Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…
In the surprisingly crowded genre of documentaries about filmmakers, director Ray Mller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is most likely the best I’ve ever seen, because it deals directly with subjects far more important than filmmaking. That grandly contradictory title is not wasted on Riefenstahl–her life really has…
Talk about showmanship! One of the distinctions co-directors Chris LaMont and Steve Bencich are claiming, probably accurately, for their comedy The Best Movie Ever Made is “the largest mime scene in motion-picture history.” Indeed, the all-mime parody of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of the highlights of this mlange…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s most exquisitely wrought piece of dramatic construction. Three tales intermingle to weave a magical web of three comic styles. Sophisticated romantic comedy featuring witty ripostes is the manner of the court creatures, ruled by Theseus and his new bride, Hippolyta. The rude mechanicals,…
The Immortals can rest easy. Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Sir Henry Irving, the divine Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Sir Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Jonathan Pryce, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes and, now, even…
Red Rock West, the splendid, tight-as-a-drum feature debut of the young writer/director John Dahl, was a comic thriller about a guy trying to get out of a small town. The hero was a decent, honorable young man who tells a tiny lie to get a job, then realizes with horror…
Nobody’s Fool is to Paul Newman’s career what Scent of a Woman was to Al Pacino’s–generously, a “character study”; more frankly, a blatant vehicle, existing for no reason other than to give a great actor a chance to charm us. It’s a much better, much less addlebrained picture than Scent,…
Say you’ve got this wise and war-weary colonel living in Montana around the turn of the century. Say he’s got three pretty-boy sons–the eldest levelheaded, the middle wild and prodigal, the youngest sweet and sensitive. What do you need to turn this scenario into an epic tear-jerker Western in the…
A friend of mine once made the mistake of performing a scene from a Neil Simon play in an acting class. “Stop!” the teacher cried, clutching his head. His objection was not to the acting (although hindsight says it was probably bad). Rather, the teacher complained, Simon’s plays lacked character…
Most of the interview subjects in Jonathan Blank’s documentary Sex, Drugs and Democracy don’t look much like libertines. We see a prostitute here, a hippie or a Rastafarian there, and a couple of artsy types, but most of the Dutch folks Blank shows us extolling the merits of the Netherlands’…
As Ty Cobb in Ron Shelton’s new biopic, Tommy Lee Jones gets to wave a pistol and vomit blood. What kind of an actor would he be if he could resist that? He doesn’t blow the chance–he’s remarkable as the man who, most commentators agree, was both the greatest baseball…
Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre is an alternative theatre that features experimental work. Experimental work implies that the outcome of the procedure is unknown. Any true experiment poses the possibility of failure. It is therefore no crime that Planet Earth’s current offering, Liberating Mama, is a disaster. Laraine Herring has written…
It seemed absurd a few months ago to read the obituaries of Eugene Ionesco. Hadn’t he been dead for years? Was this a variation on the old joke about Franco? Overshadowed by the genius of Samuel Beckett, Ionesco’s plays have seemed like literary footnotes from the past, ranking with those…
The title that Charles Schulz originally wanted to use for his comic strip was not Peanuts, but Li’l Folks. Perhaps Schulz, who once said that children were “caricatures of adults,” was thinking along the same lines as Louisa May Alcott when she gave her most beloved novel the name Little…
Increasingly common in bookstores over the last few years have been literary anthologies of “erotica–by women for women.” Erotique is probably the first such collection done for the movies. Like Boys Life, which opened last week in the Valley, it’s an omnibus of three half-hour shorts by as many directors…
To mock Nell would be neither difficult nor entirely unwarranted–what’s bad in this movie is so irritatingly God-awful that you may want to scream. But what’s good in it is good enough to make up for some of the sentiment and cheesy didacticism. Jodie Foster plays the title character, a…
Boys Life is an omnibus consisting of three roughly half-hour works, all by young filmmakers and all concerning the tribulations of the first homosexual experience for middle-class white guys of late-high school/early-college age. They are low-key films of no particular cinematic daring, but this modesty makes all three affecting and…
Since I played Scrooge in the eighth grade, I have avoided all Christmas plays as a matter of principle. But this year, as a result of my new obligations, I was forced to spend a week surveying the local offerings of the holiday season. I have seen Mesa Community College’s…
“Sexual harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about power.” So says a lawyer who specializes in harassment cases, in the film version of Michael Crichton’s best seller Disclosure. Later in the movie, the hero, an executive who is both the accused and the accuser in a harassment case, quotes this line…
“There is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst, that it doesn’t seem right to criticize.” Thornton Wilder thus quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his one-act play Pullman Car Hiawatha, the most substantial in an evening of three short works collectively titled…
The title of writer/director George Gallo’s new film is Trapped in Paradise. I certainly felt like I was trapped somewhere, but paradise wouldn’t have been my guess. This execrable attempt at a farce is, I think, the second-worst big-studio comedy of the year, surpassed only by Exit to Eden for…
Bad dates are a purgatorial experience common to most people who have been single for any length of time. Common, but not identical, however. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s (highly questionable!) observation about happy and unhappy families, all good dates are the same, but each bad date is bad in its own…
