How does a moviemaker reinvent the man who reinvented the movies? Richard Attenborough, brave soul, throws all his daring and affection into this daunting task, and a bit of foolishness, too. Attenborough’s ambitious biopic Chaplin will never be mistaken for Citizen Kane (or for Gandhi), but it’s no W.C. Fields…
A few weeks ago, when I dismissed The Bodyguard and The Distinguished Gentleman as limp vehicles for “dwarf stars,” I received voice-mail messages from annoyed readers. They weren’t Mark David Chapmanesque, If-my-man-Kevin’s-in-it-then-it-must-be-mannah-from-Heaven-so-you-better-put-your-grubby-hands-behind-your-head-and-get-in-the-damn-Chevette-type people. They were just confused as to exactly what, in my book, constituted a worthwhile, quality “star vehicle.”…
The ultimate plain-talker, Jimmy Hoffa was never known as an author of fine ironies. But one real beauty clings to him eighteen years after his disappearance: He remains a hero to a lot of the people he stole from. Director Danny DeVito, screenwriter David Mamet, and leading man Jack Nicholson…
Can evangelists be parodied? It’s doubtful. The most full-throated parody withers in the face of reality. When Alec Baldwin played the young Jimmy Swaggart, cousin and close friend of the young Jerry Lee Lewis, in Great Balls of Fire!, he was pallid. If I’d been the great, dynamic performer Swaggart,…
First off, the homage to Magritte so prominent in the ads for Barry Levinson’s gaudy, grandly entertaining live-action cartoon Toys — Robin Williams against a cloudy sky, wearing a red bowler hat with a window through which we see the same image repeating itself on a smaller and smaller scale…
Ebenezer Scrooge has been learning the error of his ways for 150 years now, but The Muppet Christmas Carol may mark the first time that frogs, pigs, assorted vermin, and pop composer Paul Williams have gotten in on the redemption of the world’s most famous miser. Charles Dickens still dispenses…
Whether he’s doing the bugaloo in his underwear, hanging around the pool hall with Paul Newman, or playing hero in airplanes and race cars, Tom Cruise remains Hollywood’s most insubstantial matinee idol — cute as a bug, light as a feather. That’s right: the Troy Donahue of his time. In…
Bill Friedkin and Bill Clinton may not have noticed, but the death penalty has been abolished by all Western democracies save one, by the modern countries of the Orient, and by the newly minted republics of the former Soviet Union. That leaves China, Iran, assorted Third World dictatorships, and the…
As soon as Frank Capra stops spinning in his grave, he may find a couple of laughs in Eddie Murphy’s election year farce, The Distinguished Gentleman. This noisy burlesque about political shenanigans owes so much to the Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that Marty Kaplan — screenwriter, executive…
As you read this, Aladdin is drawing hordes of parents and preteen children to multiplexes everywhere. But is it a true kid flick, plugged directly into the subconscious of what Emerson might have called the Overtot? And is it really as timeless as its makers would like to think? The…
It’s no mystery why Home Alone became one of the most successful movies of all time. The first clue lies in that seductive title, a situation that kids with siblings daydream about: a little autonomy in their own houses. Flawlessly defending yourself and your turf, as Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) does…
Dead at 40, Malcolm X saw, did, and experienced more than most people who live to be twice his age. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Alex Haley wrote as a first-person narrative after interviewing Malcolm for more than two years, is the sort of book that cries out for…
In The Year My Voice Broke, director John Duigan showed a feel for what Wordsworth called the “visionary dreariness” of a certain kind of rural landscape — rolling hills bare except for occasional clusters of giant rocks or the isolated gnarled tree — a landscape short on conventional picturesqueness that…
Remember Wait Until Dark, the 1967 thriller with Audrey Hepburn cast as a blind woman? Alan Arkin was the crazed thug who tormented Hepburn, moving her furniture around and hissing threats. Wait Until Dark was scary fun, yet it also generated an empathy for the disabled woman in her darkened…
Talk about Undead. Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Darkness, Aristocrat of Evil — call him what you will. Count Dracula has haunted the movies since 1921, when the great German director F.W. Murnau first rousted him from the coffin in a primitive silent called Nosferatu. Since then, this durable ghoul…
A member of a gang called the Reservoir Dogs — known only by his alias, “Mr. Blonde” — has just driven from a botched jewelry store heist with a patrolman stuffed in the trunk of his car. Although Mr. Blonde (Micheal Madsen), like his cohorts, suspects that one of their…
When Gary Sinise was playing Tom Joad in the acclaimed Broadway version of The Grapes of Wrath, he was fortunate enough to receive a visit from the author’s widow. After Elaine Steinbeck expressed her approval of Sinise’s interpretation of her late husband’s work, the actor mentioned it seemed high time…
Night and the City is a movie about bruisers and losers. Robert De Niro plays Harry Fabian, a perennially hopeful ambulance-chasing attorney living in New York City’s SoHo district, who decides — later in life and for no apparent reason — to realize dreams of hitting the big time. What…
Long before film critic Michael Medved became the insipid defender of family values and de facto darling of the Quayle campaign he is today, he had something a critic desperately needs or he’s dead in the water, a quirky sense of humor. Medved, with the help of his brother Harry,…
Never having been particularly enamored of fly fishing, male bonding, or Presbyterianism, I did not read Norman Maclean’s autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It, until very recently — and only then to coincide with the film version directed by Robert Redford and at the prodding of some friends who…
To enter Ridley’s Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise and its phantasmagoric fifteenth-century world, you will need to check your piddling prerequisites at the door. Historical scholarship, stylistic authenticity, narrative cohesion — attributes the dull, unsophisticated mind might expect in a portrait of Christopher Columbus and his times — are deemed…
I had the privilege of attending two Bob Marley concerts in my life. Both were in the Seventies and in England, an island not as far removed from Marley’s own, Jamaica, as their different climates and race denominations would indicate. The English worshiped Marley’s outsized personality and were equally captivated…
