Mack Marsh is one good-looking prospect. He’s a big kid with good hands, decent speed and plenty of power. He rarely loses his concentration up there at the plate. He plays with lots of desire and only occasionally swings at pitches three feet over his head. A real gamer. If…
If you like your summer movies indistinguishable from video games, your heroes straight out of Toon Town and, just to gild the lily, wise-cracking, clown-faced villains who chomp on pizza topped with wriggling green larvae, then Spawn might be the picture for you. Harder-edged than Spielberg’s latest dinosaur epic or…
Assorted historians are happily butting heads this week over the speculation that dour Queen Victoria may have had big eyes for the earthy Scotsman who tended her horse. For better or worse, that is the premise of Mrs. Brown, a witty nineteenth-century soap opera that shows no fear of offending…
There are moviemakers, and there are people who have access to moviemaking equipment. The neophyte documentarians Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn fall into the latter group. In a benighted attempt to find “the American Dream,” these innocents packed their cameras and their post-adolescent neuroses into a borrowed Saab and hit…
That rumble of discontentment down in the Rockies clubhouse can now be heard in the cheap (and not so cheap) seats up above. Last Tuesday, for instance, midway through the club’s disheartening and premature fiftieth loss of the year (to the Dodgers, 6-5), you could, for the first time, hear…
Here in unfettered America, where the lamest cowboy insists on doing the Texas two-step and a couple of strawberry daiquiris can transform a retiring housewife into a disco queen, it’s difficult for us to imagine a culture in which middle-class married couples don’t go out in public together and even…
Talk about tragically hip. The doomed hero of Finn Taylor’s quirky buddy picture Dream With the Fishes is Nick, a surly young thief with a taste for tequila and heroin who just happens to be dying of leukemia. His opposite number is Terry, a straitlaced Peeping Tom whose life is…
The hardened baseball fan’s devotion to statistics–most home runs hit, most hot dogs eaten–has long since taken on the unearthly glow of religion. A thirsty man can no longer enter his corner saloon without being accosted by some bright-eyed wonder stuffed full of minutiae from The Baseball Encyclopedia–a glut of…
They say we’re living in the new Golden Age of Sports. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever to lace up a pair of sneakers, they say, and Jerry Rice is the best pass receiver who’s ever run a post pattern. Young Tiger Woods won his first Masters as…
Because he often seemed less interested in studying the stars than becoming one himself, the late astronomer-author Carl Sagan had his detractors. Real scientists, they said, don’t have booking agents or worry about trading quips with Johnny Carson. Still, this tireless proponent of science for the masses exerted an influence…
The most astonishing actress in France might be one who goes to kindergarten. She is Victoire Thivisol, the traumatized little heroine of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette. Her performance–if that’s what you call it–as a four-year grieving the death of her mother revives thorny questions about the tricky old dance of life…
So far, the only ingenious action movie of this mayhem-stuffed, crash-filled summer is Face/Off, directed by the peerless John Woo. It dispenses enough all-out ass-kicking to satisfy the most hormonal adolescent but manages to balance things up with–are you ready for this?–a bracing little essay on human identity. The high-priced,…
Colm Meaney, the earthy Irish actor, has the puffy face of an ex-welterweight, the bulky grace of a steamroller and, beneath all his bluster, the blithe spirit of an imp. In the Nineties he’s been the heart and soul of two related art-house hits called The Commitments and The Snapper,…
As long as your name wasn’t Mike Tyson, the last sports person in the world you wanted to be Sunday afternoon was Scott Sharp. Six hair-raising seconds after the green flag fell on the Samsonite 200, pole-sitter Sharp slid high up on the track at 170 miles an hour and…
It’s been a long road between landmarks for Peter Fonda. When last we saw him, it seems, he was a lean young rebel perched atop a Harley chopper, the winds of freedom whipping his hair, with a little-known running mate named Jack Nicholson in tow. For a member of one…
If Speed 2: Cruise Control were a frantic, zillion-dollar disaster movie in which the world’s most luxurious ocean liner hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sinks to the bottom of the North Atlantic, people might find it a little hard to believe. If it were a frantic, zillion-dollar…
Over the weekend, Dante Bichette, Ken Griffey Jr. and their brethren in The Bigs tried something new–interleague play. Meanwhile, Kale “Gilly” Gilmore, Pat “The Deacon” Massengil and their friends tried something old–baseball circa 1862. Guess who had the better time. Amid Saturday afternoon cries of “Huzzah! Fine handle!” and “From…
The heroine of Susan Streitfeld’s solemn, psychiatry-stuffed first feature, Female Perversions, is a tense, humorless Los Angeles lawyer called Eve Stephens. She favors expensive tailored suits, two-inch spike heels and, if she can fit it into her busy schedule, mid-day office sex with her insufferable male lover or, failing that,…
The germ of Clare Peploe’s complex fantasy of the heart, Rough Magic, is a sweet, obscure piece of pulp fiction called Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, written in 1944 by an all-but-forgotten novelist named James Hadley Chase. To say that Peploe, once an assistant to Bertolucci and Antonioni, has transformed…
So I say to my agent, I say: Listen, I’m doin’ all the things it takes to be successful. I’m givin’ a hundred and ten percent every day. On D, I’m goin’ to get it in the gaps, hittin’ the cutoff man and usin’ my instincts for the game. So…
Three days before this year’s Kentucky Derby, a TV crew and members of the sporting press visited the witty California trainer Bob Baffert and his dark-gray colt, Silver Charm, at the Churchill Downs stakes barn. When the mob arrived, they found the horse standing backward in his stall, head to…
The surreal concoction of farce, tragedy and go-to-hell defiance that put Trainspotting on the international movie map also permeates Kevin Allen’s Twin Town. If this is some kind of trend, like, say, Hollywood’s current bout of Tarantino Syndrome, it probably won’t be long before audiences of all ages start separating…
