Well, it’s a good subject and a great star. The Venus Beauty Institute is a French film written and directed by Tonie Marshall which explores the female fear of commitment. Everybody knows about the male fear of same, but the female version is much more interesting. Nor to her film’s credit does Ms Marshall’s feminist…
The hallmark of what is becoming the M. Night Shyamalan franchise is a movie starring Bruce Willis and a remarkable boy, set in Philadelphia with supernatural overtones and a surprise ending. The Sixth Sense (1999) may have sold more tickets on the strength of the mystery of its ending than any film since Psycho. So,…
A husband and wife are driving home after an evening out. The wife asks the husband why it should be that they put braces on girls just at the moment when they are most self-conscious about their appearance. The husband, looking tired and fed-up, says he doesn’t know and lapses into silence. Suddenly there are…
The Family Man, written by David Diamond and David Weissman and directed by Brett Ratner, is an attempt at a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life for the Christmases of the new millennium. Jack Campbell (Nicholas Cage) is a high-flying Wall Street whiz kid and swinging bachelor whose angel (played by Don Cheadle) lets him see…
The Sixth Day, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, is a movie about cloning that is itself a clone — a genetic duplicate of every other Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle of the last 15 or 20 years. Actually, it is a clone of a clone of a clone, since the Schwarzenegger movie is itself a clone of a…
A clever headline to the New York Times review of Charlie’s Angels read “Sleek, Tough, Frosted? Must Be Empowerment.” The irony is meant to be a gentle one, as is that of the film itself, which in true postmodern style tries to make a virtue out the patent preposterousness of the kick-fighting, acrobatic babes of…
Having once lived in the area served by Channel 6 (Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Lebanon), where Russ Richards (John Travolta) works as celebrity weather man in Nora Ephron’s amusing Lucky Numbers, I can assure you that not everybody in Central Pennsylvania is a moron. Nor would anyone but a supercilious Hollywood type suppose that “Harrisburg’s most…
The 12 year-old eponymous hero of Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot, played by Jamie Bell, is made to say more than once that “just ‘cause I like ballet it doesn’t mean I’m a poof.” Sounds reasonable to me. But the film itself has a different story to tell. Both the introduction of Billy’s cross-dressing schoolboy friend,…
Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…
The Contender, written and directed by Rod Lurie, is yet another example of Hollywood’s idea of politics and even more bizarrely disconnected from reality than the director’s last outing, the appalling Deterrence which I reviewed in this space a few months ago. The film’s multiple absurdities and implausibilities would take too long to spell out…
Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…
Rachel Leigh Cook is not only beautiful but she must be the greatest actress of her generation. How else to explain the fact that she can submit to being told in the patented denasal tones of Sylvester Stallone that she is “a special girl” —and that if she forgets it she’s going to have “a…
