The line of reasoning goes like this: George Bush is an idiot, yet he’s now happily perched in the White House the only reason he’s there has to be the dark, Svengali-like figure who’s masterminded his rise to power, Karl Rove. This theory is posed in the opening scene of the nervy documentary Bush’s Brain, […]
In the press materials for his new film The Business of Fancydancing, writer/director Sherman Alexie calls making the movie cheaply and with every crew member sharing in the profits “a tribal collaboration of art and capital.” After seeing it I call this an extraordinary act of generosity. No auteur is an island, but in The
Take director John Waters and give him a really good actress like Natasha Lyonne, a paltry budget of, say, $1 million, and ask him to make a satire about a “gay rehab camp,” and you might come up with something like But I’m a Cheerleader. Then again, Waters might have come up with something funny,
There once was a time in movie history when party-hardy kids would head into the woods and get their heads bashed in by some masked psycho. Ah, the good old days. Writer director Eli Roth remembers that time fondly with his no-apologies, balls to the wall, blood-splattering thriller that recalls a time when Leatherface massacred
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago (I won’t say exactly how long) I happened upon a guy (I won’t say his name) who lived across the street from me. Rather quickly and inexplicably he developed a strange obsession with me. One might even say he was sociopathic. A good, long year
Nigel Cole’s empowering Calendar Girls calls to mind Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty, though not just because it’s about nude British people who have no business being in their birthday suits. Both imports work from simple one-line premises centered around the fundraising efforts of a cheeky lead (here it’s Helen Mirren, while there it was
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
