When Harry Met Sally

Time and again Hollywood, wearing its artist’s beret, attempts to satirize the entertainment business, of which Hollywood itself is so huge a part. Time and time and again it fails. I wonder why that is? By coincidence, we have the two latest attempts opening in consecutive weeks. But where 15 Minutes is a typical failure…

Science fiction is the parent genre of all post-modernism. If, as Hemingway said, all subsequent American fiction arises out of Huckleberry Finn, all post-modern movies arise out of Plan Nine from Outer Space and other B-grade schlock sci-fi movies of the 1950s — movies which have been enjoyed ever since by the cognoscenti more for…

For a few moments near the beginning of Betty Thomas’s 28 Days (written by Susannah Grant) you might almost begin to think that the comic drunk, that staple of 1950s humor who has now almost completely disappeared from the cultural landscape, was making a comeback. Nowadays, of course, we tend to think that laughing at…

A delightful trip down memory lane for anyone with an interest in British “football” — i.e. soccer — of the 1970s

Chasing Amy is another slacker movie and thus another piece of redundant evidence that America has become far richer than is good for it. Boys the age of this film’s director, Kevin Smith, whose earlier efforts are Clerks and Mall Rats, ought to be doing their army basic training, or serving as apprentices at some…

A silly attempt to re-imagine Jane Austen as a romance novelist of our own time inexplicably marooned in the 18^th century