Another belated thank-you to our boys in Vietnam, in particular a pilot called "Cool Hand" and a bombardier called Cole, who jump the gun on Nixon's order to go "downtown" into Hanoi. Director John Milius wants as always to strut and swagger, but it's a boozy, woozy swagger, nowhere as …
For the boids. Long soggy slog through half a century with a couple of show-biz troupers who entertain the troops from Blitzed London to South Vietnam. It's not without all sincerity. The belief in trouping is solidly backed up by the unreserved, unembarrassed performances of Bette Midler and James Caan, …
Were sweetmeats. She's a waitress, he's a short-order cook, at the Apollo cafe on 23rd and 9th, patronized and operated by a large assemblage of monotonously "colorful" characters (the wallflower waitress, the wild waitress, etc.). Terrence McNally has thus "opened up," and juiced up, his own two-character stage play, and …
An epigraph from Friedrich Nietzsche, a time-jump of ten years into the future, a heavy-metal song track, a cameo by Roseanne Barr (and hubby), an allusion to Twin Peaks, a psychedelic video-game sequence, a promised (for those who can hang on that long) climactic 3-D sequence, an overall contemptuous jokiness, …
The title improves on the Fannie Flagg novel and stage adaptation by lopping off the last five words, at the Whistle Stop Cafe -- a portent of good taste. But it's hard to believe that the movie has cut down on the frequency with which the name Idgie Threadgoode is …
A sequel only points up the resemblance of the original to a TV series. Our special-effects wizard, now retired from films, is busy inventing high-tech children's toys when he is beckoned back into police work (with dire consequences once again for a peripheral female). Cleverness far outbalances believableness in his …
A neck massage masquerading as a deep psychic probe of present-day America. Little daily "miracles" twinkle in the advancing tide of gloom and malaise: an interracial friendship blossoms between an affluent white lawyer and the black tow-truck driver who comes to his aid; a jogger finds an abandoned baby in …
The second feature film, following The Front by fifteen years, to treat of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. (That's not counting indirect, veiled, metaphorical treatments like Elia Kazan's apologia on the virtues of becoming an informer, On the Waterfront.) Room remains for many other treatments, though we cannot have …
Erotic male fantasizing -- and exceptionally lazy fantasizing at that -- about the twelve-year-old boy who, with a busty redhead as his paragon, makes up his mind he's going to marry a hairdresser, and in late middle age does just that. (Does, as far as we can tell, virtually nothing …
Hollywood action hero researches his next role in the company of a tough New York cop: "capturing the essence of the police experience." A good idea for a comedy, good enough to have been given to a real artist instead of a Hollywood hack. The whole thing is thrown hopelessly …
A couple of worm-eaten hunks of beefcake, Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson, are quite well cast in a boys-who-never-grew-up fantasy set in the year 1996. Burbank is now the site of an international airport, and the boys' favorite watering hole, the Rock 'n' Roll Bar and Grille (a decor incongruously …
Ruddy-cheeked comedy about the proprietor of a cheesy Liverpool nightclub hunting down a "wanted" Irish tenor and tax evader. Some facile and felicitous directorial touches (first-timer Peter Chelsom), though the closeups of a lip-synching Ned Beatty aren't among them. And the entire ending pushes too hard, against a too stout …
The documentary on the making of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now ought to please almost everyone. Those who admired the Coppola opus will be able to exclaim over the miracle that such a man could pull out such a movie from such a mire of disarray, diffusion, unwieldiness. Those who thought …
A romantic-comic Rashomon: first we get "his" angle on their affair, then "hers." The gimmick, even as applied to relationships, is not new (see André Cayatte's two-part Anatomy of a Marriage, see the TV movie Divorce His/Divorce Hers). What's new is that a man, Ken Kwapis, directed the first part; …
A dish of Almodóvar's cold and insincere sensationalism. Mother and daughter, a pop singer and a TV anchorwoman respectively, reunite after a separation of fifteen years. Daughter is now married to one of Mother's old flames. It's all rather ungripping, excepting the loud and aggressive color, till it turns positively …