|
|
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.), 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 |
D: Alfonso Cuaron; with Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke, Anne Bancroft, Chris Cooper, Robert De Niro. (R, 111 min.)
At the risk of getting drummed out of the brethren of former English Lit majors, I have to say this radical makeover of Dickens' "beloved classic" (beloved by whom, I've always wondered) is much to my liking. The hardy story easily survives the change of setting from 19th-century England to the modern-day USA, and the liposuctioning of marginal plotlines and characters, two characteristics that make Dickens' work seem like, well, work to many modern readers, creates a feel of refinement, not truncation. In Mitch Glazer's screenplay, Dickens' Pip becomes Finnegan "Finn" Bell, played by Ethan Hawke. As in Dickens, the small-town lad helps a runaway convict (De Niro), whose act of gratitude becomes a major plot device years later. The other key influences in Finn's life are the demented millionaire Ms. Dinsmoor (Bancroft, having a blast with the classic Miss Havisham role) and her young niece, Estella (Paltrow from the teen years on). Hired by Dinsmoor to keep Estella company, the artistically gifted Finn falls in love with the icy but strangely vulnerable girl who, as Dinsmoor repeatedly warns him, is destined to break his heart. One day, a big city lawyer shows up in Finn's Florida coast hometown to inform him that a New York art patron he's never met wants to bankroll a major gallery show for him. Though properly skeptical, Finn says yes to the offer and heads off to chase a dream he'd never previously known he had. Familiarity with the book may scotch a few surprises for you, but Glazer changes enough of the major events and character relationships to keep you guessing. What's truly intriguing about this film, though, is the stylishness with which Cuaron (A Little Princess) reinvents Dickens' hoary, often-remade tale. This Great Expectations has a seductive, enchanting feel that has nothing to do with sweet, gauzy sentiments or calculatedly "magical" Hollywood imagery. In fact, it's downright strange much of the time, combining odd, disjointed encounters between the main characters with imaginative cinematography, risky performances by the leads, and an adrenaline-stoked pace to keep you in a giddy, unbalanced state. A terrific rock score assembled by Patrick Doyle adds charm and energy to the exhilarating scenes in which Finn conquers the Big Apple but never not quite the ethereal Estella. Though Cuaron slips a time or two during his stylistic highwire act, his refreshingly original movie, aided by Hawke's career-best acting in the lead role, is a joy to watch. Of further interest is the long nude scene by Paltrow that had me, red-blooded male that I am, aching to place her upon a bed of hibiscus petals, tilt her head back gently
and feed her rashers of slab bacon until those anorexic collarbones started to soften up a bit. Gwyn, love: If you don't get help from Charter Lane, please get it from someone. You're starting to scare us. (1/30/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lakehills, Lakeline, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown
D: Stephen Sommers; with Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Anthony Heald, Kevin J. O'Connor, Wes Studi, Derrick O'Connor, Jason Flemyng, Djimom Hounsou. (R, 106 min.)
"Cheese Rising" might have been a more apt title for this Giant Monster from the Depths throwback. Despite its obvious drawbacks, however, this patently silly horror show is good, stupid fun if you can just manage to leave your intellect at home for a while. Sommers (The Adventures of Huck Finn) is well and truly into the spirit of Roger Corman here, although with some blisteringly wicked special effects work from longtime genius Rob Bottin (The Thing, The Howling) and Dream Quest Images (The Abyss, Total Recall), the film manages the look and feel of something far more than the sum of its many-tentacled parts. Williams plays Finnegan, a seadog-for-hire who rents his boat to a gaggle of modern-day pirates planning on looting a giant cruise ship in the South China Sea. Things go predictably amiss when the intended target turns out to be devoid of (human) life, and has instead become the feeding ground for some kind of giant sea anemone from the deep. Luckily, the pirates (led by Studi and Amistad's Hounsou) have brought along a baker's dozen of cruise missiles (!) and a small arsenal left over from Schwarzenegger's last action film. Anyone who's ever seen such classics as It Came From Beneath the Sea! knows that tentacles + firepower = fun, and despite Deep Rising's off-the-scale cheese factor, it's still a rollicking good time, frequently poking fun at itself and assorted horror film conventions. There's a priceless scene during which ship designer Heald takes a preposterous stab at explaining the origin of the creature ("It appears to be a giant form of Astopithea Mastopopius [or something like that]," he states, and then leaves it at that, to the howls of the audience. Brilliantly goofy scenes like that keep the film from sliding into outright pretentiousness and make for an enjoyably ridiculous ride. Also on board are Goldeneye's Janssen as a leggy thief and the priceless Kevin J. O'Connor as Finnegan's wisecracking engineer, the kind of character you just know is going to die but ends up getting all the best lines. While the film is essentially Aliens aboard a luxury liner, Sommers keeps thing fast and loose, negotiating some splendid action set-pieces within the cramped confines of the mammoth ship (christened the "Argonautica," in tribute to pioneer effects master Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, I'll bet). It's brainless, bloody fun, but fun nonetheless. (1/30/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown
D: Barbet Schroeder; with Andy Garcia, Michael Keaton, Brian Cox, Marcia Gay Harden, Erik King, Joseph Cross. (R, 101 min.)
Desperate, indeed. While the crazed implausibilities in films such as Face/Off induce a fevered delirium that's like some sweet drug, the inane plottings in movies like Desperate Measures induce something akin to a numbing catatonia: It's cinema as anesthesia. David Klass' tortured screenplay requires a suspension of disbelief that would test even the most gullible. First, you have to set aside common sense to believe that state and prison officials would agree to release a sociopathic, convicted killer for a bone marrow transplant that may save the life of the young, leukemia-stricken son of a policeman. Then you must blindly accept that the convict can execute an elaborate escape from the operating table and wind up in control of the hospital as the son's immune system deteriorates while waiting for the donor graft. And then you must swallow whole the proposition that the cop would aid and abet the escapee, shielding him from his fellow police officers, because he can't allow his son's one chance to live to be exterminated, even if it means breaking the law, destroying property, causing mayhem, and endangering the lives of innocent people. (Andy Garcia's foolhardy father in Desperate Measures is the flip side of Mel Gibson's heedless papa in last year's Ransom; while madmen dictate whether their sons live or die, one man acts recklessly out of love, while the other acts recklessly out of principle.) The pairing of Garcia and Keaton as the pursuer and pursued doesn't click from the start. Their initial meeting should have played like that of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter a test of wits, intellect, and emotion, sharpened by a palpable tension. Instead, it comes off as sterile as the washed-out walls of the prison room in which it occurs. Although the symbiotic relationship that develops between the determined two men, by virtue of their simultaneously conflicting and converging interests, is the only thing here that's remotely intriguing, it's an angle quickly enveloped by the movie's overall improbability. As the film's pandemonium increases and policemen are shot, propane canisters explode, and a major medical care facility is under siege, one is reminded of that immortal observation uttered by Bill Murray in response to another kind of pandemonium in Tootsie: That's one nutty hospital. (1/30/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross, Roundrock, Tinseltown
D: Richard Friedenberg; with James Cromwell, Tantoo Cardinal, Joseph Ashton, Graham Greene. (PG, 117 min.)
Boomer parents, whose selective memories belie their own youthful history of sneaking into movies like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! now cry out as one for benign, traditional children's films without all the violence, sexual innuendo, and profanity they now find so troubling. Well, crank the Windstar and drag the young 'uns away from Duke Nukem 3D: The Education of Little Tree is just what you've been looking for. Based on the bestselling novel by Forrest Carter, Little Tree's story occurs in the Tennessee mountains during the early years of the Depression. Little Tree (Ashton) is a half-Cherokee orphan who's been adopted by his grandparents (Cardinal and Cromwell). The elderly couple he's a Scotch-Irish moonshiner and she's a full-blooded Cherokee teach him how to make his way in a white-dominated society without sacrificing his Native American heritage. This bi-ethnic household represents something of an ideal for cultural integration, but the story unflinchingly portrays the suspicion, misunderstanding, and outright hatred the youngster must face in the outside world. Schools give him a "white" name. Townspeople are selective at best in their social acceptance. And stories of atrocities such as the Trail of Tears, told by a Cherokee neighbor (Greene) reveal the truth that his racial identity is as much a burden as a gift. Yet Little Tree is not just an obligatory shot of white collective guilt to be endured in the name of multicultural conciliation. The interaction between Little Tree and his grandparents is hearty, humorous and quite affecting. Both Cromwell (Babe, L.A. Confidential) and Ashton seem blessed with about 20 percent more vital force than most of us, and the delight the boy shows in learning woodland lore and the family trade (even moonshining seems wholesome in this context) is "family values" in its purest form, sans Christian Right connotations. Wrapped in a package of lush, luminous beauty courtesy of Anastos Michos' masterful cinematography, and blessed with a fine yin-yang balance of sentiment and realism, this is a solid, engaging piece of filmmaking craft by director Friedenberg, who's best known for adapting Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It for the screen. One note of possible and certainly ironic interest: Forrest Carter was the pen name for Asa Carter, a prominent white supremacist who wrote speeches for George Wallace in the early Sixties. Some reports have it that Carter's racist views moderated over time. Others ascribe the more enlightened tone of his later work to financial expediency or the odd affection even the most intractable bigots sometimes reserve for Injuns. (Perhaps they make exceptions for minorities that run cheap casinos and refrain from making gangsta rap music.) In any event, it seems only fair to grant Carter the same courtesy we have other politically extreme artists (John Milius and Ezra Pound, to name two random examples) and judge his work by its laudable overt content, not his unsavory personal ideology. (1/30/98)
Arbor, Westgate
D: Nick Gomez; with Michael Rapaport, Lili Taylor, Adam Trese, Kevin Corrigan, Angela Featherstone, Tony Danza, Isaac Hayes, Paul Schulze, Saul Stein. (R, 96 min.)
To Nick Gomez, heaven is 18 holes of green and a blue, blue sky. At least that's one of the striking, heavenly images we get during the course of what is essentially a metaphysical treatise on life, death, and drug-running in modern-day Florida backwaters. Perpetual Brooklyn wiseguy Rapaport tones down his flip style in favor of a cooler, more adult approach as Dante, the longtime head of a crew of heroin dealers working the well-trod streets of some nameless South Florida township. Dante and his girlfriend Micky (Taylor) bide their time managing a smallish clan of young street hoods and trying to have a baby. When their old partner Gabriel (Trese) returns after an extended stretch in the big house, the couple find their pleasant, almost placid routine disrupted by studied revenge and flip-flopping scams. Their stash is poisoned, their exceedingly polite crew is slaughtered one by one, and eventually Gabriel himself comes back to haunt them. And still no baby. Gomez's film plays like a narcoleptic fugue; it's the most melancholy, lassitudinal depiction of small-time hoods yet, filled with sleepy-time fades and ambient emotions that drift in and out of a hazy torpor that recalls nothing so much as the eloquent sparseness of Jim Jarmusch. Still, for a film in which every other scene seems calculated to send you nodding into your popcorn, there's plenty of story going on, unfolding with all the precision of a time-lapse rosebud. illtown is packed with brooding religious imagery. Antagonist Gabriel appears cloaked in white, ascending a staircase, and when asked where he's been, remarks, "I died and went to heaven
they kicked me out." Dante (and to a lesser extent Micky Taylor's role is regrettably small) is on the cusp of wanting out of the drugs & guns game; he's refined his trade and his clientele to a select, upper-crust few. Very few bullets are fired until Gabriel's avenging anti-angel takes up residence on the streets once more, recruiting bloodthirsty teen wreckage to do his dirty work for him. As Dante's friend and longtime associate Cisco, Trese is a wild card you're never really sure what he's up to until Gomez spells it out. He looks like a friend, acts like a friend, but in illtown very little is what it seems. That goes for Gomez's spacy, elliptical editing, too. The films drifts back and forth through time as well as various realities, leaving you vaguely groggy and unsure, which mirrors, to a degree, the actions and emotions unfolding before you. It's a post-noir crime story filtered through a gauze of druggy doom. (1/30/98)
Village
D: Kelli Herd; with Keri Jo Chapman, Teresa Garrett, John Hallum, Barbara Lasater, Derrick Sanders. (Not Rated, 99 min.)
In this reprised favorite from last year's Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, young SMU graduate Kelli Herd tells a story that's sure to click with the droves of gay and lesbian Austinites who migrated here from conservative hinterland outposts. Herd's 1996 debut film is set in the fictitious Texas burg of Azalea, a semi-small town with a distinct Waco/Tyler feel to it. As a newly minted Junior Leaguer and born member of Azalea's upper-class beau monde, Alexandra "Alex" Stratton (Chapman) seems to have it made. Granted, her husband is a self-absorbed drudge, their sex life is the pits and her vapid, catty fellow League members keep her trembling on the brink of a blowup. All that aside, she's still rich, yummy looking and getting plenty of satisfaction from volunteering at the local AIDS hospice despite having to fight through protesters from the local "Homo No Mo'" chapter to report for duty. One day at the hospice, she runs into Grace (Garrett), an old high school buddy who's back in town after a reportedly painful divorce. The reason for the split, Grace confides, was that her hubby discovered her fling with a fellow (female) nurse. While Alex ponders this news another friend, the brazenly inverted Spencer (Hallum) is pulling the chains of local homophobes by telling them there's something in the local water supply that releases latent homosexual potential. Paranoia spreads like ebola, and soon nonstandard sex is replacing the capital gains tax as the major local bugaboo. In the midst of this ferment, several on-the-fence heteros fall off, including Alex, who very publicly takes up with Grace. "Wake up and smell the poppers, honey!" Spencer chortles as the unhappy housewife grudgingly faces her true nature. As you've no doubt gleaned, farce is the game Herd is playing here. The water-supply business is simply a McGuffin which facilitates some broadly amusing reflection on the arbitrary nature of sexual behavior and gender roles. The social satire is a weak point. As in many gay-themed comedies, the straight opposition are virtually all hysterical, hateful buffoons with none of the conflicted feelings which make life with hets so problematic for real-world gays and lesbians. But again, subtlety was clearly not in Herd's game plan. What she attempted, with considerable success, was to create a good-natured tribute to people who've suffered the trauma of coming out in a less than supportive environment and lived to laugh about it. Enjoy that, and the attractive, appealing cast (including Austin favorite Terry Galloway in a memorable cameo), and you'll hardly notice the lack of brow-knitting depth. (1/30/98)
Dobie
D: Joe Chappelle; with Peter O'Toole, Rose McGowan, Joanna Going, Liev Schreiber, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt, Clifton Powell, Rick Otto, Rachel Shane, Adam Nelson. (R, 91 min.)
Ballyhoo abounds regarding the improbable fact that for once, author Dean Koontz is getting behind a film adaptation of one of his novels. I suppose after the hideous string of Watchers knockoffs a few years back, anything not featuring Corey Haim would come as a relief, and frankly, Phantoms holds up pretty well as a sci-fi monster movie. Up to a point, that is. With such a first-rate cast (refugees from both Scream and Scream 2 among them) you'd think Phantoms was a no-brainer, and it is, just not in the way you had hoped. When small-town physician Jennifer Pailey returns to her Colorado township with younger sister Lisa (McGowan) in tow, they find the place virtually abandoned with the gruesome exception of a few severed heads and bloated corpses. Everyone else (animals included) has mysteriously vanished, and as if that weren't enough, the pair's car suddenly won't start. Signs of life appear unexpectedly in the form of Sheriff Bryce Hammond (Affleck) and Deputy Stu (Schreiber) who have arrived in town to find out what happened to the local constabulary. It turns out everyone was devoured by an ancient life form from beneath the topsoil, the oddly-monikered "Ancient Enemy," a blobby, pseudopod-wrigglin' critter that gains the intellect of everything it eats, and as such, has convinced itself that it's a god among flatworms. And who better to slay wayward demigods than crusty old Peter O'Toole, who promptly jets in with the military and bandies about scientific and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo while lesser actors are dismembered. Director Chappelle (Thieves Quarter) lays on the spook factor heavy in the first 30 minutes or so, but the film quickly devolves into a simplistic slash 'n' bash shoot-'em-up which goes nowhere fast. It's immensely unsatisfying given the caliber of actors involved, and although KNB effects house coughs up some wonderfully disgusting work, the whole enterprise seems rushed and oddly incomplete. Affleck is miscast as the mountain-man sheriff, and McGowan seems inured to all the horror around her, barely raising a shriek whenever anything gooey happens (this may be due in part to her offscreen relationship with Marilyn Manson, which would probably render anyone's shriek mechanism a tad rusty). Koontz's source material (he also penned the screenplay) is by far and away one of his best thrillers, which makes it doubly disappointing that the film version is so unengaging. Still, it's a great leap forward from Chappelle's lousy entry into the Halloween series some years back. Not that that's much consolation. (1/30/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown
D: Various. (Not Rated, min.)
You don't need the U.S. Supreme Court to find Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation '98 "
utterly without redeeming social value by contemporary community standards." Not when the producers themselves are so proudly confident of their barnstorming animation show's emetic powers that they hand out free barf bags at the door. In a move apparently designed to bring this venerable and popular celebration of bad taste to its most natural clientele (i.e., people who are several beers to the good), this year's screenings have been moved from the longtime Dobie Theatre home base to the Alamo Drafthouse. The new feel is more vaudeville than film fest, right down to the Viking-helmeted emcee who's been added to stoke the crowd up with unison screaming contests and lewd party games. But rest easy, traditionalists, the film program itself has stuck to its tried-and-true formula of gorge- elevating raunch, carnage, and scatology. Some of the films, like Miles Thompson's crude paean to blonde bimbohood, Hut Sluts, and Don Hertzfeldt's scathing lover's lament Ah, L'Amour, are even reprised from previous shows. The biggest crowd draws this year may be The Spirit of Christmas and Frosty, two scabrously hilarious shorts by Trey Parker and Matt Stone that were the basis for Comedy Central's cult favorite cartoon series South Park. Japanese animation is lampooned not once but twice, in DNA Productions' brilliant The Booby Trap and Nick Gibbons' clever Speed Racer parody Fast Driver. There's even some solid educational content here. Adam Lane's Sea Slugs graphically illustrates why slugs have never made good sailors (all that salt water watch it, little fellas!), and the aforementioned The Booby Trap explains why anime characters are always doing that "h'ohhh!" thing (evidently just because it feels good). One of the most technically impressive films was Mike Johnson's Devil Went Down to Georgia, which was so lacking in offensive content one almost wonders how it made the cut. No such questions with Greg Ecklund's amiably grisly Lloyd's Lunchbox, which stars a pus-eating, rat-squashing skinhead. And certainly not with Steve Margolis' Sloaches Fun House, a phantasmagorical spew of body-loathing imagery that fully earns its billing by Spike & Mike as "The Sickest Film Ever Made." In short, don't assume that the free barf bag is a joke. However, to again cite the highest court in the land, the concept of offensiveness relates directly to "prevailing community standards." And when the community in question is the kind that enjoys deep-throating bananas from each other's laps and being repeatedly addressed as "perverts," it's clear that the standard is plenty low to accommodate Sick and Twisted '98. Eat it up, you sickos. (1/30/98)
Alamo Drafthouse
D: Sally Potter; with Potter, Pablo Veron, Carlos Copello, Olga Besio, Caroline Iotti, Gustavo Naveira. (PG, 101 min.)
It's time to tango in Paris once more. This new excursion comes courtesy of arthouse filmmaker Sally Potter (Orlando), but her footwork has little of the grace and profundity that characterized Bertolucci's Last Tango. Potter stumbles fearlessly through this semi-fictional/autobiographical story about a filmmaker named Sally (played by Potter), who falls in love with the tango while experiencing frustration during the writing of a screenplay called Rage (a script that Potter, the filmmaker, put aside to shoot The Tango Lesson). Her tango tutor/love interest, Pablo, is played by the renowned Argentinean tango master Pablo Veron. Entranced by the implicit subtext of the dance form in which the sexual dynamic is formalized into a highly stylized choreography, both Sally the fictional character and Potter the actual filmmaker find the tango lessons a soothing respite from the cerebral desk & duff work of scriptwriting. As The Tango Lesson's plot develops, it turns out that Pablo is just as interested in breaking into the movies as Sally is in becoming a tango tootsie. So the two strike a bargain: Pablo will teach Sally to become a top-notch tango dancer and Sally will let him star in her next film. As the characters' emotional lives become entwined with their professional lives, the tango increasingly becomes a central metaphor for complications of life. How can a person simultaneously be a director on a film project and a follower in a dance number? Can the collaborative art of filmmaking accommodate the proscribed steps of the tango? Can a director who prides herself on her artistic freedom bend to the demands of an unyielding dance pattern? Can Potter find a way to make the audience share her obsessions? To the last question, the answer is no. The Tango Lesson is ponderously scripted and stiffly acted, and though the narrative causes the characters to skip continents and languages (the story bounces from Paris to Buenos Aires to London and back) little of the passion that drives this story is conveyed. You never really sense what these two individuals see in each other apart from their professional arrangement. The film's camerawork, however, is a joy to watch as Robbie Muller's black-and-white footage matches the dance choreography step for step. The whole movie has a rich, embossed sheen, a duotone contrast to the opulent full-color glimpses of the aborted movie Rage, in which swan-like female models in haute-couture evening gowns are chased by a legless designer with murder in his heart. I'm not sure that I'd prefer that Rage were made in place of The Tango Lesson. But with Rage I'm guessing that at least I'd know when the jig was up. (1/30/98)
Village
D: Steven Spielberg; with Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, Pete Postlethwaite, Nigel Hawthorne, Stellan Skarsgard. (R, 155 min.)
Amistad is a disappointment if the standard for judging Steven Spielberg's new film is the state of mute, stumbling devastation that Schindler's List inspired in its viewers. The story it recounts, an 1839 slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship bound for New England, is a historical obscurity, not an epochal horror on par with the Holocaust. We never stand close enough to evil to stare into its dead eyes or feel its moist breath against our faces. Though we get a few glimpses of ghastly brutality aboard the packed, airless ship we're appalled less by the atrocities themselves than the practical even pious arguments by which they're later rationalized. This is by no means a passionless film, though. Cinque, the rebel leader, is played by former model Hounsou, a mountainous figure who speaks in a gutteral roar and seems to embody the rage and confusion of an entire exploited continent. He's an overwhelming presence, just barely skirting comic-book superhero imagery at times, who also excels in scenes that require him to express subtler emotions either wordlessly or in untranslated Mende dialect. Most of the widespread critical carping about this film seems to focus on the series of hearings which air out the politically charged issue of who owns the slaves. These courtroom scenes are undeniably repetitious, static, and, until the end, focused on technicalities of maritime and international law. (Weirdly, the killings aboard the Amistad aren't the issue. Since the rebels are functionally equivalent to livestock they can't be charged with committing murder; the only question is whether anyone has a valid claim on them.) McConaughey, as a real estate lawyer named Baldwin who argues on behalf of abolitionists Theodore Joadson (Freeman) and Lewis Tappan (Skarsgard), has also drawn more than a few raps for his low-keyed performance. But in the overall framework of the story, both his restraint and the tedium of the judicial proceedings buttress a vital point: In the period being dramatized, the economic considerations of slavery overwhelmed the moral ones. Baldwin is fighting this battle on the agreed-upon turf of property law. Only after being repeatedly thwarted by a politically craven President Van Buren (Hawthorne) do the abolitionists turn to an advocate (Hopkins, as former President John Quincy Adams) who dares raise the ultimate issues of innate rights and human bondage. Hopkins, overcoming bad makeup, floridly scripted lines, and John Williams' bombastic Weep, you bastards! musical score turns in some of his most masterful acting ever as the worn-out old statesman stoking the inner fires one more time in support of that "troubling and annoying" document known as the Declaration of Independence. The grandeur of these sentiments, and their expression by Hopkins, really turns the balance in favor of Spielberg's flawed but worthy film. However imperfectly, he has crafted another eloquent reminder that although goodness lives with a perpetual sense of weariness in its battle with the self-renewing power of evil, it can never retreat, never sleep. (12/19/97)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Tinseltown
D: Don Bluth and Gary Goldman; with the voices of Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Angela Lansbury, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters, Kirsten Dunst. (G, 94 min.)
Anastasia, the first feature-length offering from the new Fox animation studio, may not beat Disney at its own game, but it sure won't be for lack of trying. This sumptuous-looking film clearly spared no expense in its visual rendering; its optical flourishes and attention to detail aim for the Disney gold standard and, for the most part, come pretty darn close. The vocal talents are all solid and the songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are pleasant enough, although on first listen there doesn't appear to be any breakout hit in the bunch. (One unfortunate song early in the film during which comical Russian workers sing of the deprivations of the post-revolutionary period is needlessly tasteless, however.) Where this animated feature's two-dimensionality becomes most visible is in its storyline a sanitized confabulation about the history of the Russian Revolution and a formulaic cartoon plot about a teen searching for a sense of belonging and unconditional love. Whether Anastasia's amnesiac would-be princess garners many enduring fans beyond its target demographic of young adolescent girls remains to be seen. The movie relies heavily on Wizard of Oz-ish "There's no place like home" sentiments and the Cinderella-like yearnings for more fitting destinies. In this tale, however, our princess earns her crown not through the kiss of a handsome prince or the fit of a glass slipper but through something more akin to the modern psychological process of "recovered memory." During a several-minute-long preamble, we're shown the origins of the Russian Revolution and the source of Anastasia's plight. The culprit is Rasputin (Lloyd), who, for the purposes of this story, is an evil sorcerer solely responsible for unleashing all the country's pre-revolutionary social unrest. Even once he's dead, Rasputin obsessively follows Anastasia's progress, not through a crystal ball like Oz's Wicked Witch but through the fortune-telling glass of a reliquary devotional. Of course, recent discoveries and the advent of DNA testing has proved the fraudulence of the whole historical Anastasia phenomenon in which a parade of young girls tried to convince the Dowager Empress that each was the rumored palace refugee Anastasia the rightful heir to the felled Romanov dynasty and fortune. Back in 1956, the story won an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman in a live-action drama and, indeed, the heart of this animated tale remains that of a young girl's search for her family roots. Such warm-and-fuzzy concepts better lend themselves to agreeable rhyme schemes and cute animal companions than tough words like "Communist," "Bolshevik," and "Romanov." Still, this Anastasia is a feisty little heroine, often delightfully un-regal and un-ladylike. She's almost enough to make you forget the words of "The Internationale." (11/21/97)
Great Hills
D: James L. Brooks; with Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Skeet Ulrich, Shirley Knight. (PG-13, 138 min.)
The title, As Good as It Gets, looms like an omen, telegraphing, correctly as it turns out, the impression that this movie would've, could've, should've been better. Make no mistake, As Good as It Gets' winning combo of big laughs and big emotions practically ensures that it will be crowned the feel-good hit of the holiday season. And not undeservedly
there's a lot to like here, primarily the performance of Jack Nicholson, whose work in this film is the finest he's done in years. Yet in between all the laughs and tears, it becomes painfully obvious that there's not a whole lot of story here to prop up the constant emotional yanking. The movie plays best as a series of scenes some of them very good that fail to coalesce into a solid storyline. Character motivation is for the most part absent, and, occasionally, shot coherence is so sketchy as to become mildly confusing and engender the awareness of something missing. That a cute dog and a sick kid are the two biggest devices for advancing the plot also gives a fair indication of this movie's over-dependence on formula. Producer, director, and co-screenwriter James L. Brooks usually has a better grip on how to temper all these wild swings of emotion, having been involved in creating such innovative television shows as Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Tracey Ullman Show, and The Simpsons, and directing Broadcast News and the multiple Oscar-winner Terms of Endearment. But As Good as It Gets lurches to and fro in a way that won't impede its quips and zingers but will confound anyone looking for the dramatic arc. The vicious one-liners that spew relentlessly from the mouth of Melvin Udall (Nicholson) may be the real glue that holds these scenes together. Melvin is a successful author completing his 62nd romance novel who also suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He lives alone in a New York City apartment, and has a pathological fear of germs and stepping on sidewalk cracks. He also unloads venomous verbal shots at anyone who comes within his radar. He is an equal opportunity insulter his remarks can be homophobic, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic
whatever the occasion requires. Exactly how and why such abusiveness should be a symptom of OCD is extremely murky (as is the narrative consistency of his many other symptoms), but the movie's task is to lead Melvin into becoming a better man. Despite himself, he befriends the dog of a neighbor a gay artist (Kinnear) who is senselessly beaten by intruders and gradually befriends the neighbor. He also manages to develop a shaky rapport with the only waitress (Hunt) who will serve him at the restaurant where he eats daily. Kinnear is steadily proving that he may yet have the soul of a decent actor, but the fabulous Helen Hunt is woefully ordinary here. One wonders if Brooks went through his Rolodex, and when his Broadcast News gal Holly Hunter wasn't available, just moved on to the next name in queue. There's also the unmentionable Hollywood folderol about men successfully romancing women several decades their junior. Not only does this waitress bestow her gratuities on this man old enough to be her father, but he's a guy who also comes with a whole laundry list of pathologies and bile. In fact, it may be this bile that makes As Good as It Gets so darn irresistible. Melvin, because he's not well and also has an amusing way with a phrase, can utter the unspeakable. He's not speaking for us of course; it's his illness talking. And laughter, as we all know, is the best medicine. (12/26/97)
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Tinseltown
D: Paul Thomas Anderson; with Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, Nicole Ari Parker, Robert Ridgely, Luiz Guzman, Alfred Molina, Thomas Jane. (R, 147 min.)
From the second it begins, Boogie Nights seizes your senses and pulls you right in: no turning back, no time for debate, no regrets. You're in for the whole ride (and it's a long one at nearly two and a half hours), but you wouldn't dream of having it any other way. As the opening shot of Boogie Nights whooshes us into its disco world (much like the intoxicating long-take restaurant scene in GoodFellas), resistance proves futile. We hopelessly surrender to the dazzling neon and the propulsive music and the sight of Burt Reynolds giving the whole scene his thumbs up. Set during the waning years of the Seventies and the early Eighties, Boogie Nights focuses on a tight cluster of people who are involved in what is euphemistically called the adult film industry. It's a propitious moment for porn films: The late Seventies held out a small window of expectation that pornos were actually on the verge of becoming semi-respectable entertainment, a hope that was again shoved behind closed doors as the home video revolution of the early Eighties radically altered the industry's modus operandi. That's the cultural bedrock that grounds this period piece, a bedrock that includes wonderful attention to the period details of set design, costuming, music, and dialogue. Yet the movie is no socio-cultural abstract; Boogie Nights at heart is the story about a group of characters and the de facto family that emerges from their relationship. A stunning ensemble of actors is essential to creating this seamless world. As Jack Horner the porn director with artistic aspirations, Reynolds turns in the smoothest and most controlled performance of his career; Wahlberg, as the story's central figure, once again proves that he's more than just a billboard underwear jockey (and this story about the transformation of busboy Eddie Adams into self-invented porn superstar Dirk Diggler is only a jockstrap removed from the Marky Mark aka Mark Walhberg saga); Moore, Macy, Graham, Cheadle, Reilly, Hoffman, Ridgely, and Molina all should be singled out for their finely etched turns but to do so would come at the expense of so many others. Paul Thomas Anderson has managed to astonish the world with his sophomore effort. His debut film (the solid and stylish modern noir twister Hard Eight) gave little notice of the attention-grabber his follow-up would become. Anderson brings the right amount of humor, observational distance, and visual discretion to subject matter that most certainly would be instead easier to deal with in a salacious and voyeuristic manner. Anderson clearly invokes numerous films by such filmmakers as Scorsese and Altman as models for his multi-charactered subculture study. And it all works nearly perfectly for the first hour or so, but then some of the one-dimensionality of the characters and the schematic nature of the narrative become more evident. Each of the characters is given one or two bits of business that they carry with them from scene to scene, from year to year, but none of them ever expands much beyond these narrow parameters. A better model for Anderson might be something like Jonathan Demme's Citizens Band, a movie that puts the emphasis on the sense of community that's formed by characters existing on society's fringes rather than the fringe characters who evolve from the previously established communities in films such as Nashville and Mean Streets. And while Boogie Nights remains refreshingly nonjudgmental about its characters, an overly simplistic moralism nevertheless governs the story's overall path: Those who reach great heights must also experience great depths and the only thing that can save these individuals is their ultimate acceptance of the supremacy of "the family." Still, most of these hesitations are fodder for post-screening rumination. Boogie Nights will keep you going 'til morn. (10/31/97)
Dobie, Gateway
D: Jim Sheridan; with Daniel Day-Lewis, Emily Watson, Ken Stott, Ciaran Fitzgerald, Brian Cox, Gerald McSorley. (R, 120 min.)
After 14 years in a British prison for aiding the IRA, former teen boxing prodigy Danny Flynn (Day-Lewis) returns to his hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland. His salad days of bus-bombing and pub-torching long past, Danny now wants only to resume his pugilistic career and open a training gym so boys in the old neighborhood will have alternatives to their dismal pastimes of shooting heroin and Protestants. He'd also like to sort a few things out with his former sweetheart, Maggie (Watson), though a full-blown reconciliation seems out of the question because she's married to a still-imprisoned IRA man. I suspect you can run with the plot summary from here. Danny's peacemaking efforts get him crosswise with the local hardliners. His and Maggie's futile efforts to hide their rekindled love from the neighbors further assure his pariahdom. Familiar stuff, this. If the Irish weren't so incredibly eloquent in bemoaning their own suicidal pathologies, sheer redundancy would doom movies like The Boxer to well-deserved extinction. Director Jim Sheridan, who has collaborated with writer Terry George on In the Name of the Father and Some Mother's Son clearly understands the weariness that inevitably consumes not only long, seemingly irresolvable conflicts but stories about them. That awareness is reflected in The Boxer's appearance, tone, and plotline. Chris Menges' cinematography is so unrelievedly gray that objects and shadows seem to blend together, along with the people who move among them. Nothing that the characters try to do pursuing a love affair, reviving a career, achieving some humble social good quite works out. All their efforts are suppressed or smothered stillborn by a climate of dull, grinding fear and hatred. Predictably, this creates a certain emotional flatness in much of the film. But thanks largely to the richly insinuative acting of Day-Lewis and Watson (the sensational actress who elevated Breaking the Waves from contrived melodrama to something sublime), we're profoundly moved by the power of Maggie and Danny's intentions and desires, if not their actions. Though the two leads share nothing more sexually overt than a brief, fully clothed kiss, their mutual passion is as "explicit" as anything that could be conveyed by hours of heaving, glycerine-spritzed buttocks. The Boxer's abrupt and surprising resolution represents a logical result of the weariness with violence which has steadily accumulated throughout Sheridan's Irish "trilogy." Sheridan and George sure can't be accused of putting too fine a point on their fight-game metaphor. Even the parrot-voiced lady who sat behind me presciently announcing each major plot turn ("My God! That car's gonna blow up!") probably grasped the dramatic equivalence of The Troubles and the tightly confined mayhem of the boxing ring. But the sense of release and renewed possibility created when tired, morally exhausted warriors as it were step out of the ring is as powerful as it is obvious. As a prominent Irish-sympathizing Brit once said, war is over if you want it. (1/9/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Highland
D: Woody Allen; with Allen, Caroline Aaron, Kirstie Alley, Bob Balaban, Richard Benjamin, Eric Bogosian, Billy Crystal, Judy Davis, Hazelle Goodman, Mariel Hemingway, Amy Irving, Julie Kavner, Eric Lloyd, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore, Elisabeth Shue, Stanley Tucci, Robin Williams. (R, 95 min.)
The Nineties haven't been a particularly good decade for Woody Allen, either artistically or personally. Game genre efforts such as Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway begat the dreadful miscalculation of Everybody Says I Love You, while the straightforward comedies and dramas yielded such homage-laden misfirings as Scenes From a Mall, Shadows and Fog, and Mighty Aphrodite. Oh, there have been sparks all throughout, especially visible in his decade-starter Crimes and Misdemeanors, the enigmatic Alice, and the almost diaristic portent of things to come, Husbands and Wives. Of his private life, we know both too much and too little. Then along comes a movie like Deconstructing Harry, which marks the writer/director/actor's return to top form, once again using the stuff of his life to create the stuff of his fiction. It's his most personally revealing movie since Stardust Memories, riddled as it is with lacerating insights and penetrating self-analysis. Harry Block, the film's protagonist (played by Allen) is bound to infuriate some viewers, though. Harry is a successful New York novelist who transforms his life experiences into thinly veiled fictional recreations, and also appropriates and distorts (without consent) the lives and intimate details of the others who share in his real-life dramas. Harry is a selfish, misogynistic, pill-popping, vindictive, hooker-addicted, foul-mouthed cur of a human being, but he's also very funny and self-aware. When Harry confesses, "I'm no good at life but at least I write well," it's impossible not to be struck by the nakedness of the remark. Deconstructing Harry also shows Allen to be in peak writing form, once again proving that he's a master craftsman of brilliant one-liners. (It's tempting to simply devote this space to a mere recitation of the film's best lines everything from the observation that two most beautiful words in the English language are "It's benign" to these thoughts on aging: "It was a lot easier waiting for Lefty than waiting for Godot.") When first we meet Harry, he has worked his way through three wives and six shrinks and, nevertheless, still wants to nail every woman he sees. He is about to be honored by the college that also once expelled him and, having no one with whom to share the occasion, he snatches his son from school (defying his custody agreement) as well as bringing along his hooker du jour. The structure of the movie dips back and forth between these current events in Harry's life and enactments of illustrative scenes from his novels played by the real characters' fictional counterparts. This creates a large and interesting cast of performers who, with a few odd exceptions, serve the story well. It also calls to mind such Allen films as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Stardust Memories but perhaps more directly such artist-in-turmoil films as Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries or Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. It's probably inevitable that Deconstructing Harry will renew the public deconstruction of Woody. It takes a brave filmmaker to throw such highly refined fuel on the fire. (opens January 2) (12/26/97)
Arbor, Dobie
D: Gregory Hoblit; with Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, Embeth Davidtz, James Gandolfini, Elias Koteas. (R, 124 min.)
Demons, angels, and Denzel. What starts off as a typical police procedural is given a fresh spin by Primal Fear director Hoblit and an excellent cast. But Fallen's pretentious vision of a demonic force out to shatter the life of one lowly homicide detective is, ultimately, a pretty silly ride despite the film's obvious strengths and some genuinely eerie scenes. Washington plays Detective John Hobbes, a cop who's purely dedicated to putting away the worst of the worst and making sure they get what's coming to them, be it a lengthy stretch in the can or a solitary trip to the gas chamber. This latter option is the fate of Reese (Koteas), a mad dog killer who has a working knowledge of ancient Aramaic and a love of Sixties pop tunes. When apparent copycat killings begin cropping up after Reese's execution, Hobbes, along with partner Jonesy (Goodman), investigates and finds a lengthy skein of evil dating back decades. With the help of theologian Gretta Milano (Davidtz), Hobbes begins to believe that he is being stalked by the demon Azazel, a malicious woodland imp with the power to pass from person to person by touch (and a love of Sixties pop tunes). The demon, we are told, is here to dismantle civilization "one person at a time," and its current target is the god-fearing and righteous Hobbes. Demon/Angel films are the next big thing, due in part, I think, to the approaching millennial swing shift, and while Fallen bears the dark, melancholy look of David Fincher's Seven, it's deep in Exorcist/Omen territory. Nicholas Kazan's script makes much of the fact that Hobbes is such a stand-up guy. There are vague mutterings of a broken marriage, and the detective currently shares his house with his mentally handicapped brother and young nephew. The guy's a veritable saint, and we're led to believe that's essentially why this particular demon has chosen to wreck his life. Kazan piles on the ecumenical dialogue like it's going out of style (once again, the Book of Revelations makes an appearance), and the film falters beneath its need to pull out all the theological stops and give Hobbes at least a modicum of skepticism. Hoblit manages to pull off some clever, chilling scenes with Azazel's preferred mode of locomotion, however. One such bit set in broad daylight on a crowded city street has the demon passing from anonymous person to person to person as a bewildered and terrified Hobbes stands in their midst. One by one, they turn and give him the old evil eye, and you can tell it's all he can do not to crack right there. It's a terrific, creepy jolt in the midst of a film that, for the most part, seems to be grinding forward with all the inexorable tedium of the millennial change. (1/16/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lakehills, Lakeline, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown
D: Dean Semler; with Howie Long, Scott Glenn, William Forsythe, Suzy Amis, Christianne Hirt, Garwin Sanford, Sebastian Spence, Michael Greyeyes. (R, 89 min.)
If nothing else, Firestorm is surely the best fire-fighting action flick of 1998. Okay, okay, it's the only fire-fighting action flick of 1998. So far. Former Los Angeles Raiders defensive lineman Howie Long plays Jesse Graves, a wilderness "smokejumper" who parachutes into raging forest fires with his crew of firefighters who set backfires and, generally, try to save as much acreage as possible. It's a tough job, made even tougher by the fact that mad-dog killer Earl Shaye (Forsythe) has started a huge wildfire to mask a prison break and is masquerading as a firefighter himself. That's pretty much all there is to Firestorm, and though I went in with low expectations, the experience isn't nearly as bad as you might think. Long, for his part, is a ruggedly handsome actor who can hit his marks and grin with the best of 'em. Maybe it's his NFL Hall of Fame standing, but Long (last seen in John Woo's Broken Arrow) exudes a kind of lightweight John Wayne charm; you get the feeling he'd be equally at home riding the range and shooting at the black hats if it wasn't for the fact that his mammoth footballer's frame might break the horse's back. As Graves' mentor and aide-de-camp, Glenn turns in a predictably (and predictable) leathery performance. Only Amis (currently batting eyes at Bill Paxton in Titanic) seems to have much range here, though even that consists mostly of playing the requisite spunky female hostage. She's easier on the eye than both Forsythe (who pulls out all the stops and sounds remarkably like Michael Wincott in The Crow) and Long, but there's really not much here for her to work with. What there is is a terrific amount of bullets, brawls, and flaming forestline. This is Semler's directorial debut; in the past, the Oscar-winning cinematographer has lensed such visually stunning films as Dances With Wolves and Waterworld as well as George Miller's The Road Warrior. Consequently, Firestorm is a visual stunner, bursting with gripping action scenes set amidst flaming houses, boats, woods, and helicopters. Despite the prosaic and all-too-familiar set-ups and payoffs, Semler gets by nicely on sheer will alone. Nobody's going to throw an Academy Award his way for this one, but Firestorm is a genial, good-natured throwback to simpler action films (i.e., no Will Smith). It's a sprawling, do-or-die, all-American yarn that owes more to John Ford than John Woo, and that's not such a bad thing at all. (1/9/98)
Great Hills, Tinseltown
D: Les Mayfield; with Robin Williams, Marcia Gay Harden, Christopher McDonald, Raymond J. Barry, Ted Levine, Wil Wheaton. (PG, 93 min.)
The odds are that the uninspired remake Flubber won't appeal very much to either of its target audiences: Disney-weaned baby boomers with fond memories of Fred MacMurray in a flying jalopy in The Absent-Minded Professor, or fidgety eight-year-olds with short attention spans who want nothing more than to be entertained every minute. As in the original movie, Flubber is about the distracted Professor Phillip Brainard, who discovers a magical substance of green goo with hyperkinetic properties and christens the stuff "Flubber" (i.e., "flying rubber"). While the Professor sees his discovery as the means for generating cash to save his near-insolvent college, there are others who want to use it for their own selfish ends. Meanwhile, a romantic rivalry brews between the Professor and a fellow colleague over the Professor's ex-fiancée, whom he left standing at the altar one too many times (he is an extremely forgetful man). Also, a flying robot contraption named Weebo, who is the Professor's personal secretary and confidant, struggles with how to tell her boss of her unrequited crush on him. With the exception of the Weebo storyline, which has its tender moments, not much else in the film sticks to the ribs. Sure, there's a bizarre computer-generated sequence of numerous Flubberites dancing the mambo to a snazzy Danny Elfman score, and the basketball game in which a Flubber-assisted team triumphs is rousing. With the exception of the handful of scenes in which the Flubber does its stuff, however, the youngsters will no doubt be bored by it all. (Even the patented, Home Alone-styled physical abuse of the film's benign bad guys flying bowling balls slamming against foreheads, and the like probably won't impress this jaded generation.) As the Professor, the remarkably restrained Williams is more cuddly than mad, though on more than one occasion, you sense that this usually manic actor is just aching to let a string of stream-of-consciousness ripostes fly. That, in fact, sums up the overall impression that this amiable but lackluster movie leaves. If only it were a little crazier, a little more willing to let loose, Flubber might be a movie truly enjoyed by the kid in us all. (11/28/97)
Barton Creek, Lakeline
D: Peter Cattaneo; with Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, Hugo Speer, Paul Barber, Steve Huison. (R, 90 min.)
Bountiful laughs and a subtle dose of consciousness-raising coexist easily in Peter Cattaneo's comedy about laid-off English steelworkers whose financial desperation leads them to form a Chippendales-knockoff strip act. The title translates roughly to "full frontal nudity," which is the hook these out-of-shape, rhythmically impaired males hope will inspire the womenfolk of Sheffield to show up for "Hot Steel"s one-night-only gig. The ringleader of the group is Gaz (Carlyle, who played the hell-raising Begbie in Trainspotting), a divorced dad looking for a quick score to pay off his delinquent child support. The way he figures it, if a bunch of arse-wiggling "poofs" can drive women into frothing ecstasy and earn 10,000 pounds in a single night, why not a virile crew of steel-driving roughnecks straight outta the mills? As it turns out, the men of Hot Steel are far from cocky about how they'll look strutting around in red silk g-strings. Pudding-bellied Dave (Addy) is insecure about his weight and afraid his recent impotency will drive his wife to another man. Horse (Barber) lacks the anatomical bounty his nickname suggests and resorts in desperation to a mail-order enlargement device. Lomper (Huison) and Guy (Speer) both have the muscular definition of Gumbys though Guy at least fills out his bikini pouch impressively. As showtime nears, their performance anxiety grows geometrically, with some threatening to bail on their comrades and all recognizing for the first time how women must feel about having their bodies casually critiqued by men. Granted, this all sounds pretty broad, but the actual effect is far more tender and affecting than you'd expect. Once you've bought into the improbable premise, the particulars of the story the ridiculous early practices (a videotape of Flashdance serves as a technical reference), their children's embarrassment, the community's amusement and titillation all develop quite plausibly. This film bears some resemblance in setting and structure to the recent Brassed Off!, but any social-protest content in Cattaneo's movie is strictly implicit. He's much more interested in illuminating individual personality quirks than the pressing economic issues of the day. These modest ambitions, along with a generally predictable story, will keep the The Full Monty from ever attaining the critical regard of other English social comedies like I'm All Right, Jack, or even My Beautiful Laundrette. But by all means, see this movie anyway, because it's a rare comedy indeed that generates such a steady flow of hilarious scenes (including one in which the lads start unconsciously twitching and undulating to Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" as they're standing in line to collect their dole) from such simple, sweet-natured premises. The Full Monty is feel-good comedy with none of the pejorative hints of innocuous blandness that term so often implies. (9/12/97)
Arbor, Lakeline, Village
D: Andrew Niccol; with Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Alan Arkin, Jude Law, Loren Dean, Gore Vidal, Ernest Borgnine, Blair Underwood, Tony Shalhoub. (PG-13, 108 min.)
A striking debut from British director Niccol, Gattaca posits a not-too-distant future in which, thanks to the wonders of modern science, a person's genetic makeup is determined before birth. No diseases, no lazy eyes, no mediocrity, just faster, stronger, smarter all across the board except for the unlucky few whose parents choose to have them via natural births. These unfortunates are the "In-valids" and their lot in this brave new world is to act as the new underclass forced to roam from dead-end job to dead-end job, picking up the refuse left behind by their more perfect brethren. Vincent Freeman (Hawke) is one such person. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a space traveler and taking one of the daily Gattaca Corporation rockets to another world, but due to a congenital heart defect, it's a dream he will likely never achieve. Still, Vincent works, exercises, and studies day in and day out, and then one day he sees his opportunity in the form of Jerome Morrow (Law), an Olympic swimmer and almost-perfect specimen who's had to forego his career due to a broken back. Jerome and Vincent trade identities, causing Jerome to contribute the necessary daily samples of his self (hair, urine, dead skin particles, fingernail clippings) to help Vincent pass the rigorous testing. And it all goes swimmingly until Vincent's boss, the Gattaca flight director, is murdered and the police descend, searching for answers in literally every corner. Led by Detective Hugo (Arkin) and the mysterious Investigator (Dean), the team even searches the dust and discovers Vincent's eyelash, which places both him and Jerome in jeopardy. As if that weren't enough, Vincent finds himself falling in love with Irene (Thurman), another Gattaca employee, albeit one with a less-than-perfect constitution. Niccol's futuristic fable is a gorgeous construct, from its cast on down to the brilliant, clinical nature of the set design that reflects a future in which even a particle of saliva can be one's undoing. The world of the future is a sleek, quietly humming, extremely well-lubricated machine, full of electric cars and black suits with white shirts. Everything is painfully well-ordered. For once, Thurman's chilly visage serves her well: She's the female future perfect, all trim lines and pursed lips. Hawke is likewise well-cast, parlaying his all-American looks to good, "normal" advantage in a world where the term is an anachronism. It's Jude Law, as the handicapped, bitter Jerome, however, who represents the heart and (broken) backbone of Gattaca. He's the damaged proof that the system does not work, and as such he's Vincent's only hope, and only real friend. For all its genre-hopping (science fiction, mystery, love story, socio-political exploration), Gattaca never gets away from itself; it's firmly rooted in Hawke's masterful humanity, making this less a sci-fi epic than a simple (and simply wonderful) lesson in humanity and the direction in which one hopes it's not heading. (10/24/97)
Dobie
D: Gus Van Sant; with Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Stellan Skarsgard, Minnie Driver. (R, 126 min.)
Will Hunting (Damon) is a "Southie" a twentysomething kid from the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of South Boston. By day he works construction with his best friend Chuckie (Affleck) and by night he works as a janitor, mopping the hallowed halls of M.I.T. When he's not doing that he's out drinking down at the local pub or engaging in the sort of street-tough shenanigans that gave Alex in A Clockwork Orange such a bad name. And when he's not doing all that, he's anonymously solving some of the toughest mathematical equations that M.I.T. professor Lambeau (Skarsgard) can pitch to his students. Will is a misplaced genius, "an Einstein," the kind of mental gymnast who comes along maybe once in a generation, if that, and when he gets nailed by the cops and stands facing some hard time, Professor Lambeau tracks down this wunderkind and packs him off to his old psychologist pal Sean McGuire (Williams), himself an ex-Southie from those same mean streets. It's here that Will opens up about his battered childhood, his mental prowess, and his seeming lack of ambition, and also where a steady war of wills begins to simmer, Southie vs. Southie. Co-written by real-life pals Affleck and Damon, Good Will Hunting is the sort of coming-of-age story that all too often bogs down in cheap, sentimental claptrap and budding-wisdom brouhahas, but Van Sant and a very, very solid cast keep the film from breaking up, at least until the final reel or so. Will's romantic interest, the pre-med Skylar (Driver) at first seems to be such a stock deus ex machina that you grit your teeth, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but Van Sant never lets it happen; she's not Will Hunting's clever, witty salvation, at least not in the classic, screen sense. That comes from William's McGuire, a crotchety, angry, seething psych professor who's trapped in the painful aftermath caused by his wife's death from cancer and his refusal to rejoin the living. He's Will's mirror image, and he knows it. It's the key to both their salvations. I've been wondering recently just who the hell Matt Damon is and why he adorns the covers of so many magazines when he's done so little film work thus far, but I have to admit, he shines in the role of Will. Will is 30% cocky bravado, 30% violent thug, and 40% bewildered mastermind, and Damon plays up a storm as he ricochets off Williams (in one of his best "serious" turns yet) and pals around with Affleck with the sort of ease you feel they share in real life. Things stumble a bit in the third act as emotional speeches flow like cheap red wine and Good Will Hunting threatens to spill over the dams of pathos, but it's never so much that Van Sant loses sight of the film's original intentions. Part character study, part redemptive drama, and all cheesy heart, it's Boston-baked melodrama, a little too gooey at times, but still pretty delicious. (12/26/97)
Arbor, Highland, Lake Creek, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Tamra Davis; with David Chappelle, Jim Breuer, Guillermo Diaz, Rachel True, Harland Williams. (R, 83 min.)
People who might benefit from judicious use of marijuana: Phil Gramm, Fiona Apple, George Steinbrenner, Faye Dunaway, former Austin City Manager Camille Barnett. People likely to have any use for the wheezy pothead humor of Half-Baked: no one I can imagine. As director Tamra Davis' reward (and, I suppose, our punishment) for the box-office success of 1995's Billy Madison, she has received another opportunity to helm a low-expectations, dead-season comedy that probably will break even if it manages to linger in theatres for two weeks. Our mission as discriminating moviegoers should be to prevent this at all costs. Otherwise, we can count on a summer glut of similar fare about lovable hemphounds whose roach-burned apartment sofas are the launching pads for drearily redundant post-Cheech & Chong adventures. Half-Baked clips through its genre paces as precisely as a rider in an Olympic equestrian routine. Three young stoner buds named Thurgood, Scarface, and Brian (Chappelle, Diaz, and Breuer, respectively) are forced to venture out of their smoke-filled lair in order to help a fourth pal, Kenny (Williams), who's in jail for accidentally killing a policeman's horse. Their scheme involves selling pharmaceutical weed stolen from the government lab where Thurgood works as a janitor. Kenny's dread of becoming a "prison bitch" creates a need for haste; stealth is necessitated by the anti-dope sentiments of Thurgood's straitlaced new girlfriend, Mary Jane (True). The humor in this movie is basically anthropological notes on doper culture and behavior: junk-food frenzies, smoking rituals and hardware, non sequitur conversation, and short-term memory loss. In other words, stuff that passed into the realm of cliché back in the time of the Johnson administration. I did laugh out loud at a brief set-piece in which Chappelle professorially categorizes classical marijuana-smoker types. These species, amusingly portrayed in cameos by Snoop Doggy Dogg, Willie Nelson, Janeane Garofalo, and others, include I Need It to Be Creative, the Scavenger Smoker, the Pot Historian, and the Enhancement Smoker ("Hey man, you ever look close at the back of a $20 bill - on weed?") There are also a few semi-amusing observational touches, such as the comatose, unnamed Guy on the Couch (Steven Wright) found at many a collegiate party house and the attachments that weedies develop to their smoking hardware in this case a fireplug-sized water pipe called Billy Bong Thornton. In general, though, Half-Baked suffers from the simple, inescapable fact that there's nothing funny or original left to say about the subject at hand. Face it, dudes: This bowl is cashed. (1/23/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Riverside, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Mikael Saloman; with Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Randy Quaid, Minnie Driver, Betty White, Edward Asner, Richard Dysart. (R, 98 min.)
I think the big question on everybody's mind is: "Will they let Christian Slater out of the slammer to attend the premiere?" It's doubtful, and come to think of it, some of the scenes here Slater in a jail cell, Slater being pursued by angry cops probably strike a little too close to home anyway. To top it all off, the film is utterly forgettable, the kind of cheesy action-flick pabulum that sounds like a great idea during the pitch meeting, but plays like a soggy slice of Wonder Bread with a dead rat garnish once it hits the local multiplex. Slater plays Tom, an armored-car driver who, along with his crotchety uncle Charlie (Asner), is waylaid by a band of thieves (led by an out-of-place Freeman) eager to get their hands on the $3 million the pair are delivering. To add insult to injury, all this is occurring during a torrential flood. When Charlie is shot during the ensuing melee, Tom takes the money, hides it in a nearby cemetery, and promptly gets himself arrested by the local sheriff (Quaid), who thinks that Tom made off with the cash. There's also Minnie Driver as local girl (and Tom's love interest) Karen, and a handful of assorted other characters, but the basic crux here is Tom's battle between Freeman's gang and Quaid's money-hungry sheriff. And, of course, all that water. Director Saloman is no stranger to the wet stuff, having lensed James Cameron's The Abyss, but this misplaced summer blockbuster is so tired and formulaic that not even his considerable directing and cinematography skills can drag it above the shoreline. Slater, who lost it for me around the time of 1992's insipid Kuffs, is a cardboard cutout of an action star, reduced to simple action-reaction shots and far too much tearing about on a motorboat down the flooded small-town streets. Likewise Freeman, who appears to be taking some time off from his acting in order to get in shape by swimming a few laps, and Driver, well, I suspect she's just here for scenery. Hard Rain has been languishing on the shelf for some time, actually originally much more wittily titled The Flood, it's hopefully the final nail in the recent action-adventure-disaster tsunami that began (again these things are cyclical, like locusts) with last year's spate of volcano flicks and should end right after the entire planet is obliterated in either one of the upcoming comet films: Armageddon or Deep Impact. "Hopefully" is the key word here, since the grand master of human cinematic travail, Irwin Allen, is no longer with us, and things are getting a little seedy, disaster-wise. (1/16/98)
Gateway, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Quentin Tarantino; with Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Robert De Niro, Chris Tucker, Sid Haig, Denise Crosby. (R, 154 min.)
Apparently, it's Quentin Tarantino's mission in life to rescue long-forgotten actors good ones, that is from the dust heaps of cinema history. He single-handedly restored John Travolta's good name in Pulp Fiction, and now it looks as though he's doing the same for the queen of Seventies blaxploitation films, Pam Grier (Foxy Brown, Coffy) as well as Robert Forster (who, like it or not, I'll always remember from the Lewis Teague/John Sayles shocker Alligator). And Sid Haig (Spider Baby). And Denise Crosby (Star Trek The Next Generation/Playboy magazine). Nice work if you can get it. Based on Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, this is a far cry from the auteur's two previous films; it's practically sedate compared with the blazing mayhem of Pulp, and it has few of the lengthy, witty patches of mano a mano dialogue found in Reservoir Dogs. Instead, it's a straight-ahead caper flick, very cool, and very, very Seventies (although it takes place in 1995), from production and costume design on down to the soundtrack. Grier plays Jackie Brown, a flight attendant for one of the lower-echelon airlines who has a sideline laundering money for arms dealer Ordell Robbie (Jackson). When a zealous ATF agent (Keaton) pops her while she's carrying a bag of cocaine as well, she's sets herself up to play the players off one another. With the help of lovesick bail bondsman Max Cherry (Forster), Jackie sets up not only Ordell, but also his buddy Louis (De Niro, hilariously stoned throughout) and Ordell's pet beach bunny Melanie (Fonda) in a letter-perfect scam that's as ingenious as it is risky. That's the plot in a nutshell, but Tarantino is having so much fun playing fast and loose with Seventies genre conventions that the film plays more like one of his beloved retro-board games than a standard QT film. For one thing, there's precious little gunfire here (though what there is of it is downright deafening my ears were ringing for almost an hour afterward). Instead of firefights, Tarantino relies on various aspects of the old bait-and-switch school of heist films, keeping the story rolling along at such a leisurely pace that at times it seems both his most assured film thus far and not a Tarantino movie at all. The casting, however, is vintage QT: Both Grier and especially Forster are spot-on in their roles, trading sexy stares and duplicitous grins every other frame, while Jackson proves once again just how commanding a screen presence he is and Keaton comes out of nowhere with his slyest, coolest turn since he donned Batman's dark cowl. Anyone expecting Pulp Fiction redux or even a new litter of Reservoir Dogs is in for a surprise. Totally different in style and tact from both of those films, Jackie Brown is nonetheless one cool ride. And De Niro makes an even better stoner than Brad Pitt did in True Romance, to boot. (12/26/97)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Tinseltown
D: Martin Scorsese; with Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, Tencho Gyalpo, Tenzin, Topjar, Robert Lin. (PG-13, 135 min.)
I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that I had seen Kundun and after a brief silence to register the odd title, her response was, "Oh no, not another damn Tibet movie!" Well, yes, actually. Another damn Tibet movie. This being Martin Scorsese's take on the whole mess, however, should automatically put the whole affair head-and-shoulders above the recent Brad Pitt vehicle, Seven Years in Tibet, and any number of Richard Gere's anti-Chinese government campaigns. And it does, to a degree. Kundun is a magical film, bursting with unforgettable images and a color palette so heavily drenched in golds and reds that after it's over you feel as though you've just emerged from some riotously colored fever dream. Unfortunately, that's about all you feel. The film traces the life of the 14th Dalai Lama, beginning in 1937 when he was officially "discovered" as the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion at the age of two, to his Chinese-imposed exile from his mountain home in 1959 by Chairman Mao. Much happens along the way, but you may be hard-pressed to recall exactly what: For a film focusing on such a rich emotional tapestry, Kundun is strangely lacking in its emotional core. This may have something to do with the non-traditional cast with whom Scorsese has chosen to work; the film includes no "name" actors, and instead uses an all-Tibetan cast, many of whom had no previous acting experience. There are few distinct connections between the players here, and whether or not that is an accurate representation of how the Dalai Lama's interpersonal relationships worked in reality is anyone's guess. The whole of the film seems dreamlike and unfettered by so many of the simple familial emotions you'd expect in a film that traces, essentially, a character's entire life. The film is a marvel of technique, however (what Scorsese film isn't?). Director of photography Roger Deakins is a longtime member of the Coen Brothers' crew (Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, Barton Fink) and he drapes the scenes in gobs of arresting visual splendor. It's truly the most golden-tinged film I've ever seen (even more so than The Last Emperor) and, as such, tends to look more than a little bit like some hallowed breakfast cereal advertisement from time to time. I doubt that was what cast and crew had in mind, however. It's difficult to imagine Scorsese's work seeming as emotionally stunted as this pretty images with no scaffolding behind them but perhaps the otherworldly aspects of shooting on location caught him off guard and blinded him with beatific beauty. Not unlike Kundun. (1/16/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Tinseltown
D: Curtis Hanson; with Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito. (R, 138 min.)
Kudos to director Curtis Hanson and co-screenwriter Brian Helgeland for whipping James Ellroy's seminal novel of 1950s Los Angeles police corruption and noir sexuality into recognizable shape for this distinguished film adaptation. Ellroy's original manuscript fell under the heading of "epic." With over 100 distinct characters and nearly that many plot twists, it was long considered unfilmable and it languished in development hell for years, nevertheless remaining one of the hottest unproduced properties around. Now it's here, finally, and well worth the wait. Spacey plays a smooth-talking LAPD detective named Vincennes, who moonlights as technical adviser on a high-rated TV cop show; as such, he's looked up to by the regular Joes on the beat, although some police officers resent his penchant for working celebrity busts alongside Sid Hudgens (DeVito), the smarmy editor of Hush-Hush magazine, a seamy Hollywood scandal sheet. Together with the straitlaced, rising LAPD star Ed Exley (Pearce) and the violent, emotionally confused detective Bud White (Crowe), Vincennes falls prey to a series of internal police scandals revolving around a recent massacre at the aptly named Night Owl Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard. As the body count mounts and the internal affairs intrigue spirals out of control, this trio of good cops/bad cops furiously works to cover its collective ass before the perilous house of cards that is the 1950s LAPD collapses atop them. You come away from the film with the distinct feeling that it should have been shot in high-contrast black-and-white; echoes of classic film noir crop up in almost every scene, but cinematographer Dante Spinotti's (Heat, Last of the Mohicans) lush colors and steamy atmosphere more than make up for that. Like the best dirty cop procedurals of the past, L.A. Confidential chugs along like an approaching thunderstorm, ratcheting up the dirty dealings and hazy suspense at an alarming rate until the final, hideous confrontation. Just when it seems things can't possibly get any worse for the fallen angels in blue, things do, and the film jacks itself up to another brutal level. Full of period locations, costumes, and one very clever Lana Turner gag, it's easy to see why Ellroy is so pleased with the film. It's tough enough adapting run-of-the-mill Michael Crichton books to the screen with a sprawling tome like Ellroy's, results such as Hanson's are downright miracles. (9/19/97)
Dobie, Westgate
D: Gore Verbinski; with Nathan Lane, Lee Evans, Christopher Walken, Maury Chaykin, Eric Christmas, Annabelle Gurwitch, William Hickey, Michael Jeter, Vicki Lewis. (PG, 98 min.)
It's interesting that this dark and energetic autobahn of a comedy from DreamWorks SKG (the K is for Jeffrey "I Used to Run Disney" Katzenberg) has at its center an evil mouse evil mice never having been Disney's forte (in fact it only took writer Harlan Ellison one mis-timed crack about Mickey to get him permanently banned from the studio some years ago). Mouse Hunt's rodent isn't evil in a bad way, mind you, just with a touch of malice aforethought. When you get right down to it, this is actually Home Alone with a rodent in place of Macaulay Culkin, which does little for Culkin's already ratty rep since Mouse Hunt is head and tiny ears above anything John Hughes has ever churned out. Lane and Evans play Ernie and Lars Smuntz, siblings who inherit a dilapidated (and improbably valuable) mansion when their father (William Hickey in his last screen role) passes away. Dear old dad also leaves them in charge of his once-great string factory, which quickly becomes a financial burden. In hopes of selling off the house, they set about renovating it only to discover its lone occupant The Mouse enjoys things status quo. What follows is some of the most inventive, wanton, hilarious slapstick, pratfalls, and all-around mayhem I've seen in a long, long time. Land and Evans bounce off each other with visible comic glee. They're obviously strip-mining territory first plundered by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (at one point, a flustered Lane gives a pair of buxom beauties the old necktie waggle), but Mouse Hunt is so spastically inventive that it's more of a homage than outright theft. Walken makes a rare comedy appearance as the deranged exterminator Caesar, who quickly finds there is no such thing as a better mousetrap, while Lewis is nicely rapacious as Lars' gold-digging wife April. The real stars of Mouse Hunt, though, are the animatronic and computer-generated mouse effects by Stan Winston and Rhythm & Hues, respectively. There's a real rodent in there somewhere, but the effects are blended so seamlessly (along with a dangerous feline, the aptly named Catzilla) that the little furball takes on a life of his own. Kudos also to Linda DeScenna's (Blade Runner) wonderfully dreary, Forties-period production design, which makes everything here look as though it hadn't been dusted since the turn of the century. Kids and adults both will howl at Lane and Evans' Rube Goldberg-esque shenanigans, as they struggle to keep dignity in the face of encroaching mousy malfeasance (though some brief, bawdy humor may soar right over Junior's head). Absolutely one-hundred-percent ridiculous, this is comedy of a higher order, and more maniacally inspired than almost anything released in years. (12/19/97)
Gateway, Lakeline, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Stanley Tong; with Leslie Nielsen, Kelly Lynch, Ernie Hudson, Stephen Tobolowsky, Nick Chinlund, Malcolm McDowell, Miguel Ferrer. (PG, 87 min.)
I know I'll go to heaven when I die because I've already been to Mr. Magoo. From the director of Jackie Chan's Supercop and Rumble in the Bronx comes this disastrously bad live-action version of the not-very-revered Sixties cartoon. Nielsen once again mugs it up badly as Quincy Magoo, the perpetually befuddled socialite-cum-myopic bumbler. The plot has Magoo being pursued by jewel thief Luann (Lynch) and FBI agent Gus (Hudson) after the millionaire (accompanied by his chunky bulldog Angus) accidentally walks off with a priceless gem from a botched museum heist. Really, all I could think about was how the stars of Wagon Train, Drugstore Cowboy, and A Clockwork Orange have fallen so far that they're stuck in Grade Z pabulum like this. Ostensibly a collection of vintage slapstick gags (Magoo narrowly avoiding falling off a boat, a building, a car, ad nauseam), the problem here is that Nielsen does little else to flesh out the cartoon character. His leaden impersonation of the late, great Jim Backus (who supplied Magoo's voice in those old cartoons) is resoundingly, gratingly awful, and his prosthetic, balding noggin makes him look more like a post-op Elephant Man than a wealthy charmer. What an actress as talented as Lynch is doing here is a mystery to rival the Sphinx. As the thieving Luanne, she looks harried, nervous, and more than a little concerned about the state of her acting career and rightfully so. Tong's "everything and the kitchen sink" style of direction works well in the spastic, frantically paced world of Jackie Chan, but here it seems more panicked than anything else, leaving Nielsen to spin idly in the wind and totter on the edge of whatever precipice he runs into. It's a disastrous mix, and one that's only compounded by the dreadfully boring jewel-theft plotline. The script gives Nielsen and the others precious few verbal barbs (one has to think that this is because the original Magoo character did little except mistake parrots for telephones and the like), and after a while all the shameless mugging begins making you feel listless, tired, and more than a little annoyed that you were conned into Chez Magoo in the first place. It's a mess best left to the nitrate ashes of forgotten film and television history. (12/26/97)
Tinseltown
D: Wes Craven; with Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jamie Kennedy, Laurie Metcalf, Elise Neal, Jerry O'Connell, Jada Pinkett, Liev Schreiber, Lewis Arquette. (R, 120 min.)
Has it only been one year since director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson reintroduced the joys of the slasher film to the American moviegoing public? It has, but it may feel like longer, thanks to this fall's tide-me-over Williamson-directed shocker I Know What You Did Last Summer. In Williamson's Scream 2 script, the concept of the sequel takes a beating as in the original his characters and their dialogue are witty and almost overly hip to the conventions of the slasher genre. Here's Pinkett speechifying on the role of minorities in horror films (there aren't any), here's Kennedy listing The Rules that sequels must abide by (more gore, more bodies), here's
you get the picture. This gleeful willingness to play with the obvious conventions is what gave the original its wild pop-culture kick, and both Craven and Williamson wisely stick to the tried-and-true formula in the sequel, the only hitch being that since this is a sequel it's bound to fall prey to some of the snags the characters are so earnestly discussing, and it does. Despite Williamson's knowing turnabout on the whole sequel issue, Scream 2 lacks the visceral, punchy feeling of realization the first film engendered in its audience. No longer are these wisecracks as fresh as they once were; once again, there's more than enough material in here for several film-school theses on self-reflexive, cutting-edge filmmaking. The joke is the joke, only this time out it's a tad more obvious. Scream 2 reunites the surviving cast members of the first film, places them in a collegiate situation, and then lets a copycat serial killer loose in their midst. It's one of the film's strong points that once again, there's absolutely no telling who the killer might be until the final, bloody scene. Williamson is one of the best scenarists in the business, and he keeps his dialogue crisp and rolling (one of his favorite tricks here and one of the funniest is his penchant for having one character's comments blur over into "our" reality; for example, Gellar's character is at one point overheard discussing the latest episode of Party of Five, which, of course, stars her Scream 2 co-star Campbell). Likewise, Craven's take-no-prisoners direction; it's tightly edited, riveting, and giddily showy. A scene during which two characters are depicted on opposite sides of a soundproofed, glassed-in engineer's booth is ecstatically disturbing, and Scream 2's film-within-a-film (the aptly-titled Stab, featuring Heather Graham and Tori Spelling) is sublimely ridiculous. It's one of the better sequels to come out in years, and although it doesn't pack the emotional wallop of the first film, it's still head and shoulders (and punctured eyeballs) above most of what's out there. (12/19/97)
Gateway, Highland, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Kirby Dick. (Not Rated, 90 min.)
The funniest, most genuinely life-affirming movie in town right now isn't the one with Robin Williams in it. It's the one with the dying, masochistic performance artist who lives with a dominatrix and amuses himself by hammering nails through his dick. The subject is Bob Flanagan who, before dying two years ago at the age of 42, was the longest-surviving victim of cystic fibrosis on record. This congenitally transmitted disease kills by filling the lungs with heavy fluid, basically drowning people in their own mucus. The pain of CF is excruciating, and each sufferer tends to develop personal strategies for dealing with it. For Flanagan, the solution was to defiantly raise nature's ante by subjecting himself to agonies greater than anything his illness could dish out. (Steel yourself beforehand for all manner of ghastly, though oddly matter-of-fact shots of Bob getting flogged, drinking urine, hanging weights from his scrotum and having tangerine-sized ball bearings shoved up his rectum.) As Flanagan's dad observes in an interview, "He must've been trying to tell God, I'll show you!'" Flanagan also, at the urging of his longtime dominatrix-lover Sheree Rose, turned his unfathomable desires into art highlighted by live multimedia enactions of his favorite S&M capers. Flanagan's impish, endearing wit is surely the greatest surprise this utterly unique documentary has to offer. With a giddily irreverent style that echoes not only Lenny Bruce but other Sixties humorists such as Tom Lehrer and Paul Krassner, he serves up a manic blend of song parodies (including "Forever Lung," sung in a pretty serviceable imitation of Bob Dylan's adenoidal croak), hilarious memoirs of his furtive boyhood experiments in kink and droll, japes at his conservative antagonists ("They want me to cease and desist, and rest assured, I will but not yet.") Kirby Dick, who was personally approved for this project by Rose, also focuses closely on the touching sweetness and intimacy of the pair's 15-year relationship. If you aren't utterly repelled by the perversity of what you're seeing, you may find yourself charmed by the almost motherly tenderness with which Rose takes a razor blade to her lover's chest or chokes him with the sash of her bathrobe. A more troubling issue for some may actually be the graphic manner in which Flanagan's eventual decline and death are portrayed. Even when a life is voluntarily laid so bare in the name of art, it's hard not to feel an affront to some principle higher or deeper than mere individual privacy. But let me emphasize that this isn't a case of some talentless would-be provocateur finding artistic validation in his audiences' heaving stomachs. The driving forces behind Dick's courageous, defiantly candid film are curiosity about all things human and a desire to explain the seemingly inexplicable. And, perhaps even more, a touching belief in the power of art to defy even death and to find transcendent meaning in any pain or loss. (1/16/98)
Dobie
D: Bob Spiers; with the Spice Girls, Richard E. Grant, George Wendt, Mark McKinney, Claire Rushbrook, Richard O'Brien, Roger Moore, Barry Humphries, Meat Loaf. (PG, 93 min.)
"How bad is it?" "Imagine as bad as it could possibly be...." "Yes?" "It's much worse than that." Believe it or not, that's actual dialogue from Spice World, the first (and almost certainly the last) cinematic volley from the British femme-pop, girl power quintet. Bad as it may be, though, the film falls that one precious inch shy of being quite so awful that it achieves cult status; in short, it's just not bad enough to be any good. Essentially a reworking of The Beatles A Hard Day's Night, Spice World follows the antics and battles of the band's five members Sporty, Scary, Baby, Posh, and Ginger as they prepare for their first-ever live concert at St. Albert's Hall. Along the way, they poke fun at the media, themselves, the recording industry, themselves, filmmaking in general, and, of course, themselves. Cheeky monkeys that they are, the Spice Girls are one of the most self-aware groups to come down the pike in some time. It's obvious right off the bat that they know they're already on minute 14.9 of Warhol's Stopwatch o' Fame, and the inevitable Spice backlash (which actually began in the real world about six months ago) is ably parodied in the film, with the girls going up against a vile Fleet Street news magnate (Humphries) and his scheming paparazzo Damien (O'Brien, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the upcoming Dark City). They also have to deal with a bumbling documentary film crew shooting their exploits and a Hollywood screenwriter (McKinney) and his producer (Wendt) eager to turn their story into a blockbuster movie. Meanwhile, their road manager Cifford (Grant) is desperately trying to keep the wayward girls in line and get them to St. Albert's on time. Oh, and they manage to deliver a friend's baby, as well ("Now that's girl power!" they quip. Slap forehead/groan.) Amidst all the bad puns (of which there are many) and sublime philosophical rants (of which there are few) runs a steady stream of celebrity cameos, the spotting of which may be the most enjoyable part of the experience for many. Everyone from Bob Hoskins to Jools Holland and John Cleese to Elvis Costello (playing the waiter from Alex Cox's Straight to Hell, it seems) wanders in and out of the film. Unfortunately, longtime BBC director Spiers (Absolutely Fabulous) can't seem to build up either any suspense or genuine hilarity along the way, making this one of the weaker semi-mockumentaries in a while. Honestly, if it weren't for a) Posh Spice's dazzling cheekbones and b) the eternal mystery of why we never get to see Sporty's legs (a rash? botched prison tattoos? what?), there wouldn't be much here to hold the interest of anyone other than Princes William and Harry. (1/23/98)
Great Hills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Manny Coto; with Joseph Mazzello, Richard Gilliland, Corrine Bohrer, Joey Simmrin, Ashlee Levitch, Lauren Eckstrom. (PG, 97 min.)
Joseph Mazzello, an uncommonly good young actor (Jurassic Park, The River Wild), stars in this pre-adolescent male sci-fi fantasy about a seventh-grader who hops inside a big robotic Cybersuit and saves the planet from intergalactic aggressors called the Broodwarriors. Better than it has to be, but not nearly good enough to have much broad appeal (and I mean that in every sense), Star Kid combines the basics of kid melodrama (bullied, shy, new kid in school and fifth wheel at home) and video-game aesthetics. Mazzello plays Spencer, a kid whose mom died not too long ago and whose dad (Gilliland) is wrapped up in his job, whose sister (Levitch) refers to him as "the fungus" and whose arch-enemy is a schoolyard bully named Turbo (Simmrin). While forlornly looking out his bedroom window one night, Spencer spies a meteor crashing into a nearby junkyard. When he goes to explore, he discovers a seven-foot-tall robot prototype named Cybersuit (nicknamed "Cy") who's looking for a human host. Spencer jumps in and has great fun vanquishing his own bullies until it comes time to take on Cy's mortal enemies, the Broodwarriors. Cy is an appealing invention: part heartwarming creature with expressive, Indiglo-blue saucer eyes and part comic-book cyborg. Star Kid is most engaging in its presentation of Spencer's point of view. While Spencer is locked inside the Cybersuit, we witness conversations from Spencer's perspective: In other words, he speaks to Cy's inner skull. Also, good fun is had as Spencer tries to explain to Cy such concepts as jokes and slang (When Spencer utters "cool," Cy responds by turning down the temperature in the Cybersuit). The requisite kids' film bathroom humor is satisfied by having Spencer figure out how to urinate from within the suit. Despite the film's dramatic satisfactions, Star Kid is a big bust on the action front. Fight scenes are tediously staged and excessively long. Producer Jennie Lew Tugend (who produced all three Free Willy epics) seems to be making a bid to establish a new family film franchise with Star Kid. Who knows? It could turn out to be Mazzello's college fund. (1/16/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Tinseltown
D: Atom Egoyan; with Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Tom McCamus, Gabrielle Rose, Arsinée Khanjian, Alberta Watson, Maury Chaykin, Brooke Johnson, Earl Pastko. (R, 110 min.)
In the course of life, horrible, tragic events sometimes occur. We all know this to be a fact of life, yet this knowledge doesn't make our acceptance of the truth any easier to bear. Human beings seek reasons and culprits and causes in order to make sense of our tragedies and restore reason to those who have entered the land of the unthinkable. Few people understand this better than attorney Mitchell Stephens (impeccably played by Ian Holm), who arrives in a small rural community in British Columbia that has just experienced a gut-wrenching disaster in which 14 children perish and many others become injured when their schoolbus inexplicably crashes into a frozen lake. Promising compensation and retribution to the grief-stricken parents if they allow him to represent them in a class-action suit, one might easily mistake Stephens for little more than a well-oiled opportunist, yet he understands their agony all too well. He struggles to make his peace with another kind of bereavement, a living death, in which his daughter has been lost to drug addiction. The Sweet Hereafter fashions a rich, haunting tale from this anguish, a tale whose exquisite illumination transcends the mournful details of its storyline. Adapted by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan from the acclaimed novel by Russell Banks, the film represents a career breakthrough for the director. Up until now, Egoyan has enjoyed a reputation as a top-flight arthouse writer-director whose singularity of vision in such films as Exotica, Speaking Parts, and The Adjuster has also fostered a sense of his works as being somewhat remote and hermetic. With The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan, for the first time, adapts someone else's source material and even though he brings much to the story that is clearly his own (which results in a decidedly "Egoyan film"), it's still a story that manages to touch a more universal nerve. As Mitchell Stephens goes from home to home, we, along with him, gradually piece together a patchwork of understanding from the details of ordinary lives. Egoyan layers the story of the Pied Piper into the film, a resonant analogy that was not in the book. He also discovers beautifully cinematic storytelling devices such as the way the story of the disaster is told by means of a fractured temporal structure and also the brilliantly unsettling carwash sequence that opens the movie. The performances are all subtle jewels as well; each actor carves out a fresh and unique character. I can think of no other movie that has dared to analyze grief and its aftermath with such naked honesty and precision, a film whose here and now so totally rebukes the notion of a sweet hereafter. With a clarity of purpose and vision, Egoyan casts his line as though he were an ice fisherman determined to plumb the unyielding surface fissures to find some life that bites back from the underside of the cold, impenetrable Canadian frost. (1/9/98)
Arbor
D: James Cameron; with Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, David Warner, Bill Paxton. (PG-13, 197 min.)
Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic, if you haven't heard yet. The costliest film ever made is also one of the best, unlike the second costliest, Kevin Costner's ill-fated Waterworld (and just what is it with aquatic overexpenditures these days, anyway?). Reams have already been written on James Cameron's wild cost overruns, so I'll spare you that and say right off that every penny spent is up there on the screen. Like the doomed vessel from which it takes its tale, Cameron's film is a behemoth, svelte, streamlined, and not the least bit ponderous, even with its lengthy three-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time (the film is practically as long as the sinking of the Titanic itself). DiCaprio is charmingly rakish in the role of lower-class scoundrel-cum-artist Jack Dawson, who wins his way onboard the HMS Titanic during a card game moments before the ship sets sail on its maiden and funeral voyage from England to New York City. Once onboard, he meets Rose DeWitt Bukater (Winslet), a 17-year-old first-class passenger, who is engaged to the wealthy, utterly pompous Cal Hockley (Zane). In short order, Rose and Jack fall in love, he sketches her in the altogether, and Cal, predictably, grits his teeth and scowls meaningfully. Just over halfway into the film, the oceanliner grazes the fatal iceberg that will, 80 minutes later, send it plunging into the icy depths. It's a matter of historical record that 1,500 passengers perished that night due, in no small part, to the fact that there were less than half the necessary lifeboats on board. Cameron, who is inarguably the greatest living action director working today, milks this for all it's worth and does a splendid job, cutting between Rose and Jack's ill-timed romance and the fate of the ship in general. His crosscutting between those two stories and several other, minor subplots is the stuff film courses are made of. At his core though, Cameron, for all his Terminators and True Lies, is a savagely sentimental romantic, and it's this interplay between the lovestruck steerage lad and the first-class dream girl that fires everything else about the film, including the modern-day wraparound that features Cameron favorite Bill Paxton as a salvage engineer intent on plundering the Titanic's silted corpse. I've always had trouble getting past DiCaprio's spirited self he seems unable to fully vanish into any role other than that of himself, though he comes very, very close under Cameron's iron thumb. Winslet, on the other hand, is so perfectly cast that it's as though she's a brand new face, and not the Hollywood superstar she's currently becoming. The two of them play wonderfully off of each other, as do the host of lesser players (notably David Warner as Cal's conniving valet and Bernard Hill as the ship's captain), resulting in a monster of a film in which, for once, the astonishing special effects are overshadowed by the characters onscreen. Just barely, though. Cameron's dialogue has never been as good as his direction, which makes for a few stilted clunkers along the way, but the unstoppable flurry of Action! Romance! Etcetera! sweeps them away like so much driftwood. It's obvious this is Cameron's bid for historical relevance, and though it may fall short of the Lawrence of Arabia mark he was aiming for, it's still by far and away a grand, gorgeous, breathtaking spectacle. (12/19/97)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Roundrock, Tinseltown
D: Roger Spottiswoode; with Pierce Brosnan, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Pryce, Teri Hatcher, Judi Dench, Desmond Llewelyn. (PG-13, 119 min.)
Spottiswoode, current altar boy for the revered 007 movie franchise, has boldly gambled on saving the redundancy-mired series by reinventing one of its most sacred elements: the Bond Girl. Michelle Yeoh, familiar to Hong Kong movie fans as the diminutive, razor-wire action goddess from the Heroic Trio and Police Story series, is radically unlike any of the pillowy vinyl love dolls who've preceded her in this role. But goodgodalmighty is she a welcome change! As Chinese Col. Wai Lin, Bond's uneasy collaborator in his latest world-saving adventure, she becomes what none of his other female costars have been: a true sidekick and rival, not just a receptacle for his gin- and vermouth-infused bodily fluids. Bond (Brosnan) hooks up with Wai while pursuing a power-mad media baron named Elliot Carver (Pryce) who's trying to start a war between China and the Western alliance. Using his foreknowledge of the events, Carver (a chimerical blend of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates) plans to dominate the breaking story with his worldwide satellite news network. That's right; in our post-Cold War era, "the media" is now a global menace beside which the supervillains of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. are lowly bush leaguers. Before Yeoh's arrival on the scene, Tomorrow cruises on languid autopilot, breezing past the inevitable touchstones of exotic opening titles, socko action intro, Q's new gadgets, etc. It's far from unenjoyable, but the dank shroud of the overfamiliar lies heavy over all, kind of like watching an Elvis concert circa 1976. Brosnan, visually perfect as he is for the role, can't break through the gathering ennui alone. Though he's able to register a few emotions previous Bonds couldn't or wouldn't (boyish glee for one), he lacks a certain vital spark. He's just a bit too debonair, I guess I'm saying. Almost as troubling and this is said in total deference to the virility of spy cinema's ultimate mack daddy character he sometimes runs like a girl in those slick-soled Italian shoes of his. Yeoh changes the whole dynamic, though. With her electrifying physicality, no-bull persona, and athletic eroticism (a fully clothed shower scene after one long chase scene is one of the sexiest moments in any Bond movie), she adds a hot gush of estrogen energy to every frame she's in. Her presence opens new stylistic vistas for Spottiswoode, who stages some gonzo action dustups that Ringo Lam or Stanley Tong might appreciate. Best of all, even pretty boy Brosnan looks and behaves like a different man around her. By the end of the film, he's flailing around, caked in sweat and blood with his hairy pecs bristling from a ripped shirt. Spent shells are flying from his machine gun, blood squibs are erupting in crimson symphony and a sort of idiot action bliss suffuses everything. And when he and Yeoh (yes, it's pronounced yow) finally exchange the traditional end-credits kiss, you may even find yourself actively looking forward to the next installment in this revitalized series. (12/19/97)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Tinseltown
D: Barry Levinson; Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Anne Heche, Denis Leary, Willie Nelson, Andrea Martin, Kirsten Dunst, Woody Harrelson, William H. Macy, Craig T. Nelson, Pops Staples. (R, 105 min.)
Sharp scripting, note-perfect performances, and nimble direction and technical execution combine to make Wag the Dog one of the wittiest and most mordant political satires to come along in quite some time. This quickly shot, relatively small-budget (considering the fact that it features two of the world's top movie actors) film is a cynic's delight, a trenchant and timely social comedy that frequently recalls the best of Dr. Strangelove. It takes as its premise the modern-day bastardization of politics, show business, and the media, which have all merged into one indistinguishable generator of news events and photo ops. Wag the Dog's unholy alliance begins when the United States president, 11 days before he's up for re-election, is accused of making improper advances to a young Firefly girl during her tour the White House. In no time flat, his opponent hits the airwaves with political ads that trumpet the song, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." A fretful presidential assistant, Winifred Ames (Heche), calls professional political fixer Conrad Brean (De Niro) to a summit deep in the bowels of the Washington power center, whereupon Mr. Fixit decides that what the situation requires is the distraction of a good-old-fashioned war effort. Not a real war necessarily, just the appearance of one. Off to California go the odd couple of the prim and uptight Ames and the detached and rumpled Brean to enlist the help of top Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman), a vain Tinseltown caricature who's thrilled to have his talents appreciated at last. Things escalate from there as Motss calls in his arsenal of image wranglers who include a songwriter played by Willie Nelson to pen a "spontaneous" We Are the World"-type anthem, the advertising Fad King (Leary), and a whole studio full of computer-generated video effects that are capable of fabricating a war in Albania from the reality of a girl holding a Tostitos bag in Burbank. Everyone involved in this production is in peak form. Hoffman and De Niro both turn in some of their best work in ages, once again playing off Motss' vanity and need for recognition against Brean's shadow-skulking self-effacement, all the while each of them appreciating the other as consummate professionals. Heche holds her own in the presence of such notable company, and Harrelson is utterly hilarious as an eleventh-hour loose cannon. A plotline that involves a suspicious government agent played by William H. Macy sputters without much focus but events move along at a rapid enough clip that the duff moments barely have time to register. The script was adapted from Larry Beinhart's novel American Hero by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet. As a cautionary tale, Wag the Dog may find itself somewhat in the position of preaching to the converted, but the pews will radiate with the sounds of laughter. (1/9/98)
Arbor, Highland, Lake Creek, Roundrock, Tinseltown, Westgate
D: Iain Softley; with Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache, Alison Elliott, Charlotte Rampling, Elizabeth McGovern, Michael Gambon. (R, 103 min.)
The Wings of the Dove is yet another in a long line of recent films that seem as though they should carry the Merchant/Ivory banner, but don't. Is this the inevitable backlash against Joel Schumacher and Batmans I-V? I like to think so, but I suppose it doesn't matter. Any film without a gun in the first act is a rarity along the lines of tasty government cheese; we should be thankful. Adapted from Henry James' 1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove is one of those stories that gets tagged with the annoying label of "timeless." Nonsense the only reason James is being brought to the screen so frantically of late (Washington Square, et al.) is that the national supply of Jane Austen is running thin, and we have to have something without Bruce Willis up there. James' tale follows the apparently doomed love of Kate Croy (Bonham Carter), society matron-to-be, and ne'er-do-well journalist Merton Densher (Roache). It's turn-of-the-century London, and proper young ladies don't go about consorting with such lesser creatures as writers. Though Kate will have none of it, her stern and exceedingly wealthy Aunt Maude will have none of it either, and expressly forbids the nascent relationship to go a single step further. Never underestimate the wiliness of young girls in love. At a society ball hosted by her aunt, Kate meets American heiress Millie Theale (Elliott), who has encamped in London while waiting to die from some dreadful and unnamed illness. In Millie, Kate sees everything she desires to be: wealthy, yes, but also spontaneous, loving, and ribald. When the beautifully peaked Millie takes a shine to Merton, Kate and her beau hatch a plan that, essentially, allows the dying American to fall in love with Merton and possibly vice versa in the hopes of securing a place in her sizable will and therefore breaking free of the constraints of Aunt Maude. It seems a perfectly horrible plan at first glance, but Millie give intimations that she knows what's going on all along. She just wants one last true love before the grave, and to hell with how it comes about. Director Softley is a master stylist; from the popcorn techno-thrills of Hackers to his freshmen take on the Beatles in Backbeat, he's among the best when it comes to creating whole worlds out of thin celluloid, and The Wings of the Dove is no different. Achingly gorgeous in almost all respects, the film soars in its period depiction of turn-of-the-century London (and later in Venice, as well), from costuming to cinematography on down. Carter, Roache, and especially Elliott give their all, and though the feisty, feminist Kate may seem a purely modern creation, it's James' all the way. Condensing a 500-page novel into a two-hour span tends to result in some things being left out, and occasionally Softley's film feels rushed. There are questions left hanging that never quite get resolved to anyone's satisfaction, but the director and cast almost manage to override them with the sheer beauty on the screen (not to mention a particularly un-Jamesian nude scene toward the end. It's not quite Howards End, but then neither is it Clueless, and for that I'm thankful. (11/21/97)
Village
DISCO DOLLS IN HOT SKIN (3-D) (1979) D: Norm de Plume; Serena, Lislie Bovee, Mike Ranger, John Holmes. This 1979 3-D porn relic is being billed as the "real Boogie Nights." Right, and Norm de Plume is the director's real name. (X, 80 min.) @Dobie; Fri (1/23)-Thu (1/29)
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) D: Jim Sharman; with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien. A couple of months ago when the ACT III Theatres pulled the plug, a die-hard group of Rocky Horror fans had been dressing up and doing the "Time Warp" thing locally for 21 years straight. Well, more or less straight. It was a phenomenon for the record books. Finally, the long-running, interactive movie/stage/camp experience has found a four-week home at the Wells Branch Discount Cinema. Even though the organizers caution that management would appreciate such things as a "limited throwing of items," they believe that the Rocky Horror devotees may have found the home they've long been seeking. Even the $4 ticket prices are cheaper than they had been at the old Northcross. So if you've been searching for the way home to Transylvania or are merely curious about perusing a weekend excursion, this reprise engagement is your winning ticket. (R, 95 min.) @ Wells Branch Discount Cinema; midnight, Fri-Sat.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "John Cassavetes Series": Husbands (1970) D: John Cassavetes; with Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes. When one of their best friends dies, three buddies embark on on a lost weekend. In last week's "Screens" feature on Cassavetes Michael Ventura describes the filmmaker's thoughts on Husbands: "'I love that film,' he said, `because I love men. Men are so stupid.' But he said it so lovingly, as though it was the sweetest thing you could say about men." (PG, 154 min.) @ Texas Union; Tue, 7pm, free admission.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "Film Noir":
The Killers (1946) D: Robert Siodmak; with Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, William Conrad. Burt Lancaster made his screen debut in this affecting crime drama about an ex-boxer who mysteriously turns up dead and the investigation into what caused his death. The tale, which is based on an Ernest Hemingway story, is pieced together in fractured perspectives. As one of the defining representations of the film noir style, The Killers is just the right example to kick off the new AFS noir series. (NR, 105 min.) @ Dobie; Sat, 12 noon).
The Window (1949) D: Tad Tetzlaff; with Bobby Driscoll, Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman. Adapted from the novelette, The Boy Who Cried Murder, by Cornell Woolrich, this child-in-jeopardy film explores the ironies of childhood paranoia of adults. Bobby Driscoll won an Oscar for his performance in this dark thriller and Tetzlaff makes use of the experience he gained as the cinematographer on several Hitchcock films. The film will be introduced on Thursday by Elizabeth Peters and Elizabeth Avellán. (NR, 73 min.) @Dobie; Thu (2/5), 7pm (repeats Sat. 2/7 at 12 noon.
CINE-CLUB of the ALLIANCE FRANCAISE D'AUSTIN: A Day in the Country (Une Partie de Campagne) D: Jean Renoir; with Sylvia Bataille, Georges Saint-Saens. (Shot in 1936, completed in 1946) Jean Renoir's impressionistic ode to nature and human indulgence is taken from a Guy de Maupassant story and comes the closest of any of Renoir's films to resembling one of his father Auguste's paintings. The screening kicks off the Cine-Club's year-long series, "Seven Decades of French Film." For more info about the series go to http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~prom/cine-club. (NR, 40 min.) @St. David's Health Resource Center Theatre (3000 N. I-35 - enter parking lot through south entrance gate; exit code announced at screening); Fri, 7:30pm.
SUICIDE DOG CRACKER: D: David Hickey; with Scot Purkeypile, David Stokey, Spike Alexander, Chuck Budget, Graham Douglas, Cliff Payne, Raul, Rosa, Taco. (1997) Writer-director David Hickey and producer Amy Maner present this short film set in the Texas Hill Country. It takes a glimpse at a day in the life of three sets of brothers and their dogs and the inter-relationships between them all. Hickey is presently an adjunct professor of theatre at Southwest Texas State University and has most recently been seen in Austin Stories as the creepy journalism TA. (NR, 22 min.) @Stubb's; Wed, call for showtime.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS BIRTHDAY PARTY: Film Collaborations of Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Anthony Balch. Includes live sound by Panicsville, the Benway Institute of Psychoacoustics, and the Khat-Kuppe Kollectiff, and also short films and videos by Obraz-Obrez and live music. Call 474-9574 for more info. @Ritz Lounge; Mon, 8:30 & 10:30pm.