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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: Thomas Vinterberg; with Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Paprika Steen, Birthe Neuman, Trine Dyrholm, Helle Dolleris, Bjarne Henriksen. (R, 101 min.)
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Could it be the stench of all those Klingenfeldt family skeletons tumbling from the closets during the course of the family patriarch's 60th birthday celebration? Christian Klingenfeldt (Thomsen) is too modern a fellow to be compared with Shakespeare's melancholy young Hamlet (though he does share many of the prince's attributes and troubles); however, Vinterberg's pivotal character in The Celebration could well have stepped directly out of a long day's journey in a Eugene O'Neill family melodrama by way of the discreet charm of a Luis Buñuel social gathering. This Danish film is an alternately funny and harrowing look at a family crisis, a meltdown that blends the needs of the truthsayers with the instincts of the let's-bury-our-heads-in-the-sand-and-pretend-none-of-this-is-happening types. "I already suffer from depression," one of the cousins is heard to wail while fumbling for his pills as all hell breaks loose. Generations of the Klingenfeldt clan and friends of the family have gathered at the family's country estate/hotel on the occasion of patriarch Helge's 60th birthday. His three children -- Christian, Michael (Larsen), and Helene (Steen) -- have returned also, but the gathering is thick with the absence of Christian's twin sister Linda, who was buried just a few weeks prior to this reunion. When Christian raises his glass to say a few words about his dead sister and toast his dad, appalling intra-familial accusations rush from his mouth. The targets and guests politely turn a deaf ear, but Christian continues his charges throughout the evening. But still, the liquor flows and the food courses keep coming. The kitchen staff has stolen all the guests' car keys, so as in any good farce, there is no possibility of exit. The family's blanket insensitivity to the sordidness of Christian's accusations is compounded by the shameless racism they display upon the arrival of Helene's black boyfriend. Despite the social depravity exposed by the situation, these troupers carry on with the utmost decorum. Shot with a hand-held video camera, The Celebration has a intimate, spontaneous feel that befits the subject matter. Vinterberg's decision to film in this manner was ordained by his participation in Dogma 95, the manifesto of a film movement he helped found along with director Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom). The Dogma 95 collective wrote a "Vow of Chastity" that listed 10 rules of purist filmmaking by which its directors were to abide. Chief among them were such things as shooting only on location without additional props, costumes, or sound recording, using only hand-held cameras, rejecting genre efforts and works not existing in the present, and renouncing the auteur concept. The primary goal of the Vow, however, seems to be its utter rebuff of the cinematic status quo and its desire to shake the foundations of filmmaking to their very core. Though The Celebration abides by these concepts (except for the "confession" of his transgressions from the Vow that Vinterberg includes with the press materials), they are happily conditions that suit the subject matter perfectly. And, ironically, through this anti-auteurist effort, Vinterberg, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the unflappable cast have created a virtuosic work. (11/20/98)
Arbor
D: Woody Allen; with Kenneth Branagh, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, Joe Mantegna, Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, Famke Janssen, Melanie Griffith, Bebe Neuwirth, Gretchen Mol, Hank Azaria, Michael Lerner. (R, 113 min.)
Woody Allen skewers the cult of personality in Celebrity with the pointedness of a cocktail fork. Purportedly a seriocomic contemplation on a civilization that's lost its way, the movie jabs at America's fascination with its false idols without ever hitting its target. It's little more than a series of tableaux in which supermodels, film stars, best-selling authors, television personalities, and other "who's who" are offered up as golden calves worshipped at the altar of popular culture, as objects to be disdained, ridiculed, and clichéd in the guise of a higher calling. So what's Woody Allen? Chopped liver? There's no question that Allen has created a body of work that includes some of the most literate, personal, and affecting films about the foibles of the human heart: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives. But who is he to divorce himself so entirely from the cultural philistinism that he finds so subversive? There's no doubt that Allen positions himself as such because he's allowed Branagh, who plays a frustrated writer experiencing an existential mid-life crisis, to annoyingly impersonate him in Celebrity. Portrayed -- at least in theory -- as a lost soul, Branagh's character struggles with the superficiality of what passes today as artistic endeavor and aspires to achieve something more meaningful: He's the writer of magazine fluff pieces and screenplays about armored-car heists who abandons those trivial pursuits for the more honorable profession of novelist. He's also a jerk when it comes to his relationships with women, engaging in that honored pastime in the Allen oeuvre of always meeting someone else at the most inopportune time. By the film's end, Allen's romanticized doppleganger is depicted as a floundering man in need of a lifesaver, but it's impossible to work up any empathy, or even an objectified pity, for him. (Maybe this is a movie that only Allen's shrinks could love.) While Celebrity has some funny moments, they don't compensate for its disconnected structure and misguided aim. In fact, the entire movie has the feel of a work in search of a context. The black-and-white cinematography, the metropolitan setting, and the subject matter bring to mind the wondrous La Dolce Vita, but the comparison is a pale one indeed. Where Fellini reveled in the Roman jet-set society that he critiqued, Allen stands at a distance. That's Allen's problem with Celebrity -- he's afraid to embrace it, so that he might understand it. (11/20/98)
Arbor, Highland
D: Shohei Imamura; with Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Fujio Tsuneta, Mitsuko Baisho, Akira Emoto, Sho Aikawa, Ken Kobayashi, Sabu Kawara. (Not Rated, 117 min.)
Co-winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997, The Eel by Shohei Imamura (Black Rain) is the director's thoughtful meditation on love, death, and, well, eels. It's a film that works at any level you wish to view it, but more importantly, Imamura's colorful, occasionally caustic view of modern-day Japan is a departure from pre-fabricated Western ideals of the inscrutable East. Imamura's characters play out their extraordinary lives against a backdrop of drama, comedy, and the surreal that rivals Twin Peaks for sheer oddity. Unlike Lynch's disquieting version of small-town life, however, Imamura treats his characters with a sublime, gentle wit. Yakusho (Shall We Dance?) plays Takuro Yamashita, a drone salaryman who, as the film opens, has received an anonymous note informing him that his young wife (Shimizu) is having an affair. Maintaining his calm routine, Takuro bids farewell to his wife one night, goes off on his regular weekend fishing trip, but returns home early, and discovers that the inflammatory note is indeed the truth. In a jealous rage he stabs his wife to death, and then pedals his bicycle to the police station and turns himself in. Eight years later, he is released, with his pet eel -- his only friend from prison -- in tow. His parole officer, a Buddhist priest, helps him start up a barbershop in a remote Japanese village, and though Takuro remains silent and cool on the murder, he slowly begins life again, talking to his pet eel and renovating his new home. Into this placid dream walks Keiko (Shimizu), a beautiful young woman who bears a curious resemblance to the deceased, and who takes a job as Takuro's assistant, eventually falling in love with him. Across this redemptive canvas, Imamura splashes an assortment of oddball characters, including Takuro's UFO-obsessed neighbor, a sport fisherman who knows even more about the hidden lives of eels than Takuro, and two antagonistic forces, one from Takuro's dark past, and the other from Keiko's. Can the sins of the past be washed away by the love of the present? That's what Imamura is asking, and though his answers are -- at best -- vague, The Eel has a playful sentimentality that overrides its dark underpinnings. Yakusho and Shimizu are both enormously engaging -- he of the stoic grace and guilt, and she of the flitting hesitancy -- but together they're a wonder. Likewise Imamura's film, which relies heavily on some breathtaking camerawork by director of photography Shigeru Komatsubara. Like watercolors on rice paper, The Eel has a formalist look to it, the dark blues of Takuro's nighttime fishing expeditions colliding with the bright tones of his barbershop. It's no wonder Imamura has now collected not one but two Palmes d'Ors; The Eel is a flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen. (11/20/98)
Village
D: Shekhar Kapur; with Cate Blanchett, Christopher Eccleston, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes. (R, 124 min.)
With style, passion, and intelligence, Elizabeth answers the question lurking silently amid mounting slag heaps of cheesy Princess Di memorabilia: What is this thing we have about royalty? What primal need does their apparently superfluous presence satisfy? According to this gripping story of Queen Elizabeth I's rise to power, it's our need to see and touch the divine here on earth. And never was that need more real than in 16th-century England, when a combination of foreign military threats, debilitating Protestant-Catholic conflicts, and a bitter dispute over the line of royal succession had reduced the tiny island nation to a state of near-chaos. As we all know, it was Elizabeth, the so-called "virgin queen," who laid the foundations of a future British Empire by crushing all enemies from within and without, and by pushing for the creation of an Independent Church of England. But as Shekhar's film vividly illustrates, this was a virtually miraculous accomplishment for the young queen, who had to contend not only with her own political naïveté but also the stigma of being both Protestant and the fruit of King Henry VIII's scandalous liaison with Anne Boleyn. Cate Blanchett, who made an indelible impression as Ralph Fiennes' soulmate in Oscar and Lucinda is, if anything, even better here as the future embodiment of all things British. Despite the florid trailers' emphasis on bodice-ripping romantic imagery, Elizabeth is above all a political thriller. And the real essence of this story is the harrowing on-the-job training of an intelligent but woefully unprepared young lamb tossed into a slavering wolfpack of cold-blooded enemies (some disguised as friends and lovers) whose dearest wish is to eat her alive. Blanchett's pale, oddly compelling face is a record of every ghastly Pyhrric victory, every bitter disillusionment, every hard-won insight along the way. Each step toward her royal destiny means giving up a little more of her human essence. By the end, when she literally becomes a flesh-and-blood icon, the ambivalence of her triumph makes this scene one of the more subtly heartbreaking moments I've seen in any recent film. The excellence in casting goes deep, including not only Geoffey Rush's magnificent performance as the queen's Machiavelli-quoting chief advisor, but a searing turn by Christopher Eccleston as the fanatical, traitorous Duke of Norfolk. Former Truffaut mainstay Fanny Ardant makes a vivid impression in as a sexy, madness-tinged Mary of Guise. And Joseph Fiennes acquits himself well in his demanding, morally ambiguous role as a boyfriend of the young Elizabeth who ends up as ballast jettisoned during her ascent. Elizabeth has just one meaningful fault, common to many filmed historical dramas: Events that happened over many years have been crunched into an unmanageably (and inaccurately) short timeline, junking up the narrative and doing disservice to history. But just as I was happy to forgive this flaw in great films like A Lion in Winter, I'm also pleased to cut slack for the similarly admirable Elizabeth. If movies like this are your cup of mead, I'm betting you'll feel the same way. (11/20/98)
Arbor
D: Tony Scott; with Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Regina King, Loren Dean, Jake Busey, Barry Pepper, Gabriel Byrne, Lisa Bonet, Jason Lee, James Le Gros, Jack Black. (R, 127 min.)
Love him or hate him, Tony Scott only steals from the best. Enemy of the State is littered with echoes of previous thrillers -- everything from The Conversation to The Parallax View and from The In-Laws to Scott's own True Romance. Instead of coming off as shameless plundering, however, Scott, debuting director of photography Dan Mindel, and writer David Marconi (The Harvest) have woven a kicky, knockout thriller that ingeniously taps into the current climate of paranoia surrounding personal privacy in the Information Age. It's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream, and one that's likely to kickstart any number of spirited, after-show discussions on such topics as the resuscitated Communications Decency Act and other hot-button cyber-topics. Smith plays suave Washington, D.C. union attorney Robert Clayton Dean, who finds himself the target of a massive and deadly smear campaign by the National Security Administration when he unwittingly comes into possession of crucial evidence against State Department agent Brian Reynolds. Unaware that his every movement, conversation, and private moment is being surreptitiously tracked and recorded by Reynolds' rogue team of techies (led by a smarmy Jack Black, far afield from his Tenacious D comedy antics), the innocent, naive Dean desperately searches for a way to fight back, and eventually finds one in the mysterious spook Brill (Hackman, essentially updating his role from Coppola's aforementioned The Conversation). Since this is the fifth pairing of Scott with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the requisite action is never far away -- essentially the film is one huge, extended chase sequence -- but for all its rapid-fire editing and ominous dialogue, Enemy of the State longs to be more cerebral than the average explode-a-thon. In many ways it succeeds, mostly due to the impossibly charming performance by Smith and Hackman's bulldog acting chops. There are functioning ideas amongst all the relentless muzzle-flash, and though much of the story's "logic" can only charitably be called "fuzzy," the film still aches to be taken seriously. Whether or not you'll fall for it depends on how rabid a techno-theorist you are, but Scott and company get an A for effort. Scott has taken to peppering his productions with big names in small parts (remember Brad Pitt in True Romance?) and this is no exception: Byrne, Le Gros, and Lee all have cameos of sorts, but none seem to have lived up to his potential. Unlike True Romance, though, Enemy of the State boasts precious little comedy -- it's a thriller straight through to its sleek, millennial-fever heart, an onrushing, giddily paranoiac roller-coaster ride with bad brakes, clever dialogue, and a reach that only occasionally exceeds its grasp. (11/20/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Arlene Sanford; with Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Jessica Biel, Adam LaVorgna, Sean O'Bryan, Gary Cole, Eve Gordon, Andrew Lauer and Alexandria Mitchell. (PG, 86 min.)
Beware of seasonal comedies whose titles echo Christmas carol refrains. Remember Jingle All the Way? Heed the omen. Oh, I'll Be Home for Christmas doesn't have the aggravating decibel level or nearly the mindless mayhem of Jingle's massive affront to the senses, nor does it fill the void with warmth or mirth or much of anything else. Jonathan Taylor Thomas is passable as Jake, a selfish college student who runs sophomoric cons on his richly deserving classmates. (If this California college houses the hopes of our nation's future, our future is dim, indeed.) Still stung by his father's remarriage only 10 months after his mother's death, Jake constantly finds ways to avoid going home, so his father bribes him (with a classic red Porsche, no less) as long as he reaches home by 6pm on Christmas Eve. But on the morning of his departure, Jake finds himself in the middle of the desert wearing a Santa suit and a glued-on beard. Ho, ho, ho, merry payback! Not only is Jake penniless and stranded, but his girlfriend Allie (Biel), convinced she's been stood up, leaves for home with his despicable rival, Eddie (LaVorgna). With a funny script or some genuine tenderness, I might have been able to overlook the sloppy direction and shoddy production values. But the film, despite a constant stream of pranks and mishaps, is mired in comic inertia and poorly pieced together. It's the sort of effort you'd get from a tired and tipsy parent late on Christmas Eve, trying to put together a complicated, assembly-required toy for Christmas morning. The intent was good-hearted, but the result leaves much to be desired. Fortunately, this movie, like a Christmas toy, has an audience more concerned with the packaging than the contents. The kids who know the stars (the teen heartthrob and middle son on the sitcom Home Improvement and the beautiful and wise older sister from 7th Heaven, in case you don't have any pre-teen girls in your household) will no doubt find the pratfalls and puking scenes hilariously funny and the romantic scenes excruciatingly, deliciously discomfiting. I'll Be Home for Christmas has the feel and look of an aluminum Christmas tree -- sparse, artificial, and cold, with a cheap shininess that undermines any attempt at warmth or poignancy. The story is supposedly about a boy who learns the meaning of Christmas on his cross-country odyssey, but a Norman Rockwell ending can't fill the shallow emptiness of this picture. I'll Be Home for Christmas is like the tableau in a snow globe -- after all the whirling (and blatantly artificial) snow has settled, not a single figure has actually moved or changed. (11/20/98)
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Danny Cannon; with Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Brandy, Mehki Phifer, Muse Watson, Matthew Settle, Bill Cobbs, Jeffrey Combs, Jennifer Esposito, Red West. (R, 96 min.)
Fish sticks anyone? The evil angler of last year's surprise hit is back in a predictably lamebrain sequel, and though Hewitt's ample cleavage is shown to good, teen-scream effect, the rest of this sub-par echo is about as appetizing as three-day-old scrod. Hewitt's character, Julie James, is now in college and rooming with the impossibly ebullient Karla (Brandy). Though the grapple-clawed killer of the series' first outing has been allegedly relegated to the briny deep, Julie is tormented by recurring nightmares of the slickered fiend. Her schoolwork is suffering, her old beau Ray (Prinze) is getting the cold-shoulder treatment, and unrelenting guilt over last season's accidental murder is playing hell with her mental status quo. This all changes, momentarily, when the girls win a radio contest's trip to the Bahamas. Dragging pals Tyrell (Phifer) and Will (Settle) along for the getaway, they find themselves stuck on a remote island on the cusp of hurricane season. As the hotel's staff battens down the hatches, The Hooked One mysteriously reappears and starts offing guests and porters alike. Of course, having Jeffrey Re-Animator Combs as your desk clerk should tip anyone off, but Julie and crew are blithely unaware of their impending doom. Luckily for the audience, the film (from a script by Trey Callaway) is so preposterously uninspired that it's virtually impossible to care about what's happening onscreen. Ninety-plus minutes of Brandy's lighthouse-glare dentifrice is enough to send anyone screaming into the night, but that's the only thing generating shivers in Cannon's (Judge Dredd) film. Despite the wise addition of noted character actors Cobbs (The Hudsucker Proxy) and West (television's The Wild, Wild West), I Still Know What You Did is a muddled mess from start to finish, with its super-secret surprise slasher's identity telegraphed from Point A, and Hewitt unable to do much more than look grimly determined or occasionally ruffled. Cannon tosses in a few cheap scares along the way, but the sad fact of the matter is that I Still Know What You Did is a negligible tossoff, as limp and lifeless as one of the (perplexingly un-bloody) corpses that litter its storyline. You want real terror? If this second outing proves profitable, we'll be looking at Yet Again I Recall the Summer Before the Summer Before Last. Now that's scary. (11/20/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Bruno Barreto; with Stephen Baldwin, Chris Penn, Gina Gershon, Mike McGlone, Paul Guilfoyle, Amy Irving, Victor Slezak, Luis Guzman. (R, 90 min.)
Loosely based on the exploits of real-life NYPD cop Bo Dietl (who has of late been making the talk-show rounds with Baldwin in tow), this bloody, brawling, testosterone-heavy cop drama is a pure Seventies throwback: I kept waiting for Serpico to show his face, but Baldwin -- as Dietl -- apparently walks a different beat. Though rife with gritty urban realism, One Tough Cop is also one bad movie, wholly dependent on the hoary boys-in-blue clichés that make those Sansabelt Seventies so much retro fun today. Fists fly, perps flee, and Dietl and his partner Duke (Penn, bloated and unctuous) wage an uneasy war for their embattled streets. Big deal. As Barreto's film opens, Dietl and Duke are called in to a hostage situation involving a little girl and her estranged father. After much negotiating on Dietl's part (he sets aside his piece, he strips off his shirt, he does pretty much everything the NYPD manual advises officers not to do), the girl is released, shots ring out, and noted character actor Luis Guzman is spurting crimson. Dietl's flouting of the established rules lands him in the hot seat with Internal Affairs, but it's his longtime camaraderie with boyhood pal -- and mafioso -- Richie (McGlone) that interests the F.B.I. task force headed by an icy Agent Devlin (Irving, woefully out of place). Having grown up together on those fabled, Scorsesean mean streets, Richie and Dietl share a common bond and act more like brothers than workaday adversaries. Dietl, despite what I.A. and the F.B.I. think they know, has spent his eight years on the force keeping his nose scrupulously tidy; he may be a maverick, but his cash flow's squeaky clean. When a grisly, Bad Lieutenant-like nun-raping occurs, Dietl and Duke ignore the orders of their superior officer and go after the crackheads involved, which, of course, only adds to the ongoing intra-departmental chaos. Subplots involving Dietl's romancing of Richie's moll (Gershon) and Duke's unassuaged gambling debts (and $10,000 in parking violations) add to the general air of NYC malaise, though One Tough Cop is almost comedic in its reverent attitude toward this hulking, sweatshirted toughster. "Youse guys" is actually uttered more than once in the film, and though there is no doubt that certain quarters of New Jersey and New York City still harbor such syntax-mangling über-hoods, its repetition elicits laughter more than sympathy for these duty-bound street creatures. Barreto does his best with what appears to have been a ridiculously macho script, but what he comes up with is 90 minutes of ham-handed neo-goofiness. Honor, loyalty, and all the other supposed virtues of the street still have their place, but One Tough Cop just makes them feel like so much Fifth Avenue window-dressing. (11/20/98)
Village
D: Norton Virgien and Igor Kovalyov; with the voices of E.G. Daily, Christine Cavanaugh, Kath Soucie, Cheryl Chase, Tara Charendoff, Melanie Chartoff, Jack Riley, Joe Alaskey. (G, 85 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. Nickelodeon's award-winning cable series leaps to larger than rugrat size in a story of birth, sibling rivalry, wacky inventions, getting lost in the woods, and scary weird stuff, with lessons about friendship and family along the way. ()
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Tony Kaye; with Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Fairuza Balk, Stacy Keach, Jennifer Lien, Elliott Gould, William Russ, Avery Brooks, Beverly D'Angelo. (R, 118 min.)
Why Tony Kaye was so eager to have his name taken off this film (and replaced with "Humpty Dumpty") is a question only Kaye can answer, and not very well if the recent spate of elliptical interviews with the eccentric British advertisement auteur can be relied upon. Certainly, American History X isn't the travesty Kaye has taken to labeling it. Neither is it the revolutionary redemptive tale filled with Oscar-caliber performances certain members of the media have tagged it as. Instead, it's a violent, sober cautionary tale, strictly middle-of-the-road when it comes to its much-ballyhooed politics and grimly obvious in its telling. And as for the dead-on portrayal of neo-Nazi skinheads, well, it's no Romper Stomper. Norton plays Derek Vinyard, a former skinhead in Venice Beach who, as the film opens, is released from prison after serving a three-year stretch for killing two gangbangers who tried to steal his car. On that same day, Derek's younger brother Danny (Furlong), a budding neo-Nazi himself, has turned in a Hitler-praising school report to his much-aggrieved teacher (Gould). When Danny's principal (Brooks) gets wind of the affront, he gives the boy another assignment: "Write about your brother," he says, and tell us what you think of him, and what you think of his circumstances. This leads to an ongoing series of black-and-white flashbacks that recount how the older Vinyard came into his own as a Nazi skinhead, and how he, along with local hate-monger Cameron (Keach), founded one of the largest white supremacist gangs in Southern California. The hitch is that Derek's incarceration has changed him utterly. He's no longer interested in the swastika or hanging out and beating up minorities; his time in the joint and the shaky friendships and enemies he made there have left him with a newfound distaste for his old ways. All he wants now is to get out and get his family -- and especially Danny -- away from the corrupting influence of the local skins. Kaye's device of alternating the present-day color footage with the black-and-white flashbacks awkwardly breaks up the forward motion of the narrative. And while the film's ending isn't exactly telegraphed, you know something terrible's going to happen: It's that kind of film. Still, Norton acts up a storm here, infusing his bile-filled speechifying with a zealot's harsh glare, and later, seeming to hunker down within himself as he waits for the unavoidable backlash. Furlong is in full sullen-teen mode, as befits his character, and only Balk, as Derek's histrionically eager skinhead moll, is used to ill advantage. Kaye, for what it's worth, can frame a shot with the best of them, but American History X fails to incite much more than respect for the art of its cinematography and the occasional gasp (the film contains one of the most shocking incidents of character-driven violence in recent memory -- I lurched in my seat and suddenly had need to redefine my personal definition of "jaded"). It's rough stuff, but not revelatory, bitter yet unenlightening. (11/13/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Tinseltown North
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, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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: 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 shootouts, 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 shootout 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)
Riverside
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)
Gateway, Highland, Lakehills
D: Ronny Yu; with Jennifer Tilly, Katherine Heigl, Nick Stabile, John Ritter, Alexis Arquette, 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)
Tinseltown South
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: 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, Louise 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)
Dobie
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, Lakehills, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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: Richard LaGravenese; with Holly Hunter, Danny DeVito, Queen Latifah, Martin Donovan, Elias Koteas. (R, 102 min.)
Her pupils and irises indistinguishable orbs of liquid brown, Holly Hunter possibly has the most intent and focused gaze of any actor in films today: They're the eyes of a determined but often tortured soul. During her moments of confession in Living Out Loud, it's those eyes that speak volumes, even more than the subtle, piercing dialogue provided by director-screenwriter LaGravenese, here making his debut behind the camera. Unfortunately, there's not much of a story to go with Hunter's engaging performance and LaGravenese's words; when it comes to its narrative, there's something missing in Living Out Loud. The film begins with Hunter quizzing her husband, a successful doctor, in an elegant New York City restaurant about a woman with whom he had been seen. Suspecting something, she won't let him off the hook, as he tells her that the other woman is only a work colleague. Finally, when she asks the approximate age of this colleague, he answers with such specificity that she instantly knows the truth. It's a great moment that sets the stage for her character's fall and rise as she learns to make a new life after divorce. Along the way, she befriends a down-on-his-luck elevator operator, who's romantically interested in her, and a nightclub singer with a penchant for picking the wrong men. These are strange bedfellows for a woman living on the Upper West Side, but fitting for a movie whose theme celebrates tearing down the walls that keep us from fully experiencing life. (Woody Allen's Alice did the same thing, using the same type of character and milieu, and -- quite frankly -- did it better.) At first, Hunter's character constantly idealizes situations, imagining how they should be because she finds reality awkward and unsatisfying. But as she grows into her own skin and does things that she never had the opportunity to do before -- kiss a complete stranger in a darkened room she mistakes for a bathroom; imbibe mind-altering substances and dance the night away in a chic lesbian bar; hire a hunky masseuse to give her an erotic rubdown -- the need to fantasize becomes less so. If only the development of her character and the narrative were structured in a way that made the movie feel less episodic, you'd find yourself really drawn to this oddly appealing movie about personal liberation. If anything, it's good to see Hunter in a role befitting her after being lost in questionable acting choices in Crash and A Life Less Ordinary. And it's even better to see those fantastic eyes put to good use once more. (11/13/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Martin Brest; with Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Claire Forlani, Jake Weber, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeffrey Tambor, David S. Howard. (R, 174 min.)
A loose retelling of 1934's Death Takes a Holiday, this updated version adapts a fuller, firmer attitude toward other-worldly romance as well as a near-three-hour running time. With Hopkins onscreen for much of it, it's not as dreary as you'd expect, and even the angelic Pitt, as an anthropomorphized, blonde-banged Death, is surprisingly tolerable in an admittedly difficult role that could have just as easily descended into unwitting farce. Brest (Scent of a Woman) opens the film with a sequence in which Susan Parrish (Forlani) -- young, M.D. daughter of Hopkins' wealthy media magnate William Parrish -- runs into a nameless but utterly charming young man (Pitt) in a New York coffee shop. During the course of a five-minute flirtation the spark arcs, and the two near-strangers part, never to meet again. As it happens, the handsome stranger is struck by a car and killed moments later. As luck, or fate, or, more accurately Death should have it, the stranger is reborn, after a fashion, as Death itself appears at the Parrish family mansion wearing the stranger's flesh. He's here to take the senior Parrish off to the great beyond, but before he does, he'd like to find out a bit about the living. "You will be my tour guide," he tells an understandably stunned Hopkins, and before long Death, under the moniker of Joe Black, is attending Parrish Communications board meetings, wrapping his tongue around gob after gob of peanut butter (a delicacy, we are led to believe, absent from the netherworld), and falling in love with daughter Susan. At first it's difficult to understand why anyone would need three hours to tell this pleasant fable, but to his credit, Brest fleshes out the film with a subplot involving a corporate takeover (unnecessary but absorbing nonetheless) and assorted other tricks; Meet Joe Black flows nicely, and the whole of the film is bathed in some of the most sumptuous cinematography (courtesy of Like Water for Chocolate's Emmanuel Lubezki) of the year. The film, however, belongs to Hopkins, pure and simple. He commands your eye when he is onscreen, and when he's off you're subconsciously waiting for him to reappear. As the noble media baron and devoted family man, he's stuck with lines that would surely crumple in any other actor's mouth but here manages to make them sound good, even great, by sheer virtue of his being Sir Anthony Hopkins. Pitt is in a realm that approximates his lunatic role in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, but toned down considerably. His Death is an egocentric spirit engaged in learning a smidgen of humility (and humanity), and though the role frequently borders on the comic, it rarely sloshes over into the absurd. Only once (when Death, his facial muscles lost in the act of making love) did the males in the packed screening audience audibly squirm (which perhaps says more about the males than Pitt's acting). Too often derided as a vacuous pretty boy, Pitt brings a wan, insouciant charm to the Grim Reaper, while Hopkins, as ever, anchors everything around him. It's an elegiac love story from beyond the grave, as appealingly simple as it is emotionally complex. (11/13/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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)
Tinseltown North
D: Robert Byington; with Carmen Nogales, Jason Andrews, Damian Young. (Not Rated, 82 min.)
It's not just George Bush pere who lacks a firm grip on the vision thing. Fact is, people who really know what they want out of life are so rare they're often objects of intense fascination, even obsession for the rest of us. So it is with Bill and Ed, a pair of thirtyish sad sacks whose loserly existences are knocked off kilter by the decision of Mexican soap opera queen Olympia to quit acting and train to be an Olympic javelin-thrower. Ed (Young, previously seen in Hal Hartley's Simple Men and Amateurs) is Olympia's manager, a surly prick who actually appears to care for his former meal ticket on some level but who is dumbfounded by her sudden jockish compulsions. Ed's loss is Bill's gain. A paunchy, unmotivated slob who seems to have been fired from every job in his drowsy Rio Grande Valley hometown, his world changes forever when he finds Olympia, exhausted from her illegal border-crossing, hiding in his car. Despite Olympia's meager English, Bill (Andrews) soon discovers her purpose. Enthralled by the mysterious siren's gung-ho attitude and total focus, he manages to insinuate himself into her life -- and bring some purpose to his own -- by serving as her coach. This is a film with a sneaky, ineffable charm that's tough to describe. Character-driven in the extreme and shot in a utilitarian, quasi-documentary style, its story sort of maunders serenely along like a milk cow blocking traffic on a country road. Funny scenes abound, ranging from Ed's sulfurous rants to zany situational humor arising from the guys' responses to the truculent, single-minded Olympia (played with considerable raw charisma by model-turned-actress Nogales). Byington's writing isn't always inspired, but he has a fine Albert Brooksian flair for multi-layered comic effect in which absurd settings undermine his characters' overtly serious words and actions. In the end, however, it's hard to say what all these bright scenes' cumulative effect was meant to be. Olympia is too ornery and manipulative to be any kind of feminist heroine, and the obscure origins of her javelin jones make it tough to fully identify with her. Bill's modest personal growth, affecting though it is, hardly feels like the point of all that's come before. Honestly, I'd be very surprised if any profound themes or messages were intended here. Instead, this low-budget charmer is a classic example of indie film claiming the freedom to simply clear out space for good writers and actors (Andrews and Young both seem good bets for mainstream stardom) to develop characters through their own organic sense of story rather than screenwriting-workshop dogma. Olympia isn't the kind of movie everyone will love. Some may be actively put off by its slightness and oddly abrupt ending. However, if you're patient with its shortcomings, it definitely has -- as one of its characters says of Olympia herself -- "a certain je ne sais whatchamacallit." (Director Bob Byington will be in attendance for a Q&A session following the 7:35pm screenings on Friday and Saturday.) (11/13/98)
Dobie
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, Round Rock, 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, Lakeline, 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: 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)
Alamo Drafthouse, Gateway
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)
Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Edward Zwick; with Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Bruce Willis, Tony Shalhoub, 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: 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)
Alamo Drafthouse, Discount, Great Hills, Showplace, Westgate 3
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: 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: 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
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
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) 	D: Steven Spielberg; with Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Wolf Kahler, Paul Freeman, Denholm Elliott. Old-time adventure and derring-do by the screen hero recently voted People magazine's "sexiest" man alive and the director who knows better than any craftsman around how to tell yarns that keep our butts plastered in their seats. (PG, 115 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Fri-Sat (11/20-21), midnight.
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.
7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958) D:Nathan Juran; with Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant, Richard Eyer, Torin Thatcher. This movie is one of the greatest examples of Ray Harryhausen's special effects work -- monsters, skeletons, and a miniatured princess are among its many glories. The film also features a soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann.(NR, 87 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Thu (11/26), 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, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South; Fri-Thu.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "Decadence & Melodrama: A Rainer Werner Fassbinder Retrospective":
Veronika Voss (1982) D: R.W. Fassbinder; with Rosel Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Anne-Marie Duringer, Volker Spengler. With The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, Veronika Voss comprises Fassbinder's post-WWII German trilogy. The film recounts the story of a famous German actress who had been a friend of Joseph Goebbels and who, 10 years after the war, is a total morphine addict. Curiously, six months after the film was completed, Fassbinder would himself be dead of a drug overdose. Yet on a not unrelated note, the poster for this movie personally helped ease me through the worst pangs of nicotine withdrawal. (R, 105 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Tue (11/24), 7 & 9:30pm; free admission.
FILM FEAST:A Texas Union Theater Thanksgiving is being hosted by KVRX, KVR-TV, and The Daily Texan. The two-day film event is drawing together the Austin film community to "give thanks to the student union." We assume that tongues are planted firmly in cheek here, as it was just about one year ago that the Texas Union Theater lamentably darkened its doors due to a controversial decree by university management. On Friday, various programming organizations and film groups will present continuous programs that highlight each group's work. Presenters include Funhouse Cinema, F3, CinemaTexas, Austin Cinemaker Co-op, Alamo Drafthouse (a presentation of classic film trailers), Reel Women, the Austin Film Society, and others. Works will be presented on Super-8, video, 16mm, and 35mm. Live accordion music will be performed by Jack Stankus and Pierre Choucoun during the intermission. On Saturday, the Film Feast continues with its "3-B Movie Spectacular" showcasing Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore masterpiece Blood Feast (1963), the high school horror tale Massacre at Central High (1976), and the luridly titled Pot, Parents, and Police (1971). (NR) @Texas Union Theater; Fri-Sat (11/20-21), 5:30pm (both nights); free admission; 471-5106 for info.
FUNHOUSE CINEMA:No-Place Pictures is a collection of four experimental nonfiction essays that explore various themes of surveillance, the commercialization of public space, and the distorting relationship between photography and landscape. (NR) @Ritz Lounge; Mon (11/23), 8 & 10:30pm; $4 admission.
IMAX THEATRE (San Antonio):
The IMAX Nutcracker (1997) D: Christine Edzard; with Miriam Margoyles, Heathcote Williams, Lotte Johnson, Benjamin Hall. There's no ballet in this 37-minute-long, live-action version of this seasonal kids classic, but it's sure to be b-i-g nonetheless.(NR, 37 min.) All seating is assigned and may be purchasedin advance. Other daily IMAX shows includeMystery of the Maya, Everest, 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.
OPERATION HEADSHOTS:Operation Headshots is a film that purposes to have been discovered in a Dumpster near Langley, Virgina earlier this year. It is said to reveal two CIA agents posing as film students making a documentary about the JFK assassination. Is it a hoax, a CIA plant, or a bona fide CIA-sponsored documentary? That the film lists Chip Mosher and Otis Maclay as the writers, directors, and editors may be (ahem) a dead giveaway. Mosher is also one of the talents behind the tripped-out digital oddity Strange Attractor. Copies of the tape are also being sold via the Web at http://www.operationheadshots.com, where more info on the film can also be found. Additional information is also available at the site of the is-it-a hoax-or-is-it-real group, KRADL (Kennedy Researchers Anti-Defamation League): http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dungeon/2330.
(NR, 30 min.) @Dobie; Sun (11/22), 12:35pm
(35 years to the minute of JFK's assassination); $5.