Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden is not an easy film in any sense of the word. The cinematic treatment of Ian McEwan’s acclaimed but downbeat novel was not the kind of project Hollywood moneymen clamor for (it took the better part of a decade and an agreement to direct an…
Blown Away starts out auspiciously enough. As the credits roll and the ethereal, melancholy music moans, the camera skips over a rough sea. Murky green waves fill the screen. The water looks cold and deep. The mood is hypnotic, foreboding. Every now and again you hear a muffled roar off…
Americans are obsessed with mobility. Traveling from point A to point B, whether those destinations are geographical, spiritual, financial, or whatever, governs our lives. Success simply means getting where you want to go. And we’re all going somewhere, whether we realize it or not. We are bodies in motion trying…
I know, I know. The easiest and most PC thing to do here is to label Rose Troche’s lesbian love story Go Fish a delightful crossover film that will appeal to gay and straight audiences alike and be done with it. The film is, after all, sassy and salty and…
“Everything the light touches is your kingdom,” explains reigning king of the jungle Mufasa to Simba, his eager little cub, at the beginning of Disney’s dazzling new adventure The Lion King. There are a hundred reasons to praise The Lion King, from the bracing yet familiar screenplay to the spellbinding…
Here’s something you don’t see every day: black artists exploiting white culture for financial gain. I suppose you could make a case that talk shows were a predominantly white domain until Oprah and Arsenio marched on Phil and Johnny, and after a couple of joints you might be able to…
While you might not guess that a hip-hop mockumentary and a musical about AIDS have a lot in common, there are several parallels between Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat and John Greyson’s Zero Patience. For starters, both films are the work of young, nonmainstream auteurs, each of whom…
The flacks should have a field day with a high-concept action flick like Speed. You can almost predict the blurbs before you’ve even seen the movie: It’s a rush! The thrill ride of the summer! Speed is the ticket! My heart wouldn’t stop pounding! Pedal-to-the-metal action! Speed kills! Race to…
A disproportionate number of sociopaths and sexual miscreants have found careers as rock and rollers. Sid Vicious. Wendy O. Williams. Keith Moon. Patti Smith. Barry Manilow. As sick fucks go, however, GG Allin was probably the sickest. Whether you think Allin was as demented as advertised or just another pathetic,…
The release of Penny Marshall’s latest film, Renaissance Man, featuring Danny DeVito and Marky Mark, raises several burning questions. Can Marshall, whose picture hits theaters barely two months after Ron Howard’s The Paper and whose acting and directing career has eerily paralleled Howard’s, outschmaltz her freckle-faced colleague’s paper-thin tabloid opus?…
I lived in L.A. for two years in the late Seventies but I wasn’t much of a surfer. I tried it exactly once, sleeping on the beach at San Clemente for a long weekend with a couple of other bums I met playing hoops on Venice Beach. The waves sucked,…
Miss O’Hare, the plucky protagonist of the delightful new comedy-mystery (comedystery?) Widow’s Peak, feels betrayed by those closest to her when a scandal involving a secret love affair comes to light, airing her dirty laundry in public. Who better to play the part than Mia Farrow? Taking on a role…
Eddie Murphy needs a hit. Badly. Beverly Hills Cop 3 was written by Steven de Souza (the man who scripted Murphy’s action hit 48 HRS) and directed by John Landis (the man who shot Trading Places, Murphy’s best film to date). The favors have been called in and the hired…
Okay, I admit it. I’m a cynic. I thought the big-screen version of The Flintstones was going to be terrible, a new low in our national obsession with junk culture, a thinly veiled attempt to cash in on a popular television cartoon that was itself a tepid facsimile of The…
At first glance it might not appear that Henry Jaglom and Spike Lee have much in common. Jaglom is white, Lee is black. Jaglom is 51, Lee is 37. Jaglom handles a camera clumsily and artlessly, like a construction worker would a Stradivarius. Lee is a consummate stylist whose visual…
Once upon a time Alex Cox was a director who seemed assured of a bright future in Hollywood. His first film, 1984’s Repo Man, gained him cult status. His second, 1986’s Sid and Nancy, established Cox as a gifted, powerful filmmaker with a career as ambitious as he cared to…
Rene Rodriguez is a punk. Not the scowling, pierced, and tattoed kind; the Herald staff writer and film reviewer looks more like Opie Taylor than Sid Vicious. No, Rodriguez’s punkdom slashes deeper than nipple rings, jackboots, and the other affectations of the fashionably disaffected. Rather, he’s one of the far…
Is it just me or does anybody else out there have a problem with Peter Coyote as a paragon of Nineties studhood? The hollow-faced, crooked-toothed actor with the scraggly eyebrows that threaten to prolongate his creased and furrowed forehead like ivy on a pitted brick wall somehow landed the part…
You have to tip your hat to any motion picture with a scope broad enough to make room for former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, nihilistic rock and roll animal Lou Reed, and Peter Falk as Detective Columbo. Faraway, So Close, the sequel to 1988’s hypnotic Wings of Desire, is, like…
Stay home this Thursday evening. Sequester your house pets. Lock your kids in their rooms or pack them off to spend the night with out-of-town relatives. Get to Blockbuster early before all the copies of Another Stakeout are rented. Throw some Orville Redenbacher into the microwave and settle down in…
Thank God for John Waters. Box-office returns and market demographics have always driven Hollywood, yet residents of the self-deluding little colony still call themselves artists and make a grand show of patting themselves on the back on those exceedingly rare occasions when their handiwork offers more than just escapist entertainment…
If there’s anything encouraging to be gleaned from Cops and Robbersons, the feeble new Chevy Chase vehicle costarring flinty old macho man Jack Palance, it’s that contrary to popular belief, Hollywood takes care of its own. How else to explain hack director Michael Ritchie’s enduring career? Or Chase’s? We’ve all…
