Well, once in a while, maybe. Steven Spielberg's remake and update of Guy Named Joe, a WWII fantasy about the ghost of a recently deceased flyer who (unbeknown to anyone alive) tutors a neophyte flyer and even plays matchmaker between that neophyte and his own former sweetheart, loses some of …
A picture-postcard mutoscope flips us backwards through time, from modern day Hollywood to Fort Lee, NJ (cinema’s original hub), all the way back to a crowded Paris theatre, where, in 1895, Alice Guy-Blaché bore witness the birth of cinema. She was the first woman director, yet not even filmmaker and …
Peter Bogdanovich's "comeback" -- meaning that the director of The Last Picture Show, etc., has come back from the TV-movie wasteland, if not necessarily that he has come back very far. A cramped and scrimping stage adaptation (written for the screen by the original playwright, Steven Peros), it chews over …
Shabby little comedy about a doo-wop group that time forgot (“In 1963 we were on top of the world”), three of whose members attempt a gold heist at a dental lab to finance a restaurant. Emotionally flat, despite the constant propping-up by golden oldies. The climactic concert raises more questions …
When it comes to pure visual comedy, there is no greater director than Buster Keaton. The guy literally broke his back to make audiences laugh. Without the aid of a shooting script, Keaton labored on film much the same way an illustrator would on a sketchpad. The resourceful Buster instinctively …
Published in 1966, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut was the first book to take a title-by-title approach to exploring a director’s career. It also made it cool to like Alfred Hitchcock. A Hollywood master and an internationally acclaimed Parisian newcomer couldn’t have been more diverse, but Hitch, instantly sensing a fellow …
Substantially the same story as Capote a year earlier, an uncomfortable proximity that brings to mind the competing Columbuses of 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus or the competing Earps of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. A second account, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, of the birth pains of …
It’s one thing for a group of untried kid actors to take out a hydrocephaloid sewer clown. It was, by all accounts, a scarefree nap, but at best there was something this clown-hater found intrinsically inviting about the kids-in-peril novelty it waved. But watching a group of (mostly) well-paid (mostly) …
It’s one thing for a group of untried kid actors to take out a hydrocephaloid sewer clown. It was, by all accounts, a scarefree nap, but at best there was something this clown-hater found intrinsically inviting about the kids-in-peril novelty it waved. But watching a group of (mostly) well-paid (mostly) …
Peter Bogdanovich's cardboard re-creation of smalltown life in the Fifties (Anarene, Texas, to be exact) is done with a plethora of time-capsule artifacts (hit records, books, movies, magazines, and fashions of the period), a multitude of stereotypes, a minimum of feeling, and a patchwork of diverse Hollywood movie styles (Ford, …
Romantic comedy with a clearly staked-out area of interest -- the baggage of past relationships -- and a novel approach to it: the eaten-alive lover joins the ex-boyfriend's therapy group for reconnaissance purposes. (Further complication: he assumes the persona of his best friend, who in turn expects to get some …
It’s October, and one week into the never-ending taping of a fatuous, disaster-plagued New Year’s Eve song-and-dance extravaganza — the type even Dick Clark would have frowned upon — an extra seated at table 21 gets flattened by a runaway crane shot. One man’s tragedy is another man’s big break. …
Peter Bogdanovich, in the ranks of contemporary American directors, may be the foremost movie fan or the foremost movie plagiarist. Throughout this reminiscence of the early days of the business, he is making reference to this or that in film history (the "wild man" character from James Agee's essay on …
The transfer to screen of Michael Frayn's stage piece is in Peter Bogdanovich's more comfortable or anyhow less discomfiting mode, the frenetically pointless as opposed to the face-pullingly pretentious (Saint Jack always excepted), a theatrical farce wrapped around a sex farce (titled Nothing On) en route from Des Moines (Act …