Peter Jackson’s brief resume as a writer-director is about as impressive as any independent filmmaker. Three genre films–Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead-Alive–preceded his art-house breakthrough Heavenly Creatures, but they all bespoke a peculiar, highly individualized voice. Whether you like his movies or not, you have to acknowledge how…
A month into its much-heralded summer release, Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame has begun a slow limp down the box-office ladder. Everybody who harbors ill will toward this film–and there are a surprising number who do–want to take credit for its (relatively) poor performance with the public. Southern Baptists…
Here it is, the review you’ve all been waiting for, the one in which Joe Bob compares Striptease (estimated budget, 40 million bucks) to Stripteaser (estimated budget, 40 bucks). Guess which one’s better. You already know, don’t ya? Striptease stars Demi Moore, who received $12.5 million for her performance and…
For me, there is no movie moment that has ever approximated the satisfaction I felt when, on my 12th birthday, I saw Death Star blown apart for the first time. In my mind, I was witnessing something that could only be called cataclysmic–tempered by the pure-adrenaline joy of seeing the…
Once again, the Hollywood Foreign Press Corps has forced us into a crisis situation, so I am announcing the winners of the 1996 Drive-In Academy Awards one week early. The late announcement this year was believed to be hampering peace efforts in both Bosnia and the Golan Heights, as otherwise…
Because some of my friends have gotten married, I’ve had–on rare occasion–the opportunity to attend a few bachelor parties. Mostly, that means cheap beer and even cheaper nude dancers. I’ve seen a variety of sexual come-ons at these events, designed to titillate the hoi polloi: pole-licking, role-playing, hip-grinding of all…
For the past five years, Eddie Murphy’s career has been one of the lingering reminders of how the hollow successes of the ’80s didn’t quite translate into the ’90s. His two biggest hits financially–the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies–were part of the slick, shallow style of movie-making pioneered by…
I have a question about Twister. You know those little plastic thingies with whirlybirds on ’em that they throw up inside the tornado funnel at the end–the things that look like they’re prizes out of a gumball machine? We’re all supposed to feel great, right, because Bill Paxton and Helen…
Anyone who thinks the films of 50 years ago placed the virgin/whore shackles on female characters should check out Molly Haskell’s perpetually irritated book, From Reverence To Rape. Given the obvious gender constraints of that time, Haskell insists, actresses at the height of their careers–women like Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn,…
A shooting, a base closing, a school controversy, an interracial romance, a 40-year-old murder. These are among the numerous prosaic events that, when taken alone, don’t amount to much, but put together constitute the elements of life in a dying border town. Yet these dull, dreary distractions that seem to…
Have you ever noticed that, when the media do interviews, they almost always ask questions about… a) things that happened 30 years ago and don’t matter anymore, like why the Beatles broke up, or b) stuff that nobody wanted to know in the first place, like what Henry Kissinger’s favorite…
It must be liberating for an actor to work with directors who routinely say, “You can ham it up all you want–there’s no way you can overact this role.” It must be equally comforting for a director to work with an actor willing to heed that advice. When you add…
When asked if there’s anything he’d like to discuss about his hot new indie flick, Welcome to the Dollhouse, writer-director Todd Solondz doesn’t hesitate. It’s not the movie itself that comes to mind, but his experiences publicizing it. “Some of the journalists I’ve spoken to for this movie have said…
So far this summer, we’ve lost only 849 lives in Texas boating accidents, and I think that’s a real credit to the new Alamo Plastic Speedboat Propeller, which often maims instead of killing. One reason Texas lakes are so much safer this season, I would have to say, is due…
Zane (Charlie Sheen), the hero of the new sci-fi film The Arrival, is a geeky, quasi-paranoid radio astronomer. Zane works at the Jet Propulsion Lab for the SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and spends most of his time aiming a large parabolic satellite dish to the heavens and listening…
The Phantom opens with a scene that contains a device I refer to as “The Axiom of the Rickety Bridge.” The rule is this: In any movie where there’s a creaky, handmade bridge–usually strung together with what appear to be vines and scraps of discarded lumber, swinging precariously hundreds of…
After the groundwork laid already this summer by Twister and Mission: Impossible, there’s no use or point in mentioning that in DragonHeart the plot-surprises are few, or that you can expect astounding special effects. (Hollywood is three-for-three so far.) But DragonHeart succeeds, in parts, where those other films don’t–as a…
Writer-director Hal Salwen may be only now releasing his feature-film debut Denise Calls Up, but he is no neophyte to filmmaking. The New York University Film School graduate worked for years on spec as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and it was during these uncertain, lean, lonely years that Salwen conceived…
“I give great massages.” You ever know a girl who says this? When a guy hears this, something inside the male body goes, “yeeeeeeeessssssssssssss!” Seventeen thousand neurons rush through the nervous system and plant a flag on Mount Everest, if you know what I mean, and I think you do…
Stephen King embarked on a new project recently–The Green Mile, a serialized novel that he’s publishing in short monthly paperback installments. Luckily for King, he’s having much better luck with this new venture than with an earlier “first,” his directorial debut, which I reviewed a while back. Maximum Overdrive is…
There’s a junkie brilliance to Mission: Impossible that manages to out-shine the sparkling white teeth of its improbably smarmy star and producer, Tom Cruise. It reaches a level of such unregulated shamelessness that it easily crosses the line from schlocky fun to genuine camp. The movie doesn’t make any logical…
There are a couple reasons why director John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm should have made no splashier an American debut than Masterpiece Theatre. For one, Schlesinger filmed the project early last year to be broadcast on BBC-TV. Only a strong, favorable response from film festivals worldwide led to a chance…
