Whatever the limitations of Sherman’s March and Roger & Me, they at least offered some food for thought along with the self-congratulation this offers little more than smarmy joke cues and poetic platitudes. The narrative’s jocular, superficial tone becomes insufferable once it’s apparent that no subject is going to be accorded anything more than a cutesy one-liner. I hope I never have to after seeing this 1992 documentary produced and directed by Roger Weisberg, which follows Codrescu as he drives across the U.S., spouting cliches whenever he can’t find a religious cultist or gun freak or McDonald’s executive to spout them for him. I’ve never encountered the poetry of Romanian expatriate writer Andrei Codrescu or his contributions to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. With Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, and Christopher Walken. There’s plenty of pizzazz on view but not always a lot of sense as usual, Tarantino’s sense of fun is infectious but fairly heartless (as in the easy way the movie shrugs off the courageous death of Slater’s father, a former cop played by Dennis Hopper), and Scott’s direction is slick but mechanical, which pretty much seems what’s called for. Tony Scott (Top Gun) directs a Quentin Tarantino script about a couple (Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette) fleeing from Detroit to Los Angeles with the mob and the police after them (1993). Some of this is funny, but too much comes across as the kind of slick, soulless filmmaking the movie professes to parody. His lead actor refuses to perform a stunt, then becomes injured, reducing the director to finding a slum dweller who resembles him in order to complete the picture. (JR) Read more Two Features With One TicketĪn Iranian comedy (1991) by Dariush Farhang about the complications and disasters that ensue when an Iranian director, played by Farhang himself, tries to shoot an American-style action picture. There are still some laughs and entertainment to be found here, but forget about fidelity to the original. (JR) Read more You Can’t Take It With Youįrank Capra and Robert Riskin’s reductive, relatively conformist version of the Kaufman and Hart farce about an eccentric family (Lionel Barrymore, Jean Arthur, Mischa Auer, Spring Byington) coming into contact with a rich one (Edward Arnold, Mary Forbes, James Stewart) won best-picture and best-director Oscars in 1938. The title is a nonsense word derived from Chaplin’s splutters in The Great Dictator the tone is cheerfully irreverent, though this is hardly a patch on The Nasty Girl. It chronicles the exploits of a charlatan who starts out as an art forger, then takes up counterfeiting Nazi relics, including Hitler’s diaries and even his (and Eva Braun’s) ashes, in collusion with a puffed-up, greedy Hamburg journalist who’s restoring one of Goring’s ships and romancing one of his nieces. A pretty good German comedy by Helmut Dietl, nominated for an Oscar, that satirizes Germany’s relation to its Nazi past, with particular reference to the Hitler diaries hoax.
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