If other intelligent life forms do exist in outer space, let’s hope they never catch wind of Independence Day. Director Roland Emmerich’s triumphant merger of cutting-edge computer-generated special effects with the narrative conventions of Irwin Allen-style Seventies disaster movies — a big ensemble cast of archetypical characters playing out cliched…
Jon Turteltaub’s Phenomenon wants so desperately for you to like it that you feel guilty if you don’t. In an attempt to create a Capraesque fable, screenwriter Gerald DiPego and director Turteltaub stack the deck to make the film’s main character, George Malley (John Travolta playing warm and fuzzy) the…
Striptease may not be as precious as pure platinum or solid gold, but for most of its nearly two-hour running time the film is tauter than its $12.5 million star Demi Moore’s washboard abs, and almost as funny as last year’s crime-fiction-best-seller-turned-hit-movie Get Shorty. Viewers who would rather club Madonna…
Demi Moore continues her one-woman assault on classic literature with her appearance in Disney’s latest animated feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Less than a year after making critics see red by adding gratuitous nudity and a happy ending to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Moore — or at least…
If his new turkey Eraser has any effect on Conan the box-office Barbarian’s future per-picture asking price, perhaps Maria Shriver’s square-jawed, stogie-toking hubby should consider trading in his Hummer for a Hyundai. Rarely does one get a better chance to witness how the “too many chefs spoil the broth” axiom…
Mark Rappaport makes funny movies. Not funny in the ha-ha, laugh-out-loud sense; rather, funny in the oddball, hard-to-categorize sense. Rappaport calls his features “fictional autobiographies.” Others have labeled 1992’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and 1995’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg “imaginary monologues,” “mock autobiographical documentaries,” “blends of fiction, biography,…
A little girl gets picked on. It’s amazing how Todd Solondz’s stark, painful suburban comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse takes that simple premise and twists it into a wrenching exploration of the dark side of the Wonder Years. Solondz’s eleven-year-old protagonist, an archetypically awkward, bespectacled middle school misfit named Dawn…
Excess shaped producer Don Simpson’s movies, just as it shaped his life. With his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson latched on to a hit-making formula that dovetailed perfectly with the entertainment expectations of a generation reared on MTV: Inundate audiences with mesmerizing visuals, throw in a hot actor or a topical…
It took a sick mind to find humor — even of the darkest shade — in the murderous real-life exploits of Graham Young, a brilliant but twisted young Londoner who, in the early Sixties, conducted lethal toxicological experiments on his family and schoolmates. Fortunately, writer-director Benjamin Ross and his screenwriting…
What do Anita Bryant and David Schwimmer have in common? In addition to whatever punch line you may have come up with, they also both grace this year’s Queer Flickering Light (QFL), South Florida’s lesbian, gay, and bisexual film/video festival. QFL offers local audiences an opportunity to view gay-theme works…
Rarely have I felt the urge to punch out a movie character as strongly as I wanted to deck John, the sullen protagonist of George Hickenlooper’s cheerless The Low Life. That’s probably the reaction Hickenlooper was seeking at a certain point in his movie, but probably not the one he…
The plot of the new movie Mission: Impossible probably makes sense, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt because it was cowritten by Chinatown author Robert Towne, a veteran screenwriter with impressive credits. But to tell you the truth, the damn thing shot…
Why do we glamourize beautiful people who willfully crash and burn, especially when they choose heroin to fuel their self-immolation? It’s not as if they’re doing society a favor by testing the narcotic’s effects on the human body. It’s no secret that junkies as a rule do not enjoy long,…
Alec Baldwin’s newest star vehicle, the muddled thriller Heaven’s Prisoners, wastes no time descending into cliched detective-movie hell. The film’s opening scene introduces us to ex-New Orleans homicide lieutenant Dave Robicheaux (Baldwin with a Cajun accent so light it verges on being imperceptible) and his personal demons. “I wanna drink…
French director Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s The Horseman on the Roof is the kind of grand, stirring epic that lightweight pretenders such as Hollywood’s Legends of the Fall aspire to be when they grow up. Rappeneau, the man responsible for 1990’s spectacular adaption of Cyrano de Bergerac, spits directly into the prevailing…
“The male is obsessed with screwing,” wrote Valerie Solanas in her funny-scary radical feminist primer The SCUM Manifesto. (That’s SCUM — Society for Cutting Up Men — of which Solanas was founder and sole member.) “He’ll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he…
In the summer of 1993, director Steven Spielberg and author Michael Crichton collaborated on the highest-grossing movie of all time (a distinction formerly held by Spielberg’s own E.T.), excavating dinosaur-size box-office returns with Jurassic Park. The movie suffered from a contrived plot and paper-thin characters, but all was forgiven once…
A naive foreigner with a funny accent arrives in New York City and learns some tough lessons about survival before adapting and ultimately triumphing over adversity. Quick, that describes: (A) Coming to America (B) The Godfather, Part 2 (C) Crocodile Dundee (D) An American Tail (E) Tarzan’s New York Adventure…
Hypnotism works only if you allow it to. Even then not everyone who wants to be hypnotized can be. Jim Jarmusch movies are like that. You have to want to fall under Jarmusch’s spell to enjoy his films, and even then you might never make it into the fully entranced…
Jeez, has it really come to this? Have cell phones, fax machines, and personal computers assumed such an integral role in our harried lives that we prefer securely chatting away in the comfort of our homes to the more exciting possibilities of face-to-face human contact? Hal Salwen, the first-time writer/director…
The makers and distributors of the stale Argentine confection Killing Grandpa would love for me to compare their bland bonbon to the deliciously sexy Mexican mousse Like Water for Chocolate. There are a few similarities: Magic realism informs both tales, and both exalt the power of passion to the point…
John Woo has often cited the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) as among his greatest influences — particularly 1967’s Le Samourai — and it’s easy to see the connection. Even in France, Melville spent most of his career as a cult director: His series of gangster films, starting in 1956…
