They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for March, 1987
Blind Date (1987)
Oh! I wanted so badly for this Blind Date to work. The pedigree is here. It stars, and is made by, some very talented and funny people. There’s Bruce Willis who is hilarious on ” Moonlighting.” There’s John Larroquette, who is hilarious on “Night Court”. There is the beautiful Kim Basinger who was great in Nine […]
Dolls (1987)
Scary dolls are really only scary when they are inactive. There is something about their stillness, their frozen expression, the light cast on their plastic faces that makes them unsettling. A lot of filmmakers don’t realize this. When they charge forward and attack they look ridiculous. A filmmaker has to be truly skilled to really […]
Street Smart (1987)
It is amazing how these things work out. I just wrote my review of Hollywood Shuffle and noted that most of Hollywood’s popular African-American actors are being cast as crooks, thieves, pimps and killers, at least the ones who aren’t Eddie Murphy. Now here’s Street Smart which issues me a challenge. Morgan Freeman, one of our […]
Hollywood Shuffle (1987)
Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle is a very funny comedy send-up of the treatment and compartmentalization of black actors who have been routinely forced into roles as slaves, pimps, crooks, and killers. It had to be a comedy because the reality is all too real even as I write this review. I just finished writing my review of […]
Burglar (1987)
Burglar is an action comedy of such absurd stupidity that during its last half hour I found myself involuntarily muttering: “Aw, come on.” This happens to me occasionally when a movie is droning on endlessly, has passed the point of wrapping up and just seems to keep going. I wanted it to wrap up. Really, […]
Heat (1987)
I once heard an interview with Roger Ebert about how the “Siskel and Ebert” show got started. He said that initially, both critics walked into the studio with 3×5 cards containing talk points – a method that proved to be a disaster – the show seemed stiff and formal. At one point, the producer Thea […]
Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)
Evil Dead 2; Dead by Dawn is what I wanted from Stuart Gordon’s Dolls. From that movie, I wanted a grand guignol of blood and guts fantasia. but it seemed too slight and too civilized to move in that direction. Sam Raimi doesn’t have that problem. This is a comedy made with a very specific visual […]
Lily Tomlin (1987)
Just about the only thing that I knew about the documentary Lily Tomlin going in is that Tomlin and her partner Jane Wagner unsuccessfully sued to prevent this film from being show because it upstages the material in her one-woman show “The Search for Signs of Intelligence Life in the Universe.” What could they be […]
