A nostalgic recollection of Fifties America by way of the already nostalgic Seventies novel of Dan Wakefield. It gets through its best material early: the Madison Avenue-styled illustrations of a Dream America, to the accompaniment of "A White Sport Coat," behind the credits. (The Marty Robbins tune sets the period …
There is a story, oft told, behind the story on screen. On-the-make actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, best friends since grade school, wrote the script for themselves to act in. There's more to it than that, but it doesn't get more interesting, and nor does the story on screen, …
Director Steven Soderbergh plays cinematic amaneunsis to Spalding Gray, putting down on film one of the latter's long-winded stage monologues. Subject: eye trouble. Or in short: the verbal equivalent of the razored eyeball at the beginning of Un Chien Andalou, except that the torture lasts infinitely longer and you cannot …
The New Year's Eve overdose of a Detroit jazz vocalist convinces her bassist and keyboardist to make a New Year's Resolution to kick their own habits. (The three are very close: flashbacks reveal they even pee together.) The bureaucratic obstacles ahead of them reach almost Kafka-esque proportions. But the raw …
I am almost entirely unfamiliar with Tupac Shakur’s discography, but I can personally vouch for the quality of his performances in the half-dozen films in which he starred. This black comedy romp places near the top. Spend New Year’s Day with a trio of junkies — Spoon (Tupac Shakur), Stretch …
A hip, flip, deadpan comedy which washed through the Tarantino floodgate. The hero is a professional hitman in career crisis ("I don't think necessarily what a person does for a living reflects who he is") and in therapy with a psychoanalyst who is terrified of him. A new assignment -- …
On the road to Havana, with the body of Aunt Yoyita, in a relay-team of hearses. The final film of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (co-directing with Juan Carlos Tabia) shows clear signs of being a comedy, but none to laugh out loud at. The Cuban local color is small compensation. With …
Wong Kar-wai, of Chungking Express, Days of Being Wild, et al., demonstrates himself again to be a natural-born moviemaker, or shot-maker at any rate, with an offhand, on-the-run manner that makes light of his prodigious gifts. (The spirit of the French New Wave lives.) He toys here with film speeds; …
A P.T. Anderson Picture, it says right at the top. More precisely, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's first picture, a contrived yet underplotted piece about a gentleman gambler (Philip Baker Hall, suit, tie, white shirt, tremendous air of authority) and his hapless protégé (John C. Reilly). It is not without ambitions, …
An island, a summer house, a Superior Court judge, a wife half his age, a next-door childhood playmate of the opposite sex, and an ex-boyfriend, soon a corpse. An intended dark comedy negated by a relentlessly light heart. It premiered on the HBO channel prior to its unnecessary theatrical release. …
The ready-or-not-here-we-come Disney animation team of the Nineties, having previously trivialized a classic novel in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, are not about to balk at trivializing an entire classical mythology. And under their ruling sensibility of the camped-up contemporary stage musical, the very notion of a virile hero is …
An abused child in a broken marriage in present-day Bath (Jane Austen's old stomping ground). The father now lives with his homosexual lover; the abuser is the mother's new live-in boyfriend, a man's-man construction worker. Getting the truth out into the open, getting the right people to believe it, getting …
Notwithstanding the move uptown to Harlem, this covers familiar territory: the underworld turf wars of the Great Depression. It covers it at great length and not at great speed, and yet it can find no time to elaborate on the distinguishing characteristics of Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson as a thinker, a …
A Thanksgiving get-together of a dysfunctional family with an unhealthy fixation on the Kennedys and especially the Dallas assassination. (We only hear about -- we do not get to see for ourselves -- the costume-party ensemble of pillbox hat and Chanel dress sullied with ketchup splotch and glued-on macaroni. Director …