The Diary of a Seducer, by Dani le Dubroux, is a clever little movie based loosely on Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer. The diary in this case exists in two forms. One is as a French translation of Kierkegaard which Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud), a young philosophy student who lives with his crazy grandmother, Diane, a…
Ulee’s Gold, written and directed by Victor Nunez is a film so slow-paced that even the exciting parts look as if they are on drugs. Perhaps this is because its star, the Ulee of the title (short for Ulysses) is the former pot- head Peter Fonda. It is not necessarily the highest of compliments to…
One ought, I think, to be suspicious of films about mental illness. They nearly always call on us to pity and thus to condescend to their characters. Such feelings are not those elicited by great art, which requires us to recognize in the characters an essential likeness to ourselves. But Angel Baby by Michael Rymer,…
Pink Flamingos by John Waters (1972), now re-released, is not a film which it is really possible to review. It contains sex scenes, both homo and heterosexual, weird perversions, bestiality, coprophagy, incest, madness, murder, torture, mutilation, rape, kidnapping, cannibalism, and the sale of human babies — and to all of this it invites and (in…
In Anaconda, Danny (Ice Cube), while he is being pursued up the Amazon by a gigantic, man-eating snake and a homocidal river man, dreams of being back in “civilization” — by which he means “on the L.A. freeways with my cell phone.” Ha! If you’ve got to choose between the giant snake and the river…
That Old Feeling, directed by Carl Reiner, is a vehicle for Bette Midler to do her First Wives’ Club schtick all over again, but this time in the Goldie Hawn role as the over-the-hill starlet, Lilly. Dennis Farina plays her ex-husband, Dan, with whom she is said to have a hostile relationship with nuclear capability….
Anaconda by Luis Llosa is a riot of special effects but as dramatically negligible as you would expect. If you haven’t seen it, see if you can answer the following questions about it. 1. The expedition up the Amazon is (a) to shoot big game, (b) to capture big snakes to sell to zoos, (c)…
The Saint, starring Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue and directed by Phillip Noyce is simply one more Hollywood wish-fulfilment fantasy for teenage boys — full of gadgetry, secret identities, revenge against authority and beautiful but compliant females — and therefore of negligible interest to those with a more general interest in the art of cinema….
The Devil’s Own by Alan J. Pakula is a dishonest film in the way that we have come to expect Hollywood films to be dishonest when they deal with politics. Here we see noble IRA terrorists fighting only against heavily armed (and comically incompetent) British soldiers instead of blowing up innocent civilians, which is what…
It’s too bad that the people in Dwight Little’s Murder at 1600 don’t know, postmodern style, that they are in a movie. It would have saved them an awful lot of trouble spent working out who it was that killed the attractive blonde in the White House one rainy night. Of course everybody’s first answer…
Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion by David Mirkin seems to be a sort of female version of Dumb and Dumber about two dumb blondes, Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow), who have lived together since high school, had no success to speak of, but return to their tenth reunion determined to pretend to…
The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway is a typical Greenaway blend of the bizarre, the disgusting and the boring. Especially the boring. You wouldn’t think it, would you? That a man could concentrate so exclusively on weird sexual fetishes (in this case, a woman’s desire to have her body written on — and then to…
