I have a question. Whatever happened to the 40-hour work week? I don’t know ANYBODY who works 40 hours. I know guys who work zero hours and I know guys who work 80 hours. I don’t know anybody in between. And the guys who work 80 hours are not complaining…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chickenshit. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, he has not only chosen the number one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over–abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject–but made…
Waiting for Guffman is such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it’s not much better directed than a cable-access talk show. Christopher Guest’s is-this-where-I-point-the-camera? auteurism, last seen in The Big Picture, is redeemed by the performers–himself most of all–and the material they worked up…
Never date a woman between the ages of 37 and 41. You know why? The dinner conversation is likely to go like this. You say, “That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing.” She says, “If you think it’s sexy, perhaps you’d like to fertilize my ovum tonight.” These women think they…
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects–The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984)–had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which he excels, his personal…
For his fourth feature, Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton has chosen to re-create the 1923 Rosewood massacre, during which the white population of Sumner, Florida, went on a three-day rampage and destroyed the neighboring black town of Rosewood, killing many of its inhabitants. Perhaps reimagine is a better…
The new Richard Linklater film, subUrbia, adapted by Eric Bogosian from his 1994 play, opens with a long, unbroken tracking shot through a ticky-tacky Texas suburb, backed on the soundtrack by Gene Pitney wailing “Town Without Pity.” This logy, Jim Jarmusch-y opening hints at even greater anomie to come–and boy,…
Am I the only guy in America who’s upset because we keep putting people on trial TWICE? We did it with the Rodney King police officers. We did it with O.J. We did it with this guy Lemrick Nelson, who’s accused of starting the Crown Heights riots. I know the…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan adventures, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’ Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Kolya is being talked up as the odds-on favorite to cop this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language film. It just might win. It’s cuddly and heartwarming and life-affirming in that sentimental way that tends to impress Academy jurors who favor poky, old-fashioned Hollywood weepies in foreign camouflage. Kolya is a…
People send me these movies. They come in plain brown wrappers that look like they’ve been mailed from Pakistan, and inside is a video with a plasticine cover they bought at Staples and a letter that’s BEGGING for attention. “Dear Joe Bob: Only you could appreciate the enclosed zombie love…
In Norman Mailer’s The Fight, his great book on the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” he begins by writing of Ali, “There is always the shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is…
The narrative of Andre Techine’s Thieves opens moments shortly after the story’s climax. A gangster’s corpse is brought to his isolated home; his widow grieves; his 8-year-old son silently assimilates the news; a few mourners arrive. The climactic scene is the bungled caper during which the gangster has been shot…
You’d think that after more than a decade in this business, I’d have learned one simple, sanity-preserving rule: January and February are excellent times for a movie critic to take a vacation. Not because the airfares are low or the weather sucks, but because what a critic must endure professionally…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
I just found out that one of my best friends is a glitter-that-flies-out-of-the-envelope person. She sends out those greeting cards where GLITTER FLIES OUT OF THE ENVELOPE. I’m reconsidering our whole relationship. Anyhow, who invented this? Who thought this was a good idea? Who had a meeting and said: “I…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’ quietly atmospheric…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism–a primal moral pull. During the horrifying 1927 Mississippi flood, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a man clinging to a cotton house and a woman stuck in a cypress…
Terry George, the director and co-writer (with Jim Sheridan) of Some Mother’s Son, has more complicated feelings about Northern Ireland than he can express coherently. They shoot out in piercing shards of action and potent gutter or pulpit rhetoric. Some Mother’s Son is about the fight to save the lives…
Richard Jewell got his half-million bucks, so I guess he’s satisfied with the whole deal, but I still wish he’d filed a case and pursued it to the Supreme Court. Even AFTER the Richard Jewell case–where an innocent man was hounded half to death by a media convinced of his…
