One of the benefits of being a famous television actor is that you’re allowed backstage, that roped-off wonderland most audience members believe to be an orgiastic utopia of groupies and booze. Little do fans realize how mundane it really is behind the velvet rope–cold cuts and bottled water, and musicians…
Much has changed for urban gays in the 21 years since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller–set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village–was derided by gay rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly designed to exacerbate…
American culture has not been kind to the ’60s. Outside of the extraordinarily resilient appeal of the pop music of the time, the period has become–for more than one of the several subsequent generations of college students–the embarrassing punch line to a bad joke. The movies have also not been…
In the 1998 documentary The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist, made for the BBC and available on The Exorcist 25th-anniversary DVD, director William Friedkin spends a great deal of time explaining why he excised certain scenes from his film, scenes author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty had…
I didn’t know about comedienne-actress Margaret Cho’s struggles with depression and drug and alcohol addiction, nor about her near-death from kidney failure brought on by extreme dieting. In fact, I didn’t know anything about her at all except that she had been the star of a short-lived television sitcom I…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical but sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on…
“This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
It’s unfortunate the title Being John Malkovich has already been taken, as it’s a far better one than Bait–and far more appropriate to boot. As Bristol, a computer expert and wily thief and cold-blooded killer, Doug Hutchison is the human sampling machine. His is a routine coddled together from the…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
So many intense themes run rampant in Joe Charbanic’s debut feature, The Watcher, that it’s tricky to keep up. For instance, a young lady who lives alone with her cat seems ominously doomed. Then there’s the gripping premise that borrowing from nihilistic wanker David Fincher (Se7en) or industrial scamp Trent…
At the age of 10, young Martin (Jeremy Kreikenmayer) is forced by his single mother to finally meet the father he had avioded seeing every year. Nothing wrong with that–at least on the surface; boys heading into adolescence need their fathers. Dad (Pierre Maguelon), as is often the case in…
There’s plenty of campaign rhetoric about working families, but who ever talks about one of the biggest problems of the working man today–massive corporate downsizing? In the era of record profits and welfare “reform,” all that matters is having any kind of job, whether or not it’s the one you…
Humans and their stories, my oh my. Somehow, the familiar themes just keep coming around, again and again, ad infinitum. Of course, most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the…
This is the beginning of The Way of the Gun you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker (Ryan Phillippe, sporting a pubic beard) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro, looking lost and dangerous), urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up…
It seems like he has always been there, this man whose presence is as inescapable as heat on the sun. He taught the children of the 1970s how to read, pronouncing letters until they formed words until they became sentences; they called him “Easy Reader,” because he made learning such…
In 1988 Penelope Spheeris released the amusing rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap is an almost perfect parody of Spheeris’ film, and Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel is a perfect parody of Ozzy Osborne’s persona in Spheeris’ film. The…
It’s strange to encounter a movie like The Opportunists, the debut feature by writer/director Myles Connell, because, as it eschews pomp and sensationalism, there aren’t a lot of obvious highlights to mention. The stakes are low, the relationships are subtle, and Christopher Walken hardly even raises his voice, barking only…
Catfish in Black Bean Sauce starts with a promising premise for either a farce or a melodrama: Two Vietnamese-American siblings, adopted and raised by a black couple, find their lives turned upside down when their birth mother arrives in the States 20-some years later. Unfortunately, writer/producer/director/star Chi Muoi Lo doesn’t…
Whatever one might believe about the past centuries of English oppression of the Irish, one thing is sure: No matter how raw a deal they’ve gotten in real life, the Irish haven’t been shortchanged on the screen. From the Easter Rising to the more recent Troubles, the conflict has been…
Try to resist the urge to yell “Focus!” during the first five minutes or so of An Affair of Love. It’s been a while since a director has actively utilized such tools as focus and color to hint at deeper truths, but Frederic Fonteyne (Max and Bobo) knows what he’s…
Amanda Peet has extraordinarily large teeth; you’re surprised she can close her mouth. It may be in vogue for hot, young, would-be sex symbols to have a set of brightly polished choppers prominent in neighboring counties (cf. Neve Campbell, Casper Van Dien, or Denise Richards), but Amanda’s impressive ivories belong…
Be cool, get chicks.” While that’s paraphrased and boiled down, it’s nonetheless the essential creed of Dex (Donal Logue), the corpulent connoisseur of carnality who lumbers through this debut feature from Jenniphr Goodman as if he’s Paul Bunyan and every woman in sight is a tree. Overweight and underemployed, Dex…
