Email Author Michael Sragow

1997 Stories by Michael Sragow

• Building the Perfect Beast

  published December 11, 1997

  Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs... More >>

• Coppola v. Grisham

  published November 27, 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... More >>

• For Love and Money

  published November 13, 1997

  Put brutally, The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frameup that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical... More >>

• Bored to the Core

  published November 13, 1997

  Writer-director Mike Figgis has mastered a kind of style I usually mistrust: Jumpy and almost free-associative, it begs to be dubbed "arty." At... More >>

• Media Cool

  published November 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's... More >>

• Ugly Americanization

  published October 30, 1997

  Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting... More >>

• Something Bugs You

  published August 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 Thoracic... More >>

• A Conspiracy That's for Real

  published August 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... More >>

• Flunking Out

  published July 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... More >>

• Muscle Bound

  published July 3, 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... More >>

• Taming Leo

  published May 1, 1997

  When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multi-part Anna Karenina to mark the novel's centennial in 1977, series producer Joan Sullivan said, "I think... More >>

• Prisoners of Bore

  published April 24, 1997

  No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak, he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with... More >>

• Boot Camp

  published April 10, 1997

  Could the release of a three-and-a-half-hour director's cut of the 1982 nautical spectacular Das Boot reflect some mass Oedipal desire to get... More >>

• Still a Killer

  published March 20, 1997

  I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary.... More >>

• Ewok, Don't Run

  published March 13, 1997

  In Return of the Jedi, the last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy, an intergalactic window display of creepy and cuddly critters upstages the human... More >>

• Full Force

  published February 20, 1997

  Irvin Kershner's The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas's Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it... More >>

• A Soft Touch

  published February 20, 1997

  Elmore Leonard's Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard's celebrated crime novels (like Get... More >>

• The Prehistory of Conan

  published February 13, 1997

  Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland's wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan... More >>

• The Force Is Almost With You

  published January 30, 1997

  At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American... More >>

• Not a Pretty Picture

  published January 23, 1997

  When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about Campion's version of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded,... More >>

• Past Perfect

  published January 2, 1997

  For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album.... More >>