The Hollywood office of the CIA has pulled off its slickest trick in years. When last we saw him, singlehandedly combating the Evil Empire in The Hunt for Red October, the agency’s ace analyst, Jack Ryan, looked remarkably like the heartthrob actor Alec Baldwin. His new mission for the Langley-based…
Never having put much stock in the concept of acquired tastes, the films of Derek Jarman, for all their incidental beauties, continue to leave a bad impression on me: too much flash, too little insight is the short of it. Jarman belongs to a generation of British filmmakers who came…
“I don’t see how that time could turn into this time,” agonizes an ex-Royal Air Force officer, remembering the days when jobs seemed to rain from the heavens over his merry ol’ nation and nice girls dared not drink in pubs. Songs of romance and loverly dreams hypnotized comely couples…
Whoopi here, Whoopi there, Whoopi everywhere. Like a coral-bound moray eel furiously biting off more than it can chew, the ubiquitous Goldberg has been, in the main, an eyesore since she blazed on Broadway in her 1984 subcultural solo act. In one comedy spectacle after another – Jumpin’ Jack Flash,…
From stage left of the paint-splattered canvas set – designed to evoke faded brain cells – music begins. Themes from glaring examples of lowdown popular trash, such as snippets of the McDonald’s song about deserving a break today and the twice-incarnated Addams Family whistle, waft ominously through the air. Like…
Every moviegoing generation must contend with the fact that great directors don’t come in bunches, though, as P.T. Barnum observed long ago, suckers do. And it’s to these poor, born-every-minute souls that Slacker, a subcultural tribute to vagrancy by first-time filmmaker Richard Linklater, is unwittingly dedicated. The film is populated…
Don’t be misled by her sex: She’s big. She’s mean. She’s bald. In a world filled with scampering rodents calling themselves macho, she stands firmer and taller than a forest oak tree. In the solitude and vastness of outer space, she fears no evil. No challenge is too great. No…
There are doubtless many people who will see The Waterdance and deem it courageous, dignified, powerful even, for its well-intentioned compassion toward the disabled. I beg the forbearance of those whose lives have been afflicted with disability, and beg to differ with those whose contention it is that any movie…
Now must we brace ourselves for the start of the silly season. Richard Donner’s undigestably dreadful Lethal Weapon 3 opened this past Friday, and the box-office blitzkrieg continues this Friday with the return of Sigourney Weaver’s parasite-pulverizing space mama, Ripley, in Alien 3, Encino Man (another SoCal comedy), and finally…
Lately, there’s been a lot of tongue-clucking and finger-pointing at Brian C. Smith’s Off Broadway Theatre. The artistic director stands accused of pandering to a predominantly Jewish audience in the (often futile) attempt to make a profit producing live theater. And the critics who make these accusations certainly offer enough…
And now for the other film nominated for an Academy Award for 1991’s “Best Foreign Language Film,” the one that eventually beat Raise the Red Lantern for the Oscar: from Italy, Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo. It’s not by any means a bad film, nor, I hasten to add, is it especially…
When it comes to heaping praise on foreign films, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not been, traditionally speaking, a very good judge of quality – artistic, scientific, or other. Any audience member with a journeyman knowledge of the movies can casually bet his house that, of…
After watching the recent Los Angeles debacle – and numbed by the evidence of mankind’s inability to coexist peacefully and democratically – a thought struck me: While the inner cities were screaming and burning, the plutocratic residents of Beverly Hills and Bel Air were probably resting their massaged bodies on…
Now that the fledgling Irish film industry has gained a toehold, it seems intent on waxing native to a fault. These days, Ireland’s most marketable cinematic exports bask in picturesque charm, scenic beauty, and boozy wit. It’s an amalgam of the Emerald Isle’s folk art, calculated to strike a sentimental…
Some memories of seemingly insignificant origin can last a lifetime. Ten years ago, I took a taxi from La Guardia Airport to Manhattan, and struck up a conversation with an elderly cab driver during the 30-minute ride to my apartment on the East Side. It began almost as a ritualized…
One of the most subtle, powerful, and potentially hazardous relationships is that which takes place between father and child. In an effort to project masculinity and strength, fathers sometimes trample hearts; as a legacy, they may leave behind mixed messages and hard memories. They don’t yield as easily as mothers,…
The opening tracking shot, at eight minutes even more protracted than the famous single-shot title sequence in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (on which it is obviously – and deliberately – modeled), launches Robert Altman’s new film, The Player, on a virtuosic, inspirational high. As the credits roll, the fast-moving…
Though E.M. Forster was a nonagenarian upon his death, it’s interesting to note that most of his novels – with the exception of his last one, A Passage to India – were written when the author was still in his twenties and early thirties. Forster the essayist traversed a sizable…
Guillermo Gentile is the David Lynch of playwrights: either you get his work or you don’t, either you fall into the fantastic and misshapen spell he weaves, or you leave the theater disturbed and confused. Challenging and surrealistic, his With Folded Wings won the 1989 Best Play Award from the…
It’s one of history’s sublime inversions that, just as Marco Polo traveled to China during the Thirteenth Century for egocentric discovery reasons, the wealthy Westerners of our own Twentieth Century cavort throughout the slums of India in pursuit of – can you guess? – selflessness. Which does not disparage the…
Having just coordinated a three-day conference with some of theater’s finest critics and scholars (hosted by New World School of the Arts, with performances by NWSA and Florida International University that did the area much good, as far as credibility goes), I attended numerous panels about the theatrical body, and…
By the time Orson Welles set about playing Othello in 1948, he had already established himself as one of the great cinematic innovators in the short history of the medium, as well as a gifted man of the theater – something people tend to forget nowadays, for understandable reasons. Indeed,…
