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…
While nothing can come close to duplicating the inimitable Drive-In experience, going to the videotape is the next best thing. I heartily recommend these classics–true Drive-In material–for every home library: * I Spit On Your Grave: This flick is considered “the most disgusting movie ever made” by Ebert the Wimp…
The camera loves 30-year-old French actor Olivier Martinez, but it doesn’t do him justice. In Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s deliriously romantic spectacle, The Horseman on the Roof, he wields heavy-lidded eyes that can make an offhand glance look like an invitation to hit the sack, yet there’s not an ounce of self-consciousness…
AMC’s The Grand–the Gotham City of film-exhibition venues–officially opened its doors in May 1995 with its inaugural movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance. One year later, The Grand can lay claim to unofficially opening the doors to something else as well–an unstoppable movie-house feeding frenzy that has seen three additional…
Sho Kosugi is the best kung-fu man since Bruce Lee. Forget Jackie Chan. Forget Jet Lee. Forget Bruce Lei, Bruce Li, Bruce Lea, and Bruce Leigh. It’s no wonder that they’re giving Hong Kong back to the Commies. They haven’t turned out a world-class thwacker since 1974, when Bruce’s head…
You have to wonder what compels capable actors–aside from pure greed, of course–to want to appear in franchise entertainment packages like Flipper. After all, it’s been predigested and massaged so much it hardly qualifies as a legitimate movie. Rather, it is an extended anecdote–or at best, a shaggy-dog story. There…
Sources as varied as the artist’s published diaries and Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography have documented that Andy Warhol had a peculiar disgust with bodily functions. He was, in fact, a highly anal hypochondriac who never touched drink or drugs and rarely participated in sex. It’s fitting, perhaps, that…
There is virtually no doubt in my mind that the opening scene of Twister is more terrifying than being trapped in an actual tornado. As a small farming family rushes to its storm cellar to escape the approaching maelstrom, the sense of wrenching danger comes off in two ways: first…
Vida Stegall threw all my stuff out on the lawn last week and refused to gimme my dog back just because I failed to mention I was having the occasional date with Cherry Dilday. It’s one of those woman things. They just never understand that men forget stuff. I just…
When I walked out of a screening of Dead Man Walking last January, I didn’t quite know what to think. Here was a movie written and directed by Tim Robbins, and starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn–three of the most unabashed liberals Hollywood has to offer–that did not allow easy…
