It would be presumptuous of me to review Return With Honor, a documentary directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, who also co-wrote it with Christine Z. Wiser. Both the writing and the direction are quite unobtrusive, and the picture consists almost entirely of interviews with American prisoners of war, most of them Navy…
The arrogance of the evil Disney empire as it colonizes the world, both in space and in time, on behalf of spoiled American pre-teens continues. Characteristically, it has chosen for its next property to be conquered and laid waste a peculiarly inappropriate vehicle in Tarzan. The story of Tarzan, that is, absolutely depends on the…
The Blair Witch Project directed by the first-time filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and David Myrick, is a curious and partly successful attempt to make fiction look as much like documentary as possible by giving us what purports to be raw documentary footage from three young kids who were making a film about witches in the mountains…
Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam represents yet another mile-marker in Mr Lee’s progress from interesting young filmmaker to boring commercial hack. He no longer seems to have anything to say except for the same kinds of things he says in interviews to get attention: Clarence Thomas ought to be beaten with a baseball bat, Charlton…
The General’s Daughter, directed by Simon West from a screenplay by Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman, adapted from the novel by Nelson DeMille is yet another example of Hollywood’s grotesquely misconceived representation of life in our country’s armed forces where, we are constantly asked to believe, kinky sex vies with political plots and murder as…
There is often a satirical edge to Mike Myers’s comic speciality, which is characters who are trying and mostly failing to be cool. At some level, he understands the foolishness and moral poverty of the “cool” ideal and loves to laugh at those whose self-presentation falls pathetically short of their own self-image. But there is…
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…
Do too many kids go to college? — From National Review of May 17, 1999.Vol. 51, No. 9; p. 30
Twice Upon a Yesterday, whose British title was The Man With Rain in His Shoes, was directed by Maria Ripoll as a pretty transparent imitation of Sliding Doors but without very much of that film’s wit or stylishness. I have nothing in principle against this kind of metaphysical fable and think of its great exemplar,…
Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…
Election was directed and co-written by Alexander Payne, the promising young director of Citizen Ruth. Once again, he shows that he has real talent in this often hilarious tale of life at George Washington Carver High in Omaha. Like that other recent success, Rushmore, the film looks at high school as something of a metaphor…
I hope it will not sound too relativistic of me to say that each age has its own moral needs. In the late Victorian era people needed to hear—though not nearly so much as they might have needed to hear a few years earlier or later—that mercy and forgiveness and forbearance to sinners was holy…
