At thirty, Barry Bonds is still the finest baseball player in the world. The San Francisco Giants’ left-fielder has a sweet swing, hits with awesome power and guns down runners with an arm the chairman of the NRA would envy. He’s won five Gold Gloves for his defensive play and…
Trying to squeeze the goo out of Robert James Waller’s romantic bestseller, The Bridges of Madison County, must have been like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wherever you look, there’s another mess. Clint Eastwood, a man of few words, and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, a man of patience, have…
Hal Hartley’s Amateur flirts with pretension, but Hartley always pulls its head out of the clouds with dark humor. Consider: A French ex-nun named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who believes the Virgin Mary has appeared to her, is now living in New York, writing pornographic sketches for a skin magazine. A…
The assembled scholars in the South Stands think Al Davis is Satan, and they may be right. But if he does what he’s making noises about doing, they’ll canonize the man in Oakland, California. His stock might even rise a few notches right here in Elway Corners. Maybe Al wouldn’t…
If we are to believe Mel Gibson’s version of thirteenth-century history–and there’s not much evidence that we should–the ragtag army led by Scottish patriot William Wallace gloried in goring onrushing Englishmen with deer antlers, in bludgeoning, spearing, crushing and dismembering them. But first they mooned them. Braveheart, Gibson’s bloody (and…
What does it say about Hollywood that it has taken a British writer, Paula Milne, and a British director, Antonia Bird, to come up with the most provocative movie in years about American first love and American teenage anxiety? Mad Love is a little rough around the edges, but there’s…
If Dr. Kevorkian isn’t doing anything this week, he might want to drop by CBS headquarters and apply his skills to everyone in the place. When last we looked, for instance, smug Dan Rather was still glued to his chair, dispensing the usual mixture of lame Texas aphorism and lofty…
Once they become “celebrities,” some Hollywood types like to hang around race-car drivers. Others prefer tennis players. Or boxers. Billy Crystal claims to have played a little hoop back in high school on Long Island, so the jocks he sniffs from one end of Tinseltown to the other are NBA…
The guards probably won’t be piping Die Hard With a Vengeance into Timothy McVeigh’s jail cell, but it might look awfully familiar to him if they did. As you might expect, the third installment of the Bruce Willis action series has but one dramatic goal–to blow things up–and even though…
About five minutes after Duke’s Grant Hill was selected in last year’s National Basketball Association draft, the hucksters slapped his name on a pair of $110 sneakers and sent along a check big enough to keep him in Armani suits, BMWs and swimming pools until the millennium. However, it took…
Enough is enough. The World Boxing Council, a collection of crooks that competes against two other collections of crooks to control the world’s supply of human fighting flesh, last week pronounced Mike Tyson its number-one heavyweight contender. Perfect. That puts Leg-Iron Mike just a couple of angry lurches away from…
The crux of Crimson Tide is a mutiny aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine at the height of an international crisis–the stuff that huge underwater explosions and tiny ruminations on the future of the planet are made of. This is also standard naval-war movie material. If you let your attention wander…
Try to pick the moment when jazz reached its apogee in America, and the summer of 1958 is not a bad choice. In New York’s smokey Five Spot Cafe, pianist Thelonious Monk and his quartet were in the middle of an extended, overreaching engagement that would revolutionize the music forever…
The roughhouse political slapstick in Yuri Mamin’s Window to Paris makes for perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of its plea for cross-cultural exchange. The Russian peasant in Mamin is willing to wreck a government phone booth or overturn a snob’s piano to get a laugh, but beyond the mayhem, the…
The Indian-born, Harvard-educated director Mira Nair knows a thing or two about culture shock, bigotry and the immigrant’s burdens of adjustment–three of melodrama’s classic subjects. But she is never content with merely yanking at our heartstrings. Unlike more straight-faced, straitlaced filmmakers, this independent thinker also has a healthy grasp of…
Far be it from us to kill the joy on Blake Street. But before Colorado Rockies fans begin lining up to buy playoff tickets, they’d do well to think about what happens on Monday. The Rox’s 7-1 start was astonishing, to be sure. Those comeback wins against the Mets and…
If you choose to imagine that a woman can get pregnant by dreaming about it, or that the god of good fortune is really Quentin Tarantino and he lives on the bottom of the swimming pool at a fleabag motel in Las Vegas, then Destiny Turns on the Radio may…
Ouch! Four centuries before Lorena Bobbitt fetched her paring knife from the kitchen drawer, the Italians began carving up assorted choirboys in the name of Art. Whether we like it or not, Gerard Corbiau’s Farinelli now tells the bittersweet tale of one Carlo Broschi, supposedly the most renowned of Italy’s…
Want the best method for picking the winner of this Saturday’s Kentucky Derby? Just follow these three easy steps: 1. Lock your doors and draw the blinds. 2. Have five or six mint juleps. 3. Call Uncle Willie down at the state hospital and ask him who he likes. As…
If you’re looking for a spark of life in Team Merchant-Ivory’s fatal collision with American history, Jefferson in Paris, skip right past the hotly disputed moment at which the author of the Declaration of Independence beds a fourteen-year-old slave girl from Old Virginny. That’s this straight-faced movie’s lone comic moment–and…
We probably have William S. Burroughs to thank for the unlikely inflation of heroin use into an American literary credential. Drug vogues come and go, but ever since Burroughs sanctified smack in Naked Lunch, the wannabes of tragic hipdom have been quick to embrace anyone who owns a ballpoint pen…
Last Thursday night, the wet flags on the high rim of the stadium flapped at half mast for the dead in Oklahoma. A chill wind whistled through the lower box seats, and periodic drizzle slanted down onto players, clots of fans and the guys struggling to sell cold beer. You…
