One weekday morning in 1982, several boys in my fourth grade class, including yours truly, suddenly fell ill and needed to go home from school. Teachers feared an epidemic, and they were right. We had The Cannonball Run fever, and the only cure was not missing its debut on pay cable. The next day in […]
Andrew Jarecki’s new documentary, I’ve read, started not as a journalistic exploration about a collapsing family, but as a piece about clowns who entertain children at birthday parties. Jarecki was urged by several of his original subjects to talk to fellow clown David Friedman. It turns out David’s father and younger brother, Arnold and Jesse,
I’ve never seen the original 1942 Cat People (I have now Ed.), but I have a hard time imagining it bears much resemblance to this 1982 remake, courtesy of director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo), writer Alan Ormsby (who wrote Porky’s II and four of the Substitute movies), and stars Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. Bizarre
Spitting in the face of the idea that criminals are simply nurtured by their environments, legendary gangster Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino, doing a vague approximation of a Puerto Rican accent) stands before a judge in the 1993 Brian De Palma film Carlito’s Way and refuses to blame his criminal ways on his upbringing or the
I might be the only person in the world who thinks Brian DePalma’s 1976 classic thriller Carrie is one of the most overrated, disappointing horror films of all time, but I stand behind my review, and I swear I can knock down just about any argument its defenders throw. This is my third viewing of
The way I see it, Martin Scorsese has one problem He’s in love with the sound of his own voice, as it comes out through the dialogue of films like GoodFellas and now, Casino. Clocking in at three long hours, Casino is an entertaining and engrossing film, but just drags a simple story into a
“Get two geniuses, put them together in a room, and… wow!” That was Steve Martin’s self-conscious gag incorporated into the dialogue of his play Picasso at the Lapin Angile. It said, in effect, that we shouldn’t give famous intellectuals more credit than they’re due. They have inconsistencies like all of us. Peter Bogdanovich’s bitter Hollywood
Make a movie about a black cat, and you’re just asking to be cursed with a streak of bad luck. Yet even the most hardened cynic will be surprised at how far Universal’s The Cat in the Hat strays from the childish antics of Dr. Seuss’ original work. Judging from this humorless monstrosity, the Cat
By 1967, Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) had become the youngest con man to make the FBI’s “Most Wanted List.” He’d cashed millions of dollars in forged checks, posed as a co-pilot for a major airline, landed a job as a surgeon in Atlanta, and passed the bar exam in New Orleans. At the time,
A wry and sarcastic (and thick as hell) book about the ridiculous duplicity of war? Sounds like a movie to me. And so it did to Mike Nichols and Buck Henry, collaborators on The Graduate who conspired once again to make one of the greats of cinema. While Catch-22 has none of the cachet of
