Put down those peanuts and Cracker Jacks and pay attention: TPQ=HR/AB+TB/AB+RBI/AB=(HR+TB+RBI)/AB. And don’t you forget it. Okay, unfair. David Pietrusza cringes every time an outsider sees the Society for American Baseball Research as a collection of mere number-crunchers–as 6,300 squinty baseball nerds tripping over their wing tips en route to…
At first glimpse, Iain Softley’s Backbeat looks like a gritty trifle aimed at nostalgic Beatles buffs. It dusts off the old story of Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s best friend in Liverpool, who played bass with the group from 1959 to 1961. A halfhearted musician, Sutcliffe found his head turned by…
Because of dazzling special effects and a funny, bloodcurdling villain called the Trickster (he looks like a Mohawk warrior freaked out on acid but talks like a Phi Beta Kappa), the witty techno-fantasy Brainscan could be the teen hit of the spring. But there’s something else here, too–a distinction between…
Big Bill Tilden’s shoulder was bothering him, and Don Budge was having dinner with President Roosevelt. Little matter. Pro tennis’s dinosaur division, the five-stop Advanta Tour, made its debut Thursday night at McNichols Sports Arena without a single visit by the paramedics. For a while there you needed No Doz–the…
If the Manson Family hadn’t stumbled across Sharon Tate, maybe Roman Polanski would be making movies for the Disney Channel. As it is, this once-fascinating artiste of the cinema has turned his personal life into a trashy novel and his mercifully infrequent movies into guided tours of his own sour…
John Waters may have grown up, but he hasn’t gone straight. In his days as an enfant terrible, the most notorious moviemaker in Baltimore served up raw sensation, black comedy and low camp to fringe audiences who prided themselves on all manner of deviance. Those raucous midnight screenings of Pink…
The tulips are in bloom, and Bud Biegel is thinking comeback. Last June he tore a hamstring while diving for a foul pop, and before he could heal, some banjo hitter whacked him on his mitt hand with the bat. Busted index finger. Out for the year. So after getting…
The first installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors Trilogy” is called Blue, and the Polish filmmaker says it represents the French ideal of liberty. But before we get to any kind of liberty, we get a powerful dose of imprisonment–the self-imposed, emotional imprisonment of a young woman who has seen…
The ironically titled Belle Epoque (“Beautiful Age”), winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a playful Spanish sex farce that unfolds during the brief honeymoon between the bloodless overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 and the rise of the Fascists five years later in the…
What’s new? Put five circus midgets wearing swim fins on the floor and Your Denver Nuggets can find a way to lose to them. But if it’s the high-flying, trash-talking, world-beating Seattle Supersonics out there, or Hakeem the Dream and the Houston Rockets, Dan Issel’s problem children probably will kick…
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the Italian brothers who co-directed flinty, passionate films like Padre Padrone and The Night of Shooting Stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, probably haven’t gone soft in the head. But Fiorile, which traces the legend of a family curse through two centuries of domestic…
This is a strange time for Hollywood to revive newspaper movies. Despite their obvious saintliness, reporters rank just north of lawyers and child molesters on the nation’s current list of heroes–and I’m not talking here only of the “Elvis Shot JFK” brand of journalism. These days, the public–and the White…
October 18, 1994–Two days after the miracle, the stunned Montreal Expos are crying in their Beaujolais. Don Baylor is pinching himself. And Denver fans–all five million of them–can’t seem to sober up. The Colorado Rockies have amazed the world by winning the National League pennant in just their sophomore year,…
In Barry Levinson’s Jimmy Hollywood, an unemployed actor finally gets his shot at five minutes of TV fame by casting himself as a real-life anticrime vigilante. Sound familiar? Hero at Large, a lukewarm 1980 comedy with John Ritter, played the same hand. The feisty protagonist this time around is Joe…
The youngish filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen might do well to come out into the light once in a while. As it is, their parochial, stubbornly adolescent view of life seems thrown together entirely from the bits and pieces of the old movies floating around in their heads, cemented by…
The idea for Twenty Bucks probably came from Max Ophuls’s sparkling 1950 comedy La Ronde, but its prickly sensibility is pure 1990s. Rather than chase the flame of love, as Ophuls did, first-time director Keva Rosenfeld follows a pivotal twenty-dollar bill from person to person to person, with amusing results…
These are strange days in the arenas and on the playing fields, wouldn’t you say? The White Sox have sent nagging irritant Michael Jordan down to Single A, and the United States government is sending the Patriots to South Korea–probably because they haven’t won the AFC East in about a…
You’ll never take Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the bumbling flatfoot of the Naked Gun movies, for one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Combining the cold solemnity of Joe Friday with the ineptitude of Inspector Clouseau, he scatters dumb non sequiturs like confetti in the streets of Los Angeles,…
Like most soap operas, Claude Miller’s The Accompanist covers familiar ground. It is the winter of 1942-1943. The Nazis occupy Paris. And the ethical tug-of-war between the French Resistance fighters and the Vichy collaborationists is taking on ever darker tones. Still, director Miller wants us to believe that the problems…
This March Madness thing now has two lunatic faces–one male and one female. It wasn’t always so. Just a generation ago, the only women you saw around college gyms in the spring were waving pompons or cheering for their boyfriends. Through no fault of its own, women’s basketball was cause…
Shirley MacLaine may believe she was Dolly Madison or Mary Todd Lincoln in a previous life, but right now her only shot at First Ladyhood comes in a hot-and-cold comedy called Guarding Tess. The widow of a beloved president, Tess Carlisle is regarded by all America as a living monument…
Well-heeled suburbia on Christmas Eve is not the most dangerous venue on the planet, but in The Ref it becomes “the fifth circle of hell” for a brainy burglar on the lam. Ted Demme’s bawdy domestic comedy fairly shouts “high concept,” and there’s no point in arguing with witty writers…
