Have you ever heard this? “Best movie I ever saw in my life! It’s about this guy, and he goes to this place, and then a bunch of funny things happen to him, and then he escapes–but he doesn’t really escape–and then this really goofy old friend of his whom…
For some reason I wasn’t getting any action on my new, improved personal ad for the ’90s. “Chain-Smoking Couch Potato, 35 (but looks 55), card-carrying NRA member. Hates to laugh but loves to drink pina coladas on a bass boat while watching you scuba dive. Seeking morose, big-breasted, bisexual lesbian…
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, directed by award-winning New York stage director Christopher Ashley in his feature film debut, is something of a mess. Ashley has no sense of how to build momentum within the camera’s frame, so he relies on stock TV effects–slow motion, crane shots, first-person addresses by the lead…
A glance at the names associated with Like Water For Chocolate’s Alfonso Arau’s new filmic fable A Walk in the Clouds is enough to strike terror in the heart of any Like Water cultist. Can the Mexican director’s pulsing, sexy vision survive the Zucker brothers production team, who have individually…
Upon greeting the photographer assigned to take his portrait for a newspaper profile, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau immediately turns his Crescent Court hotel suite into a set. “Do you like this light?” he asks, gesturing toward delicate sun rays that shimmer through a window and rest upon a fawn-colored chair…
Going into it, I never would have imagined that Operation Dumbo Drop would provoke any thought whatsoever; it is, after all, just another predictably heartwarming human-animal bonding story, about a bunch of tough American servicemen charged with procuring a baby elephant to please the inhabitants of a strategically important South…
I love it when a movie leaves me feeling wrung out and exhausted–as if I’ve been on a tortuous journey I didn’t expect to take, but one that showed me things I never would have dreamed I’d see. Belle de Jour, surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film about a repressed…
Only in California. People keep getting kicked off the O.J. jury for “planning to write a book.” First of all, what difference does it make? Nine million people a day decide their life is so danged fascinating they’ll write a book about it, but none of them ever actually do…
It’s a small world after all–oppressively small, in fact. The announcement that the Magic Kingdom would be purchasing Capital Cities/ABC for an estimated $19 billion, instantly transforming the Magic Kingdom into the largest media conglomerate on the planet, shook the entertainment industry last week in ways that Westinghouse’s purchase of…
As of this writing, there are only three American actresses who’ve proven to Hollywood they can attract big audiences by name alone–Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs like Disclosure proves…
Let’s face it. What’s the No. 1 reason for bar fights in America? It’s the following words: “What are you looking at?” And we know what he’s looking at, right? He’s looking at a female. And the female is with a guy. And any other guy who looks at, talks…
About 30 minutes into Clueless, an utterly disposable new teen comedy starring MTV-spawned glamour gal Alicia Silverstone as a spoiled Beverly Hills princess, I started to picture myself as the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. I’m playing a hardbitten journalistic loner, a cross between Mad Max and Andrew…
At first, adults might not see the delightful kid-flick Babe as an intelligent, even brave film. The film’s clever combination of stunts by live animals and incredibly expressive animatronic puppets makes you suspicious, a little fearful it might become an ordeal of gimmicks. The story unleashes a barnyard full of…
That carefree blond mop atop a paste-white, square face graced by dual ellipses of tortoise shell; that rigid frame; those nimble hands; these mark the presence of Ed Begley, Jr., one of the more reliable supporting actors in Hollywood. He etched himself onto our minds during his five years with…
The Indian in the Cupboard is an oasis of calm amid the glitzy din of summer. It rarely shouts when it can whisper. Like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and the stories of the Arabian Nights, it’s strange and complicated and contradictory. Working from a kids’ novel by…
I’m gonna start selling this new flag. It has 49 stars and 12 stripes on it. This is gonna drive the cops crazy, not to mention the Newt Nuts who are about to clutter up the Constitution with a don’t-torch-the-flag amendment. Just think. We can load up about a thousand…
On July 28, the most expensive movie of all time, the Kevin Costner sci-fi epic Waterworld, will sail into a multiplex near you. That’s why you can’t open a newspaper or magazine or turn on the TV these days without encountering yet another retelling of its cursed production. The features…
Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
The opening credits of the new sci-fi thriller Species are splashed across a panorama of stars while ominous, understated theme music lurks in the background. Veteran monster movie fans might be reminded of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien by this deliberately hushed but melodramatic beginning. Audiences will find another link between…
There’s a moment in the second half of Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s scorching and fearless feature-length profile of the underground comic-book artist Robert Crumb, that confirms movie audiences have entered a very different world than they are accustomed to exploring. After Crumb and numerous friends, family members, and loved ones have…
Looking at Judge Dredd star Sylvester Stallone these days, with his bulbous physique, his imploding face, and his orangeish, rubbery-looking skin, it’s tough to recall that he once seemed rather charming, and that he was a pretty good actor to boot. He made his starring debut in the self-written 1976…
The city of Bellevue, Wash., is trying to force Papagayo’s Cantina–which, by the way, is an excellent topless bar if you ever get up that way–to make its stage “wheelchair-accessible.” In case any handicapped topless dancers decide to buy G-strings. Let me pause here for a moment so you can…
