I haven’t seen Red Rock West (1993) or Unforgettable (1996), but The Last Seduction (1994) is depressive and contemptuous of its audience. Still, a beguiling Rounders may owe something to director John Dahl. Certainly the film is beautifully written by David Levien and Brian Koppelman, elegantly lensed in sometimes noirish colors by Jean Yves Escoffier, […]
Monthly Archives: March 2007
Sentimental and insubstantial, Real Women Have Curves revolves around the generational dispute between a mother, a Mexican immigrant, and a daughter who is eager to embrace most aspects of her identity as a first-generation American. The daughter, Ana, has just graduated from high school and wants to go to college (her Latino English teacher encourages […]
Some twenty years ago, Francisco J. Lombardi made a powerful film about a military boys’ school, La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs, 1985), based on a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. In the meantime, he has been prolific; but marketplace censorship being what it is, extremely few Peruvian (or any other […]
It was Damon Runyan, I believe, who fixed the tag “Cinderella Man” to light heavyweight boxer James J. Braddock during the Great Depression. It is fitting, therefore, that Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man, which is about Braddock’s failures in the ring—his boxing license was revoked in 1933—and sensational comeback in 1935, should be vaguely Runyonesque as […]
Here is one of the major points on which Peter Jackson’s King Kong breaks down. One of the principal themes of the original Schoedsack-Cooper masterpiece is how civilization sublimates primitive religious awe and worship in its audience responses to modern entertainment. Jackson, perhaps choking on the density of crusading Christian import in his vile Lord […]
Dennis Grunes 