Film Reviews

 Film reviews are updated on Fridays. This section compiled by Marjorie Baumgarten (M.B.); with reviews by Hollis Chacona (H.C.), Steve Davis (S.D.), Robert Faires (R.F.), Alison Macor (A.M.), Marc Savlov (M.S.), Russell Smith (R.S.).

Ratings:
5 stars As perfect as a movie can be
4 stars Slightly flawed, but excellent nonetheless
3 stars Has its good points, and its bad points
2 stars Mediocre, but with one or two bright spots
1 stars Poor, without any saving graces
0 stars La Bomba


Recommended


MABOROSI

D: Hirokazu Kore-eda; with Makiko Esumi, Takashi Naitoh, Tadanobu Asano, Gohki Kashiyama, Maomi Watanabe, Matsuka Sakura. (Not Rated, 110 min.)
The concept of loss, and the sorrow that shadows it, is not what you'd call an uncommon theme in films, but rarely is it handled with such uncommon eloquence as it is in Maborosi. Based on the short story Maborosi no Hikari (Illusory Light) by noted Japanese author Teru Miyamoto, Kore-eda's adaptation follows the trials and tribulations of Yumiko, a young married woman (Esumi) whose life seems almost imperceptibly haunted by the spirit of death. As the film opens, Yumiko is awakened from a dream in which she finds her grandmother leaving the village to go die in her native village. Pleading with her to stay, the young dream-Yumiko cannot fathom the concept of such a loss and weeps inconsolably. The dream, as it turns out, is a recurring one, and upon waking, Yumiko mentions this in passing to her husband, Ikuo (Asano), a buoyant, self-deprecating fellow who seems to be the ideal husband. Along with their infant son Yuichi (Kashiyama), Yumiko seems to lead an ideal life. Her husband works in a nearby factory, and when his bicycle is stolen, he cheerfully steals another from the wealthy neighborhood up the road. At night, the two fall asleep to the sound of the nearby trains hauling packaged goods to the major cities. All is bliss, until the night when two police officers come to the door to announce that Ikuo is dead - struck by a train in what appears to be an act of suicide. Yumiko is shattered, and spends the next several years alone until, with the help of a local matchmaker, she falls for Tamio (Naitoh), a resident of a nearby fishing village. She moves in with Tamio and his daughter Tomoko, and once again her life enters into a period of happy stasis, until she is called back to her former village to attend her brother's wedding. Once there, the reality of her former husband's death comes rushing back, filling her head with thoughts of horror and blinding her to the newfound happiness in her life. It's very difficult to relay the full measure of Kore-eda's touchingly morbid film through a synopsis. Like so many other classic Japanese films, the images the director chooses to illustrate his points are far more illuminating than the story itself. Indeed, the amount of dialogue in Maborosi is practically negligible, and the film instead relies on the haunting sounds of lonely train whistles, eerie bicycle bells, and the lapping of the ocean waves to convey the deep, soulless aura of loss that permeates the film from beginning to end. In this respect, Maborosi could almost be taken as a sort of Japanese gothic. Cinematographer Masao Nakabori's stunning use of light - and the absence thereof - also plays into the story: The film uses natural lighting exclusively, eschewing staged settings as often as possible and keeping some nighttime scenes entirely in the dark, an eerie mirror to Yumiko's wounded heart. (2/7/97)

3.5 stars (M.S.)

Texas Union


New Review

THE BEAUTICIAN AND THE BEAST

D: Ken Kwapis; with Fran Drescher, Timothy Dalton, Lids Jakub, Ian McNiece, Patrick Malahide. (PG, 107 min.)
A key premise of this comedic love-child of The King and I and Evita is that "big career break" is a relative term defined by where you're starting from. For lowly beauty-school instructor Judy Miller (Drescher), it's a stranger's invitation to move to a tiny Eastern European police state and tutor the children of fearsome dictator Boris "The Beast" Pochenko (Dalton). If this move up means prolonging your employers' misconceptions about what you teach (they think it deals with hard sciences not hair extensions), then so be it. And who knows what might happen when a cute, eligible Jersey girl finds herself in the thrillingly butch milieu of jackbooted secret police, looming Stalin-era statuary, and gloomy castles draped with crypto-Nazi, red-and-black banners. Can romance be far behind? This latest vehicle for the star of TV's The Nanny certainly can't be accused of picking an obvious setting for the comedic skills of the brassy-mouthed, American-as-mustard-pretzels Drescher. Even less expected is the decision by screenwriter Todd Graff (Used People, Fly by Night) to develop this screwy concept into the aforementioned homage to The King and I, in classic Kerr-Brynner fashion, Judy and Boris butt heads early as she introduces the Pochenko brood to Romeo and Juliet via tapes of West Side Story, but before long she's melting his icy heart with her earthy humor, common sense advice, and tight Capri pants. When the pair's animosity starts giving way to amore, you almost expect them to break into a duet of "Getting to Know You." This is just a strange, disorienting film all the way around. The story often feigns serious interest in its weightier political elements (odd enough for a comedy), then casually flips them aside like peanut shells. For example, when Judy tries to wheedle the strongman into freeing a student activist his daughter is dating, the main result is not a triumph of justice but a bonding experience between herself and the daughter. As with so many recent Hollywood comedies, The Beautician and the Beast crackles with fitful bursts of real wit and good comic acting (Dalton is especially enjoyable) that only heighten the frustration when the plot takes bizarre, nonsensical turns and crucial payoff scenes are market-pandering clichˇs. In a way, mediocrities like this are more galling than straightforwardly brain-dead movies of the Beverly Hills Ninja ilk. Viewers need to start demanding better. Otherwise, we'll continue to see comedies that favor one-liners and high concept over outmoded verities like character and plausible story development. Give this Beast a wide berth. (2/7/97)

2.0 stars (R.S.)

Arbor, Barton Creek, Lakeline, Lincoln, Riverside, Roundrock

DANTE'S PEAK

D: Roger Donaldson; with Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton. (PG-13, 108 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. Thar she blows. Dante's Peak has won the honor of being the first of 1997's dueling volcano movies to erupt. Certainly, the movie promises images of cataclysmic destruction, but it also purports to show the ethical dilemmas between the brave volcanologists who risk their lives while making predictions and the sleepy townsfolk who resist the outsiders' alarmist warnings. Sounds like a job for Agent 007 Pierce Brosnan and pumped-up Terminator gal Linda Hamilton. Co-producer Gale Anne Hurd ( The Terminator, T2, The Abyss) also knows a thing or two about epic adventures ()

(M.B.)

Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock

LOSING CHASE

D: Kevin Bacon; with Helen Mirren, Kyra Sedgwick, Beau Bridges, Michael Yarmush, Lucas Denton. (R, 92 min.)
For a "small" film, Losing Chase has received a large amount of attention lately. Having premiered on cable television late last year, actor Kevin Bacon's directorial debut received an auspicious number of Golden Globe award nominations, one of which the film won for Helen Mirren's portrayal of Chase Philips. Mirren is wonderful as the intriguing Chase, a woman whose strong character and emotional frailty are at odds with one another, alternately enraging and puzzling her husband and two young sons. After a particularly public and frightening "scene" atop a lighthouse on Martha's Vineyard where the Philips have a summer home, Chase's husband Richard (Bridges) enlists the services of Elizabeth Cole (Sedgwick, Bacon's real-life partner), a young woman hired as a mother's helper for little Richard (Yarmush) and his younger brother Jason (Denton). At first hostile to the attractive and overly solicitous Elizabeth, Chase puts her through a series of "tests" that serve to humiliate Elizabeth and further distance Chase from her family. These incidents also drive Elizabeth closer toward her own demons, which ultimately brings the two women to a deeper understanding of one another and the complexity of their relationship. Working from a solid script by Anne Meredith (the screenwriter who also wrote the screen adaptation of Bastard Out of Carolina for Angelica Huston's directorial debut), Kevin Bacon proves as adept at directing as he is at acting. Without any distracting flourishes, Bacon allows the story to take center stage, privileging the characters and letting Mirren and Sedgwick guide the film with their fine performances. While the role of Elizabeth does not offer Sedgwick the adult role that she seems capable of playing, the character does allow her to express the subtleties of the human heart, a feat that she always seems to excel at. As Chase's well-meaning but mismatched husband, Beau Bridges also proves heartbreakingly convincing. Once in a while, the story skips lightly over certain moments while holding on to others a little too long, but, generally, it is a well-paced character study of a woman - and her family - struggling to stay together in spite of herself. Given all of these accolades, Losing Chase may be just the film to give Bacon the attention his work deserves but rarely receives, making him known for something other than the cult party game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." (2/7/97)

3.0 stars (A.M.)

Dobie

MEET WALLY SPARKS

D: Peter Baldwin; with Rodney Dangerfield, Debi Mazar, David Ogden Stiers, Cindy Williams, Burt Reynolds, Alan Rachins. (R, 105 min.)
What's up with Rodney Dangerfield? His latter-day film career seems intent on turning his famed comedy routine about getting "no respect" into some kind of precocious epitaph. His recent movie projects such as Ladybugs and Meet Wally Sparks have the rancid smell of self-destructive wish fulfillment. At issue is not the lowbrow humor of Wally Sparks. (Were the movie to be judged on a sheer quantity scale, Dangerfield's torrent of one-liners as lead character Wally Sparks would make the movie an Olympic contender.) What is at issue here is the quality of the moviemaking, that organizing structure into which are poured all those gags and ribald remarks. In Meet Wally Sparks, that structure is flimsy to non-existent. Although the movie seizes on a plot device - the sleazy pandering of TV talk shows - that's topical as hell, it doesn't really do much of anything with the premise, and for that matter, doesn't show signs of the scriptwriters (Dangerfield and Harry Basil) being terribly attentive to the format while doing their homework. Meet Wally Sparks is a free-for-all collection of Dangerfield one-liners (many of them amusing), propped up by a chaotic narrative farce and maudlin pauses for emotional exchanges. Following a long television career as a respected sitcom director, Peter Baldwin has not succeeded in making the transition to film. Most of Wally Sparks is tediously shot, with the antic mayhem unfolding in a constipated and transparently blocked-out manner. Debi Mazar's brashness provides a good foil for Dangerfield's oafish smart-aleck routine, and David Ogden Stiers brings an unmatched three-dimensionality to the portrayal of his character. Interestingly, Burt Reynolds here continues his past year's return to movies with the portrait of yet another oily figure (add his Wally Sparks TV network executive to the borderline sleazeballs he portrays in Striptease and Citizen Ruth). But nothing in this ugly movie prepares us for the sight of Cindy Williams, as the plump and drunk Spring Byington spawn, stripping down to her underwires in a Wally Sparks-inspired poker game in the governor's mansion. The movie is also punctuated with a riot-squad worth of cameo appearances (Tony Danza, Jay Leno, Gilbert Gottfried, Julia Sweeney, Roseanne, Bob Saget, Lesley Anne Down, Sir Mix-a Lot, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Morton Downey, Jr.), but most of them probably woke up hating themselves in the morning. If nothing I've said so far has induced you to give the cold shoulder to Meet Wally Sparks, heed this: Michael Bolton sings. (2/7/97)

0 stars (M.B.)

Great Hills, Lakeline, Movies 12, Northcross, Westgate

THE PEST

D: Paul Miller; with John Leguizamo, Jeffrey Jones, Edoardo Ballerini, Freddy Rodriguez, Aries Spears, Tammy Townsend. (PG-13, 85 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. John Leguizamo co-wrote and stars in this comic Latino take on The Most Dangerous Game, in which hunters track a human target for sport. Here, Leguizamo plays a con man in Miami's South Beach district who dons different personalities and costumes to save his skin (remember, last time we saw Leguizamo in the movies, he was camping it up in To Wong Foo...). Let's hope we don't have to call the exterminator on this pest. ()

(M.B.)

Arbor, Barton Creek, Highland, Lakeline, Northcross

ZEUS AND ROXANNE

D: George Miller; with Kathleen Quinlan, Steve Guttenberg, Arnold Vosloo, Dawn McMillan, Miko Hughes, Majandra Delfino, Jessica Howell. (PG, 97 min.)
If nothing else, the out-there premise of this tale of dolphin-canine bonding reveals interesting parallels between the creative processes of whimsical children and those of frazzled, espresso- and panic-addled Hollywood producers. Luckily for the "braintrust" behind Zeus and Roxanne, director George Miller (Andre, The Man From Snowy River) is an old hand at these family entertainment gigs and knows how to kludge even the most harebrained concepts into saleable product. He almost pulls it off again here, whipping up a bland but semi-palatable trash soup of leftovers from The Parent Trap, Flipper, and Benji. The pooch - played by a trio of animatronically cute Portuguese Podengos - is united in his improbable friendship with the dolphin by a grant-grubbing marine biologist/single mom (Quinlan) who's studying interspecies communication. Complicating her efforts are a devious slimeball rival (Vosloo) and her borderline wild pubescent daughters' plot to matchmake her with the widowed musician dude next door (Guttenberg). A likeable cast, among whom the almost oppressively pleasant Guttenberg gets the most screen time, complements the wan charms of a script by a team that includes Free Willy co-writer Tom Benedek. There's some honest, unforced warmth here, and improbably credible romantic chemistry between Guttenberg and Quinlan - the latter possibly stimulated by a sexy Florida Keys setting. One senses and appreciates that all involved are soldiering on like good pros, trying to wrest a few shreds of honor from their ignominious situation. Sadly, this modest nest egg of goodwill is frittered away in the final scene - an over-the-top schmaltz orgy in which all loose plot threads are tied and lifelong rapture is assured to both human and animal protagonists in a span of roughly 60 seconds. In all fairness, Zeus and Roxanne isn't quite the steaming load of bollocks it could have been, or even the silliest aquatic-themed film ever made (The Big Blue still owns that distinction). But it could only hope to achieve hit status in some entropy-sapped alternate dimension in which the Jane Austen catalog is plundered for teen comedy plots, Sheryl Crow is a musical superstar, a dissembling, Eddie Haskellish hayseed is the most powerful person on the planet, and... um, never mind. (2/7/97)

1.5 stars (R.S.)

Great Hills, Lakehills, Movies 12, Northcross


Still Playing

ALBINO ALLIGATOR

D: Kevin Spacey; with Matt Dillon, Faye Dunaway, Gary Sinise, William Fichtner, Viggo Mortensen, John Spencer, Skeet Ulrich, M. Emmett Walsh, Joe Mantegna. (R, 96 min.)
If nothing else, Spacey's directorial debut boasts the year's best cast thus far. Apart from that, however, Albino Alligator is a fierce little hybrid: part deadpan black comedy, part classic noir. Leader Dova (Dillon), his wounded older brother Milo (Sinise), and their unpredictable sidekick Law (Fichtner) are a trio of lowbrow robbers who find themselves trapped in a New Orleans basement bar one night after their heist goes spectacularly awry. They've also inadvertently killed several ATF agents in the process. As luck would have it, Dino's Last Chance Bar, a former Prohibition speakeasy with no back door, is their last line of defense against the massing police force out front. Also at Dino's are five late-night barflies-cum-hostages: the barmaid Janet (Dunaway); young Danny (Ulrich); grizzled Jack (Spencer); the silent, mysterious Guy (Mortensen); and owner Dino (Walsh). As nerves begin to fray on both sides of the crisis, tensions come to a boil, and the inevitable violence erupts, more often than not in the form of the woefully inappropriately named Law, a sociopathic Cajun maniac who plays the rampant Id to Sinise's melancholy Ego. Law is the most disturbing screen maniac since Mr. Blonde, and indeed Spacey's film owes much to the Tarantino school of botched-heist filmmaking, and perhaps even more to Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest. Spacey doesn't steal from the masters as much as he appropriates, but all the same, his stylistic flourishes are obvious and occasionally glaring. Which isn't to say Albino Alligator is a waste of time. It's not. Sinise and Fichtner, in particular, give stand-out, nail-biting performances, and Ulrich is Johnny Depp (intentionally or otherwise). But the dark, wry humor that flows so effortlessly from Dillon's Dova doesn't always register. "Was that a joke? Should I laugh?" Sometimes it requires some thought, bogging the film down until the next wash of blood, random violence, and Faye Dunaway. (1/31/97)

2.5 stars (M.S.)

Dobie

BEVERLY HILLS NINJA

D: Dennis Dugan; with Chris Farley, Nicollette Sheridan, Nathaniel Parker, Soon-Tek Oh, Chris Rock, Robin Shou. (PG-13, 90 min.)
Nearly as much fun as a case of scabies, Beverly Hills Ninja transports the viewer into a mystical realm where pratfall is king and mediocrity is its own reward. Granted, one doesn't attend Chris Farley vehicles to bask in their sublime theatre-of-the-absurd ambience, but Dugan's painful, childlike finesse with a Panaflex never approaches even the subtle, self-inflicted hilarity of sea-salted razor wire ground inexorably into raw, weeping sores. Essentially, the former Saturday Night Live player is recreating any one of a number of his previous parts from SNL or Tommy Boy: the hulking man-child, oblivious to the chaos that surrounds and engulfs him, slapstick gone over the top. Here, however, he is Haru, a mindlessly inept wannabe Ninja warrior who makes his way from the hills surrounding his ancient Dojo to Beverly Hills in hopes of rescuing a mysterious blonde (Sheridan) who may or may not be in peril from her "boyfriend," Martin Tanley (Parker). Tanley, as it turns out, is scheming to get his hands on one-half of a set of stolen Treasury plates the Yakuza has. The Yakuza, naturally, would like the other half that Tanley has, and Haru is stuck in the middle, too overwhelmed to know quite what to do, but knowing he must do something, if only to prove to his sensei that he is less of a buffoon than his martial arts comrades would think. Shadowing Haru's every move is his brother Gobei (Shou), a skilled Ninja sent to keep watch over the bumbling Haru and all-around general foil. Dugan keeps Farley moving around, having him run into immobile objects every time the film threatens to bog down in rationality, but it's no use. There are only so many ways even a Mack Sennett clown could fall over, and Farley exhausts them all within the space of a half hour, leaving us with a good 60 minutes to wonder what comes next. When nothing does, we're left to ponder the rampant unfunniness of it all, counting Jujubes in the dark and waiting for Adam Sandler to save the day. (01/24/97)

0 stars (M.S.)

Lakeline, Movies 12, Riverside, Roundrock, Westgate

BIG NIGHT

D: Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott; with Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Ian Holm, Minnie Driver, Isabella Rossellini, Campbell Scott. (R, 107 min.)
Big Night is, in a word, delicious - not since Eat Drink Man Woman has a movie celebrated the joy of cooking and the exhilaration of eating with such mouthwatering gusto. And like Ang Lee's 1994 film, it effortlessly integrates its undeniable love of fine cuisine into a narrative of familial bonds in which blood is often irrationally, but reliably, thicker than water. (In other words, it's something more than a cinematic rendering of Gourmet magazine.) Set in an unnamed town on the Jersey shore sometime in the Fifties, Big Night centers on the plight of two Italian immigrant brothers, Primo and Secondo, who are struggling to keep the doors of their little restaurant open. The problem is one of vulgar American tastes: While the flashy Italian eatery around the corner does booming business serving transatlantic bastardizations like spaghetti and meatballs, the brothers' trattoria offers a bill of fare faithful to their native land's culinary traditions. When their friendly restaurateur rival proposes to induce Louis Prima, a popular big-band musician of the day, to dine at their establishment, the Brothers Pilaggi see the opportunity as their last chance to save the business. What ensues is a meal to end all meals, an Epicurean blowout, a gourmand's wet dream. (The food looks so good, so appetizing up there onscreen that you'll find yourself mentally savoring every morsel.) As it turns out, however, the big night is not momentous for the reasons you might expect; rather, it is an evening in which all things finally -Źand somewhat messily - converge in a manner that's in marked contrast to the perfection of the banquet's courses. Tucci - who pulls a hat trick as screenwriter, co-director, and actor - always strives for simplicity, never making more of something than it actually is. The unadorned result is a startlingly empathetic observation of human behavior, particularly in the sibling relationship between the principal characters. As the frustrated pragmatist and his tempestuous brother, respectively, Tucci and Shalhoub give authentic performances in every sense, from their gestures and accents down to their brotherly interactions marked by a lifetime of familiarity. To turn a phrase, these guys can't live with - or without - each other. As an actor on television series such as Wise Guy and Murder One, Tucci has traded on characterizations with a hard, flinty edge; here, his portrayal of a man beset by disappointment is a wonderful surprise. Obviously his labor of love, Big Night serves Tucci - and everyone involved with it - well. It's that infrequent moviegoing experience that doesn't leave you hungry for something more. (10/4/96)

4.0 stars (S.D.)

Dobie

THE ENGLISH PATIENT

D: Anthony Minghella; with Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, Julian Wadham. (R, 162 min.)
Based on the Booker Award-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient is a lush, sprawling epic about romantic betrayal and redemption set against the backdrop of North Africa and Italy before and during World War II. At just under three hours, there's plenty of sandblown eroticism to go around, but, comfortingly, director Minghella (Truly, Madly, Deeply) never lets the film (or the audience) get bogged down in panoramic crane shots and gorgeous sunsets. Fiennes is uncanny as the titular patient, a man who is found beside the wreckage of his plane in the gritty dunes of Northern Africa. Burned beyond recognition and with no memory of his name or existence before the crash, he is found and cared for by a group of nomads who eventually place him in the hands of Hana (Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse with some grievous emotional scars of her own. At this point in The English Patient's decidedly non-linear story line, the war is just ending, and Hana moves her disfigured charge into an abandoned monastery in Tuscany, where she can care for the mysterious man and nurse her own wounds in solitude. Into this picture wanders Caravaggio (Dafoe), a Canadian soldier who says he's been recruited to help disarm the local partisans. The truth of his arrival appears to be a bit more shady; he stares at the English patient for long periods, picking away at his faulty memory as if it were as easy to peel away as the countless layers of scar tissue that surround the man. Concurrent with this Tuscan interlude is the film's backstory, seen in flashbacks, which chronicles the forbidden love between a brilliant, solitary royal cartographer working in North Africa (Fiennes, sans makeup) and the wife of another member of the Royal Cartographic team (Kristin Scott-Thomas). Gradually, Minghella draws these seemingly unrelated strands together into a skein of bitter loss and hopeful redemption. Any synopsis will fail to do this magnificently complex film justice, and repeated viewings may well be in order - it's simply that emotionally resonant. Suffice to say, The English Patient is operating on any number of levels throughout. Subtextually, the film is like some enormous cinematic onion, ripe with the promise of hidden meaning for anyone who cares to look. Films this rewarding are rare enough these days. Films this rewarding with casts this good have, in recent years, been more or less the sole property of the Merchant-Ivory conglomerate. The entire cast is electrifying, with Fiennes guaranteed a nod (at the very least) come Oscar time. His Count de Alm‡sy is a rich, eminently watchable creation, and Binoche, Dafoe, and Scott Thomas match his prowess every horrifically romantic step of the way. Despite its lengthy running time and occasionally languid pace, The English Patient feels brief and dreamlike. Waking from its spell, you touch your face, and it's wet, but you're smiling anyway. (11/22/96)

4.0 stars (M.S.)

Barton Creek, Great Hills, Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross

EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU

D: Woody Allen; with Allen, Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, Edward Norton, Tim Roth, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman. (R, 101 min.)
A feeble attempt to recreate the magic of the movie musical, Everyone Says I Love You is a post-modern throwback to those films in which characters spontaneously burst into a song and danced their hearts out whenever the mood hit them. The trouble is, director-screenwriter Allen - who seems to be in a creative rut these days - has made the mistake of emulating the less-than-stellar examples of the genre, forsaking both plot and character development seemingly in favor of staging clever song-and-dance numbers that could easily exist outside the celluloid confines of this film. Everyone Says I Love You ostensibly chronicles the romantic travails of a bunch of well-to-do, intellectual Manhattanites (the only focus group Allen can apparently focus upon), all to the tune of vaguely familiar popular standards. With the exception of Roberts and Allen - she must be tone-deaf, he confuses croaking with singing - the cast performs these musical numbers without too much embarrassment, especially when you consider that none of them (with the exception of Hawn) has any training or experience in this area. (The fact that only Barrymore's voice was dubbed speaks volumes about how totally lacking her singing talents must be.) Yet, while certain of the film's artifices induce a smile - store-window mannequins, funeral-parlor ghosts, and Gallic Grouchos contribute to the musical merriment, and there's a wonderful lighter-than-air pas de deux on the banks of the Seine - there's still something terribly facile about the whole thing. Allen's writing continues to get lazier and lazier: Characters' emotions flip on and off like light switches, and turns in events occur without rhyme or reason. His jokes aren't that funny anymore, although the occasional one-liner can still zing like the best of them. The preoccupation with rich, uninteresting New Yorkers continues to distance his audience from his work more and more with each movie. (When was the last time you heard someone say, "Remember our first Christmas in Paris?") And his narcissistic insistence on having beautiful, young women tell him - er, his character - how great he is in bed is getting downright twisted. Though its title entices with the promise of sweet flattery, Everyone Says I Love You is really not much more than a calculated fib. (1/17/97)

1.5 stars (S.D.)

Village

EVITA

D: Alan Parker; with Madonna, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce, Jimmy Nail. (PG, 135 min.)
That Madonna... she's voguing again. This time she strikes a pose as Eva Peron, the cultishly worshipped former first lady of Argentina and, not incidentally, the eponymous star of a fabulously successful stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. It's perfect material for the Material Girl and it's easy to see why she fought so hard for the part. The resemblances between the lives of these two women - each of whom rose from obscurity to become a mesmeric one-name wonder - should be evident to even the laziest of armchair analysts. And clearly, that's the audience toward whom this film version of Evita is aimed. It's the "no muss, no fuss" historical approach toward the military dictator and his popularly adored wife, an approach that skims and ignores many of the tale's darker elements (such as the perverse years-long saga of Evita's embalmed yet unburied corpse). Experiencing Evita is like watching one uninterrupted long-form music video divided only by different arias or costume changes (of which there are untold numbers). The movie is a wall of musical sound, an unending barrage of sung exposition. Madonna and Antonio Banderas, who serves as the story's Brechtian narrator Che, perform the difficult, near-tuneless Lloyd Webber music nicely enough, although their vocal skills tilt more toward the adequate than the spectacular realm. The music itself is full of Lloyd Webber's typical bombast and grandiosity and director Alan Parker's visual style maintains the tone of the aural onslaught. Visually, Evita is also huge. Yet, for all the teeming crowd scenes and sweeping visual pastiches, the movie still feel bereft of substance and weight. Parker has a substantial history with musicals having helmed the kiddie gangster movie Bugsy Malone, the high school song-and-dance ditty Fame, the sweet, Irish rock band saga The Commitments, and the overblown rock opera Pink Floyd - The Wall. He now probably qualifies as the world's premiere living director of movie musicals and that may be equivalent to saying that the movie musical is thoroughly dead. There is little about Evita that will leave audiences wanting more. (1/10/97)

2.0 stars (M.B.)

Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Lincoln

FIERCE CREATURES

D: Robert Young & Fred Schepisi; with John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Ronnie Corbett, Carey Lowell, Robert Lindsay. (PG-13, 93 min.)
As a general rule of thumb, studios reserve the month of January for the release of those films deemed "not so hot." It is a month of clunkers, wastrels, and layabouts as far as Hollywood is concerned, and with that in mind, it is immensely pleasing to see that this non-sequel sequel to one of the highest-grossing British films of all time, A Fish Called Wanda, is, in fact, the genuine article. It neither clunks, wastes, nor lays about, but instead races, pirouettes, and gambols from scene to scene with a reckless, thoroughly British abandon not seen since, well, A Fish Called Wanda. Actually, it doesn't pirouette per se, but the film is wonderfully manic in its own eccentric way, a fashion that Monty Python alums Cleese and Palin mastered decades ago. Cleese is Rollo Lee, a former Hong Kong police officer who now works for a TV station owned by the evil Atlanta-based media empire Octopus, Inc. When Octopus offhandedly acquires a British zoo one day, Rollo is sent to manage it and see if he can't milk a 20% return on the investment for foul Octopus CEO Rod McCain (Kline). To this end, Rollo decides that the zoo must from now on stock only "fierce animals," the line of thought being that the public is far more interested in the violent, terrifying species than in the cuddly ones. Meanwhile, McCain sends his new executive Willa Weston (Curtis) and egomaniacal, testosterone-fueled son Vince (Kline, again) to keep an eye on the proceedings abroad. Willa has grandiose dreams of turning the zoo into the first of a series of animal theme parks, Vince has grandiose dreams of bedding Willa, and Rollo, meanwhile, just wants to hold onto his job. As in their previous outing, the four principals move as a well-oiled comedy machine. Curtis has had her comic timing down ever since 1983's Trading Places, and it's only gotten better with time, and the rest are non-pareil as well. Schepisi and Young wisely let the leads run riot, making this perhaps the first zoological sex farce that plays like an old Carry On... feature. There are occasional outbursts of zealous overacting, but I suppose that's to be expected here. Precious little can detract from the bizarre hilarity of watching the zoo's staff trying to convince Rollo and Company that the lemur is indeed a vicious maneater. Inspired lunacy. (1/24/97)

3.5 stars (M.S.)

Arbor, Highland, Lakehills, Lakeline, Movies 12, Northcross

GRIDLOCK'D

D: Vondie Curtis Hall; with Tim Roth, Tupac Shakur, Thandie Newton. (R, 91 min.)
For their New Year's resolutions, Stretch (Roth) and Spoon (Shakur) - two junkies who moonlight as jazz musicians when they aren't copping, shooting up, or dragging OD'd friends to the emergency room - decide to kick heroin once and for all. So much for the easy part. Now comes the William Burroughs nightmare journey through a bureaucratic Inferno of interminable Medicaid approvals, lazy nitwit caseworkers, senseless regulations, and welfare offices that shift locations overnight like Saharan sand dunes. Our byzantine, indigent health-care system seems a logical enough subject for the directing and writing debut of Vondie Curtis Hall, who's best known as a regular on the TV medical drama Chicago Hope. But there's a lot more going on here than an earnest freshman civics thesis on the need for reform. Though Hall's grungy urban tableau owes a lot to Tarantino and Scorsese, he also displays a uniquely jaundiced satirical vision that Cˇline and Kafka would heartily endorse. Sad sacks though they are, Spoon and Stretch are also droll commentators on the perversity of a system that asks strung-out addicts to muster the discipline of Olympic decathletes in order to get help. The late Shakur is especially impressive as the brighter of the duo - a frazzled but infinitely patient character with a touching faith that somehow, if the pair just keeps plugging away, everything will turn out okay. Displaying a wealth of subtlety, sweet-natured humor, and introspection that were almost wholly absent from his run-of-the-mill, G rap music, he leaves no doubt that acting was his dominant talent. He more than holds his own with Roth, whose Stretch sometimes comes across as a pastiche of Tarantino lowlife characters. In a cockeyed but inspired narrative move, Hall supplements his two drugstore cowboys' red-tape battles with an ongoing plotline in which they're pursued by vice cops and a menacing local gangsta named D Reper (Hall in classic Superfly TNT ultrapimp attire) in scenes that feel like outtakes from some hazily recalled Seventies blaxploitation flick. Heady and enjoyable as it is, GRIDLOCK'd is also, in many ways, a disjointed, shambling mess. Reeling from near-slapstick to stark realism to gentle buddy comedy, it feels very much like the apprentice work it is. But Hall is clearly a bold and idiosyncratic talent whose grasp will someday match his long reach. (1/31/97)

3.0 stars (R.S.)

Highland, Lake Creek, Movies 12, Riverside

HAMLET

D: Kenneth Branagh; with Branagh, Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gerard Depardieu, Charlton Heston, Derek Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, Rufus Sewell, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet. (PG-13, 238 min.)
The man we can pretty much thank for the movies' current "Bard Wars" - actor-director Kenneth Branagh, who set off this frenzy of Shakespeare on film with Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing - wades back into the fray swinging the Big One, the saga of the melancholy Dane, and at first glance he looks to be trying to trounce the competition just by using the biggest sword. I mean, everything about this film is big. Big script. Big names. Big screen format. Big running time. Big sets. Big crowd scenes. And, yes, some mighty big acting. But the more you watch, the more it seems that Branagh is following in the footsteps of the century's other great Shakespearean cinematizers, Olivier and Orson; he's trying for the grand gesture, the bold stroke, that conveys the epic quality of Shakespeare's writing. It doesn't always serve Branagh well - some of his more fiery orations come off as mere ranting, and a few of his spectacular set pieces reek of a self-indulgent "watch me work" quality, and do we really need Gerard Depardieu sitting in a chair smoking a cigar and saying "Yes, m'lord" a half-dozen times? - but much more often than not, Branagh's bigness connects with the text in a big way and gives us astonishing visuals, passionate performances, a daring, sweeping, living version of this dramatic masterwork. Part of Branagh's genius is providing contexts for Shakespeare's characters into which modern viewers can key. When he has Hamlet retreat into a library and lean against a wall, his body outlined by hundreds of volumes, the sense of Hamlet as a private man and one who takes comfort in knowledge and books, strikes home in us, in a way that all his talk of Wittenburg may not. Here, he endeavors to provide us with a context for the whole of Hamlet's world - Denmark as a political entity, Hamlet and Claudius as public figures whose actions are watched closely by the Danish people, the characters as people of faith - all of which draws us closer to the prince and makes us feel his tragedy more keenly. Although the film's scope is broad, it retains a tight focus on the war between Hamlet and his stepfather Claudius, the murderer of his true father. Branagh sets up a dynamic tension between himself and Derek Jacobi that wrenches the screen. Jacobi is a wonder, sounding all the notes in the complex Claudius - his ardor, his frustration, his fear, even his horror at his own crime. It's the performance of a titan. Few members of the cast here match his majesty, but most bring rich feeling to the project, particularly Christie as Gertrude, Winslet as Ophelia, and Sewell as Laertes. And some of the Hollywood casting is surprisingly good, notably Charlton Heston, as an aged actor, and Robin Williams as the foppish servant Osric. In fact, it may be Osric who best sums up Branagh's Hamlet: "A hit. A very palpable hit." (1/24/97)

4.0 stars (R.F.)

Village

IN LOVE AND WAR

D: Richard Attenborough; with Sandra Bullock, Chris O'Donnell, Mackenzie Astin, Emilio Bonucci. (PG-13, 116 min.)
It seems like some kind of cruel joke that a lot of movies lately are based on books through which I struggled in high school. Suddenly, the mysteries of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet unfold before me at the Highland 10; where was this movie when I was muddling through the play during the hell of high school? I had a similar experience watching this new film by Richard Attenborough (Chaplin) about the early love life of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway immortalized that time in A Farewell to Arms, another of my required, somewhat impenetrable high school texts. Attenborough's film, however, is based on the book Hemingway in Love and War, by Hemingway's friend and fellow WWI compatriot Henry Villard and details Hemingway's first - some say his only - love, with American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. Unfortunately for me, watching In Love and War did not open my mind to the nuances of first love that I had been too dense to understand in high school. Instead, Attenborough's film seems to struggle under the combined weight of spark-less chemistry between leads Bullock and O'Donnell and the tendency of the director toward sweeping epic strokes, even when the moments might best be played out quietly. In 1918 Italy, a brash 19-year-old American reporter named Ernest (O'Donnell) reports for duty as a kind of cheerleader-cum-soldier to boost the morale of the Italians, who are trying to stave off a final demolition by the Austrian troops. At the same time, another American arrives in Italy, a nurse who has come to Europe to improve her skills and flee an overzealous suitor. When young Ernie is shot in the leg during his first visit to the front, he finds himself under Aggie's care. Thanks to her knowledge of progressive medical techniques, he recovers nicely and finds himself falling for her despite their age difference. Being the older of the two, Aggie is more cautious, yet ultimately she too admits to tender feelings. There are some sweet moments here, but they're few and far between. O'Donnell's fresh-faced acting and general overeagerness (granted, a trait that young Hemingway apparently had in spades) become irritating. My sympathies lie with Agnes and her painful decisions; the character of Hemingway becomes an afterthought and not just because he gets less screen time. The film begins with Agnes' voice-over, which suggests this will be her story, but the script never seems to make up its mind on that point. This unevenness and the lackluster romantic energy between Bullock and O'Donnell made In Love and War more of a homework assignment than an enjoyable moviegoing experience. (1/24/97)

1.5 stars (A.M.)

Great Hills, Highland, Lakeline, Movies 12, Roundrock, Westgate

JERRY MAGUIRE

D: Cameron Crowe; with Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Renee Zellweger, Kelly Preston, Jerry O'Connell, Jay Mohr, Regina King, Bonnie Hunt, Jonathan Lipnicki, Todd Louiso. (R, 135 min.)
Jerry Maguire opens with the kind of event that a more traditional movie would generally save for its concluding moments. This disruption should be our first indication that Cameron Crowe's new movie is anything but "business as usual." At the outset of the story, top-of-his-game sports agent Jerry Maguire (Cruise) suffers a pang of conscience that causes him to stay up all night and write an impromptu 25-page-long rant entitled "The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business." Before dawn, Jerry has his idealistic mission statement photocopied, bound, and distributed company-wide, eliminating all possibility of turning back in the light of day. What Jerry proposes is the agency's elimination of "business as usual" and a refocusing of the company's goals toward quality rather than quantity: placing the firm's values in people rather than dollars. Jerry's revelation is the kind of yuppie crisis of faith that other movies structurally build toward, the kind of leaf-turning that signals a happy ending just around the bend and better days ahead. But in Jerry Maguire, the bold act of conscience is only the beginning. Of course, Jerry's midnight scribblings cause him to be fired within the week, thus forcing him to confront the wisdom of his ideals. Only two other people flock to his camp: Dorothy Boyd (Zellweger), an agency bookkeeper who defects with Jerry, and Rod Tidwell (Gooding), a second-tier wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals. Jerry's crisis, however, is interesting in that it doesn't really force him to question the root of what he does, only the manner in which the business is conducted. (For example, the creation of a meretricious, sports-merchandising phenomenon such as Space Jam might still be one of Jerry Maguire's goals; only now he'd make sure that no human beings were harmed during its making.) Swiftly abandoned by his high-powered fiancˇe (Preston), it's not long before Jerry and Dorothy are found tying the knot. Dorothy loves him for "the man he nearly is"; Jerry still has to learn the difference between loyalty and love. We've seen Cruise play this type of smooth operator before: the button-down yupster with the Cheshire grin. What's fascinating is the depth of humanity Cruise finds within the character of Jerry and also Cruise's generosity toward the other actors in the story - a generosity that allows all the other performers to shine and create vivid and memorable characters. Cuba Gooding, Jr. practically steals the show as the ball player with a mouth and attitude as big as his heart. As his proud and loving wife, Regina King delivers a searingly real portrait of a proud black woman and football spouse. Newcomer (and Austin success story) Renee Zellweger takes to the screen like a true natural, and as her caustic yet loving sister Bonnie Hunt winningly serves as the audience's eyes and ears. And captivating new kid star on the block Jonathan Lipnicki demonstrates the truth in the old show-biz adage about never working with dogs, children, or other natural scene-stealers. Very much in keeping with Cameron Crowe's previous writing-directing projects Say Anything and Singles, Jerry Maguire is another sweet (though somewhat long) movie wrapped around a jagged emotional core - one of those tempting sugar confections you devour halfway through before recognizing the strange new taste sensations at the center. (12/13/96)

3.5 stars (M.B.)

Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Lincoln, Movies 12, Roundrock

METRO

D: Thomas Carter; with Eddie Murphy, Michael Rapaport, Michael Wincott, Carmen Ejogo, Denis Arndt. (R, 117 min.)
Having revived his moribund career with last year's out-of-nowhere hit, The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy now attempts an even more ambitious artistic feat: reanimating the fly-blown carcass of the cop-buddy movie genre that he helped define with early-Eighties blockbusters like Beverly Hills Cop. But while Metro is patently a get-well commercial move for Murphy, it's also, to his credit, not just Axel Foley redux. Eddie's 35 now, so it's fitting that his new alter ego, San Francisco police hostage negotiator Scott Roper, isn't merely another smack-talking kid squawking along with Sting on his Walkman. Roper is an adult, a guy whose trade tools are psychological insight and a cool head. In his personal life, though, he's still pretty much a screwup, displaying far more expertise at handicapping horse races than managing personal relationships. As a result, his girlfriend Ronnie (exotic up-and-comer Carmen Ejogo) has ditched him for a studly Giants outfielder and is having none of his wan pleas for reconciliation. Back at the station, we have the core elements of the traditional buddy pic, including the pain-in-the-butt new white partner (Rapaport) and the cranky, by-the-books captain (Arndt). But as pro forma as the setup is, director Carter (who directed 1993's underappreciated Swing Kids) and screenwriter Randy Feldman also subtly but meaningfully subvert our expectations. For example, much more attention is paid to Scott's relationship with his old flame than with his partner, especially after Ronnie is kidnapped by a psycho jewel thief (Wincott) who has a vendetta against Roper. The usual car chases and explosions are here, of course (the latter are truly ludicrous, rivaling those Dr. Strangelove fireballs from the action movie parodies in Last Action Hero), but these scenes are at least a bit more inventive than usual and never feel like the story's whole rationale. This is one of those rare cop/action movies driven by character, not spectacle. Murphy helps the cause with the most focused, persuasive acting of his career. As a young phenom, he got by on charisma, which he promptly commodified and cheapened with Hollywood's enthusiastic collusion. Now there's a calm, unfakeable assurance behind his eyes that only comes with life experience. It's something he can and should build on. Two straight hits, as Murphy well remembers, bring you a lot of juice in Hollywood. Here's hoping he doesn't waste it again. (1/24/97)

3.0 stars (R.S.)

Arbor, Highland, Lakeline, Movies 12, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Westgate

MICHAEL

D: Nora Ephron; with John Travolta, Andie MacDowell, William Hurt, Bob Hoskins, Robert Pastorelli, Jean Stapleton, Teri Garr. (PG, 105 min.)
Last time we checked in with comeback kid John Travolta he was channeling the powers of higher intelligence in the crypto-spiritual barnstormer Phenomenon. Gossamer fuzz similarly shrouds his follow-up film Michael, in which Travolta appears as an archangel returned to earth to meddle in the affairs of human beings. This kind of angel stuff is classic Hollywood fare, especially at Christmastime. Thus, it's all the more wonder that director Nora Ephron has missed and mishandled so many of her cues. Michael finds Ephron recycling bits and pieces of her previous movies: the casting of a holiday assortment of Mixed Nuts and the sweet belief in the predestination of lovers as in Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally.... The best thing about Michael winds up being Travolta himself. As always, he delivers a magnetic performance and, as has become de rigueur, Travolta dances. And in that one dance sequence, Travolta lifts this sodden angel tale into a truly magical realm. Also good is the performance of William Hurt whose bemused diffidence as a jaded tabloid reporter shows signs of someone actually working to create a believable character. The script (which is credited to four writers: Ephron, her sister Delia Ephron, Pete Dexter, and Jim Quinlan) suffers from thin plotting and lame set-ups. Audiences are likely to react badly to the movie's disappointing pay-offs. Hurt and sidekick Pastorelli play two cynical tabloid reporters from Chicago, Frank Quinlan (there's that name again) and Huey Driscoll, who land an assignment to go to Iowa and follow-up on a report of an angel. Sent to accompany them is "angel expert" Dorothy Winters (MacDowell). Travolta plays the angel Michael, whose mission here is also to be his last visit on earth and he intends to enjoy every minute. (Angels, he explains, are only allowed 26 visits, a curious and unexplained fact that is an example of the kind of extraneous detail that the movie allows us too much free time to explore.) Michael's hook is that he is not a stereotypical angel. He is an earthy figure who is an unkempt, beer-swilling, Beatles-quoting skirt-chaser. Part of his heavenly power is that he exerts a raw magnetism over all women who stray into his path. His mission is to bring together the movie's two squabbling stars, Quinlan and Dorothy, who need divine intervention to realize on their own that they are the two stars of the movie and, therefore, must fall in love. Lacking any real chemistry, however, it is easy to see why these two might miss the point. The whole movie is constructed with a similar kind of disinterested pallor. It's a good thing this archangel Michael comes to earth sporting his own wings. Those ungainly flappers will at least will spare him the indignity of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. (Opens 12/25) (12/27/96)

1.0 stars (M.B.)

Arbor, Highland, Lakeline, Roundrock, Westgate

MOTHER

D: Albert Brooks; with Brooks, Debbie Reynolds, Rob Morrow, Lisa Kudrow, Isabel Glaser, Peter White. (PG, 104 min.)
John Henderson (Brooks) is a science fiction writer who, following his second divorce, decides that it's time for him to figure out, once and for all, the root cause of his failure with women and intimacy. To accomplish this, he decides to move back in with his mother - the primal source of all things intimate and woman-related. Not only does he decide to move back in with his less-than-convinced mom, he wants his old bedroom back (despite its conversion into a sewing room by a woman who never sews). To the tune of a lyrically hilarious update of "Mrs. Robinson," John loads up his convertible and cruises up the highway to Sausalito, drags in from the garage his old lava lamp, twin bed, and wall posters, and reinstates himself in his boyhood home. "Why didn't you want to stay in a hotel?" asks his mom Beatrice (Reynolds). From John's point of view, she once more doesn't "get" it. Or maybe, just maybe, it's that she does get it and though she's happy to see her son, she also knows that his upending of her happy domestic life will do little to explain why his two marriages failed. And perhaps that's the point that Brooks is trying to make, that mothers are people too and that part of John's difficulties stem from his inability to see Beatrice as an individual. Some of the film's funniest moments come from these two as they tentatively try to mesh their habits and lifestyles. Mother finds Brooks in top form as he dons the tri-fold hat of director, star, and writer (with co-writer Monica Johnson). His humor has more of an observational zing than a jokey, one-two patter. Within this structure, Brooks uncovers many of the fidgety truths about the relationships between parents and their grown children. The film comeback of Debbie Reynolds is also a most welcome offshoot of this movie. With impeccable timing and a spirit as pert as ever, Reynolds as Beatrice can manage to introduce John to her supermarket friends as her "other son" and at once be both believably sweet and sadistic. Rob Morrow as the "successful" son who woos his mother with speaker phones and other expensive gifts also delivers a fine performance that mixes deep-seated sibling rivalries with genuine familial concerns. Although Brooks apparently takes a long time between projects (the last movie he directed was 1991's uneven Defending Your Life), the finely honed Mother proves that a new Brooks film is well worth the wait. (1/17/97)

4.0 stars (M.B.)

Arbor, Lakehills, Lincoln

ONE FINE DAY

D: Michael Hoffman; with Michelle Pfeiffer, George Clooney, Mae Whitman, Alex D. Linz, Charles Durning, Holland Taylor, Ellen Greene, Amanda Peet. (PG, 109 min.)
One Fine Day begins as anything but that for divorced Manhattan mom and architect Melanie Parker (Pfeiffer). Kept up without much sleep by her chattering five-year-old son Sammy (Linz), Melanie has to get him to a school field trip and herself to an important presentation all within the span of about five minutes. Enter columnist Jack Taylor (Clooney), the fetching but somewhat clueless father of Sammy's classmate Maggie (Whitman). A series of screw-ups brings the two divorced parents together, and they spend one fine day and the entire film thawing out the antagonistic iceberg that springs up between them. This the film does well. Screenwriters Terry Seltzer and Ellen Simon strike just the right balance among such subplots as Jack's trying to confirm a City Hall scandal, Melanie's attempting to win over demanding clients, and the children's competing antics. Of course, what dominates the entire plot is the attraction between Melanie and Jack, who both haul behind them the requisite emotional baggage that accompanies many adults living in the 1990s. As Melanie, Pfeiffer once again demonstrates that she can do comedy without compromising her sexy allure. Clooney is a natural as the head-turning columnist-about-town, but the film goes a bit overboard emphasizing his sex appeal. It's no surprise that Melanie's crusty exterior is what initially repels and attracts Jack, and her softening seems to require her admitting that indeed, she can't do it all. This cinematic message (double-edged as it may be) is nothing new; in fact, it's at the heart of all successful romantic comedies. For me, the little touches make the film appealing, such as Melanie's amazing transformation of the kids for "Superhero Day" at the local child care facility. Or the scene in which Maggie tells her father that she's hungry and he offers her a Tic Tac, while Melanie - amazing mommy that she is - whips out Juicy Juice and Flintstones Chewables for both kids. For those viewers who can relate to Melanie's and Jack's lives, One Fine Day offers light-hearted romantic fun, but for younger viewers the film may not quite hit the mark. Most women under the age of 25 in the sneak preview audience with whom I saw this film seemed to experience a collective shutting down of their reproductive systems once Maggie and Sammy went full throttle into five-year-old mode. But for many of the other viewers, it was enough just to watch Melanie and Jack's relationship lurch and sway toward its happy ending. And for Natalie Merchant fans, her rendition of the film's title song is almost reason enough to buy a ticket. (12/20/96)

3.0 stars (A.M.)

Barton Creek

101 DALMATIANS

D: Stephen Herek; with Glenn Close, Jeff Daniels, Joely Richardson, Joan Plowright, Hugh Laurie, Mark Williams, John Schrapnel. (G, 111 min.)
At least a couple of times every month, the dogs in my neighborhood start barking at each other. "Hey! Here comes that meter reader!" or "Hey, that's not our regular mailman." Now, if the dog down the street howls, "Get out of my yard, you #$%&* cat!", my dog might woof a little canine encouragement. But mostly she'll just cock an ear for a moment and go back to sleep. After all, territorially speaking, that cat's not really any of her concern. Which is how I know that dogs talk. That and the fact that I've seen Lady and the Tramp, The Fox and the Hound, Homeward Bound, and, of course, 101 Dalmatians. The original, animated version, that is. For in this live-action remake, the animals don't speak, except with their eyes, ears, tails and other appropriate (and eloquent) body parts. It is an interesting approach, and provides a bit of subtlety which this version of the Disney classic is otherwise woefully lacking. Obviously, subtlety needn't be the mainstay of children's movies, but I do think that children are capable of surviving, even enjoying, subtlety and often benefit from having to work at a film a bit. But John (Home Alone) Hughes wrote and produced this movie and proves that he hasn't changed his spots one bit. At times, the film feels like one painful, protracted pratfall. It simply wastes the comedic genius of British comic Hugh Laurie (Jasper) and allows - indeed, encourages - Close's excessive vamping. (Her last acting job was in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway and it shows.) Close's DeVil is big and loud, but more twisted and pathetic than scary and funny - more Norma Desmond than wicked fashion queen. Cruella's outrageous animal garb is great fun to look at but we tend to get only glimpses before the next cut, usually to an extreme close-up of her shrieking crimson lips or to a long-shot silhouette of her exhorting the heavens in tortured, silent-movie posturing. Cruella's criminal cohorts are the just plain creepy Skinner (Schrapnel), a Mengele-like taxidermist, and the two stooges, Jasper and Horace (Williams). There seems an uneasy blend of scary depravity and blundering buffoonery, not to mention an inordinate amount of head-bopping and eye-poking, in this picture. Admittedly, the kids in the audience (my bunch included) loved every slapstick minute of it. But I pined for more scenes with the dogs, more of that sweet, silly Disney magic so evident in the animated version. The ingredients are here. Daniels and Richardson make an amiable and attractive Roger and Anita. Plowright is a perfect Everynanny. It has a lovely, snowy English setting. The puppies are excruciatingly endearing and the dogs are wonderfully keen and communicative - when given the opportunity. Unfortunately, this 101 Dalmatians has a lot of bite and far too little bark. (11/29/96)

2.0 stars (H.C.)

Barton Creek, Lakeline

THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT

D: Milos Forman; with Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton, James Cromwell, James Carville, Crispin Glover, Larry Flynt. (R, 130 min.)
A flag-waver for the free speech set, The People vs. Larry Flynt isn't what you might expect it to be - it's more raucous than raunchy. Using the trials and tribulations of the self-proclaimed smut king to teach a civics lesson in the meaning of the First Amendment, this audacious film will undoubtedly be reviled by feminists and fundamentalists alike for its refusal to judge Flynt's fleshy commerce. (One of the film's critics has pontificated that director Forman, who allegedly had never seen Hustler magazine before committing to the movie, would have never agreed to direct had he first seen a copy. Given that Forman - a Czech ˇmigrˇ - left his homeland while it was under totalitarian Communist rule, I'd guess he'd probably be more willing to undertake this freedom-of-speech project than one of his American counterparts.) Those disturbed by the film's glorification (of sorts) of its white-trash Hugh Hefner - there's nothing airbrushed about Larry Flynt - may rightly be concerned that less discriminating viewers will see it as elevating its subject to martyr status, as a forthright defender of American civil liberties, when in reality the man is nothing but a pornographer for profit. The truth is, however, that The People vs. Larry Flynt depicts its focal character as both hero and antihero. Flynt's ascent into notoriety smacks of pure 20th-century Horatio Alger. Born to a dirt-poor Appalachian family, he got into the strip-joint business in less-than-hospitable Cincinnati in the 1970s, striking paydirt only when he began publishing a skin magazine that defied all notions of good taste. (A hilarious scene in which copies of Hustler are distributed to concerned - and "respectable" - citizens at a posh dinner, as evidence of the depravity that has entered their community, beautifully exemplifies human beings' natural curiosity to look at the forbidden, even when it's repellent and vile to them.) It is only when Flynt's cash flow is threatened and the prospect of incarceration becomes real that he unwittingly becomes an advocate for constitutional rights. Still, if the First Amendment is to mean anything when it comes to the right of free speech, it must include the right to be selfish - to say what you think, rather than what others believe you should or should not say, regardless of what your motivation may be. Battered by obscenity trials and paralyzed by a sniper's bullet, Flynt reaches his abyss in the 1980s - addicted to painkillers and mentally unhinged - all the while accompanied for the wild ride by his wife, Althea, the love of his life. Unlike most film biographies in which the love interest angle is an often obtuse one, the romance of Larry and Althea - the Sid and Nancy of porn circles - is a truly genuine one. All the notions of co-dependency aside, the film presents them as two people acutely attuned to each other, eternal soulmates by default because no one else in the world could love them as they loved each other. This unexpected poignancy, blooming amidst an unflinching portrait of the couple's downward spiral - he was hospitalized in an institution, she died an AIDS junkie - easily makes The People vs. Larry Flynt one of the most adept movies seen in a while, especially when considering its satiric panache as well. Harrelson gives an almost fearless performance as Flynt, clearly relishing the thought of playing this American icon. (About halfway through the film, Harrelson's timbre decidedly changes; was there any irony in this acting choice, in that he then sounds like a gravel-voiced James Stewart?) Harrelson is more than matched by Love in an open-wound performance. In an acting turn full of physical and emotional contortions, she gives herself wholly to the role of Althea, most likely because she's actually lived it to some degree. When the perfect arc of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's smart screenplay is completed, you may find yourself tearing up, but not in response to the tragedies that marked Flynt's life. Rather, the unlikely culprit is the opening language in a United States Supreme Court opinion, in which the nine justices unanimously ruled in Flynt's favor in an infamous lawsuit brought by the Reverend Jerry Falwell. The People vs. Larry Flynt is proof that you can find patriotism in the most unlikely of places. (1/10/97)

4.0 stars (S.D.)

Great Hills, Movies 12, Northcross, Westgate

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

D: Jane Campion; with Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey, Mary-Louise Parker, Martin Donovan, Shelley Winters, Richard E. Grant, Shelley Duvall, Christian Bale, Viggo Mortensen, Valentina Cervi. (PG-13, 144 min.)
Great and evident artistry shapes this film version of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady. Yet the end result perplexes as much as it fascinates. Jane Campion, the much-lauded director of The Piano, and screenwriter Laura Jones (An Angel at My Table) bring their modern sensibilities to bear on this story of James' 1870s heroine Isabel Archer, a young, sharp-minded, American woman abroad who inherits unexpected wealth and uses it to live as she likes, traveling and rejecting numerous suitors until she falls into an unwise marriage that nearly becomes her ruination. From the opening credits, Campion signals her intention to recontextualize this classic novel for modern times and feminist analysis. The sound and images behind the credits are those of contemporary young women talking of their feelings about love and first kisses. The movie then opens in apparent mid-scene with Isabel (Kidder) rejecting her first suitor, even though he offers her a choice of castles to live in. Campion and Jones add a psychosexual fervor to the story and include several Freudian fantasy sequences as Isabel makes her way through the world as a single woman. Yet, the movie only seems interested in this phase of Isabel's life as a preliminary background to her unhappy marriage. Her broadening travels are depicted simply (and frugally) as a picture-postcard diorama. The movie focuses primarily on Isabel's attraction to and near-undoing by the manipulative esthete Gilbert Osmond (Malkovich). Prior to this, we see too little of the searing intelligence that has earned Isabel so many admirers and, likewise, we also see too little of the internal fire that lures Isabel to the viperous Osmond. In a movie marked by outstanding performances, Malkovich is the one weak link. We've seen him vamp through these coyly sinister roles a few too many times, and his Osmond comes off like a creature left over from Dangerous Liaisons. Kidman does what she can to bring the movie's opaque Isabel to life (though I seriously doubt the role will win her the Oscar that, rightly, should have been hers last year for her delicious work in To Die For). As her sickly cousin and biggest admirer, Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan makes a strong impression, as do John Gielgud (especially in a memorable death scene) and Barbara Hershey. No small contribution to the film's overall impact is made by the wonderfully rich and atmospheric work of cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (Lone Star, Once Were Warriors, The Piano). Toward the end of The Portrait of a Lady, sequences and events have a hurried feel that not only contrasts sharply with the steady tone that preceded it but also packs too much subtle information into too little space. However, for all its misfirings The Portrait of a Lady paints a fascinating picture. (1/17/97)

3.0 stars (M.B.)

Village

THE RELIC

D: Peter Hyams; with Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, James Whitmore. (R, 110 min.)
With no undue hype, The Relic can be hailed as a new quality benchmark in the always competitive field of movies about part-gecko, part-bug, part-human, hypothalamus-munching, breast-fondling genetic mutant monsters. All facetiousness aside, the new offering from Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, The Presidio) isn't nearly as original as that summary makes it sound. Much like the DNA-scrambled beast to which the title alludes, this film is a chimerical chop-shop product, consisting mostly of spare parts pulled from Alien, Jurassic Park, and even The Ghost and the Darkness. Director-cinematographer Hyams, who's actually a pretty fair hand with sci-fi and suspense material, samples Alien most heavily in this gory yarn about a mythical South American demon critter who's reborn (some mumbo jumbo involving retroviruses and brain hormones) and ends up terrorizing rich philanthropists trapped in a natural history museum. Once you get past that Mystery Science Theater 3000-ready plot, the suspense stuff is not too shabby. The aforementioned Alien parallels kick in via Hyams' skillful transformation of the museum's lower chambers into a claustrophobic labyrinth of horrors reminiscent of Ridley Scott's dank, shadowy spaceship Nostromo. Repeating the Alien carnival ride, with Penelope Ann Miller as a fair-to-middling Sigourney Weaver fill-in, is enjoyable enough. However, the downside of such faithful tributes is a near-inevitable emergence of The Copy Is Never as Sharp Syndrome, and that's certainly the case here. Entire scenes are ritualistically quoted from Scott's original, and at times you can almost hear the vigorous pencil-scratch noises of Hyams checking off items from his subgenre feature list. And many of the basics are competently handled here. Ace animator Stan Winston, who also contributed heavily to Jurassic Park and last year's The Island of Dr. Moreau remake, has fashioned a suitably ghastly monster that pinches necks and torsos asunder with almost palpable glee. Screenwriter Amy Holden Jones pumps a few extra ergs of creative energy into the dialogue, resulting in surprisingly fresh interaction between co-protagonists Miller and Sizemore (the poor man's George Clooney or is he trying for Kevin Spacey?). Veteran TV actress Audra Lindley even contributes a short but juicy scene as a mordantly funny coroner. The Relic's blood-and-guts index is way off the scale, but more by virtue of sheer quantity than startling innovations in gorehoundry. Long story short: This film stands as a near-perfect specimen of two hardy cinema archetypes - the cheesy but diverting creature feature and the weekend bargain matinee. (1/10/97)

2.5 stars (R.S.)

Arbor, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Movies 12, Riverside, Westgate

SCREAM

D: Wes Craven; with David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy, Matthew Lillard, Courteney Cox. (R, 100 min.)
A triumphant return to form for Wes Craven, Scream is the kind of psychological slasher film for which horror fans have been waiting years. The stalk 'n' slash gorefests of the early to mid-Eighties may be a distant crimson glimmer in cinematic history, but most people who grew up with such unique also-rans as Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me, Hell Night, and the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises will gleefully admit the role they played in their adolescence. Like a cultural watermark, those films (and many, many others) helped define teenagers in the Eighties just as surely as did Def Leppard, Stridex Pads, and pre-Jordan Nike footwear. They also prepped us for what not to do when being pursued by an axe-wielding maniac, but sadly, very few ever had the chance to put that knowledge to the test. Not so for the cast of Scream, Wes Craven's new horror film that playfully uses such movies of the past and their writ-in-stone lessons (never leave the house to check on a strange noise outside, never assume the psycho is really dead, never go in the basement if the lights have gone off, etc.) as pivot points in Craven's wonderfully self-reflexive plot. Neve Campbell plays Sidney, a young girl who, one year ago, lost her mother to a murderous maniac. Almost to the day, more body parts start popping up, but this time, it's her friends at Woodsboro High School who are the victims. The unnamed killer wears a cheap Halloween mask and queries his victims on horror-show etiquette via threatening phone calls before doing them in. It's up to Sidney and her clique of horror film buffs (among them the excellent Skeet Ulrich, looking very, very much like Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street) to stay alive long enough to ID the madman before everyone's strung up and butchered like Yuletide hogs. That's the plot in a nutshell, but the real thrill in Scream comes from Craven's gleefully over-the-top plotting and nightmare psychology. One scene featuring a pair of small-town cops discussing the case out-Lynches David Lynch, and Craven's brilliant use of film-within-film-within-film is taken to new heights in the final reel as the surviving characters watch themselves watching John Carpenter's Halloween as they're being stalked, courtesy of a hidden video camera. Scream operates on so many levels at once that you could write a dissertation on it, but the real fun lies in the director's (and cast's) obvious love of the genre. Craven is obviously having a ball here, and it's impossible not to sit back and go grinning into this dark, gory ride. (12/20/96)

3.5 stars (M.S.)

Great Hills, Highland, Lake Creek, Movies 12, Riverside, Westgate

SHINE

D: Scott Hicks; with Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor, Alex Rafalowicz, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Lynn Redgrave, John Gielgud, Googie Withers. (PG-13, 105 min.)
What is it about our mad artists that makes us love them so? Shine now adds the story of Australian pianist David Helfgott to our popular literature. Based on the life story of this child prodigy, Shine tells the story of this artist's life - from his early years of study under the tutelage of his stern, tyrannical father (Mueller-Stahl), who is himself an emotionally scarred victim of the Holocaust; to David's decision to accept a scholarship to study abroad, which results in his disinheritance by his father, who permanently cuts David out of his life; to David's own mental breakdown in his 20s while performing his personal bogeyman piece, Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 3" (affectionately referred to throughout the film as Rach 3); to David's decade-long institutionalization for treatment of his mental condition during which time he is forbidden to play the piano (the movie breezes past these years); to David's resurrection of himself as a popular performer and his discovery of the love of a good woman, an astrologer named Gillian (Redgrave). This sentimental favorite from last January's Sundance Film Festival begins with the artist's redemption, showing his re-entry into the world of the living following his long hibernation. It seals our romantic vision of the mad artist as an indomitable vessel whose functional resurrection is a testament to the human spirit. By choosing to tell in flashback the sad trajectory of this young man's life, the filmmakers have chosen to stress the human ability to triumph over the injustices of the past. It's as if to state that true artistry and a good soul will win out every time, and since we see little of David's years of isolation and therapy, we have no evidence to refute that romantic notion. Despite Shine's over-reliance on its feel-good story structure that leaves more questions unanswered than asked, the movie is wonderfully constructed. The viewer is swept along by the drama of David's life story, in its specifics of how a father's love and pride also contain the seeds of poison, and in its generalities about Oedipal knots and the sins of the fathers. No one aspect is ever examined terribly closely, making David Helfgott almost as much of a cipher at the end of the movie as at the beginning - only now we have witnessed a resurrection and a just cause to celebrate. Contributing enormously to the success of the movie are its awesome performances. It is no accident that Geoffrey Rush, who plays David Helfgott in his latter years (he is played as a child by Alex Rafalowicz and as a young man by Noah Taylor) is showing up as best actor of the year on so many critical year-end lists. His performance as the babbling, stuttering bundle of childlike manhood is the film's most exuberant glory. As the anguished father, Mueller-Stahl delivers a performance that is truly devastating to watch. If, at times, Shine's luster reveals more elbow grease than internal radiance, the movie is still a moving tribute to the human capacity to overcome all odds. (12/27/96)

3.5 stars (M.B.)

Barton Creek, Highland, Village

SOME MOTHER'S SON

D: Terry George; with Helen Mirren, Fionnula Flanagan, David O'Hara, Aidan Gillen. (R, 112 min.)
Ireland, the first colony in the British Empire, is no closer to social or political assimilation today than when it came under Crown rule 800 years ago. At regular intervals, the Irish people's dogged struggle for independence has flared into warfare and ghastly carnage. The ancient conflict's poisoned black heart is laid bare in this fictionalized account of a 1981 prison hunger strike that left 10 IRA inmates dead. With Some Mother's Son, director/co-writer George (who also collaborated with writing partner Jim Sheridan on 1993's In the Name of the Father), delivers a lucid, fiercely moral film that strikes an artful balance between the personal and political elements of the story. The principals are two young IRA "soldiers," Gerard Quigley (Gillen) and Frank Higgins (O'Hara), and their mothers, Kathleen Quigley (Mirren) and Annie Higgins (veteran Irish stage actress Flanagan). When Frank and Gerard are jailed for their parts in a fatal attack on British troops, the pacifistic Kathleen is stunned because she's strongly anti-IRA and hitherto ignorant of her son's ties to the group. Earthy, passionate Annie, on the other hand, is IRA to the hilt. When Frank joins prison activist Bobby Sands in the hunger strike (the inmates refuse to wear prison uniforms because they see themselves as political prisoners, not criminals), she backs him despite her maternal fears. As days pass, the strikers become pawns in a worldwide P.R. battle between Sinn Fein and the Margaret Thatcher government. Chilled by the dull haze of imminent death in their gaunt sons' eyes, the mothers shelve their ideological differences to jointly lobby in support of the strikers. Though George's sentiments clearly lie with the Ulster rebels, he refrains from ultimate judgment in favor of one side or the other. In contrast to the masculine absolutism of In the Name of the Father and Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, Some Mother's Son finds George disengaging from, and rising above, the killing fields to consider the pathology of war itself. At what point, he forces us to ask ourselves, does righteous fervor devolve into insanity? Do political convictions, however passionately held, imply a duty to sacrifice not only one's own life but those of people we love? It's a critical mode most associated with women, hence George's decision to tell the story from a feminine viewpoint. Mirren, delivering an Oscar-worthy performance of astonishing reach, urgency, and emotional complexity, embodies these timeless questions in her character. In an unforgettable late scene, Kathleen watches in horror as talks between a British diplomat and a Gerry Adamsesque Sinn Fein spokesman collapse over the mostly semantic issue of whether prisoners are to be granted "rights" or "privileges." The roar of angry male voices fades to silence and the camera locks onto Mirren's face, in which confusion gives way to amazement, then to clear resolve about the decision she must make on behalf of her dying son. Flanagan, matching and complementing Mirren's brilliance at every turn, presents Annie's own choice as equally inescapable, leaving a final and wrenching personal judgment for the viewer to make. And a lingering question: Can humankind ever find in its collective soul a passion for peace as deep as that for the causes, both great and picayune, that we've butchered ourselves over throughout history? There's very real doubt about that, despite heartening recent events such as the Hebron Accord. But it's still a quest that must continue. A great, morally uncompromising film like Some Mother's Son represents real hope for progress. (1/31/97)

4.0 stars (R.S.)

Dobie

SPIKE & MIKE'S SICK & TWISTED FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION '97

D: Various. (Not Rated, 92 min.)
Many of the animators in this latest version of the infamous Sick & Twisted animation anthology thank their parents in their films' closing credits. And don't you know those moms and dads are mighty proud of having given their kids the financial wherewithal to learn how to faithfully reproduce the aqueous squelching noises of a man extracting yardlong ropes of snot from his nose? As always with the S&T show, there's a twofold response to the head-spinning grossness of the artistry on display. First and constant is the grim struggle to hold down your gorge in the face of images that include (but are hardly limited to) disembowlings, dismemberings, coprophagy, self-mutilation, exploding skulls, and massive ejaculating penises. All major bodily excretions, and the orifices that produce them, are represented here. The second response is genuine awe at the technical prowess of the roughly 20 artists who use processes ranging from stop-motion photography to digital rendering to traditional cel animation. Most of these animators - including Bill Plympton, whose amiably gruesome "How to Make Love to a Woman" is one of the show's highlights - also produce less in-your-face work, and simply use Sick & Twisted as a playground for their unruly ids. Although this show struck me as even cruder and more puerile than past editions (admittedly a tough call), it also has its share of real wit, style, and invention. Don Hertzfeld's "Ah, L'Amour!" is a hilarious, if viciously misogynistic, take on the anatomy of love. T. Reed Norton's "The Lizard Whomper" features amazing claymation reptiles that deserve a cult following equal to those Budweiser frogs. And "Tie-Dyed Dick Featuring Rick the Dick" hilariously lampoons neo-hippie alternative culture ("Why don't you losers get your own generation?" a disgusted Rick asks a meadow full of twentyish Deadheads). Unfortunately, there are several films here that simply aren't worthy of the respected Spike & Mike nameplate. For example, Kevin Kaliher's "Home Honey, I'm High" is banal stoner humor based on a stale sight gag of vaguely Jetsons-esque suburbanites sucking on bongs and blunts. A few other films are technically crude in a way that suggests plain old lack of talent more than studied primitiveness. As always, the candid labeling of Sick & Twisted assures a receptive, self-selected audience that knows what to expect and is unlikely to be offended by anything it sees here. In its own way, this is a pretty sophisticated audience that recognizes standards of artistic merit, if not taste. It deserves more attention to quality control than the folks at Spike and Mike have shown with this collection. (1/24/97)

2.5 stars (R.S.)

Dobie

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT

D: Jonathan Frakes; with Patrick Stewart, Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell. (PG-13, 120 min.)
Directed by the Enterprise's executive officer "Number One," First Contact is what you might expect from Commander Will Riker (Frakes): action, action, chat, action. Not in itself a bad thing - the Star Trek films have long come under friendly fire for being too heavy on the philosophizing and not enough so on the deep-space car chases - but oddly, the film feels soulless and hollow, despite best intentions to the contrary. That may have something to do with the Borg, the hive-mind collective enemy that returns from Star Trek's televised run to make their big-screen debut. As the film opens, Picard (Stewart) is tormented by memories of his past assimilation by the Borg, and his brief life as the Borg Locutus. His mind is still linked, however tentatively, to the collective, and when, in the film's opening, the Borg attack Earth outright, he and the newly revamped Enterprise are sent away on a fool's errand, with Starfleet reluctant to let him in on the action lest he suffer a bout of Stockholm Syndrome. In grand Shatneresque tradition, Picard marshals his crew and, against orders, joins the fray, only to discover that the Borg have gone back into time and altered human history by destroying Zefram Cochrane (Babe's Cromwell, wonderfully over-the-top), the man who first pioneered the warp drive that powers the great starships and eventually made the "first contact" that introduced earthlings to other life in the universe and ushered in a new era of universe-wide brotherhood. Whew. Naturally, it's up to the Enterprise to follow the Borg back and set things right, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that they do just that. Along the way, they discover that this much-adored historical figure they've come to rescue ("I went to Zefram Cochrane High," quips Burton's Geordi) isn't the heroic space pioneer they'd thought, but a hard-drinking coward, more interested in the windfall his famous flight might generate than its ramifications for the future. Also, along the way Data (Spiner) is assimilated by the Borg, and Picard must come to very Mevillian terms with his obsessive fear and loathing of his past captors. In all, the whole film flows less like the cinematic adventure it is and more like one of the television show's two-hour episodes. There are plenty of above-average set-pieces here, not the least of which is the whole of Starfleet's gripping, multi-ship attack on a gigantic Borg ship, but the film still seems cobbled together from past episodes and ideas (the character of Cochrane first made an appearance in the Sixties original Star Trek). It's enough to make you miss Khan. (See related story in this week's "Screens" section.) (11/22/96)

2.5 stars (M.S.)

Lakeline

STAR WARS: SPECIAL EDITION

D: George Lucas; with Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Sir Alec Guiness. (PG, 125 min.)
No synopsis necessary, I'll presume. On the eve of commencing work on the new triumvirate that will make up the Star Wars trilogy's prequels, wunderkind Lucas and 20th Century Fox have opted to soup up the first three films as part of a simultaneous marketing push and as a means to smooth over some of the rougher spots that made it to theatres 20 years ago. Has it really been that long? It certainly doesn't seem so, but, yes, here we are in 1997 and the Force is still with us, iconic and pervasive in ways that no one - not even the studio brass - could have predicted two decades back. This "Special Edition" is by no means the director's cut one might expect from Lucas and company; the total additional footage amounts to a little under five minutes, and most of it is extraneous, there only to highlight and flesh out certain scenes. The Mos Eiseley spaceport on the desert planet Tatooine - where Obi Wan takes Luke and the droids to meet Han Solo - is now the sprawling den of thieves it was originally intended to be, complete with a much-improved landspeeder for Luke and plenty of rearing Dewbacks and assorted CGI critters hamming it up in the background. Previously excised footage of Jabba the Hut conversing with a startlingly youthful Solo is back in, and the rebel fleet is now much, much larger than it first appeared. Most of the changes on this newly refurbished print are purely cosmetic (the film is now in THX, although not, for some reason, at the advance screening I took in), but Lucas' vision still packs a mighty Saturday-afternoon wallop. I'd forgotten just how viscerally exhilarating the rebel forces' final run on the death star is. It's an icy-pure, white-knuckle ride that never lets up until the final ceremony on Endor - masterful editing, pacing, and vision all the way. Whew! Those of us who were old enough to catch the film as kids the first time around may even find an unexpected lump in their throats as the nostalgia gates bust wide open and Vader gets his, once again, on that giant, silver screen. (1/31/97)

4.5 stars (M.S.)

Arbor, Highland, Lake Creek, Movies 12, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Westgate

SWINGERS

D: Doug Liman; with Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston, Patrick Van Horn, Alex Desert, Heather Graham, Deena Martin. (R, 108 min.)
"You're so money and you don't even know it" is the constant refrain that Mike (Favreau) hears from his hipster friends Trent (Vaughn) and Sue (Van Horn) throughout director Doug Liman's feature film debut Swingers. Being money is the thing, baby, and if you're like Trent, you work it in order to get the "beautiful babies." If you're like Mike, who's still reeling from the breakup with his longtime girlfriend Michelle, you're just too damn depressed to care. I like Mike, and I found myself enjoying Swingers the more it developed these characters. Or I should say, I liked the film in spite of characters like Trent and Sue, who categorize women as either beautiful babies or nasty skanks, a paradigm that begs the question, "Were you abandoned by your mother at an early age?" Mike, on the other hand, is not willing to buy into those beliefs, and once he gets back on his feet and realizes he is money in his own way, he becomes quite an appealing (dare I say sexy?) guy. But Mike's realization is a long time coming, and the bulk of Swingers' narrative focuses on the exploits of these friends - all aspiring actors or entertainers of some kind - as they make their way through the L.A. party scene, which includes the subculture of 1940s-style swing clubs and lounges. The well-crafted script (written in two weeks by Favreau for his actor friends) and slick visuals pay homage to swingers both past and present: from the Rat Pack of the 1960s and films like Ocean's Eleven to the current prince of pastiche Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs. Prefacing a tribute to a particularly iconic Reservoir Dogs sequence is this tongue-in-cheek comment about contemporary filmmakers: "Everyone steals everything from everybody." But viewers will be pleasantly surprised to see something rare in this film, which is the way that Mike's character experiences his romantic suffering. Rather than take it on the chin, Mike wallows in it, managing to retain viewer sympathy despite some very ill-advised dating decisions that involve the basic standards and practices for calling a woman. There's no question that Mike's the underdog here, and I found myself rooting for him throughout the film. Swingers gets off to a slightly irritating start but segues smoothly into a series of comical and bittersweet plot developments. Favreau himself is no stranger to uphill battles; shedding 90 pounds prior to this film, he liberated himself as an actor from "fat kid" roles such as his appearance in Rudy. Weight issues aside, actor-screenwriter Favreau and director Liman demonstrate with Swingers that they're definitely "money." (11/1/96)

3.5 stars (A.M.)

Dobie

TRAINSPOTTING

D: Danny Boyle; with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald. (R, 94 min.)
Two young men are hurtling down a street as Iggy Pop's incantatory ode to survival, "Lust for Life," blasts through the theatre's speakers. Concurrently, a voiceover, with a thick Scottish accent, sardonically disembowels society's empty exhortation to "choose life." Trainspotting is a modern-day movie about the experiences of some unrepentant Scottish junkies, yet in its opening moments, Trainspotting spiritually resembles nothing so much as the Beatles' careening burst of adrenaline-charged "devil-may-care" in their introductory movies, A Hard Day's Night and Help! Hardly cute and cuddly moptops, these Trainspotting rogues are, nevertheless, driven by similarly simplistic formulas. In the movies, the Beatles race along trying to stay one step ahead of crazed fans and other pursuers; action for the Trainspotting crew is solely motivated by the need to fix and score. Instead of the social-realism approach taken by most movies dealing with drug subcultures, Trainspotting observes its subjects with a mordant eye - an inclusive perspective that permits humor, exhilaration, wit, and hyperbole to mingle with stark realism and dingy morality. Some have (falsely) interpreted this stance as a dangerous glorification of heroin, but Trainspotting really remains neutral on the subject. Heroin, with its pitfalls and pleasures, is merely a fact of life, and so are the subcultures and lifestyles it generates. The movie does not ignore the drug's harrows, but neither does it deny heroin's intractable lure and efficacy. In fact, the movie's most pathologically violent and twisted character is an alcoholic who never touches heroin. Trainspotting plainly includes various heroin-related tragedies such as AIDS, crib death, and personal betrayal, but it also resorts frequently to humor and exaggeration in order to drive home other points. (The most obvious example of this is the scene in which a character swims into the most disgusting toilet/cesspool of feces in order to retrieve a couple of heroin suppositories he unwittingly excreted, thereby showing in an astonishingly vivid, surreal, and unforgettable manner the literal depths to which one can sink in the quest to score.) The same Scottish team (director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge, and actor Ewan McGregor) responsible for 1994's surprise low-budget hit Shallow Grave reunite here for Trainspotting despite serious wooing and many lucrative proposals from Hollywood financiers. Also retained for this sophomore effort are many of the same crew members who worked on Shallow Grave. Additionally, Irvine Walsh, the author of the novel on which Trainspotting is based, appears as a drug dealer toward the end of the movie. At times, the Scottish accents seem difficult for Americans to penetrate, and the characters' dexterous use of slang and subculture references do not make things any easier. Yet the ear, if permitted, adapts quickly to the foreign cadences, and though some of the specifics and nuances may pass unclarified, isn't that the way of all subculture lingo? The on-target performances, along with the unceasing barrage of popular music and daring narrative gambles, combine to make Trainspotting one of the grand movie rushes of 1996. (8/2/96)

4.0 stars (M.B.)

Dobie


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