Hollywood’s fascination with plots involving benevolent ghosts who interfere in humans’ lives peaked with Topper in 1937. Since then it’s all been downhill. There have been exceptions — Heaven Can Wait and All of Me, for example — but ever since Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore slopped a lump of…
The cinematic version of the long-running (or maybe it just seemed that way) TV series The Fugitive has so little in common with its small-screen progenitor that truth in advertising laws would have seemed to mandate a name change. On the small screen, phlegmatic sourpuss David Janssen played the indefatigable…
What is it about summer weather that propagates bad comedies like Nebraska corn? Anyone who has suffered through Life with Mikey, Son-in-law, Weekend at Bernie’s Part 2, Dennis the Menace, Hocus Pocus, and Another Stakeout knows what to expect if the sewer line beneath Biscayne Bay finally blows: wave after…
It’s easy to see why Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel and the first draft of the screenplay for Rising Sun, eventually became so upset with director Philip Kaufman’s vision that, depending on whose version of the story you believe, he either abandoned the project or was removed from it…
Lesbians have always gotten a pretty raw deal from Hollywood. They’ve generally been portrayed as either villains or seductresses, take your pick. Sure, you’ll find the occasional self-consciously sensitive film (usually made by a man) like John Sayles’s Lianna or Robert Towne’s Personal Best, which took themselves so seriously that…
You don’t always get what you pay for. Weekend at Bernie’s II and Son-in-law are lame excuses for comedies, but seeing them will still lighten your wallet noticeably. Meanwhile Studentfilms, Inc., an offshoot of Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Center in New York City, has compiled a touring exhibition of eight…
Remember Vic Hitler, the narcoleptic comic in Hill Street Blues? Terry Kiser received an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of the comedian with the penchant for nodding off just when he had an audience rolling in the aisles. Like most of the quirky characters who populated Hill Street, Vic…
Welcome to another installment of Bad Career Move Derby. Today’s contestants are a pair of male actors whose professions began auspiciously enough but have spiraled inexorably downward ever since: Donald Sutherland and Gary Busey. Sutherland broke from the gate with a vengeance, lending his bug-eyed irreverence to such films as…
Life with Mikey is one of those execrable exercises in sitcom sentimentality that leaves even the uncritical viewer with one question: What were they thinking? Let’s be charitable. Maybe the filmmakers were inspired by Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, but the only way they could obtain financing was to cast…
Poor Al D’Andrea. He’s doomed. It’s hard to look him in the eye because you know he’s going to die soon. Al is not an AIDS patient, a Somali warlord, a gangbanger, or a journalist in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s worse than that. Al is the latest guy to hold the job…
The Firm is one of those so-so movies critics dread. It’s like generic vanilla ice cream A tasty enough to satisfy a craving, but not compelling enough to go out of your way for. It’s not bad. It’s just bland. Like Last Action Hero, five writers share in the blame…
Tina Turner is the heroine of What’s Love Got to Do With It. The dramatic sequences in the rock siren’s film bio hammer home the point that Turner (formerly Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee) overcame huge odds and years of physical abuse to become the international megastar that she…
Privately, so as not to give away your age, ask yourself a question: Do you remember when Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat was considered scandalous enough to merit an X rating from the MPAA? How the fun thing to do was smoke a couple of joints and head down to…
Yikes. Just when you thought Arnold was nearly as invincible at the box office as the on-screen characters he’s been playing, along comes Last Action Hero to put his survival skills to the test. Last Action Hero has the feel of a movie that can’t make up its mind what…
At last! A big-budget summer movie that actually lives up to the hype. Jurassic Park is the cinematic equivalent of a doctoral thesis on special effects wizardry from director Steven Spielberg. It’s also a heart-stopping, jaw-dropping, eye-popping spectacular that supplies all the vicarious thrills of a trip to Disney World…
Cute kids are a regular feature of Steven Spielberg’s movies, but it will be a cold day in Jurassic Park before a Spielberg film embraces a family like Leolo Lozone’s. “Because I dream, I’m not,” intones the youngster at the center of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s semiautobiographical tour de force, Leolo. Not…
Seems like everywhere you look these days, something’s falling. America has fallen on hard times. The dollar has fallen in value against the yen. President Clinton’s approval rating, SAT scores, GNP, consumer confidence A falling, falling, falling, falling. Everywhere you look, standards are dropping, heroes are backsliding, institutions are toppling…
A living actor portrays a dead actor who, while he was alive, was a gay man pretending to be straight who made a movie wherein he played a straight man who seduced a woman by pretending to be gay. Confused? Imagine how Rock Hudson felt. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, opening…
Audiences are incredibly tolerant when it comes to romantic comedies. Inane dialogue, contrived plots, transparent sentimentality A all is forgiven if the filmmaker is able to create the illusion of even the remotest strain of chemistry between the principals. That goes double for movies that revolve around the matchmaking of…
Back in 1980, writer-directors David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams teamed up to create Airplane!, the landmark send-up of one of the most cliche-ridden, typecast, overwrought melodramas of all time, Airport. Airplane! was silly, schmaltzy shtick that worked because it dared to be stupid at a time when it…
The venerable director of Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), the first Chinese films ever nominated for Academy Awards (in spite of the fact that they have yet to be released in the country where they were shot), was sixteen years old when Mao and the Red…
It could have been a disaster. The cardinal rules of good party throwing were broken. Anticipating a crowd of 300, the organizers of the Premiere Night Gala Screening Program of the first annual Make-A-Film Competition were not prepared for the nearly 500 folks who showed up. The caterer ran out…
