Movies & TV

OPENING THE BIG TEASE– Cinema 21 THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL– Hollywood Theatre DIVINE TRASH– Clinton Street Theatre GONE IN 60 SECONDS– 82nd Avenue A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES– Northwest Film Center @The Guild Theater WINTER SLEEPERS– Cinema 21 MOVIES & EVENTS *American Movie A documentary about the trials and […]

THE PROBLEM with experimental films is that they are experiments. The makers of the films in the traveling Super Super-8 Film Festival, however, would probably dispute the idea that they are simply experimenting. What to us is idle dabbling must be to them a glorious individual work, valuable in its own right. Though many American […]

IS A DRAG QUEEN MUNCHING on a real piece of dog poop as shocking as it used to be? It still makes my gag reflex do flip-flops–which, considering the things I’ve put in my mouth, really says something. Director Steve Yeager explores this issue and other tabooisms in Divine Trash; his tribute to the masters […]

IF THERE’S ANYTHING EVEN CLOSE to a scientific argument for the existence of a collective unconscious, it’s film. Never mind the jillion dollar ad campaigns and Taco Bell tie-ins; the tentacles of movies unfurl into the mind’s darkest recesses, resulting in a branch of pop culture that’s more recognizable, universally speaking, than any other. Just […]

The June 6 video releases offer a lot of murderous kooks and a smidgen of homoeroticism. Hey, it’s kind of like the Mercury office! • MR. DEATH–Erroll Morris’ documentary of Fred Leuchter Jr., an execution device engineer-turned-revisionist historian, is so good you’ll wanna puke. Leuchter Jr. commits a series of gut-wrenching travesties, from making electric […]

Thursday, June 1 8:00 32 POPULAR A new male student comes to school with a strange request: He wants to be a pretty, pretty cheerleader! 8:00 49 SCREAM–Movie Now, here’s a really fun horror flick (until you remember it’s written by Kevin Williamson, who created Dawson’s Creek). Friday, June 2 9:00 USA STUART SAVES HIS […]

MOVIES & EVENTS 28 DAYS Sandra Bullock is an alcoholic whose behavior lands her in Serenity Glen, a touchy-feely rehab center filled with the requisite, cuddly goofs and embittered oddballs. Bullock carries an ultimately phony movie with something resembling humanity. Division Street ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER “You are more authentic the more you are closer […]

LIKE SCORSESE’S TAXI DRIVER and Bresson’s Pickpocket before it, Mike Hodges’ unreleased 1998 masterpiece Croupier makes a convincing case that a sleazy, specialized profession–in this case, the guy who rolls the ball and collects the chips at a roulette table–is a perfect metaphor for existential malaise. In the role of God’s Lonely Man stands Jack […]

THE WORLD OF JAPANESE ANIME is like an oversized carousel operated by the Marquis de Sade. The lights are too bright, it spins too fast, everyone around is screaming out of control, and in the end, all you want to do is throw up. The problem lies in the lack of appreciation for simple stillness. […]

Girl, Interrupted, the mediocre screen adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s similarly mediocre novel, is released on video June 6. Winona Ryder can put an audience to sleep more efficiently than a Sealy mattress. Our chicks-in-the-loony-bin picks are like a bucket of NoDoz. • FRANCES (1982)–If lobotomies were handed out after every nervous breakdown (like ’30s film […]

Thursday, May 18 8:00 5 FRIENDS Season finale! Chandler is about to pop the question to Monica when Tom Selleck walks back in! Damn his gorgeous booshy moostache! 10:00 5 E.R. Season finale! Carter pitches a hissy-fit in front of everybody, just because he was stabbed with a knife. Boo, hoo, hoo! Friday, May 19 […]

FILM IS A POWERFUL AGENT of confusion, especially when taken in massive quantity. The multiplicity of film’s attack on our minds–aural, visual, rhythmic, musical–makes us extraordinarily susceptible to its demands. When the Lumières projected a train arriving at the Gare St. Lazare, and the terrified audience fled the cinema, they did so in a state […]