Hannah Lehmann is one of six children in a wealthy. New York, Orthodox Jewish family headed by a somewhat caustic, undemonstrative mother and a father whose concern is business. Hannah is obsessed with her mother, who never loved her enough, but whom Hannah cannot leave, forgive, or stop thinking about. Years, lovers, and psychiatrists do...
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August 1, 1987April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Making Love
Making Mr. Right directed by Susan Seidelman written by Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank Orion Pictures Perhaps it’s living in New York that makes me like Making Mr. Right. Susan Seidelman’s latest (she did Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, remember) is just one step up from farce: a lighthearted comedy of manners and sexual politics....
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June 1, 1987April 21, 2022Vital Signs
The Long War
Platoon directed and written by Oliver Stone Hemdale Film Corporation & Orion Pictures Some opinions are communicated like a virus, and the received wisdom on Platoon is a good example of this cultural dissemination on the scale of an epidemic. It’s a movie that moviegoers have flocked to, and as for our collected punditry, bowing...
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May 1, 1987April 21, 2022Vital Signs
The Three Sisters
Crimes of the Heart written by Beth Henley directed by Bruce Beresford De Laurentiis Entertainment Group When Perseus went to slay the monster Medusa, advice and presents from Minerva and Mercury were not enough; he had to seek out the Graeae—three crones with but a single prized eye they shared between them, which Perseus snatched...
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March 1, 1987April 21, 2022Vital Signs
The Mythological South
Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law opens with rolling shots of New Orleans townhouses) tenements, the down and out on a crummy side-street. From there we enter into two variations on the theme of domestic disharmony, Jack’s and Zack’s, and on to a story set in a South that never was, by a film maker who,...
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February 1, 1987April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Pins in the Carpet
The Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario has been training and cultivating great actors for years now—William Hutt, Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, Alan Scarfe, and Martha Henry have all done beautiful work—probably some of their best—there. However, with the slight exception of Smith, none have made the transition to film. So to find Martha...
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January 1, 1987April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Empty Tomato Plot
So often the trouble with a play-turned-movie is that the screenwriter and director have fooled with the original too much—opened it up too much, added too many new characters and too many new scenes. In the case of William Mastrosimone’s Extremities, however, the problem lies in the fact that he and director Robert M. Young...
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November 1, 1986April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Cherry Bomb
Under the Cherry Moon directed by and starring Prince; Warner Bros. “Once upon a time in France,” Under the Cherry Moon begins. Indeed: Once upon a time in France, a kid from Minnesota who’d made good came out to try to do better. Nice would be nice, he decided, with all its tacky money, and...
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September 1, 1986April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Ground Zero, 1950
In December 1950, at the Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, the Atomic Energy Commission set off the first atomic bomb since Nagasaki. The year before, the Soviets had conducted their first atomic test—an unpleasant surprise to most Americans—and Mao had taken over China. Truman announced in January of ’50 that he was...