John Powers

Kill Bill… Or Else!

John Powers
Photo by Andrew Cooper Ten years ago, I was scheduled to interview Quentin Tarantino in Cannes, a couple of days before the premiere of Pulp Fiction. I arrived at his hotel at noon and called him, only to be greeted with a bleary hello. He invited me to his room,......

Anger Management

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett On the second day of Air America, the new talk-radio network geared toward liberals (not the CIA), I tuned in to Unfiltered, a show hosted by Lizz Winstead, Rachel Maddow and Chuck D, the once-dazzling mastermind of Public Enemy. The first guest was Christopher Hitchens, the......

Land of Milk and Honey

John Powers
JEAN-LUC GODARD FAMOUSLY DECLARED that all it takes to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Both turn up in Millennium Mambo, a ravishing bauble about la dolce vita in Taiwan, but frankly, the gun’s an afterthought. This is a movie about the girl. Set in and around......

Lands of Milk and Honey

John Powers
JEAN-LUC GODARD FAMOUSLY DECLARED that all it takes to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Both turn up in Millennium Mambo, a ravishing bauble about la dolce vita in Taiwan, but frankly, the gun’s an afterthought. This is a movie about the girl. Set in and around......

About a Boy

John Powers
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes its title from a line by Alexander Pope, the 18th-century neoclassicist poet whose witty, polished heroic couplets were his way of imposing order on a world that had arbitrarily made him a 4-foot-6-inch hunchback. I suspect that film scripts serve a similar healing......

Martha and Barry’s Big Britches

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett Churchill famously remarked that the Germans are always either at your throat or at your feet. Americans adopt the same schizoid posture toward celebrity — only we tend to do both at the same time. In the polarizing Bush Era, this relationship with fame has been......
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Brave Newsom World

John Powers
“Change is a fact of God,” says a character in a Grace Paley short story, “from which no one is immune.” Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Texas law against sodomy last June, the changes have come so fast that everyone — right and left, gay and straight......

The Ballad of Mel and Jesus

John Powers
I don’t know about you, but I was sick of Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie about six months ago. By that point, New York Times columnist Frank Rich had already smacked The Passion of the Christ — sight unseen — for potential anti-Semitism, and L.A. Times media critic Tim Rutten (who......

Watch Them All Fall Down

John Powers
Photos by Anne Fishbein A little over 16 years ago, I flew to Budapest for the Hungarian Film Week and received my first taste of Eastern European communism. Although Hungary had long been reckoned one of the Soviet bloc’s more pleasant countries and Budapest one of its few jewels, the......

Killer of Sheep: The Best Film about Los Angeles

John Powers
You may claim that the best one is actually Sunset Boulevard just for the title and the swimming pool alone.  You may argue that it’s Chinatown for its incestuous history lesson, Point Blank for redefining how Hollywood shoots local architecture or Blade Runner for giving us rainy noodle shops and......