Month: September 1998

Think of it as the Eddie Bauer Survival Adventure: all inclusive, airfare and air crash included, all the bear meat and snow you can eat. Or consider The Edge a big episode of MacGyver as envisioned by screenwriter David Mamet.

Clay Pigeons isn’t a great film — it’s black and it’s a comedy, but never enough of either — but it is supremely interesting to watch. If nothing else, it demonstrates that the incredible talent displayed by Vaughn and Phoenix in Return to Paradise — as well the palpable chemistry between them — was not a fluke. These are two guys to watch.

A schoolbus full of children plunges into icy waters and sinks. That one event is central to two very different movies. Simon Birch builds to the bus crash, making it the culmination of a mystical plan of God. The Sweet Hereafter examines the aftermath of tragedy, how one town learns to cope with grief and the desire to assign blame.