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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: Todd Haynes; with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Christian Bale, Ewan McGregor, Toni Collette. (R, 127 min.)
Early-Seventies glam rock culture, that brief but spectacular global explosion of polymorphous sexuality, nelly fashions, and Byronic libertinism writ large, is the setting for Todd Haynes' wildly original new film, Velvet Goldmine. For rock fans who were either too young to experience glam the first time around or who found its posh, crushed velvet surfaces too incompatible with the prevailing hippie culture's denim-and-chambray aesthetics, this film portrays with eerie precision what it was like to be there. But in keeping with the stylistic brinksmanship of his subject, Haynes (Safe; Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) has a larger, more audacious agenda than mere documentary excellence. Glam, he implies, was not a special case but simply the latest of many romantic, style-intensive cultural movements throughout history. Starting with a fanciful opening scene in which aliens deposit the infant Oscar Wilde on a grimy London door stoop, there's an explicit assertion that the Wildes, Baudelaires, and Marc Bolans in our midst are made of finer, more ethereal stuff than the gray mass of men. They shine like stars because that's what they were born to be. In a characteristically whimsical gesture, Haynes nicks the Citizen Kane plot device of a reporter investigating the details of a mysterious celebrity's passing. Here, the reporter (Bale) is doing a where-is-he-now piece about a Bowie-like English glitter idol named Brian Slade (Rhys-Meyers) who ended his career 10 years earlier by faking his own murder onstage. The quest not only puts him in touch with several worse-for-wear glam era survivors but also reimmerses him in poignant memories of his own days as a sexually confused glitter kid. Though Haynes' nominal focus is the mesmerizing figure of Slade, Slade is -- aptly enough for a man who believes surfaces are all-important -- little more than a vivid, epigram-spouting holographic image. To some extent, the same is true of American underground rocker Curt Wild (McGregor, doing an Iggy Pop/Lou Reed amalgam to scary perfection), a dionysian madman who becomes an obsession for Slade, first inspiring his career, then threatening to destroy it. But then, neither is really the central character. Instead, the film's true anchor is Bale's touching performance as one of those fans who's not just transported by the theatrical conjury of rock shamans like Slade and Wild, but transformed into an honorary alien himself. In terms of sheer, unrelenting visual invention, Velvet Goldmine is a wonder. Like the glam stars it celebrates, it leaves no visual detail untouched by the hand of inspired high artifice. And have I mentioned that this movie really rocks, bursting from the screen like a magenta hurricane with great, half-forgotten tunes (and covers) by glam and glam-fellow-traveler acts like Roxy Music, Brian Eno, the New York Dolls, and Lou Reed? Yet for all these virtues the most exciting thing about this film is its sheer nerviness. Velvet Goldmine dares to be campy and fey without ever sacrificing its heart or emotional intensity. With irreverent glee it cheekily quotes from iconic film masterpieces (in several scenes, twinkly showers of glitter from the stars echo the snow imagery from the aforementioned Citizen Kane) yet never descends to empty wiseass. This is, in short, a film that manages to feel wildly spontaneous while developing a grand historical vision in which absinthe-sipping poets maudit stand cape-to-feather-boa with mascaraed glitter rockers and gaze at the night sky, seeing stars that are hidden from the rest of us. (11/6/98)
Arbor, Dobie
D: Robert Towne; with Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter, Jeremy Sisto. (PG-13, 118 min.)
Winning a race was not a matter of strategy to Steve Prefontaine: It was a matter of sheer willpower. Always the front-runner, he believed that he had to constantly push himself full throttle; to do less would betray the spirit of the competition. Without Limits traces the short-lived but amazing career of track star Prefontaine -- known by his zealous fans as "Pre" -- from his days as a college sports phenomenon at the University of Oregon to his disappointing showing at the 1972 Olympics to his tragic death in a car accident at age 24. A complicated personality, to say the least, Prefontaine is depicted in Without Limits as an enigma of sorts, a confounding character you can't figure out. He's at once noble and self-serving, principled and sly, perceptive and clueless. For Bill Bowerman, the legendary track and field coach who attempted (and not always successfully) to shape Prefontaine into a more traditional runner, it was the dichotomous nature of his protégé that both fascinated and frustrated him. It is the relationship between Prefontaine and Bowerman that serves as the narrative framework for Without Limits, which depicts the friendship that develops between these two very different men without resorting to creaky sentimentality. (That is, until the film's eulogistic end, when Prefontaine goes from man to myth in a way that seems contrary to his character.) As Prefontaine and Bowerman, respectively, Crudup and Sutherland nicely handle their roles, in which the student/teacher relationship is often blurred. Crudup's relative anonymity as an actor serves him well here, and Sutherland hasn't had the chance to create as memorable a character as this in a long time. Director-coscreenwriter Towne is no stranger to this genre -- he also directed Personal Best, another film set in the world of track and field -- and his execution of the film's race sequences is exhilarating. The intercutting of slow-motion and real-time during these contests of physical endurance gives these scenes an almost fantastic feel, which is all the more enhanced by Randy Miller's rock-inspired score and the period songs. It's too bad that Without Limits has been released with so little fanfare and buried in the season's lineup of fall films. It's a good, solid little film about a man whose story deserves better. (11/6/98)
Village
D: Roberto Begnini; with Begnini, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Giustino Durano, Sergio Bustric, Marisa Paredes, Horst Buchholz. (PG-13, 114 min.)
Life Is Beautiful is the drama every comic probably wishes he had made. This Italian "concentration-camp comedy" believes that the powers of humor and joy are strong enough to overcome any adversity, even that of the Nazi Holocaust. Now, we all know this not to be true, the numbers certainly bear us out on this point. But the fact of the matter is that humor and joy sure can't hurt in the face of overwhelming odds. Proclaiming that "life is beautiful" is kind of like saying that the glass is half full; it's an attitudinal choice to side with the positive because the only other option is the inevitability of negativism and defeat. It is within this life-affirming context that the controversy surrounding co-writer, director, and star Roberto Begnini's movie needs to be examined. A high-profile award winner, Life Is Beautiful won the grand jury prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, eight Donatellos (Italian Oscars), and many other prestigious awards. It has also come under attack for its soft-focus, unrealistic presentation of life in the death camps. Both the popular acclaim and the alarmist criticism are deserved. Roberto Begnini is a clown, and an irrepressible one at that. In this defining work of his career he uses those unique clowning skills and comic imagination to create not a documentary portrait of the consequences of the Nazi Final Solution but a testament to the magnitude of the human spirit. In so doing, Begnini obscures most of the harsh realities and logical consequences of the situation, and though there is a degree to which such narrative license is unforgivable, we must also appreciate that by privileging history's impermeability we are also limiting its possibilities for inciting the poetic imagination. What Begnini does in Life Is Beautiful is use the Holocaust as a backdrop for telling a heartfelt story about a father who protects his son from the gas chambers by the use of the only weapons at his command: his quick imagination, outlandish buffoonery, and scrappy determination. In the real camps such tactics would not have had a chance in hell. Within the fiction of the movie, we are witnesses to the plight of a lone man whistling bravely in the dark. In addition to its questionable subject matter, another difficulty the film has to surmount is the way its mood abruptly turns on a dime after the first hour. Opening in 1939, we see signs everywhere of fascist rule, but the story focuses on the young man Guido (Begnini) and his arrival in the Tuscan town of Arezzo to seek his fortune as a waiter who wants to open a bookshop and the meeting and wooing of his future bride Dora (Begnini's wife, Braschi, who has starred in most of his films). The first hour is a slapstick paradise. Begnini is an inheritor of the Chaplinesque tradition and Life Is Beautiful owes obvious debts to The Great Dictator. Though in such films as Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law and Night on Earth and Begnini's own Johnny Stecchino and The Monster, I never was terribly moved by the effusively inexhaustive talents of Italy's favorite comedic son. However, I must say that I was unexpectedly beguiled by Begnini's clownish powers to amuse during Life Is Beautiful's thoroughly anti-authoritarian first hour. Then, within just a few moments, he wins the girl, they glide through a doorway and it's suddenly five years later on the eve of their son's fifth birthday, and we discover that Guido is Jewish and he and his son are being herded off to the camps, in which location the movie spends its second hour. And though Guido's tactics for promoting his son's survival are most unlikely to have been successful in the real world (if we dare call concentration camps the real world), and the film's harshest truths are depicted offscreen or in implied tropes, and some of the worst Nazi commandant behavior is only a few clapboards removed from Hogan's Heroes, still … the movie manages to incorporate all these things into a moving yet unsentimental story about the beauty of maintaining one's wits while stumbling blindly in the insane no-man's-land that lies beyond wit's end. (11/6/98)
Arbor
D: Agnès Merlot; with Valentina Cervi, Michel Serrault, Miki Manojlovic. (R, 96 min.)
Artemisia is an interesting meditation on the life of 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the first women in the Western world to forge a successful career as a professional artist in a male-dominated field. Her story, though individual, is also a universal story about a woman who defies society's strictures and follows her own instincts. This French film also has a lot to tell us about the world in which Artemisia lived: the roles of sexes, the power of the Church, the Baroque period's breakthroughs in art, and so on. This feminist reclamation of a historically important female art figure, however, is overshadowed by the film's bodice-ripper tendencies that conflate the realms of art and passion into the same indistinguishable blur that has hindered the understanding of women's creativity over the centuries. Although the film is eminently watchable and informative, it would be wrong to mistake Artemisia for a study in art history. Too many aspects of the film diverge with the known historical record. Played by Valentina Cervi (best known for her performance as John Malkovich's daughter in Portrait of a Lady), Artemisia is a single-minded young woman whose desire to paint knows no bounds. Moreover, she's driven to paint anatomically correct male nudes, subject matter which is totally forbidden to women of the time. (That most of the subjects in her surviving paintings are women and not men, however, is the kind of art-historical fudging that pops up all over the place in Artemisia). The movie seems to make the case that Artemisia's desire to view naked men is as much a sexual impulse as an artistic one. As the daughter of the famous painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia was already in a privileged position by having a father who understood and encouraged his daughter's proclivities. Trouble arose when Orazio allowed Artemisia to study with the painter Agostino Tassi, an acclaimed painter from Florence who was Orazio's colleague, rival, and emotional opposite. Because of the physicality of her portraiture, Tassi (whom we see carousing in orgies with prostitute/models) assumes that Artemisia has more sexual knowledge than she does. The two begin a sexual relationship that is portrayed in the film as a loving affair. Artemisia's sexual appetite fuels her artistic appetite and Tassi's ardor seems spurred in part by the recognition that Artemisia is unlike any woman he has known before. Orazio learns of the affair and brings the matter to an ecclesiastical court, accusing Tassi of rape. The transcripts of the trial have been published in recent years, and according to those who've viewed them, the film strays from the transcripts in numerous ways. Yet it's probably misleading to interpret these transcripts from the vantage point of the modern day and age in doggedly literal terms. Modern viewpoints seem to shape a lot of what is portrayed in Artemisia. While that opens up possibilities for understanding, it also presents a skewed perspective for biography. Still, Artemisia poses the age-old question for women artists: Is anatomy destiny or is destiny anatomy? (11/6/98)
Village
D: Michael Paxton. (Not Rated, 147 min.)
While not exactly Ken Burns territory, this expansive documentary on the multi-tiered life of Russian émigré-cum-novelist-cum-philosopher Rand is nothing if not ambitious. At 147minutes, it may in fact be too ambitious for its own good, slavishly marking everything about Rand from her humble origins in St. Petersburg to her waning years post-Atlas Shrugged when she was making the rounds of such television interview programs as Donahue. Frankly, I haven't seen anything more bizarre in years than the sight of the pudgy-cheeked Rand giving Phil Donohue's silver mane a good what-for -- the pairing of these two (in 1980) was, and remains, one of the oddest philosophical sparring matches in known history. That aside, Paxton has recruited Rand scholars from all over to echo her always controversial opinions and add insight where possible. Colleagues Dr. Harry Binswanger and Dr. Leonard Peikoff recount Rand's transition from a bright if introspective Russian child who, after suffering through the October Revolution, enrolled herself in film school (while still in the Soviet Union) and then managed against all odds to secure a passport to visit relatives in Chicago. Rand never returned to her homeland, nor, it is assumed, did she plan to. Once in the U.S., she hurriedly set about learning her adopted language so that she could pursue her real goal, that of becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood. Although she was originally taken under the wing of Cecil B. DeMille while the director was in the course of shooting King of Kings, Rand kept busy during the Depression honing her fledgling skills writing plays and preparing to begin work on her first great novel, We the Living. Always an outspoken critic of the Soviet system (and fascism and collectivism in general), Rand at first found it difficult to have her anti-Soviet work published in the Bolshevik-happy heyday of 1930s Hollywood. As Stalin's oppressive regime was eventually dragged into the light, Rand found more acceptance, but like modern Rand progeny such as Camille Paglia, acceptance was hard-won. Paxton is thorough to the point of punctiliousness -- there's not an event that remains unrecounted here, and no aspect of Rand's philosophy goes unexamined. Her deep hatred of altruism ("I regard that as evil," she remarks. "It means placing the interests of others above your own.") and the antipathy that engendered makes for some dishy, objectivist commentary, but most of all Paxton reveals a woman before her time, neither feminist nor shrinking violet, and above all stridently passionate. The same applies to Paxton's film; by the end of its 147 minutes, you'll only have to read the books and plays to seemingly know all there is to know about Unpronounceable Rand. (11/6/98)
Dobie
D: Hype Williams; with Earl Simmons, Nasir Jones, Oli Grant, Clifford Smith, Taral Hicks, Tionne Watkins, Louie Rankin. (R, 110 min.)
Video director Hype Williams' directorial debut shows that he knows a lot about flash and much less about narrative. Belly teems with glamorized shots of sex and violence, while paradoxically advocating for a more decent way of life. At first, the film seems a standard-issue action story about drug dealers from Queens, replete with balletic shoot-outs, neon-drenched city streets, rapid editing, eye-grabbing images, booty shots galore, and street-language overkill. Two life-long friends, Tommy (Simmons, aka DMX) and Sincere (Jones, aka Nas), live the carefree lives of unrepentant drug dealers who believe that since death is their fate, scoring big money is their only means of making their mark. Tommy has managed to move into a flashy pad on Long Island while Sincere lives in a more modest home in Queens with his wife Tionne (Watkins, aka T-Boz) and baby daughter. The plot has them shooting up discos in New York, and expanding their drug routes to Omaha and Jamaica. In Omaha, Tommy crosses some of the hometown gang and winds up in a bloody shoot-out and on the run. A federal agent offers Tommy the choice of life in prison or the task of assassinating the leader of a Nation of Islam-like organization led by Benjamin F. Muhammed (aka Benjamin Chavis). Meanwhile, Sincere has been reading Elijah Mohammed's Message to the Black Man and is ready to pack up the family and move to Africa, while at the same time helping his on-the-run best pal. The film concludes with a passionate plea for a new millennial outlook, but the words are at odds with the compelling images of the gangsta life. The cinematography of Malik Hassan Sayeed, who has shot most of Spike Lee's recent films, is stunning. The rap stars-turned-actors who populate this film exude a real presence, if not a wealth of acting chops. Williams' script is a real muddle, however, reinforcing the worst clichés about video directors who make the leap to feature filmmaking. (11/6/98)
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lincoln, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Richard LaGravenese; with Danny DeVito, Holly Hunter, Queen Latifah, Martin Donovan. (R, 102 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. A suddenly unmarried woman who has been abandoned for a younger woman by her wealthy, Fifth-Avenue-doctor husband forms an unlikely friendship with the troubled elevator operator in her building. Inspired by two Chekhov short stories, the film shows what happens when two disparate people connect during an odd moment in the midst of everyday circumstances and proceed to get to know one another. Acclaimed screenwriter LaGravenese (The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, Beloved) makes his directing debut. (11/6/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Marcus van Bavel; with Robert Logan, Devon Roy-Brown, David Boone, Charlie Schmidt, Tito Villalobos Moreno, Wendy Blech, Harper Washburn, Cheri Gelber, Diane Perella, van Bavel. (Not Rated, 96 min.)
Unlike anything you've seen and yet eerily familiar, Austinite van Bavel's paean to childhood dreamtime and Ian Flemming-style Cold War theatrics is a minor masterpiece of the surreal, taking viewers to places they may not have visited since the last time they lodged an M-80 in Eagle-Eye G.I. Joe's rucksack while mucking about in their parents' backyard. Roy-Brown (looking and acting like a very young Gary Cooper) plays Redboy 13, an adolescent covert-ops agent for the CYA. Despite being retired from the field, Redboy is called back into the fray against his better judgment when rugged Colonel Calcan (Logan, late of 77 Sunset Strip and assorted Wilderness Family adventures) arrives at his school one day bearing the grim news that evil is up to its old tricks. Saying good-bye to his mother ("And pick up those guns off your floor!" she reminds him, to which he sheepishly replies, "Oh, the toy ones"), this diminutive savior of life, liberty, and all that sort of thing is airlifted off to the jungles of South America where he goes head to head with the diabolical Dr. Heimlich Manure (van Bavel), a twisted neo-Nazi reduced to living as a wheelchair-bound brain attached to a jerky video monitor. Also on board for the adventure are Blech's Jungle Girl, a Jane-esque sidekick with a penchant for romance and the foul Commander Paisano, a Latin dictator wannabe with a coffee fetish. Explosions, dirty tricks, and bad puns abound, but van Bavel's film is nothing if not a loving tribute to all those Hollywood Cold War relics such as James Coburn's Flint series and others. Playing it straight all the way through, Roy-Brown and Logan craft a Nineties pop sensibility from the wreckage of past adventure films; Redboy 13 is so determinedly semi-serious that it's consistently bizarre, even when the occasional line-reading goes flat or the sporadic outburst of overly broad humor threatens to sack the action. Shot in CinemaScope, van Bavel piles on the epic shots, getting more use out of one crane than John Milius could out of a hundred, and setting the whole film against the testosterone overload of Gustav Holst's Planets Suite. From the opening James Bondian credit sequence (itself a triumph of the absurd), Redboy 13 is a low-budget gem, craftily using computer graphics in lieu of real devastation and managing to keep a straight face in the line of some of the most sublimely silly outbursts to grace the screen in some time. It may not be a cult movie yet, but that's just a matter of time. (11/6/98)
Dobie
D: Edward Zwick; with Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Bruce Willis, Tony Shaloub, Sami Bouajila, Ahmed Ben Larby, Mosleh Mohamed. (R, 125 min.)
Could someone please turn down Denzel Washington's Righteousness Meter? It's set too high. The king of earnest masculinity is about due for a comedy (The Pelican Brief doesn't count), but this isn't it. Zwick, who worked with Washington on Glory all those years ago, keeps on keeping on as well, and together the two of them have managed to not only make a painfully serious, weighty film, they've also pissed off a large segment of the Arab-American community in the process. The good news, then, is that The Siege is hardly the ticking time bomb of racial slurs some would have you imagine, and the bad news is that it doesn't matter because it's all too damn pedantically serious to take seriously. (Except for Bruce Willis, of course; he's one actor who should always be taken with a grain of salt the size of Lot's wife.) Washington plays FBI Special Agent Anthony Hubbard, who along with CIA spook Elise Kraft (Bening) and General William Devereaux (Willis), is called in to handle an escalating series of domestic terrorist acts that are reducing New York City to so much rubble and body parts. After an unnamed terrorist cell demolishes a city bus, then a city bus with actual people on it, and then the NYC Federal Building, the chain of operations moves from Hubbard's sage FBI agent to Devereaux's camp-happy general. As panic grips the city, the president gives the order to shut down Brooklyn (strangely the Beastie Boys are nowhere to be found), declare martial law, and round up any suspicious-looking Middle-Eastern nationals, placing them in a concertina-wire-enclosed facility deep within the bowels of Yankee Stadium. Meanwhile, while everybody's rights are being trampled, Hubbard and Kraft seek out the real agents of terror behind the charade. Zwick and co-scenarists Lawrence Wright and Menno Myers go to great lengths to make sure that everybody knows that what is happening -- martial law, indiscriminate persecution of Arab-Americans -- is utterly in the wrong. The Siege is so blatant in its condemnation of the events in its storyline that you get the feeling there are subliminal "Bad! Wrong!" messages flashing just out of sight on the screen. For all its obviousness, however, and Willis aside, Zwick has crafted a fairly tight actioner here. Remove the dogma and the occasional screed, and what you have is Die Hard all over the place, which, come to think of it, is probably on its way to us in time for Christmas '99. An action film on a soapbox is still an action film, and an action film with Bruce Willis on a soapbox runs the risk of becoming a comedy. So maybe this is the comic vehicle Denzel Washington's been so sorely missing after all. (11/6/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Michael Anderson; with Wilford Brimley, Michael Ontkean, Leslie Hope, Corey Servier. (G, 101 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. Based on the Newberry Award-winning 1961 book by Wilson Rawls, this family film tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who rescues four chimpanzees that escaped from the local circus and hopes to use the reward money to fulfill his lifelong dream of buying a pony. Just this week, the film won one of the top prizes at the Heartland Film Festival, which is dedicated to works that express positive values. Disney has the film scheduled for a straight-to-video release in December, but in an unusual move the company has decided to try the film out theatrically in five "family-friendly" markets, and Austin has been determined to be one of these five. Director Anderson has been doing a lot of television work in recent years, but some of his past film credits include such gems as Around the World in 80 Days, All the Fine Young Cannibals, Logan's Run, and Orca. Anderson's film is booked for a one-week exclusive run. (10/30/98)
Great Hills
D: Frank Coraci; with Adam Sandler, Kathy Bates, Fairuza Balk, Jerry Reed, Henry Winkler, Clint Howard, Rob Schneider, Larry Gilliard Jr. (PG-13, 100 min.)
Another half a year, another Adam Sandler film. Director Coraci, who reined in the manic comic in their last outing, The Wedding Singer, takes the opposite tack this time and allows Sandler the freedom to go way over the top with mixed results. Fans of The Mumble that Walks Like a Man will almost certainly rejoice that Sandler is back to his old SNL tricks; others might note that the whole thing feels like yet another extended sketch that drags on about an hour too long. Either way, the game is played by Sandler's rules. Here he's Bobby Boucher, a Louisiana football waterboy who, when fired by evil coach Reed, moves on to serve for the losingest college team in Louisiana history, which, unsurprisingly, is coached by Henry Winkler. Thoroughly wrapped in his mother's apron strings (Kathy Bates, even more over the top than her co-star, if such a thing is conceivable), he's the saddest sack around, taking his team's abuse as if it came with the job. When Winkler urges him to take a stand, Bobby unleashes the beast within and turns out to be a pretty good tackler. So good, in fact, that he wins the respect of his teammates, leads them to the first annual Louisiana Bourbon Bowl, and starts attracting groupies like Peter Frampton on remoulade. Against the better wishes of his mother, he begins dating ex-con Vicki Valencourt (Balk) and, well, you can probably figure it out from here. The Waterboy is about as inoffensive a comedy as you're likely to find these days, although citizens of the Sportsman's Paradise might rankle at the heavy-handed depiction of their Cajun cousins. Still, it's a mildly amusing bayou farce with plenty of "foosball" action to liven the sometimes plodding proceedings. As in The Wedding Singer, Coraci displays an inspired sense of mediocrity in his direction. Scenes proceed from one another with casual ease as Sandler loafs through the role, smacking his lips and generally playing up the Cajun hick routine. Salvation, if that's what you want to call it, comes in the form of the impossibly sexualized Balk, who devours scenery with gooey abandon. Who knew this evil witch from The Craft was such an accomplished comedienne, and why isn't she doing more of it? All raven locks and gobby mascara (and that aquamarine tattoo -- nice permanent touch), she's all the cornfield girls of Hee-Haw rolled into one smoky package. Kudos also to Clint Howard, who has a smallish part, but makes the most of it, and to SNL alumnus Schneider as well, whose predictably toady turn is one of the small, throwaway highlights of the film. It's not Billy Madison, quite, but The Waterboy is still pure Sandler. If you like that sort of thing. (11/6/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Eric Darnell and Lawrence Guterman; with the voices of Woody Allen, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Christopher Walken, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Anne Bancroft, Gene Hackman, Jennifer Lopez, Paul Mazursky. (PG, 77 min.)
It's about to get a little crowded in the world of computer-generated animation (CGI). This fall sees the release of both this offering from DreamWorks SKG, as well as the Disney/Pixar collaboration A Bug's Life, two films treading remarkably similar ground. Antz arrives first, and while it's a visually arresting piece of filmmaking, it lacks the core resonance of that previous high-water mark, Pixar's Toy Story. With an all-star, dream cast of voice actors and a storyline geared more toward adults than kids, Antz remains curiously lacking in emotional involvement. It's great to look at, sure, but it also just sits there -- and it's the most expensive Woody Allen film ever made by someone other than that king of the meshuganahs. Here Allen gives voice to Z, a neurotic worker ant in a colony of millions, longing for individuality in a society that quashes even the merest hint of singularity. The filmmakers use this rigid caste system -- workers, soldiers, queen (and princess) -- as a metaphor for life in general, though the traditional lessons imparted here are done so with a heavy hand most of the time. When Z runs into a slumming Princess Bala (Stone) while cutting a metronomic rug at the local watering hole, he falls madly in love. Thinking that the princess reciprocates his feelings, he hurriedly trades places with soldier pal Weaver (Stallone) and seeks her out, only to be rebuffed and shipped off to battle against the fearsome aphids. Hackman's power-mad General Mandible and his right-hand ant Cutter (Walken) seek to overthrow the Queen and create a "more perfect colony" via some behind-the-scenes scheming. However, when only Z returns from the melee unscathed, his hero's welcome is parlayed into a muddled kidnapping of the princess, and together they find themselves outside the colony, searching for the mythical "Insectopia." It's frankly bizarre to hear the voice of Broadway Danny Rose emanating from this pint-sized insect, though the idea of pairing Stallone and Allen as insect buddies is admittedly too rich for words. Antz plays up its Allen connection, with many of Z's lines sounding as though they've been taken part and parcel from previous Allen films (as the film opens, Z is on the couch at his psychiatrist's, opining about his inferiority complex). What Antz is lacking is that wacky spark that sent Toy Story over the edge and into the realm of the spectacular. Large segments of time meander during which nothing much happens, and even occasional cameos such as Aykroyd and Curtin's yuppified wasps (get it?) do little to relieve the ennui. Without a doubt, the animation is vibrant and electrifying; it's only the story that lacks. (10/2/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Bryan Singer; with Ian McKellan, Brad Renfro, Bruce Davidson, Elias Koteas, Joe Morton, Jan Triska, Michael Byrne, Heather McComb, Ann Dowd, David Schwimmer. (R, 100 min.)
Based on the Stephen King novella of the same name, Apt Pupil is one of those rarest of films, a King adaptation that doesn't fall flat. It's not perfect, certainly, but as directed by Singer (The Usual Suspects) it's a punchy, hair-raising descent into the nature of evil and the corrupting influence of one man's power over another. King's pulpy, straightforward meditation on the same themes runs through the original work, and though Singer and screenwriter Brandon Boyce have toned down many of the author's more disquieting passages (including an entirely new and entirely unnecessary ending), the tale, more or less, remains the same. Renfro plays Todd Bowden, a talented, seemingly normal Midwestern American teenager, with one exception: He harbors a bizarre obsession with Nazis and the Holocaust. When he discovers, quite by accident, that the wizened old man down the block is in reality Kurt Dussander (McKellan), former death camp commander, he uses it to blackmail Dussander into telling him "all the things they're afraid to teach us in school." Specifically, Todd is interested in the mechanics of genocide: How did the ovens work? How many Jews could be packed into a shower? How long did it take the Zyklon-B to work? And so on. As King put it, Todd is after "all the gooshey stuff." As their relationship progresses, the boy and Dussander form an unlikely partnership, one that awakens the latent evil in both of them. Eventually, Todd's grades begin to slip and the old man reasserts a control he hasn't had since the fall of Berlin. Singer stays remarkably true to the spirit of King's electrifying novella, but toes the line when it comes to the true horrors: Gone are the story's homoerotic overtones, the boy's perversely sexual camp fantasies, and the entire Stephen King ending (King has gone on record as saying he believes the reworked finale is -- in a word -- "weak," and I'd have to agree with him). In their absence, Singer piles on the stylistic flourishes, such as a scene in which Dussander makes sauerkraut of a wandering homeless man while strains of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde blare, and a horrific, hallucinatory sequence wherein Todd imagines his school locker-room shower to be something else entirely. The story's main themes, however, remain intact, and both McKellan and Renfro are spot-on in their portrayals. At times, Renfro seems a bit too All-American, until you flash back to the opening scene and its subtitle of "1984." Leaving the film in King's original time frame wipes out any sociological clutter such as gangsta rap, high school bloodbaths, and the like, that might otherwise get in the way of the film's straightforward and wrenching emotional impact. It's not perfect King, but it is jarringly close, which these days remains pretty much all one could hope for. (10/23/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Eduardo Mignogna; with Norma Aleandro, Federico Luppi, Cecilia Rossetto, Jorge Luz. (Not Rated, 103 min.)
Like that tube of Monistat 3 in the medicine cabinet, the possibility of hot and sexy romance in one's dotage is reassuring, but how much do we really want to think about the circumstances in which it'll be needed? That, in a nutshell, is the potential problem facing this tender-hearted, sweetly humorous 1996 Argentine film about love between sophisticated sexagenarians in modern Buenos Aires. As a seemingly mismatched pair brought together by an unattached Jewish woman's newspaper ad (she wants him to pose as her Jewish boyfriend while her Orthodox brother is visiting), longtime Latin-American stars Aleandro and Luppi are a constant joy to watch. Eloquently portraying both the vulnerability of old age and a stubborn refusal to let these fears quell their appetite for life, they prove once more that erotic sizzle is more than just chemical call-and-response between Soloflex-buffed young hardbodies. And yet, judging from the mildly disappointing turnouts for recent November-December romantic fare such as That Old Feeling and Out to Sea, there's some doubt about how comfortable Americans really are with images of old folks as fully functional sexual entities. It'd be a shame, though, if a movie as involving, well-acted, and beautifully shot failed to achieve the strong arthouse response it deserves. Not only do Luppi (Men With Guns, Cronos) and Aleana present images of mature ardor that compare favorably with the late-career work of Mastroianni and Loren, they also impressively overcome certain Hollywood-like contrivances of plot and dialogue the latter two actors seldom had to contend with. It's a tribute to these stars that, even given the trite situation of the love-shy odd couple gradually facing the inevitable, every halting step they take toward each other feels like a mini-triumph of love's power over the schoolmarmish intellect. They portray with touching specificity what it's like to crave total surrender to love even after long years of experience have proven the foolhardiness of such blind leaps. Not even the blatantly market-tested ending (a malady that seems to be spreading worldwide like Hong Kong flu) detracts from the pleasure of this admirable, eminently watchable date flick. Well worth the price of admission, whether or not you qualify for the senior discount. (10/30/98)
Village
D: Jonathan Demme; with Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberley Elise, Beah Richards, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Albert Hall, Irma P. Hall. (R, 172 min.)
The funny thing about the present is how quickly and doggedly it becomes the past. The past is always nipping at our heels, chasing us into the future, and shadowing our present. And the present is little more than the total accumulation of the past merged with the unwritten potential of the future. The damned thing about the past, however, is how it can catch up to you in the present and bite you on the ass. For Sethe (Winfrey), the former slave in this film version of Toni Morrison's prize-winning novel Beloved, the past is "the tree on her back." It's a richly metaphoric image for the weight of her history and its tangled branches into her future; it's also the literal shape of the permanent scars lashed into her back by the wretched hand of slavery. Set mostly in 1873 in rural Ohio outside Cincinnati, Beloved is a story about how the cruelties of the past continue to impinge on the present, about how the ugly consequences of slavery do not vanish by presidential proclamation. It's storytelling at its most irresistible, a sinewy saga that seamlessly snakes the boundary lines separating ghost tale from family epic and historical drama from psychological subjectivism. At nearly three hours running time, the movie covers a lot of turf, though it infrequently ventures past the front gate of Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road. Flashbacks are essential to the way Beloved tells its story, explanatory snatches of the past are expertly insinuated into the narrative through deft editing maneuvers and subtly altered film stocks. Supernaturalistic flourishes reside side by side with naturalistic detail. Her house, says Sethe, "ain't evil, just sad." Bit by bit we learn proud, self-reliant Sethe's history: the details of the plantation-life horrors that drove her to commit a desperate act of violence and the joyous embrace of the future that her mother-in-law's sermons in the backwoods inspire. To tell too much here would pre-empt the pleasure of uncovering the story's mysteries on their own terms. Though rest assured that the mysteries are not all horrific explications of the twisted legacy of slavery but also include buoyant demonstrations of the transcendent powers of love. The performances of all the central and secondary characters match the passionate intensity of the film's behind-the-scenes collaborators: notably, director Jonathan Demme, DP Tak Fujimoto, production designer Kristi Zea, editors Carol Littleton and Andy Keir, composer Rachel Portman, vocalist Oumou Sangare, and writers Akousa Busia, Richard LaGravenese, and Adam Brooks. Winfrey enriches her well-documented lifetime of accomplishments with this strong, stripped-of-Oprahness performance that astutely dodges the traps of sentimentalism to create a character more hauntingly evocative. Glover, as far as I'm concerned, can do a dozen more Lethal Weapon movies if it means he'll pause every so often and do work as moving, intelligent, and ingratiating as Beloved's Paul D. As Sethe's daughter Dakota, Elise's assured, emotionally varied performance (she's the only character who undergoes any significant transformation in the story) promises that she is a newcomer from whom we'll be seeing much, much more over the coming years. And as the story's ghost girl Beloved, Newton seethes with a feral intensity that's an unsettling combination of frightening Exorcist child demon and endearing wild child mannerisms and naïveté. It's true that Beloved comes packaged with "Oscar" written all over it, and with such obvious pre-sells it's always wise to be cautious. Yet it's no understatement to call Beloved one of the best movies of the year. (10/16/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Ronny Yu; with Jennifer Tilly, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile, John Ritter, Alexis Arquetted, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Brad Dourif. (R, 89 min.)
No matter that Brad Dourif snagged an Academy Award nomination for his work in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- for legions of moviegoers, he'll always be best remembered as the voice of Chucky, poor guy. If it's any consolation, this fourth entry in the killer doll franchise is by far and away the best, a surprisingly affecting tale of pint-sized love and dismemberment that's remarkably well-done. Hong Kong transplant Yu (The Bride With White Hair) reworks the Chucky mythos while cinematographer and frequent collaborator Peter Pau punches up the visuals -- together they make one of the most original-yet-self-referential comic horror shows since Bride of Re-Animator. This movie begins 10 years after the original Child's Play took place, at which time the soul of serial killer Charles "Chucky" Lee Ray was transplanted -- via voodoo -- into the body of a plastic Good Guys doll. Now, Ray's ex-girlfriend Tiffany (Tilly, all oozy sexuality and breathy, helium squeaks) has stolen the remains of Chucky from a police evidence locker and raised him from the dead. A black vinyl Martha Stewart fanatic with a latent taste for homicide, Tiffany and beau Chucky immediately hit a brick wall when the topic of matrimony comes up, which results in Tiffany's soul being unceremoniously transferred into a bridal doll's plastic shell and the sudden death of Alexis Arquette (don't ask). From here, Bride of Chucky morphs into a Barbie and Clyde road movie as the pair hijack a couple of young newlyweds (Heigl and Stabile) and make their way to Hackensack, NJ to retrieve Chucky's decade-old corpse. It may not be the most original horror film of the last five years, but it's certainly close, thanks in equal parts to Yu's dazzling imagery and series overlord Don Mancini's witty, pithy script. If you thought Kevin Williamson's Scream was the height of genre-specific comic horror, Mancini goes it one better, tossing in wry, underplayed gags aimed at everything from Bride of Frankenstein to the Men are from Mars/Women are from Venus stable of relationship theory, and then giving the whole shebang a raucous, nasty twist. Make no mistake, this is a horror film, and effects artisan Kevin Yagher gets impressive mileage out of some hoary genre clichés. Gore flows in copious amounts here, so much so that I wondered how this crept past the MPAA with only an R rating. In addition to the gallons of red stuff, Bride of Chucky also works the nerves in other ways as well. Despite (or perhaps because of) the film's comic undertone, the more serious aspects of Yu's film -- serial killers, relationships, plastic dolls making the beast with two backs -- are all the more disturbing. It's not quite as relentless as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but Bride of Chucky is still sick and wrong in all the right ways. (10/23/98)
Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Vincenzo Natali; with Maurice Dean Wint, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlitt, Wayne Robson, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings. (R, 90 min.)
In 1961 Rod Serling penned a Twilight Zone episode entitled Five Characters in Search of an Exit. Although it's never been one of that series' most popular outings, the tale of five strangers trapped inside a giant cylindrical object with no means of escape and no idea how or why they're even there must have stuck with director Natali because Cube is virtually identical in more ways than one. Like Serling's script, the Canadian-helmed Cube revolves around a quintet of strangers trapped inside an impenetrable mystery: a steel and Lucite cube that looks for all the world like the Cenobite's view off one of Hellraiser's evil puzzle-boxes. Bizarre, seemingly random patterns cover the walls and in the center of each wall sits a sliding portal through which egress can be made. The trick? Some rooms contain deadly booby traps such as whipping razor wire and wall-mounted jets of acid. It's up to the five -- a hair-trigger cop (Wint), a paranoid M.D. (Guadagni), a young mathematics whiz (de Boer), a nihilistic office worker (Hewlett), and a wily ex-con (Robson) -- to figure out which room is which, as well as other suitable topics such as what the hell's going on and why, specifically, they've been cast in alongside each other. Cube opens with some astonishingly gory footage of what not to do when entering an adjoining room, but quickly goes downhill from there. It's an existential, Kafka-esque nightmare with no real resolution, although if you've been biding your time waiting to see some high-strung, ham-handed bickering on-screen, this is your A-ticket. Stagy in the extreme (though not based on a play), the action moves through the variously colored cubes as the characters devolve into parodies of themselves. The cop's steely authority eventually turns to psychotic rage, while the nihilist turns out to have plenty of just cause. Conversations, of which there are many, touch on everything from eco-terrorism to government cover-ups to UFOs, all while providing virtually no backstory about the cube or its inhabitants. Eventually, all of this wears thin, enlivened only by a couple of moderately unassuming turns (de Boer, Miller) and the occasional freshet of gore. By the end of 90 minutes, it comes as no surprise that the "protagonist" turns out to be the most simple-minded of the lot (Miller's idiot savant, who wanders in about a third of the way through), making this a sort of angsty Forrest Gump for the Wired set. Startling at times, but just as equally distant at others, Cube seems to have it all backwards: It's a film in search of a one-act play. (10/30/98)
Village
D: Tim McCanlies, with Breckin Meyer, Peter Facinelli, Ethan Embry, Eddie Mills, Patricia Wettig, Eddie Jones, Alexandra Holden, Wayne Tippit. (PG, 97 min.)
There are so many captivating characters, so many funny moments, and so much sweet affection in this movie, its ending comes as a sorrowful leave-taking. You're tempted to wave goodbye to it (if you have a hankie to wave, so much the better) and linger in your seat long after the lights have come up. John, Keller, Squirrel, and Terrell Lee are four fast friends who are fixin' to graduate and make good on their childhood pact to get the heck out of Dancer, Texas, thereby decreasing their hometown's population by five percent. Their plans are to head out to L.A., believing that their small-town woes will disappear once they're west of the Rockies. Most of the townspeople know better, of course -- some hold their counsel, some relate long and (hilariously) tragic tales about the fate of similar odysseys, and still others make book on how many, if any, of the four will actually leave. And, indeed, as the film progresses, it looks as if the skeptical bookie will prosper. Faced with imminent departure, each boy struggles with the childhood vow, and just who will take that westbound bus is uncertain. The hours that unfold between graduation and the estimated time of departure tell a loving and funny tale of small-town life distilled into the creak of a porch swing or the dust from a speeding car on a lonely highway, a tale of opportunities that beckon and ties that bind. Writer/director Tim McCanlies proves that rural wit is not an oxymoron. A wonderful script is matched by a terrific cast. Meyer (Keller) and Mills (John) are particular standouts. Keller is eager to leave and angry at his friends' defection, but he is Dancer's Everyman, a restless native son who is (and makes us) acutely aware of why they would choose to stay. Mills is simply big, big star material. Though John is the quietest of the four boys, Mills' slight frame and scrubbed face emit something powerful and pure, with a connection to that vast land that goes far beyond his years. His John is an anathema to L.A., a young man you'd like to meet. Patricia Wettig (thirtysomething) has a scene-stealing turn as Terrell Lee's mama. She captures a quality peculiar to rich Texas women: the ability to be icily brittle and sashay down the street at the same time. The film is filled with such performances -- fond and funny and never condescending. Shot entirely in the Fort Davis area, Dancer, Texas is a gorgeous picture that makes wonderful use of the West Texas landscape. We can breathe the air, squint at the sun, and feel dwarfed by the towering buttes and endless sky. And, sitting in traffic on I-35, I feel like getting the heck out of Austin and heading straight for Dancer, Texas, where the deer and the antelope and a bunch of warm and witty characters roam. (5/1/98)
Village
D: Steve Miner; with Jamie Lee Curtis, Adam Arkin, Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodi Lynn O'Keefe, Janet Leigh, Josh Hartnett, LL Cool J, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. (R, 83 min.)
Has it really been 20 years already? It seems like only yesterday good-girl babysitter Laurie Strode battled it out with her inhuman, Captain Kirk-bemasked, butcher knife-wielding sibling Michael Myers and revolutionized the face of the American horror film. I remember driving through an overcast Albany one afternoon in '78 and pestering my dad to swing by the Loew's and take in a matinee -- I was 12 and the suggestion carried little fatherly imperative that day, but I more than made up for it by spending much of the Eighties mooning over freshly minted scream queen Curtis in her post-Halloween roles (The Fog creeps me out to this day). And now, the final chapter, one hopes, of yet another sagging franchise. As if Halloweens 3-5 never existed (hardly a stretch), H20 catches up to a damaged version of its protagonist 20 years to the day after the events of the first film. (We know this is so because a subtitle proclaims that it's "October 31, 1998," quickly followed by "Halloween." Duh.) Strode (Curtis) is now Keri Tate, a "functioning alcoholic" and principal of a smallish private high school sequestered outside a small Southern California town. She's also the mother of 17-year-old Josh (Hartnett), who, in the fine tradition of teenagers everywhere, resents mom's asphyxiative apron strings. Guys, like girls, just wanna have fun, and when the opportunity arises to ditch the school camping trip and hang out with a trio of equally horny friends, Josh takes the bait and stays behind while mom hallucinates her evil brother at every available juncture, this despite the marginally reassuring presence of her romance-inclined counselor (Arkin). Michael, of course, is back in town, and without Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis around to keep him on a leash, suburbia's favorite bogeyman makes a beeline to the school and begins slicing, dicing, and julienning assorted victims as he moves toward Laurie and her son. Film geeks will chuckle over Curtis' real-life mom Janet Leigh in a cameo as Laurie/Keri's busybody secretary (if you're a real geek, you'll recognize her car and that snatch of Bernard Herrmann straight off), but H20, like the original, isn't a particularly humorous affair. For one thing, Laurie's character arc has bottomed out, resulting in a powerful heroine coming off as a paranoid lush. In the real world, I suppose, that's how things might have turned out, but the Laurie Strode of Halloween's 1 and 2 never struck me as a quitter. Miner strives to imbue the film with the requisite autumnal haze of the original but then gives up midway through and instead resorts to the standard stalk 'n' slash formulas. It's heartening to see a beloved character revived like this (at one point during the screening I attended, audience members actually stood up and cheered), but H20 -- for all its good, gory intentions -- is barely a shadow of the original. There's no frisson, no sense of the impossible here, though whether that's due to Miner and company or simply the passage of time is up for debate. It's a fitting enough capstone for one of horror cinema's more memorable series, I suppose, but when it ended I wanted, more than anything else, to go peruse the original. (8/7/98)
Great Hills
D: S.R. Bindler. (PG, 97 min.)
As engrossing as documentaries about manifestly "big" subjects (Triumph of the Will, A Brief History of Time) can be, I've always found even more delight in the ones about picayune-seeming phenomena and pursuits that gain an improbable aura of significance from the passion people pour into them. A classic example is Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, with The Endless Summer, Pumping Iron, and Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey also popping quickly to mind. So, if surfing, bodybuilding, or mole rats can commandeer souls and spawn whole new schools of philosophy, why not a publicity stunt staged by a small-town car dealer? That's the premise of S.R. Bindler's marvelous little film, Hands on a Hard Body, winner of numerous festival awards including the audience award from the 1997 Austin Heart of Film Festival, that's just now seeing theatrical release. (The movie launches its world theatrical premiere in Austin this Friday.) Hands documents the 1995 edition of a yearly contest in which Jack Long Nissan of Longview, Texas gives a new hard body pickup to whomever can keep his or her hands on it the longest. Apart from short breaks at one- and six-hour intervals, contestants stand in place for up to four days at a time, often lapsing into hallucinations, laughing jags, and other erratic behavior around the 50-hour mark. Now, as a small-town native who's had his fill of specious, smirking "tributes" to down-home culture, I found this premise depressing as hell: a bunch of poor rubes suffering in 100-degree heat for a modest set of wheels that Michael Dell or Jim Bob Moffett could cover with glovebox change. Yet the wonder of Bindler's film is the way this random ensemble's foibles, quirks, and artless declamations work to ingratiate the contestants with the audience, not set them up as a geek show for urban hipsters' delectation. Interspersing live action at the contest with staged interviews held beforehand, Bindler and crew let the people who are the story tell the story. And a roomful of Hollywood screenwriters stoked on espresso and ginkgo biloba couldn't have dreamed up this cast. Former champ Benny, a self-styled Dalai Lama of hardbodyology, reels off malaprop-laden -- though often surprisingly insightful -- commentary. ("It's absurd, very absurd… it's a human drama thang." "I'm gonna just wait out the night and see what transgresses.") Ethereal Jesus freak Norma grooves blissfully to her stack of gospel tapes. Mellow J.D. sucks down unfiltered cigarettes and beams like a shitkicker Buddha. Gap-toothed Janice seethes with righteous fury at unpunished rule violations. Further obviating any doubt that we're meant to laugh with, not at, these people is the filmmakers' direct involvement in the drama. Speaking with obvious empathy to contestants, cracking up at their jokes, underscoring their powers of endurance with frequent shots of the sun and moon crossing the sky, Bindler's affection and respect for his subjects is unimpeachable. As with Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the documentarian's receptive spirit makes us collaborators in -- not just observers of -- the peculiar quest we're seeing. We've been blessed with an amazing run of great documentaries over the past couple of years, and Hands on a Hard Body ranks with the very best. The cost-cutting measures endemic to DIY filmmaking are clearly reflected in bare-basics production techniques and the rather dodgy look created by blowing up an original Hi-8 video print. Yet a nigh-miraculous blend of high spirits, poignancy, gentle satire, and unpretentious insight into the nature of human aspiration make this one of the most impressive films you're likely to see this year. (7/10/98)
Dobie
D: Todd Solondz; with Jane Adams, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, Jared Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lousie Lasser, Camryn Manheim, Rufus Read, Cynthia Stevenson, Elizabeth Ashley, Jon Lovitz, Marla Maples. (Not Rated, 137 min.)
Let it be said that there is no mistaking Todd Solondz's movies for anyone else's. This follow-up to Welcome to the Dollhouse, his 1996 Sundance grand prize winner that used a geeky junior high-schooler's painful adolescence to push the audience's personal boundaries of what is considered humorous and comfortably empathetic into new uncharted realms, has done it again. Happiness, a corrosively funny yet emotionally devastating look at that elusive thing that all Americans presume to be their right (as in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of … "), is another journey into the ironic heart of darkness, the dark center of being that can't roll over and internalize society's "Don't worry, be happy" blandishments. Don't worry if you haven't found happiness; it will eventually find you, it's right around the corner, all you need is the right map. Happiness finds us all at the crossroads, compass in one hand and thumb stuck out with the other, desperate to hitch a ride with anything that moves through the gridlock. Often that means we settle for the veneer of happiness, and for Solondz these surface trappings take the form of sex, romance, and the inauthenticity of the suburban dream. Happiness is structured episodically as it loosely follows key events in the lives of three New Jersey sisters, their parents in Florida, and their neighbors, acquaintances, and loved ones. The key events all involve sex and the agonies it brings. Helen (Boyle) is the sister whose success as an author brings her social and professional popularity but exacerbates her self-loathing and sense of phoniness; the misnamed Joy (Adams) is the sister whose 30-year string of disappointments in love and career do not extinguish her abiding hope for romantic and professional fulfillment. Trish (Stevenson) is the happily married homemaker who "has it all" and whose self-delusions are painfully unmasked when her mild-mannered and sensitive husband Bill (Baker) is exposed as a gay pedophile who has raped two of his 11-year-old son's classmates. This, of course, is the storyline that has aroused the most controversy, particularly in light of the publicity surrounding the film's abandonment by its original distributor October Films, which was forced to renege on its distribution deal by its wary parent company Universal. In true Solondz fashion, we have come to feel sympathy for this character who commits the most heinous of actions. The movie's cornerstone sequences are the frank, comforting, and strangely icky conversations Bill has with his son (Read) who is worried about such pubescent issues as penis size and ejaculation. These conversations provide the fodder for the movie's glorious penultimate joke as well as perhaps its most upsetting moment as the son sheds tears of rejection when he learns that his father would not molest him. At two hours and 20 minutes, Happiness rambles a bit too much, particularly in its last third, but the strength of these characters is undeniable. There are the parents (Gazzara and Lasser) in Boca Raton whose marriage is sputtering to a bored demise, the chubby obscene phone caller Allen (Hoffman) who is fixated on the unattainable Helen, the fat girl (Manheim) down the hall who is fixated on Allen and maybe also the male body parts she has squirreled away in her freezer as evidence of a crime, and Joy's ex-boyfriend (Lovitz) and her new hope -- a Russian émigré thief (Harris). Happiness is creepy, funny, mordant, and disturbing, an edgy work which embraces discomfort as the flip of movie escapism. With There's Something About Mary, Happiness helps mark 1998 as the breakthrough year of the cum shot in mainstream films. Happiness also fits nicely with our contemporary political landscape that suggests that everyone has dirty secrets lurking behind their placid public exteriors. Happiness, in all irony, may be the beast within. (10/23/98)
Arbor, Dobie
D: Stephen Herek; with Eddie Murphy, Jeff Goldblum, Kelly Preston, Robert Loggia, Jon Cryer, Eric McCormack. (PG, 113 min.)
All the advance signs looked discouraging, but I still kept thinking: How bad could a comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Jeff Goldblum really be? Well, let's put it this way … you won't ever hear me asking that particular question again. The more-often-brilliant-than-not Murphy and Goldblum have both hit new career nadirs in this tedious, unfunny comedy about a slumping shopping-network TV channel in Miami that hires a freelance guru to boost its sales. The set-up offers what seems to be potentially sharp-edged opportunities for satire of our modern mercenary media and national desire for belief -- whether it be the quest for a spiritual higher plane or faith in the power of material things to improve our lot in life -- yet the film manages to skirt all its keen potential and mire itself in prosaic boy-meets-girl-and-kooky-sidekick plot machinations. Ultimately, the ascetic approach may work best with Holy Man -- eliminate its consumption from your life plan and your burden will be lifted, my friends. Goldblum plays the part of Ricky Hayman, a top executive at the Good Buy Shopping Network (GBSN). He's a craven, soulless, and moderately powerful paragon of modern life who harbors contempt for the products he hawks as well as the lovely models he dates. But Ricky's job is hanging by a thread, and he must prove his mettle to the station's new owner (Loggia) and his pert new media analyst Kate Newell (Preston). Enter the mysterious "holy man" named G (Murphy), a pilgrim who first appears to him by the side of the highway. G attaches himself to Ricky like Marlowe's Ghost, here on a mission to guide Ricky toward the real meaning of life. Or maybe he's just a crazy scam artist who spouts vaguely spiritual feel-good aphorisms. The script by Tom Shulman (who found success early in his career with an Oscar win for his second screenplay, Dead Poets Society, but has recently hit the skids with such monumental clunkers as Medicine Man and 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag) is woefully shopworn and predictable and brimming with implausibilities. The stars evidence no chemistry whatsoever, either with the characters they are playing or with each other. Murphy underplays his comic mannerisms, as if in deference to the belief that he is indeed playing a holy man. Goldblum, as is usual, conveys a thinking man's twitchiness but you suspect his eyes are just darting about madly in search of the exit signs. As a couple, Goldblum and Preston give off no real sparks; their leap from animosity to passion is barely noticeable. Amplifying the film's lackadaisical attitude is its poorly conceived compositions that awkwardly cut characters off at the forehead, as if the filmmakers didn't know how to accommodate Goldblum's tall stature. Holy Man needs to be sent on a retreat. (10/9/98)
Lakeline
D: John Carpenter; with James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, Sheryl Lee, Thomas Ian Griffith, Maximilian Schell, Tim Guinee, Gregory Sierra, Mark Boone Junior. (R, 107 min.)
James Woods as a fearless vampire slayer? Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer as an undead seductress? Daniel Baldwin unimpeded by stimulants? Is there anything John Carpenter can't do? Well, yes, actually: He can't get this film to rise above its comic-book level plotting and inane dialogue. Based on John Steakley's novel Vampire$, Carpenter's version jettisons much of the Vatican-as-Global-Overseer subplotting and instead pares the action down to its most basic level, that of a modern-day vampiric Western (which in itself sounds like a pretty nifty idea). Too bad everybody except Woods plays it so straight: Baldwin's earnest-though-lumpy features and delivery make for some of the goofiest lines around this Halloween season, and Griffith's dark prince of evil is essentially Frank Langella with a makeover and a bad attitude. Woods plays Jack Crow, the head of a Vatican-ordained group of professional vampire slayers who search the Southwest turning up "nests" of the creepy-crawlies and dragging them out into the daylight (via a winch attached to a Jeep Cherokee) to meet their richly deserved ends. When the group is slaughtered one night while busy making merry with some Vatican-ordained whores and liquor, survivors Crow and right-hand-man Tony Montoya (Baldwin) grab freshly bitten whore Katrina (Lee) and wait for her to flip over to the dark side so that they can use her to telepathically track down the master vampire Valek (Griffith). Carpenter makes good use of the New Mexican locales -- a posse of the pulse-impeded arising from the desert soil packs a resounding wallop -- and Woods, god bless him, is sterling as the hyper, wisecracking Crow, all black-leather-jacket and Ray-Ban panache and crossbow-packing sinew. Trouble is, the rest of the cast is as disposable as a Flintstones' Band-Aid on a severed jugular; try though they might, Baldwin and Lee are eminently forgettable here, despite Carpenter's deeply submerged subplot involving a living-dead love triangle and some obscure AIDS metaphors. For all its violent chutzpah, Vampires fails to affect the ice-cubes-in-the-blood reaction of even Interview With the Vampire, and the trouble lies in Carpenter's over-the-top dynamics. The film moves relentlessly, leaving you with less a sense of scenes and sequences passing than of pages turning: It really is a comic book, come to think of it. Severed heads and spurting arteries do not a quality horror film make. You'd think the director of Halloween would have been able to keep that in mind, but it just isn't so. It's interesting, though, to think of double-billing Woods' Crow with Pacino's Prince of Darkness from Devil's Advocate: Scenery-chewing never looked so good. (10/30/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Ted Demme; with Denis Leary, Jason Barry, Billy Crudup, John Diehl, Greg Dulli, Nah Emmerich, Ian Hart, Famke Janssen, Colm Meaney, Martin Sheen, Jeanne Tripplehorn. (R, 90 min.)
If you only know Denis Leary from comic roles such as The Ref (also directed by Demme) or his stand-up routines, this movie may come as a bit of a shock. Leary, Demme, and screenwriter Mike Armstrong have come up with a brilliant, harrowing portrait of misplaced loyalties and savage valor that may be one of the best character-driven ensemble pieces to come around in some time. Mining his old-school memories of the fightin' Irish Boston neighborhood where he was raised, Leary plays Bobby O'Grady, a thirtysomething hoodlum who's never managed to leave behind his working-class Charlestown community. Although it's only a tiny, one-square-mile swath of land, the old neighborhood is a fiercely proud and self-supporting separate community. At night Bobby and his friends -- Red (Emmerich), Mouse (Hart), and Digger (Diehl) -- steal cars, get high on Harp Lager and cocaine, and exist in a perpetually hyper state of arrested adolescence. Lording it over the neighborhood like a two-bit Jimmy Cagney is Jackie O (Meaney), a paranoid gangster wannabe whose petty criminal schemes are as stagnant as Bobby's toadyism. When Jackie has Bobby's cokehead cousin Teddy (Crudup) killed in cold blood on the off chance that the youngster was a snitch, Bobby's allegiance begins to swing from one end of the scale to the other, all while carrying on an affair with the boss' saturnine moll Katy (Janssen). Monument Ave. contains echoes of plenty of other urban wolfpack films, from De Niro's A Bronx Tale to everything Scorsese ever did, but it at least feels wildly dissimilar. Leary, for his part, plays Bobby straight, never giving in to the omnipresent opportunities that arise to make the character more sympathetic than he actually is. A closet nihilist with a black-leather-jacket affectation and a weakness for stimulants, Bobby is nonetheless the conscience of the film. When his cousin Seamus (Barry), just off the boat from Dublin, falls prey to Jackie's gangster-sized ego, Bobby snaps in just the right way. Unlike so many other portraits of urban life in America, Monument Ave. never feels like a sham; from Bobby's misbegotten cronies on down to his alcoholic, aged mother, the film rings true, and is all the more powerful for it. Demme, as well, is firing on all points. He's cut the film with a ragged-yet-seamless style, inserting childhood photos of better daze to underscore his thematics and even tossing a few freeze-framed Kodak moments that feel as natural as the .38 in Bobby's pocket. Don't be put off by a storyline that sounds all too familiar -- Monument Ave. is a punchy and ultimately sorrowful (not to mention soulful) meditation on fractious brotherhood and bad decisions, tough stuff all the way around. (10/30/98)
Arbor
D: John Fortenberry and Will Ferrell; with Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Molly Shannon, Dan Hedaya, Richard Grieco. (PG-13, 83 min.)
Like all movie fans, I'm awed by Hollywood's relentless Napoleonic obsession with making movies of all known Saturday Night Live skits. And unlike many, I seldom even wonder how this bizarre passion began or why it persists in the face of such meager demand. Far be it from me to oppose manifest destiny. Still, movies as flagrantly vacant and pointless as A Night at the Roxbury do raise the question of how long the gods will keep letting us whiz away our precious moments of mortal existence before they simply get fed up and incinerate us all with plasma beams. Surely you're familiar with the premise. The Butabi Brothers (Ferrell and Kattan), SNL's mongoose-necked, rayon-suited disco commandos, are now the subject of a full-length feature that answers all our urgent questions about their backgrounds and aspirations. Both, it turns out, center upon their tireless efforts to breach the citadel of LA's glitzy Roxbury club and eventually become clubowners themselves. As with all of these SNL spinoffs (It's Pat, Coneheads, Wayne's World ,Stuart Saves His Family), the project's success hinges upon the writers' ability to dream up enough viable backstory to turn single-gag skits into watchable 90-minute films. Here, Ferrell, Steve Koren, and Amy Heckerling fall back on precedent (Wayne's World, Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd's Wild and Crazy Guys) and imagine the lads as developmentally stunted child-men with delusions of grandeur. With a persistence available only to the totally clueless, the Butabis chase their dream of Rubell-like disco godhood against all odds, aided by the likes of 21 Jump Street heartthrob Richard Grieco and the unbilled Chazz Palminteri. But for all the grim effort invested in covering the screenwriterly bases of three-act structure, motivation, crisis, redemption, etc., there's no getting around a single brutal fact: Nobody really gives a flip. Not the actors, whose mailed-in performances convey the unspoken message, "Hey! I'm just puttin' food on the table here; if you don't like it take it up with my agent." Not the filmmakers, who've scrimped at every turn from the mediocre cast to the hack writing team to the leadenly unimaginative directing. And, in all likelihood, not the viewers, whose chief reward for showing up will be the dismal sport of spotting has-beens like Dwayne Hickman (Dobie Gillis) and Loni Anderson in cameo roles. "What is love?" Haddaway asks in the omnipresent soundtrack song. Not this time-wasting bilge, that's for sure. (10/9/98)
Gateway, Tinseltown North
D: Carl Franklin; with Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger, William Hurt, Tom Everett Scott, Lauren Graham, Nicky Katt. (R, 121 min.)
The one true thing that can be said about families is that there never really is just one true thing, only a multiplicity of truths, a plurality of perspectives at least as numerous as the participants themselves. The rich, fertile nuances of these essential relationships and our ever-changing understanding of them are the magma of our dramatic bedrock. The retreads in the family drama cycle are as old and deep as civilization itself, yet every once in a while someone new takes the vehicle out for a spin and finds a few more good miles left in its tires. That's the case with One True Thing, a formulaic family melodrama whose craftsmanship and sensitivity to its characters raises it to the level of sublime group portrait. Adapted by Karen Croner from Anna Quindlen's 1995 novel, the story is told from the point of view of Ellen Gulden (Zellweger), a successful, young investigative journalist whose career is temporarily derailed by her mother's battle with cancer and her father's insistence that she return home and take care of the household. Ellen's resentment over putting her own life on hold is compounded by her complicated feelings for her parents. She desperately longs for professional approval from her father (Hurt), a National Book Award-winning "important" author, while also dreading the time that will be spent alone with her mother (Streep), a domestic whirlwind with whom she's never felt close. Of course, before it's all through Ellen will learn that there's more to her parents' lives than she previously understood. The manipulative man who can criticize her writing as being too emotional can also guilt-trip her into coming home by implying that she has no heart. He can flatter Ellen by asking her to write the intro for his new book at the same time he piles her with his dirty laundry. She comes to suspect things about his relationships with his female students and discovers some of his well-cloaked inner demons. The mother whose domestic and civic involvements Ellen likens to cult activity, is discovered to have a method to her madness and inner resources and thoughts that prove to be revelations to her daughter. "Thank god," Ellen caustically murmurs in the beginning of the film when someone observes, "There's no place like home." And even though by the end of the film Ellen's understanding of her family is richer and more multi-faceted, I suspect she's still relieved to know that it's a place she'll only travel through once in her life. What makes One True Thing truly exceptional, however, is the strength of the three central performances (Zellweger, Streep, and Hurt). The actors are all phenomenally affecting and Carl Franklin's direction and Declan Quinn's camerawork make the most of the little moments that pass between people. The film's biggest burden is the clunky whodunit unifying structure that constantly interrupts the narrative as a D.A. quizzes Ellen about the suspicious results of her mother's autopsy. It's an artificial dramatic device that feels external and devoid of real tension. Despite this, director Franklin proves he knows the difference between One False Move and One True Thing. (9/25/98)
Great Hills, Lincoln
D: Trey Parker; with Parker, Matt Stone, Dian Bachar, Robyn Lynne Raab, Michael Dean Jacobs, Ron Jeremy, David Dunn, Chasey Lain, Juli Ashton, Stanley L. Kaufman. (NC-17, 90 min.)
From the evil geniuses behind South Park comes the Citizen Kane of pornographic/Mormon/martial arts/superhero/buddy films. Perhaps that's a bit over the top in the praise department, but Orgazmo -- like everything else Parker puts his mind to -- is equally outlandish, part skewed morality play, part sophomoric slapstick, and wholly ridiculous. Rarely will anyone get the chance to see so many professional adult film stars so frequently clothed, and it's equally uncommon to find porn legend Ron "Porcupine" Jeremy actually acting. The mind reels. A rosy-cheeked Parker plays Elder Joe Young, a young Mormon serving his required time in Los Angeles amongst the heathens while waiting anxiously to return to Utah to marry his beloved -- and impossibly cheery -- fiancée Lisa (Raab). Through a complex turn of events, Joe catches the eye of adult film producer Maxxx Orbison (Jacobs). Orbison takes a liking to Joe's martial arts abilities and recruits him to star in his next production as the titular Orgazmo, a triple-X superhero who battles evildoers alongside his diminutive sidekick Choda-boy (Bachar). When the film proves to be an unlikely box-office sensation, Joe must hide the embarrassing truth from Lisa (he tells her he's starring in Death of a Salesman and its sequels) as well as perform as the fictional Orgazmo in real life, using a fully functioning Orgazmorator (a weapon that stuns and incapacitates criminals by inducing intense orgasms). As his already narrow bridge between fantasy and reality dwindles, Joe finds himself becoming more and more enmeshed in the world of Orgazmo (all this despite the fact that he's contractually obligated to have a stunt penis). If that sounds silly, it is. Parker's hallmark wackiness is in full swing here, from the opening credits, in which a cheesoid metal band sings the praises of being a man, to his romantic interlude with one of the most hideously overweight strippers yet committed to film. Fans of South Park (and Parker's previous film, Cannibal: The Musical!) will have a riotous time, but it should be noted that the native Coloradoan is fast becoming an accomplished filmmaker. Orgazmo, for all its triple-entendres and bare-breasted shenanigans, is a sly little work of subversive comedy, at once poking some much-needed fun at the porn industry while simultaneously using real-life porno actors in key roles. Parker's white-bread take on the apple-pie, Mormon Joe Young is a thing of sublime silliness (blasting the evil Orbison with his Orgazmorator, he fires off a clip and adds, "One more. For Jesus.") Whether or not the success of South Park and Parker's other work is indicative of the downfall of cerebral comedy is an argument for another time. Bottom line? Super-porno-Mormons are pretty damn funny. Nearly as much as watching Ron Jeremy try to act. (10/23/98)
Dobie
D: Gary Ross; with Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, J.T. Walsh, Don Knotts. (PG-13, 123 min.)
Pleasantville is indeed a technical marvel to behold, rich with sophisticated computer technology that deftly combines full-color and black-and-white images all in one shot. However, the movie's simplistic storyline does not match its stunning visual accomplishments: Pleasantville's story is drawn from a palette that's strictly limited to black-and-white. Terrific performances by all the key cast members also help mask the fact that the movie's central hook -- two Nineties teens who are trapped in the staid, colorless world of a Fifties family sitcom and infect the said town, Pleasantville, with all sorts of newfangled, daring notions about self-expression and self-fulfillment -- is never developed beyond its obvious symbolism and ramifications. In fact, the only obvious note that the film surprisingly failed to include would be that of Cyndi Lauper power-ballading about seeing "true colors shining through." And even then, something like the Stones' "She Comes in Colors" might have been more appropriate and certainly more literal-minded for Joan Allen's scene as the Mom who discovers the joy of masturbatory sex (and though discreet, it's the one surprising sequence in an otherwise solidly PG-13 film). Pleasantville is too content to settle for the same kind of easy escapism that its modern protagonists long for. David (Maguire) is hooked on reruns of his favorite Fifties TV show, Pleasantville, as an obvious refuge from the real-world pressures of his parents' unhappy divorce and the steady reminders of a future with low job expectations, safe sex precautions, and bleak projections of famine and ecological devastation. During a tug of war with his twin sister Jennifer (Witherspoon), the remote control breaks and an oddball TV repairman (the serendipitously cast Don Knotts) mysteriously appears on their doorstep to provide them with a new zapper that strangely transports them into the actual world of Pleasantville. This alternate universe is a Fifties time warp in living black-and-white: firemen only exist to rescue cats from trees and all basketballs shot by varsity ballplayers automatically swoosh through the hoop. When David and Jennifer introduce sex, emotion, and spontaneity to Pleasantville, the town comes apart at the seams. First someone's tongue turns red, then others start to notice flashes of color, words suddenly appear in previously blank books, and a tree bursts into flames (the "burning bush" coincides with the discovery of orgasm). Next thing you know, folks are listening to Dave Brubeck and admiring Picasso and D.H. Lawrence. A girl seduces her boyfriend with a red apple (really!) and Mom's not there with dinner on the table when Dad comes home from work. J.T. Walsh in his last screen role leads the town in a mob reaction to the "Coloreds" who have invaded town. The last third of the movie devolves into too much illogical detail about the town's reactionary response. (If hate is as strong an emotion as love, why aren't these rioters also shedding their placid black-and-white exteriors for unsuppressible color combos?) Yet it feels curmudgeonly to dwell on the film's dim plotting when the film's performances are all so strong and endearing and the sight of a smudge of color breaking through the gray pancake makeup is so breathtaking to behold. First-time director Ross is an old hand at this kind of magical adult parable, having scripted Big and Dave. To have selected such a technically difficult project for his first directing job must say a lot about his commitment. This time out, his characters get to see the roses bloom. Next film he does, I bet they'll stop to smell them too. (10/30/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lakehills, Lakeline, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Griffin Dunne; with Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, Stockard Channing, Aidan Quinn. (PG-13, 110 min.)
If you can swing it, the most appropriate way to see Practical Magic would be as part of an evening that also includes dinner at Olive Garden, a tour of Amado Peña's art gallery, and a few pages of the latest Clive Cussler before hitting the sack. The unifying theme, of course, is predictability -- a pervading sense of generic okayness that my Conspiracy Theory of Everything ascribes to the same benignly oppressive force behind the troubling identicality of Olive Garden breadsticks. Granted, bagging on a film as competently executed as Practical Magic may seem odd and mean-spirited given the flood tide of true crap that washes constantly through our local multiplexes. Still, it's just a little too ironic (to quote Okay Pop Singer Alanis Morrisette) that a movie with the word "magic" in its title should be such a perfect example of the difference between competence and inspiration. This adaptation of Alice Hoffman's bestselling novel deals with a modern-day witch family living in a tiny New England burg where their social lot has barely improved since the days of Cotton Mather. Due to a centuries-old curse, lasting love has never been in the tarot cards for the Owens women (their guys always die gruesome deaths). However, the latest nubile generation (Kidman and Bullock) is again bucking the curse, with horrific results for Kidman's Gillian but a faint ray of promise for Bullock's Sally. It's a story well told by pros who know what they're doing. Starting with the savvy casting of Bullock, Kidman, Wiest, and Channing as the wiccan family and continuing on through the sharply focused script by Hoffman and Robin Swicord to the soundtrack by an eclectic lineup of big-time estro-rockers, everything here clicks -- just not very loudly. Even as I was entertained minute to minute by Practical Magic's undeniable buoyancy, sexiness, and visual richness, I found it impossible not to resent the constant willingness to settle for serviceable, off-the-shelf MovieParts. Doing better wouldn't have required any Kubrickesque creative agonies. Maybe just a sharper eye out for lazy dialogue like "It's all about you, isn't it?". Or a less familiar signifier for family joie de vivre than conga-lining around the house to Seventies pop tunes. Or a little more effort by the normally resourceful Quinn to show why an all-world babe like Bullock would fall for his dim-bulb hick character. Granted, this film may be (okay, almost surely will be) a hit. It's too well-assembled in a Burger King Whopperish way for one to imagine otherwise. Yet it's equally hard to imagine that cinematic fast food like this was what the talented cast and crew had in mind as kids when their first bright, urgent movie dreams were born. My guess is that what they were really hoping for was something more like, I don't know … magic. (10/16/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: John Frankenheimer; with Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Jonathan Pryce, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Skipp Sudduth, Sean Bean, Michel Lonsdale. (R, 121 min.)
Trying to find a first-rate Euro-caper these days is akin to trying to find romantic comedies by Abel Ferrara: They're just not there. Kudos, then, to Frankenheimer, the grand old man of cerebral action films, for giving it his best shot one more time. And although Ronin fails to live up to its admittedly high expectations, it remains head and shoulders above what little competition there is by virtue of its stellar casting, editing, and above all, Frankenheimer's fluid, explosive direction. An old hand at ratcheting up the suspense until your veins begin to pop, Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, French Connection II) pulls out all the stops here, but ultimately Ronin is snafued by a few too many plot twists and some creative scripting that even a late-addition (and pseudonymous) David Mamet couldn't solve. The film revolves around a shadowy group of Cold War relics, four men and a woman, recruited in Paris to acquire by any means necessary a large, silver briefcase from an unknown target. The details are sketchy at best: Tall, blonde Dierdre (McElhone), possibly an I.R.A. member, has gathered the best of the best; De Niro's Sam, who may or may not be ex-CIA; the impossibly ravaged Reno as Vincent, a French acquisitions specialist; Skarsgård as Gregor, the duplicitous über-hacker; and Bean's Spence, the puke-at-the-first-sign-of-trouble Brit. Frankenheimer does wonderful things with his set-up (watching the quintet interact as they meet for the first time is a revelation -- De Niro and Reno, particularly, are at the top of their form), but the rest of the film is spent waiting for a payoff that never arrives. Ronin is a case of too much too soon, and by the time "Directed by John Frankenheimer" flashes on the screen some two hours later, you're still wondering "Is that it?" Unfortunately, it is. Still, it's a hell of a ride. No one directs car chases like Frankenheimer, and the lengthy, turbo-charged rides here are akin to living things, snaking their reptilian paths through the claustrophobic byways of a decrepit Paris and a sprawling, too-small Nice. Much of this out-of-control beauty is due to editor Tony Gibbs, who knows just when to cut and when to let the sequence play itself out. Ronin also succeeds wonderfully in terms of sound: It's a loud film, but unlike last summer's Armageddon -- which turned it all up to 11 and then went out for a six-pack -- this film knows exactly when to be loud, and exactly when to let the quiet, hissing sound of a dying Fiat engine taper into a cacophonous silence. It looks good, it sounds good, but Ronin falls just shy of the mark; it's the kind of near-miss you don't mind so much. (10/2/98)
Gateway, Lakeline
D: Brett Ratner; with Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, Tom Wilkinson, Elizabeth Peña, Tzi Ma, Julia Hsu, Philip Baker Hall, Rex Linn. (PG-13, 105 min.)
What is it about the troublesome transfer of Hong Kong action stars and directors to working within the Hollywood system? John Woo, Tsui Hark, Stanley Tong, and certainly last but not least Chan himself have seen their formidable talents reduced to a cookie-cutter sort of lowest-common-denominator wimpiness that leaves their domestically produced work hollow and relatively uninspired compared with their maverick firestorms back in the former crown colony. Does Immigration and Naturalization force them to check their chutzpah at the border? Someone look into this, I beg you. While Woo has managed (with great difficulty) to make the studio system work for him -- or perhaps he's learned to work around it -- this new buddy cop mishmash by Ratner (Money Talks) under-utilizes both Chan's manic comic energy and his legendary martial artistry. It's Chan Lite: less filling, tastes grate. Much of the grating comes in the form of sidekick Chris Tucker, a comic actor whose spastic, nitrous oxide stylings occasionally make even Jim Carrey look positively lachrymose by comparison. Here they're teamed as the prerequisite daffy duo, with Tucker's LAPD Detective James Carter the brash, flamboyant (and woefully in need of a suspension) upstart, and Chan's fish-out-of-water Lee as a transplanted HK Detective Inspector hot on the trail of a mysterious Asian gangster who has relocated to the greener pastures of Los Angeles and promptly kidnapped the new Hong Kong Consul's young daughter. When the F.B.I. takes the case, Carter is chosen to babysit the intense Lee and keep him out of the way of the investigation. From this slapdash pairing evolves a numbing series of gags involving, among other things, Chinese food, the language barrier, hip hop music vs. the Beach Boys, and all manner of lowbrow cheese poofery. Originality, that most dangerous of Hollywood's 700 deadly sins, is conspicuous in its absence, and though Tucker's bug-eyed histrionics do elicit a few chuckles from time to time, Rush Hour is in desperate need of a laugh track. For his part, Chan is relegated to a few smirky asides while Tucker hogs the show, and when it comes to Ratner's handling of the action sequences, the less said the better. Like all martial artists (and physical actors in general), Chan needs a full shot to do his work. What Ratner gives us instead is a disjointed and often confusing series of close-ups, two-shots, and the like that may well leave Chan initiates puzzling over all the international fuss. While it's always a rush to see Chan ingratiate himself before the camera, and therefore the audience, this is hardly the showcase for his myriad talents. Instead, Rush Hour falls into the same old buddy cop niche as so many other films before. There may be nothing new under the sun, but you can bet your life there's absolutely nothing new about Rush Hour at all. (9/25/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Steven Spielberg; with Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi, Jeremy Davies, Ted Danson, Dennis Farina. (R, 168 min.)
Weeks before its release, Saving Private Ryan had already been tagged as "the best film about war ever made." This from critics and veterans alike, and though I fall (thankfully) into the former category, the film is inarguably one of the most realistic depictions of what it must be like to engage in modern warfare. For once, believe the hype. It certainly doesn't hurt matters that Saving Private Ryan is helmed by icon/director Spielberg and many of his longtime collaborators, including director of photography Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List, Amistad), and is populated by a brilliant ensemble cast headed by that other Hollywood icon, Tom Hanks. In Robert Rodat's script, Capt. John Miller (Hanks) is ordered to lead his squad of eight men through the madness of Omaha Beach and D-Day, then go behind German lines to rescue Pvt. James Ryan, the only surviving brother among four soldiers, and thereby scuttle a potential public-relations snafu on the home front. Miller and his men don't give a rat's ass for this unseen, unknown private they've been ordered to find, but they know -- or at least Miller knows -- that finishing the mission brings them all one step closer to home and hearth. Rounding out Miller's squad are some of the best character actors working today, including Sizemore's square-shooting Sgt. Horvarth, Burns' wisecracking Brooklyn dogface Pvt. Reiben, Diesel as the requisite Italian-American Pvt. Carpazo, Ribisi's medic Wade, newcomer Pepper as the squad's devoutly religious sharpshooter, Goldberg as the Nazi-baiting Jew, and Davies as the conscripted, unsure Cpl. Upham. Rodat and the actors steer clear of the most obvious clichés in squadron demographics, and instead, let their audience come to know them on their own terms. One by one, the men are introduced by mannerism and dialogue, very slowly emerging as fully developed characters who, by the end of the film, you feel as though you've known maybe your whole dreaming life, if not your waking. All these acting chops merge with Spielberg's brilliant recreation of the final countdown to V-E Day. Beginning with the Allied forces landing at Omaha Beach (which goes on for an unprecedented half hour), Spielberg proves again and again just why he's one of the most respected filmmakers alive. Never has there been such unmitigated carnage outside of combat documentaries: Awash in blood and strewn with staggering, limbless men jetting arterial gore, the Omaha sequence is a prolonged, relentless nightmare of death, agony, and stark, naked terror. And yet it's a gorgeous, achingly affecting and artistically rendered sequence as well, a ballet of bodies, an adagio of organs. Spielberg paints everything in desaturated, khaki tones; dirt clods hang suspended, jittering in the frigid air while bullets impact and bodies sag and fall like sad, untethered marionettes. On top of this epic, disturbing realism, of course, is Saving Private Ryan's genuine sense of loss and humanity; it's perhaps the most humanistic war film since J'Accuse or All Quiet on the Western Front. A bitter, bloody masterpiece with adrenalized emotions and hyper-realized images, this is perhaps as close to battle as any sane human being should ever hope to tread. (7/24/98)
Lincoln, Tinseltown North
D: Paul Anderson; with Kurt Russell, Jason Scott Lee, Connie Nielsen, Michael Chiklis, Gary Busey. (R, 120 min.)
"Shane! Come back, Shane!" Granted, Brandon de Wilde is nowhere in sight, but that doesn't make the obvious comparisons any less obvious. Anderson and screenwriter David Webb Peoples have mercilessly stolen from George Stevens' classic Western, as well as pillaging a whole slew of other sources from George Miller's Mad Max trilogy to all manner of Kurosawa knock-offs. "So what?" I hear you cry. "Film as a medium is reflexive by its very nature -- it's inherent in the art form!" Sure, kid, but there's a fine line between art and theft, and Anderson's high-wire act on Soldier is nothing if not shifty-eyed. That quibble aside, Soldier almost makes up for its ponderous lack of originality with some terrific set design -- courtesy of Blade Runner's David L. Snyder -- and one of the best bouts of futuristic fisticuffs since Rowdy Roddy Piper whupped alleged alien ass in They Live (which was in itself shades of The Quiet Man). Russell plays Todd, a post-millennial super soldier, bred from birth for intensive combat, who finds himself on the outs when a new breed of über-goons (led by Lee's steely, one-eyed Caine 607) comes up through the ranks. Told he is obsolete and left for dead on a supposedly uninhabited garbage planet, an injured Todd makes his way through the ravaged wasteland (which looks to all effects like the set of John Cameron's futuristic Terminator-overrun Earth) until he meets up with a rag-tag band of peace-loving scavengers who make their homes amongst the towering piles of debris and the deadly, F5-level sandstorms that periodically sweep across the planet's surface. While trying to get in touch with his nonexistent feminine side, Todd and his new friends are besieged by Caine and his squadron, who just happen to pick this planet for some field testing. Mindful of his priorities ("Weakness = Death" and so on) and aching for a chance to get even with his replacement model, Todd embarks on a bloodthirsty explode-o-thon while Gary Busey (as former boss Church) simmers in the background, as always. Kudos to Peoples' imagery-heavy script, which manages to give Russell even fewer lines than Schwarzenegger's Conan, and also for his glib backgrounding here. If nothing else, you can't accuse Soldier of taking its time getting to the action. Blood, bullets, and body parts arc across the screen in wild parabolas, though the same cannot be said for the characterizations. Still, it's a suitably ornery slice of he-man gruntstuff. Those looking for an escape from the wearing bonds of logic and sensibility could do worse, though any film featuring a professional killer named "Todd" is surely more fiction than science. (10/30/98)
Gateway, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Peter and Bobby Farrelly; with Ben Stiller, Cameron Diaz, Matt Dillon, Chris Elliott, Lin Shaye, Lee Evans, Jeffrey Tambor, W. Earl Brown, Markie Post, Keith David, Jonathan Richman, Brett Favre. (R, 119 min.)
When Peter and Bobby Farrelly titled their first film Dumb & Dumber it's as if they issued themselves a comic challenge: Always aim for the next level -- downward. However, this shouldn't be misunderstood as meaning that their new film There's Something About Mary isn't funny, frequently side-splittingly so. These fraternal filmmakers are specialists in lowbrow bodily-functions humor as well as defiant assailants of any subject matter that's marked "Fragile: Politically Correct." Where they branch out in There's Something About Mary is in their creation of sustained comic sequences, an advance over the strung-together assemblage of gags that propel the momentum of both Dumb & Dumber and Kingpin. The film's much described early sequence in which nerdy Ted (Stiller) never makes it to the prom with dream girl Mary (Diaz) because of an excruciatingly catastrophic accident with his pants zipper, is destined to become a classic bit of film comedy. In its antic craziness as more and more characters barge into the scene, Mary is reminiscent of the crazed, hellzapoppin' style of the Marx Brothers. More and more characters pop into the scene, the jokes fly ("Is it the frank or the beans?" Mary's solicitous dad keeps asking), and the audience winces hysterically with laughter. And then, when you think it's all gone just as far as it's able, the sequence layers on a sight gag so audacious that you suddenly understand that you're completely at the film's mercy. Though this sequence is the instant classic, a few others nearly equal its antic mischief and sublime buildup. And, really, they're much better left undescribed. At about two hours in length, however, Mary consists of more jokes than sustained sequences. A surprisingly large number of the laughs work, although, understandably, a good number of them also fall flat. You can bet that whenever the story slows down to advance the plot concerning its paper-thin characters, the film takes a noticeable dip. As the Mary at the center of it all, Diaz certainly exudes that irresistible "something" expressed in the title. In films such as My Best Friend's Wedding and A Life Less Ordinary, Diaz has shown herself to be a good comic sport who is game for just about anything. Here, it's no stretch to understand why, at the end of the movie, some half-dozen suitors have converged in her living room to throw themselves at her feet. Stiller is a deadpan hoot, although Dillon's scuzzball private dick is a bit too extreme for the circumstances. Able support work is provided by numerous players, among them Chris Elliott (who, regrettably has little more to do than be the butt of a skin-ailment joke); Lin Shaye (a Farrelly regular in her assigned role of wizened sexpot), and Lee Evans (the physical comedian who was so good in Funny Bones and Mouse Hunt and here milks his character's crutches for every joke they're worth). Special note must be made of cult musician Jonathan Richman, the minimalist romantic troubadour who is used here with snare-drum sidekick Tommy Larkins as roving minstrels who pop up (à la Cat Ballou) in various scenes to provide running ironic commentaries -- in verse. And speaking of songs, stick around for the closing credits during which the entire cast vamps to "Build me Up, Buttercup." The Farrellys won't be winning any good taste awards in the near future (their next film, reportedly, centers around Siamese twins), but, my oh my, they are modern kingpins of comedy. (7/17/98)
Great Hills, Lakeline, Tinseltown North
D: Jamie Blanks; with Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Michael Rosenbaum, Loretta Devine, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid, John Neville, Robert Englund, Brad Dourif. (R, 100 min.)
What hath Kevin Williamson wrought? Not this sad excuse for a horror film, thankfully, but the lineage of the recently reanimated slasher genre can indeed be traced right on back to Scream. Still, like Victor Frankenstein, his intentions were good, though the marketing juggernaut he's created is beginning to bear bitter fruit. Like chainsaws and Karo syrup, it comes, I suspect, with the terror-itory (as does Brad Dourif, whose brief cameo here is far more interesting than it should be). Urban Legend's story is a simple one: An unseen psychopath is carving up students at a prestigious Maine university and using those hoary old urban legends as a template. Thus we get the guy with the ax in the back seat of the co-ed's car, the boyfriend dangling from the tree, the Dran-o down the gullet, and so on, until only leads Witt (as good girl Natalie) and Gayheart (as might-be-a-good-girl Brenda) remain running about screaming while Leto's eager-beaver cub reporter seeks the truth. Believe me, though, this is one time it's not out there. Instead, first-time director Blanks fires nothing but, O.D.'ing on cheap frights and cheeseball scare tactics (i.e., "Is that a killer behind me, or just a friend?") while running his very talented leads (Witt's turn in the indie Fun remains a genre high-water mark) through the same paces Jamie Lee Curtis established two decades before. The only thing new about Blanks' film is the actors/victims: Stereotyped cardboard cutouts such as these are hardly the basis for a riveting thriller, though, and when one dies, another takes his or her place. Even Bill Clinton couldn't give a rat's patootie about these folks' pain. Horror show stalwart Englund is on hand as the grizzled professor of needless exposition, explaining in a vaguely menacing way how these myths and folk tales came about. He looks eerie enough without that Freddy Krueger makeup that he could have been the perfect MacGuffin, but Blanks unwisely does away with him early on in the film, making way for more confusing "whodunit" gambits and poorly lensed carnage. Unlike Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend even falls short when it comes to the grue. Nary a disemboweling is lingered over for more than six or seven frames, leaving the viewer to puzzle over just how all these people died. And that deadly teen sexual activity that always seems to result in too much blood? Nowhere to be found. Spottily directed and lacking the dubious merits of even the Friday the 13th franchise, this is one slasher film that should die a quick and lonely box-office death. (10/2/98)
Alamo Drafthouse, Lake Creek, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Vincent Ward; with Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jr., Annabella Sciorra, Max von Sydow, Jessica Brooks Grant, Josh Paddock, Rosalind Chao. (PG-13, 113 min.)
Beautiful dreams these be indeed. What Dreams May Come is a stunningly original visual journey to heaven, hell, and beyond. But like most dreams revisited with eyes wide open, this one's content dissolves into a transparent puddle of inchoate thoughts and predictable iconography. The film's maddening dime-store metaphysics are part and parcel of the story's epic romantic sentiment and classically familiar visual cues. What Dreams May Come straddles an intriguingly awkward gap between its "art film" ambitions and its "mass market" inclinations. And though the film is mired in a granola slick of touchy-feely hokum about eternal love, the afterlife, and the beyond, the film's absolute gravity about its subjects of life and death make it an original exception to our standard romantic sagas. Of course there's also the fact that What Dreams May Come looks like nothing else you've seen before (which is partly due to the recent advances in electronic compositing technology that permit the creation of amazing new visions never before seen on the screen). The script, which was written by Ron Bass (Rain Man, My Best Friend's Wedding, Waiting to Exhale) and adapted from the novel by Richard Matheson, casts Robin Williams as a modern-day Orpheus who descends to the depths of hell to reclaim his beloved Eurydice. In this version, Williams is a kindly doctor named Chris Nielsen who is married to his soulmate, Annie (Sciorra), a painter and 19th-century art restorer. Before the movie's preamble is over, we learn that the couple's two children have died in a car accident, which is followed four years later by Chris also meeting death in the headlights after he stops to render Good Samaritan aid to another motorist hurt in a car crash. Annie is understandably distraught. Chris finds (with the help of a guide played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) that heaven is whatever you make it out to be, and for him it resembles the romantic visual world he shared with Annie. He is able to enter into her brooding paintings, and his heaven becomes an oozing canvas as he sumptuously slides through paint blobs and stunning two-dimensional scenes suddenly rendered three-dimensional. The film's visions of heaven and hell are fairly conventional: Heaven is full of cherubic sprites and Victorian archetypes, hell is a painting by Hieronymous Bosch (with contributions from Dante). By the time Ingmar Bergman icon Max von Sydow shows up as the Tracker who will lead Chris into hell, well, we're just about ready to sit down and play a chess game with Death. Despite the script's fuzzy logic and tear-jerking ploys, New Zealand director Vincent Ward's American debut makes complete sense in terms of his career progression. Two previous films, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey and Map of the Human Heart are boldly original dramas predicated on elliptical time and space strategies. Both succeed to much greater degrees than What Dreams May Come, perhaps because of their more modest budgets and scale. Ward is one of the contemporary cinema's true visionaries and it's always worthwhile to anticipate what new dreams may come from his imagination. This latest one vacillates between the wondrous and the trite, yet I'm certain we're the better for its presence in the world. (10/2/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Lakeline, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
THE BIG CHILL (1983) D: Lawrence Kasdan; with Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, JoBeth Williams. The cool embers of idealistic passions, the sudden "face-to-face" with mortality, the illumination of the present by the rekindled hearth of the past -- this is just some of the terrain explored in The Big Chill. A group of old college friends who shared a house together during the late 1960s are reunited at the funeral of one of their former housemates who has inexplicably committed suicide. For over a decade they had drifted apart, but the weekend they spend together in the funeral's aftermath catalyzes each character's individual reassessment of his or her present circumstances and chosen parth in light of the optimism and assuredness of their reglimpsed youth. Each member of the well-chosen cast not only creates a distinct character with unique and memorable resonances but also meshes these separate personalities to form as satisfying an example of ensemble acting as we are likely to see for quite some time to come. This comforable ensemble quality ironically accounts for one of the film's minor miscalculations: the ease with which the group falls back into their old patterns of trust and familiarity after an awkwardly long period of separation is narratively convenient, but not really probable. Also, these fictive representatives of the Sixties have for the most part achieved more personal and professional success than is generally common. So their weekend preoccupation with the dashed hopes of their youth and the rationalizations of their maturity sometimes appears a luxurious commodity. Among the film's other delights is its extraordinary soundtrack.(Reviewed: 11/11/83; -- M.B.)
(R, 103 min.) @Arbor; Fri-Thu.
FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965) D: Russ Meyer; with Tura Santana, Haji, Lori Williams, Ray Barlow. The one and only Russ Meyer will be in attendance at all three screenings of this infamous movie about violent, big-breasted, man-hating, go-go-dancing women. With his companion Miss Melissa Mounds, (Flesh Gordon vs. the Cosmic Cheerleaders) Meyer will introduce the film and conduct a Q&A following each screening. Prior to each screening will be the presentation of rarely seen footage from Meyer's work in progress, The Breasts of Russ Meyer. Live grindhouse music will be performed by the Elegant Esquires, who will accompany a go-go dancing show before the latter two screenings.(See related story in this week's "Screens" section.) (NR, 83 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Thu (11/12), 6:45pm, 9:15pm, & 12:15am; $10 advance tickets on sale at box office.
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) D: Jim Sharman; with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien. Austin Rocky Horror fans have been dressing up and doing the "Time Warp" thing live for 22 years straight. Well, more or less straight. So if you've been searching for the way home to Transylvania or are merely curious about perusing a weekend excursion, this show is your winning ticket. In the meantime, you can check out the Austin group's Web site:http://www.austinrocky.org.(R, 95 min.)@ Wells Branch Discount Cinema; midnight, Fri-Sat.
SUPERFLY (1972) D: Gordon Parks Jr.; with Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius W. Harris, Charles McGregor. Curtis Mayfield's sizzling score may be the most enduringly superfly aspect of this blaxploitation classic about a hustling drug pusher with a heart of gold. He just needs to stick it to the man one more time before having the capital to retire. The black-market ghetto economy has never looked this cool. Your admission ticket comes with a complimentary 40oz. Schlitz Malt Liquor. The feature is preceded by a marathon of blaxploitation preview trailers. (R, 96 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Fri-Sat (11/6-7), midnight.
TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) D: Orson Welles; with Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Marlene Dietrich. Forty years old and still as wonderfully vile as ever, this newly re-edited version (based on a recently unearthed 58-page memo from Welles himself) of the great director's masterpiece of bad juju is as close as we're ever going to get concerning what Welles actually had in mind. And what he had in mind was trouble, the dislocated, transient trouble-fear of nightmares and dreamscapes. The film follows honeymooning Mexican D.A. Mike Vargas (Heston) and his Anglo wife Susan (Leigh) as they run afoul of the hulking, amoral gringo cop Hank Quinlan (Welles) who is searching out the truth about a lurid double-homicide in a seedy, El Norte border town. This new edit restores Welles' original vision, including previously specified continuity edits that, while they may not make the film any easier to follow, definitely make it harder to forget. It's not Welles' best film -- you know what that is -- but it may turn out to be his most important in the way it has influenced (and continues to influence) everything from the ongoing film noir resurgence to bad dreams everywhere. (Reviewed: 10/9/98; -- M.S.)(PG-13, 113 min.) @Arbor; Fri-Thu.
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) D: Victor Fleming; with Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Frank Morgan, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton, Charley Grapewin, the Munchkins. This special edition re-release commemorating the 60th anniversary of America's beloved classic has been digitally restored and remastered in Dolby Digital Stereo Sound.It's been 25 years since the movie's last theatrical run, which means that just about eveyone is overdue for seeing this marvelous spectacle the way it was meant to be seen. (But even though the MPAA has doled out a G rating for this new release, do remember how truly scary all those flying monkeys and melting witches can be on young, impressionable eyes.) A particularly fun Web site with a movie timeline and lots of sound clips, photos, lyrics, and posters can be found at http://www.thewizardofoz.com. Click those ruby slippers and be off to see the Wizard.(G, 101 min.) @Arbor, Barton Creek, Highland, Lake Creek, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South ; Fri-Thu.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "Decadence & Melodrama: A Rainer Werner Fassbinder Retrospective":
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) D: R.W. Fassbinder; with Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Karl-Heinz Bohm, Margit Cartensen, Irm Hermann, Gottfried John. Another way of phrasing this movie title would be to ask: Why Does Frau Küsters' Husband Run Amok? The film shows all the forces that pull a woman apart after her factory-worker husband goes berserk on the job at the prospect of layoffs, kill the boss' son, and then commits suicide. Only then does the real horror begin. Politicians, journalists, celebrity whores, and family make one woman's grieving stupefaction grist for their mills. (NR, 120 min.) @AlamoDrafthouse; Tue (11/10), 7 & 9:30pm; free admission.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "Never Fear: The Remarkable Independence of Ida Lupino":
On Dangerous Ground (1951) D: Nicholas Ray; with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond. In the concluding film in this season's Ida Lupino Series,Robert Ryan plays a tough city cop sent upstate to investigate the murder of a young girl at the hands of a madman. He finds spiritual redemption in the example of Ida Lupino, who plays the blind sister of the chief suspect. An uneasy blend of heartfelt melodrama and psychotic thriller, On Dangerous Ground also receives an assist from the beautiful Bernard Herrmann score, one which the preeminent movie musician has referred to as his favorite. The film will be introduced by Rebecca Campbell of the Austin Film Society. The series is a co-presentation of the Austin Film Society, Austin Community College, and the Austin Museum of Art. (NR, 82 min.) @Dobie Theatre; Thu (11/12), 7pm; $5/$3.50 AFS members.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY & CINEMATEXAS
North on Evers (1992) D: James Benning. Benning, a master framer of landscapes, charts a cross-country ride that is subtitled with an equally relevant handwritten text that crawls across the frame. Text and visuals assume equal importance as the filmmaker creates an American scrapbook that stops for a spell in Austin. James Benning will be in attendance at the screening. Also at the screening will the announcement of the first recipient of the annual D. Montgomery Award, given to a multi-disciplinary artist. Montgomery and some other familiar Austinites can be see in North on Evers and Benning particularly wanted to be part of presenting this first commemorative grant in Montgomery's name. (See related story in this week's "Screens" section.)(NR) @Texas Union; Mon (11/9), 7pm; free admission.
FUNHOUSE CINEMA:Survival Research Laboratories is the title of this program that documents SRL's infamous Texas show and the Crime Wave show. The program also includes some industrial shorts that depict the kind of apocalyptic robotic mayhem of which only SRL is capable. (NR) @Ritz Lounge; Mon (11/9), 8 & 10:30pm; $4 admission.
IMAX THEATRE (San Antonio):
Mystery of the Maya (1995) D: Barrie Howells, Roberto Rochin Naya; with Albert Ruz Jr. The Imax cameras are here focused on the fabled pyramids and temples of Mexico and Guatemala and the enduring innovations of Mayan culture. All seating is assigned and may be purchasedin advance. Other daily Imax shows includeEverest, Alamo: The Price of Freedom,and conventional 35mm theatrical screenings each evening. For more info and reservations, call 800/354-4629. @Imax Theatre in San Antonio; Fri-Thu.
THE TEXAS DOCUMENTARY TOUR:
The Farm (1997) D: Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stark. Once a prosperous Louisiana plantation, Angola is now a maximum-security prison for over 5,000 men (80% of whom are African-American). These are lifers; most of them will never leave and certainly not while alive.The film focuses on half a dozen inmates in various stages of acceptance, and the filmmakers are guided by inmate/activist/journalist Waler Rideau. (See related story in this week's "Screens" section.) The Documentary Tour is co-sponsored by the Austin Film Society, the UT Department of RTF, The Austin Chronicle, and SXSW Film. (NR, 88 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Wed (11/11), 7 & 9:30pm (tickets go on sale 30 min. before showtimes); $5 public/$3.50 AFS members.