
“Did you have a good flight?” Why do people say this? I hate it when people say this to me. What’s a “good flight”? You get on the airplane, the airplane doesn’t crash–that’s a good flight. Does somebody really wanna hear about the frozen Three Musketeers ice cream bar they…
I went out to El Lay last week and, for the first time in my life, I felt nekkid without a cellular. I actually wanted to hold a cellular in my hand. I went to lunch with three guys at one of those restaurants with a veranda where you can…
One of the biggest box-office successes in the history of Japanese cinema, The Mystery of Rampo arrives on these shores as a limited engagement in a few major markets. Indeed, the film has been booked for one week only at Landmark’s Inwood Theatre, so if you want to catch this…
When you hear that an upcoming film has generated a positive “buzz,” that usually means one thing–studios expect it to make money and win positive critical reactions and a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jocelyn Moorhouse’s multi-generational comic-romantic epic How To Make an American Quilt has created so much advance excitement…
