Because I Said So

The most important question to be asked about Stepmom, directed by Chris Columbus, is why on earth Ed Harris was cast as the male lead, Lawyer Luke, who was married to the gorgeous Susan Sarandon and is now about to marry the gorgeous Julia Roberts. It makes no sense. There is no chemistry at all…

More super-heroes arrive to poison your children’s imaginations — but at least Pixar knows how to make them fun

I tried very hard to like Loser, the latest from Amy Heckerling of Clueless fame. And, indeed, there is much to like about it. Its hero, Paul Tannek (Jason Biggs) is a poor but likeable guy from a poor but likeable rural family who goes to college in the big city (a thinly disguised New…

The General’s Daughter, directed by Simon West from a screenplay by Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman, adapted from the novel by Nelson DeMille is yet another example of Hollywood’s grotesquely misconceived representation of life in our country’s armed forces where, we are constantly asked to believe, kinky sex vies with political plots and murder as…

Body Shots, directed by Michael Cristofer and written by David McKenna, is really two movies in one, pulling in opposite directions—a fact which, whether it is intended as a kind of post-modern experiment or simply the result of incompetence, is fatal to its success. The first movie is a sort of latter-day comedy of manners,…

Gridlock’d is yet another attitude film, this one by Vondie Curtis Hall and starring the late Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth. They play a couple of junkie musicians in Detroit vaguely trying to “kick” (i.e. the habit) after Tupac’s girlfriend, played by Thandie Newton, overdoses one New Year’s Eve. They take the girl, Cookie, to…