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…
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…
