We safely can assume that Hollywood will experience shortages of UV rays, earthquakes, and Porsche-driving studio executives before the town runs out of formulaic crap plots for pseudo-trash murder mysteries. Lately, however, a disproportionate share of the cinematic flotsam seems to flow from the prolific pen of a single writer:…
Fans of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann rejoice! With his excruciatingly moronic script for Showgirls, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Flashdance, Basic Instinct) strips off all the layers of pseudo-social conscience that informed his two collaborations with director Costa-Gavras (Betrayed and Music Box) and exposes himself as the heir apparent to Susann’s…
A black Philip Marlowe: It’s an idea so simple you wonder why nobody thought of it sooner. Writer-director Carl Franklin’s sensational Devil in a Blue Dress casts Denzel Washington in the role of hard-boiled, soon-to-be private investigator Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins in the film adaption of Walter Mosley’s absorbing debut novel…
Following the breakout success of 1992’s Under Siege and 1993’s The Fugitive, director Andrew Davis could have had his pick of just about any action movie project his heart desired. Instead he opted for Steal Big, Steal Little, a misguided comic morality play about twin brothers (both played by Andy…
I don’t know if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but anyone who doubts that we hail from different planets should attempt to discuss with a member of the opposite sex the film How to Make an American Quilt. This is not just another women’s movie. It’s…
I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t get Safe, the latest haunting study of an afflicted soul from writer-director Todd Haynes (Superstar, Poison). But I’m not sure I — or anyone else — was supposed to understand it. Haynes is one of those artists who uses conflicting symbols…
Movies about people making movies bug me. Sure, writing professors always tell you to “write what you know,” and what filmmakers purport to know is how to make films. But I suspect that advice was formulated back in the good old days, when guys such as Hemingway lived real lives…
There are two ways of looking at The Innocent (no relation to the 1976 Luchino Visconti powerhouse or the 1985 British production, both of which have the same title). You can write it off as a horribly acted, pretentiously directed, inconsistently paced, drearily written exercise in Cold War espionage with…
Film schools across the country should use Last of the Dogmen as a sort of final exam. If, after viewing the film for fifteen minutes, a student can’t come up with more than half the dialogue every character will speak before he or she utters it, that would-be filmmaker has…
A half-dozen case-hardened cops crack dark jokes over the corpse of a young black clocker (crack dealer). The bullet that killed him passed through the kid’s T-shirt, which, ironically, bears the legend “I will kill you” under a line drawing of a gun. “Someone musta read it backwards,” deadpans one…
I don’t know, you tell me: In 1995, how big a deal is it for a pair of (presumably) straight actors best known for lady-killing and macho action roles to play drag queens on-screen? (I’m talking indisputably gay characters, not heteros-in-heels like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like…
Papa McMullen was an oul-bollocks. He drank. He beat Mom. He died. Mom’s eyes barely had dried from the funeral service when she announced her decision to pack off to Ireland to live with the man she had really loved for all those years. Her parting advice to her three…
I suppose the mere fact that I’ve never seen a movie quite like Desperado should qualify as a high compliment. After all, these days so many movies seem like so many other movies, which seemed like so many others before them, that a little originality deserves praise in and of…
Early in Jeffrey, the big-screen version of Paul Rudnick’s funny-sad off-Broadway play about a gay man wrestling with love and intimacy in the Nineties, there’s a hilarious scene that neatly and astutely anticipates the film’s commercial dilemma. Two male characters share a sloppy kiss. The camera cuts away to an…
The most unnerving — and delectable — skill of film noir masters such as John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Jules Dassin may have been the way they turned all of human relations into a slippery fiction, a pack of lies, an extended alibi. In the dangerous netherworld of these movies,…
The Seventies refuse to die. Whatever else you say about that God-forsaken decade, it has proven incredibly resilient. Disco –both the music and the fashions — has made a strong comeback. The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations have made many Americans nostalgic for those of Ford and Carter. Saturday Night…
A dumb movie is one thing, but a dumb movie about the importance of education — now that’s something special. The only thing dangerous about Dangerous Minds is the glibness with which it treats its subject matter. Even the title is a transparent attempt to sex up what is (or…
Only three American actresses have proven to Hollywood they can attract large audiences by name recognition 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 such as Disclosure proves that moviegoers…
As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be re-shot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked — such were the problems that ran the tab…
If American adults are still capable of being shocked by the behavior of teenagers, then Larry Clark’s Kids is the movie that will shock them. The New York City teens we meet here for one harrowing 24-hour period talk dirty. They pursue sex and drugs with casual single-mindedness. They lie…
With a pitch-perfect performance from precocious eighteen-year-old music video starlet Alicia Silverstone and a sharp, sassy, knowing script from writer-director Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Clueless steps right to the head of the class of high school comedies, surpassing even Heckerling’s own previous foray into that perilous territory…
Who would argue against Luis Bu*uel’s deserving a place in the filmmaking pantheon? Not only have many of his works become roundly considered classics, but the man produced great art for nearly half a century. Bunuel displayed a talent for using vivid imagery to jolt audiences from the first scene…
