Michael Spiller Movies

The unlikely relationship between a pregnant high school student and a brooding electronics repairman lies at the center of this droll comedy from writer-director Hal Hartley. Intelligent but unconventional, Maria (Adrienne Shelly) has more to worry about than her pregnancy, as her expectant state drives away her boyfriend and triggers a fatal heart attack in her father. Meanwhile, Matthew (Martin Donovan) has his own problems: an abusive father, a heightened sense of morality that prevents him from taking semi-lucrative television repair jobs, and a suicidal streak that causes him to carry around a potentially deadly grenade. The meeting of these troubled minds at first promises to be beneficial for both, but sours as they are forced to interact with each other's dysfunctional families. As in all of Hartley's pictures, the narrative is filtered through an amusingly detached sensibility that some may consider an acquired taste. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

Made for PBS' American Playhouse, Surviving Desire is a very short romantic comedy starring Martin Donovan and Mary Ward. He's an uninspired college literature professor. She's a kooky student, and the only member of Donovan's class who doesn't doze off during his lectures. The comedy relies upon the inevitable pairing of two vague, aimless, but very recognizable campus types. The videocassette version of Surving Desire is filled out with two other short subjects directed by Hal Hartley. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Theory of Achievement, a short film by director Hal Hartley, is a droll look at a group of young Brooklynites grappling with the great issues: aesthetics, romance, and real estate. Bob, a broke, aspiring writer, takes advantage of his girlfriend's absence to enter the real estate business. He sublets her apartment to a group of struggling artists, convincing them that Williamsburg, Brooklyn is destined to be "the new art capital of the world." Amongst the tenants are Hartley regulars William Sage and Elina Lowensohn, portraying a couple arguing over the husband's refusal to quit his uninspiring job and follow his dream of becoming a songwriter. Bob and the tenants bond in their mutual poverty and ennui, discussing art, drinking beer, and playing the accordion. All is well, until Bob's girlfriend returns to town early and discovers his scheme. The short is one of three made by Hartley in 1991, along with Ambition and Surviving Desire. All are available on a single videocassette. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

A pair of brothers dodge the law while trying to locate their long-lost father in this third feature from independent New York filmmaker Hal Hartley. Robert John Burke stars as Bill McCabe, a failed computer thief who's just been doublecrossed by his girlfriend and partner. Vowing revenge on the next beautiful blonde he encounters, Bill meets up with his younger brother Dennis (William Sage), a philosophy student concerned about their father William (John A. MacKay). It seems the McCabe paterfamilias was a former major league shortstop who became an anarchist bomber in the 1960s, nearly blowing up the Pentagon. On the run for twenty-three years, William was recently caught by the FBI but escaped again. Based on information from their mother, the McCabes travel to Long Island, where William may be hiding. Along the way, the brothers meet the epileptic Elina (Elina Lowensohn) and her friend Kate (Karen Sillas), a beautiful blonde with whom Bill is instantly smitten. While Dennis figures out that Elina is somehow connected to William, Bill contends with Kate's ex-con husband Jack (Joe Stevens) and Jack's best friend Martin (Martin Donovan), both of whom are also in love with her. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Hal Hartley's fourth feature is a significant break from the quirky romantic comedy territory of his previous work -- though all of the deadpan idiosyncracies which make him such a singular filmmaker remain intact, here he tries his hand at the thriller genre, a move yielding typically unconventional and innovative results. Amateur stars Hartley mainstay Martin Donovan as Thomas, an amnesiac who, in the first scenes, wakes up in an alley, badly injured; he stumbles to a nearby coffeeshop where he meets Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a former nun and would-be nymphomaniac who now makes her living writing pornographic fiction. She takes him back to her apartment, where in time his past slowly begins to emerge -- a sharp contrast to the sweet, even naive soul that Huppert has befriended, it appears that the old Thomas was in fact a vicious pornographer whose attempted murder was at the hands of his wife, adult film star wife Sofia (Elina Lowensohn). Thomas is also the target of a nefarious European arms merchant whose hired guns are hot on his trail. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Martin Mirkhein (Griffin Dunne) is a failed entrepreneur trying to figure out how to pay a huge tax bill to the State of Florida when he gets a brainstorm -- Daniel Strong, the inspirational men's movement novel by New Age philosopher Luther Waxling (Dennis Hopper), would make a great film. Never mind that Mirkhein doesn't know a thing about making movies -- he decides that this film is his destiny, and he heads out with his girlfriend/personal assistant/aspiring screenwriter Marie (Illeana Douglas) to visit Waxling's representatives, who don't react with much enthusiasm when Mirkhein suggests that he'd like them to give him the film rights as well as the money to produce the movie. In search of financing, Mirkhein finds himself working with Kim Ulander (Christopher Walken), a businessman who doesn't mind if people think he's a gangster (and boy, is he something at karaoke night!), and Ron (John Turturro), a second-rate hood with a severely impaired fashion sense. The first directorial effort from artist David Salle, Search and Destroy was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who also plays a small role as a tax agent. ~ Mark Deming, 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

A wealthy young man wants to wed a painfully ordinary girl, and a few hours with his family will convince anyone why he's doing so in this black comedy. Marty Pascal (Josh Hamilton) is engaged to marry Lesly (Tori Spelling), a dizzy blonde he met when she was working at a doughnut shop, and he bravely decides that it's time she met his family, so he brings her along for Thanksgiving dinner at his mother's house in West Virginia. Bravery is necessary because the Pascals are not an especially healthy or wholesome family. Mother (Genevieve Bujold) explains her philosophy about parenting like so: "You raise cattle; children just happen." In this environment, where refusing your child anything is all but unknown, her youngest son Anthony (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) has grown up to be an overanxious virgin eager to seduce Lesly while Marty's not paying attention. And Marty's twin sister Jackie (Parker Posey), malignily obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, often re-enacts the murder of JFK using spaghetti sauce for blood (when she can't get ahold of real bullets) and enjoys incestuously seducing Marty (which hardly bothers Mother, who notes that "Jackie's hand was holding Marty's penis when they came out the womb"). The House of Yes was based on the play by Wendy MacLeod; first time director Mark S. Waters (brother of screenwriter Daniel Waters) also adapted the screenplay. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In this Fox drama series, Los Angeles angst permeates a group of lifelong friends -- Campbell (Eion Bailey), Henry (Scott Bairstow), and Nell (Jennifer Garner). Website porn author Henry moves in with Nell, but after they break up, he takes an interest in married porn-queen Charlotte (Gigi Rice). Campbell, learning an ex-girlfriend might marry his older brother Ben (Michael Weatherly), deals with his feelings by shooting some pool. In the second episode, a final birthday party is planned for someone who's HIV positive, while Campbell plans to make a children's video about farm animals. Premiered March 11, 1998 on Fox. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

So how far would you go to win a beauty pageant? That's the burning question of Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which the citizens of Mount Rose, Minnesota gear up for the year's biggest event, the Sarah Rose Miss Teen Princess America Pageant, in which Becky Leeman (Denise Richards) and Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst) are the contestants to beat. Becky's mother Gladys (Kirstie Alley), a former beauty queen herself, has instilled in her daughter a drive to succeed at any cost. And Gladys will do anything to help Becky's chances of success. Amber's mother Annette (Ellen Barkin) is devoted to her daughter but drinks, smokes, and swears like a sailor. And while Amber is ambitious and a skilled beautician (a talent that she uses in her part-time job at the local mortuary), her view of the pageant is pragmatic: while boys can get sports scholarships, this pageant may be her only ticket out of town. However, Amber and the other contestants may have underestimated just how badly Becky wants to win -- or just how good she is with a gun. Drop Dead Gorgeous was directed by Michael Patrick Jann, a founding member of the sketch comedy group The State (who had their own series on MTV), and written by Lorna Williams, a veteran of the beauty pageant circuit who claims that nearly everything in the film is based on an actual incident. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Beauty meets the Beast, and neither is sure just what to make of the other, in a modern-dress comic variation on the ancient folk tale, written and directed by the eternally offbeat Hal Hartley. Beatrice (Sarah Polley) works with the office staff of a sleazy tabloid TV news show, run by a harridan producer (Helen Mirren) eager for something other than the usual spate of violent crimes and natural disasters that are her show's bread and butter. The producer sends her camera crew to Iceland in search of something new and unusual, and they certainly find it when they run across a village that has its own monster (Robert John Burke), a large part-mammal and part-lizard with a short temper and habit of killing people who get on his nerves. The show's camera crew (including Beatrice's boyfriend) doesn't survive their first encounter with the monster, and Beatrice is sent to find out what happened to them. En route to Iceland, Beatrice's plane crashes into the waters off the coast, and while she survives the accident, a group of unsympathetic locals decide (after a few drinks too many) to take her to the monster's lair, where a grim fate doubtless awaits her. Except that the monster is a bit depressed and Beatrice isn't in the mood to take any guff from anyone; after the monster wonders aloud why folks aren't as frightened of him as they once were, he asks Beatrice to help him find Dr. Artaud (Baltasar Kormakur), a mad scientist who might be able to cure him of the curse of eternal life. No Such Thing received its world premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened as part of the Un Certain Regard series. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The Wonder Years met Malcolm in the Middle in this Fox network sitcom set in the early '60s. Grant Rosenmeyer starred as 11-year-old Oliver Beene, a budding intellectual and inveterate cut-up mired in a world of eccentric relatives, spiteful teachers, and mercurial females. Oliver's dad, Jerry (Grant Shaud), was a dentist who liked to spend his off-hours either drilling teeth for fun or talking about it; his mom, Charlotte (Wendy Makkena), was a neat-freak who wished she was Jackie Kennedy; and his brother, Ted (Andrew Lawrence), was a self-involved sports nut, his ear perennially glued to his transistor radio. Things weren't much better at school, where Oliver was bedeviled by venom-spouting teacher Mrs. Heller (Annie Korzen), ardently pursued by moonstruck classmate Joyce (Daveigh Chase), and studiously ignored by red-haired beauty Bonnie (Amy Castle). On the other hand, Oliver enjoyed the company of his best friends, chubby Neal (Ben Bookbinder) and closeted-homosexual Michael (Taylor Emerson). Like The Wonder Years, this series was narrated from the vantage point of the future by the leading character. Oliver Beene debuted March 9, 2003. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide