Mad City
In our infinite quest to turn the English language into a subliterate mess, we have added the word “stalkarazzi” in honor of those daring young men with their cameras who allegedly sent Di and her Dodi off into jet-set oblivion. Fingers were pointed as the tears and Elton John drivel flowed. Now Hollywood, ever timely,…
Telling Lies in America
In the loosely autobiographical Telling Lies in America, highly paid Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Jade, Basic Instinct, Showgirls) shows he can do more than churn out the violence and sex-saturated screenplays that have recently been his stock-in-trade. By turns poignant and humorous, this thoughtful coming-of-age story is set in an early-1960s working-class neighborhood in Cleveland…
The Wings of the Dove
After two highly touted adaptations of Henry James novels — Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady and Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square — comes one with fewer built-in expectations. Not only is The Wings of the Dove based on one of the author’s lesser-known works, but its director has only the lackluster Backbeat (1993) and…
Starship Troopers
That wacky Paul Verhoeven is at it again. One minute into the first of several satirical “Fed Net” commercials running through his latest sci-fi schlocker, Starship Troopers, a Net correspondent reporting on the enemy Arachnids is overtaken by one of the bugs. The bug wrenches the man into the air with its mandibles and clicks…
Deep Crimson
Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s Deep Crimson is based on the same true-crime story that inspired the American cult film The Honeymoon Killers (1970), the murder spree of an unlikely couple who hustled lonely-heart types for their money before killing them. But whereas the earlier film was a gritty black-and-white affair, Ripstein’s version is graced with…
The Ice Storm
The chill that permeates The Ice Storm doesn’t come just from the weather. During Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, a freezing rain blankets the tony suburb of New Canaan, Conn. But comfort and the basic fuel of human warmth are nowhere to be found. In this masterful film, director Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense…
Riding the Rails
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Janis Joplin might have been singing about a free love throw-down with Bobby McGee, but for the teenage railroad gypsies of the Great Depression, freedom was the booby prize from a society that could offer them very little — least of all, hope. A quarter million…
IRRESISTIBLY SAD STUFF
Now this is one of Michigan’s more lustrous gems, even with a few alterations from the previous incarnation. Add a Moog, say bye-bye to singer Amon Krist and let band founder Trey Many trick some talented people into playing out his hauntingly psychedelic sadness, and there you have it. Of Color Bright should be next…
Trance and Dance?
Turntable kings the Chemical Bros. know it’s still only rock’n’roll.
Eve’s Bayou
Memory is changeable, insists the narrator at the start of Eve’s Bayou — the haunting debut film from writer-director Kasi Lemmons — before she plants the verbal equivalent of a land mine: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old.” But as startling, high-contrast, black-and-white images (a recurring device indicating dreams and…
Bean
Mr. Bean, the mostly mute comic character created and portrayed by British actor Rowan Atkinson, may already be familiar to many via the “Mr. Bean” television series, which was one of the most popular comedy shows of the ’90s in Britain and has been widely shown on public television stations in the United States. A…
Out past the edge
Ann Arbor Edgefest ’97 takes 13 hours of musical chances….
Painters have the power
WSU’s new gallery opens with Spero and Golub’s political visions….
