How’s this for a movie plot: two unlikely friends – one a responsible, buttoned-down dud, the other a bewildered, manic slacker – experience relationship dilemmas, take refuge in a sea of commercialism, and neatly resolve all their problems (ranging from the unexpected death of an acquaintance to run-ins with the…
Editor’s note: With this issue, Arnold Wayne Jones, a Dallas attorney and writer, joins the Observer as a regular contributor and film critic. There’s a joke about the movie business that gets revived occasionally in one form or another, usually following the latest success of Benji, or Lassie, or Mr…
A Roland Joffe film just wouldn’t be a Roland Joffe film without a flaming cart rolling uncontrollably through the town square; I’d swear there was one in The Mission, The Killing Fields, even, if I remember correctly, City of Joy. I’m at somewhat of a loss to explain why Joffe…
I have a question about “women’s studies.” Did you know you can get a Ph.D. in this? You can basically spend your whole life at a college proving how the reason the world is all screwed up is that there are too dang many men in it. People go to…
As if the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t have a big enough public-relations disaster after the O.J. Simpson murder case, along comes Strange Days, a futuristic action thriller whose entire convoluted plot depends on one act of racist violence by an LAPD cop. Judging by the unprecedented level of media…
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant almost scored another flop to go along with his last film–Even Cowgirls Get the Blues–based on the kind of advance notice his latest movie, To Die For, got before it hit Cannes. The audiences at that much-hyped Italian film festival have been known to commit sin–deluging…
According to its movie poster, Dead Presidents, the latest Hughes brothers film, is about “getting paid.” Truer to fact, the second outing by the brothered ones is as flat and senseless as the white faces printed on that poster’s pile of greenbacks. And when you read the film’s slogan, “Dead…
“Did you have a good flight?” Why do people say this? I hate it when people say this to me. What’s a “good flight”? You get on the airplane, the airplane doesn’t crash–that’s a good flight. Does somebody really wanna hear about the frozen Three Musketeers ice cream bar they…
I went out to El Lay last week and, for the first time in my life, I felt nekkid without a cellular. I actually wanted to hold a cellular in my hand. I went to lunch with three guys at one of those restaurants with a veranda where you can…
One of the biggest box-office successes in the history of Japanese cinema, The Mystery of Rampo arrives on these shores as a limited engagement in a few major markets. Indeed, the film has been booked for one week only at Landmark’s Inwood Theatre, so if you want to catch this…
When you hear that an upcoming film has generated a positive “buzz,” that usually means one thing–studios expect it to make money and win positive critical reactions and a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jocelyn Moorhouse’s multi-generational comic-romantic epic How To Make an American Quilt has created so much advance excitement…
There are isolated moments in writer-director Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress when you roll your eyes heavenward at the familiarity of it all. This is the story of a man caught between two different forces who would use him for their own ends, then throw him…
If you have to compare watching the NC-17 “erotic drama” Showgirls to a non-cinematic experience, it might be getting a mammogram. There are dozens of breasts on display in this film, and they are constantly being poked, prodded, criticized, praised, bitten, licked, rubbed with ice cubes, and generally wielded as…
Reading the press materials for A Month By the Lake, the latest bit of curdled whimsy from our mother country, you discover that there is a prestigious English film institute called the London School of Film Technique, and that director John Irvin (Widow’s Peak, Hamburger Hill) graduated from it. One…
The latest film by writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Dottie Gets Spanked) has barely earned a nickel in its limited theatrical engagements around the country, yet it’s the canniest, most intriguing American film to be released so far this year. The reasons for its box-office reception are not hard to fathom…
The deeper you delve into the latest serial-killer thriller Seven–and the film’s damp, shadowy, claustrophobic look does make you feel like a spelunker at times–the more you’re likely to be annoyed by the visual excesses of director David Fincher. The man has one feature film to his credit–the underrated financial…
I get these catalogs all the time from big-deal art museums like the Metropolitan in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and they wanna sell me art to either wear on my body or put on top of my TV set. And these are not SMALL…
You know how Wayne and Garth aren’t quite as funny as Beavis and Butthead, and how Bill and Ted aren’t as funny as Wayne and Garth, and how Pauly Shore isn’t funny at all. Well, Dags and Reggie aren’t even as funny as Pauly Shore–although they certainly try. Dags and…
American cinema usually splits the difference when it comes to depicting the high-school experience. In a hormone-driven subculture where democracy exists only as a popularity contest, most filmmakers have been wary of spreading perspective too thin. So we’re offered the views of teachers (Up The Down Staircase, Dangerous Minds); the…
There are two kinds of laws–Mom Laws and Dad Laws. Mom always wants to regulate, control and pass laws about every single second of human existence. Mom Laws are rules like, “Never go out without a muffler, even if you’re in a hurry.” Or “Never make anybody feel bad, even…
Don’t let the title mislead you–Unstrung Heroes doesn’t deal with an underdog sports team, or a state psychiatric hospital that wins big against the snobs of a private institution during field day. Still, the film does deal with mental illness–not to mention cancer, religious faith, the human imagination, family relationships,…
As soon as writer-director Spike Lee burst into the national arena with his masterful unwinding of an urban race riot in 1989’s Do The Right Thing, both Anglo and African-American audiences expected him to explain for us the strangling bitterness that lurks between black and white in America. Unlike the…
