For my money, the savage and savagely funny crime films of Quentin Tarantino are a welcome antidote not only to those witless action heroes who give off baby talk as they tear up the joint, but also to Hollywood’s current wave of sweetness, its creeping Gumpmania. Let the self-appointed morals…
The career (if you can call it that) of Edward G. Wood Jr. has become the stuff of cult legend because the man is widely acknowledged as the worst movie director of all time. In his 1950s heyday, such as it was, even Hollywood’s lowest shlockmeisters wouldn’t hire him. If…
The personification of baseball this October–the game’s patron saint–might as well be William Aloysius Bergen, late of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. For he suits the present mood. Bergen, who spent eleven seasons as a catcher with the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers right after the turn of the century, played…
Until now, no one has mistaken the fine-featured, sublimely gifted actress Meryl Streep for a regular on American Gladiators. But in The River Wild, there’s not only muscle in Streep’s performance, there’s plenty of it on her frame, too. In this rip-roaring adventure, the beefed-up star can shoot a set…
This autumn, baseball fans are getting too little World Series and too much Ken Burns. In all likelihood, the last thing the strike-stricken multitudes need right now is another gooey baseball movie that fields the usual lineup of sentimental caricatures. But that’s what The Scout is. Apparently, Hollywood hasn’t figured…
Certain Christian theologians tell us that the worst thing that can happen to a person is to catch a momentary vision of heaven, then watch the big gate swing shut without getting to go inside. Even if that’s not true, it could explain what’s wrong with those thugs and vigilantes…
In the great scheme of evil–where the schemers always out-think the victims–the TV quiz-show scandals of the 1950s are minor infractions. In view of later events like Watergate, Iran-Contra or the O.J. Simpson case, we Americans can hardly be expected to get all worked up about a couple of TV…
Boaz Yakin’s Fresh has its heart in the right place, but it takes a bewildering wrong turn. First, the acceptable news: Yakin again shows us the dangers and sorrows facing a good kid on the streets of the ghetto. Twelve-year-old Fresh (Sean Nelson) lives with his aunt and eleven cousins…
In any other season, a gust of wind or an act of God would have steered the visitors’ last-ditch field goal try through the uprights. In any other season, the Colorado State Rams–the Rodney Dangerfields of football on the high plains–would again have found themselves reeling off to the dressing…
If you want to move up in the superhero pecking order, as Belgian hulk Jean-Claude Van Damme does, you’d better outslug Sly and outshoot Schwarzenegger. You must snap more necks than Steven Seagal, and just in case you hear Chuck Norris closing fast, it’s wise to keep your killer kicks…
Whenever moviegoers do time in prison–or the nuthouse–they almost always run across that one transcendent inmate who sets the others free with his soaring spirit. He may be called Cool Hand Luke or Randall Patrick McMurphy or Papillon, but he’s always the soul of liberty–and the bane of authority. He…
Just as baseball shoots itself in the head, the man who perfectly symbolizes the game these days–all-star jiveass Deion Sanders–slips away to San Francisco to play football. Before Prime Time’s plane can land on the Day of Infamy, owner Jerry McMorris decides to reward the patience, loyalty and goodwill of…
Transplant the classic Western Shane to a ranch in modern-day Argentina. Spice it up with local politics. Add horses. And sheep. And freight trains. There. You now have a pretty fair take on Adolfo Aristarain’s A Place in the World, an engaging coming-of-age story wherein the filmmaker also manages to…
Bruce Beresford, the Australian-born filmmaker who specializes in cultural collisions, has been very quiet since Driving Miss Daisy dominated Oscar night a couple of years back. Those who saw Rich in Love, the only movie he’s made since then, are in pretty select company. More likely you remember this director…
Remember the Six Blocks of Granite? How about the Purple People Eaters? And the No-Name Defense. Care to go against the Fearsome Foursome? Hey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This season the Denver Broncos have (take your pick): A. The Eleven Slices of Toast B. The Chenille Curtain C. The…
It seems a bit early for hotshot director Quentin Tarantino to beget a school of imitators, but then, instant genius is a cheap commodity in the slam-bang world of pop culture. Roger Avary is Tarantino’s pal from his days as a video-store clerk in California, as well as his writing…
Before last week’s Denver preview screening of A Simple Twist of Fate, theater employees handed out little packets of Kleenex to the audience. Cute studio promotion, no? Prepare yourself, the gesture said, for a real tearjerker, a rare opportunity to bawl your eyes out in the dark and go home…
If major-league baseball players and owners want to know what’s good for them–they remain stubbornly in the dark about that–both sides would do well to lay down their golf clubs and set aside their disputes this month to finish school. The professor will be Ken Burns, the ground-breaking documentary filmmaker…
Those who have followed Oliver Stone’s bombastic career know that the reckless loudmouth in him usually gets the best of the deep thinker. Every intriguing conspiracy theory in JFK seemed to be inundated by a flood of bilge. Every pointed comment about the greed of the Eighties in Wall Street…
Raining Stones, a bittersweet comedy by Great Britain’s Ken Loach, is another bow to the tenacity of working-class people trying to keep their heads above water in hard times. Working in the same sort of grimy, northern city (Manchester, this time) where an earlier generation of British “kitchen sink” directors…
When they’re not preaching the Word of God or playing General MacArthur, football coaches are usually stewing in their juices. Is it seemly for grown men to worry quite so much about the efficacy of the all-out blitz or the state of mind in the Atlanta Falcons locker room? Probably…
When a moviemaker wants to dabble in American social issues–but avoid confronting them head-on–the common refuge is the 1950s. That decade, growing gauzier and less distinct by the moment, has been reduced to a neat set of cliches suitable to the purposes of almost any storyteller burning to make a…
