The Gingerbread Man, directed by Robert Altman from a story by John Grisham is a kind of cross between Deliverance and Fatal Attraction—that is a meditation on how bad things happen to nice yuppies when they fall victim to wily backwoodsmen or “white trash tramps” or various sorts of throwbacks still lurking around the edges…
Senseless, directed by Penelope Spheeris, is a gross-out comedy of the school of Eddie Murphy’s Absent Minded Professor, designed to appeal to upwardly mobile blacks. Marlon Wayans stars as Darryl Whitherspoon, a student working several jobs in order to pay his way through college while at the same time sending money home to his single…
Like the unsuccessfully arty Deceiver, the unashamedly popular Desperate Measures by Barbet Schroeder is a film which begins by telling us the IQ—“over 150”—of its criminal protagonist, Peter McCabe (Michael Keaton). Oh dear. Once again we are in the presence of one of those criminal geniuses who are so seldom to be met with in…
Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…
Hollywood producers have always been a prey to the delusion that what makes great novels great are their stories, or their characters or their “ideas”—things whose transfer to celluloid is fairly straightforward. But as Stéphane Mallarmé once said of poems, novels are not made of ideas but of words. Without Dickens’s words, Great Expectations is…
There is a scene in October Sky, directed by Joe Johnston, when the four “Rocket Boys” from Coalwood, West Virginia., inspired by the sight of Sputnik streaking through the night sky, are setting off one of their rockets. On a sylvan road beside the launch site there appears an original, 1958 Corvette convertible in red…
Office Space, written and directed by the great creator of “Beavis and Butthead,” Mike Judge, is really two movies jammed into one. Up until the very funny moment at which its hero, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) tells the Two Bobs (John C. McGinley and Paul Wilson) — efficiency experts brought in to recommend to his…
Four Days in September by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has about it the sepia tones of an old photograph. How strange people were in those far off days of 1969, and what strange things they did. Much credit is due to Barreto, himself a former leftist, for the skill and artistic restraint involved in…
Nil By Mouth by Gary Oldman is a surprise. You would think that Hollywood’s favorite maniac villain — along with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken — would have been infected with the Hollywood slicks, but here, in his first appearance as director, he is doing something altogether different — that is a sort of cinéma…
The Borrowers directed by Peter Hewitt and based on novels by Mary Norton is a curious looking picture and occasionally a funny one, but for the most part it leaves us with the impression of opportunities missed. As so often in big-money Hollywood pictures, a world of artistry is lost for the sake of some…
Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life by Michael Paxton turns out to be a product of the Rand industry instead of a critical and dispassionate look at the life of the late novelist and philosopher. For anyone of critical temperament, watching it is only slightly less creepy than sitting through something called L. Ron Hubbard:…
Zero Effect is a wacky detective yarn written and directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, an updated, Americanized version of Sherlock Holmes. Zero is a reclusive private detective who gives his cases names like “The Case of the Mismatched Shoelaces” and commands spectacularly high fees for his “highly intuitive” powers…
