As Good As It Gets
During a session with an artist’s model, the painter Simon Bishop — one of the main characters in As Good As It Gets –says that if you look at someone long enough, you discover their humanity and they become increasingly real and more alive. This is exactly what occurs with each of the three main…
Interstellar love music
American Mars’ debut recording asks questions, offers no answers and wades in its own ragged beauty, dark power and sensual confusion like a peacock strutting its feathers in a field full of crows. This Dearborn quartet (what’s up with Dearborn, anyway? Windy and Carl, Fez and now American Mars?) combines — mostly unintentionally — the…
Interdimensional Transmissions From Beyond
Ann Arbor’s Brendan Gillen, of electro-purist outfit Ectomorph, has assembled a nicely off-kilter collection of neo-electro tracks on this compilation of his label’s 12-inch singles series. The tracks vary from a few bpms just this side of booty, to straight-up new wave. Gillen makes the case for electro both as kitschy, futuristic funk, and as…
Good Will Hunting
Good Will Hunting is a smooth blend of Little Man Tate and Breaking Away: A prodigy is uprooted from his normal environment by an ambitious mentor, and a college-age blue-collar “townie” gains entrance to the ivy-clad university in his backyard. Will Hunting (Matt Damon) has spent all of his 20 years in the working-class neighborhood…
Post Coitum
In the epic, postapocalyptic action drama The Postman, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, the world of the near future is a bleak and unforgiving place. The United States has been ravaged by wars, plagues and weather disruptions that have left the population decimated and all infrastructure destroyed. Technology has all but disappeared (except for…
The Postman
In the epic, postapocalyptic action drama The Postman, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, the world of the near future is a bleak and unforgiving place. The United States has been ravaged by wars, plagues and weather disruptions that have left the population decimated and all infrastructure destroyed. Technology has all but disappeared (except for…
Jackie Brown
In his famous essay on Casablanca, Umberto Eco contends that its genius lies in the wholesale plundering of clichés from every film genre under the sun. There’s something in there for everyone. And, he suggests, had the director and writers chosen to limit the bandwidth of clichés, the film would have been a stinker. Eco’s…
Another world
A parable for the new year….
Don’t walk away in silence
A new Joy Division box set reveals the tragedy-framed band’s music as both timeless and out of its time.
Deconstructing Harry
What makes Woody run? What turns Woody on? We assume that the answers to these questions are to be found, like intriguing proverbs, in the more than two dozen cinematic fortune cookies directed by Woody Allen since the mid-’60s. Allen’s most successful comedies have often combined confessional farce and hilarious self-deflation, with himself as the…
The Sweet Hereafter
Where to begin describing this film by Atom Egoyan, which is quite clearly a work of genius, based on a novel by Russell Banks, who has brought to his remarkable fictions a greater sense of the eloquence of hardscrabble lives than any other living American author? The achievement here is prodigious and consistently excellent: acting,…
Titanic
When the Titanic itself is first viewed in writer-director James Cameron’s three-hour-plus epic, it’s an algae-covered hull on the ocean floor. For the leader (Bill Paxton) of an underwater salvage team searching for an ultravaluable necklace, the Titanic is just an object containing sunken treasure. When 101-year-old Titanic survivor Rose Calvert (a hypnotic Gloria Stuart)…
Titanic
First it stinks, then it sinks. (Didn’t somebody say that about Waterworld? Ditto this bloated extravaganza.) Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron (Terminator 1 & 2, The Abyss, Aliens) takes longer to go down on screen than the real liner did in 1912 (3 hours 14 minutes vs. 2 hours 40 minutes). This picture…
Tomorrow Never Dies
James Bond never dies. The suave and indestructible British Agent 007 has graced movie screens for 35 years. Embodied by five different actors, he still prefers his vodka martinis shaken not stirred and his women conveniently located in his path. So what makes this creaky male adolescent fantasy still appealing after 18 films? Just as…
