The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan, is a Hollywoodification of Michael Crichton’s attempt to re- imagine Beowulf in his novel, Eaters of the Dead, with the help of a 10th century Arabic account of adventures in Central Asia. It was Kipling who pioneered this sort of thing in his brilliant story, “The Knife and…
When The Very Thought of You, directed by Nick Hamm from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, was released in Britain last year, it was called Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence. The American distributors must have thought that sounded somehow too suggestive, so they gave it one of those nondescript American titles, like Lost and…
Let’s stipulate that teenage sexual energy and the sorts of things it drives the young’uns to get up to are inherently funny subjects. Shakespeare has the grumbling old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale say: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is…
Wild, Wild West, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, is one of those movies where you can reconstruct the story conference. “It’s James Bond in the Old West,” says the pitchman. “Only he’s black, you see. Will Smith would be perfect for the part. He can be a dandy, Maverick-like, and of course a ladies’ man. But…
Never a big fan of the late Stanley Kubrick’s, I went to see Eyes Wide Shut with no very great expectations. As in so many of Kubrick’s films, the cineaste predominates over the dramatist or the moralist. He is one of those directors — Bertolucci is another — whose approach to the movies is what…
The movie version of the scatological TV series, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, directed by Trey Parker from a script he co-wrote with Matt Stone and Pam Brady, is billed as satire, but it has no coherent satirical vision. In fact, it cannot even remember what, if anything, it is supposed to be satirical…
The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird, is an animated adaptation of Ted Hughes’s fable which recruits it for a role in Hollywood’s continuing attempts to re-mythologize the 1950s according to “progressive” notions. The old mythology, now long discredited so far as Hollywood and the media are concerned, was that during that period God-fearing Americans…
Drop Dead Gorgeous, directed by Michael Patrick Jann, is intermittently quite funny, but ultimately doesn’t work because it is offensively patronizing to the people of small-town Minnesota whom it sees through the eyes of New York or Los Angeles—or some even more fabulously sophisticated place. In this view of the American heartland, the people are…
The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…
The Dinner Game, as the untranslatable Dîner de Cons is awkwardly but decorously rendered, is an uproarious French farce by Francis Veber, co-author of La Cage Aux Folles and creator on his own of a number of other plays and films in a similar style. It tells the story of Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), a…
Run Lola Run, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is the kind of film for which critics must have invented the word “stylish.” It is so stylish in fact that it thinks it has nothing to do but to be stylish. And indeed many critics seem to have forgiven it all its many little incoherences…
My Life So Far, directed by Hugh Hudson from a memoir called Son of Adam by Sir Denis Forman, former director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is rather slight but utterly charming. Lit with the soft backglow of memory, it presents the Oedipal conflict between young Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) and his eccentric…
