The heroine is trying to write a bubbly Broadway comedy, but nightmares about her former lover's apparent suicide have given her writer's block. She returns to the actual site, a lighthouse on the Northwest coast, and begins work immediately on a quasi-erotic, Dylan Thomas-esque play in blank verse. This rather …
For anyone who felt left out on Madonna's and Sean Penn's honeymoon, this will be the next best thing. For anyone who felt their honeymoon was their own private business, this will seem too much the same thing. The first-class production, the Thirties costumes, and the exotic locales only erect …
Spike Lee's comedy about three very different men in love with the same woman. All of them are black (one of them is Spike Lee himself), though you scarcely notice it. The movie is miraculously successful at shedding color-consciousness, dodging stereotypes, and the like. With that out of the way, …
Imagine one of the robots from Star Wars -- only more cloying -- inserted in the storyline from E.T. -- only more crass -- and you will have an idea what to expect. But too "good" an idea. You should be warned, particularly, of the Mr. Malaprop of Asian Indian …
Rock-and-roll romance: British punker Sid Vicious (bassist of the Sex Pistols) and American junkie Nancy Spungen living and loving as if there's no tomorrow: and indeed there were not to be a lot of them; and near the end, as drug use escalates to obliviating levels, there wasn't much in …
A 1984 for teenagers (if for any-agers). The year is actually 41 (of New Time, you see), and the world's youth are dressed in uniform blues and penned up in "orphanages," and their only officially sanctioned outlet is a sport called skateball -- roughly, lacrosse on roller skates. Five aggressively …
A Hipper-Than-Thou romantic comedy centered around a woman who sports a Louise Brooks haircut and accordingly calls herself "Lulu," listens to a steady diet of Third World rock, reads biographies of people like Frida Kahlo and Winnie Mandela, sips Seagram's 7 from dawn till lights-out, makes left-hand turns across three …
A California white boy, swallowing mega-doses of tanning pills, tries to pass for black (and in Boston, of all places) in order to qualify for a full-tuition scholarship to Harvard Law School. C. Thomas Howell's makeup, for a start, is passable; and the rest, as any liberal will be obliged …
Based on a Stephen King novella -- but Stephen King without supernaturalism: Stephen King encroaching instead on Sherwood Anderson territory. (Do they still read Sherwood Anderson in American high schools, or is it now all Stephen King, S.E. Hinton, and the "poetry" of Bruce Springsteen?) Set in the summer of …
The plot this time, which finds our crew in a Klingon vessel (the Enterprise having been blown, as you will remember if you were not traumatized into amnesia, to smithereens) heading earthward toward a court-martial, and with the "reborn" Spock back at his post, shows no decline in the ability …
Moscow on the Hudson meets Rocky and The Karate Kid. It's two against one, and no chance. Klaus Maria Brandauer (a good actor, in an I-want-to-be-a-star-too sort of role) is the former Soviet middleweight champion, now ignominiously exiled in America as a "dishwasher, drunk, parasite, bum," who undertakes to train …
Erotico-political cartoon by Lina Wertmuller, said to be the second part of a trilogy that began with Swept Away, twelve years earlier. (Said so, perhaps, to regenerate interest where apathy had become a habit.) The Italian upper class has been losing face, not to mention millions, to terrorists, so one …
Alan Alda stands as a tower of integrity next to the cesspool of Hollywood, a history professor and Pulitzer Prize winner whose nonfiction tome on the American Revolution has been defiled by the schlock-mongers. Or anyway, was about to be defiled. He prevents them by rewriting the script as they …
Back we go (kicking and screaming, quite likely), back to those halcyon days of the British Empire, when men were men and women were Oriental: "I want you to be fantastical good," chirrups the half-naked Chinese beauty, feeding aphrodisiacal prawns into the mouth of her master. James Clavell's very fat …