An L.A. industrialist makes one itty-bitty mistake with a twenty-two-year-old nude model, and a trio of blackmailers want him to fork over a hundred and five thousand. But he'd prefer to tell his wife, even though she's a present member of the Clean Air Commission and a future candidate for …
It starts out in the precinct of Joseph Wambaugh's Police Story — L.A. cop shoots and kills petty drug dealer, goes on an extended bender, loses his family, emerges months later at A.A. meetings — but it soon veers off toward more routine TV cop shows. Director Hal Ashby has …
A film of famous post-production troubles, so watered down in the editing (or somewhere) that you can no longer tell what the hard stuff originally was. Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? Whatever it was, it tastes now like nothing kickier than oversugared and overiced tea: something to do with two style-conscious voluptuaries …
Based on the David Mamet play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, adapted by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, and directed by first-timer Edward Zwick. The movie, wherever it gets it from, and however deeply buried beneath slickness, cuteness, soupiness, pop songs, montages, and assorted froufrou, has something a little special about …
I remember that wonderful summer when the teenage miracle reached full bloom -- it was 1958, in London, and for the first time in history, according to the original novel by Colin MacInnes, "kids" had become "teenagers." The vehicle for this slice of sociology is a triple-scoop youth musical, with …
Another animated mouse from the Disney studio, in fact a whole society of them underneath (and a perfect mirror image of) the London of 1897. They have their own mouse queen beneath Buckingham Palace, who coincidentally happens to be celebrating her own Diamond Jubilee. And they have a portly medical …
In America, little Fievel Mousekewitz learns while growing up in Russia in 1885, "there are no cats. And the streets are paved with cheese." This establishes, immediately and neverendingly, the monotonous pattern of rodentized clichés and stereotypes: especially ethnic clichés and stereotypes, Jewish, Irish, French, Italian. There has been no …
In America, little Fievel Mousekewitz learns while growing up in Russia in 1885, "there are no cats. And the streets are paved with cheese." This establishes, immediately and neverendingly, the monotonous pattern of rodentized clichés and stereotypes: especially ethnic clichés and stereotypes, Jewish, Irish, French, Italian. There has been no …
The first collaboration between dancer Antonio Gades and director Carlos Saura, Blood Wedding, was a stark dress rehearsal in a dance studio; the second, Carmen, was a realistic backstage musical, or anyway as realistic as its life-imitating-art gambits would permit. This third one is something altogether different again, a fully …
Not bad for its type. But the type is the college-kid elimination derby, set this time at a weekend party on an isolated island estate. "It's just like an Agatha Christie," remarks one of the guests. Or to be specific, quite a lot like And Then There Were None (or …
Not very well distributed, this is nonetheless an important movie for those who have been otherwise diligent and want to keep a complete mental record of Sean Penn's haircuts: a field of study known to its more serious scholars as Sean Penn's Coiffography. The thatch in question is straw-colored this …
Rodney Dangerfield, with a fluffier and less funny hairdo, is "the world's oldest living freshman" and "the walking epitome of the decline of modern education" -- the nouveau riche big-wig of Tall and Fat Clothing Stores, who buys his way into college with a considerable donation, continues to throw around …
Mod Squad for the Eighties, except that there are now five of them (like the fingers of a hand, see). The executive producer, Michael Mann, is the executive producer of Miami Vice; and the director, Paul Michael Glaser, used to be one or the other of the title characters on …
Rather bland for Cajun fare, with toned down and easily intelligible accents and a rudimentary dramatic conflict (ca. 1859) along ranchers-vs.-farmers lines. An independent production of modest aims and modest means and commensurately modest achievement. Robert Duvall, credited for unspecified work as Creative Consultant, appears briefly on screen to read …