A Bug’s Life, directed by John Lasseter “with co-direction by Andrew Stanton” and the usual array of celebrity voices including Kevin Spacey as the bad guy and Phyllis Diller as the ant-queen, is that by-now familiar Hollywood phenomenon, a movie about movies. The fact prompts the reflection that the American entertainment industry is so big…
I tried very hard to like A Simple Plan, written by Scott B.Smith and directed by Sam (Evil Dead) Raimi, but I was only partly successful. The movie seems to have been heavily influenced by Fargo, right down to the vast and snowy prairie landscapes and the unexpectedly satisfying moralism of the ending, and, insofar…
Affliction, based on a novel by Russell Banks, is written and directed by Paul Schrader, and, like so many other Hollywood products these days, it asks us to believe that traditional ideas of masculinity are psychically and socially destructive. Though it is well-written, well-acted and well-photographed, the movie really has nothing else to say to…
Celebrity is the first good film Woody Allen has made since Husbands and Wives, though it’s still not all that great. It is about celebrity, which is a subject of major concern to the postmodernist sensibility, and it makes use of a central postmodern joke. That is, the celebrity director known as “Woody Allen,” does…
Home Fries, written by Vince Gilligan and directed by Dean Parisot, stars Drew Barrymore as Sally, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks made pregnant by a relatively well-to-do married man called Henry. Henry’s wife Beatrice (Catherine O’Hara), having learned of his affair emotionally manipulates her two dutiful sons by an earlier marriage,…
Living Out Loud, written and directed by Richard LaGravenese is a handsome tribute to a charming woman, but it has no idea where it is going. Or rather: it knows where it wants to go, which is in the direction of a romantic rescue, but hasn’t got the nerve to go there. The story concerns…
My first thought about The Waterboy, directed by Frank Coraci, was that I had already seen just about as many movies as I would ever need to see in which Adam Sandler attempts to exploit his arrested development for comic purposes. But then the Washington Post ran a “Style” section piece by Sharon Waxman taking…
Orgazmo, written and directed by and starring Trey Parker, exploits the essential comedy in sex by bringing together the adult film industry and Mormonism — an unpromising combination, you might think, though the premiss is good for a few laughs before it sputters out about half way through. Parker plays Joe Young, a Mormon missionary…
A Place Called Chiapas, directed by the Canadian Nettie Wild, is a documentary about what the New York Times has rightly called “the world’s first post-modern revolution.” It begins with military vehicles emerging from darkness and a voiceover talking about the Zapatista movement of the Chiapan campesinos, led by Subcomandante Marcos, as having been “born…
The Inheritors written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, is a curious anachronism, borrowing its story (so it might seem) from some Communist propaganda tract of the 1930s—when it is ostensibly set. It tells the story of a group of Austrian peasants whose master, when he is murdered, is found to have willed his farm to…
Jerry Springer in ‘Ringmaster,’ directed by Neil Abramson and written by Jon Bernstein, stars Jerry Springer as the host of a daytime talk show very much like “The Jerry Springer Show”—only a disclaimer at the end informs us that this Jerry and that Jerry have nothing to do with one another. It is the downmarket…
Arab-Americans are protesting against the portrayal of Arabs in The Siege, the new movie by Edward Zwick, and so of course the politically correct will argue among themselves for a while about whether or not Arabs are being stereotyped as terrorists. The film’s apologists claim that, by including a token Arab (played by Tony Shalhoub)…
