Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical tale of a family of Russian immigrants in Baltimore spans something like fifty years -- sufficient in some people's minds to qualify any movie as an "epic" or "saga" -- but for the most part it spans only about five of them, from post-Second World War to …
Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, scriptwriting partners who are also husband and wife, have written a semi-private joke about scriptwriting partners who become husband and wife, and about what happens next. The various topics that are ambled through are hardly very private: Hollywood producers, health-food restaurants, wedding chapels, trains, weather, …
Siegel, that is -- the vain gangster, the "visionary" gangster, the lovesick gangster, the henpecked gangster, the moonstruck, the loony, the buggy gangster. He makes a wide-ranging acting portfolio for the narrowly talented Warren Beatty, but he never really comes into focus as a character. And the movie on the …
Barry Levinson's very "personal," yet very derivative, portrait of young manhood in Baltimore, 1959. The production is unstinting in its collection of period cars and haircuts and toggle-button jackets and what-have-you (and are those pink-flamingo lawn decorations a sly tribute to that other cinematic bard of Baltimore and fellow pop-culture …
Sexual harassment in the workplace: of a man, by a woman. It eventually comes to light (a dim, glimmering light at most) that the perpetrator was motivated not by lust but by a calculated scheme to oust the victim. Which would seem to transform her into more a Mata Hari …
Sizes up the strain on a friendship after the "dreamer" of the two invents an aerosol spray to make dogshit disappear. The invention itself -- Vapoorize -- gives a fair indication of the level of inventiveness in the movie (license plates: "CACA KING" and "POO CZAR"), and further proof that …
Robin Williams as a disc jockey for Armed Forces Radio in Saigon, ca. 1965, where he fights for the Beach Boys, James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, and against Lawrence Welk, Ray Coniff, Mantovani, and intersperses machine-gun bursts of light patter: "It's oh-six hundred. What's the 'oh' stand for? 'Oh …
Echoes of Best Friends: a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team writing a script about a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team. And here as there, the result contains plenty of "insider" stuff for the movie buff: the hero's graduate thesis, for instance, is called "A Semiological Analysis of Sexual Overtones in the Early Films of …
An unforgettable character and not a lot to go with him. The character is a Hollywood hopeless called Jimmy Alto, a dumpy middle-aged man with shoulder-length dyed-yellow hair and floral-print shirt, who has never actually landed a single solitary part -- "It's all politics" -- and who finally finds his …
Barry Levinson goes back to Baltimore, back to the setting of his Diner and Avalon, back to the Fifties, back to the bygone days of school prayer, segregation, and striptease with pasties, in order to remember what it was like to find out that the whole world was not Jewish. …
A cable-channel comedian (Robin Williams, given plenty of scope for his penile obsession) runs for President on a dare, and thereafter needs to be continually nagged by his aides to be "edgier" and "funnier." These might also be the voices inside the head of writer and director Barry Levinson, who …
One must of course be willing to go a certain distance, however grumblingly, with the movie's chosen premise: the mixture of baseball lore and Arthurian Romance preserved from the Bernard Malamud novel. But the road downward from Arthurian Romance to the latest issue of Baseball Digest is not short and …
A bath of bathos, with a rubber ducky for occasional squeals of fun. The character of the idiot-savant — a crossbreed of Mickey Rooney's Bill, Peter Sellers's Chauncey Gardner, Bruno S.'s Kaspar Hauser, and perhaps HAL the computer — attains a certain eccentric grandeur, what with his rigorous daily routine, …
A bath of bathos, with a rubber ducky for occasional squeals of fun. The character of the idiot-savant — a crossbreed of Mickey Rooney's Bill, Peter Sellers's Chauncey Gardner, Bruno S.'s Kaspar Hauser, and perhaps HAL the computer — attains a certain eccentric grandeur, what with his rigorous daily routine, …
Just about 30 years ago, director Barry Levinson gave us Good Morning, Vietnam, the story of a fast-talking American operator who brings rock and roll to war-torn Vietnam. Now he's back with the story of a fast-talking American operator who brings rock and roll to war-torn Afghanistan. Plus ca change. …