Baseball’s problems have grown bigger than Babe Ruth, what with the possibility that the clubs may not step to the plate next year, either. Do you sense a little corporate fright out there? In Kansas City, the Royals have cut general-admission ticket prices by a dollar in an attempt to…
Unless you want to feel dull and laughless over the holidays, beware the latest outbreak of Chevy Chase Syndrome. Trapped in Paradise purports to be a comedy about three small-time, big-city crooks stuck in a cutesy-poo hick town at Christmastime. But there’s never been much funny in the spectacle of…
The fevers of adolescence have fascinated moviemakers since Griffith discovered the Gish sisters, but the results have grown more predictable by the decade. Ruled even more strictly by fad and formula than other commercial genres, most Hollywood teen movies are dominated by raunchy schoolboy humor, sweet nostalgia for the verge…
If, in the past two weeks or so, you’ve been watching the jock-sniffer segments on the TV news or plowing through the daily sports sections, you know now what deep thinkers like Copernicus and Bill McCartney and O.J. Simpson have known for ages: The earth revolves around the Heisman Trophy…
Bridget Gregory, the scheming vixen at the heart of John Dahl’s neo-noir thriller The Last Seduction, is already undergoing feminist scrutiny, and her credentials are said to have come up short in some quarters. I find this hilarious. For while those breakout queens of the road, Thelma and Louise, may…
The third and fourth generations of “magical realist” writers and moviemakers may have strayed from the path lit long ago by Borges, Garcia Marquez and Bunuel, but there’s still a bizarre metaphor or two lurking out there in the darkness of Latin America. Witness I Don’t Want to Talk About…
As Bill McCartney can tell you, if you’ve ever been to a football game in Texas–any football game–it’s like full immersion at the river bend. Texans take their football as seriously as their cattle, or their oil wells, or their ancient dislike of Oklahoma. If you don’t walk the walk…
The new-wave ghouls who inhabit Anne Rice’s vampire novels don’t back off from the traditional threats. Wave a crucifix in the face of one of these doomed, androgynous wanderers and he’ll coldly laugh it off. Drive a stake into his heart and he’ll come right back at you, bloody in…
To hear David Mamet tell it, his two-character play Oleanna is such a lightning rod that, all over the country, couples who come to it wind up shouting at each other in the lobby and often leave separately. Judging from the public-radio interview I heard recently, Mamet is quite taken…
Last week the only news trickling out of the moribund women’s tennis tour concerned the return of Jennifer Capriati, the eighteen-year-old burnout who is justifiably more famous for her adolescent misdeeds than for any real prowess on the court. Before her mug shots were plastered all over the front pages…
That rumble you hear down in the laboratory is mad Dr. Branagh putting a charge into the tragic creature De Niro. Whether we need it or not, there’s a new Frankenstein afoot, and it’s a freak of nature. Kenneth Branagh, the British boy wonder who’s given us a pair of…
A fine paradox has risen in the Mother Country: Some of the most expressive British films now portray characters who are notably inexpressive, buttoned up and repressed. Last year, Anthony Hopkins’s stoic butler in The Remains of the Day, paralyzed by his devotion to Stiff Upper Lip, won hearts and…
By the time you see this, the dogcatcher in Resume Speed, Idaho, has probably been voted out of office, and Teddy Kennedy may be driving a cab in Boston. The American electorate is clearly in a sour, surly mood for the long haul, the political pundits say. After Tuesday’s midterm…
Unrepentant beef eaters, contented non-joggers and connoisseurs of the dry martini will probably love it. So will earthly folk who don’t give a hoot about the alignment of the planets or the present whereabouts of Werner Erhard. In fact, virtually anyone who thinks that the humorless orthodoxies and freshly minted…
Set a pack of Yankee filmmakers down amid the weeping willows and sultry heat of rural Mississippi and there’s no telling what they’ll come up with. In the case of The War, it’s a movie about poverty. And the relentless tug of family love. And coming of age. And post-traumatic…
Frankie Accardo, the philosopher, used to say that the greatest feeling in the world is when your horse wins. The second greatest feeling, he added, is when your horse doesn’t win. Frankie would know. In his customary perch just inside the eighth pole at Jamaica or Aqueduct, he experienced the…
Radioland Murders is the kind of dippy, overheated show-biz fantasy that besmirches the good name of slapstick. It doesn’t do much for the long-cherished romance of radio, either. The operative cliche here–and it operates overtime–is the oldest one of all: The show must go on. The time is 1939. The…
Every time you start hoping Dr. Kevorkian will pay a house call on Woody Allen, the filmmaker miraculously returns to form and gets everybody laughing again. Witness Bullets Over Broadway, the third movie Allen has completed since The Troubles started. It’s a Runyonesque farce combining Roaring Twenties theater folk, potato-nosed…
Now that the National Basketball Association season is about to tip off, local connoisseurs are cautioning Denver Nuggets fans not to get their hopes up. That shocking upset of the powerful Seattle Supersonics in the playoffs last spring, the pundits reason, was not only a sign that the young Nuggets…
Bad scholarship, new-age fantasy and publishers’ avarice have collided to produce the current vogue for Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French physician and astrologer who is said to have predicted everything from Nazi Germany to AIDS to the JFK assassination. What he didn’t predict is that a movie this awful would one…
The first (and maybe the last) thing anyone will want to know about The Specialist is that an hour and a half passes before Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone pretend to copulate in the shower. Until then, what they do is model expensive sunglasses down in Miami and talk on…
You always remember your first time. For Charles Sampson, it happened in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, in 1972, when he was fourteen. “That one should be a good ride,” the owner said to no one in particular, and Charles–they called him Pee Wee back then–clambered up on the fence for a better…
