Human beings love to flirt with fear, which is even more attractive when placed under lock and key, visible but inaccessible. We caress the iron bars that keep the caged lions from slashing our faces; we queue up to ride mechanical contraptions designed to make us vomit. Still, nothing thrills us more than stories that … Read more
Not so very long ago, sex in the movies took place off camera, if at all. But the swinging ’60s put an end to pudeur, and most Hollywood films now contain at least one scene in which the male and female leads are shown in a state of undress, engaging in an elaborately choreographed pantomime … Read more
The French, as usual, got it wrong: The more things change, the worse they get. As far back as 1974, the famously dyspeptic John Simon, who revels in cursing the darkness, was pointing out that American movies “do not (cannot? dare not?) cope with serious, contemporary, middle-class, adult problems ….What is virtually nonexistent is serious … Read more
In the anxious hours following the Columbine High School shootings, America’s television screens repeatedly showed a slow-motion film clip in which a black-clad, shotgun-toting boy bursts into a classroom and fills his fellow students full of buckshot. The gunman was teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of Titanic, and the clip came not from a … Read more
Hollywood does only three things consistently well: light comedy, film noir, and the western. (Star Wars is a western.) At their best, these stylized genres serve as masks of deniability behind which intelligent filmmakers hide their heterodoxies. The gods of the Copybook Headings may have been driven from the public square, but turn back the … Read more
In America, only pretty young women become movie stars. Middle-aged ale actors who are unattractive—or at least Bogart-ugly—can and do play romantic leads, but no actress who is short of beautiful or much older than 30 has much chance of seeing her name above the title of a big-budget movie, save as part of a … Read more
Man bites dog: The Prince of Egypt, DreamWorks’ animated feature film about the life of Moses, has been banned in Malaysia because it is too explicitly religious. “We found it insensitive for religious and moral reasons,” says Lukeman Saaid, chairman of Malaysia’s Film Censorship Board. The ban is all the more comical given the equally … Read more
Truth sometimes finds its way into the movies—accidents happen—but when it comes to death, Hollywood is incapable of honesty, and the bigger the budget, the balder the lies. Real movie stars live forever or die nobly, uttering memorable last words and expiring with a smile; you never see the catheter, or smell the pus. Even … Read more
Christmas is to Hollywood what a bank is to a crook. The kids are home for the holidays, the house is full of restless guests who need tending—so why not take the afternoon off and go to the movies? And go we do, in numbers that fill the larcenous hearts of studio moguls with an … Read more
Only a decade ago, animation was about as hip as—well, lounge music. Now audiences can’t seem to get enough of it. Antz, a feature-length cartoon “starring” Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Sylvester Stallone, drew bigger crowds than Oprah Winfrey’s Beloved; three of TV’s smartest sitcoms, Fox’s King of the Hill and The Simpsons … Read more
Big-budget studio movies, like the Clinton administration, are monsters of majority rule. Concocted by committee, they are painstakingly engineered to appeal to the largest possible number of potential viewers, a goal that necessarily precludes such superfluous adornments as wit, eccentricity or a strongly individual point of view; for the same reason, anything that might tend … Read more
How do we know that we live in postmodern times? Were he alive and sane, Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of modernity, would no doubt tell us to be on the lookout for signs and portents of what he called “the transvaluation of all values,” the great ethical inversion that he expected to occur when modern … Read more
Every couple of years, American filmgoers become mysteriously obsessed with a “water-cooler movie,” a picture that ordinary people feel compelled to talk about at endless length, usually around the office water cooler. Though such movies sometimes feature well-known actors and actresses, and may even have been quite expensive to make, the size of the budget … Read more
How can the spiritually conscious artist hold the attention of an audience whose members, as Flannery O’Connor bluntly put it, have had the moral sense bred out of them? “A secular society,” she said in 1963, “understands the religious mind less and less. It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable. … Read more
The cultural seismographs of Hollywood have finally registered the Third Great Awakening: City of Angels, a tearjerker about a soulful-looking angel who falls in love with a perky heart surgeon, blew Titanic out of the top box-office slot. No doubt this is the film industry’s idea of divine intervention—James Cameron, the writer-director-producer of Titanic, was … Read more
All of a sudden, it’s hip to be noir. L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s tough-minded homage to the most influential American film genre of the ’40s, was the best-reviewed movie of 1997; Robert Polito, author of a prize-winning biography of pulp novelist Jim Thompson, edited a two-volume anthology of crime fiction published last year by the … Read more
Historians seeking to understand the mind of Bill Clinton will surely make much of the fact that just three days after the White House found itself engulfed in sexual scandal, the president of the United States was conspicuously in attendance at a screening of The Apostle, a film about a Pentecostal preacher from Texas who … Read more