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…
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…
