Remember Vic Hitler, the narcoleptic comic in Hill Street Blues? Terry Kiser received an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of the comedian with the penchant for nodding off just when he had an audience rolling in the aisles. Like most of the quirky characters who populated Hill Street, Vic…
Welcome to another installment of Bad Career Move Derby. Today’s contestants are a pair of male actors whose professions began auspiciously enough but have spiraled inexorably downward ever since: Donald Sutherland and Gary Busey. Sutherland broke from the gate with a vengeance, lending his bug-eyed irreverence to such films as…
Life with Mikey is one of those execrable exercises in sitcom sentimentality that leaves even the uncritical viewer with one question: What were they thinking? Let’s be charitable. Maybe the filmmakers were inspired by Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, but the only way they could obtain financing was to cast…
Poor Al D’Andrea. He’s doomed. It’s hard to look him in the eye because you know he’s going to die soon. Al is not an AIDS patient, a Somali warlord, a gangbanger, or a journalist in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s worse than that. Al is the latest guy to hold the job…
The Firm is one of those so-so movies critics dread. It’s like generic vanilla ice cream A tasty enough to satisfy a craving, but not compelling enough to go out of your way for. It’s not bad. It’s just bland. Like Last Action Hero, five writers share in the blame…
Tina Turner is the heroine of What’s Love Got to Do With It. The dramatic sequences in the rock siren’s film bio hammer home the point that Turner (formerly Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee) overcame huge odds and years of physical abuse to become the international megastar that she…
Privately, so as not to give away your age, ask yourself a question: Do you remember when Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat was considered scandalous enough to merit an X rating from the MPAA? How the fun thing to do was smoke a couple of joints and head down to…
Yikes. Just when you thought Arnold was nearly as invincible at the box office as the on-screen characters he’s been playing, along comes Last Action Hero to put his survival skills to the test. Last Action Hero has the feel of a movie that can’t make up its mind what…
At last! A big-budget summer movie that actually lives up to the hype. Jurassic Park is the cinematic equivalent of a doctoral thesis on special effects wizardry from director Steven Spielberg. It’s also a heart-stopping, jaw-dropping, eye-popping spectacular that supplies all the vicarious thrills of a trip to Disney World…
Cute kids are a regular feature of Steven Spielberg’s movies, but it will be a cold day in Jurassic Park before a Spielberg film embraces a family like Leolo Lozone’s. “Because I dream, I’m not,” intones the youngster at the center of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s semiautobiographical tour de force, Leolo. Not…
Seems like everywhere you look these days, something’s falling. America has fallen on hard times. The dollar has fallen in value against the yen. President Clinton’s approval rating, SAT scores, GNP, consumer confidence A falling, falling, falling, falling. Everywhere you look, standards are dropping, heroes are backsliding, institutions are toppling…
A living actor portrays a dead actor who, while he was alive, was a gay man pretending to be straight who made a movie wherein he played a straight man who seduced a woman by pretending to be gay. Confused? Imagine how Rock Hudson felt. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, opening…
Audiences are incredibly tolerant when it comes to romantic comedies. Inane dialogue, contrived plots, transparent sentimentality A all is forgiven if the filmmaker is able to create the illusion of even the remotest strain of chemistry between the principals. That goes double for movies that revolve around the matchmaking of…
Back in 1980, writer-directors David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams teamed up to create Airplane!, the landmark send-up of one of the most cliche-ridden, typecast, overwrought melodramas of all time, Airport. Airplane! was silly, schmaltzy shtick that worked because it dared to be stupid at a time when it…
The venerable director of Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), the first Chinese films ever nominated for Academy Awards (in spite of the fact that they have yet to be released in the country where they were shot), was sixteen years old when Mao and the Red…
It could have been a disaster. The cardinal rules of good party throwing were broken. Anticipating a crowd of 300, the organizers of the Premiere Night Gala Screening Program of the first annual Make-A-Film Competition were not prepared for the nearly 500 folks who showed up. The caterer ran out…
The good news is that Karina Lombard is great in bed. The bad news is that the novice thespian’s acting skills drop off precipitously the further she ventures from the boudoir. Luckily Wide Sargasso Sea, the cinematic adaptation of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, calls for Antoinette (the tragic heroine played…
“The dog ate the part we didn’t like” — from Panama, by Thomas McGuane You probably don’t have to hate George Bush or his presidential predecessor, Ronald Reagan, to appreciate The Panama Deception (opening Friday at the Alliance on Lincoln Road), this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature…
Lesbians have feelings too. That’s the earth-shattering revelation at the core of three of hearts. (What is it with lower-case titles these days? bodies, rest & motion, the night we never met A am i the only one who finds the trend precious?) For the first twenty minutes or so,…
A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. bodies, rest & motion is proof positive of the veracity of that Newtonian law of physics. This is an insufferable, pretentious, existential character drama that starts out at rest and stays there. Nick, played…
After watching Robert De Niro sleepwalk through Mad Dog and Glory, it was a relief to see that someone had awakened the venerable actor in time for his next performance as an abusive stepfather in This Boy’s Life. Unfortunately, whoever roused the sleeping Dog for the film adaptation of Tobias…
Lampooning middle-class neuroses has long been a staple of television sitcoms. From the Bundys to the Simpsons, some of our most popular TV families are paragons of bourgeois dysfunction. But the big screen has been another story; mainstream Hollywood hasn’t really gotten suburban angst right since The Graduate. But not…
