I don’t know what I expected Douglas McGrath to look and sound like after I had been told the writer-director of Miramax’s sterling new version of Emma was born and raised in Midland, Texas. But the last thing I imagined was the polite, dapper, dandyish man with the glittering eyes…
Have you noticed that the only people who know how to do anything are from other countries? These two Armenian brothers are the only guys I’ll let work on my car. I can never pronounce their names, so I refer to ’em as the Skinny Goofy One and the Stocky…
The era of the mom-and-pop video store has pretty much died in Dallas, with the thrilling exception of four stalwart independents: Tapelenders on Cedar Springs; Premiere Video at Mockingbird and Central; and Forbidden Books and Alternative Videos in Exposition Park. Genre is the operative word at each of these valuable…
Everyone thinks he was the first to adore Louise Fitzhugh’s remarkably sophisticated 1964 short novel, Harriet the Spy. As with sex or illicit drugs, your average adolescent must be turned on to Fitzhugh’s smart-aleck exploration of a lonely girl’s traumatic introduction to the consequences of honesty. I had a whip-smart,…
You ever get advice like this? “Gee, that’s a horrible story, Joe Bob. You should prob’ly just swear off women entirely.” That makes you feel great, doesn’t it? It’s sort of like hearing, “You seem to be a toxic individual. Everything you touch turns to dog doo-doo.” I mean, you…
Ticket buyers should know there is a controversial presumption behind Trainspotting, the remarkable new feature by director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge–that drugs are fun. Specifically, heroin. The synthetic morphine substitute that keeps creeping back into ’90s headlines–most recently, with the overdose death of Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Danny Melvoin…
A Time to Kill, like just about everything seeping from John Grisham’s popular pen, points up the author’s two weaknesses as storyteller: plotting, and everything else. In this fairly routine courtroom drama, a cocky young Mississippi attorney named Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey), craving success and adulation, agrees to represent Carl…
The Scottish accents are so thick in Trainspotting that for the first few minutes you’re not sure the characters are really saying what you’re hearing. Could it be–in the politically correct ’90s–that the central characters of a film are extolling the virtues of heroin addiction? Can these smart, interesting, vigorous…
Why is it that the people on airplanes who look like they have no jobs are always the ones who have to get off the plane immediately to get somewhere? Check out the guy with the six-day growth of beard carrying a paper sack full of greasy buffalo wings. As…
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…
