Wallace Shawn Movies
The son of an editor for the New Yorker, the diminutive comedic actor Wallace Shawn speaks with a recognizable lisp that is appropriate for his frequent portrayals of little irate men. A graduate of both Harvard and Oxford University, he has taught several courses in English and struggled as a playwright in the early '70s; in 1977 he translated Machiavelli's The Mandrake. Shawn broke into films soon after, building a successful career as a supporting actor to help fund his playwriting. He debuted in two of the best films of 1979: Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. In 1981, he co-wrote the semi-autobiographical My Dinner With André, a talky comedy starring himself and theater director André Gregory in a dinner conversation, directed by Louis Malle. The movie was acclaimed by critics, but many audiences grew tired during its two-hour running time. After this personal project, Shawn would build a career out of playing brief but surprisingly memorable roles in a long list of movies. One of his most warmly remembered appearances was in 1987 as Vizzini, the inept leader of a misfit criminal gang, in The Princess Bride. The same year, he supplied the heroic voice for the Masked Avenger in Woody Allen's Radio Days. Taking the next step to straight voice acting, he lent his distinctive speech to the animated features The Goofy Movie, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and both installments of Toy Story. He also continued to work with Woody Allen throughout the next decade in the films Shadows and Fog and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Taking his quirky persona to the small screen, Shawn had several guest-star appearances on TV shows like Taxi, Murphy Brown, and The Cosby Show, but he didn't have his own reoccurring character until he reprised his feature-film role of Mr. Hall for the ABC sitcom version of Clueless. He quickly followed that with the role of Zek on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Throughout his acting career, Shawn has managed to continue writing successful plays, and eventually adapted one of them, The Designated Mourner, for a feature film in 1997. After a few brief appearances in some forgettable films in the late '90s, he gained some larger roles in TV movies and miniseries. In 2002, he played the publishing boss Mr. Gelb for the "Greta" story in Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity: Three Portraits. He then joined a large cast of other comedians for Danny DeVito's crime comedy Duplex in 2003. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
In Michael Moore's political satire, the U.S. president (Alan Alda) decides to wage a cold war against Canada in an attempt to reverse his slipping popularity, and, as a result, he drives a small group of incensed Canadians to take matters into their own hands. Alda is the first president in years not to lead his country into war, which naturally means that his approval rating is dangerously low. The sure-fire way to boost his popularity is to start a war and demonstrate American superiority. Unfortunately, as his advisors point out, the U.S. has run out of enemies. That is, until Alda's National Security Advisor Stuart Smiley (Kevin Pollak) happens to catch a segment on the news about a brawl at a Canadian hockey game that began when local American sheriff Bud Boomer (John Candy) made a remark about Canadian beer. This incident gives Smiley the notion to make the public believe that Canada is their new enemy. Determined to demonstrate the mighty power of America to the Canadians, Boomer gets a group of equally angry fellow Americans together to cross the border and perform the most serious of all Canadian crimes -- littering. However, the invasion is foiled and Boomer's numerous blunders threaten to turn a fabricated war into a real one. Written, directed, and produced by Michael Moore, Canadian Bacon takes lighthearted jabs at the differences between the U.S. and Canada, while also satirizing America's obsession with its military strength. The film features John Candy in his last complete screen performance. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alan Alda, John Candy, (more)
In the late 1980s, noted theatrical director Andre Gregory assembled a group of friends and actors and began rehearsing a new translation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by David Mamet, not with any specific performance in mind but as a way of exploring the beauty and precise construction of Chekhov's play. Louis Malle, a friend of Gregory's, became interested in the project and spent two weeks filming Gregory's actors as they performed Uncle Vanya without an audience in a run-down theater near New York's Times Square. In these performances, the line between theater and real life is blurred as conversations between actors -- juggling take-out cups of coffee and wearing street clothes -- slowly grow into a superb performance of Chekhov's classic, with Wallace Shawn as Vanya, Julianne Moore as Yelena, Brooke Smith as Sonya, and Larry Pine as Dr. Astrov. With a certain sad irony, this marvelously realized adaptation of a play about people wondering what they've done with their lives proved to be Louis Malle's final film; he died of cancer in 1995. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, (more)
- 1994
On the occasion of "FYI"'s 17th anniversary, the network hires the show's original anchorman Stuart Best (Wallace Shawn) for a guest appearance. This does not sit well with Jim (Charles Kimbrough), Frank (Joe Regalbuto) and Murphy (Candice Bergen), who so despised Best during his first go-round that they arranged to have him fired. Not surprisingly, the trio intends to do the same thing when Best returns--at least until Murphy discovers that she may owe her entire career to her much-hated former colleague. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1994
- R
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Jennifer Jason Leigh offers an acclaimed performance as humorist Dorothy Parker, who together with such 1920s luminaries as Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, was a charter member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table. The story is related in flashback form, as Mrs. Parker, in Hollywood to cowrite the 1937 feature A Star is Born with her second husband Alan Campbell (Peter Gallagher), recalls her glory days as an Algonquinite. A great deal of attention is afforded Parker's vituperative bon mots, her alcoholism, her self-destructiveness, her suicide attempts, and her affairs with such literary contemporaries as Charles MacArthur (an uncharacteristically unsympathetic Matthew Broderick) and Robert E. Sherwood (Nick Cassavetes). The one person Parker truly seems to care about is humorist Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott), who prefers to keep their friendship platonic. Director Alan Rudolph attempts to convey the ambience of the 1920s by having dozens of that decade's luminaries appear in fleeting cameos, from Will Rogers (Keith Carradine) to Harpo Marx. Also featured in Mrs. Parker are Tom McGowan as the waspish Alexander Woollcott and Andrew McCarthy as Dorothy's near-invisible first husband, Eddie Parker. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jennifer Jason Leigh, Matthew Broderick, (more)
Robert Townsend's superhero action comedy underwent much tinkering during post-production, employing four editors to whip the film into shape. Townsend wrote, directed, and produced this urban fable and also stars as Jefferson Reed, a meek substitute teacher in an inner-city neighborhood dominated by a gang of leather-jacketed, peroxided blonde goons who call themselves the Golden Lords. The residents of the neighborhood feel they can do nothing about the gang. But then a meteor hits Jefferson, who finds that he can fly, has super-strength, and can retain all the information in a book in thirty seconds. As a result, Jefferson, who normally is afraid of heights and runs from danger, becomes a reluctant superhero. The word about the "Meteor Man" gets back to the Golden Lords, who intend to rid the neighborhood of this milquetoast crime-fighter. The Meteor Man contains a cornucopia of cameos appearances, including Bill Cosby, Luther Vandross, Sinbad, Big Daddy Kane and Nancy Wilson. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert Townsend, Marla Gibbs, (more)
- 1993
For the second week in a row, the duplicitous Quark is the center of attention. This time out, the Grand Nagus Zek (Wallace Shawn) appoints Quark the leader of the Ferengi financial empire. His exultation over this lofty position is dampened somewhat when Quark finds that he has been targetted for assassination. Scripted by Ira Steven Behr from an original story by David Livingston (who also directed), "The Nagus" was originally telecast March 21, 1993. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1993
Despite his spotty previous record, Quark is recruited by Grand Nagus Zek (Wallace Shawn) for the next session of Gamma Quadrant Negotiations. This occurs just after Quark has himself recruited a new partner. Little does he realize that his male cohort is actually a disguised female Ferengi outlaw named Pel (Helene Udy). He also doesn't suspect that Pel has fallen in love with him, a fact that could prove ruinous for them both. Scripted by Ira Steven Behr from a story by Hilary J. Bader, "Rules of Acquistion" originally aired November 6, 1993. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Based on the play by Ivan Menchell, this drama concerns three friends, Doris (Olympia Dukakis), Lucille (Diane Ladd), and Esther (Ellen Burstyn). All three live in the same Jewish community in Pittsburgh, are in their mid-to-late 50s, and have become widows within the past few months. Once a week, they gather to visit their husbands' graves and meet at a deli afterward to talk about their lives. Doris remains fiercely devoted to her late husband and takes her responsibilities as a widow seriously. Lucille is eager to get her feet back in the waters of dating, partly as revenge against her late husband, who often cheated on her, and partly because she's very lonely by herself. Esther is also not used to being alone after 39 years of marriage, but she doesn't feel ready to start dating again, at least not until she meets Ben (Danny Aiello), a former cop turned cab driver who gradually but firmly eases his way into her life. Doris is appalled when she discovers that Esther is dating again and loudly protests that she's being disrespectful to her late husband, while Lucille is more than a bit jealous that Esther snagged a good man before she could. Jerry Orbach and Lee Richardson appear in a brief prologue sequence. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ellen Burstyn, Olympia Dukakis, (more)
- 1992
- PG
This youth-oriented actioner centers on a 17-year-old boy whose exceptional video-game-playing ability leads him to become a rookie spy with a mysterious organization that assigns him to get a mysterious package to Los Angeles ASAP. En route, the youth finds himself entangled in a deadly terrorist plot involving his dangerous package. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Corey Haim, Brigitte Nielsen, (more)
Just after the evil Emperor Spengo (Jon Lovitz) imprisons King Raff (Eric Idle), he spots a California housewife (Teri Garr) through his telescope. He decides to beam her up along with her husband (Jeffrey Jones), but isn't prepared to deal with the results when both become interplanetary freedom fighters. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Teri Garr, Jeffrey Jones, (more)
Julia Cole (Diane Salinger) is more than a little upset about turning 40. She's depressed about growing older, distressed at the lack of attention from her workaholic husband Charles (John Calvin), and bored with being a stay-at-home wife and mother. On her birthday, she finds a bottle of enchanted soap bubbles. Blowing them transports her to moments of happiness from earlier times in her life. Soon, she not only regains her youthful vigor, she cannot even remember how old she is. She changes her appearance, her personality is transformed from reclusive to outgoing, and her values change from strict to permissive. Eventually, she realizes that happiness is not age-dependent. George Clooney and Wallace Shawn are the biggest names in this low-budget, independently produced romantic comedy, also known as The Magic Bubble, directed by Deborah Taper Ringel and Alfredo Ringel. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Diane Salinger, John Calvin, (more)
- 1992
- PG
In this drama, the ingenious and lucrative scam of an excellent con artist comes crashing down when the IRS catches on. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- C. Thomas Howell, Wallace Shawn, (more)
Woody Allen's black-and-white curiosity piece is a mixture of influences -- from German silent film expressionism to Franz Kafka's nightmare worlds to the contemporary fables of Wim Wenders. Woody Allen plays the nebbish clerk Kleinman (in a throwback to his characters from Sleeper and Love and Death), who is awakened in the middle of the night by a vigilante group who want him to help capture a serial killer on the loose. Kleinman reluctantly agrees, but when he gets to the street, the vigilantes are gone and Kleinmen spends most of the film wandering the shadowy back alleys in search of the citizen's brigade. Meanwhile, a circus is in town. When sword-swallower Irmy (Mia Farrow) catches her creepy clown husband (John Malkovich) getting familiar with trapeze artist Marie (Madonna), she packs her bags and heads for town, where she meets up with Kleinman. This meeting sets up a number of plot lines that has Irmy befriending a trio of prostitutes (Jodie Foster, Lily Tomlin and Kathy Bates) at the local brothel and accepting $700 from a university student (John Cusack) who wants to sleep with her. She finally meets up with her husband, and they then find an abandoned baby which they decide to raise as their own. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, (more)
- 1991
Much against their will, Cliff (Bill Cosby) and his neighbor Jeffrey (Wallace Shawn) agree to escort Olivia (Raven-Symone) and her classmates on a museum field trip. Meanwhile, a nervous Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) is put in charge of the community center's fundraiser. While Cliff survives his ordeal, Theo may not be so lucky: it turns out that the expensive T-shirts he has ordered as prizes have no neckholes. But lest you think that Theo is doomed, please remember that his mom Clair (Phylicia Rashad) is an attorney! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1990
There is a terrible price to pay when Cliff (Bill Cosby) devours a sausage sandwich as a midnight snack. Sure enough, Cliff suffers a nightmare in which he is back in the Navy with son Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) as his CO, wife Clair (Phylicia Rashad) is sucked out of the house by a tornado, and Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe) disgraces the family by becoming a jazz-funk performer. Add to this some monsters, a staff of muppet doctors, a talking sandwich and the birth of "Koozbanian" and you can understand why Cliff ultimately swears off sausages--at least until next time. Several members of The Cosby Show's writing and production staff show up in cameos. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1990
Involved in a legal action to prevent a community center from losing its playground, Clair finds out that the opposing attorney is her longtime friend Bernadette Foley (Mercedes Ruehl). At the same time, the Huxtables' novelist neighbor Jeffrey Engels (Wallace Shawn) is undergoing a middle-aged crisis, desperately endeavoring to change his lifestyle and appearance so that no one will consider him "dull." Inevitably, Bernadette and Jeffrey meet--but will romance result? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
In this comedy, escaped prisoners Ned (Robert DeNiro) and Jim (Sean Penn) take refuge in a monastery where they pose as priests to avoid capture. Intending to flee across the Canadian border, the two convicts run into all kinds of unexpected trouble in their new-found priesthood. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, (more)
- 1989
In a wild and surprisingly profound foray into fantasy, Cliff (Bill Cosby) dreams that a Peruvian volcano eruption has polluted the world's water supply, resulting in a epidemic of pregnant men. As a result, Cliff, Elvin (Geoffrey Owens), Martin (Joseph C. Phillips) and Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) waddle around with bloated bellies and suffer spectacular mood-swings--while the women in their lives prove to be insensitive in the extreme. But all this is mere prologue to the episode's riotous climax, in which the malefolk "give birth" to such bizarre progeny as sailboats, sportscars and steak sandwiches! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1989
- R
In this satirical skewering of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, a divorced Beverly Hills gal ends up on the doorstep of her next-door neighbor, an out-of-work TV sitcom actress who happens to have a socially eclectic group of friends and a deceased husband who can't accept the fact that he is dead. The topic of conversation is sex, and before long, a wager between servants sets the sexual escapades into action. ~ All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jacqueline Bisset, Ray Sharkey, (more)
Director Stan Dragoti, whose forte is plumbing the depths of the male psyche, plumbs those depths once again in She's Out of Control. Tony Danza stars as Doug Simpson, a broadcasting executive who has trouble adjusting to the fact that his fifteen-year-old daughter Katie (Ami Dolenz) is blossoming into a sexual being. This realization kicks in after his fiancee Janet (Catherine Hicks) takes Katie for a makeover; suddenly she appears before Doug looking like a sultry super model. Now Doug is unable to look at his daughter as anything other than as a sexy chick, and he spends his time fending off packs of horny suitors while dictating morality to Katie. It finally gets to the point where Doug consults with television psychiatrist Dr. Fishbinder (Wallace Shawn), who recommends that Doug read a book he has written for single fathers, advising him, "If you're a slow reader, you better put your daughter on the pill." ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tony Danza, Catherine Hicks, (more)
In the expatriate-littered Paris of the 1920s, painter Nick Hart (Keith Carradine) mingles with Ernest Hemingway (Kevin O'Connor) and other leading lights of the Lost Generation while palling around with gossip columnist Oiseau (Wallace Shawn), whose reportage has helped establish the international reputation of the writers and artists who fled America for France after WWI. Older and less successful than many of his fellow painters, Hart relies on gallery owner Libby Valentin (Genevieve Bujold) to sell what she can of his work while he supports himself drawing cartoons for Oiseau's weekly column. In a café one day, Hart spies Rachel Stone (Linda Fiorentino) on the arm of her husband, Bertram (John Lone), a condom magnate and art patron who's trying to buy his way into society. It seems Hart and Rachel share a romantic past of which Stone is completely unaware. At the salon of writers Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven) and Alice B. Tolkas (Ali Giron), Hart suffers a nasty run-in with the Stones and meets Nathalie de Ville (Geraldine Chaplin), a rich socialite who wants to steal three paintings from her estranged husband. Nathalie plies Hart with sexual favors and the promise of cash in exchange for his help in forging copies of the paintings. Although he's loath to follow in the footsteps of his father, a gifted forger, Hart acquiesces, and soon his rivalry with Stone and his involvement with the forgeries leads to death, destruction, and scandal in the art world. Bujold, Shawn, Chaplin, and Carradine are all regular collaborators of iconoclastic director Alan Rudolph, who filmed The Moderns in Montréal and would go on to lens the similarly intellectual Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino, (more)
This unadorned biography of playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) charts his bawdy, dangerous relationships. Alfred Molina plays Orton's brutish lover, Kenneth Halliwell, a pathetic figure who becomes horrific and then tragic before the film is over. The hilarity of scenes from such Orton plays as Loot and What the Butler Saw is evenly balanced by the bleakness of the playwright's tormented (and tormenting) off-stage existence, which ended suddenly at age 34 with half a dozen blows to the head from a hammer. Prick Up Your Ears is based on the book by theater critic John Lahr, who is played in the film by Wallace Shawn. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, (more)
Woody Allen's gentle and nostalgic tribute to the glory days of radio and coming-of-age during World War II plays like Fellini's Amarcord filtered through Neil Simon. The nominal star is Seth Green as Joe, a teenage Jewish boy, growing up with a house full of relatives in Brooklyn. Allen cuts between Joe's working class neighborhood of Rockaway Beach, Queens, and the glittery and glamorous world of radio in Manhattan. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mia Farrow, Seth Green, (more)
