Raw Loathing
I suspect filmmaker Todd Solondz of being the sort of man who has difficulties with public transport. I imagine him staggering gray-faced off the bus with his sense of self almost erased by the stink...
View ArticleShooting Dumas's Dog
There is poetry -- or a good rhyme, at least -- in the fact that Disney's new adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's 1845 novel The Count of Monte Cristo was written by a man better known as a producer and...
View ArticleBoffins and Eggheads
I was once at a club in London where the Philadelphian rapper Schoolly D was performing. It was a tense affair: Schoolly was notorious at the time for his super-vicious raps, and the English crowd --...
View ArticleOf Mice and Monkeys:
Don't go see Human Nature in the art house. Stay away, if you can, from the like minds and the cineastes and the smell of Central American coffee. The place to see a film as fluidly daft, as limpidly...
View ArticleWhat's in a Name?
Hal Hartley has a fine name, a bright exhalation of a name, prancingly rhythmic, mildly heroic, suggestive of things boyish, airy, lyrical. A better name, perhaps, for an athlete -- a high jumper or a...
View ArticleDogtown Chronicles
The vicious drought that struck California in the mid-1970s killed lawns, turned golf courses to dust, and created the modern skateboarder. A team of street riders from "Dogtown" -- south Santa Monica...
View ArticleEasy on the Adrenals
I could have walked out of Enigma. Not in anger -- not in that state of congested indignation that sometimes forces cinemagoers to their feet, huffing and puffing and clawing for their coats in the...
View ArticleA Film Divided
Hollywood made some healthy contributions to the "rogue cop" genre in the 1990s. One was Internal Affairs, in which Richard Gere, as a cop gone bad, was corrupt, porkily sexual, running rackets, and...
View ArticleFuture Imperfect:
The claim Philip Kindred Dick, California nutcase and sci-fi seer, holds on our imagination is a particular one. Dick's signature as a writer is a sort of pre-epileptic hum or aura, an intimation of...
View ArticlePlumbing the Depths
There are many reasons to applaud K-19: The Widowmaker, not the least of which is that it is such a hellish bummer. Here's the scenario (and it's based on a true story): In 1961, with the Cold War...
View ArticleA Party of One
Tony Wilson, narrator and protagonist of the fictionalized documentary 24 Hour Party People, is a hard man to pin down. Club owner, record label boss, self-proclaimed "serious journalist," daring...
View ArticleNo Surer Signs
One approaches the films of M. Night Shyamalan with the slightly hysterical goodwill of a parent attending a school play. Senses gaping, disbelief suspended a mile high, one so wants the evening to go...
View ArticleA Not-So-Novel Approach
When a well-made film whistles past me without touching, when I've sat down and presented the astonished bull's-eye of my brain to the filmmaker only to hear the arrow go harmlessly by my left ear, I...
View ArticleShow, Don't Tell
The great god of laughter, his sides forever split, is not pleased by black comedies, for the simple reason that they tend not to be very funny. The comedy of blackness is usually a kind of local...
View ArticleBloody Good Fun
Dr. Hannibal Lecter is the premier Hollywood monster of our time -- even scarier, in his way, than John Travolta. Fish-eyed and slightly phosphorescent, wearing an expression of icy beatitude, he...
View ArticleAll Joking Aside
It's well known that stand-up comedians are among the most miserable bastards on God's green earth. What a wound it must be, the need to make people laugh, to stand pinned in the never-to-be-dimmed...
View ArticleHero Worship
As if in answer to a special, seasonal wistfulness silently voiced by the moviegoing public, the film industry seems to hit us each fall with a couple of hero-centered megafilms. Die Another Day is the...
View ArticleAnd the Winner Is ...
One leaf fibrillating on an otherwise naked bough, and a wind that seems to stain the lungs with ice: It's that time of year, so let's start rounding it up, let's start making our lists. Best films of...
View ArticleScorsese's Low Score
Let us hearken back to a time when gangs ruled the world. Gangs sizing each other up, puffed with pride, wagging their weaponry, painstakingly stylized in diction and dress. There were the Bowery Boys...
View ArticleNot Slumming It
"On the fair green hills of Rio / There grows a fearful stain / The poor who come to Rio / And can't go home again." So wrote Elizabeth Bishop, although a visitor to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is just as...
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