It’s been a strange summer. In July I accepted a position as a pop culture writer at New York Newsday. I gave my notice on a Monday. On Wednesday, my editors ran an affectionate Buzz item bidding me farewell. The editor of The Met, Eric Celeste, once my boss in…
Photographer Larry Clark’s debut feature film Kids is one of those tough critical calls for a movie pundit, although you wouldn’t know it by reading any of the rapturous notices printed in the national press about this eye-poppingly explicit look at the hijinks of a group of rootless adolescents on…
“What an actor that guy is!” “She is such a little actress!” When people say stuff like this, they usually mean, “What a liar!”‘ And this is a little annoying–especially if you’re an actor. Because I know a lot of actors, and they spend all their time, every day, thinking…
This much-anticipated, unofficial American version of the 1994 Australian art-house hit Priscilla, Queen of the Desert has different audiences waiting for different results. Action film fans wonder how Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze will carry themselves with heels, fake nails, and extravagant drag-queen mannerisms. Gay audiences, thrilled by the moxie…
Matthew McConaughey, a lean, 25-year-old Texan with curly, blondish-brown hair and a scraggly beard and moustache, is hunched over a Tex-Mex breakfast at Barney’s Beanery, a popular greasy spoon on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, scooping egg onto a tortilla with a fork and telling a reporter from Dallas…
Let’s talk Pro Beach Volleyball. I’ve decided the universe can continue to exist without Pro Beach Volleyball. Baggy-shorts jerks in a sandbox, right? Not just baggy shorts. Purple baggy shorts. Aquamarine baggy shorts. With goggle sunglasses riding up on their foreheads like they were a bunch of four-eyed possums sponsored…
In retrospect, it seems odd that a project like The Right Stuff–screened Monday, September 4 at 7 p.m. at the AMC Glen Lakes by the USA Film Festival–could get made in Hollywood at all. Sure, the 1983 movie is based on a best seller by New Journalism icon Tom Wolfe,…
Get a load of this: Antonio Banderas, all decked out in bandit black, scampering across the bar in a dingy cantina, a blazing gun in either hand, mowing down bad guys as he twirls his arm this way, that way, any way, like a flamboyant bullfighter facing death in the…
Prominent movie critics across the country have joined hands in ritual public display of their admiration for Oklahoma-born photographer Larry Clark’s unrated feature debut Kids. This, after all, is the film that Mickey The Mouse refused to release under His newly acquired Miramax label, forcing the filmmakers to form their…
It’s easy to see why Hollywood went berserk over El Mariachi. Produced for the now-legendary sum of $7,000, Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’ fable of a guitar player caught in a border town war between rival drug gangs wasn’t a revelatory piece of cinematic art. It was just a bunch of…
Fretful, chain-smoking fashion wunderkind Isaac Mizrahi–the subject of Douglas Keeve’s wildly kinetic, hysterically funny documentary Unzipped–is a slightly more butch Yiddish version of Alicia Silverstone, and sort of like Harvey Fierstein without the mileage. During this documentary, which details the New York fashion designer preparing for his fall 1994 show,…
Have you ever heard this? “Best movie I ever saw in my life! It’s about this guy, and he goes to this place, and then a bunch of funny things happen to him, and then he escapes–but he doesn’t really escape–and then this really goofy old friend of his whom…
For some reason I wasn’t getting any action on my new, improved personal ad for the ’90s. “Chain-Smoking Couch Potato, 35 (but looks 55), card-carrying NRA member. Hates to laugh but loves to drink pina coladas on a bass boat while watching you scuba dive. Seeking morose, big-breasted, bisexual lesbian…
Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, directed by award-winning New York stage director Christopher Ashley in his feature film debut, is something of a mess. Ashley has no sense of how to build momentum within the camera’s frame, so he relies on stock TV effects–slow motion, crane shots, first-person addresses by the lead…
A glance at the names associated with Like Water For Chocolate’s Alfonso Arau’s new filmic fable A Walk in the Clouds is enough to strike terror in the heart of any Like Water cultist. Can the Mexican director’s pulsing, sexy vision survive the Zucker brothers production team, who have individually…
Upon greeting the photographer assigned to take his portrait for a newspaper profile, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau immediately turns his Crescent Court hotel suite into a set. “Do you like this light?” he asks, gesturing toward delicate sun rays that shimmer through a window and rest upon a fawn-colored chair…
Going into it, I never would have imagined that Operation Dumbo Drop would provoke any thought whatsoever; it is, after all, just another predictably heartwarming human-animal bonding story, about a bunch of tough American servicemen charged with procuring a baby elephant to please the inhabitants of a strategically important South…
I love it when a movie leaves me feeling wrung out and exhausted–as if I’ve been on a tortuous journey I didn’t expect to take, but one that showed me things I never would have dreamed I’d see. Belle de Jour, surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film about a repressed…
Only in California. People keep getting kicked off the O.J. jury for “planning to write a book.” First of all, what difference does it make? Nine million people a day decide their life is so danged fascinating they’ll write a book about it, but none of them ever actually do…
It’s a small world after all–oppressively small, in fact. The announcement that the Magic Kingdom would be purchasing Capital Cities/ABC for an estimated $19 billion, instantly transforming the Magic Kingdom into the largest media conglomerate on the planet, shook the entertainment industry last week in ways that Westinghouse’s purchase of…
As of this writing, there are only three American actresses who’ve proven to Hollywood they can attract big audiences by name alone–Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs like Disclosure proves…
Let’s face it. What’s the No. 1 reason for bar fights in America? It’s the following words: “What are you looking at?” And we know what he’s looking at, right? He’s looking at a female. And the female is with a guy. And any other guy who looks at, talks…
