By Rex Reed 10/16/12 7:30pm

movies

Hawkes and Hunt in The Sessions.

Sexual Healing: The Sessions Breathes New Life Into Oft-Avoided Subject

Sex and the disabled may still be a difficult topic to some, but at the movies it’s a hot-button theme whose time has come, with numerous examples of candor on film. The Sessions, a wonderful movie with splendid performances by John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, as well as a careful and sensitive screenplay and flawless direction by writer-director Ben Lewin, is the best movie about the pain, ecstasy and life-enriching courage of a handicapped person that I have seen since Jon Voight’s Oscar-winning work in Coming Home. Put aside all reservations. You will love this movie and go away from it informed, enlightened and positive about the sustaining power of the human experience.

This is the true story of Mark O’Brien, a Berkeley poet and journalist who was paralyzed by polio at the age of six and confined to a horizontal position in an iron lung for 32 years. The movie focuses on his terrified but determined decision, at age 38, to lose his virginity before he dies. Read More

By Ted Gushue 1/22/12 2:54pm

Sundance Film Festival

Bing Presents Comedy With Aziz Ansari And A Drake Performance At The Bing Bar - 2012 Park City

Turf Wars, Lil Jon And The Josh Hartnett Sundance Stink Eye

Day 2 of the Sundance Film Festival found The Observer snowbound in the extreme. We’re talking enough snow to give Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City transit system nightmares. Astronomic surcharges became the norm as Park City’s anemic livery force struggled to even make the most ludicrous time frames: ”Yeah I can have a guy up there in like 3 and a half hours?” deadpanned one audacious taxi dispatcher, who seemed to take pleasure in seeing so many city slickers squeal. Read More

By Christopher Rosen 8/04/10 12:44am

One Indie Movie’s Hollywood Ending

Blame Kevin Smith, or perhaps Edward Burns. They took their little indie films (Clerks and The Brothers McMullen, respectively) to the festival circuit in the mid-’90s, grabbed a distribution deal and went on to fame and fortune. “The popular story that got everyone’s attention at the time was the young filmmaker who put Read More

By Andrew Sarris 7/24/06 12:00am

Mr. Mamet and Mr. Macy Make Misery in Edmond

Stuart Gordon’s Edmond, from a screenplay by David Mamet, based on his play, had been reportedly turned down by many mainstream studios before Gary Rubin’s First Independent Pictures took the plunge with this decidedly downbeat project. I can certainly understand the mainstream hesitations. I never saw Edmond in its original early-80’s theatrical version, and I Read More

By Andrew Sarris 7/24/06 12:00am

Mr. Mamet and Mr. Macy Make Misery in Edmond

Stuart Gordon’s Edmond, from a screenplay by David Mamet, based on his play, had been reportedly turned down by many mainstream studios before Gary Rubin’s First Independent Pictures took the plunge with this decidedly downbeat project. I can certainly understand the mainstream hesitations. I never saw Edmond in its original early-80’s theatrical version, and I Read More

By Frank DiGiacomo and Alexandra Wolfe 12/01/03 12:00am

Rootin’-Tootin’ Macy

“Sex is good! Sex is really, really, really good!” the actor William H. Macy said. “Sex? Love! It’s fine! I have two little girls, and I don’t care if they see sex. It’s not going to hurt them. Violence, however, will.”

Then his voice rose an octave. “Even bad sex is O.K.!” he said.

Read More

By John Heilpern 4/03/00 12:00am

How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway?

The revival of David Mamet’s breakthrough 1975 play, American Buffalo (at the Atlantic Theater Company), confirms its still-invigorating, toxic power. In their monosyllabic savage incoherence, Mr. Mamet’s lowlifes in the wilderness are his funniest demolition of big business and the American Dream. As the hustler Teach puts it with near-Elizabethan eloquence: “You know what is Read More

By John Heilpern 12/08/97 12:00am

David Mamet and Andy Warhol: Separated at Birth?

It will be sacrilege to many, but I’m beginning to see David Mamet as the Andy Warhol of theater. They are, of course, outwardly as different as a crew cut is from a lopsided wig, but they link in the shallow essentials. Both, for instance, claim that their art reflects us, or the culture, or Read More