Perhaps the most exhilarating entertainment of the 1980s is the fabulous Diva (1982), by Jean-Jacques Beineix, a mere thirty-three at the time. This is the one where the kid on his moped, a letter carrier who has stumbled into a dangerous intrigue involving drugs and murder, speeds for his life while being chased throughout the […]
Monthly Archives: April 2007
Barry Levinson’s Rain Man belongs to a genre of movies I love: the “road picture.” In these films, partly derived from medieval literature (such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s unfinished The Canterbury Tales, from the late fourteenth century), one or more characters journey, by foot or by vehicle, through a physical landscape that acts as correlative to […]
Sure, Gigli (pronounced so that it rhymes with really) is bad; but as bad as writer-director Martin Brest’s earlier Scent of a Woman (1992) or Meet Joe Black (1998)? No way. Indeed, one of the most disparaged Hollywood entertainments of all time is pretty entertaining. The ridiculous plot about the kidnapping of a mentally challenged […]
La haine (Hate), which brought Mathieu Kassovitz, in his twenties, the directorial prize at Cannes, centers on three friends living in a Parisian housing project. A Jew, an Arab and a black African, the youths represent groups that a culturally self-involved society prefers to keep at its outermost fringe. They are “kept” there in rather […]
In every woman there’s a sleeping tiger. What happens when it is aroused? With this lurid promotion thus began blacklisted Joseph Losey’s excellent British career, in this instance, to fool its way into distribution back home, under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury. (Blacklisted scenarists Harold Buchman and Carl Foreman wrote the script under the pseudonym Derek […]
Dennis Grunes 