 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| ||||||||
| |||||||||
| |||||||||
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: Sam Raimi; with Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, Bridget Fonda, Brent Briscoe, Gary Cole, Becky Ann Baker, Chelcie Ross. (R, 123 min.)
"Simple" is a misnomer of epic proportions. In horror stylist Sam Raimi's first non-horror film, everything is gratingly complex: the tangled skein of emotions that make the backbiting in The Treasure of Sierra Madre look downright antiquated, Bill Paxton's unstoppable descent into the world of the felonious, and Billy Bob Thornton's heart-and-soul portrayal of the sly idiot brother. It ain't brain surgery, but oh my goodness, it certainly isn't simple. Paxton plays rural Minnesota family man Hank, an upright citizen patiently waiting for his day to take over management at the local feed store. His loving wife Sarah (Fonda) sports a convex tummy and worries about the state of their financial affairs. Hank's brother Jacob (Thornton), on the other hand, is a few planks shy of an outhouse and longs only to renovate the family farmhouse and take up where mom and pop left off, much to Hank's consternation; he knows the hideous toil it takes to manage the modern American farm, and he knows just as well there's no way brother Jacob is fit to tackle that task. While out in the woods one snowy afternoon, this placid, middle-American setup comes to a screeching halt when Hank, Jacob, and Jacob's hickoid friend Lou (Briscoe) accidentally stumble across a downed Cessna with $4.4 million and a dead pilot. Lou and Jacob vociferously argue that the money is theirs by the ancient right of finders keepers, however Hank is anxious to turn over the Benjamin-crammed duffel bag to the authorities and takes the moral high road, at least for the minute. In the end, it's decided that Hank, and only Hank, will hold the money until he feels it's safe to split it up; then the three will go their separate ways, leave town, and never, presumably, be seen again. With as juicy a setup as this (courtesy of scenarist Scott B. Smith, who adapted the screenplay from his bestselling novel of the same name), the possibilities are endless, but from the moment you lay eyes on the bitter, sterile Minnesotan tundra that acts as the film's unofficial fourth conspirator, it's obvious the direction in which events are going to go. Fear, paranoia, and plain old greed quickly factor their way into the trio's plans, aided and abetted by Hank's wife Sarah, who despite (or maybe because of) that bun in the proverbial oven is no creampuff. Regardless, she's immediately on Hank's case to keep a close rein on the cash, as well as advising him to "put a little of it back" in the plane in an attempt to cover their tracks. A Simple Plan takes so many twists and turns (none of which engender confidence in the human race, I might add) that revealing any more here would be a sin. Suffice to say that Raimi has crafted a nasty, countrified gem of a psychological thriller, and he's done it with none of his usual gimmicky shrieks or stylistic flourishes. A Simple Plan is almost painfully reserved at times, while at others it flares into a maelstrom of jaw-dropping, stomach-clenching anxiety. It's not perfect -- Thornton's slack-jawed yokel Jacob is played a bit wide of the mark and Fonda continues to irk in some indefinable way -- but it's a revelation for longtime Raimi fans. And it's a hell of a ride too, for both Raimi fans and newcomers alike. (12/11/98)
Arbor
D: Erik Skjoldbjaerg; with Stellan Skarsgard, Marie Bonnevie, Bjorn Floberg, Sverre Anker Ousdal. (Norwegian with English subtitles.) (Not Rated, 97 min.)
So far, "film blanc" is still more of a cute little movie-critics' conceit than a bona fide movie genre. However, this terrific Norwegian psych-thriller does share with films as diverse as Smilla's Sense of Snow and Fargo an odd, disorienting feel caused by seeing dark deeds take place in broad daylight against a backdrop of stark, dazzling winter landscapes. Insomnia is the first shot out of the box for young Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjaerg, and it's a real stunner. Not so much a murder mystery as a Crime and Punishment-style story of guilt-driven emotional breakdown, it draws heavily upon the classic noir tradition of blurring lines between the moral positions of the "good" and "bad" guys. The hero is Jan, a Swedish cop known equally for his brilliant detective work and shaky ethics. So renowned are his sleuthing skills that when Norwegian police hit a wall in investigating a teenage girl's murder (the killer has scrubbed her entire body to eliminate clues), they hire him as a special consultant on the case. True to form, Jan quickly devises a clever trap for the suspect. But while chasing the perp, he accidentally shoots and kills his own partner, then compounds the ghastly error by trying to hide his guilt. This decision appears to be typical of Jan, a weak-willed character for whom the low road is the default path in most moral quandaries. Once the cover-up is on, the story's focus shifts away from Jan's pursuit of the killer to his own slow crackup in the face of a guilty conscience and the growing suspicions of fellow detective Ane (Marie Bonnevie). As the walls close in on Jan (at least in his own mind), he lies sweating in bed, denied sleep by the relentless midnight sun pouring through and around the flimsy curtains of his hotel room. The genius cop makes mistake after disastrous mistake: crude sexual advances at an underaged witness; lies to cover previous lies; even a covert pact with the main suspect himself. This is a masterful performance by Skarsgard (Breaking the Waves, Good Will Hunting), one that ably demonstrates his skills as one of the world's finest character actors. Under the pitiless glare of around-the-clock sunlight, without the escape of sleep, Jan is forced to see himself clearly for the first time, and Skarsgard shows us in minute detail how shattering this experience is for his character. Skjoldbjaerg's flair for creating atmosphere, powerful though never showy or artificial, reinforces the claustrophobic feel of enveloping dread that's only slightly relieved by a surprising yet plausible ending. See this movie -- but be prepared to miss a little sleep yourself. (12/11/98)
Village
D: Bill Plympton; with the voices of Charis Michelsen, Tom Larson, Richard Spore, Toni Rossi, J.B. Adams. (Not Rated, 74 min.)
I wonder about Bill Plympton's childhood sometimes. Was he indeed raised by nitrous-huffing aliens with oversized red rubber honkers, as his work indicates? Or is it just a simple case of too many El Marko fumes in too small a work environment? We'll probably never know the truth; suffice to say that the Portland-based animator is head and shoulders above Spumco, Spike and Mike, and yes, even hometown boy Mike Judge when it comes to creating the weirdest, wildest, most sublimely outré cartoons in the world and, presumably, elsewhere. Let's face it: The guy's a loon. But he's our loon, and thank God for that. This new feature by Plympton continues in his ongoing vein of inspired lunacy, mixing an improbable storyline with the artist's jerky animation style and outlandish visual puns. And while Plympton has always been best taken in small doses, I Married a Strange Person holds together for much of its 74-minute running time, leaving your head reeling with some of the most bizarre images yet committed to film. Lantern-jawed Grant and his sexy, black-bobbed wife Kerry find their marriage on the brink of collapse after a mysterious ray from the couple's satellite dish zaps Grant while he's watching TV one day. The ray creates a tumor, or lobe, on the back of Grant's neck which allows him to realize anything he can think of (for example, a torrent of insects erupting from his mother-in-law's jabbering mouth), and before long the couple are on the outs. It's all just too much for Kerry ("What's with Grant," she understandably wonders. "Is he a robot? Or possibly the Antichrist?") On the plus side, Grant is being pursued by the evil Smile Corporation, a media conglomerate headed by the evil Larson Giles, eager to steal Grant's newfound super powers for use in his own nefarious purposes. Add to this a washed-up Catskills comic by the name of Solly Jim, the obsequious talk-show host Jackie Jason, and more running gags that you can shake a marmot at, and you've got prime Plymptonia. Plympton has always scored big with his ability to transform the human body into literalisms; here he twists the libido of his characters, allowing Grant to alter his wife during the act of love: She's a nun, a Hottentot, a giant, flaming breast, et cetera. No wonder this marriage is on the verge of collapse. Absurdist comedy of this sort is rarely seen these days -- Plympton strip-mines Dadaist territory, but for all the hullabaloo his tales are innately sweet. There may be viscera zipping through the air and bulbous, olive drab army tanks frantically humping each other, but it's all done with childlike good humor, a Plympton staple. Seventy-four minutes of Plympton is pushing it even for the hard core fans, but the cause-and-effect comedy of the animator is so inspired that you make it through unscathed and unbored. True, your head may be spinning a bit, but just think how Bill Plympton's must feel. It's all good. (12/11/98)
Dobie
D: Troy Miller; with Michael Keaton, Kelly Preston, Mark Addy, Joseph Cross. (PG, 96 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. A neglectful husband and father (Keaton) is killed in a car wreck only to receive a second chance to become a better dad when he comes back to life in the form of a snowman that his son has built. No longer a frigid family man, his transformation turns him into one super-cool dad. ()
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Gus Van Sant; with Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, Robert Forster, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Haney, Chad Everett, Rance Howard, Rita Wilson, James Remar, James Legros. (R, 105 min.)
"Norman Ö Is That You?" The time has come to abandon the question of why Gus Van Sant did it. Because he could and because he wanted to should be reasons enough. It's easy to understand the curiosity, the challenge of the task, and the attraction of the ultimate methodology for getting inside the head of an artist so admired. It's even fitting, thematically, that Van Sant should want to shadow a director like Alfred Hitchcock, for whom doubling, doppelgangers, and mistaken identities were dominant narrative constructs. Van Sant used the carte blanche he earned from the success of the bland and prosaic Good Will Hunting to return to his artier and more experimental roots with this highly publicized and modestly budgeted "re-creation" (Van Sant's word) of Hitchcock's 1960 movie sensation Psycho. Unleashed to the public without advance screenings (since that's the way Hitchcock did it, a marketing conceit that might be more believable if things like admission prices and the film's budget were also rolled back to 1960 rates), the only question that should matter now is how well the re-creation succeeds. The answer is: alright, to a point. As an exercise it's always intriguing, but as a contemporary thriller the 1998 Psycho is hardly a white-knuckle ride. To some degree, that's because the plot is already well-known to us; but still, so much of the movie's thrill has to do with our appreciation of the devious finesse with which the filmmaker manipulates our emotions. But even here, a great deal of the genre's techniques and ploys seem routine and even clichéd in today's context. Van Sant's and Universal's hopes of luring a young, unacquainted-with-Hitchcock audience with this contemporary but faithful remake seems like a tough sell due to this generation's greater familiarity with the conventions of the slasher genre. Granted, the original Psycho is where a lot of these conventions caught fire, so this re-creation becomes almost a study of their efficacy and power. So what becomes very weird are the few moments in which Van Sant varies from his slavish re-creation. Why, for instance, in the most famous of all sequences -- the shower sequence -- does Van Sant cut away to a subjective shot of gathering clouds, à la My Own Private Idaho? Other updates make more sense (like the Walkman-wearing sister, Norman Bates masturbating while watching Marion through the office peephole, the sound of couples noisily making love in the next-door hotel room of lovers Marion and Sam, or the naked butt shot of Viggo Mortensen climbing out of bed), but don't really add anything new to our appreciation of the story. And why, when he was updating scenes, did Van Sant and writer Joseph Stefano (who also penned the original screenplay from Robert Bloch's novel) elect to leave in the obsolete touch in which the sheriff's wife rings up the old-fashioned rural telephone operator? But for William Macy's, the performances add little depth to these pre-established characters. Anne Heche seems lost, stuck in a fruitless search for the motivations driving this character from another era that no amount of tangerine-colored undergarments can solve. As Norman Bates, Vince Vaughn makes us better appreciate how much Anthony Perkins brought to the original project. It's clear now that he owned the role and that he shares equally with Hitchcock the credit for making Psycho the memorable creep show it is -- and was. Maybe it's just that Oedipally-fixated cross-dressers are way too commonplace in this day and age of tell-all television. Or maybe it's best to just let sleeping psychos lie. (12/11/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Raul Ruiz; with Anne Parillaud, William Baldwin, Bulle Ogier. (R, 102 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. Daring narrative experimentation is cult auteur Raul Ruiz's forte, and this new murder mystery should be no different. A wealthy young heiress on an island honeymoon (Anne Parillaud of La Femme Nikita) and an assassin for hire (Baldwin) seem only to exist in each other's dreams. Who's zooming who? What the recklessly experimental cult auteur Ruiz is doing making a suspense thriller is anyone's guess. And moreover, what's he doing casting a Baldwin brother? More experimentation, we hope. (12/11/98)
Arbor
D: Jonathan Frakes; with Patrick Stewart, Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, F. Murray Abraham, Donna Murphy, Anthony Zerbe. (PG, 99 min.)
The so-called Star Trek Curse continues unabated; that is, even-numbered Trek's are good, while their odd-numbered cohorts stink like a dead Horta in a pop bottle on a hot July day. This being the ninth outing of the series, all is not well in Federation space. As directed by Jonathan "Testosterone" Frakes (who, it should be noted, also directed the above-average First Contact last time out), Insurrection is a muddled, gimpy mess, filled with the worst sort of Trek clichés and ill-timed humorous outbursts. On top of that, the film might as well have been edited by Mr. Scott in the midst of a Romulan ale bender: Plot points appear out of nowhere and voluminous backstory seems to have been dropped in favor of bigger, better explosions and forehead-slappingly bad double entendres. Is this Star Trek or Friends in space? Briefly, the plot centers around a vague plot by Federation Admiral Dougherty (Zerbe) and his alien ally Ru'afo (Abraham, playing what appears to be some sort of deep-space Salieri) to participate in the forced relocation of an indigenous people to another world in order to secure mining rights to a planet firmly resembling paradise. Captain Picard (Stewart) is rightfully shocked that the Federation would condone this blatant slap in the face to their sacred Prime Directive of non-interference in alien cultures, and decides -- on a whim, it seems -- to commit high treason and rescue the natives from their usurpers. That's about it, plot-wise, though The Next Generation series creator Rick Berman does toss a bone to Picard in the form of a lovely alien sage who acts as a sort of love interest. Meanwhile Riker (Frakes) shaves his beard and goes hot-tubbing with ex-flame Counselor Troi (Sirtis), Data (Spiner) runs amok, and Worf (Dorn) finally hits puberty (I kid you not). Longtime fans of the series (I number myself among them) will be aghast at the flimsily constructed plotting and subpar set design; didn't we get enough otherworldly Styrofoam passageways back when J. Tiberius Kirk was the Federation's chief gallavanteer? And why the sudden need to have poor android Data spout such witless Schwarzeneggerisms as "Saddle up! Lock 'n' load!" It's enough to make a Trekker miss the glory days of Ensign Yeoman's cleavage, I tell you. Trek has fared far better with comic underpinnings before (Nimoy's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home succeeded nicely, as did STTNG television episodes like "The Naked Now," in which the entire Enterprise crew was goofily sidelined by some intergalactic Ecstasy). Frakes, I fear, directs with an iron goatee, and his notion of humor is on a par with Buddy Hackett's. Let's hope installment number 10 -- an anniversary of sorts -- will put the crew back on sci-fi terra firma where they belong. (12/11/98)
Gateway, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Lincoln, 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
D: George Miller; with Magda Szubanski, James Cromwell, Mary Stein, Mickey Rooney, and the voices of E.G. Daily, Danny Mann, Glenne Headly, Steven Wright, Adam Goldberg, Roscoe Lee Browne. (G, 95 min.)
It befits the director of Mad Max and The Road Warrior that this sequel to his Academy Award-nominated Babe is a far more boisterous affair than its predecessor. Whereas audiences' initial introduction to the helium-voiced sheep-pig centered around the benign characters of Hoggett's farm, Miller broadens the scope considerably by transplanting the action to the metaphorical City (with its skyline sporting not only the Statue of Liberty, but also the Eiffel Tower, the Hollywood sign, and the Sidney Opera House), making for an altogether more rollicking affair. You know this isn't the same old Babe when the film's first reel has plump Mrs. Hoggett being strip-searched by the Drug Enforcement Agency. If the first film was a gentle parable for children and adults alike, then Babe: Pig in the City -- its brash city cousin -- is a surrealistic, occasionally grim tale of valor in the face of terrifically bad odds. With occasional flashes of Orwell's Animal Farm and some set design that looks strangely cribbed from The City of Lost Children, it is easy to see why the filmmakers had difficulty securing that all-important G rating. Miller opens his film moments after the close of the first, with the sheep-pig Babe (E.G. Daily) basking in his newfound glory, with farmer Hoggett (Cromwell) at his side. The adulation and notoriety soon take second place to more pressing concerns when the farmer is accidentally injured, leaving his wife Esme (Szubanski) to manage the farm. After that, it's not long before a pair of cadaverous bank men come calling to inform the Hoggetts they are about to lose their land. In a desperate effort to secure some cash flow, Mrs. Hoggett and Babe set out to make a guest appearance at a faraway fairgrounds, though a series of missed connections leave them stranded in The City. There they check into an animal-friendly hotel and, while Mrs. Hoggett is thrown in jail (after skirmishing with security guards who appear to be extras from Mad Max), Babe allies himself with a group of city-bred animals including a Fagin-esque orangutan and his hipster chimpanzee cronies (headed by a cool Steven Wright). Much chaos ensues -- far too much to go into here -- but suffice to say that yes, it all works out in the end. No surprise that; the real question is whether kids are going to like this loud, tumultuous menagerie of a film. Despite the odd scene of injured animals and breakneck suspense, this is still a children's film, though it's much more Willy Wonka than Mickey Mouse. Miller's non-stop pacing and sense of the absurd is operating on all cylinders, and though younger kids might shy away from some of the adult gags (of which there are many), that hard-won G rating is in place, barely. You couldn't have gotten a more pleasantly bizarre film if Salvador Dali himself had directed, which says a lot for Miller's rabid talents. Fans of the original (myself included) may be temporarily put off by this sequel's kinetic clutter, but at its heart it's still the same pinkly porcine tale of pig power and PETA-friendly anima. (11/27/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton; with the voices of Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kevin Spacey, David Hyde Pierce, Denis Leary, Phyllis Diller, Madeline Kahn, John Ratzenberger, Bonnie Hunt, Edie McClurg, Alex Rocco, Roddy McDowall. (G, 94 min.)
In 1998's mano-a-mandible clash of digital an(t)imation features, this breakneck-paced, understatedly clever, Disney/Pixar release wins in a split decision over DreamWorks' previously released Antz. Split because, whereas most grownups would agree that Antz boasts a more sophisticated quality of wit, A Bug's Life strikes a better overall balance of adult- and kid-friendly entertainment. As with Antz, the animation is stellar, though not necessarily in terms of startling innovation. (After all, this is an era when you can't make it through an Ace Hardware commercial without being subjected to CGI Weedeaters quivering spasmodically amid tangerine nebulae with the Chemical Brothers doinking maniacally in the background.) No, where Pixar really excels is in creating a seamless, through-the-looking-glass experience in which the 3D feel of computer animation -- its chief aesthetic distinction -- sucks you deeply into a surreal alternate reality. The characters, however, are classic Disney in style and attitude, creating an intriguing effect of old wine in a new bottle that should be accessible even to those who've been slow to warm to computer animation. Like its predecessor, A Bug's Life wastes little of its creative juice in the story department. Its plot is based upon the oft-recycled theme of a sweet-natured dreamer (a young ant named Flik, voiced by Kids in the Hall ex Dave Foley) whose innovative thinking makes him first an outcast, then a hero. When one of Flik's screw-ups gets his ant brethren in trouble with a gang of grasshopper hooligans led by the sinister Hopper (Kevin Spacey), he goes looking for insect mercenaries to fight them. Instead, he goofs again and accidentally hires a motley crew of circus bugs consisting of a preening master-thespian mantis, a glamorous gypsy moth, a cranky ladybug (Denis Leary), a dimwitted beetle, and sundry other dimwitted, craven insectoid troupers. The outcome, of course, is preordained from the earliest scenes, but the story's a ton of fun anyway. From the pure entertainment standpoint, ABL's nonstop action helps it avoid the slack moments that marred Antz. The dialogue, kiddie-accessible though it is, is plenty intelligent for adult enjoyment. And cinephiles can even amuse themselves spotting allusions to movies as diverse as Blade Runner, Microcosmos and The Wild Angels. Further proof of A Bug's Life's sneaky-smart charm is the end credit sequence, a series of fake "outtakes" that wittily remind us we're dealing with a medium in which not only live action but cameras themselves are unnecessary. At the screening I attended, one or two of the tiniest tots were reduced to tears by a noisy closing battle scene, but in general, A Bug's Life is as ideal a piece of family entertainment as you're likely to find. Eight pincers up -- way up. (11/27/98)
Gateway, Highland, Lakehills, Lakeline, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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 an 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: Bennett Miller. (PG-13, 76 min.)
From atop his perch on the upper deck of New York City's Gray Line tour buses, Timothy "Speed" Levitch sees it all, and says it all. Like some omniscient chronicler of the city's life, he daily weaves a mind-bending spiel for the tourists who end up on his bus, seeking to "rewrite their souls and to redo every day that they lived thus far before they came onto the double-decker bus." You get the feeling Levitch accomplishes that formidable task more often than he realizes. Combining the wry, outrageous wit of a modern-day Oscar Wilde with a healthy dose of NYC angst and a veritable photographic memory concerning everything you'd ever want to know from a tour guide, he feels more like a fictional construct than a real, flesh-and-blood citizen. Levitch has NYC coursing through his veins like some magical drug, and his ongoing love affair with the city translates directly to the audience. If you've never been there, The Cruise will send you rushing to your travel agent to book a flight into JFK, and if you're a native, the film will reaffirm that with which you first fell in love. Miller, a 31-year-old NYU film grad, is obviously passionate about the city he calls home as well; it shows in the lush black-and-white images that illustrate the film (which was shot not on film at all but on digital video) and in the painstaking attention to detail. Whether it's the unforgettable image of Levitch caressing the base of the Brooklyn Bridge in a flurry of lovely synaptic overload or gleefully spinning around and around in the courtyard between the World Trade Center's twin towers, Miller knows how to draw not only a portrait of this epic town but also one of its most endearing figures. Shot over the course of three years, The Cruise follows its wild-maned, adenoidal-voiced subject through the ups and downs of his daily grind at the tour company (his dismay at eventually having to be made to wear a uniform is one of the film's comic highlights). In between work and protracted bouts of couch-surfing, Levitch wanders the city and enthuses on everything from architecture to history to all manner of persons, famous and otherwise (he seems to have a special place in his heart for Thomas Paine). This, according to Levitch, is "the cruise," the act of living and moving through life with an exploratory, open mindset. Rarely will you find anyone with such a gaping maw of intellect as Levitch, who alternately comes across as a hippie-esque naïf, street scholar, and poet. Miller has somehow, inadvertently by his own admission, managed to capture the essence of the human throng, in all its maddening, scintillating permutations. It's a tour unlike any you have ever taken. (See related interview in this week's "Screens" section.) (11/27/98)
Dobie
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, Dobie, Highland
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: 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 absurdÖ 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: Dean Parisot; with Drew Barrymore, Catherine O'Hara, Luke Wilson, Jake Busey, Shelley Duvall, Kim Robillard, Daryl Mitchell, Lanny Flaherty, Chris Ellis. (PG-13, 92 min.)
This locally shot feature debut by Dean Parisot plays like a quasi-sequel to Wes Anderson's minor cult classic Bottle Rocket. Both films star Dallas native Wilson as a quiet Everyman caught up in circumstances (romantic and otherwise) beyond his control, and both films feature quirky, small-scale Texas lifestyles of the poor and bewildered. Home Fries ups the ante, however, by tossing in some outlandish plotting and one large military aircraft, and ends up being the lesser of the two films by virtue of its brazen silliness. Wilson plays Dorian, a young, part-time Texas National Guardsman who, alongside his brother Angus (Busey, over the top and loving it), flies Cobra attack helicopters on the weekends and spends his days, apparently, plotting to drive off his philandering stepfather Henry (Ellis). This at the behest of the brother's controlling mother (O'Hara), a brassy, shrewish witch of a woman whose entreaties to the boys to get rid of old Henry once and for all lead to the man's semi-accidental demise via helicopter terrorism. When that happens, and in an effort to clean up any loose evidentiary ends, Dorian takes a job at the local Burger-Matic, where he checks out pregnant counter girl Sally (Barrymore) to see what she knows, if anything, and eventually falls in love. As complex as that sounds (and Home Fries takes a while to set things up for its audience), things grow even more interesting as the convoluted plot sails along. Wilson is the emotional linchpin in this highly emotional film, and he does the job with a guileless ease. He's the kind of actor that seems destined to slip through the cracks of the studio system until someone realizes he's the guy holding up the entire film. Slyly acting with a bare modicum of attention-grabbing flare, Wilson feels like a young Hoffman minus the mumble. High praise, I know, but rarely have I seen a young actor with such internalized talent. Is it live or is it Luke? Or is it acting? I don't know but whatever it is it works, drawing you in and making you care in the midst of a charitably ramshackle storyline. Barrymore is all cuteness and light, as she often is, though Duvall and especially O'Hara more than make up for it with country laissez-faire (Duvall) and screeching irritants (O'Hara). In the end, Home Fries bites off more than it can chew with its protracted tale of aggrieved families, double-dealing romance, and Jake Busey's teeth (which, frankly, should have received much higher billing). It's small-town humor with big-city scripting, but at least there's Luke Wilson to savor. (11/27/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Lincoln, 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, 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)
Lakeline, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
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, Lake Creek, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Stefan Ruzowitzky; with Simon Schwarz, Sophie Rois, Lars Rudolph, Julia Gschnitzer, Ulrich Wildgruber. (Not Rated, 95 min.)
"Used to be no one listened when I talked," says one of the peasants in Stefan Ruzowitzky's rural Austrian allegory, The Inheritors. "Used to be you had nothing to say," replies another. That in a nutshell sums up the journey undertaken by the characters in this intriguing tale. Seven hard-working farmhands unexpectedly inherit their master's property after his mysterious murder. Wealthy landowners and self-righteous townspeople connive to take it away from the inexperienced peasants. But, much to everyone's amazement (including their own), they decide to stick to their guns and stay on the land. With this small act of bravery, the entire social order becomes unraveled. The villagers and the tight religious community are affronted by the inheritors' impudence. Yet even more disruptive is the ripple-down effect the decision has on the peasants' own lives. For the first time ever, these workers have a say-so in their own destiny and find they are ill-trained to make decisions and think independently. Writer-director Ruzowitzky does an amazing job at capturing the nuances of change: economic, social, sexual, and political. The story is set in 1930s Austria, but the film has a timeless rural look that suits the universality of its dumb-hicks-hit-the-jackpot storyline. What The Inheritors adds is a sharp socio-political angle, crystalline images by cinematographer Peter von Haller, and engaging performances by this entire group of Austrian actors. As the film has very little dialogue, most of what passes can be understood through observation. Like its generous use of the familiar Erik Satie music that limns the background, The Inheritors is subtle, definite, and hard to pin down. The story meanders a bit in the latter third as the murder mystery plays more of a central role and characterization is emphasized at the expense of social analysis, but overall, The Inheritors is never less than penetrating, unusual, and finely achieved. It is the rare film that shows us how the imprint of culture messes with our heads; it is an even rarer film that shows how our heads can mess with the culture. (Opens Nov. 27) (11/27/98)
Village
D: Roberto Begnini; with Begnini, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Giustino Durano, Sergio Bustric, Marisa Paredes, Horst Buchholz. (PG-13, 114 min.)
Life Is Beautiful is the drama every comic probably wishes he had made. This Italian "concentration-camp comedy" believes that the powers of humor and joy are strong enough to overcome any adversity, even that of the Nazi Holocaust. Now, we all know this not to be true, the numbers certainly bear us out on this point. But the fact of the matter is that humor and joy sure can't hurt in the face of overwhelming odds. Proclaiming that "life is beautiful" is kind of like saying that the glass is half full; it's an attitudinal choice to side with the positive because the only other option is the inevitability of negativism and defeat. It is within this life-affirming context that the controversy surrounding co-writer, director, and star Roberto Begnini's movie needs to be examined. A high-profile award winner, Life Is Beautiful won the grand jury prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, eight Donatellos (Italian Oscars), and many other prestigious awards. It has also come under attack for its soft-focus, unrealistic presentation of life in the death camps. Both the popular acclaim and the alarmist criticism are deserved. Roberto Begnini is a clown, and an irrepressible one at that. In this defining work of his career he uses those unique clowning skills and comic imagination to create not a documentary portrait of the consequences of the Nazi Final Solution but a testament to the magnitude of the human spirit. In so doing, Begnini obscures most of the harsh realities and logical consequences of the situation, and though there is a degree to which such narrative license is unforgivable, we must also appreciate that by privileging history's impermeability we are also limiting its possibilities for inciting the poetic imagination. What Begnini does in Life Is Beautiful is use the Holocaust as a backdrop for telling a heartfelt story about a father who protects his son from the gas chambers by the use of the only weapons at his command: his quick imagination, outlandish buffoonery, and scrappy determination. In the real camps such tactics would not have had a chance in hell. Within the fiction of the movie, we are witnesses to the plight of a lone man whistling bravely in the dark. In addition to its questionable subject matter, another difficulty the film has to surmount is the way its mood abruptly turns on a dime after the first hour. Opening in 1939, we see signs everywhere of fascist rule, but the story focuses on the young man Guido (Begnini) and his arrival in the Tuscan town of Arezzo to seek his fortune as a waiter who wants to open a bookshop and the meeting and wooing of his future bride Dora (Begnini's wife, Braschi, who has starred in most of his films). The first hour is a slapstick paradise. Begnini is an inheritor of the Chaplinesque tradition and Life Is Beautiful owes obvious debts to The Great Dictator. Though in such films as Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law and Night on Earth and Begnini's own Johnny Stecchino and The Monster, I never was terribly moved by the effusively inexhaustive talents of Italy's favorite comedic son. However, I must say that I was unexpectedly beguiled by Begnini's clownish powers to amuse during Life Is Beautiful's thoroughly anti-authoritarian first hour. Then, within just a few moments, he wins the girl, they glide through a doorway and it's suddenly five years later on the eve of their son's fifth birthday, and we discover that Guido is Jewish and he and his son are being herded off to the camps, in which location the movie spends its second hour. And though Guido's tactics for promoting his son's survival are most unlikely to have been successful in the real world (if we dare call concentration camps the real world), and the film's harshest truths are depicted offscreen or in implied tropes, and some of the worst Nazi commandant behavior is only a few clapboards removed from Hogan's Heroes, still Ö 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)
Great Hills, Village
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, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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, Lakehills, Tinseltown North
D: Neil Abramson; with Jerry Springer, Jaime Pressly, William McNamara, Molly Hagan, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Michael Jai White, Michael Dudikoff, Tangie Ambrose, Nicki Micheaux, Rebecca Broussard, Maximilliana. (R, 90 min.)
Ringmaster Jerry Springer is the kind of guy who gives even the circus a bad name. With the popularity of his syndicated TV talk show and best-selling videotapes, this self-invented star has decided to go for the mantle of "king of all media" and branch out into autobiography-writing and filmmaking, just this month releasing both a book and a movie with the same title: Ringmaster. The movie purports to offer a backstage glimpse at life behind the scenes of a controversial trash-talk show. But this is hardly a Madonna-like Truth or Dare backstage enterprise. Springer's film takes a fictionalized approach to the whole operation (if that's not an oxymoron), using professional (though vastly undistinguished) actors to play the real-life guests on the show, and himself appearing in only a small fraction of the film as a benign host named Jerry Farrelly. This move to the big screen puts the focus on two subsets of guests: one, the white trailer-trash foursome who come to L.A. to appear in the "You Did What With Your Stepdaddy?" segment; and the other, the black ghetto gals and their man who can't keep his pants zipped who come for the segment devoted to "My Traitor Girlfriends." Ringmaster envisions a world in which the masses have abandoned their unfulfilled fantasies of becoming movie stars and instead dream of becoming guests on Jerry's show. And it's a show that believes in "the masses." Springer's ludicrous onscreen speeches justifying why he does what he does would have us see him as some kind of cathode-ray Mother Teresa giving sustenance to the American poor and disenfranchised. He makes a point of defending himself against the effete journalists who charge that he panders to lowest common denominators, exploits the real troubles of his core constituency, and gets rich by never underestimating the public's bad taste. Aesthetics and morality aside, Ringmaster is a badly made movie. The performances are sub-par, the bare-bones script (by Jon Bernstein) is painfully shrill and witless, scenes don't cut together properly, there's very little story to speak of, and certainly no behind-the-scenes insights. Director Neil Abramson, who previously made his small mark in the filmmaking world with the moody Sundance favorite, Without Air, has -- perhaps understandably -- made a 180-degree turn here into the land of anti-aesthetics. Distribution company Artisan Entertainment, which also promotes such acclaimed festival fare as Pi and The Cruise, is surely hoping to make a killing here. But it remains to be seen if Springer's core audience will fork over the box-office bucks to see what they can see at home on the TV for free -- especially since the movie offers less blood and mayhem than the home version. It's like watching the WWF and knowing for sure that it's all rigged. (11/27/98)
Barton Creek, Highland, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Igor Kovalyov and Norton Virgien; with the voices of Elizabeth Daily, Christine Cavanaugh, Cheryl Chase, David Spade, Whoopi Goldberg, Lisa Loeb. (G, 85 min.)
No one appreciates a clever and charming children's cartoon more than a parent who feels she will go totally, irrevocably berserk if she hears Scooby Doo say "Ruh-roh" one more time. The Rugrats can count among its ardent fans many grateful parents and a surprising number of channel-surfing adults who are caught and held by the Nickelodeon show's sweet, sly wit. Each half-hour show features two short segments that are bright, quick, and snappy, driven by silly flights of fancy and engaging characterizations. With the same cast at their beck and draw and a truly brilliant TV Passover special under their belts, it seemed as though the cartoon's producers (husband and wife team Gabor Csupo and Arlene Klasky) were ready for the big screen. Or maybe not. Despite a few funny moments, and some richly colored and fluid animation, The Rugrats Movie simply cannot sustain the frenetic charm and imagination of the shorter TV segments. Particularly ill-advised are the musical numbers that seem artificial and de rigueur despite some pretty heavy musical artillery (Elvis Costello, No Doubt, Laurie Anderson, and Iggy Pop to name but a few). The movie simply has too much contrived narrative to be much fun. The Rugrats' charm lay in the babies' whimsical, rug-level perspective and fanciful misperceptions. On TV, an overstuffed garbage can becomes a UFO, but in the movie a snarling wolf is a snarling wolf and though there is suspense in that, it's not the wildly freeform adventure we've come to expect from the rugrats. The Rugrats Movie has traded in imagination for storytelling. The destination has become more important than the ride. On the bright side, we still have Tommy Pickles, the ebullient one-year-old with an appetite for adventure; Chuckie, his nasally pessimistic sidekick; Phil and Lil, the intrepid fraternal twins; and the queen of mean, Angelica, a truly terrible two-year-old who uses her superior height and verbal capacity to manipulate babies and parents alike. (We don't get nearly enough of Angelica, who is on a quest to retrieve her precious Cynthia fashion doll which has fallen into Dil's iron grasp. It's not clear whether this is the Hot Tub Cynthia or the Camaro Cynthia or any one of the many Cynthia dolls which are Angelica's most prized possessions.) The babies' adventure in the movie is spawned by the arrival of another Pickles baby, newborn Dil, whose presence upsets the balance of attention and causes the babies to try to return him to Bob. (A baby is a gift from a Bob, they heard their grandparents say.) The ensuing adventure has a few giggles and a warm, sweet ending, but The Rugrats Movie is more like a pleasant Sunday drive in a big smooth sedan than the TV show's riotous joyrides in a fast, shiny convertible. (11/27/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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)
Alamo Drafthouse
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, 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, Dobie, Westgate 3
D: Peter Berg; with Christian Slater, Cameron Diaz, Daniel Stern, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Jon Favreau, Jeremy Piven, Leland Orser, Carla Scott. (R, 101 min.)
Chicago Hope's Peter Berg hangs up his scrubs in favor of the director's chair and ends up with more blood on his hands than a whole season's worth of television dramatics. He also ends up helming one of the nastier black comedies to come down the pike in some time, though calling this mess a "comedy" cheapens the term in the extreme. Newlywed-to-be Kyle Fisher (Favreau) finds himself on the receiving end of the karmic Louisville Slugger when he and four of his closest, most masculine buddies take off for a weekend bachelor party in Las Vegas. Along for the ride are brothers Michael and Adam (Piven and Stern); shy, withdrawn mechanic Charlie (Orser); and scheming real-estate weasel Robert Boyd (Slater), a man so devoid of scruples he makes Michael Milken look like Michael Moore. Against the better wishes of Kyle's fiancée Laura (Cameron), the guys shack up in a swank Vegas casino and spend the first night binging on liquor, cocaine, and, eventually, a high-priced call girl. Although Kyle nixes the traditional sleep-with-the-hooker idea, Michael has no such qualms and leads her into the bathroom, where, after a drunken game of "spin the hooker," she meets her grisly end when her skull accidentally fuses with a towel rack. Panicked and wasted, the quintet decide (under the wild-eyed tutelage of Robert) their best shot is to bury the poor girl in the Nevada desert. Unfortunately, before they can get their act together, hotel security drops by and leaves them, eventually, with another corpse. After a vaguely disturbing scene in which the boys load up on such high-desert incidentals as chainsaws, shovels, and gore-proof slickers, the deed is done and they return home to a life forever changed. Once back, both tempers and paranoia flare as their plan begins to unravel, and more corpses begin to make appearances. Through it all, Kyle and Laura staunchly march on toward their appointed destiny in holy matrimony, while all else is reduced to chaos and bloodletting. Ostensibly a cautionary tale of how very bad things create lasting mental impacts on those involved, Berg's film instead plays out like Laurel and Hardy directed by Sam Raimi with a hangover. The comic moments revolve almost exclusively around pain and violence and degradation, and though that may work well enough in more cerebral films (the Belgian Man Bites Dog comes to mind), here it's simply too much of a very bad thing. Slater is particularly disturbing as he plays the moral black hole and mindless drug Hoover, while Cameron steadfastly acts as though she's on the verge of a full-scale panic attack. There is a line between gallows humor and tastelessness, but Very Bad Things apparently doesn't have a clue where that might be. (11/27/98)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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, 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)
Gateway
GREMLINS (1984) D:Joe Dante; with Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Frances Lee McCain, Polly Holiday, Dick Miller, Judge Reinhold, Corey Feldman, voice of Howie Mandel. Comic horror ensues when a teenager's furry little pet of mysterious origins spawns a whole town full of snaggle-toothed killer gremlins. It's a violent suburban splatter story ameliorated by an overriding streak of humor and in-jokes. Director Joe Dante has a real flair for this kind of tonal blend as can beseen in such films as Small Soldiers,Matinee, The Howling, and Piranha. (PG, 106 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Fri-Sat (12/111-12), midnight.
THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987) D: Rob Reiner; with Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn, Andre the Giant, Fred Savage, Robin Wright, Peter Falk, Peter Cook, Carol Kane, Billy Crystal, Mel Smith. This whimsical, comedic fairy tale was written by William Goldman, who adapted his cult novel for the screen. The film has gone to develop its own cultish devotees. It's directed by This Is Spinal Tap's Rob Reiner, who here abandons his previous movie's sense of farce and satire for much broader and more innocuous comedy. (PG, 98 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Thu (12/17), 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.
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.) @Village; 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; Fri-Thu.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "Decadence & Melodrama: A Rainer Werner Fassbinder Retrospective":
Satan's Brew (1976) D: R.W. Fassbinder; with Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Ulli Lommel, Armin Meier, Brigitte Mira, Peter Chatel. My, oh my. They've saved the most perverse Fassbinder film for last. Like a Germanic Antonin Artaud, Fassbinder here seems to be in search of a Cinema of Cruelty. It's about the non-fuctioning of the group. Physical and verbal aggression abound in this piece and all the characters' interactions are malicious and/or absurd. The central figure is a poet of the revolution who has not written a word in two years. Fassbinder pushes the boundaries of vulgarity, perversity, and absurdity here and he wouldn't have wanted it any other way. (NR, 112 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Tue (12/15), 7 & 9:30pm; free admission.
F3 FILM SERIES:F3 Film Series provides a forum for films outside the Hollywood aesthetic and focuses on the work of Austin filmmakers and beyond. Featured in this December series is the work of Christian Divine (Berkeley), Dave Johnston (Belfast), Huck Botko (Earth), Gabriel Massey (Austin), David Hickey (Austin), Eric Patrick (Austin), Bill Brown (Austin), Erik Deutschman (Germany), Jane Higgins, and more. Brown's "The Hub City" is a personal essay about Lubbock which mixes meterology, philosophy, and documentary materials. Patrick's "Stark Film" is an experiemental work by a CalArts graduate who has won an annual MTV student animation award. Botko's "Baked Alaska" presents a roadside wilderness cooking show as therapy. Higgins' "Down the Tube" is a Super-8 personal account of the objectification of the female body. (Filmmakers wishing to submit work for future consideration should send them to Vincent O'Brien, 3701 Speedway, Austin, Texas, 78705. All work will be returned provided a SASE is enclosed.) The current F3 series runs every Saturday through December. (NR) @The Thin Gallery (505 San Jacinto, upstairs); Sat (12/12), 8pm; $5 admission.
FUNHOUSE CINEMA:Luke Savisky and Group: Film Actions 3 (1998)Film and installation artist Luke Savisky presents another Film Action in conjunction with musician Adam Wiltzy of Stars of the Lid and filmmaker/Funhouse Cinema impresario Bill Daniel. The group's multi-projector pieces are constructed from 16mm loops layered to create improvisational "movies." Daniel describes the collaboration as a "three-piece projection band." This Film Actionis the final show in this season's Funhouse Cinema series and it should send things off with a bang. Daniel's renegade, DIY programming has consistently made Funhouse Cinema into one of the most exciting, interesting, and entertaining series this town has had the pleasure to experience. (NR) @Ritz Lounge; Mon (12/14), 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.
MOVIE & MUSIC:
Battleship Potemkin (1925) D: Sergei Eisenstein; with Alexander Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Alexandrov, Mikhail Goronorov; live musical accompaniment by the Golden Arm Trio. You don't know jack about movies 'til you've experienced Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. We may have learned things like film narrative from classics like Birth of a Nation and The Great Train Robbery, or cinema poetry from beauts like Sunrise and Un Chien Andalou, or twinkling laughter from any number of comic geniuses. But from Battleship Potemkin we experience the thrill of the movies -- as vividly in 1998 as ever, be it five years ago or 50 or right now for the first time. The Russian-born Eisenstein, who edited as well as directed this 1925 film, shows us the thrill of slamming shots together, of shaping images into ideas, yanking meaning from the mass. There are moments in Potemkin that are as rousing as any ever put on film. An artist working under the strictures of socialist realism, Eisenstein took for Potemkin's narrative a Russian story based on historical incident: a ship uprising in 1905 during which the sailors broke out in mutinous rebellion over the worm-ridden rations they were forced to eat by their czarist commanders. As word of the sailors' rebellion spread inland across Odessa, the townspeople gathered spontaneously in the local square and were indiscriminantly shot down on the steps by the armed Cossacks (thus engendering Eisenstein's famed Odessa Steps sequence, one of the most watched sequences in all of filmdom). The escalation of the people's rebellion in the face of the jackboots of repression continues in many more permutations throughout Potemkin, and Eisenstein and cameraman Edward Tisse lead us powerfully through these heady eruptions, as charismatically as if they were Jim Morrison declaring, "We want the world and we want it now." Battleship Potemkin represents the thrill and the power of the movies to anoint our lives with the passion for greater things. With live musical accompaniment by Golden Arm Trio, and a new print struck to commemorate both the 100th anniversary of Eisenstein's birth and the 50th anniversary of his death, this screening should be one of those only-in-Austin events for which the Alamo Movies & Music series is becoming famous. (NR, 84 min.) @Alamo Drafthouse; Thu (12/10), 7:30 (sold out) & 9:45pm; advance tickets recommended (476-1320), $10 advance/$12 door.
TEXAS FILMMAKERS' PRODUCTION FUND:The Faculty World Premiere (1998) D: Robert Rodriguez; with Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Christopher McDonald, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Jon Stewart, Elijah Wood, Usher Raymond, Louis Black, Harry Knowles. Director Robert Rodriguez and producer Elizabeth Avellán present their new filmed-in-Austin, aliens-posing-as-high-school-teachers horror adventure as a benefit for the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. Tickets are on sale to Austin Film Society members, exclusively, through Friday (12/11). Tickets go on sale to the general public on Saturday (12/12). Each ticket-holder is eligible to win the souped-up, 1970 GTO hot rod featured in the film. This pricey collectible will be given away at the Q&A after the film. Each ticket also admits the bearer to a post-screening party hosted by Mike Judge, Richard Linklater, Guillermo Del Toro, Harry Knowles, and Matthew McConaughey. Tickets are currently on sale to AFS members at the Paramount box office (present your membership card) and beginning Saturday, tickets will also be available through Star Tickets outlets or by phone at 469-SHOW or 888/597-STAR. Ticket prices are $15, $20, & $35. @Paramount Theatre; Wed (12/16), 8pm.
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS:Radio-TV-Film Department End-of the-Semester Student Film Screenings always present the opportunity for discovery and acknowledgment. In a marathon weekend session, the work of all the semester's production students will be screened. You never know what you may find here, but you can always count on spotting some unexpectedly recognizable faces and locales. Friday (12/11):1-2pm, Production 2 (first section);6-6:30pm, Undergraduate Thesis (summer); 7-9:30pm, Small-Format Video; 9-10pm, DocumentaryProduction. Saturday (12/12): 3-6pm, Production 1; 6-7pm, Production 2 (second section); 7-8pm, Production 2 (first section); 8-9pm, RTF 340 (Knight), 9-10pm, RTF 343 (Foshko). Sunday (12/13): 5-6pm, Animation; 6-7pm, First-Year MFA Students; 7-9pm, Sync-Sound Production. (NR) Call Jacob Vaughn at 475-6297 for more info. @Communications Building B (Guadalupe & Dean Keeton); Fri-Sun (12/11-13); free admission.