No, not his song or his poem, but his new girlfriend, whose name (heaven help her) is Lyric, a sassy Louisiana Soul Food waitress, swept up in a sunset, carnival, and sex-on-a-flowerbed courtship. But Jason's got a no-good brother, too, darkening the horizon with drugs and drink. A heart-on-sleeve and …
An unforgettable character and not a lot to go with him. The character is a Hollywood hopeless called Jimmy Alto, a dumpy middle-aged man with shoulder-length dyed-yellow hair and floral-print shirt, who has never actually landed a single solitary part -- "It's all politics" -- and who finally finds his …
Comic-book Kipling: Mowgli the Wolf-boy, the Black Jungle, the Monkey City. The initial half-hour or so is a well-crammed phantasmagoria of eye-widening images: the runaway tandem of horses dragging a burning remnant of an exploded buckboard through the jungle; the nose-to-nose staring contest between child and panther; the simian-infested sacred …
The co-stars of Twins, Schwarzenegger and DeVito, together again, in another one-joke comedy, this time to do with the world's first pregnant man (not counting Marcello Mastroianni in The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon or Billy Crystal in Rabbit Test). The script -- "My nipples are …
Ultra-violent nihilistic caper film about a grungy gang of Parisian bank robbers (plus their imported American safecracker) who prepare for a big Bastille Day job by taking handfuls of drugs (interesting subjective effects with distorting lenses and in-and-out focus) and hopping nightclubs. There's not much to it, when all's said …
Special pleading on behalf of a lower-class Englishwoman who, at the outset, has lost four children (of four different fathers) to Social Services. By the end, she will have lost two more (one and the same father, a too-good-to-be-true Paraguayan political refugee, accompanied by panpipes on the soundtrack). A typical …
More of Gianni Amelio's retro-neorealism: the attention to social ailments, yes; poverty, bureaucracy, the boot heel on the human spirit, that type of thing; but with a polished and precise cinematic technique, and a strong-arm brand of sentimentality. The saucer-eyed, beetle-browed Enrico Lo Verso, of Amelio's Stolen Children, is once …
Pleasant trifle to do with a late-adolescent French orphan (Ken Higelin, a cross between young Monty Clift and young Jerry Lewis), his friendship with Raymond the Fat Farter (sound effects for authentication), his apprenticeship to a Jewish tailor (easy role for Jean Yanne), his romance with a winsome auto mechanic …
Italian political thriller, fact-based, in the mode of Francesco Rosi, though without his documentary eye. Under Ricky Tognazzi's direction, it's all faces, faces, faces, and talk, talk, talk: the human concern is undoubted. Tognazzi displays a high-minded reluctance to juice up the proceedings -- centered around a determined magistrate, with …
Stoutly reactionary animal tale, with a compatible back-to-nature plotline: a skateboarding, MTV-watching, Walkman-wearing Baltimore brat is transplanted to Franklin Falls, Va. (pop. 148), and along the way acquires a stray collie. Or more accurately, the collie, named explicitly after the 1950s TV star, acquires the boy. (Splendid subjective panning shot …
Another (after Kill Me Again and Red Rock West) homage to film noir by John Dahl. More narrowly, an homage to the resident femme fatale (Linda Fiorentino, with hooded eye, clamped jaw, uninflected voice -- a cartoon figure). So awed is the filmmaker that he can throw up no resistance …
Edward Zwick, one-time director of Glory, has here reassumed some epic aspirations, or epic postures and gestures at any rate, in the matter of an all-male family of four on a Montana horse ranch reminiscent of Bonanza's Ponderosa (Eng. trans., ponderous; labored; lumpish). The unspooling storyline, however, never generates the …
Molasses Jack, more like it. A moseying Western comedy about an Aussie outlaw, last survivor of the Younger Gang, and his mute (but not deaf) hostage and then partner. Paul Hogan, who also authored the script, loses the Mr. Congeniality Award to his co-star, Cuba Gooding, Jr., in an anachronistic …
Predigested heroic myth to do with a lion cub called Simba, rightful heir to the paradisiacal pridelands, dispossessed by a Machiavellian uncle, and — no need to go on. The apotheosis of Joseph Campbell into a household name has not been a boon to the fictional imagination. The prince in …