For seventy years Dorothy Parker’s adherents have been calling her “the first modern American woman” or “the wittiest writer of her time” or something equally absolute. Valued for her sardonic commentaries on failed love, suicide, heavy drinking and the bad plays she was forced to review, she is held up…
“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” Yes, Dorothy Parker said that, too. She also said, “Let’s go wild–there’s plenty of time to do nothing once you’re dead.” And she summed up a Katharine Hepburn performance with this famous jape: “The whole range of emotion, from A to…
Before the cameras even started rolling on Ready to Wear (formerly Pret-a-Porter), Robert Altman’s mordant sendup of the fashion industry, the filmmaker had offended delicate sensibilities from New York to Paris and beyond. John Fairchild, editorial director of Women’s Wear Daily, has led a massive preemptive strike against Altman in…
The title says it all. The makers of Dumb and Dumber won’t win a genius grant anytime soon, but as long as you have a taste for the flipped-out antics of Jim Carrey and don’t mind juvenile bathroom humor, it ain’t a bad way to kill two hours. Especially if…
For some reason, beautiful wackos just can’t keep their hands off Michael Douglas. Glenn Close made him pay dearly for infidelity in Fatal Attraction, then scheming Sharon Stone did that police-station number on him in Basic Instinct. Now it’s Demi Moore’s turn at bat, and Kirk Douglas’s baby boy winds…
Robert King, it says right here, in 1989 began to write a screenplay about love at first sight between political junkies from opposite camps. Hurrah for him. Without the unlikely, unseemly romance of Clinton spin doctor James Carville and his opposite number from the ’92 Bush staff, Mary Matalin, however,…
Gary Busey is six years old. That’s how long it’s been since the blond Texan star of Under Siege and Lethal Weapon dumped his Harley-Davidson at 45 miles an hour, whacked his head on the pavement and…died. “I left my body,” he says, speaking very fast. “I was looking through…
The relationship between great film directors and their actors can be perfunctory–Alfred Hitchcock showed open contempt for the succession of cool blonds ensnared in his thrillers, and entire casts quaked before the imperiousness of Erich Von Stroheim. But when kindred souls meet on the set, the bond can be mystical,…
Red is the final chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s riveting “Three Colors Trilogy,” and if we can believe him, it’s also his swan song. But even if the Polish director of such art-house hits as The Double Life of Veronique and Red’s predecessors, Blue and White, doesn’t actually retire in his…
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…
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…
This is how Captain James Tiberius Kirk dies: He jumps across a broken bridge to retrieve a device whose function is too complicated, and frankly, too unimportant, to describe in any detail. The bridge gives way, and he falls into a ravine. Yes, Captain Kirk–the man who cheated death a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
