Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale,…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions…
Sweet Sauerkraut “I’m not compulsive; I’m precise,” insists Martha Klein, the accomplished but rigidly self-contained heroine at the center of this enormously appealing German romantic comedy-drama called Mostly Martha. The head chef at an upscale Hamburg restaurant, Martha (Martina Gedeck) is so focused and dour that she doesn’t even recognize…
What’s the movie world coming to? Time was, if you wanted flash, dash, and empty-headed excitement you looked for them in the latest Hollywood bonbon, not in those sober, slow-paced films from Europe. Yet here comes Nadie conoce a nadie, a stylish Spanish thriller that pays deliberate homage to Hollywood…
Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: tough-yet-sensitive cop…
Naked alien goddesses, with big tits and bouffant hair, frolicking in the sun on Super-8 film. Buxom harlots smothering men to death with their breasts and slashing one another. Sordid kisses in wood-paneled rooms and toupéed men spanking creamy virgins on shaggy rugs. Ashtrays, closeups of ashtrays, weird velvet paintings…
This is the time of year when the weather starts to infect everyone in Miami. The city’s tempo slows down and a whole lot of hustle and bustle gets put off till mañana. But here’s a not-so-early warning for you jazz and film fans: Hustle over to the Absinthe House…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
In life, as in the movies, perspective is everything. Adults often recall their childhoods as idyllic and carefree, but such nostalgia is more fiction than recollection. Children live lives as full of heartache, fear, anguish, and doubt as any adult’s. Perhaps more, for children often suffer the consequences of adult…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show, and now the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendency of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
If nothing else, give French actor Yvan Attal credit for his faith in domestic bliss. At a time when matrimony has a shorter lifespan than mayonnaise, Attal has sought to mingle the joys and traumas of his own marriage (to actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) with his piquant views on the ambiguities…
The weird thing about Rain is that there’s virtually no rain in it. Characters mention precipitation briefly and metaphorically, but the cloudburst never happens. Fortunately we get light showers of emotion a couple of times, but then — strangely — these wane to an inconsistent and ultimately unsatisfying drizzle. It’s…
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from downtown Dallas to the Allen home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University…
The first generation to be labeled with a letter suffered through some serious metaphysical shit in the Nineties (if you doubt this, try listening to the period-specific music — emphasis on try), but now this societal clusterfuck is searching for antidotes to its own pop-culture poison. Evidence of a renewed…
It’s not exactly a good sign when a movie starring Tim Allen, Christian Slater, and Richard Dreyfuss gets dumped into one or two arthouse theaters after a couple years on the shelf. Even if none of them is a guaranteed box office draw (though Allen was, until Joe Somebody and…
Cementing his reputation as one of the most important modern Italian filmmakers, writer-director Gianni Amelio’s latest drama, The Way We Laughed, deals with the plight of two Sicilian brothers who go north to Turin in search of a better life. Luchino Visconti’s 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers followed five…
If there’s any truth to reincarnation, the spirit of Napoleon may walk among us today. It’s not unreasonable to conjecture that he has taken up residence in Bill Gates or Joel Silver, but — perhaps more likely — the little conqueror with the big hat has fragmented and landed in…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, eighteen shooting days, a two-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director, and nine high-profile actors (among them Julia Roberts, Brad…
Not much has changed in the eleven years since Mike Myers used the Wayne’s World movies as a personal launch pad, only tipping his James Bond-spoofing Austin Powers hand when he was strong enough box office to reap the rewards of his licensed characters. Now those spy-movie sendups — the…
Merchant Ivory productions — Howard’s End and A Room With a View being two of the most notable — are famous for their almost tactile sense of time and place. The company’s latest effort, The Mystic Masseur, which was not directed by the team’s customary director, James Ivory, but by…
Long before chart-toppers We Are The World and Feed the World, French woodworker and lyricist Eugene Pottier accomplished what Michael Jackson and Sir Bob Geldoff only feigned at doing: igniting a social movement and uniting the world with a simple song. With the words to the 1871 Internationale, the Frenchman…
