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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Fallen, written by Nicholas Kazan and directed by Gregory Hoblit from the novel by Dawn Steele is an idiotic fantasy about a Biblical demon called Azazel who inhabits the body of a murderer named Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas). When Reese is executed for his crimes, the spirit of Azazel transmigrates into the bodies of various…
Readers may remember my reservations about the all-but universally praised L.A. Confidential a few months ago — a film which I note continues to garner award after award from less fastidious critics. Yet, thought I, what was the point of a movie in which everybody but a couple of utterly self-absorbed heroes is basically scum?…
Martin Scorsese’s reverent Kundun proves the occasion for reminding us of a curious fact about Hollywood—namely that Buddhism is the only religion which Tinseltown treats with respect, let alone reverence. If I were a Buddhist, this would worry me. What is it that is wrong with this religion that a bunch of shallow, ignorant, self-important…
The Boxer by Jim Sheridan deserves some praise for being one of the very few among the spate of recent movies about “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland (including Sheridan’s own) that actually tries to depict the I.R.A. as it is and not with the romantic patina of Michael Collins or, most recently, The Jackal. But…
Hard Rain by Mikael Salomon could have been and almost is a really competently managed thriller. Half-way through it I was weighing up whether it deserved one or two stars and delighting in what I took to be an unexpected throwback to the old days in Hollywood when the stories the movies told were tough…
