Just when you begin to suspect that intelligence, wit and charm have vanished from the movies under the haunches of full-grown dogs like For the Boys and Shining Through, a sleeper pops up to restore your faith. Hear My Song, an Anglo-Irish comedy made on a shoestring, features elements of…
If anyone ever doubted to what extent English and Spanish have been mingled, maimed, or mangled over the course of 33 years of Cuban exile in the United States, I have a suggestion: Rush to your nearest movie theater this weekend and catch The Mambo Kings. The gallery of rogue…
As bizarre as any form of sycophantic behavior is – whether it’s tearing out chairs in a frenzy over Sinatra, or throwing underwear on stage at the feet of Axl Rose – one of the most perplexing and bloodless incarnations has to be the literary groupie. While living in New…
What’s a theatrical producer to do? Grants are being slashed without warning, ticket sales plummet in proportion to the economy, while the salaries of some artists strain modest budgets to the point of cancellations. Minimizing set changes and elaborate costumes may help, but usually not enough, so the producer resorts…
Last year, in a review of Oliver Stone’s The Doors for this paper, Ben Greenman delivered a brilliant parting shot aimed at Stone, concluding that the best Doors movie ever was Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Admittedly it’s a loaded sentence – Coppola’s Vietnam War movie isn’t about The Doors at…
Illiteracy and philistinism, America’s most unremitting woes in the age of homogenized tube culture, could scarcely have found two wittier, more delightful exponents and defenders than Saturday Night Live’s Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, the hyper-juvenile, heavy-metal yarn spinners whose late-night, public-access cable show, direct from Wayne’s basement in Aurora,…
It’s a challenge to define the term illuminati in all its incarnations. Several science fiction novels, as well as historical documents, describe a secret society of white and black magicians – including the legendary British sorcerer Aleister Crowley – who planned on ruling the world through esoteric rituals and spiritual…
What is to be done with the Miami Film Festival? The question has plagued critical columns (mine and those of others throughout South Florida) for years, and based on a predictably limited advance peek at this year’s festival selections, the answer for me remains as elusive as ever. On one…
“Glamour, excitement, and ennui” promises the press release about the Ninth Miami Film Festival ready to roll this Friday at Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. In keeping with such promises over nine years, at least you can count on one being fulfilled this year – ennui. I shouldn’t yet…
It takes a supremely perverted sense of humor allied to a well-meaning foolhardiness to conjure up something like Kafka. The new film, delivered in The Third Man thriller style, has the added cachet of being loosely based on the life of – and employing themes taken from works by -…
The question most frequently asked of a theater critic is whether a particular production was good or bad. This often is not answered simply, but requires a lengthy discussion. Actors may be deficient, while the direction is innovative; an excellent play may suffer because of a markedly inadequate presentation. Among…
Thorough, profound, astonishing, and insufferable imbecility envelops the screen in Shining Through, a Hollywood-formula spy thriller-romance set in a woebegone World War II, finding a permanent home there for two hours and twelve minutes. It’s one of the worst movies to come my way in a long while, which is…
Neil Simon is the most prolific and successful of contemporary playwrights. And the most maligned. Legendary director and theatrical scholar Harold Clurman wrote an article back in the Sixties called “In Defense of Neil Simon.” Whereupon Simon’s business manager asked Clurman “why a man who earns $40,000 a week needs…
As the science fiction thriller Freejack would have it, the big Apple seventeen years hence is a grimy midnight junkyard blanketed by noxious gas, infested with drug-crazed snipers engaged in open warfare, and run, police-state style, by the hired goons of all-powerful corporations. Nuns armed with machine guns curse like…
Juice, a coming-of-age picture about a group of four young black men growing up in a New York City ghetto, is the kind of film you root for during the first hour, then pray for during the second. Ernest Dickerson’s movie looks great, of course, but the former cinematographer doesn’t…
Tom Berenger has never been as imposing and remote – or as doggone silly – as he is in At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Hector Babenco’s new film based on the Peter Matthiessen novel of white mischief in the rain forests of South America. Berenger plays Lewis…
On a fateful night in February, 1964, en route to pick up custom-made plaid tuxedos for their first big gig, an eager but amateur singing quartet is slammed broadside by a busload of parochial-school virgins bound for the Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. All four members of the…
When Hollywood producers scan their in-boxes for hot scripts, they look for a story with a “through line.” They’d like you to believe this term refers to a strong, lean narrative that pulls you through the movie and keeps you interested. But it really refers to a concept you can…
In this era of slob humor and assault comedy, it’s a pleasure to stumble across a movie that comes at you as obliquely – slyly, even – as Mike Leigh’s offbeat Life Is Sweet. This wry slice of life, filmed in the north London suburb of Enfield, concerns the quiet…
Rita, a working-class hairdresser from the north of England, bumbles and bounces into the life of Frank, an overeducated college tutor and failed poet. Sporting a red fright-wig and rag-doll clothes, she comes on teetering heels to the open university, which she aptly dubs “degrees for dishwashers.” Here she hopes…
It’s amazing what passes for deep thinking in Southern California. Lawrence Kasdan’s godawful Grand Canyon combines a heavy dose of New Age psycho-babble, some lame platitudes about race relations, and a spoonful of pseudo-mystical pap on the possibilities of transcendence in evil, chaotic Los Angeles. Kasdan (The Accidental Tourist, Body…
Depending on which school of style you consult, William S. Burroughs comes up as a neglected literary genius or a dithering fraud still awash in the tame excesses of the Beat era. Cultists and detractors agree on one thing, though: For more than 30 years, Burroughs’s complex, scabrous fantasies have…
