Worth Seeing
[See “He Wore a Yellow Stripe,” The American Spectator of April, 2007, under “Articles”]
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I tried very hard to like Henry Fool by Hal Hartley and was intermittently successful, but I found it in the end unsatisfying. The film tells the story of two friends, the rogue Henry Fool (“there used to be an ‘e’ on the end of it in the 17th century, but it dropped off”), played…
The curse of Disney strikes again, ruining another fine filmic property as only the Evil Empire knows how to do
Albert Brooks, more than any other Hollywood writer/director, is able to write satirically about Hollywood without at the same time succumbing to the charm of its own outrageousness. In The Muse he has had the particularly clever idea of casting Sharon Stone, Hollywood’s premiere sex symbol of the moment, as a sexless “Muse” (“All the…
The introductory disclaimer to the Dreamworks animated blockbuster, The Prince of Egypt (directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells) notifies us that the film has taken some “historical license” but that it has been “true to the essence, values and integrity” of the Exodus story. In literal terms this is true, but in…
Way back in 1976, Alan Parker had the clever idea of making use of the venerable satirical form of the mock heroic and applying it to gangster movies. This he did by making, in Bugsy Malone, a basic gangster flick in which children were cast in all the roles, from tough-guy killers to hard-eyed hookers….
It was an interesting experience to go to see Kevin Spacey’s Albino Alligator with Jackie Chan’s First Strike fresh in my mind. The two films stand at opposite poles: the one delightfully fresh and uncomplicated and entirely based on its swift, non-stop movement and the other slow and lugubrious and full of portentous dialogue and…
