With Mel Brooks on the skids, Eddie Murphy retooling as Mr. Romantic, and Woody Allen all tied up in divorce court, somebody in the movies had to pick up the slack…yukwise. Enter Andrew Bergman, the fellow New York Magazine dubbed “The Unknown King of Comedy” back in 1985. Unknown no…
The fictional hamlet of Lumbertown in Blue Velvet, with its “sound of the falling tree” radio jingle, Eisenhower-era veneer of community values, and visions of singing robins overcoming the real — though often surreal — forces of darkness as personified by Frank Booth, Dorothy Vallens, and their fetishistic underworld cronies,…
Made in 1980 on a shoestring budget — and looking every bit as dirt-cheap as John Waters’s deliciously trashy Baltimore chronicles of the early Seventies — Pedro Almodovar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom has the courage and outlandish invention of new discovery. For not only was Spain enjoying a honeymoon with life,…
Many ignorant critics have lately waxed enthusiastic over what remains a questionable kinship between E.M. Forster’s “Italian” novels — the early Where Angels Fear to Tread and later A Room with A View, both adapted to film within the past five years, and directed, respectively, by Charles Sturridge and James…
There is a stateliness and repose, a stillness even, in the shots of the land in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven that persuasively evoke the pervasive mood of the film — melancholy — and help underscore its predominant theme: death. The majestic vistas of Alberta, Canada, have served Eastwood’s generous, retrospective glance…
Speaking of genres, the woman-in-jeopardy movie has been getting quite a working-over lately, from Sleeping With the Enemy to A Stranger Among Us. Whispers in the Dark is a fairly fluent example of this stereotypical crowd-pleaser: The film is tension-packed, mystery-laden, and ably acted. And there’s a bonus: Psychiatrists will…
Bill Cosford of the Miami Herald, a dependable critic who has had to sit through his share of turkeys over the course of a long tenure covering movies in this area, hinted at a pervasive problem when he assessed 1992’s films in a column last Thursday. After dutifully clumping together…
The title sequence of Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her promises a much funnier and more adept black comedy than what eventually comes to pass. On the Broadway stage in 1978 (the year is important), Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), a waning theatrical diva, stars in a musical production adapted from Tennessee…
Never having been a great admirer of Jean-Luc Godard, aging daddy of the French nouvelle vague, I was rightly suspicious with his showering praise on the little-known Jon Jost, naming the latter the current best among America’s independent directors. Given the source, it is certainly a dubious tribute, as complimentary…
To any casual moviegoer, it comes as no surprise that a starlet now growing quite long in the tooth like Melanie Griffith should show up in an embarrassment such as A Stranger Among Us. From 1988’s passable Working Girl to this year’s abominable Shining Through, Tippi Hedren’s problem child has…
When it opened in 1989 — the same week as Batman — I was delighted by Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its Lilliputian adventure set in a suburban back yard teeming with giant blades of grass, ants, puddles, bumblebees, and scorpions. “An adventure yarn in the tradition of Fantastic…
When Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, one bemused onlooker, George Bernard Shaw — a winner of the same award in 1925 — made the following observation: “I have defined the hundred percent American as ninety-nine percent an idiot.” No doubt Shaw’s scintillating wit would be…
Eddie Murphy’s metamorphosis from foulmouthed ghetto comic into suave leading man is now almost complete, but so far it’s been about as successful as Woody Allen’s bumbling reincarnation as a lox-and-bagel Cary Grant. Because at least when Murphy was talking dirty and raising feminist hackles, he brought some hyperkinetic energy…
Set in a hazy, non-specific, post-apocalyptic future, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s black-hearted satirical comedy from France, Delicatessen, makes no attempt to conceal its sources of inspiration, pictorial and thematic: A predominant one is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which, of course, drew from wide literary sources such as Orwell’s 1984 and…
One False Move is a knuckleheaded title for a diminutive detective thriller — particularly as, both in its plot and the filmmaking in general, there are about as many false moves as barbecued ribs at a wild hog jamboree. Directed by former actor Carl Franklin and written by another actor,…
A work of mesmerizing lyrical power and profoundly human dimension, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust celebrates the bond of women, the richness of culture and tradition, and the mystery of nature with bracing, impressive authority. Unlike so many of our contemporary media products passed along the popular-culture conveyer belt,…
“An opera – a gothic, Teutonic, thickly textured hybrid of various theatrical and cinematic conventions. To call this film Wagnerian would be understating the case, because even the Ring has its light and shade…[it] recalls the elliptical and symbolic world of Strauss-Hoffmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, with its somber metaphysical…
As Goldie Hawn traipses through it early in Housesitter, the fictional New England town of Dobbs Mill (Concord and Cohasset, Massachusetts) is a patch of retro-colonialist Americana: star-spangled flags hang over modestly ornamented homes, the wood-panel architecture recalls the idealistic haze of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post,…
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…
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,…
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…
