The Fifth Element by Luc Besson is what every crappy Hollywood postmodern extravaganza would be if it had the wit and the boldness of the author of La Femme Nikita and The Professional—together with a Hollywood blockbuster-sized budget of $100 million. With it, postmodernism has entered into its rococo phase. Some day, if anyone ever…
Addicted to Love, written by Robert Gordon and directed by Griffin Dunne has its moments of humor but it never really seems to understand the seriousness of the issue it is playing with. This is the issue of revenge. Maggie (Meg Ryan) has been dumped by Anton (Tcheky Karyo), who has since moved on to…
Walkabout by Nicholas Roeg has joined the ever lengthening list of film classics on re-release this spring, like the Star Wars triology, the Godfather, Das Boot (in a new version), Pink Flamingos and even The Big Sleep. More than any of these others — more even than Star Wars (nothing dates like futurism) — Walkabout…
The Daytrippers by Greg Mottola is quite a pleasant little film. An actor’s film. There are excellent performances from Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey, Anne Meara, Hope Davis, Campbell Scott, and Pat McNamara especially, but credit must also be given to Mr. Mottola, a young man just out of film school who conceived such good parts…
Inventing the Abbotts directed by Pat O’Connor from a story by Sue Miller is set in the 1950s and runs through the usual movie and journalistic clichés about that era as a time of “innocence.” In addition to authentic cars and clothes and appliances and TV shows (surprisingly, there is little period rock ‘n’ roll),…
Bruce Beresford does so many things so well that he should by rights be one of the best directors of our time. But there is a certain coarseness to his sensibility, a weakness for the sentimental cliché, which often comes near to vitiating even his best work. His latest film, Paradise Road, though I don’t…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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)…
