The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old manchild who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical autopilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
Only in the movies could a kid who looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’ character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Peter Fonda is the top-billed star of Thomas and the Magic Railroad. The plot involves Fonda and Thomas the Tank Engine steaming across the country, with Steppenwolf blaring on the soundtrack, to Mardi Gras, a stash of dope taped under Thomas’ cow-catcher. They have an acid trip with New Orleans…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
Antonioni and Bergman, I get. Show me Buñuel or Godard, Tarkovsky or Marguerite Duras, and you won’t see me knit my brow. David Lynch is a snap. I can even sort of see where Stan Brakhage is coming from. When it comes to cryptic cinema, I’ll sit there and find…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews who were murdered in…
For most Americans, the social and political issues underlying José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly seem remote at best. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, and dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have stirred strong feelings…
Armchair shrinks can debate for hours about why Mel Gibson loves to get the snot knocked out of him. A facile answer, considering the star’s reputation as a homophobe, is that the lady doth protest too much, and that getting electrically tortured by Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon or hacked…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven, but often effective, adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character…
Why is the film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible that the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated in the title? Or was this an attempt to…
Is there a more bankrupt genre than the parody movie? So many movies nowadays are so painfully self-aware and referential anyway that there often isn’t much left to make fun of, which is especially the case for Kevin Williamson-penned films like Scream and its clones, clichéd teen slasher movies that…
Despite what many believe, it doesn’t come down to explosions, star power or millions of greenbacks thrown at the producers. The true indicator of success for a summer movie is The Moment, that one memorable scene that sticks in your head, the one that Billy Crystal parodies the following spring…
The press kit for The Perfect Storm contains the damnedest thing I’ve ever read. Right at the top, there is a “special request to the press” that reads, in full: “Warner Bros. Pictures would appreciate the press’ cooperation in not revealing the ending of this film to their readers, viewers…
It has taken moviemakers and, more crucially, foot-dragging movie investors almost a decade to catch up with rave culture — the heady mix of secret warehouses, electronic music, designer drugs and ecstatic dancing that has come to define the yearning and the restlessness of a generation. But now, the 5…
Holy moley! Yet another version of Hamlet? Will they never stop? Ah, well, at least Michael Almereyda’s new adaptation is one of those really different takes on the venerable play. While the last two widely seen versions — the 1990 Mel Gibson/Franco Zeffirelli film and the four-hour-plus 1996 Kenneth Branagh/Kenneth…
About nine years ago, in a humble Redondo Beach nightclub, urbane British folk singer Billy Bragg reappraised 20th-century politics — as is often his socialist wont — by means of an intriguing correlation. Might it be, he postulated, that contemporaries Leon Trotsky and Harlan Sanders were not merely striking doppelgängers,…
To begin, let us discuss puking. You know, upchucking, barfing, yacking, Technicolor yawning, blowing cookies, driving the porcelain bus, screaming at one’s shoes, and, for you Aussies, chundering.Always unpleasant — and yet usually a great relief to a queasy gut — a nice vomit can be provoked by just about…
I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes on screen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking, but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler’s List, he…
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie whose aggressions are so pent-up that they finally have to break out in the form of a second personality called “Hank.”Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from little…
