In a no doubt apocryphal scene purportedly from the protagonist Harvey Pekar’s life, American Splendor opens with the young Harvey out Halloween trick-or-treating with some other boys. His friends are all dressed as superheroes — Batman, Superman, etc. — but Harvey steadfastly rejects costumes and maintains his own identity. The moment sums up most of […]
Movies
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Making stew with the neurotic confidence man
The appearance of the new movie Matchstick Men underlines the surprising versatility of its director, Ridley Scott. He at times seems something of a throwback to the old studio system, when a great many talented, dedicated, hard-working people turned out all sorts of motion pictures without a great deal of thought about how they would […]
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Sorting out films, from feel-goods to yawners
From the thick of the 28th Toronto International Film Festival, here is the lowdown on the most notable films so far. The Good Coffee & Cigarettes: Not so much a film as a collection of shorts Jim Jarmusch started making back in 1986 (for Saturday Night Live, no less). Each features a few actors sitting […]
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Treating decay with boredom
Beginning with its title, which promises something quirky and unusual, the new movie from Alan Rudolph depends upon a number of deceptions, intended or not, that may fool the public (as, judging by the superlatives in the advertisements, they have already fooled the reviewers) into actually paying money to see it. Rudolph himself has spent […]
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Losing their way in the Middle East
There are a pair of 40-minute Middle Eastern films screening at the Dryden Theatre this Saturday (September 6). Each makes its Rochester debut and each arrives with buckets full of praise from people whose hearts go out to the ridiculously oppressed citizens of the countries represented by the shorts (Yemen and Iran). I don’t […]
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Remembrance of screams past
Many students and fans of the horror film, I am sure, will welcome the new movie Freddy vs. Jason with expressions of gratitude and relief, and possibly even a few resounding cheers. Surely, after so many years of shock and fright, so many buckets of gore and gobbets of flesh, so many scores of dead […]
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Buffy who? Give us more JC!
The makers of Slamdance victors Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy are back with a cautionary tale involving Jesus, lesbians, vampires, Mexican wrestling, Kung Fu, and God knows what else I missed because the smile on my face was so huge, I couldn’t see over my cheekbones. We’re talking about a film […]
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Nowhere to go and all day to get there
It’s been a decade since the bafflingly popular Merchant-Ivory team has churned out anything I could even remotely recommend to friends and family. Since Remains of the Day, director and co-writer James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have made a couple of really awful pictures (Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso), […]
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We need some real cowboys again
The release of Kevin Costner’s generally impressive new picture, Open Range, ironically emphasizes the delicate condition of that once robust genre, the Western. Innumerable students of the form at every level of learning offer a wide variety of reasons for its virtual disappearance over the last three decades — the war in Vietnam, a new […]
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Perfectly at home on the ‘Range’
Despite its decades of decline, the Western, that grand and glorious American form, will never entirely succumb to the vagaries of taste and time. Expressing, no matter how crudely and falsely at times, some notions of ourselves as a people, it simply means too much to our history and more important, to our mythology. Its […]
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Get itchy and dirty this weekend
Okay, first things first: Ichi is pronounced “ee-chee,” not “itchy,” otherwise this would probably be the long-awaited feature-film debut of a certain ultra-violent cat-and-mouse team from The Simpsons. But that’s not to say Ichi the Killer (screens Saturday, August 16, at the Dryden) isn’t brutal in its own right. Believe me, when director Takashi Miike […]
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The Ben and Jen show
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, one of those isolated brainstorms that now and then sweep through narrow areas of Southern California, specifically, conference rooms in the region of Hollywood. Some inventive person probably suggested a movie constructed around two of the best known young stars in American film, who […]
