Bruce Willis, psychoanalyst. That’s the first hurdle audiences must clear at Color of Night, and it’s not easy. Imagine Sylvester Stallone in the role of, say, a golden-hearted half-wit from Alabama who stumbles into the lives of presidents and pop stars. Envision John Wayne as Billy the Kid. Now think…
Big-league baseball may be on strike, but Jack Rose plays on. And on. When the University of Denver baseball team opens its 127th season of play next February, its fearless leader won’t feel many butterflies. In 33 years as DU’s head coach, Rose has piled up 743 victories (fourth among…
It has taken a couple of weeks to catch up with Andrew Bergman’s new comedy, but the rewards are still there. It Could Happen to You, a New York fairy tale about a sweet-tempered cop and a good-as-gold waitress who split a $4 million lottery jackpot, lightens up a bit…
When we first see old Chu, the bewildered father at the center of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, he’s doing what he knows best–steaming fresh fish in his sun-dappled garden, carefully roasting a just-plucked chicken, carving vegetables into exquisite rose-petal shapes. Lee observes these rituals in such concentrated, silent…
Early in the second round, Jesse “The Boogieman” Ferguson, all 242 1/2 pounds of him, caught Larry Holmes with a monster left hook that buckled the ex-champ like a man hit in the shins with an ax handle. Deep in the fogs of Queer Street, Larry reeled, pawed the air…
It’s not exactly news that Mom and Dad and all the things they stand for are completely lame. They were lame in the 1920s, when nice Presbyterian girls from Omaha turned to bathtub gin and the sin of the Charleston. They were lame in the 1950s, when James Dean took…
If you liked Whit Stillman’s earlier comedy Metropolitan, in which a group of lamebrained debutantes and their sniffy dates sit around a Park Avenue living room drinking their parents’ whiskey and pondering the meaning of life, you’ll probably like Barcelona. The blue-blooded Stillman remains the only moviemaker in America who…
At a time when baseball fans would rather be thinking about rally caps than salary caps, the Sultans of Snit and the robber barons who grudgingly pay them are taking the game from us. This will be the eighth interruption in twenty-two years. If present-day players were as good at…
Clear and Present Danger is only a movie. In real life, pundits of all political stripes are complaining that the Central Intelligence Agency has grown clumsy and mendacious, that it couldn’t find double-agent Aldrich Ames under its very nose, that it’s lazy and self-serving. But don’t tell that to Tom…
Jim Carrey, the double-jointed, rubber-faced dervish of In Living Color and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, seems like the last guy in the world who needs his act powered up by the special-effects department. But that’s what happens in The Mask. Industrial Light & Magic, the people who put the giddy-up…
That little punch-up the other night in Barcelona meant nothing, of course. Still, there were a few surprises: No one poisoned Al Davis’s paella. Denver’s defensive backs failed to plant a bomb on the Raiders’ team plane. The Raiders didn’t burn Denver deep on the second play of the game…
The figure of the windburned, rawboned, self-sufficient loner has always stood at the heart of the frontier myth. If anything, he’s still getting taller. Witness Colorado Cowboy: The Bruce Ford Story. Arthur Elgort’s spare, straightforward documentary about the five-time world rodeo champion is cause for local pride–Ford operates a ranch…
While most of the nation’s lawyers are defending O.J. Simpson, a precious dozen or so have slipped away to assist the Clintons in their various tribulations. Apparently all the others drive cabs or run around in the pages of John Grisham’s potboilers saying pithy things. At least there’s finally a…
Amid the current outpouring of nostalgia about those American footprints in the lunar dust, the observations of former Apollo astronaut Alan Bean seem particularly apt. Bean recently told a magazine interviewer that whenever he looks at Norman Rockwell’s painting of Neil Armstrong’s small step/giant leap, it strikes him as a…
American moviemakers with their eye on the hot cultural-diversity issue or the quandaries of the melting pot would do well to see Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. In a splendid balancing act, this able young director brings keen social observation and pungent, distinctly feminine humor to the everyday traumas…
Shopping for a superhero this summer? Give poor Arnold Schwarzenegger another chance. That spell of self-doubt that plagued him last year, exemplified by a bomb called The Last Action Hero, now appears to be over, and Arnold is up to his old tricks in True Lies. Most of them, anyway…
If the beach volleyball season gets wiped out, you won’t hear a peep out of me. If the monster-truck drivers decide to walk, so be it. Even if ice dancing melts down tomorrow morning, the pro bowlers pack up ball, bag and shoes at noon, and they cancel the rest…
The sweet-tempered half-wit Tom Hanks portrays in Forrest Gump has dozens of antecedents in literature and films, so it’s a little tough to keep him in focus. For a start, imagine the eternal optimist Candide combined with Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin and Dustin Hoffman’s savant from Rain Man. Add a dash…
Even good actors are entitled to load a dud once in a while–especially in July. Blown Away is the summer’s second action picture pitting a mad bomber against a cop, but the fireworks this time around are limited to the explosive charges that wacko Irish terrorist Tommy Lee Jones plants…
When Brazil booted the U.S. soccer team out of the World Cup on the Fourth of July, you could feel the blow to our national psyche for almost five minutes. “Nice try,” America murmured in one voice, then got right back to flipping burgers on the grill, choosing up sides…
In its vain and glamorous heyday, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studiously avoided sending “messages” to the 90 million Americans who went to the movies each week. Instead, the biggest and richest of the Hollywood studios produced sophisticated escapism, polished to a gleam by the slickest directors and craftspeople and inhabited, as the company…
The Shadow is a shadow of the Thirties radio fantasy that inspired it, but not for the usual reasons. As early TV shows demonstrated, you can impose visual images on radio melodrama and get away with it. Especially when most of the original audience will never see the thing. What…
