Wonderland by Michael Winterbottom is the second British film this year to adapt to London the ambitious American treatment of Los Angeles by Robert Altman in Short Cuts or the San Fernando Valley by Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia. The other was Beautiful People by Jasmin Dizdar which, though not a bad film, lost its…
There are a lot of things wrong with Howard Deutch’s new film, The Replacements, beginning with the fact that it is a football movie and therefore, in my view, extremely limited in its scope for originality. But it is just about worth seeing. There are some good jokes — I especially liked the one where…
The Tao of Steve by Jenniphr Goodman is a likeable little slacker film set in (or near) Santa Fe, but a little too top-heavy with talk — in particular philosophical talk — as many indy first films by would-be intellectuals tend to be. We mustn’t be too hard on them. And the idea is a…
They don’t come much more charming than Shower, a Chinese film by Zhang Yang with a delicacy and a poignancy in its humor that is almost French. Its theme is a compelling one too, depicting in comic yet poignant form the clash between the new economy in post- Mao, post-Deng China and the old ways…
Bring It On, directed by Peyton Reed, offers the movie connoisseur plenty of shots of high school girls in their underwear and some terrific choreography of synchronized cheering routines which seem to have little if anything to do with cheerleading in the traditional sense but which are apparently true to life. If so, they are…
The Opportunists by Myles Connell is a pleasant surprise. To some extent, it represents a throwback to the good old days in Hollywood when even the most hard-boiled gangster movies, or movies later taken to have glorified the criminal life, could be relied upon to portray a moral world characterized by inflexible certainty about what…
So now I guess it’s official. After Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, The Sopranos and other recent fictional treatments of the Mafia, along comes Michael Dinner’s The Crew to confirm that, so far from being the frightening organized crime syndicate we used to think it was, the mob is now to be considered as just…
At one point in Space Cowboys, William “Hawk” Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) says to Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood): “Old Age just brings out more of the Frank in you, Frank” The same could be said of Eastwood himself. Like pretty much all of the films he has been unwise enough to try directing, this one…
BURR, HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON: A STUDY IN CHARACTER by Roger G. Kennedy Oxford U.P., 476 pp, $30 0 19 513055 3 REVIEWED BY JAMES BOWMAN Roger G. Kennedy’s book is subtitled “A Study in Character,” but it is also a study in historical reputation. Kennedy’s aim is to shock received opinion by rehabilitating Aaron…
It used to be said of anything that sounded overwrought and over-writerly that it “smelled of the lamp” — because the author was supposed to have had to stay up late to think of all the labored and artificial expressions he uses. Trixie, directed and co-written (with John Binder) by Alan Rudolph doesn’t just smell…
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 Perfect Storm, though exciting as spectacle is disappointing as drama. Its director, Wolfgang Petersen here favors rather the style of Air Force One, his best known film, than Das Boot, his second best-known. Perhaps it was only the relatively small budget of the latter film which forced him to pay the attention he does…
