That would be Stuart of the Smalley family, the lisping, simpering, fuzzy-sweater-wearing, touchie-feelie, new-age, self-appointed self-help "guru" from Saturday Night Live. The recurrent skits, limited in scope to his on-air activities as host of a cable TV program called Daily Affirmation, are padded out to feature length with things we …
It's the seventh game of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Pittsburgh vs. Chicago (no, it's not science fiction, exactly), and the Vice President and his party have been taken hostage in the luxury box by a stereotypically smart-aleck arch villain ("What do I want? World peace, an end to bigotry, and …
Silly willies: your basic Night of the Living Dead-type siege, under the aegis of Satan, but also that of TV's Tales from the Crypt, complete with jocular prologue and epilogue hosted by the Crypt Keeper. Gore galore, and bare breasts of great size if not frequency. All very adolescent. With …
Black takeoff on horror anthologies à la Tales from the Crypt: a vehicle for sledgehammer social comment on racism, child abuse, right-wing politics, ghetto violence. Third episode produces one funny line from a closet Klansman besieged by foot-tall slave dolls: "I'll kill ya all, ya little niglets." With Rusty Cundieff, …
Ungoverned fantasy, from the folks at Disney, about a dreamy twelve-year-old who recruits Pecos Bill (Patrick Swayze), Paul Bunyon (an undersized Oliver Platt), and John Henry (Roger Aaron Brown) to defend the family farm against the encroaching railroad. Hardly seems a fair fight. Nice shot of a sidewinder leaving a …
Live-action teenie cartoon, as distinct (slightly) from kiddie cartoon. Flip, unpretentious, mostly just silly. The comic-book heroine is a kind of punkish Barbarella in the water-short future of 2033 A.D., and Lori Petty brings to her a Cyndi Lauper-ish irrepressibility (if that's the word; or unrelentingness, if it's not; or …
Earmarks of American independent cinema: a Tom Waits song behind the credits, the presence on screen of Christopher Walken (a quadriplegic ganglord) and Steve Buscemi (a hitman nicknamed Mr. Shush). Scott Rosenberg's overspiced dialogue ("Girls who glide need guys who make them thump") is so idiom-heavy it is often hard …
Sentimental fantasy about a bearded drifter (beatnik? commie?) and his bright-eyed mutt, empowered (one or the other of them) to grant the individual wishes of a Korean War widow, her athletically ungifted elder son, her cancer-ridden younger son. The supernatural is minimized; the natural is stressed (with the always gentle …
Something to put in the right-hand column of your list of the pros and cons of adoption: the possibility that the biological parents might be homicidal maniacs and want to regain custody. Wesley Strick, who wrote the remake of Cape Fear, mines the same vein in his directing debut (implement …
Gus Van Sant's tactless satire on the national hunger for celebrity: "You're not anybody in America," chirps the Barbie Doll heroine, "unless you're on TV." The Buck Henry screenplay, lazily structured around interviews and flashbacks, is based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, based in turn on a true-crime story …
Total mistake. Conventional literary "biopic" on the anti-conventional French poets (and homosexual lovers) Rimbaud and Verlaine, the both of them reduced to boorish bohemians who never have to put up any actual work in partial justification. The cast produces an international cacophony: the American Leonardo DiCaprio as the adolescent Rimbaud …
An American Adventures of Priscilla. Three New York transvestites en route to L.A. in a vintage Cadillac convertible must cool their high heels waiting for a car part in Podunk, U.S.A., where they are able to pass themselves off as actual women as long as they choose to. It's a …
From Disney, the self-proclaimed First Fully Computer-Animated Feature Film: reason enough to disdain it on general principle. Reason in particular, and in plenty, is provided by the horrible forms of the figures -- closer to Puppetoons, Claymation, Gumby, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and the Pillsbury Doughboy than to the Disney family of …