The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddy comedy that really…
Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, he says, you ain’t gonna find…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions. . . . No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions. . . . The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like . . . what the hell does “Fight the future” mean?…
In 1993, the acclaimed husband-and-wife documentary team of Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker released The War Room, an intimate study of the first Clinton/Gore campaign. That done, they turned their cameras on the mounting of a less successful comedy: Ken Ludwig’s Broadway farce Moon Over Buffalo, which opened at the…
Though Lilies was shot in Quebec with a French-Canadian cast, the actors don’t speak French. Based on the play Les Feluettes ou la Repetition d’un Drame Romantique (The Lilies, or the Revival of a Romantic Drama) by Michel Marc Bouchard, the script was adapted into English by Inda Gaboriau, probably…
A bird’s-eye view of the Brooklyn bridge opened John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever in 1977, when disco was in full swing. It was the route the working-class hero took to travel from where he lived and worked to the disco in Manhattan where he danced and partied. Then the titles…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force–a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film…
Be nice to your mailman. That’s the cautionary message of the Norwegian film Junk Mail. Near the beginning of this hilariously clammy comedy-thriller, the–for lack of a better term–hero, an Oslo mail carrier named Roy (Robert Skjaerstad), is filling the boxes in an apartment building when a middle-aged man who’s…
According to the movies, Godzilla takes its name from a legendary Japanese sea monster. But according to the man who made those movies, the name’s source was more mundane. Tomoyuki Tanaka, producer of the classic Godzilla films, claims that back in the 1950s, there was a fat, hulking press agent…
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson’s staggering, semifictional account of “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream,” has proved difficult to translate to the screen. After more than a quarter century–and 20 scripts–since the book’s 1971 publication, Thompson’s countercultural touchstone has finally assumed filmic…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about the ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
Danny and Anna, the hero and heroine of Music From Another Room, meet portentously: Danny, at the age of 6, is pressed into service helping his father deliver Anna when her mother (wonderful Brenda Blethyn) goes into labor unexpectedly at a party. The umbilical cord wraps around Anna’s neck, and…
Where was the montage? About halfway through the Brit caper comedy Shooting Fish, lovely young heroine Georgie (Kate Beckinsale) and sensitive young hero Jez (Stuart Townsend) meet outside a club. In the next scene, we see them sitting on the roof of a huge gas tank, talking, as the dawn…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic Senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office where, in a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges…
Chinese Box arrives with one of the weirdest hybrid pedigrees in living memory. The writing credits include–in addition to the film’s director, Wayne Wang–Jean-Claude Carriere, who worked on most of the best films of Luis Bunuel’s late period (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Phantom of Liberty, Belle de Jour); classy…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford–and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars–could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach and, most important, his understanding of actors…
One of the few seemingly spontaneous bursts of energy at this year’s Oscar ceremony was provided by motor-mouthing Dutch director Mike van Diem, who seemed genuinely surprised to have won the award for Best Foreign Film for his debut feature, Character. If the commercial popularity and Oscar sweep for Titanic…
Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, four of 12 children of a Polish-Jewish cobbler who immigrated to Baltimore with his wife in the 1880s, grew up poor and tough in Youngstown, Ohio. Around the turn of the century, after failing bitterly at a variety of family businesses, they scraped together…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today–one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers–is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less “human drama.” In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the side show. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff–the daughter who reunites with her…
. . . but when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride, I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills . . . –The Rocky Horror Picture Show Nowhere in the press materials for Deep Impact can I find any reference to Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s novel When Worlds…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new movie, He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing. . . .” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got…
