Have you noticed how many things can cause fistfights these days? I mean, things that used to be considered normal, and even polite, but now they’re grounds for fights, lawsuits and general ugliness. For example, the words “Excuse me.” “Excuse me” used to be what you would say if you…
In the middle of the public premiere of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “Ode to Joy,” the elderly, decrepit, bitter composer leaves his seat in the audience and wanders onstage as if drawn by a supernatural beacon. He’s remembering an incident of childhood abuse at the hands of his drunken…
“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre,” writes legendary film critic Pauline Kael in an influential 1969 essay entitled, “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” “If somewhere in the Hollywood entertainment world someone has managed…
Gillian Armstrong, the director of Little Women, isn’t a daring, kinetic film artist like Martin Scorsese or Peter Jackson or Jane Campion. She’s a storyteller of a purer, less flashy sort–like William Wyler, George Stevens, and other directors from Hollywood’s studio era. Armstrong has faith in the strength of her…
It’s quite a compliment to say that an artist’s failures are more interesting than most of his colleagues’ successes. The description certainly applies to Robert Altman, a filmmaker who works so close to his heart and intuitions that even his most ill-conceived films usually show you something startling and fresh…
The Fire Chief of New York City keeps trying to get permission to rip down all the fire-alarm boxes on the street–let people just dial 911 if they see a fire–but nobody wants to let him do it. Everybody thinks the city will burn down or somethin’. But listen to…
The best way to describe Jodie Foster’s singular brand of beauty is bird-like–large eyes, sharp nose, a concentrated mouth, a tiny frame. She contains a fierce intelligence which compels her to talk a mile a minute. The tom-boyishness of her childhood movie performances returns even as she riffs eloquent on…
The conventional line about Hollywood is that there are few good roles for women. And while women still tend to be simultaneously blamed and glorified for what happens to us as a culture, it remains unlikely that cinema–as pure a social reflection as you’ll find–can create an adult female who…
There are two kinds of bad movies: actively bad and passively bad. An actively bad one can prove perversely enjoyable. You sit there gazing up at the screen, marveling at the gap between what the filmmakers believed they were doing and what they’re really giving you. This kind of movie…
When fans of old Hollywood complain that modern feature films are too darned commercial–that they’ve lost the personality and passion that made films emerging from the old studio system so pleasurable–they are often reminded that there’s no such thing as the Good Old Days. Movies are, and always have been,…
I just got kicked out of a hotel bar for smoking a cigar. I don’t mind so much gettin’ kicked out, ’cause it was a 15-dollar Bolivar and I managed to save it without havin’ to smush it out in an ashtray. But what bugged me was: there was nobody…
The set of the gentle-spirited independent romance Late Bloomers incurred a stroke of bad luck last week, when the director, Julie Dyer, narrowly escaped an attempted mugging in an alley behind an East Dallas house where a wedding scene was being shot. She managed to escape her assailant, who panicked…
Unlike many large, university-heavy urban areas, Dallas-Fort Worth has never hosted an event celebrating the work of young film students. And that’s a shame, because once you wade through the usual undergraduate film program combo platter of angst, dreck, technical incompetence, and brain-numbing cliches (I’m-sad-because-I-just-killed-my-girlfriend movies, all-this-nudity-proves-I’m-a-brave-artist movies, I-just-saw-Reservoir Dogs-and-want-to-have-fun-with-blanks-and-squibs…
Adapted from Michael Crichton’s bestseller about sexual harassment and office intrigue in a high-tech Seattle computer company, Disclosure is a lavishly photographed, smartly acted, superbly directed piece of hooey. Director Barry Levinson, who gave us such upper-middlebrow entertainments as Bugsy and Rainman, and screenwriter Paul Attanasio, whose work for Quiz…
Somewhere between Joan Rivers’ 1978 bad-taste classic Rabbit Test and the $200 million-plus success of Mrs. Doubtfire teeters Junior, a film whose thudding lack of inventiveness marks the first time I’ve never laughed once at an Ivan Reitman film. Considering the track record of the major players involved, this is…
It should be no small irony to film buffs that 76-year-old filmmaker-author Ingmar Bergman, having directed and written 36 movies during his lifetime, is finally beginning to convey authentic, vital emotion in his work. His most generous feature, Fanny and Alexander (1982), about the sumptuous excesses of his grandmother’s family,…
I have a question for the Lesbos. Is it possible to turn Lesbo? People talk about this all the time. They say, “Well, after that third divorce, she just went plumb lesbo on us.” Or they say, “She’s a lesbian, but she has a boyfriend. She’s just doing it ’till…
Peter Jackson might be the boldest English-language director working today whose films are seen by almost no one. His latest effort, Heavenly Creatures, should remedy that situation. Based on a real-life New Zealand murder case in which two adolescent girls plotted the murder of a parent they believed was impairing…
Well, the No-Smoking Nazis have reached the borders of New York City. There’s a lot of things you can say about New York City, but the one thing I always liked about the place is that it was the last place in America that respected smokers. Some of the office…
John Frankenheimer’s World War II-era railway adventure The Train turns 30 this year, and it’s almost appalling to consider just how infrequently modern-day Hollywood has mustered up the energy and dedication to match its countless splendors. A huge, roiling, clanking, screeching, rumbling hulk of mayhem that seizes you from frame…
When a first film–especially a locally produced, very low-budget film–doesn’t ring your bell, the tempting course as a critic is simply to ignore it, under the assumption that bad press isn’t always better than no press at all. Fortunately, Joseph Alexandre, the Dallas-based writer, director, editor, and co-star of the…
Twenty pages into her first read through the script of The Last Seduction, John Dahl’s stunningly nasty film noir, Linda Fiorentino realized she simply had to play the film’s antiheroine, Bridget–a femme so fatale she makes Sharon Stone look like Sandy Dennis. She’d reached the page where Bridget arrives in…
