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…
The durable cottage industry created by the events of November 22, 1963 (six hundred books, just for a start) has never seen anything quite like the Coming of Oliver Stone – or the $40 million Warner Bros. poured into his three-hour epic, JFK. To hear the self-appointed guardian of the…
At the age of eight, after the bite from a cottonmouth snake failed to scare him, Truman Capote visited a legendary witch in his hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Armed with Grandma’s ornamental necklace – stolen to bribe his fondest wish out of the crone – he demanded to become a…
It’s hard to talk about what’s wrong with Claude Chabrol’s static retelling of Madame Bovary without mentioning the glossy 1949 version, directed by Hollywood musical master Vincente Minnelli. Few of the nine celluloid stabs at Bovary pleased Flaubert’s fans (Jean Renoir’s 1934 fantasy version probably came close, because it used…
The ads for The Prince of Tides, Barbra Streisand’s latest directorial effort, sell the film as a love story. But the romance feels secondary, because the story’s really about a rangy South Carolina football coach named Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) struggling to understand how his dysfunctional childhood disfigured the rest…
The prototypical Steve Martin character has evolved into a decent, beleaguered goof who can but roll his eyes, dip into that little trademark mambo step, and try to persevere in the face of domestic distress. He’s true-hearted but baffled — Buster Keaton with facial expressions. This is the striving Dad…
Bugsy, the biography of Forties gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, the man who built Las Vegas, is directed by Barry Levinson, who knows a thing or two about the way men think; his previous films, including Diner and Tin Men, are about how men relate to one another while ignoring or…
“Work in progress” — it’s a theatrical tradition, a sacred one that conjures up visions of feverish writers and composers relentlessly chiseling masterworks into perfection, guided by enthusiastic audiences and patient critics. Unlike the novel, rarely revised after its formal public introduction, musicals and plays may be recrafted several times,…
West German writer and director Monika Treut has devoted her film career to a study of sexuality, especially those sexualities viewed as taboo or deviant. Since she selected de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs as the primary texts for her Ph.D. thesis, Treut has forged bravely ahead with…
Any Trekkie worth his stars can probably fix the precise moment when Kirk, Spock, and Bones replaced the Three Stooges (or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in the American popular imagination. The less enthralled among us simply grin and bear the gradual fact of it. In any case, here…
Rita and Peter, New York singles tentatively looking for love, find each other at a friend’s garden party, pursue a relationship, and marry after only six weeks. But at the wedding, an old lush kisses Rita and transacts a soul switch, leaving Peter with a stranger in his bed and…
If you’ve started to swallow this generation’s subtle ethnic-assassination campaign – resolving Japan’s dominance of world business by denigrating the Japanese as button-down, honor-bewildered, investment-confounded numberheads – you should probably hop in your Toyota and go see Black Lizard. If you’ve ever hankered for a detective story in which the…
Consider the plight of the Garcia family, which faces the biggest decision of nearly any Cuban-American’s life: To return to the island or not if Castro falls. Part Cuban, part Miamian – to varying degrees, depending on the generation – the Garcias mark el exilio time, waiting for a free…
Luis Santeiro, born in Cuba and raised in Miami, uses his roots and a finely-tuned sense of humor to draw unforgettable portraits of Cuban-American Miamians living in exile. He’s won seven Emmy Awards creating laughs for the bilingual sitcom Que Pasa, U.S.A?, and for Sesame Street, and his Mixed Blessings,…
Given: Frank Pesce, Jr., (Anthony LaPaglia), the youngest son of a New York trucker, is the hero of George Gallo’s savvy and affecting new comedy 29th Street, based on a true story about a young man who must come to terms with his family and himself. Prove: Frank Pesce, Jr.,…
Goodfellas may have been his finest movie, but Raging Bull is still the seminal masterpiece that future film students will watch to understand Martin Scorsese. Scorsese directs as if he’s boxing, with a powerful mix of physicality and strategy, and he has an uncanny knack for knowing precisely how to…
According to a popular Broadway anecdote, Noel Coward didn’t like Anton Chekhov as a playwright, and really didn’t appreciate Chekhov’s The Sea Gull. When Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne opened in a 1938 production of the play, Lunt, upon seeing the set, quoted his witty friend. “I hate plays,” Coward…
Los Angeles may be the City of Angels, but Sharon (Mimi Rogers) – the protagonist of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture – isn’t one of them. At least not for the first movement of this complex, disturbing film, which slips phantasmagorically from religious parable to suburban adventure to supernatural gothic. Thirtyish…
In 1959 Robert Penn Warren’s play, All The King’s Men (based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) opened off-Broadway, and asked a relevant question: Is it possible for a corrupt politician to be a man of the people? Do true statesmen exist any more? Have they ever? The premise is a…
The hope, I guess, was that phenom Patsy Kensit would light up every corner of Twenty-One, Don Boyd’s saga of how a spirited girl in modern-day London learns to juggle sex, love, and satisfaction. The reality is far different. Though Kensit’s wattage is high – she’s brilliantly blonde and beautiful…
Bessie Smith earned the right to sing the blues. Her first husband died soon after the wedding; the second one cheated on her regularly, and kidnapped their adopted son and placed him in a foster home. Bessie herself died in an auto accident, but not before making more than 50…
