Veanne Cox Movies

Arye Gross plays an up-and-coming artist who foregoes the convenience of big-city life for the charms of Montana in this drama, writer-director Thomas Bezucha's debut feature. On the eve of his first show at the Whitney Museum, Henry (Gross) hears news that his grandfather back home has had a stroke. Upon returning to his idyllic birthplace, however, Henry realizes that the old man isn't the only thing he has to tend to: There's the semi-closeted issue of his sexuality, which he longs to reveal to his clan -- as well as to his old high-school crush, Dean (Tim DeKay). Amidst all the angst, Henry fails to notice the advances of the sensitive Pike (Eric Schweig), an espresso-brewing outdoorsman who owns the town's general store and cooks meals for the stroke-addled grandpa Sam (George Coe). ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is a garbageman, and his life is about as unpleasant and uneventful as you'd expect given his profession; he doesn't much care for his work, he's treated with violence or contempt by most of the people in his neighborhood, and he shares a house with Mary (Maria Porter), his cranky, pill-head mother, and Fay (Parker Posey), his morally suggestible sister. One day, Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) appears; he claims to be a writer in the midst of a major project, entitled "Confessions," and needs a place to stay. Henry ends up moving in with Simon and his family, where he wastes no time in bedding both Mary and Fay, and encourages Simon to write in a journal. Simon begins to write in long torrents of words that surprisingly fall together into iambic pentameter; Henry tells Simon that what he's writing is poetry, and he's truly gifted. Simon seems dubious at first, but when several of Simon's pieces are posted on the Internet, he developes a huge and rabid following and is acclaimed as one of the great authors of our time. Henry, however, isn't able to get anywhere with his own book or his own life; as Simon's star slowly rises, Henry's orbit slowly sinks past the horizon. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Paul Rudnick provides the script for the Scott Rudin-produced comedy Marci X, directed by Richard Benjamin. The new song "Shoot Ya' Teacha" by controversial hardcore rapper Dr. S. (short for Dr. Snatchcatcher, played by Damon Wayans) causes a public outcry. The stress causes a heart attack for the owner of the hardcore rap record label Felony Assault (played by director Benjamin). It's up to his stylishly sunny daughter Marci (Lisa Kudrow) to take over his business. She tries to rescue the record label by changing the negative image of Dr. S. in order to appeal to a youth-oriented crowd, which leads the pair into an unlikely romance. Actress Christine Baranski appears as a conservative senator who threatens to ban the rapper. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

Once upon a time, National Lampoon was on the cutting edge of satire and scatology. By 1986, the magazine was on its last legs, a doddering shadow of what it once had been. The performers in the 86-minute review National Lampoon's Class of '86 give it the old college try, but they're hampered by scads of hit-and-miss material. This video was labelled "adults only", though it's hard to imagine anyone over the age of 15 who will be amused. The title Class of '86 is only half right: it has no class, but it certainly deserves to be eighty-sixed. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Seen on ABC's Wonderful World of Disney, this $12-million production is the only musical Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for television. The CBS-TV original, with 21-year-old Julie Andrews in the title role and Edie Adams as the Fairy Godmother, played on live television March 31, 1957 to TV's largest audience ever to that date (107-million viewers). That historic production, captured on kinescope, can still be seen today on library monitors at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York and Los Angeles. Hammerstein died in 1960 and did not get to see 18-year-old Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella in the February 22, 1965 restaged production, repeated annually on CBS until 1977 and later made available on videotape from CBS/Fox Video and Facets Multimedia. Added to the 1965 show was "Loneliness of Evening", a song actually written for South Pacific but cut before the Broadway opening.

Running a half-hour longer, this third interpretation premiered November 2, 1997. Filmed over a 28-day period, it stars Brandy Norwood as Cinderella and Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother, with Bernadette Peters as the Stepmother, Whoopi Goldberg as the Queen (wearing $60 million worth of borrowed Harry Winston jewelry), Paolo Montalban as the Prince, and Jason Alexander as the Prince's steward, Lionel. Scripter Robert L. Freedman provided a rewrite of the original Oscar Hammerstein book, and three other Richard Rodgers songs were added to the existing score: "There's Music in You" (from the 1953 movie musical Main Street to Broadway), "The Sweetest Sounds" (a Brandy/Montalban duet), and "Falling in Love with Love". Originally set in motion as a follow-up to the highly successful TV Gypsy (1993) with Bette Midler, this 1997 multicultural version (sometimes referred to as the "rainbow Cinderella") was years in the making, since it was initiated in 1994 when Houston joined executive producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (the team responsible for the TV Gypsy). ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide