THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THUGS

I don’t know what kind of pictures you’ve pasted into your book of golden memories in recent months, but you’re welcome to rest a while and look at mine: Here’s Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd trying to decapitate quarterback Brett Favre of the Green Bay Packers. Here’s Greg Lloyd with…

DREAMY PASSION

The crux of Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling is a woman’s sexual awakening, which in itself has all the cinematic originality of a San Francisco car chase or a cowboy riding into the sunset. But Rozema is no commonplace filmmaker, as anyone who saw her cult hit I’ve Heard…

TOAST OF THE TOWN

It’s unlikely that Mike Figgis’s eloquent tragicomedy Leaving Las Vegas will be a smash hit down at the local AA chapter. Because this is one movie about alcoholism and the algebra of need that doesn’t go in for sanctimony, self-help solutions or any kind of moral uplift in the final…

“HELLO, DENVER, YOU’RE ON LARRY KING LIVE!”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Larry King Live. I’m Larry King. But you already know that. You know it, Portland, Oregon. You know it, Bellevue, Washington. And you know it, Dunedin, Florida. You know that there’s nobody quite as important as Larry King. And that’s me. Larry…

REBELS WITHOUT A PAUSE

The peculiar love affair joining the biographer/ essayist Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington was played out, early in our century, on the periphery of London’s celebrated Bloomsbury Group. But for intensity and vision, this bohemian union may have surpassed even Virginia Woolf’s novelistic experiments or John Maynard Keynes’s…

GO WEST, YOUNG HOOD

Following a high-toned promenade through Edwardian New York, The Age of Innocence, Martin Scor-sese is back doing what he does best–wallowing in the Age of Corruption. Casino, Scorsese’s three-hour journey through the back rooms, bedrooms and killing grounds of Las Vegas, is tinged with hip satire and studded with scenes…

JOY IN MUDVILLE

It is 7 p.m., tail end of the rush hour, and a cold, hard rain is falling on Atlanta, Georgia. All along Peachtree Street you can make out fugitive figures with umbrellas unfurled and wind-bent, ducking into doorways, dodging out of the paths of their fellows in the nick of…

A DREAMY PRESIDENT

Mount the charm of Kennedy, the wisdom of Lincoln and the eloquence of FDR on the sleek chassis of Michael Douglas and you’ve got a pretty nice piece of Democratic Party wish fulfillment. Forget the facts of real life–the ascendancy of the Gingrichians and the decline of Bill Clinton. This…

CANDIDE CAMERA

Norman Rene’s Reckless is not for everyone, and Mia Farrow with her neurotic whine turned up full blast is for almost no one. But this quirky black comedy, which is in part another take on Candide, has the kind of daring you don’t find in more commercial projects. For one…

40,000 YARDS–BUT MILES TO GO

In the dead of winters to come, you can bet that John Elway’s long-battered knees will ache and that Dan Marino’s torn Achilles tendon–an injury some ironic classicist must have picked out for him–will start to act up. In winters to come, Warren Moon’s shoulder will surely pain him again…

IN HER GENES

The whore with a heart of gold and the punchy fighter with a rosin bag for a brain are not exactly new movie types–not even for that high Manhattan intellect Woody Allen. So when we meet them again in Allen’s new movie, Mighty Aphrodite, we’re tempted to apply the same…

RHYME AND PUNISHMENT

Agnieszka Holland’s overwrought Total Eclipse tries to exalt Arthur Rimbaud, the bad boy of French poetry, as the soul of raging creativity, a revolutionary so fierce and pure that no act of drunken self-destruction or wanton cruelty could bank his artistic fire or soil his reputation. Fine. The reports about…

KING SHOULD BE CROWNED

Oh, what a beautiful morning. Mike Tyson’s thumb is busted, and Don King is on trial for wire fraud. But don’t ice down the champagne just yet, fight fans. The injury cancellation last week of the Saturday Night Charade that was to pit Tyson against Buster Mathis Jr., a second-generation…

MOB SCENES

It has been half a century since the star-struck gangster Bugsy Siegel arranged a screen test for himself (alas, his gifts lay elsewhere), and more than two decades since assorted soldiers from the Lucchese and Gambino crime families stood around the Godfather set giving Mafia style tips to Marlon Brando…

HAM AND YEGGS

As the story goes, Wayne Wang’s Smoke, that fascinating loaf of life set in and around a Brooklyn cigar store, got such a grip on its authors and actors amid last year’s shooting that no one wanted to let go. So they didn’t. With just six more days of filming…

BURNING UP THE TRACK

Frankie Accardo, the philosopher, was continually baffled by people who diluted their whiskey with water. “That’s alcohol abuse,” he’d say. He also wondered about men wearing bright plaid sports jackets. (“What’d the guy do? Shoot a couch?”) And he had no use whatsoever for five-year-olds. “Everybody out here knows an…

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATION

The reading public–O, endangered species–grows understandably wary every time screenwriter, director and cast get their collective hooks into a bona fide literary classic. It doesn’t happen every time, but some of the world’s most dreadful movies have dropped stillborn from some of the greatest books. Who can imagine Tolstoy’s reaction…

SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES THEM

St. Jude must be working overtime. First the patron of lost causes gets the Seattle Mariners into the playoff picture after nineteen seasons of rain-dampened futility and one collapsing stadium roof. Then he squeaks the M’s past the big, bad New York Yankees. As if that weren’t enough, our man…

BROTHERS OF INVENTION

Cushioned by money and blunted by convention, Dead Presidents lacks the raw thrill that catapulted the Hughes brothers’ first film, Menace II Society, onto critics’ Best Ten lists and into the consciousness of an America obsessed with race and violence. Like many filmmakers on their second outing, Allen and Albert…

ROLL ‘EM

The eighteenth Denver International Film Festival gets under way October 11 at the Auditorium Theatre with the local premiere of Woody Allen’s new film, Mighty Aphrodite–in which Allen and Helena Bonham Carter play a married couple with plenty of, well, marital problems. The festival closes nine days later at the…

SUFFERING FROM BAD HIP

Gus Van Sant, best known for the junkie street fantasy Drugstore Cowboy and the quasi-poetic road movie My Own Private Idaho, is a hipster first and last–a contemporary Jack Kerouac with a Panaflex pointed at the Nineties. So the swipes Van Sant takes in To Die For at celebrity worship…

DANTE? HELL, YES

The same day O.J. walked, John Vander Wal grounded into a double play. Then Andres Galarraga struck out. And that was the beginning of the end for the 1995 Colorado Rockies. Not even manager Don Baylor expected his overachieving club to take the dominant and confident Atlanta Braves (30-6 against…