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…
Far be it from me to whine about how tough my job is. I learned long ago that there aren’t many folks sympathetic to complaints from a guy who sits around all day watching movies and getting paid for it. Suffice it to say if it was that easy, everyone…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one could apply to the setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s probably not…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent to the outback by the bishop of Sydney. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay (Sam…
On paper, they probably seemed like wonderful ideas. How about a reworking of His Girl Friday, set at a big-city newspaper, but with an ensemble cast full of likable stars? Maybe they could crack a hot story about a couple of teenagers who are being railroaded for murder, huh? Or…
Say what you will about the sorry state of theatrical film exhibition in South Florida; some of our local movie houses are at least trying to remedy the situation. One of the most popular offerings from the 1993 Miami Film Festival, Bigas Luna’s Jam centsn Jam centsn, did not begin…
The mix-up-at-the-sperm-bank premise, the basis for 1993’s vacuous Made in America, takes a turn for the kosher in Vadim Jean’s and Gary Sinyor’s Leon the Pig Farmer. The quirky, oddly engaging little film has its Miami premiere this Saturday at the Colony Theater as part of the Jewish Film Festival…
“One hundred rinses cannot wash away these kinds of stains,” warns Duilio, eighteenth-century patriarch of the Benedetti (“the blessed”) clan in the rolling hills of Tuscany. He’s a poor farmer speaking to his fellow villagers in the town square, where a French lieutenant named Jean will be executed at dawn…
I can’t help it. It’s a reflex action. I hear the word “documentary” and some uncontrollable voice from deep within me screams, “Boring!” I realize it’s an irrational response; after all, I’ve seen plenty of entertaining documentaries. Then again, most of them have had something to do with rock music,…
Am I the only viewer in America who has a problem with the recent spate of slacker movies? From Slacker to Singles to Dazed and Confused, a trend seems to be emerging, the salient characteristic of which is the romanticization of sloth and navel contemplation. Not that I have anything…
