Email Author Bill Gallo

1999 Stories by Bill Gallo

• The good Mother

  published December 23, 1999

  At first glance, Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor.... More >>

• Party at ground zero

  published December 9, 1999

  Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century's Eve... More >>

• Anywhere but there

  published December 9, 1999

  The heroines of Gavin O'Connor's offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her... More >>

• Grand illusion

  published November 11, 1999

  The world's demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they're great poets or great musicians or great movie... More >>

• The sins of the father

  published November 11, 1999

  Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction, but none of them cuts as... More >>

• The weasels go pop

  published October 7, 1999

  Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity,... More >>

• Lots o' libido

  published October 7, 1999

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not... More >>

• Northern lights

  published September 30, 1999

  The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable, and the record reading on the feel-good-ometer totally predictable. But Mystery,... More >>

• The terrifying Beauty

  published September 23, 1999

  Behind the camera, Beauty's driving forces are new to movies, but their theatrical résumés are faultless -- a fact that did... More >>

• Nuts to you

  published September 23, 1999

  The only tools a nice fellow needs to repair the damaged psyches of an entire town are a guilty conscience and a dash of insight. That, at least,... More >>

• Tough love

  published September 2, 1999

  When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting movie houses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen,... More >>

• Season finale

  published August 26, 1999

  It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The... More >>

• Hot for teacher

  published August 19, 1999

  If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers such as Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland... More >>

• Get me outta here

  published August 12, 1999

  For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn't get any worse -- or better. That's because one of... More >>

• Try hard

  published August 5, 1999

  The Sixth Sense, a kind of touchy-feely horror movie, wants to do it all -- scare the hell out of us at the same time that it makes us feel... More >>

• D.O.A.

  published July 22, 1999

  Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that's square-headed and unhip in... More >>

• That summer of '77

  published July 1, 1999

  To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City -- when temperatures shot into... More >>

• Wilde about it

  published June 24, 1999

  Woe to the scribe who presumes to rewrite a master -- unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter... More >>

• Irish stew

  published June 24, 1999

  It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers -- actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer-director Paul -- that in old Gaelic culture, the... More >>

• Limbo crock

  published June 10, 1999

  In John Sayles' Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn),... More >>

• Lame hip

  published May 20, 1999

  Relentlessly hip? You'd better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn't hurt.... More >>

• Get a life

  published May 20, 1999

  If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you've taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelley a... More >>

• High school unhinged

  published May 6, 1999

  The latest release from Paramount Pictures' bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of... More >>

• Romancing the '60s? Not quite

  published May 6, 1999

  A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride--stirred as much, you can't help thinking, by the transfiguration of... More >>

• Heart of bleakness

  published May 6, 1999

  When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels, she's trudging under the weight of a huge backpack... More >>