Writer and director David Seltzer throws a thimbleful of cold water onto the business of the stand-up comic: taking the laughing-on-the-outside-crying-on-the-inside cliché, wrapping it in some psychoanalytic cheesecloth, and running with it (in no very purposeful direction) for two full hours. And with the other hand he pitches him a …
A bath of bathos, with a rubber ducky for occasional squeals of fun. The character of the idiot-savant — a crossbreed of Mickey Rooney's Bill, Peter Sellers's Chauncey Gardner, Bruno S.'s Kaspar Hauser, and perhaps HAL the computer — attains a certain eccentric grandeur, what with his rigorous daily routine, …
A bath of bathos, with a rubber ducky for occasional squeals of fun. The character of the idiot-savant — a crossbreed of Mickey Rooney's Bill, Peter Sellers's Chauncey Gardner, Bruno S.'s Kaspar Hauser, and perhaps HAL the computer — attains a certain eccentric grandeur, what with his rigorous daily routine, …
A male-bonding version of Ninotchka: a Soviet cop dispatched to Chicago to extradite a Georgian dope importer (new synonym for cocaine: "American poison"), and escorted around town by his wisecracking U.S. counterpart. Out of the ideological crossfire emerge some offhand comments on American capitalism (i.e., sex videos on the hotel …
Burt and Liza together again, a dozen years after Lucky Lady -- not that they've noticed the passage of time. "It's called joie de vivre," chirps former hoofer, current hooker Minnelli (actual age, forty-one), when having to explain her special something. And Reynolds, a tough cop whose football memorabilia share …
Four Navy men are taken by the North Koreans, and after thirty days of captivity ("The Israelis would have had them out twenty-nine days ago") their superiors decide to abort Operation Phoenix to retrieve them. So their teenage sons (and one daughter) steal the plan and implement it themselves. In …
Shrill horror comedy, not really a sequel, just another one -- this time with the balance of weight shifted away from horror and toward comedy, and shoved all the way into inanity instead. James Karen, Thom Mathews, Dana Ashbrook; written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn.
Now where were we? Oh, yes: the boy had become a man (indeed had become the titular Man from Snowy River, six years past), but that wouldn't be an end to it, would it? There are still fillies (of two distinct species) to be mated, and class-barriers to be leapt …
An interracial Cinderella story about a hefty black cleaning lady -- and single mother of five -- whose alertness and fortitude help clear the name of a disgraced yogurt executive, and who earns more than just his gratitude. A softly feminist comedy virtually devoid of mirth, but bubbling over with …
Inebriating romantic moonshine about a courtesan of the 1930s who turns up as a ghost in present-day Hong Kong looking for the lover with whom she shared a suicide pact. The presence of this dreamy-eyed, breathy-voiced vamp in the modern world brings an unhappy, but not unamusing, clash of styles; …
Requiem for the New Left ("It was over as soon as the war ended"), played rather detachedly by Old Lefty Sidney Lumet. A couple of Vietnam protesters have been on the lam, with their two sons, since bombing a napalm plant in the early Seventies; their elder son impresses the …
Children of the streets, Indian-style. Pretty tough as compared with what we usually see from that country -- namely, Satyajit Ray -- though it's no Los Olvidados by a long shot. It's even a short shot from a Pixote. Directed by documentarist Mira Nair -- her first fiction film -- …
A girls' rock band (plus one guy, a classical pianist, to replace the girl keyboardist) makes the big jump to L.A. It's no Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: no one gets shot in the esophagus, no one gets his head chopped off. One of them does take too many …