Twelve or thirteen years earlier, in the Easy Rider aftermath, this sort of movie was coming out every time you looked up: the modest, humanistic, Middle American "location" movie. With the subsequent retreat to Hollywood studios (and special-effects labs), this sort of movie might seem a bit more special. Even …
Slender anthology of clips from old B-movies (and on down through Z-movies), assembled with a sort of Worst Films of All Time/Golden Turkey Awards mentality (indeed, the dreaded Medveds, Harry and Michael, are credited as consultants). Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Cheech and Chong, and John Candy appear as "hosts" in …
If Chevy Chase, if John Belushi, if Dan Aykroyd, if Gilda Radner, if Bill Murray, if Jane Curtin, if Laraine Newman, then why not Mark Blankfield? But then again, why? Why bring him, and the Fridays brand of drug humor, from the little screen to the big? Jerry Belson's Jekyll-and-Hyde …
The shaky, quasi-supernatural premise — that a small-time Nevada gambler would discover a particular blackjack dealer to whom he is providentially guaranteed not to lose — keeps getting shakier under subsequent developments: a hare-brained murder conspiracy, a scavenger hunt for a meaningless anagram. The only thing that prevents total collapse …
Nice idea; nice execution. A self-styled but totally untested comic named Rupert Pupkin and a female groupie named Masha kidnap a Johnny Carson-ish late-night talk-show host, each for their own private ends, Pupkin to extract a fifteen-minute guest spot on The Jerry Langford Show and the groupie to fulfill her …
Frigid, monotoned sadsack-comedy about big dreams and their abortions. Quite serious, but so unvaried that your attention wanders. Located appealingly in Atlantic City, of which more should have been made. Directed by Bob Rafelson of Five Easy Pieces and written by Jacob Brackman, who, while film critic for Esquire, was …
Premarital ménage à trois between a tweedy Egyptologist, a widow, and the ghost of her previous husband. The third of these, true to form, is visible and audible only to the second, and much of the dialogue thus proceeds, with a nice sense of tradition, in accordance with the who-are-you-talking-to, …
The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance," and the life depicted as such, in horrific slow-motion and comic fast-motion, and always in the slickest of photography, is that of urban America. Short of universal genocide, however, no alternative lifestyle is put up for inspection. The …
Pedro Almodóvar's fans, assuming the existence of these, should be delighted to find out that this early (1982) effort is a virtual seed-packet of ideas that sprouted up in his later and wider-circulated efforts. (Exhibit A: it would appear to be here, and not in Law of Desire, that Almodóvar …
Too much of the melancholy that is supposed to be inspired by the extinction of the unicorns is inspired instead by the proliferation of Saturday-morning-TV-level animation. A triumph, of sorts, for reality. Scripted by Peter S. Beagle, from his own novel; co-directed by Arthur Rankin, Jr., and Jules Bass; with …
Zeffirelli tries to sell Verdi to moviegoers primarily on the basis of costumes, candelabra, chandeliers, jewelry, flowers, furniture, pillows, confetti, streamers, colored lights, mists, and other such finery. The entire effect bolsters the impression that whereas movies are Come As You Are, opera is Dress Up -- and the moviegoer …
But all films must end, and in this case the sooner the better. Like the chattery mourners who gather round a sudden middle-aged widow, director Moshe Mizrahi "means well." He effuses sympathy like a burst dam, and poor Annie Girardot, who appears in every scene, has to act as if …
A New York hustler, down ten thousand dollars to angry mobsters, takes his roommate, confidant, and conscience to Las Vegas to try to dig himself out of the hole. Not quite a character study -- it doesn't probe that deep; nothing more, really, than behavioral mimicry. And Jon Voight, who …
The baby-faced young doctor, Zack, shares with his wife of eight years an uncommon affinity for Gilbert and Sullivan and Rupert Brooke. Where could he ever hope to find such another? Nowhere, probably, and certainly not with the beefy-faced homosexual writer, Bart, whose idea of a cultural evening is to …