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Michael Sragow

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Rough trade

Life is messy, but As Good As It Gets is just a mess

By Michael Sragow
Dec 25, 1997

The ad line for As Good As It Gets is "A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat." Isn't this simply another way of saying, "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll gag"? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who's a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless...
Out of Africa

Spielberg delivers a wildly erratic--and tumultuously moving--historical epic with the overreaching passion of a man possessed

By Michael Sragow
Dec 11, 1997

Was Steven Spielberg fated to make Amistad? "Amity," you might recall, was the name of the shark-bedeviled island in his breakthrough picture, Jaws; my dictionary defines it as "friendship, esp friendly relations between nations." Amistad, too, means "friendship"--although the ship the movie is named for is a slave ship, and...
Building the perfect beast

Phil Tippett and his studio--creators of Starship Troopers' murderous bugs--are envisioning the digital future of creature features

By Michael Sragow
Dec 4, 1997

Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he's at the...
Blind faith

Coppola brings little insight or verve to Grisham's The Rainmaker

By Michael Sragow
Nov 20, 1997

John Grisham's The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and...
Wilted garden

Heavy-handed direction plows under Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

By Michael Sragow
Nov 20, 1997

In John Berendt's beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt's words) "flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure...
For love and money

The Wings of the Dove transcends period prettiness--it has the cathartic beauty that comes from dramatic truth

By Michael Sragow
Nov 13, 1997

Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James' masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena...
The big carnival

Costa-Gavras' latest is alternately ultra-real and stylized--and heavy-handed

By Michael Sragow
Nov 6, 1997

Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas' supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into "the big carnival" (the film's alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter...
Peking soap opera

Red Corner aspires to political bravado, but can't avoid bombast and cliche

By Michael Sragow
Oct 30, 1997

Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I...
Also Opening This Week

By Scott Timberg, Michael Sragow and Elana Roston
Oct 2, 1997

The Locusts. If Elvis Presley acted in Tennessee Williams plays instead of dragster movies and bad beach flicks, he'd have the same kind of charisma as Vince Vaughn in The Locusts. With V-neck undershirts, an early-'60s pompadour, and loads of aw-shucks charm, the Swingers star bashfully saunters his way through...
City of angles

How Curtis Hanson turned James Ellroy's epic crime novel L.A. Confidential into one of the year's best films

By Michael Sragow
Sep 11, 1997

Bernardo Bertolucci once dubbed Los Angeles the Big Nipple. Writer-director Curtis Hanson has been suckling at it all his life. Just how much nourishment he's drawn becomes clear in his terrific new L.A. film, L.A. Confidential. Now 52, Hanson has been a talent for critics to dead-reckon with for 20...
Open your mouth and say "AH"

Mimic rehashes a familiar story line

By Michael Sragow
Aug 21, 1997

When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Spielberg's, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine--the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr...
A couple of clowns

In Box of Moonlight, John Turturro finds himself...in a mediocre movie

By Michael Sragow
Aug 14, 1997

When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes "A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence," I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner's hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by...
The truth, and the consequences, are out there

Conspiracy Theory gives slick thrillers a good name

By Michael Sragow
Aug 7, 1997

Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he's a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world's hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing...
Lost in Hollywood

Star Maps hustles its cheap wares

By Michael Sragow
Aug 7, 1997

In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in...
Flunking out

187 is a blackboard bungle

By Michael Sragow
Jul 31, 1997

187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide--and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo--and retaliates with his...
Queen Victoria's highland fling

Mrs. Brown's dig into English history turns up a calcified fossil

By Michael Sragow
Jul 24, 1997

Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max--brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It's based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been the devoted...
Hommes en noir: film blanc

A refreshingly small, and forgettable, sci-fi farce

By Michael Sragow
Jul 3, 1997

One speech and one prop from Men in Black combine to sum up the movie. An alien in four-legged Earthly form delivers the speech: "You humans, when're you gonna learn that size doesn't matter? Just 'cause something's important, doesn't mean it's not very, very small." The most refreshing thing about...
Muscle bound

Disney's Hercules is all brawn, no brain

By Michael Sragow
Jun 26, 1997

Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures' action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It's a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating...
Honey, I shrunk the movie

Ulee's Gold chases the yawn at the end of the rainbow

By Michael Sragow
Jun 19, 1997

To get into a good-lovin' mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey" while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee's Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out...
Magical mystery tour

Peploe's potion mixes all the right ingredients

By Michael Sragow
May 29, 1997

In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It's the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It's about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles...
On golden yawn

Love! Valour! Compassion! is boring! boring! boring!

By Michael Sragow
May 22, 1997

Picking up the press kit for the new gay comedy-drama Love! Valour! Compassion!, I was primed to find a dictionary noting the multiple meanings of "queen." Of course, this enterprise is too self-consciously tasteful to commit such a faux pas. Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning work has been called "one of...
Taming Leo

This Anna Karenina rips the heart out of Tolstoy

By Michael Sragow
May 1, 1997

When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multipart Anna Karenina to mark the novel's centennial in 1977, the series producer, Joan Sullivan, said, "I think that great stories [like Tolstoy's] are what the series is about." Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was...