Although Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy receive screenwriting credit for Waiting for Guffman, cast member Fred Willard says in interviews that the actors were given the outline of each sequence and that all the dialogue was improvised. Believe it or don't! (Who can ever tell whether Fred Willard is kidding or not?) Even though Guest and wife Jamie Lee Curtis are now Lord an…
Were Linda Hunt and Andrew Lloyd Webbe separated at birth? Just curious.
The BBC has always been fascinated by American pop iconography, and Walk on the Wild Side might easily qualify to be a segment on A&E's Biography series.
One provincial critic recently expressed enormous concern for the career of Anne Heche, now that everyone knows that she and Ellen DeGeneres are an item; will audiences be able to accept a gay woman in a straight role? Well, why not? We've been accepting gay actors and actresses in straight roles since the movies began, the only difference is that the gossip and whispers have been replaced …
It is easy for us to see the humanity in characters who DO things in their lives, who show subtle acts of courage, who make small gestures of kindness. But what about a character who is completely passive, who lets her life and her family drift away from her? Welcome to the world of Wanda, whom we first see on the couch of her sister and brother-in-law, sleepily getting ready for what turns out to…
The Clinton team had been in the White House for less than a year when The War Room was released, but in many ways, the campaign and election of 1992 seemed incredibly far away, even then. P. F. Bentley's striking photographs for his book on the campaign, Portrait of Victory, were shot entirely in black and white, and these timeless yet pleasantly dated images are the ones we remember best.…
Wendy Hughes is among the most gifted actresses in the world today, yet her last two Australian films, Shadows of the Peacock and Warm Nights on a Slow-Moving Train, are romantic fluff pieces in which travel represent sexual fulfillment. I can actually see very little difference between Warm Nights and the Sigourney Weaver flop Half Moon Street. In both films, we are asked to believe that intellig…
The Wash is a wise, gentle film about the death of love and its rebirth. Nobu McCarthy portrays a woman who is leaving her husband after 40 years, yet who continues to care about him even though she is no longer in love with him. After watching film after film in which the Japanese male is portrayed as cold and unfeeling and wondering how he could stand such loneliness, viewers finally have an opp…
Neal Jimenez, who was paralyzed in a 1984 accident, wrote and co-directed The Waterdance, an exceptional film about the trials and tribulations of adjusting to paralysis. Eric Stoltz is wisely cast as Joel, the central character, and Helen Hunt delivers her usual beautifully understated performance as his girlfriend Anna. Wesley Snipes is a flamboyant scene stealer as Ray, who becomes the unlikely…
Way Down East was severely dated when D.W. Griffith spent the extravagant sum of $175,000 for the rights to turn it into a movie in 1920. Its star, Lillian Gish, was not the only one who wondered about the wisdom of acquiring a creaky piece of Americana which had been familiar to audiences since 1898. Clearly, Griffith realized that the tale of a country girl led astray by a rich adventurer…
The Wedding Banquet is a charade for the benefit of Wai-Tung's parents. He's really gay and living happily with Simon. When tenant Wei-wei (May Chin) suggests marriage to Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) so she can get a green card, he says sure and so does Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). And then Wai-Tung's parents (Sihung Lung and Ah-Le…
This hilarious view of junior high as seen by 11-year-old Dawn Wiener is Todd Solondz’ second film. (His first, 1989's Fear, Anxiety and Depression starring himself and Stanley Tucci, was generally panned for being unduly influenced by Woody Allen.) So we don't need to concern ourselves here with the Second Film Syndrome experienced by hot (overpraised�…
The cast is good, but the story leads nowhere. The narrative goes back and forth and forth and back, in quest of a friend (Rafael Baez as Richie) and the meaning of the friendship he shared with the two men who are looking for him (Jon Cryer as Daniel and Rick Stear as Stan). The friends encounter distractions along the way, but both the distractions and the back story …
Wes Craven's New Nightmare is a work of imagination and wit from the man who's been scaring us for over 25 years. In this film, he's written nice roles for himself and three participants in 1984's The Nightmare on Elm Street—Heather Langencamp, Robert Englund, and John Saxon, plus producers Marianne Maddalena, Robert Shaye, and Sara Risher. They all play themselv…
Lindsay Anderson's The Whales of August features one luminous piece of work by Miss Lillian Gish, then in her 95th year, and four excellent performances by Bette Davis, then 79, Harry Carey Jr., 66, and Vincent Price and Ann Sothern, both 78. The script by playwright David Berry is not so hot, with a confusing timeline and a fuzzy psychological grasp of its elderly characters. Berry offers …
Co-workers Jackie and Michael discover that neither is what s/he appears to be on the first date from Hell.
Chloe (Garance Clavel) wants to go on a seaside holiday but her gay roommate Michel (Olivier Py) won't accept responsibility for her sweet little black cat Gris-Gris. Madame Renee (Renee Le Calm) agrees to make a home for Gris-Gris while Chloe is away. Chloe returns to every cat lover's nightmare—Madame Renee is in despair! Chloe is lo…
Where Angels Fear to Tread was E. M. Forster's first novel and it is filled with all the ambitious flaws of a 26-year-old writer who wants to say something important but doesn't quite know how to say it yet. His subsequent novels, A Room with a View, Maurice, and A Passage to India, reflected Forster's greater understanding of human nature, but when he wrote Angels, he was sti…
Which Way, Por Favor? is an inexpensive travelogue that looks like it was more fun to make than it is to watch.
The British are fascinated with members of its upper classes who continue to enjoy their positions of privilege while betraying Queen and country as Soviet spies. This obsession has evolved into plays and films like Another Country and Blunt, and many books, one of which, by John Hale, was released as The Whistle Blower, starring Michael Caine in the title role. The most intriguing question, why d…
The big Hayley Mills movie of July 1961, the one that everyone remembers, is The Parent Trap, a primal flick for every child of divorce during that era. Mills’ contract for six Disney movies was non-exclusive, meaning that she could continue to make small British films like this one. At 15, Mills was too mature for the part of Kathy, a little girl (obviously pre-sexual) who be…
White Mischief is a tale of lust and violence in the Happy Valley region of Kenya. It is based on a true story, and what a story it is: in 1940, Sir Henry Delves Broughton, known as Jock, arrived in Kenya with his beautiful wife Diana. At 27, Diana was 30 years younger than her rich new husband, and it took her all of one day in Nairobi to become attracted to jock's friend Lord Erroll, a da…
When Maria Schell, then 31, and Marcello Mastroianni, then 34, played Natalia and Mario in White Nights in 1957, they were both too mature and worldly to play a pair of innocents. Feodor Dostoevsky's 1848 story, published when he was 27, makes sense for a girl of 17 and a lonely dreamer of 26 in cold St. Petersburg in the midst of the 30-year-reign of Tsar Nicholas I. For all the visual lov…
I discovered this treasure on a library shelf where you can check out “educational” tapes like this one for a whole week for free! Even Christopher Walken aficionados who follow his every professional move may not know about Who Am I This Time? Susan Sarandon is Helene Shaw, who is cast in a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire and is immediately attracted to Harry Shaw �…
I wonder what's happened to Dorothy and Bob DeBolt and their large and enchanting family in the 20-something years since filmmaker John Korty won both an Oscar and an Emmy for making a documentary about their lives in Piedmont, California. Until it won the Oscar and ABC picked it up, television networks shied away from the project. They claimed it was depressing because many of the DeBolt k…
You either love Benny Hill or you don't. If you do, you'll get a kick out of seeing him in his first movie. Hill is Hugo, a mystery buff who reads Date with Death when he's supposed to be working at his job at an ice show. He wins money in a contest for amateur detectives and decides to use it to make himself a real private eye. Only in the movies! He gets mixed up in some gob…
Surviving pre-code film festivals provide a forcible reminder of just how much we missed onscreen between 1934 and 1969 when the Production Code had a stranglehold on major studio releases. But occasionally, independent filmmakers of “B” movies were able to slip a little something extra into their pictures that sailed clean past the censors. While moral guardians remained fixated on …
Renee Zellweger and Ann Wedgeworth last worked together in Love and a.45, not exactly my favorite movie of 1994. This time, they have a better vehicle for their talents, and the Oscar-worthy Vincent D'Onofrio, one of the outstanding character stars of his generation, gets a rare chance to be front and center for the length of a movie. Fans of Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, Solomon Kane, Ki…
Coline Serreau made her vivid directorial debut with Why Not! The former actress explores the relationships of two men and a woman who live happily together in a house in the suburbs. This idyllic menage a trois is disrupted by the presence of a young girl who falls in love with one of the inhabitants, but doesn't know how to accept the living arrangements he obviously has no desire to chan…
Wicked Woman is a grade-Z movie with a vengeance, starting with the grungy title song, belted with conviction by some cheesy male vocalist, circa 1954. Beverly Michaels IS the Wicked Woman, a gigantic blonde who destroys every life she touches, sort of. Her grubby neighbor down the hall is Percy Helton who'll do ANYTHING for the promise of a cheap thrill with her. Of course, NO ONE in this …
Hugh Leonard originally wrote Widow's Peak for the late Maureen O'Sullivan and her daughter Mia Farrow. O'Sullivan was to play Miss O'Hare and Farrow would be Edwina Broome. When Widow's Peak finally went into production, Farrow inherited the role of Miss O'Hare and Natasha Richardson wound up playing Edwina Broome. The story takes place in Kilshannon in t…
At the start of 1947's The Hucksters, one of Sidney Greenstreet's sharply etched villains spits on a table. As he was quick to admit, it was a disgusting gesture, but he wanted to make sure that people would remember him. In the opening sequence of David Lynch's Wild at Heart, Nicolas Cage's character commits an act so violent and so grisly that you're unlikely e…
Immediately after delivering his second Oscar-winning performance in Lust for Life, Anthony Quinn made two independent films for Oscar-winning art director Harry Horner. The Wild Party, made for Security Pictures, was the second. Horner directed several films between 1952 and 1956 before returning to art direction. (He would be nominated again in 1969 for They Shoot Horses, Don't The…
Wild West: Cute idea, dumb execution. Not everything that comes out of the hallowed halls of London's Channel Four is an instant classic on the level of My Beautiful Laundrette. Three Pakistani brothers form a Country Western band called the Honky Tonky Cowboys. Their ultimate destination is Nashville, but on the road to fame and fortune, the oldest brother Zaf (Naveen Andrews)…
Oscar Wilde became such a dearly loved character in the latter half of the 20th century that his fall from grace at the height of his fame in 1895 seems almost surreal to his loyal legion of devoted admirers. His much-trampled grave at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris was, until its 1992 restoration, nearly as filled with graffiti as that of Jim Morrison. The constant revival of his plays and a…
This beautiful indie first turned up on the Lifetime Cable Network. The story, set in the South during the Great Depression, focuses on Reese Witherspoon, then 15, as motherless Ellie Perkins, who lives with her grandmother Bessie (Collin Wilcox Paxton), alcoholic father Jack (Beau Bridges), and teen brother Sammy (William McNamara, then 26). In spite of h…
Four more hours on The Windsors? What is there left to be said about what may be the most chronicled family of all time? A great deal, actually, as can be seen in a 1994 documentary available through MPI Home Video. What distinguishes this historical overview of Britain's royal family is an impending sense of closure. The choice of the narrator, Janet Suzman, is revealing. Suzman won an Osc…
Did you ever see a movie that everyone in the world was raving about, that won a fistful of awards, that was considered the director's masterpiece, and that did absolutely nothing for you, so you shut up about it in mixed company? And then the director made a sequel five years later, so you disqualified yourself from reviewing it, but the sequel did not become the subject of mixed company, …
From Backbeat to Hackers to The Wings of the Dove may seem like a psychological stretch for director Iain Softley, but all three of his films focus on characters that are ahead of their time, perhaps too many steps ahead for their own good. Kate (Helena Bonham Carter) has the perfectly sensible idea of transforming her lover Merton Densher (Linus Roache) from the poor w…
There are lousy movies and then there is Wired, the film that will set the standard for bad screen biographies for years to come. Remember Reefer Madness? Cocaine Fiends? Maniac? Wired may be even more laughable than watching all three of those turkeys on a triple bill at the grungiest flea pit you can imagine. It's hard to believe that, in 1964, Larry Peerce directed One Potato, Two Potato…
Considerable controversy surrounded the making of Wish You Were Here because of its sexual candor and because its star was then just 16 years old. Yet Emily Lloyd's performance as the emotionally battered Linda is one of the most heartfelt and authentic portraits of a teen ever seen on film. You can always tell when Linda's guts have been ripped out—her sarcasm goes into high …
I never could understand why so-called Mai Zetterling fans were always sighing about her looks because she couldn't stay 16 years old forever. To me, Mai Zetterling (1925–94), was beautiful and brilliant and never more so than in her lovely swan song as the 65-year-old grandmother in Nicolas Roeg's charming film adaptation of Roald Dahl's prize-winning fan…
Unless it's Eraserhead’s Baby Henry or Monkey Business, in which Ginger Rogers THINKS that Cary Grant's been rejuvenated into a baby, I tend to hit the rewind button whenever movies about babies swim into focus: planning them, having them, diapering them, feeding them, walking them, et cetera. I took my sister Alanna, who had two stunning babies—Emma and Tess—bet…
This exceptional, lovely Russian film begins with abduction, then evolves into a story of love and survival.
There's nostalgic drek about the 1960s and then there's the bracing dark comedy Withnail and I. Who better to separate fantasy from reality about that era than George Harrison and Richard Starkey (AKA Ringo Starr)? As a spur to struggling creative geniuses, The Beatles’ Apple was worm-ridden from Day One, but Handmade Films, Harrison's independent film com…
The Wizard of Loneliness, a pile of nostalgic goo (although another word also comes to mind) from American Playhouse will eventually wind up on public television, interrupted by excruciating pledge breaks which will run a tight race to rival this film's boredom level. Lukas Haas, whose large brown eyes and riveting presence stole Witness and The Lady in White from award-winnin…
I've never understood why talented Jean Kent didn't become a bigger star than she did. She was attractive in an evil, insolent, menacing sort of way that was just right for noir films like this one. For that matter, I've never understood why this fine Anthony Asquith film isn't better known than it is, either. Jean Kent is a fortune teller named Astra, who is already de…
Housewife Gena Rowlands is cracking up and husband Peter Falk doesn't understand why. I'm with Peter Falk on this one. I felt like a stranger who'd stumbled into a psychodramatic household for two and a half hours. At one point, when Gena Rowlands asks everyone in the house to leave so she can make love with her husband, I actually found myself blushing with acute embarrassmen…
How often have you seen an absolutely magnificent woman trash herself relentlessly over a jerk? Then you see HIM and wonder what all the fuss was about. Hollywood has supplied us with stunning examples of this phenomenon: observe Bette Davis or Joan Crawford work themselves into suicidal despair over assorted male contract players. Or watch Italy's Anna Magnani pine away because Ben Gazzara…
This quiet little film is about a factory owner who steals to pay his worker's wages.
At the age of 95, Leni Riefenstahl remains a vital, seductive ball of energy. Ray Muller's three-hour documentary about her life and career doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this frustrating enigma. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl was somewhat hindered at the start by a major restriction; Riefenstahl would only cooperate with the filmmaker if no opposing v…
Wonderland was a curious choice for 1989's closing night at San Francisco's Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, an event which professes to celebrate positive gay images on film. Philip Saville's film is saturated with so many homophobic messages: If you're young, nice, and gay, prepare to die. If you're a thief, a liar, and a gay basher, you deserve to survive. Moreo…
The Summer of Love in the straight world occurred in 1967. For the San Francisco gay community, the Summer of Love took place in 1978. Harvey Milk was still alive and thriving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and AIDS, the plague that would be an epidemic by the summer of 1981 and didn't even have a name yet, had only been detected in a few scattered cases. Disco was huge that summ…
One of the major frustrations about being a child is that grown-ups often fail to explain matters in which kids have a very real stake. Sometimes, as in A World Apart, a mother can't explain what's going on to her 13-year-old daughter, even when it seems as if their entire world is caving in. These are the rough lessons screenwriter Shawn Slovo learned at a young age in South Africa.…
The World of Henry Orient was considerably overshadowed by another Peter Sellers release in 1964, The Pink Panther, but it remains one of the best films about teenagers ever made, and among the few to give anything like an accurate reading of the many crossed signals between kids and adults. Sellers portrays Henry Orient, a concert piano player of limited ability who becomes the reluctant idol of …
The late Jacques Demy (1931–90) was a darling of the festival circuit for over 20 years. He was in love with Hollywood musicals and fairy tales that ended happily ever after. In The World of Jacques Demy, his widow Agnes Varda pays tribute to the unique filmmaker who thrived during the French New Wave without ever really being part of it. Demy's uneven career consisted …