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Film reviews are updated on Fridays. This section compiled by Marjorie Baumgarten (M.B.); with reviews by Hollis Chacona (H.C.), Steve Davis (S.D.), Robert Faires (R.F.), Marc Savlov (M.S.), Russell Smith (R.S.).
| Ratings: 5 stars As perfect as a movie can be 4 stars Slightly flawed, but excellent nonetheless 3 stars Has its good points, and its bad points 2 stars Mediocre, but with one or two bright spots 1 stars Poor, without any saving graces 0 stars La Bomba |
D: Paul Schrader; with Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe, Mary Beth Hurt. (R, 110 min.)
"Some days I feel just like a whipped dog," says Wade Whitehouse (Nolte). The sad, uncomprehending look in his eyes both confirms his words and foreshadows the ones that follow: "Ö someday, I swear, I'm gonna bite back." Wade, an ill-paid and ill-regarded small-town cop in New Hampshire, is a guy we all know only too well. Middle-aged in body but utterly used up in spirit, his main source of satisfaction in life appears to be a grim commitment to slogging robotically through his remaining years -- if only to spite the ill-defined outside forces he blames for his failures and disappointments. In this magnificent, profoundly tragic film, Nolte and Coburn each turn in career-best performances as a father and son who embody the ancient, seemingly ineradicable male pathology of violence, retribution, and the slow death of the soul. The story is based on a book by Russell Banks, whose work was also the basis for Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Paul Schrader's treatment of the material (he also wrote the screenplay) bears some similarities to Egoyan's in tone and setting, but there's a crucial difference in how the narrative unfolds. Here, events build inexorably toward rather than from a ghastly moment of violence, and this imbues even the most innocuous scenes with an icy sense of dread. As we learn through flashbacks and the narrative spoken by Wade's younger brother, Rolfe (Dafoe), Wade took the brunt of the childhood beatings and verbal put-downs from their despicable, alcoholic dad, Glen (Coburn). Wade's response is one so familiar we've come to regard it, on some level, as quintessentially male: He shuts down vast sectors of his emotional life to dull the pain of the shame, anger, and confusion that would otherwise blight every waking hour. Wade is unusual in that he understands his affliction better than most, and even allows himself occasional furloughs from his psychic prison when he's with his tender-hearted girlfriend (Spacek) or his young daughter. This system works, after a fashion, until a series of shattering events, including his mom's death and his investigation of a suspicious hunting accident, force him to recognize how helpless he really is against the disease he's inherited. As familiar as the rudiments of this story are, I don't believe I've ever seen them presented with such compassion, eloquence, and sheer, elemental force. And I find it doubly amazing that Schrader, whose previous directorial efforts are better categorized as meditations on psychological torment than embodiments of it, could create a work of such devastating power. There are a few moments where the narrative trowels on Oprah-like pop psych banalities that serve only to belabor points the action makes abundantly clear. But as a whole, Affliction stands as a career benchmark for Paul Schrader (whose ability to divine the untapped potential of Our Man Flint is the least of his accomplishments here) and confirmation of Nolte's status as one of the more resourceful character actors working today. Come what may, it's surely one of the best movies that'll open in Austin this year, and it may be the best ever made on this grimly fascinating subject. (2/19/99)
Arbor, Highland, Tinseltown South
D: Mike Judge; with Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, Diedrich Bader, Stephen Root, Gary Cole, John C. McGinley, Paul Willson. (R, 89 min.)
A frightening number of people are going to recognize themselves in this movie: white-collar prisoners of the corporate office place -- knowledge workers and computer programmers and paper-shuffling desk jockeys who haven't become victims of downsizing so much as they have become victims of the cubicizing of the American workplace. Office Space is a movie whose battlegrounds will be familiar turf to any modern office worker. It is a land defined by stapler wars and coffee mugs, memos and rumors, grievances about improper usage of such things as cover pages, radio earplugs, time sheets, and office equipment. It is a place where workers peer suspiciously around the edges of their cubicles and where a person's snapping point may be triggered by something as innocuous as a copier machine that unhelpfully displays a paper-jam message when there is no paper jam or when a payroll clerk chirpily declares for the millionth time, "Looks like someone has a case of the Mondays." However, do not fear that writer-director Mike Judge has turned all Marxist, working-class hero on his fans. The characters in Office Space lie somewhere in between the extremes of Judge's other world-famous creations: those quintessential "What, me work!?" goons, Beavis and Butt-head (and let's face it, who among us would want those cartoon clowns to be handing us our burger and fries?), and King of the Hill's propane (and propane accessories) salesman Hank Hill, who is a veritable avatar of the suburban work ethic. Office Space is most definitely a comedy, something like Norma Rae with a college degree and a sense of humor. "It's not all about me and my dream of doing nothing. It's about all of us," Judge's lead character Peter (Livingston) declares. Judge's script for this live-action feature -- his first after establishing his reputation as one of the kings of the new wave of sophisticated, adult animation -- is wickedly funny and to the point. The storyline is something of a hodge-podge but what the narrative lacks in honing and straight-ahead storytelling it more than makes up for with well-aimed barbs and acutely focused observations. Much the same is true for the visual design -- one suspects that the sterile, fluorescent atmosphere of cubed-in wage slaves might have offered unfulfilled opportunities for more sight gags and hellish corporate vistas, but then a scene like the slow-motion copier machine gangbang episode comes along and you realize that it's an image that will become an instant classic. The performances are all sharply drawn examples of picture-perfect understatement. Livingston (Swingers) makes a career breakthrough as the film's Everyman, Herman and Naidu (subUrbia) shine as Peter's co-workers and co-conspirators -- the unfortunately named Michael Bolton and the Near Eastern computer guy, Root is absolutely hilarious as the mumbling office worker Milton (who was the subject of Judge's original animated shorts that inspired the live-action feature), Cole oozes a fecund trail of smarm as the company's unctuous supervisor, and Aniston is delightfully unFriend-like in her downplayed role as Peter's love interest. Although the movie was filmed here in Austin, Office Space strives for, and achieves, a generic Anywhere, USA look. Nevertheless, this funny, funny satire gets us where we live. (2/19/99)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Bruce Neibaur; with Christopher Heyerdahl, Jennifer Bertram, Cary Lawrence. (G, min.)
Not reviewed at press time. This family drama/fantasy film is a co-production of Canada's CINAR television production studio and Feature Films for Families, a U.S. company that shoots straight-to-video family films. The story is a fictionalized account of the process Charles Dickens underwent in order to write his enduring classic, A Christmas Carol. Told through flashbacks, the character of Dickens recalls a young street urchin who saved him from being robbed and then, years later, returns as an apparition to show him the deplorable living conditions caused by child labor laws and poverty. Sounds like a perfect film for mid February. (2/19/99)
Lakeline
D: Darren Stein; with Rose McGowan, Rebecca Gayheart, Julie Benz, Judy Evans Greer, Chad Christ, Ethan Erickson, Charlotte Roldan, Pam Grier, Carol Kane, P.J. Soles, William Katt, Marilyn Manson. (R, 87 min.)
Is high school today really this treasonous? All I can remember is getting sidelined for wearing a Plasmatics T-shirt with a too-fleshy Wendy O. Williams on it. That and the occasional parking-lot fisticuffs with Joe Tough Guy. Granted, the cliques have always been in place, enforced, and as inescapable as the pre-date zit forming like a hellish bullseye dead square on your panicky forehead, but newcomer Stein's vision of life among the quick, dead, and gorgeous plays like GoodFellas meets Pygmalion meets Heathers. That's all peachy keen until you suddenly realize Jawbreaker has all the heart and soul of last week's mystery loaf (a dish that made the weekly rounds at my alma mater, sadly). And like that unidentifiable bovine by-product, the film is a chilly, messy anti-treat, sweet on the outside, sickly on the in. It's Heathers without the wry wit, Blackboard Jungle sans the fun, Very Bad Things with more ick. Like the high school it so ably portrays, it's a nasty piece of business, calculating, coolly efficient, and deeply pessimistic on levels to which even I don't usually go. (On the plus side, it does have a helluva cast.) Former Gregg Araki stablemate and Marilyn Manson paramour Rose McGowan plays Courtney Shayne, the leader of Reagan High's beautiful people. Along with sidewinder fillies Julie (Gayheart), Marcie (Benz), and Liz (Roldan), she embodies school-time's fleshy excess. When Courtney and her friends jokingly kidnap good-girl Liz on her birthday, they accidentally asphyxiate her (with the titular jawbreaker), sending the glam crew into a frenzy of guilt, doubt, and Nietzchean ballistics. Adding insult to homicide, class wallflower Fern Mayo (Greer) spots the clean-up action, and fearing for her life, submits to a makeover and the chance to "replace" the still-sultry Liz. From here on out it's a battle of egos, with the newly popular Fern ditching that tired moniker for the more avant-stupid "Violette" and running amok, a Frankensteinian Sandy from Grease III: The Hellion. There are some surprises amongst the muck: Teen punk quartet the Donnas appear as themselves, Pam Grier makes a one-note cameo as a hard-boiled investigating detective (even in a tired cameo like this she devours the screen), and Carrie alumni Soles and Katt give it their all. No pig's blood, though it is alluded to. Which brings us to Marilyn Manson's acting debut. All eleven seconds of it. Spooky Kids expecting the second coming of Anton LaVey will be disappointed by the cadaverous one's brief -- albeit oozily creepified -- performance as one of McGowan's slimy, mustachioed accomplices. Of course the big question is does Jawbreaker live up to its direct antecedent, Michael Lehmann's Heathers. The answer? In your dreams, Veronica. (2/19/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Joe Johnston; with Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, William Lee Scott, Chris Owen, Chad Lindberg, Natalie Canerday, Laura Dern. (PG, 108 min.)
Let me preface this by saying I have absolutely nothing against former Austinite Joe Johnston. His work with George Lucas, as production and visual effects honcho on Star Wars and its sequels as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark (not to mention supervising the intense aerial sequences on Spielberg's Always) is beyond reproach. This, clearly, is an artist who can reach deep inside himself and touch the kid that grew up thriving on Ray Bradbury's Mars stories. As Harry Knowles' geek squad would wisely put it, the man is "one of us." That's not even mentioning the terribly overlooked The Rocketeer. There have been the occasional slip-ups: TV's The Ewok Adventure and it's so-bad-it's-really bad sequel Ewoks: The Battle for Endor spring to mind like Tinky-Winky in a broken blender. Hey, no one's perfect. So it pains me to say that October Sky, the true story of Homer Hickam, a Coalwood, West Virginia kid with a dream, is ploddingly earthbound. That dream, to follow in the footsteps of his hero Werner von Braun and kick out rockets for America's budding, late-Fifties space program, comes true, though not without its setbacks. As the film opens, the American world is reeling from the announcement that the Soviets have sent an unmanned satellite -- Sputnik -- into low orbit around the Earth. Gyllenhaal, as the teen Hickam, reacts not with fear but with single-minded fascination. It's not long before he and his friends -- Roy (Scott), Quentin (Owen), and O'Dell (Lindberg) -- set off their own rudimentary jet propulsion mockups, blasting holes in mom's white picket fence and tearing up the countryside with needle-nosed precision. Of course, there's a setback, and here it comes in the form of Homer's father John (Cooper), a longtime coalminer stuck between the striking miners beneath him and this wild kid who just wants to get out of town. Tough call, yes, but Cooper, late of John Sayles' Lone Star, gives the best performance in the film. It's not what you'd call nuanced, but it is thoroughly believable, this hardshelled rural traditionalist with a stoic façade. There's nothing remotely "bad" about October Sky -- it's an accomplished, heartfelt work by anyone's measure. The problem here is the film's deadweight earnestness; watching October Sky is like having von Braun proselytize at you for two hours at a stretch. And that's without the admittedly fascinating Wagnerian subtext. If you've seen the ad campaign -- "not since Rocky has a film so deeply touched the hearts of blah blah blah" -- you're acquainted with a studio that has absolutely no idea how to market this unique, fresh, but ultimately stagnant film. There's hope, heroism, and Dern as a dying schoolmarm, but October Sky falls flat (despite its rich tone and some startling cinematography from Fred Murphy) due to its all-too-obvious third act and the vague fact that, really, not that much happens. Familial redemption, yes, of a sort, but no real fireworks. Here's hoping for a sequel that takes off where that final shot of the space shuttle rocketing skyward begins. (2/19/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Irwin Winkler; with Val Kilmer, Mira Sorvino, Kelly McGillis, Bruce Davison, Steven Weber, Ken Howard, Nathan Lane. (PG-13, 124 min.)
What a pleasant last few months it must have been for those male (and female) filmgoers sick to death of the blond, chiseled features of the Hollywood poster boys: first Brad Pitt performs a rag doll pas de deux with a pair of speeding automobiles in Meet Joe Black and now Val Kilmer stumbles around blindly (but not, I fear, unattractively) in At First Sight. It's standard operating procedure for the supremely handsome and ambulatory to tackle roles that perversely diminish their natural gifts -- it has always been -- but now the narcissistic wonderboys are flying blind, I think. Death just has to be better than Brad Pitt, and Kilmer's take on the sightless naïf strikes me as overly affected and stagy: You can see him straining toward the darkness, and the obviousness of it is grim and hamstrung. Kilmer plays Virgil Adamson, and like his namesake he's a poet. Not with words, but with his hands, which he uses to work free the tension-filled back muscles of the women who come to his upstate New York spa for rest and relaxation. When NYC architect Amy Benic (Sorvino) arrives for a week of stress relief, the pair immediately hit it off and before you can say Awakenings, she's convinced him to come with her to the city and undergo some experimental eye surgery that may or may not restore his vision. At first he's hesitant; he's safe in his tiny, insular township, watched over by his matronly sister Jennie (McGillis) and aware of where all the chairs are placed. But Virgil soon enough caves in, only to find, in the wake of the operation, that seeing isn't necessarily believing, or understanding, or better. Based on a section of Dr. Oliver Sacks' book, An Anthropologist on Mars (Sacks also wrote the book Awakenings), Kilmer is almost a mirror Method image of Robert De Niro's performance in that earlier film. Instead of Robin Williams, this time out we have Nathan Lane (Sacks himself appears in a cameo) as the nontraditional bringer of inner peace. And while At First Sight is a far more conventional love story than Awakenings, it's also far more mediocre, filled too often with Kilmer's grinning, impish face and enough Eddie Bauer-ware to flood Dawson's Creek. Director Irwin Winkler and his cast obviously hope to shed light on the boundaries of love, and instead come up with a walloping case of the preachies. At First Sight is so earnest I half expected to see Jim Varney skulking about in the background. Romantic comedy, tragic dramedy, it's all of the same cloth, and it proves conclusively that with this much teary treacle it's better to remain in the dark. (1/22/99)
Great Hills
D: Hugh Wilson; with Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone, Sissy Spacek, Christopher Walken, Dave Foley. (PG-13, 112 min.)
Ö Or, how Calvin Webber learned to stop worrying and love the bomb shelter. Ex Cal Tech professor Calvin Webber (Walken) made his fortune in the late Fifties and used the proceeds as well as his brilliant and paranoid mind to construct a backyard bomb shelter that would withstand even a direct nuclear hit. His odd obsession proved worthy when one night in 1962, after watching an announcement about the Cuban Missile Crisis, he hurries his pregnant wife into the shelter only minutes before the big blast. How is he to know that the big blast was actually a plane crash that destroyed little other than the plane and his suburban tract home? Fully cognizant of the half-life of nuclear fallout, Calvin has equipped his subterranean nest with 35 years of supplies and a time lock that precludes an early exit. Thus little Adam Webber (Fraser) enters the world and grows up listening to Perry Como records, learning about geography and baseball from his dad and about manners and swing dancing from his mom, never having actually seen the sky or a dog or a girl. As the benignly lunatic Calvin, Walken delivers (of course) with deadpan enthusiasm and sweetly clumsy affection. Spacek slips convincingly into Helen's shirtwaists and clandestine cocktails and ages from a worried but loving little wife into a loving but watery-eyed lush right before our eyes. Unfortunately, even these two wondrous actors cannot carry Blast From the Past's featherweight load. It's not that I didn't want this pleasant bit of flummery to succeed. It has some clever culture clash, a fabulous dance scene, and a wacky, inverted comedy of manners that Hugh Wilson could have fashioned into a slick, clever piece of pop Americana without sacrificing its Eagle Scout optimism. Wilson, the creator of WKRP in Cincinnati and the divine Frank's Place has shown a wonderful touch for comic cadence and deliciously skewed perception and I keep hoping that ability will manifest itself on the big screen. (After such prior feature outings as Police Academy and The First Wives Club, I guess I'm guilty of some of that Eagle Scout optimism myself.) Blast From the Past is divided into two distinct segments: the years in the bomb shelter and the weeks during Adam's foray into Los Angeles of the Nineties. We spend the former anticipating the latter and the latter looking back with nostalgia on the former. Fraser milks his goofy charm, Silverstone appealingly quivers her lower lip and Foley, as the limpid-eyed, Caesar-shorn Troy, gives it his considerable comic best, but Blast From the Past simply stalls out. I felt as though I were at a Pine Car Derby, watching an earnestly made, inexpertly crafted car inch down the slope, rooting for it to pick up speed and feeling guilty for my disappointment. It was sweet, but it should have been better. (2/12/99)
Gateway, Highland, Lakehills, Lakeline, 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, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown South
D: Walter Salles; with Fernanda Montenegro, Vinicius De Olveira, Marilia Pêra, Othon Bastos. (R, 115 min.)
When first we meet Dora (Montenegro), the lead character of this compelling Brazilian film Central Station, her hard shell of cynicism does not seem inappropriate. We may not sympathize with Dora's coping strategies and human responses, but given the abrasiveness of her environment her detachment seems a reasonable defense. We are introduced to this retired single woman as she plies her trade: writing letters from a makeshift stall in the train station for the illiterate of Rio de Janeiro who want her to wave her pen like a magic wand and make their long-lost loved ones reappear and cause all their groundless dreams to come true. They dictate letters to saints, runaway spouses, and family members who long ago scattered to the country's massive interior. For additional money Dora promises to mail the letters but instead she takes them home and reads them for amusement with her friend Irene (Pêra, who played the prostitute in Pixote) before throwing them in an empty drawer or destroying them. One day after a woman and her son dictate a letter to the boy's missing father, the woman steps into the street and is killed by a bus. Seemingly, the young boy Josué (De Oliveira) has no one else in Rio to turn to for help, so he approaches Dora. She shoos him away but he sticks to her like any good movie orphan would. And we think at this point that we know where the movie is going -- it will be a heartwarming story about how the needy urchin wears down the older woman's defenses and teaches her the transcendent value of human contact. And to a certain degree it is, but things are not nearly that simple in Central Station. The movie is much more subtle about its journey, and the path it takes deviates from the well-traveled road. In fact, the central action of the movie occurs in the form of a road movie. The story is much less about its resolution than the experience along the way. At its best, Central Station is a movie of small textures and fleeting moments, the intangibles that pass between people. So much of the movie's success is due to the stirring performance of Fernanda Montenegro (who has just been nominated for a best actress Oscar along with the picture, which was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar). Hailed as Brazil's finest actress, most of Montenegro's work has been on the stage, so this screen performance in such a widely seen work is sure to bump her international stock in trade. It is understandable why she is so frequently compared to Guilietta Massina, the star and muse of so many unforgettable Fellini films: There is a physical resemblance that emphasizes each character's inner dilemmas and native physicality and forgoes the thin sheen of Max-Factored beauty. The nonprofessional actor, Vincius De Oliveira, was discovered working as a shoeshine boy by director Salles, who saw in the boy's pluck the qualities he wanted for his Josué. Salles, who also works as a documentary filmmaker, does a superlative job of bringing the realism of the streets and the countryside to this narrative fiction. Central Station is a film that shares the weight of reality with the fragility of the intangible. Despite its ultimate narrative predictability, the combination is a nice blend. (2/12/99)
Arbor
D: Steven Zaillian; with John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub, Kathleen Quinlan, Robert Duvall, Bruce Norris, Dan Hedaya, James Gandolfini, Zeljko Ivanek, John Lithgow, Sydney Pollack, Stephen Fry. (PG-13, 112 min.)
Many a bleary-brained air traveler was blessed last year by Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, a personal nominee for the Airport Newsstand-Book Hall of Fame. But when Steven Zaillian's ambitious adaptation hits the in-flight movie circuit I'm not so sure it'll be the same kind of flyers' savior. The underlying problem is the mainstream film format's length constraints, which seem to have forced a rude bowdlerization of the story. What Harr's book has going for it is the power of accumulation -- of details, facts, characterizations, whiplash story turnarounds, and prismatic shifts of understanding as new facts illuminate the old. The basic scenario is a real-life classic from the annals of personal injury law: a class action suit by small-town parents over a deadly "leukemia cluster" they blamed on well-water pollution from local plants owned by Beatrice Foods and Grace Industries. The lawyer who ultimately took on their hard-to-prove case was Jan Schlictmann (Travolta). In truth, Schlictmann's tiny, modestly capitalized firm should've tucked tail and run from the clash with Grace and Beatrice's hordes of Gieves and Hawkes-suited badasses. Predictably, though, Schlictmann went on a lawyer-ego bender, for which he paid dearly in both financial and professional terms before justice (of a sort) was done. Harr's book takes its sweet time to illuminate all the elements of this engrossing story. Not only do we learn of barristerial machismo, but also epidemiology, geology, the philosophical bases of tort law, and the uneasy relationship that process-oriented law has always had with the touchy-feely moral notion of "justice." But with only two hours to tell his story, Zaillian is forced to do some serious triage. Predictably, he elects to keep the elements that seem most obviously movie-friendly: the fall and redemption of Schlictmann and a trumped-up Ultimate WWF Death Match between the forces of justice (represented by Schlictmann), and callous, buck-chasing cynicism (chiefly embodied by Beatrice's lead attorney, Jerome Facher, played by Duvall). Not that these elements can't make for good cinema. In fact, one key confrontation between Duvall and Travolta, in which Duvall drops the curmudgeonly but likable eccentric mask he's previously worn and reveals the waxy, cadaverous face of total nihilism, is as brilliantly staged and acted as any we're likely to see this year. Schlictmann's painful trudge toward moral redemption is also well-delineated in another strong performance by Travolta -- even if he starts out as so much of a putz that you actually kind of enjoy watching him get ground into hamburger. A procession of vivid supporting turns by Macy, Shalhoub, Lithgow, Hedaya, and Quinlan keep ennui from ever totally prevailing. And Zaillian displays a masterful feel for the emotional resonance not only of overall environments but the tiny, revelatory details within them. Still, for all its craftsmanlike sheen, this film is so sketchy, obvious, and idea-poor compared to Harr's book that you can't help wishing Zaillian had paid more attention to its warnings about biting off more than you can chew. (1/8/99)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Tinseltown North
D: Pat O'Connor; with Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon, Catherine McCormack, Kathy Burke, Sophie Thompson, Brid Brennan, Rhys Ifans. (PG, 94 min.)
Good roles for women are hard to find, so a movie that offers a total of five good parts is something quite exceptional indeed. Dancing at Lughnasa is a screen adaptation of Brian Friel's multi-award-wining play of the same title. Set in Donegal, Ireland in 1936, the film tells the story of the five unmarried Mundy sisters who live together in their family home. It's narrated by Michael, the illegitimate son of the prettiest sister Christina (McCormack). Michael lives there in the beloved company of his four aunts and mother, but the story he relates is a wistful recollection of the way things were the summer before they all changed forever. The nominal head of the sisters is the formidable Kate (Streep, with a brogue as fine as any of her previous stage accents); the others include impulsive, fun-loving Maggie (Burke); quiet, hard-working Agnes (Brennan); and simple-minded Rose (Thompson). The movie begins as their older brother Jack (Gambon), returns to the family hearth after 25 years as a priest ministering to the heathen in Africa. It is clear from the outset that not all is right with Jack. He has become a bit dodgy over the years and his world view is now an odd amalgam of pagan and Christian rituals. Next, Michael's unrepentant father appears for an extended visit, though it is his intention to soon leave to join the forces fighting Franco in Spain. The local priest eventually relieves Kate from her teaching post in the village, no doubt due in part to the shamelessness of her family members. Adding to the family's financial woes is the introduction of a new woolen mill, which obviates the demand for the home knitting that sustained them. What's great about the movie is what passes between the sisters: little glances, sighs, and verbal exchanges. Even though Kate has forbidden them to attend the harvest dance in the village, the movie's climax comes when the sisters all spontaneously burst into dance to a song on the radio. Of course, it was not just Michael's close-knit family that was to break up in the late Thirties but all of Europe. You get the sense that Dancing at Lughnasa has a deeper sadness to express than what seems to come across onscreen. While it is a thorough pleasure to watch these fine actresses do their thing, the film leaves one with the nagging feeling that there ought to be more grist to their tale. (1/15/99)
Village
D: Shekhar Kapur; with Cate Blanchett, Christopher Eccleston, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes. (R, 124 min.)
With style, passion, and intelligence, Elizabeth answers the question lurking silently amid mounting slag heaps of cheesy Princess Di memorabilia: What is this thing we have about royalty? What primal need does their apparently superfluous presence satisfy? According to this gripping story of Queen Elizabeth I's rise to power, it's our need to see and touch the divine here on earth. And never was that need more real than in 16th-century England, when a combination of foreign military threats, debilitating Protestant-Catholic conflicts, and a bitter dispute over the line of royal succession had reduced the tiny island nation to a state of near-chaos. As we all know, it was Elizabeth, the so-called "virgin queen," who laid the foundations of a future British Empire by crushing all enemies from within and without, and by pushing for the creation of an Independent Church of England. But as Shekhar's film vividly illustrates, this was a virtually miraculous accomplishment for the young queen, who had to contend not only with her own political naïveté but also the stigma of being both Protestant and the fruit of King Henry VIII's scandalous liaison with Anne Boleyn. Cate Blanchett, who made an indelible impression as Ralph Fiennes' soulmate in Oscar and Lucinda is, if anything, even better here as the future embodiment of all things British. Despite the florid trailers' emphasis on bodice-ripping romantic imagery, Elizabeth is above all a political thriller. And the real essence of this story is the harrowing on-the-job training of an intelligent but woefully unprepared young lamb tossed into a slavering wolfpack of cold-blooded enemies (some disguised as friends and lovers) whose dearest wish is to eat her alive. Blanchett's pale, oddly compelling face is a record of every ghastly Pyhrric victory, every bitter disillusionment, every hard-won insight along the way. Each step toward her royal destiny means giving up a little more of her human essence. By the end, when she literally becomes a flesh-and-blood icon, the ambivalence of her triumph makes this scene one of the more subtly heartbreaking moments I've seen in any recent film. The excellence in casting goes deep, including not only Geoffey Rush's magnificent performance as the queen's Machiavelli-quoting chief advisor, but a searing turn by Christopher Eccleston as the fanatical, traitorous Duke of Norfolk. Former Truffaut mainstay Fanny Ardant makes a vivid impression in as a sexy, madness-tinged Mary of Guise. And Joseph Fiennes acquits himself well in his demanding, morally ambiguous role as a boyfriend of the young Elizabeth who ends up as ballast jettisoned during her ascent. Elizabeth has just one meaningful fault, common to many filmed historical dramas: Events that happened over many years have been crunched into an unmanageably (and inaccurately) short timeline, junking up the narrative and doing disservice to history. But just as I was happy to forgive this flaw in great films like A Lion in Winter, I'm also pleased to cut slack for the similarly admirable Elizabeth. If movies like this are your cup of mead, I'm betting you'll feel the same way. (11/20/98)
Dobie, Gateway, Highland
D: Robert Rodriguez; with Elijah Wood, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Piper Laurie, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Jon Stewart, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Usher Raymond. (R, 102 min.)
One of these days, somebody's going to build a full-fledged drive-in theatre here in town for the express purpose of showing Robert Rodriguez's films. Think of it: lawn chairs in the back of your 4x4, a six-pack of Shiner Bock, and Rodriguez's movies non-stop from dusk 'til dawn. Until that happens, though, we're just going to have to make do with catching the local auteur's work at the multiplex. Co-written by Scream scribe Kevin Williamson and George Huang (Swimming With Sharks), The Faculty is pure Rodriguez, jam-packed with action, suspense, humor, horror, and plenty of cinematic homages. While it may suffer a bit from excess character clutter (nearly 10 major characters throughout), it's nonetheless a slam-bang, sci-fi actioner, relentlessly paced and edited, with a pounding soundtrack and some ingenious aliens courtesy of Berni Wrightson and KNB Effects. Wood plays Casey, the introverted class misfit at Ohio's Herrington High School. When he chances upon a bizarre, slug-like life form while shooting pictures on the football field one day, Casey unwittingly uncovers a plot by aliens to infect the school's faculty and, eventually, the whole planet. This sly spin on the high school caste system (think The Breakfast Club by way of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) is pure Williamson; the script is rife with knowing dialogue and genre in-jokes, and it's a hoot to play "spot the allusion." John Carpenter's The Thing is hilariously echoed in a scene in which Casey and his classmates Zeke (Hartnett), Stokely (DuVall), Mary Beth (Harris) and others must prove their humanity by snorting vials of diuretic No-Doz, while lesser genre highlights such as Night of the Kreeps are given their due as well. Rodriguez's film takes off like a rocket and never lets up from the get-go. The deadly faculty itself -- football coach Willis (Patrick), Principal Drake (Neuwirth), English teacher Miss Burke (Janssen), and Piper Laurie's Miss Olsen -- are a wonderfully creepy crew, morphing into slimy, Lovecraftian horrors and sprouting multi-tendrilled shadows at every turn. If anything, Rodriguez packs too much of a good thing into an already crowded film. Just as one hair-raising horror dies down, two more take its place. It's a rush, yes, but sometimes I caught myself wishing for a breather of sorts. Still, no one around these days edits with such sublime accuracy as Rodriguez. A master of the smash-cut, The Faculty is overflowing with the director's "I'll try anything once" spirit, and that's what makes the film such witty, freaky fun. Besides, any film that can make the high school experience even worse than I remember it is aces in my book. (12/25/98)
Great Hills
D: Bill Condon; with Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave, David Dukes, Lolita Davidovich. (Not Rated, 105 min.)
In 1957, Golden Age of Hollywood director James Whale was found dead -- a suicide -- in the swimming pool of his Pacific Palisades home. By that point, the English émigré director of some 21 feature films had not made a movie since he retired from filmmaking to live the life of a gentleman painter in the early Forties. Whale, who was an openly gay man in the urbane but closeted world of Hollywood in the Thirties, is generally assumed to have been blackballed by the studios for his sexual/professional imprudence. Although his roots were in the British stage, Whale is best remembered for his stylish American horror gems Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House,and The Invisible Man. But like the good doctor who created the Frankenstein monster, Whale's creative reputation was overtaken by the iconic magnitude of the creature he had spawned. Indeed, Bill Condon based his Gods and Monsters screenplay on Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein. The story is a speculative account of the final days in the life of James Whale, whose debilitating health due to a recent stroke is presumed to be the cause of his suicide. The story invents the character of Clayton Boone (Fraser), a buff, none-too-swift, ex-marine gardener to whom Whale (McKellen) takes a fancy. The decidedly straight Boone is slow to catch on when Whale invites him to pose for one of his paintings and to avail himself of the pool (one of Whale's primary seduction aids). Yet the crux of the story emerges from the unlikely bonds of friendship that grow between the two men. Boone stimulates memories long dormant in Whale -- of such things as his impoverished childhood in England, the horror of life in the trenches during WWI and the horrific death of his young soldier lover, and the buzz of activity and petty drama that typified life on a movie set. Boone delights in the warmth exhibited toward him by this new friend -- a famous person and the father of Frankenstein, no less -- and responds to these overtures of friendship with a newfound compassion and surprising sensitivity. Condon's film also shows great sensitivity to the characters and events depicted here; it never tramples on the privacy and dignity of the subject in question while using the film's speculative structure as a source of biographical illumination -- what it lacks in historical fact it makes up for with emotional realism. So much of the credit must be laid at the feet of Ian McKellen, whose portrait of Whale is a study in acting excellence. The character displays a range that goes from coy to pained, somber to peckish, dapper to dilapidated, and tart to tortured. It is a performance that richly deserves all the end-of-the-year kudos many of the critics groups have awarded it. Against McKellen, Fraser's acting limitations become more noticeable; it seems like another actor might have found dimensions to the character other than his ability to bare his biceps and smile affably. As Whale's disapproving but lovingly attentive uptight Teutonic housemaid, Lynn Redgrave is practically unrecognizable and gives one of the great performances of her career. Though Gods and Monsters is full of scenes and moments that are unforgettable (George Cukor's garden party is a real time-capsule standout), there is an overly romantic quality to the film that makes a narrative parallel between Whale's quest for the young man and the Frankenstein monster's longing for a friend Ö or bride. It's a resonant idea but one that reduces the director to the same typecasting he fought all his career. A wonderful companion piece for Gods and Monsters would be Richard Kwietniowski's Love and Death on Long Island, another intriguing film that came out in 1998 that concerns an older, heterosexual British man's sudden, inexplicable yearning for a young, American, male pop star. In that film, John Hurt and Jason Priestley perform an unpredictable pas de deux, motivated by mysteriously compulsive needs that are never fully explained or rationalized. Gods and Monsters instead seeks to make sense of a life hidden by the self-imposed shadows of the lavender curtain and the inscrutabilities of suicide. It's most revealing but ultimately conjecture. (1/1/99)
Dobie, Great Hills
D: S.R. Bindler. (PG, 97 min.)
As engrossing as documentaries about manifestly "big" subjects (Triumph of the Will, A Brief History of Time) can be, I've always found even more delight in the ones about picayune-seeming phenomena and pursuits that gain an improbable aura of significance from the passion people pour into them. A classic example is Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, with The Endless Summer, Pumping Iron, and Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey also popping quickly to mind. So, if surfing, bodybuilding, or mole rats can commandeer souls and spawn whole new schools of philosophy, why not a publicity stunt staged by a small-town car dealer? That's the premise of S.R. Bindler's marvelous little film, Hands on a Hard Body, winner of numerous festival awards including the audience award from the 1997 Austin Heart of Film Festival, that's just now seeing theatrical release. (The movie launches its world theatrical premiere in Austin this Friday.) Hands documents the 1995 edition of a yearly contest in which Jack Long Nissan of Longview, Texas gives a new hard body pickup to whomever can keep his or her hands on it the longest. Apart from short breaks at one- and six-hour intervals, contestants stand in place for up to four days at a time, often lapsing into hallucinations, laughing jags, and other erratic behavior around the 50-hour mark. Now, as a small-town native who's had his fill of specious, smirking "tributes" to down-home culture, I found this premise depressing as hell: a bunch of poor rubes suffering in 100-degree heat for a modest set of wheels that Michael Dell or Jim Bob Moffett could cover with glovebox change. Yet the wonder of Bindler's film is the way this random ensemble's foibles, quirks, and artless declamations work to ingratiate the contestants with the audience, not set them up as a geek show for urban hipsters' delectation. Interspersing live action at the contest with staged interviews held beforehand, Bindler and crew let the people who are the story tell the story. And a roomful of Hollywood screenwriters stoked on espresso and ginkgo biloba couldn't have dreamed up this cast. Former champ Benny, a self-styled Dalai Lama of hardbodyology, reels off malaprop-laden -- though often surprisingly insightful -- commentary. ("It's absurd, very 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: Anand Tucker; with Emily Watson, Rachel Griffiths, David Morrissey, James Frain (R, 121 min.)
For all its knock-'em-dead acting and aggressively stylish direction, Hilary and Jackie is still best described as arthouse comfort food: a big, proteiny platterful of cinematic meatloaf cooked to order for an audience with a limitless appetite for soap opera coated with a light, sophisticated glacé of highbrow-culture ambience. And that's fine. Just don't let your expectations get carried away by all the gratuitous hype that Tucker's laudable but hardly dazzling film seems to be generating. That said, one area in which H&J fully justifies its polyorgasmic critical response is the lead performances by Watson (Breaking the Waves, The Boxer) and Griffiths (Muriel's Wedding) as musician sisters Hilary and Jacqueline DuPré. The story is based on a memoir by Hilary about her intense, often strained relationship with Jackie, a world-famous cellist who died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 42. Everything revolves around the two women and their responses to each other. There's hardly a scene in which one or both are not present. And although the spectacularly gifted Watson is the bigger star here, Griffiths' role is every bit as challenging. She meets the challenge head-on, developing a finely articulated study of a human identity being first broken down in young adulthood, then painfully rebuilt from newer, sturdier materials. This is critical to the film's success, given the strong suggestion that differences in ambition and childhood experience, not innate talent, were what steered Jackie toward superstardom and Hilary toward domestic obscurity in a small country village. Both women, we learn, have been shaped by the perceptions of others regarding who's the greater and lesser light. By young adulthood, the die is cast. Jackie's a world-class musical prodigy (also, unfortunately, an insufferable prima donna) married to boy wonder conductor Daniel Barenboim (Frain). Hilary, meanwhile, has bailed out of the sibling rivalry and refocused her energies on raising her family, playing music only occasionally with local amateurs. The onset of Jackie's MS, which Watson portrays with agonizing believability, swings the power balance back toward Hilary while raising the ultimate question of which woman has, all things considered, lived most richly. It's hard to knock Hilary and Jackie on any count. As a classy soaper about the conflicting calls of artistic ambition and personal satisfaction I'd place it roughly on par with The Turning Point, which inspired a similarly unwarranted amount of critical fawning in its day. However -- and this is my most serious reservation -- it suffers direly from the absence of any truly indelible scenes that might have pushed it across the line separating high-quality diversion from something more enduring and transcendent. Despite all of Tucker's efforts to impose that missing luster by force of camera wizardry and subtle magical-realist flourishes, there's just no faking it: Meatloaf is meatloaf, no matter how crafty the seasoning or how stylish the presentation. (1/29/99)
Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South, Village
D: Anthony Drazan; with Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri, Garry Shandling, Robin Wright Penn, Anna Paquin, Meg Ryan. (R, 122 min.)
Hurlyburly is a screeching, white-knuckled, razor-tongued descent into the foulest recesses of the shattered psyches of a quartet of Hollywood Hills scumbags. The film's biggest surprise is that David Mamet had nothing to do with it -- that honor falls to screenwriter David Rabe who adapted the script from his stage play, and director Drazan (Zebrahead), who fleshes out the material and fills each frame with enough vitriolic self-loathing to sink a fleet of Alpha Male fuckups. It's a boys-night-out gab-fest from Hell as roommates Eddie (Penn) and Mickey (Spacey) booze, snort, swallow, and holler with pals Artie (Shandling) and Phil (Palminteri) night after night, week after week. Discourse runs the gamut from women and why they're so lousy to sex to Eddie's ongoing existential, coke-fueled rants on karma and the universe. What it all boils down to, though, is that these guys are schmucks of the "highest" order. An Oscar-worthy Penn plays Eddie as a braniac, motormouth loser, too smart for his own good, so much so that he's actually blindingly stupid. Mickey exemplifies the term "cynical bastard," though at one point he notes aloud the difference between being flip and sarcastic, noting "I can do both." Phil, an ex-con bruiser with a penchant for using his fists on anything that moves across his narrow field of vision, is the group's wild card, desperate for some sort of renewal from his ex-wife but unable to do anything but victimize women (and men). Artie, the slick Hollywood producer, is the most clichéd here: At one point he picks up a young girl (Paquin) in an elevator and trundles her off to Mickey and Eddie's pad where he offers her up like some psycho-sexual sacrifice. Scary stuff. Like Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men, Hurlyburly delves into the male mindset and comes up with a fistful of sick. Rabe's dialogue is fired off in nonstop salvos that come at you like testosterone-laden Stinger missiles. These guys, for all their seeming desire to get things right, wouldn't know how to do the right thing if Spike Lee and Mister Rogers engaged them in a double-teaming bitch-slap festival. Rabe makes them out to be wasted ejaculate. The question is, does Rabe see them as the male mirror or only a broken shard? The film's female population is treated nearly as poorly, with a doe-eyed Ryan serving as a shrill party girl and Wright Penn as a wedge between Mickey and Eddie. And Paquin? She's on the order of a busty little California roll: Here, try some, it's yummy. That Hurlyburly can delight with its barbed-wire-and-blow anti-witticisms while simultaneously making you crave a good 'n' hot battery acid shower to remove the misogyny from your soul is an accomplishment in itself. That this superb, brilliantly evocative cast is along for the ride as well is magic. Black magic, sure, but magic nonetheless. (1/15/99)
Village
D: Roberto Benigni; with Benigni, 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 Benigni'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 Benigni 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, Benigni 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 Benigni 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 (Benigni) 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 (Benigni's wife, Braschi, who has starred in most of his films). The first hour is a slapstick paradise. Benigni 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 Benigni'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 Benigni'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)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Tinseltown North
D: Paul Oremland; Steve Bell, Ian Rose, Roger Daltrey, Dani Behr. (Not Rated, 90 min.)
Alert to fans of The Who: Roger Daltrey is at his campiest best in this gay love story from Britain. He plays the part of Kelvin, a deliciously unscrupulous record company and club impresario, a vicious old queen whose regular collagen injections and steady diet of fresh young boys keeps him trim and ever-ready. For laughs, it seems, he tries to draw a wedge between young lovers Matt (Rose) and Craig (Bell). The other one who tries to keep them apart is Matt's roommate Paula, a singer who inexplicably resents Craig's intrusion. Kelvin and Paula are the story's antagonists. The movie's real focus is on the relationship between Matt and Craig. That the story keeps throwing these fabricated hurdles in love's path is part of the film's inconsistency. Director Oremland does little to smooth out these narrative bumps and instead repeats the blocking of nearly similar tiffs and nightclub frenzy again and again. However, the nature of the relationship between Matt and Craig is unusual for gay screen romances. Their courtship is slight, it's the difficulty these opposites face when trying to stay together that's the dilemma. Matt, who is described as a "serial shagger," works for Kelvin as a music promoter. He meets Craig on an out-of-town trip, but their attempt at sex reveals that Craig has some issues to work out regarding his homosexuality. Craig earns money boxing in illegal bare-knuckles fights, but soon moves down to London to seek out Matt. But the fast-paced world of the druggy club scene is a bit out of Craig's ken. Like It Is has a welcome realistic feel in its emphasis on work, the unspoken language of cruising, and Daltrey's deft skewering of the music business. The performances are all solid but the characters lack real depth or emotional growth. (2/12/99)
Village
D: Mark Herman; with Jane Horrocks, Michael Caine, Brenda Blethyn, Ewan McGregor. (R, 99 min.)
The decibel level in Little Voice ranges from a delicate whisper to seismic bellowing; aurally speaking, it traverses the spectrum of human sounds. Sitting on the floor in her lonely room upstairs, the reclusive, mousy L.V. (an abbreviation of "Little Voice") quietly listens to old phonograph records that belonged to her beloved dead father, while her blowsy mother, Mari, screeches downstairs like a foul-mouthed foghorn. It is, to say the least, a study in contrasts. But Little Voice isn't your standard British kitchen-sink drama set in a working-class milieu. Rather, it has a gimmick, and a great one at that: the uncanny and amazing ability of Horrocks, in the title role, to vocally impersonate the likes of Garland, Bassey, Dietrich, Monroe, and others. This ain't lip-synching, honey, it's the real thing. Based on a successful London play written especially to showcase Horrocks' talent for mimicry, Little Voice is best when L.V. transforms into a beautiful songbird, expressing the emotions in the music and lyrics of the songs she's clung to as if they were her own. Watching Horrocks come alive in these scenes is the stuff of goosebumps; it's a star turn in every respect. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is so weak that it feels like an excuse for giving Horrocks the chance to strut her stuff. (Maybe it is.) The conflict between L.V. and her mother (Blethyn), rooted in their different relationships with the dead father/husband, is Freud-lite, while the appearance of Caine in the role of the sleazy talent agent, Ray Say, is just a plot device to get L.V. in front of an audience. Both Blethyn and Caine shed all inhibitions in their performances as Mari and Ray; watching them bump and grind together is a sight. But the two roles are more grotesques than human beings, created to invoke sympathy for a character that needs none because she's so dazzled you with her gift. (And if you disliked Blethyn in Secrets and Lies, you'll despise her in Little Voice; in these types of roles, she's an acquired taste.) Although the love story between Horrocks and McGregor, her shy suitor, is sweet enough, it can't sustain the movie plotwise, most likely because Horrocks overwhelms the movie whenever she's channeling divas. The essence of Little Voice is a cabaret act, one in which Horrocks transports you to another place. Just close your eyes, and she'll take you over the rainbow. (2/5/99)
Village
D: Luis Mandoki; with Kevin Costner, Robin Wright Penn, Paul Newman, John Savage, Illeana Douglas, Robbie Coltrane. (PG-13, 126 min.)
A young woman running along a drizzly Atlantic shoreline. A bottle washed up at her feet. Inside the bottle a passionate letter from a man named "G" to an unnamed woman. And it's a real doozy: a love-hammered, claw-your-beating-heart-out, roar of wild romantic eloquence that sucks the breath right out of the lone jogger's body. Who'd have imagined such a guy exists? More to the point, is he dating anybody now? Fortunately, the woman -- a Chicago Tribune research assistant named Theresa (Wright Penn) -- has both the detective skills and initiative to find out. Using clues in the letter she tracks down G to a small North Carolina fishing village. To her delight, he turns out to be a cute/sensitive/handy-around-the-house shipbuilder, Garrett (Costner), whose letter was a tribute to his now-dead wife. Slam Dunk! Well, not quite. Per ironclad romance-novel convention (the story is based on a bestseller by Nicholas Sparks), a convoluted steeplechase course of emotional obstacles must first be negotiated. Garrett, contrary to his Byronic epistolary style, is actually tight-lipped and obtuse in person. Worse, his lingering obsession with his wife keeps him from recognizing or seriously pursuing new love. Oh yeah, he's also scared of subways and can't see himself moving to the big city to accommodate Theresa's career. In short, this is your basic Soulmates Riven by Fate Plot #1744-B, with the addition of a ludicrous, out-of-left-field ending that serves more to extricate screenwriter Gerald Di Pego from the corner into which he's written himself than to honestly resolve the key story conflicts. Costner, whose Nineties career has settled into a hit-miss ratio of about 1:4, delivers one of his more unostentatiously moving performances here. Humility becomes Costner, and one imagines it comes pretty easily to him these days. Wright Penn's function as an emotionally uninvested contract laborer couldn't be more obvious. Dutiful pro that she is, she delivers every item on the romantic-heroine job ticket, but there's no hint of the galvanizing presence that scorched a hole through the screen in She's So Lovely. Hubby Sean Penn's blood pressure shouldn't so much as flutter during her kissing scenes. Paul Newman, as Garrett's lovably irascible ex-alkie father, emerges as the main justification for this film's existence. True, these cantankerous oldster roles are rather patronizing and redundant, and it's a bit depressing to see Newman reduced to playing them. But his seemingly effortless realness and iconic magnetism at least provide a handful of moments that transcend this movie's ruthlessly synthetic, market-servicing feel. Message in a Bottle inspires a thought, probably not original with me, that romance has a very odd parallel with hardcore porn. For diehard fans of both genres, shameless addiction obviates any concern about lack of imagination or subtlety. The rest of us, though, have to be seduced with a few gestural touches of intelligence, irony, self-aware humor Ö whatever. Otherwise, we feel cheap, exploited, used. Not exactly the stuff of true love, eh? (2/12/99)
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Donald Petrie; with Jeff Daniels, Christopher Lloyd, Elizabeth Hurley, Daryl Hannah, Wallace Shawn, Christine Ebersole, Ray Walston, Michael Lerner. (PG, 93 min.)
There will come a day when Hollywood finally runs dry of Sixties television shows to adapt to the big screen. That day hasn't come yet, obviously, but it will, and then what? Forward to Quincy, M.E.: The Movie, and Bosom Buddies: Sinister Queen, I suspect. It's only a matter time. This Disneyfied update of the old CBS curiosity, which ran from 1963 to 1966, isn't as embarrassingly trite as, say, Car 54, Where Are You? but neither is it likely to take home any awards in the originality department. Daniels, mastering the art of the buffaloed double-take, fills in for the late Bill Bixby as Santa Barbara television producer Tim O'Hara, who one night witnesses the crash of an alien craft while tooling down the Pacific Coast Highway. The ship is piloted by a renegade Martian played with shameless gusto by Lloyd, an actor who more and more seems to have arrived from some alternate future where all actors mug like Jim Carrey at an awards presentation. With his craft damaged, Lloyd enlists the help of Tim (who introduces this silver-spacesuited wiseacre to the neighbors as his Uncle Martin). Also drafted into assistance is Tim's co-worker Lizzie (Hannah) since Uncle Martin is being pursued by a loopy gang of sci-fi toughs from SETI, led by TV's original Martian Ray Walston and a hyperkinetic Wallace Shawn. (No one appears to have told the writers, Sherry Stoner and Danna Oliver, that SETI -- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life -- like the proverbial X-Files, has long since been retired by its NASA overlords. Does it matter? Not a whit.) Toss into this mix Hurley as the conniving newswoman Brace Channing and Ebersole as the nosy paramour-next-door, and you have mass comedy chaos, or so the pitch presumably went. In reality, Petrie (Richie Rich) has crafted a snuffling dog of a comedy that's far too reliant on less-than-amazing CGI effects. Among these are Uncle Martin's ambulatory spacesuit named Zoot, and some truly abrasive chicanery revolving around space gumballs that allow the chewer to transform into an alien being. Kudos, though, to Hannah for transforming into a multi-tentacled she-beast in the film's latter third; the Acme Novelty horror of it all puts you in mind of Sean Young, and it's a kick to watch her/it devour the bad guys. That aside, My Favorite Martian is notable only for the return of Wallace Shawn in yet another role that most would consider far beneath him. This isn't Andre he noshing with, nor is it Uncle Vanya. You've got to wonder what Shawn's father, the late, great William Shawn, former editor of The New Yorker magazine, would have thought of his son's acting choices of late, though it's perhaps for the best that we'll never know. On the plus side, the film opens with a new Mickey Mouse and Pluto short which may indeed be the single worst piece of animated output the Disney studio has ever created. That alone is worth the price of admission on the "so bad it's good" scale -- if you're into that sort of thing, that is. (2/12/99)
Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, 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: Tom Shadyac; with Robin Williams, Monica Potter, Daniel London, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Peter Coyote, Michael Jeter, Bob Gunton, Harold Gould, Irma P. Hall, Harve Presnell, Richard Kiley. (PG-13, 115 min.)
Let's confess my biases up front: God help the doctor who comes near me wearing a bulbous red clown nose, and God help the movie doctor who wants me to believe that a few good belly laughs are nature's best medicine. Now, I know that laughter is undeniably good for the soul and good for the constitution, and that doctors are generally too dependent on their scalpels and potions and protocols. In my lifetime, I have experienced doctors who have been sweethearts and doctors who have been jerks, but the only thing that has mattered in the long run was their skill. Patch Adams, which is based on the true experiences of Dr. Hunter Adams as recounted in his book Gesundheit: Good Health Is a Laughing Matter, is predicated on the notion that treating a patient involves so much more than merely treating the individual's symptoms. As the title character, Robin Williams picks up the doctoring game pretty much where he left off in Awakenings. Still playing a character based on a real person/doctor, Patch Adams shares many of the same iconoclastic attributes of Awakening's Dr. Oliver Sacks. This movie begins in 1969 as Adams commits himself to a mental hospital, where he discovers that his true calling is to help people as a medical doctor. At the age of 39, he enrolls in medical school where he easily aces his courses but riles under the system's harsh paternalism and unwavering educational traditions. Instantly, he defies the power structure, and is punished for his "excessive happiness." These are the kinds of black-and-white polarizations that Patch Adams sets up and maintains throughout. The members of the medical hierarchy are all close-minded slaves to the past; Patch and his friends are the saviors of the medical profession, the true healers of the sick. Patch is willing to dress in a clown costume, gorilla suit, and angel wings, or dunk a dying woman in a pool full of noodles (don't ask) in order to bring happiness to the ill. (I'd like to see him billing the HMOs for such treatments.) And Patch is unwilling to wait until his third year of medical school in order to have contact with real patients, so he sneaks into rounds and onto the wards. Though Patch's methods are disputable, there is little intrinsically wrong with his thinking. Where the movie really errs is in its failure to place the story in any kind of historical context. Patch Adams' thinking is an outgrowth of the turbulence of the late Sixties and early Seventies; his renegade approach to medicine had parallels in all other areas of life, be they cultural, political, educational, or professional. The mood in the land was to "question authority" and find new structures. But as directed by Tom Shadyac and written by Steve Oedkerk, the team who collaborated on Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Nutty Professor, this new movie is a variation on Patch Adams: Clown Physician. Robin Williams lends his increasingly annoying manic dramatic persona to the fore, creating another character out of sheer force of enthusiasm instead of motivation. Monica Potter reprises much the same thankless girlfriend role she played in Without Limits. Audiences may find this pap brimming with heart and sympathy for the little guy, but as prescriptions go, Patch Adams is pure placebo. (12/25/98)
Gateway, Lakeline, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Brian Helgeland; with Mel Gibson, Gregg Henry, Maria Bello, David Paymer, Lucy Liu, Deborah Kara Unger, William Devane, Bill Duke, Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn. (R, 102 min.)
Here's the set-up: Bagman and driver Val and Porter (Henry, Gibson) steal $140,000 from an Asian syndicate, and then Val double-crosses Porter, steals his cut, and runs off with his wife (Bello), leaving Porter for dead in a parking garage with a bunch of .38 slugs in his hide and a crack in his head. The only trouble? Porter, like the proverbial bad penny, just keeps coming back, much to the dismay of his ex-partner and those unlucky enough to be in control of his missing cash flow. Based on the Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark) novel The Hunter (which was also made into the 1967 film Point Blank), Payback mines the gritty, flinty conventions of heist-and-vendetta flicks like a streamlined pro, all rough edges and washed out images. Gibson reverts almost to his primeval Mad Max days as the unstoppable, amoral Porter, a wandering Ronin intent only on getting his cut. With his junkyard-dog good looks and scrappy leather jacket hanging off-kilter on his frame, Porter looks like the gutter come to nasty life. That he's Payback's protagonist says less about his Homeric qualities than it does about the rest of the film's morally bankrupt cast, which includes Porter's junkie wife (Bello), weaselly cab Mafia honcho Stegman (Paymer, excellent as always), Porter's trick-turning ex-flame Lynn (Unger), and assorted other roughhousers. Screenwriter Helgeland, coming off the critical success of L.A. Confidential and the commercial wreck of Costner's The Postman, makes his directing debut this time out and does an alarmingly bang-up job. Payback has a slight story; there's really not much going on here except for this dog-tired, three-time-loser trying desperately to get his money back, but Helgeland whips it up into a monumental battle of wills: Porter vs. The City. What city? We're never told, but this steaming, befouled metropolitan slag heap bears more than a passing resemblance to the Dark Knight's fabled Gotham (you get the idea, though, that even superheroes might want to steer clear of this Porter guy). Production designer Richard Hoover deserves particular praise for creating the look and feel of a giant, post-industrialized hellhole for Porter to chase around in. It's not exactly the Detroit of Robocop or Carpenter's New York escape, but Payback's milieu is as formidable a character as anyone sporting an exit wound onscreen. Helgeland's film positively seethes with bad vibrations; it's kicky, nasty urban sangfroid with pointy little teeth and a serious case of the angries, an existential hand grenade disguised as a heist film. (2/5/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Darren Aronofsky; with Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart, Stephen Pearlman, Samia Shoaib, Ajay Naidu. (R, 85 min.)
Brilliant, surreal, and emotionally draining, this first feature from American Film Institute grad Aronofsky recalls such low-budget sci-fi epics as Tetsuo: The Iron Man and more traditional paranoiac suspense films (Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder in particular, but also Polanski's Rosemary's Baby) and yet manages to be a wholly original animal. Gullette plays Max Cohen, a twentysomething theoretical mathematics genius, who spends his days cloistered away in his New York City Chinatown apartment searching for a connection between the numerical construct p (the division of a circle's circumference by its diameter, i.e., 3.14 ad infinitum) and the stock market. Convinced that there is a deliberate correlation between the patterns inherent in mathematics and the patterns found in all other aspects of life, Max delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, barricading himself inside his tiny apartment amidst a humming warren of computer equipment and intelligence (nicknamed Euclid). A chance meeting with a Hasidic math whiz named Lenny Meyer (Shenkman) puts him in touch with a bizarre Jewish religious underground cult that seeks to reveal the true name of God via mathematical computations, while on the other end of Max's dwindling social circle, shady representatives of a monomaniacal Wall Street consortium persistently hound Max to share his discoveries or face unspoken consequences. All of this is played out against Max's frequent bouts of hallucinatory, crippling migraines, and against the better judgment of his former mentor, the aged Sol (Margolis), who realizes that caution is the better part of wisdom. The mathematics background in Pi (p) is essentially a construct for Aronofsky to explore the limits of creativity and, finally, breakdown. Pi (p) asks big questions of its audience, but can also be viewed as a simple (if non-simplistic) suspense film, replete with dizzying chases, heated battles, and shady underworld figures. Director of photography Matthew Libatique invests the film with a heady, disorienting black-and-white palette; as in Max's figures, there is precious little gray to be found here, and the cinematography reflects the stark ideas and shaky desperation behind Max's quest. Gullette plays Max as a closeted cipher; he's the physical manifestation of too much time spent breaking reality down into algorithmic patterns. Gangly, pale, and with a high, receding forehead, he'd be creepy enough without all the mystical, revelatory goings-on, but amid the steadily mounting chaos around him, he imparts a kind of feverish, terrifying intensity -- he practically sweats barely contained anxiety. That's a good description of Aronofsky's film as well: the cinematic equivalent of a full-bore panic attack, sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, and all. (7/31/98)
Dobie
D: Willard Carroll; with Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Gillian Anderson, Jon Stewart, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Phillippe, Dennis Quaid, Madeline Stowe, Anthony Edwards, Ellen Burstyn, Jay Mohr, Patricia Clarkson. (R, 120 min.)
Like the Angelenos in Alan Rudolph's Welcome to L.A. and Robert Altman's Short Cuts who intersect at various points in a Southern California geography, the characters in Playing by Heart are denizens of a discombobulated City of Angels. But where the gradual convergence of storylines in those two earlier films felt happenstance and random in a way that gave those movies a ragged spontaneity, the narrative structure of Playing by Heart slowly reveals itself as something more purposeful. It ultimately embraces a hope, an optimism far removed from the cynical feelings with which Welcome to L.A. and Short Cuts leave you -- in fact, it's positively upbeat. Roughly spanning a period of a week, the days and nights of Playing by Heart are interspersed with little dramas which are, for the most part, about romantic relationships, both new and old, that are in crisis. There's the 40-year-old marriage that hits a bump when the husband reveals his chaste love for another woman 25 years earlier; the strained union between a couple who no longer communicate with each other to the point that they've become strangers; the confusion in the attraction between two twentysomethings who appear to be polar opposites. Initially, these stories run in linear parallel universes; in time, they tangentially touch each other, consummating in a final sequence in which all of the characters' interrelationships are revealed. The film's former -- and more interesting -- title, Dancing About Architecture, conveyed more figuratively what director-screenwriter Carroll is going for here: a meditation on the futility of trying to rationalize how the human heart works. He's mostly successful in his endeavor, although there is the occasional banal line of dialogue that cuts the movie's momentum short. (There's no postmodern irony in this triteness.) Despite this, Playing by Heart is, above all, an actor's movie: lots of monologues, lots of engaging conversation, lots of opportunities to shine without pouring it on too thickly. Everyone has his or her moment, although it is the older folks (Connery and Rowlands) and the youngsters (Jolie and Phillippe) who come off best, giving affecting performances in roles that serve as generational bookends in the film. Playing by Heart seems to say that no matter where you are on the spectrum of years, love can be a most challenging proposition. (1/22/99)
Arbor
D: Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells; with the voices of Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum, Steve Martin, Helen Mirren, Michelle Pfeiffer, Martin Short, Patrick Stewart. (PG, 99 min.)
DreamWorks executives are hoping that their new animated feature The Prince of Egypt will be the chosen one that will lead the young studio into the promised land. Like their source material, the Book of Exodus, the studio may have invented a movie with enough moxie to wake it from its second-class status, yet the studio may be forced to wander a few more years in the desert before finding a work with enough purity of spirit to pass into animation's holy ground. Indeed, The Prince of Egypt accomplishes extraordinary feats of animation. The movie's pictorial realism and illusions of three-dimensionality are landmark progressions in the art of animation. Watching the movie is a genuinely thrilling experience, as such things as the harrowing hairpin turns of chariot races and the teeming spectacle of purely invented cast of thousands are balanced with such delicacies as the fine details of human images and physical motion. Plus, there are no overly cute animals or singing/dancing inanimates (although I suspect that if anyone truly thought they could get away with a Burning Bush song-and-dance routine without appearing disrespectful -- or somethng like a God of Hellfire Arthur Brown knockoff, then we'd all be tap, tap, tapping at heaven's door right now). The astonishing realism of The Prince of Egypt's imagery, however, calls into question the supposition that this four-years-in-the-making illusion is the pinnacle of animated artistry. However, now that cartoons have been shown to be capable of aping the look of a live-action movie, we should ask ourselves what this advancement has accomplished and whether something unique to the art of animation has been lost along the way. It seems to me that animation's most salient characteristic is its ability to defy all human rules of nature, logic, and physics. Making an animated feature look and behave like a live-action narrative film seems a goal with intrinsically dubious merits. Of course, these are questions for the long haul, questions that are not meant to denigrate the majesty of The Prince of Egypt's images -- and there is majesty in some of them -- but rather guide us in a discussion of the state of the art form. As breathtaking as many of this film's precision images are, I have to admit that my favorite sequence is the film's most unrealistic, as the hieroglyphic pictographs come to life and dashingly tell the whole saga of Egyptian power and Hebrew enslavement and quite inventively tell the story of lifetimes literally spent up against the walls. Apart from the animation techniques, The Prince of Egypt also raises fascinating questions about subject matter and marketing. The filmmakers have chosen to retell "the greatest story ever told," a story whose efficacy has been tested through the millennia. Yet in its drive to become all things to all people the story has lost most of its religious context. The God of The Prince of Egypt is more of a master illusionist, an alchemist who can turn a staff into a snake or the Nile into a river of blood, the capo di tutti of all the special-effects artists who ever were. The filmmakers should be given credit for retaining the Old Testament's version of a vengeful God, one who can smite first-born male children and wreak other plagues and devastation on those not in his favor. Yet to this god, the sole sin of the Egyptians is their commitment to slavery and not their unwillingness to renounce polytheism for monotheism. It ends up being a very secular version of ancient events, one that has much less religious baggage attached to it. Calculating universal acceptance is even more difficult in a situation such as this, in which most marketing tie-ins would seem crass and sacrilegious (Ten Commandments Mad Libs, or Holy Tablet Etch-A-Sketches, anyone?). Thus, we see as the main marketing ploy a series of tasteful musical tie-ins. These "music inspired by the movie" CDs and TV specials, not incoincidentally, make the most of the film's voice talent. DreamWorks has gathered for the movie and for these extracurricular projects an amazing collection of voice talent that complements the film's stunning technical achievements. In all, The Prince of Egypt may not rank as one of the great wonders of the world, but it sure ain't no pyramid scheme either. (12/18/98)
Great Hills, Lake Creek, Northcross, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Wes Anderson; with Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Brian Cox, Seymour Cassel, Mason Gamble, Sara Tanaka, Stephen McCole, Luke Wilson. (R, 93 min.)
There's something about Jason Schwartzman's face in Rushmore that makes you want to punch him or hug him -- you're never quite sure which. It's a face that demands a reaction, even while it stares out coolly from beneath the oily brow, assessing the possibilities before it. As Max Fischer, a 10th-grade student at Rushmore Academy, Schwartzman is the underachieving soul of academia, his plate piled high with extracurricular activities (French Club, Fencing Club, Double-Team Dodgeball Society, and founder of the Max Fischer Players) but with little else. His entire life is built on schemes, dreams, and ambitions that realistically should have no part in his life (upon graduating from Rushmore, he's chosen to attend Oxford, with Harvard as his "safety"), and when he falls in love with widowed first-grade teacher Miss Cross (Williams) everything becomes that much more complicated. It's about this time that Max also meets Rushmore alum Herman Blume (Murray), a crinkled, sallow industrialist whose faded dreams of Rushmore past have been replaced by a sterile home life composed of a fatuous trophy wife and a pair of zombified hooligans for children. In Max, Blume sees himself as he used to be, and in Blume, Max sees a chance to perhaps win the heart of Miss Cross. With funding from Blume, Max begins work on a planned aquarium above the baseball field. For his effort, and due, in large part to his flagging academic standing (his Max Fischer Players production of Serpico obviously isn't being taken into consideration here), Max finds himself banished to public school. To make matters infinitely worse, Blume has fallen in love with Miss Cross, and Max's best friend, fourth grader Dirk Calloway, is on the outs after hearing how Max off-handedly bragged about getting some play in the back seat of his mother's convertible. Anderson sets up this conflict of wills -- Max vs. Blume -- in a sort of surrealist, academic omniverse. Although the film was shot in Houston at St. John's Academy (Anderson's alma mater), Rushmore as a film exists out of time and place, locked into a vaguely Sixties-ish groove that's only heightened by Schwartzman's dank locks and Anderson's choice of a uniformly British Invasion soundtrack. If anything, this outré, wildly original piece of cinema recalls Mike Nichols' The Graduate, especially in one scene in which the estranged Blume takes a solo cannonball into his family's pool and rests, silently, on the bottom, observing. Featuring Schwartzman, Williams, and Cassel (as Max's father), Rushmore is filled with brilliant, stand-out performances. But it is Murray who thrills here like he hasn't done in years. Murray's quiet, reserved, and droll wit is always at the ready and Rushmore offers him the opportunity to flex his chops and kick into laconic high gear. It's a wonder watching this comic stylist come back into the fore, especially in a film like this. See this week's "Screens" section for an interview with director Wes Anderson. Anderson and Jason Schwartzman will be parked at 24th St. and Rio Grande in the Rushmore schoolbus Friday, February 5 from 3:30-6:30pm. (2/5/99)
Arbor, Barton Creek, Highland, Lakeline, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Steven Spielberg; with Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi, Jeremy Davies, Ted Danson, Dennis Farina. (R, 168 min.)
Weeks before its release, Saving Private Ryan had already been tagged as "the best film about war ever made." This from critics and veterans alike, and though I fall (thankfully) into the former category, the film is inarguably one of the most realistic depictions of what it must be like to engage in modern warfare. For once, believe the hype. It certainly doesn't hurt matters that Saving Private Ryan is helmed by icon/director Spielberg and many of his longtime collaborators, including director of photography Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List, Amistad), and is populated by a brilliant ensemble cast headed by that other Hollywood icon, Tom Hanks. In Robert Rodat's script, Capt. John Miller (Hanks) is ordered to lead his squad of eight men through the madness of Omaha Beach and D-Day, then go behind German lines to rescue Pvt. James Ryan, the only surviving brother among four soldiers, and thereby scuttle a potential public-relations snafu on the home front. Miller and his men don't give a rat's ass for this unseen, unknown private they've been ordered to find, but they know -- or at least Miller knows -- that finishing the mission brings them all one step closer to home and hearth. Rounding out Miller's squad are some of the best character actors working today, including Sizemore's square-shooting Sgt. Horvarth, Burns' wisecracking Brooklyn dogface Pvt. Reiben, Diesel as the requisite Italian-American Pvt. Carpazo, Ribisi's medic Wade, newcomer Pepper as the squad's devoutly religious sharpshooter, Goldberg as the Nazi-baiting Jew, and Davies as the conscripted, unsure Cpl. Upham. Rodat and the actors steer clear of the most obvious clichés in squadron demographics, and instead, let their audience come to know them on their own terms. One by one, the men are introduced by mannerism and dialogue, very slowly emerging as fully developed characters who, by the end of the film, you feel as though you've known maybe your whole dreaming life, if not your waking. All these acting chops merge with Spielberg's brilliant recreation of the final countdown to V-E Day. Beginning with the Allied forces landing at Omaha Beach (which goes on for an unprecedented half hour), Spielberg proves again and again just why he's one of the most respected filmmakers alive. Never has there been such unmitigated carnage outside of combat documentaries: Awash in blood and strewn with staggering, limbless men jetting arterial gore, the Omaha sequence is a prolonged, relentless nightmare of death, agony, and stark, naked terror. And yet it's a gorgeous, achingly affecting and artistically rendered sequence as well, a ballet of bodies, an adagio of organs. Spielberg paints everything in desaturated, khaki tones; dirt clods hang suspended, jittering in the frigid air while bullets impact and bodies sag and fall like sad, untethered marionettes. On top of this epic, disturbing realism, of course, is Saving Private Ryan's genuine sense of loss and humanity; it's perhaps the most humanistic war film since J'Accuse or All Quiet on the Western Front. A bitter, bloody masterpiece with adrenalized emotions and hyper-realized images, this is perhaps as close to battle as any sane human being should ever hope to tread. (7/24/98)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: John Madden; with Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, Ben Affleck, Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Simon Callow, Antony Sher. (R, 113 min.)
"The play's the thing," proves Shakespeare in Love as it presents the imaginary events that led to the creation of the playwright's timeless romantic drama, Romeo and Juliet. The setting is 1593, back before Shakespeare went down in history as the esteemed Bard of Avon. As we are introduced to him here, Shakespeare is just another scribbling London hack, who is suffering a bad case of writer's block on his new play, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter. The movie's grand conceit is this mixture of fact and fantasy, using some of the known biographical material of the playwright and his age to imagine how he came to write one of Western literature's most enduring romantic epics. The result is a frothy romantic comedy that is equally nourished with truisms of historic lore and modern sensibility. In much the same way that Baz Luhrmann made Shakespeare accessible to a whole new generation a couple of years ago with his pop operatic William and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Love takes the text and the trappings of the Elizabethan drama and embroiders them into a thoroughly modern romantic comedy, along the lines of When Bill Met Viola Ö or Annie Hall. The script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard is similar in structure to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which the author takes a couple of Hamlet's sideline characters and reworks the whole drama from their perspective. In Shakespeare in Love, the authors use a blend of historic information, imagined events, and stray bits of literary luminescence to depict a love affair that might have occurred in the life of William Shakespeare. It's flighty, improbable stuff, meant not to be a historical restorative but a modern tribute to the scribe whose words have launched a million sonnets. Certainly, the more the viewer knows about the life and writings of Shakespeare, the richer the viewing experience will be, for the film is saturated with amusing detail and poetically licensed snatches of dialogue. Yet such knowledge isn't necessary to the enjoyment of the story; it's a 1593 love story that works on its own terms. To some degree, it's a classic backstage romance (with shades of a classic Shakespearean mistaken identity), as Viola (Paltrow) secretly dons male attire in order to appear on the no-females-allowed Elizabethan stage and falls in love with the besieged playwright Bill Shakespeare (Fiennes). We learn much about the state of the dramatic arts during this period as real characters such as Christopher Marlowe and theatre owners Philip Henslowe and Richard Burbage mix with the usurious money lenders, vain actors, morality police, and tavern whores. As the lovers, Fiennes and Paltrow (whose beautiful swan neck provides the perfect adornment for those elaborate Elizabethan collars) are an enchanting pair. The film's other performances are all terrific too. Geoffrey Rush and Ben Affleck get to demonstrate their deft comedic chops and Judi Dench rules the roost as the imperious Virgin Queen. (The last time Dench paired with director John Madden, it was for her highly acclaimed turn as Queen Victoria in his Mrs. Brown.) The set design and costuming are all also thoughtfully re-imagined. The end result is a delightful, though a smidge too long, reminder of one of the reasons we so enjoy going to the movies: perchance to dream. (12/25/98)
Arbor, Barton Creek, Dobie, Highland, Lake Creek, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Robert Iscove; with Freddie Prinze Jr., Rachael Leigh Cook, Matthew Lillard, Paul Walker, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Kevin Pollack, Kieran Culkan, Elden Henson, Usher Raymond, Anna Paquin. (PG-13, 105 min.)
After the surprise success of the recent Jennifer Love Hewitt coming-of-age comedy Can't Hardly Wait, I privately hoped for a return to popular favor of that Eighties cinema stalwart, the teen-sex comedy. After all, if Kevin Williamson can single-handedly usher in the rebirth of the splatter-cool, could The Penultimate American Virgin be far behind? Judging from this tired, painfully obvious stab at modern high school mores filtered through the spotty lens of Pygmalion, the point is moot. When senior BMOC Zack Siler (Prinze Jr.) finds himself left high and dry by his longtime paramour Taylor (O'Keefe) upon returning from spring break, he wagers his best friend Dean (Walker) that he can turn any one of the school's waify wallflowers into the next prom queen. When Dean sets his sights on tortured-artist type Laney Boggs (Cook), Zack initiates a series of "random" encounters and eventually insinuates himself into Laney's muddled, paint-bedecked life. Although She's All That may have its heart in the right place, Iscove and writer R. Lee Fleming Jr., do precious little to update the story. Teen-comedy stalwart Lillard (who, at 29, is getting a bit long in the tooth for these roles) is tossed onboard as a Puck-like refugee from MTV's The Real World, although even his mugging to Rick James during a convoluted party sequence wears thin in mere seconds. As the portrait of high school suffering, Cook is a diamond in the rough -- if anything, she's too cute to be chosen for this rogue's scheme, and not nearly enough of the closeted artiste the story seems to want her to be. The film treats Prinze Jr. with equal diffidence, shading the character of Zach with just enough hues of gray so that he can ride roughshod over the film's final 30 minutes. Equally clichéd when it comes to either of the sexes, She's All That runs the gamut from confused to confusing, with plot schematics tangled up in third-act jumbles that creep up out of nowhere. One such bizarre sidetrack -- a last-minute threat of impending date-rape -- sets the stage for a sequence that either was never intended to be shown or was hastily pulled after the fact. No explanation given, except for a tired denouement by Kevin Pollack as Cook's well-meaning father. Shoddily constructed out of bits and pieces of previous genre triumphs, She's All That is as dull and droning as the fluorescent lighting in your old study hall. (2/5/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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 mainstream thriller, everything is gratingly complex: the tangled skein of emotions that make the backbiting in The Treasure of the 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, Lake Creek
D: Mark Tarlov; with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean Patrick Flanery, Patricia Clarkson, Dylan Baker, Betty Buckley, Larry Gilliard Jr. (PG-13, 93 min.)
It's rare to find a film as bizarre as this that also comes with an equally bizarre pedigree, but it certainly makes for some interesting theorizing. Consider: Simply Irresistible, a romantic comedy of the frothiest sort, is the directorial debut of Mark Tarlov, better-known as the producer behind John Waters' last two outings (Pecker and Serial Mom). There is, of course, no trace of Waters' naughty subversion here; instead, we have two interesting performances jammed in amongst a spate of truly awful ones. (The two of interest are Clarkson, who was recently seen as the Teutonic junkie du jour in High Art, and Baker, who played Happiness' very bad Dad. Both of them prove they can act relatively normal when given free reign in a mediocre love story.) Topping things off is Gellar herself, an actress who slays the undead with the best of them on television but comes across with all the strength of a soggy Twinkie in widescreen. It's all too odd to credit, and that's not even including the storyline. Gellar plays Amanda Shelton, a Tribeca single who has inherited her mother's beloved eatery, the Southern Cross. Alas, she's no Emeril in the kitchen; the restaurant, which has apparently been in the family for 70 years, is failing, and her idea of haute cuisine hovers somewhere in the margins of Like Spam for Chocolate. One morning while out canvassing the open air market for that day's lunchtime ingredients, Amanda encounters what may or may not be an angel (the film is resoundingly unclear on such matters) who gives her a basket of enchanted soft-shell crabs. As luck would have it, one magical crustacean goes AWOL and ends up uniting the emotional Amanda with Flanery's Tim Bartlett (looking for all the world like a young David Cassidy), a natty, semi-conceited uptown department store manager who's in the process of building a new A-list restaurant. In short order, Amanda and Tim are falling in love as that enchanted crab imbues her with the power to cook her emotions into her foodstuffs. Overnight, the Southern Cross is booming, Amanda is written up in the Times, and Tim is swept off his feet (literally) by her witchy kitchen hijinks. What's going on here? No one, least of all the screenwriters, seems to be able to tell us. There's levitation, hors d'oeuvres seething with dry-ice fog, weeping patrons, and a score from Gil Goldstein that reeks of bad Seventies television melodramas. The point, of course, is that old nugget "follow your heart," though Tarlov rephrases it in a most unusual way and adds heapings of unnecessary storybook allusions. Muddled and confusing (Why is everybody floating? Where did the phantom dance band come from? What were Dutch Schultz's final words?), Tarlov's romantic comedy is eminently resistible, an unclassifiable cinematic leftover best left untasted. (2/12/99)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Tinseltown North
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
D: Chris Columbus; with Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts, Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Lynn Whitfield, Liam Aiken. (PG-13, 124 min.)
Motherhood is a perpetually dangerous place, filled with dread and fear and necessary losses. By their very nature, our children must depend on us, reject us, abandon us. But we cannot, ever, abandon them. And if, for some reason, we must leave them, it is our profound responsibility and unerring instinct to ensure their continued well-being. It's a rich vein, and director Columbus is given all the right machinery with which to mine it. Unfortunately, his shiny product is more silverplate than sterling. Stepmom is the tale of two adversarial mothers, one a birth mother who is as passionate about, and committed to, her maternal toils as any driven career woman, and the other a stepmother-to-be, a successful young photographer who is thrust prematurely into full-blown, reluctant motherhood. The film's characters, a wealthy lawyer (Harris), his gorgeous young girlfriend Isabelle (Roberts), and his stunningly competent ex-wife Jackie (Sarandon) are straight from a layout of Town and Country, all glossy and composed. They live a lush life -- in a Manhattan loft, a Hudson Valley country home -- their lives rich with gorgeous props, perfect lighting, and extravagant detail. But all that cosmetic shine dulls the intense, heartrending humanness of the story. Jackie, for all her russet earth-motherness and exaggerated civility can't help but detest her glamorous successor, and Isabelle's earnest efforts just make her more irritating. The children resent the interloper, especially 12-year-old Anna who turns her considerable adolescent venom and contempt on her vulnerable stepmother at every opportunity. Jackie quietly, deliciously feeds the fire until she is given a diagnosis that forces her to view Isabelle as her children's savior rather than her own competitor. Save for the stars' extraordinary big-screen charisma and an astonishingly effective performance from young Malone as Anna, these characters are too remote, too pretty, and too unrealistic to move us in any lasting way. Short term, however, Stepmom delivers. Saying goodbye, facing the ultimate maternal fear, is trenchant, if familiar, stuff and Stepmom fairly drips with it. While fully recognizing the film's heavy-handed manipulation, it's actually fun to surrender to the gut-wrenching sensations, to fly through the cycle of the seasons and emotions that are so artistically painted on the screen (closing, of course, with the obligatory, heartwarming Christmas scene). Watching Stepmom is like walking past a grand house at night, its curtains open and lights ablaze. We pause, curiously involved in the tableau unfolding within. We can gawk at the decor, marvel at the dresses, get momentarily caught up in the visible actions of the people inside. But because we are so utterly removed from that milieu, our interest flags, our walk resumes, and the moment slips away. (12/25/98)
Tinseltown South
D: Terrence Malick; with Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Jared Leto, Dash Mihok, Tim Blake Nelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, Larry Romano, John Savage, John Travolta, Tom Jane, Miranda Otto. (R, 160 min.)
Majestically lyrical and maddeningly introverted, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is a one-of-a kind movie experience. Of all the things this mysterious writer-director may have accomplished during his 20-year absence from filmmaking, none of them included cozying up to the idea of conventional narrative structure. Malick's nonconformist stride to the beat of his own internal drums remains both his strength and his weakness. The Thin Red Line, his film adaptation of James Jones' WWII novel about the taking of Guadalcanal, is as visually stunning and emotive as anything you're likely to see this year yet as organizationally fitful and fractured as a philosophy student's dissertation. And at two hours and 50 minutes, The Thin Red Line certainly has the feel of an epic, but the film is less a standard-issue war picture than it is a meditation on the destructive relationship between Man and Nature. (It is both literally and figuratively a story about the world of men, the all-male enclave of the WWII combat soldier; the only women glimpsed in the film are in incidental shots of Melanesian natives and the sun-dappled flashbacks of a soldier fretting about his wife's fidelity back home.) To make his case for nature at war with itself, Malick begins his movie in a Melanesian Eden in which an AWOL soldier and his buddy are enjoying a castaway idyll on a peaceful chunk of beachfront. Then the soldiers storm the pristine beach. The story is simple; it follows the American troops as they struggle to overtake one strategic hill from the Japanese. It's a bloody and gruesome battle. But what remains most indelibly in the mind are specific images: the way the camera moves through the tall grass, the shots of exotically colored birds and prehistoric crocodiles, the random trajectory of a missile as it hits one target and not another, and most of all the look of terror etched in a man's face. This is what The Thin Red Line captures better than any other war film I can think of: the unvarnished expression of fear and trepidation on the faces of sane men who are staring into the maw of insanity. As consuming as these images are, there is also no question that the reason they remain the most indelible aspect of the movie is because there is so little character evolution or plot development to otherwise hang on to. The film does not want for a broad contingent of able young actors ready and capable of running their characters through their thespic paces. Instead, their stories are told through continuing voiceover monologues. Often it is confusing to determine which character is speaking (it doesn't help that two of the central characters played by Caviezel and Chaplin both have dark, brooding looks that are even more difficult to distinguish from each other underneath their soot, uniforms, and helmets) and even some of the top-billed players have no more than a couple lines of spoken dialogue. And what do they ruminate about in their voiceovers? Such things as the nature of evil, how we lost the goodness in ourselves, and whether we're all part of one big soul. Neither does it help that the occasional muddiness of the sound quality obscures random lines of dialogue. Despite having too little to do, the cast is excellent, especially Nolte, although an unbilled Travolta is uncomfortably cast in a cameo as a general and other marquee stars have meager screen time disproportionate to their star value (Clooney first appears in the picture only minutes from the end). The Thin Red Line will forever suffer from its release on the heels of one of the year's favorite sons: Saving Private Ryan. It invites undue comparisons between the two only because they are both WWII dramas. But in their storytelling and their objectives, the two couldn't be more different. Watching The Thin Red Line often reminded me of reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book of James Agee prose that's coupled with Walker Evans' photographs of rural sharecroppers during the Depression: unforgettable riffs and images from an untenable state of existence. The Thin Red Line alternately draws us in and loses us in the murk. It's an astonishing achievement (and here the achievements of cinematographer John Toll, composer Hans Zimmer, and production designer Jack Fisk cannot be underestimated) that has more in common with Malick's two previous films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, than any war movie we've ever known. Despite this film's narrative lapses, Malick has a unique way of distilling the poetry from the commonplace Ö and for that precious gift we should say amen. (1/15/99)
Arbor, Barton Creek, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Brian Robbins; with James Van Der Beek, Jon Voight, Scott Caan, Thomas F. Duffy, Paul Walker, Ali Larter, Ron Lester, Amy Smart, Tonie Perensky. (R, 99 min.)
MTV, which has almost entirely eliminated the M(usic) from its TV of late, has been slow to get into the film arena (Beavis and Butt-head Do America and Joe's Apartment are the company's two most prominent predecessors of Varsity Blues). You'd think with all the video directors the network has weaned, they'd be pumping out high-gloss ephemera at a steady clip by now, but that's not the case. Filmed in and around the Austin/Coupland/Elgin area, Varsity Blues is the MTV ethic distilled to its most pandering levels. It's also a lot of fun in that MTV way that made The Real World -- an ongoing soap opera about a revolving quintet of strangers -- such a long-running hit. Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek, now with added musculature and raven locks, plays John Moxon, a second-string quarterback for the high school football team, the West Canaan Coyotes. Having spent the years putting up with the vagaries of small-town Texas life, he's itching to graduate and get into Brown -- in between plays on the field he surreptitiously reads a copy of Slaughterhouse Five that's tucked inside the playbook. Off the field, he spars with his football-lovin' dad, hangs out with his equally bright girlfriend, Julie (Smart), and bides his time, waiting for that magic E ticket out. This all changes when the Coyotes' star quarterback Lance Harbor (Walker) blows out a leg on the field and thus ushers in the thoroughly unanticipated era of Mox. Things change, and not necessarily for the better, as Mox suddenly finds himself the target of Lance's old steady Darcy (Larter) and a force for change under the iron rule of the team's coach Bud Kilmer (Voight), under whose leadership the school has won 23 division titles. Slick to the core, Varsity Blues isn't quite sure if it's a morality lesson (Coach Kilmer is as oily a sonovabitch as you're likely to see Voight play, pumping his players' mangled limbs full of steroids and berating his team like a Marine D.I. on a crack bender) or a coming-of-age comedy, and so it falls somewhere between the two. Pathos, of which there is much, comes in the form of vastly overweight linebacker Billy Bob (Lester, alternating between humor and horror) and the certifiable coach. Humor rears its braying head every time Mox's pal Tweeder (Caan) stumbles drunkenly onscreen or when a pesky cheerleader pops up in a whipped-cream bikini. Friday Night Lights it's not. To be fair, Varsity Blues is pretty entertaining stuff taken at face value. Some of the most bone-crunching, solar-plexus defenestrating gridiron footage I've ever seen is on fine display, and Van Der Beek heads up an excellent ensemble cast (including Austin's Perensky as a libidinous health-ed teacher). Still, its vague stabs at moralizing and goofball shenanigans are an odd mix. It's not the high school experience I had, nor is it probably like yours. It's MTV all the way. (1/15/99)
Gateway, Lakeline, Lincoln, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: John Bruno; with Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, Joanna Pacula, Marshall Bell, Julio Oscar Mechoso, Sheman Augustus, Cliff Curtis. (R, 100 min.)
Pity the poor Mir space station. First it suffers the real-world traumas of lousy post-Perestroika management, technical foul-ups, and shoddy construction, then it suffers at the hands of both filmmakers Michael Bay (in Armageddon) and Virus' John Bruno. No wonder the Russian space program is in such tatters. Bruno, working from a script by ex-SEAL Chuck Pfarrer (who also created the Dark Horse comic on which the film is based), does his best to make this tale of otherworldly infestation on the high seas a rousing affair but fails miserably on all counts. I've seen sushi more frightening than anything in this film, and even the above-average cast can't seem to lock in to the required mode of action/terror hijinks the filmmakers had in mind. Sutherland and Curtis play a pair of high-seas salvage operators who, along with their motley crew, stumble across a modern-day Flying Dutchman after running afoul of a force-five hurricane. Sutherland, eager to recoup the losses sustained by his tug during the storm, decides to tow the stricken Russian science vessel back to safe harbor to sell as scrap. Maritime law appears to be on his side, but an alien life form ("Electricity that can think?!" mumbles one dumbstruck crew member) would rather turn Sutherland and his crew into meaty Erector Sets, complete with spinning blades and human viscera oozing appropriately. It is, of course, up to Baldwin and Curtis to save the world from the alien (if not the Mir -- that gets it in the first five minutes) and stand down their wild-eyed Captain. You know the rest. Sutherland, to his credit, does a fine impersonation of Captain Bligh on an anabolic steroid frenzy, but everyone else involved seems to have stumbled in from an episode of Earth 2. Rarely do we get the chance to see such poorly constructed models tossing in a tank of brine, and though director Bruno has had a hand in the special effects of both The Abyss and Titanic, the effects here are strictly Grade Z. With an eye-poppingly silly climax that has to be seen to be disbelieved and a welter of dialogue ripped straight from the pages of Amazingly Bad Tales, it's sci-fi schlock right down to its cheesy robotic monsters. It's also a lot like the 1980 Kirk Douglas/Farrah Fawcett clunker Saturn 3 on a boat, actually, with a good bit of last summer's Deep Rising thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, Virus lacks that latter film's stunningly off-center wit and wildcatter direction -- as it is, it's dead in the water. (1/22/99)
Great Hills
D: Kirk Jones; with Ian Bannen, Fionnula Flanagan, David Kelly, Susan Lynch, James Nesbitt, Robert Hickey, Dermot Kerrigan, Eileen Dromey. (PG, 91 min.)
With a minimum of effort you can picture the brass at Fox Searchlight, eager grins plastered across their faces, preparing for the imminent release of what is almost certain to be this year's The Full Monty. Like that wildly popular U.K. import, Waking Ned Devine has a terrific ensemble cast composed of no actor American audiences are likely to recognize (Bannen was in Flight of the Phoenix way back in 1966), lilting accents, and nude men doing remarkably silly things in the name of money. Unfortunately, it's not all that (though, come to think of it, The Full Monty wasn't really all that, either). Predicated on the slimmest of notions, this debut by Jones is so cuddly-cute in its desire to be pleasing that it's all but transparent; what you can see of it is cobbled together out of some decidedly rancorous clichés. In Waking Ned Devine, the Irish are dual-fisted, opportunistic whiskey machines out to score the big haul in the name of village solidarity. They're also wildly funny, eccentric, and lovable. These polar extremes are not mutually exclusive in Jones' world, obviously. It's a County Cork crock, to be sure, but Jones and his cast serve it up in high style, milking it for all it's worth. Bannen and Kelly play Jackie O'Shea and Michael Sullivan, a pair of aging Irish scalawags who wend their way through their twilight years sunning themselves on the rocky beaches of their Tully More home and playing -- as does everyone else -- the Irish National Lottery. When a local resident -- the elderly and besainted Ned Devine -- arrives at the winning combination and then promptly expires, the men take it upon themselves to liberate the ticket from the deceased, defraud the lottery board, and share the winnings among the 52 assorted townspeople. Chaos, as they say, ensues. On its face, the film has a touch of the old Ealing comedies about it, but for all the mugging and blarney and frothy pints of Guinness, Waking Ned Devine is as thin as old David Kelly's sunken chest. At its worst, it reinforces those hoary Emerald Isle stereotypes of the scheming, drunken Irishman; at its best, it's an ingratiating, weepy testament to the resourcefulness of those zany Irish. Either way, it's not really all that much. It does, however, have some wonderful turns from both Bannen and Kelly, as well as Dromey as the town's reviled curmudgeon. Jones, to his credit, directs with a sure hand and makes the most of some of the world's most gorgeous geography, filling downtime (of which there is little -- the film boasts some superb editing) with sweeping, panoramic shots of the rugged Isle of Man coastline (where the film was shot despite its Irish setting), velvet green cliffs rushing to meet the crashing breakers below. Sodden, middle-of-the-lane humor of this sort has never bothered me before -- I just think perhaps the Irish might enjoy being the subject of a film with slightly less alcohol and a smidgen more honesty to it for once. (1/8/99)
Gateway
D: Nora Ephron; with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Dave Chappelle, Jean Stapleton, Parker Posey, Steve Zahn, Dabney Coleman. (PG, 116 min.)
They say that chemistry is everything when it comes to romantic screen pairings. As the star-crossed couple who carry on a cyberspace romance that has trouble translating into real life, Hanks and Ryan double-click in You've Got Mail. Unlike actors in many contemporary movie romances, they connect in that indefinable but unmistakable way, their attraction to each other as natural and inevitable as taking the next breath. Both Hanks and, more particularly, Ryan have heavily relied on certain expressions to play cute in the past -- she often scrunches up her face and flashes a gummy grin, he's prone to looking befuddled and skeptical at the same time -- but those mannerisms don't obscure their characters' mutual attraction here. Nora and Delia Ephron's screenplay begins smartly as it charts the movie's online love affair, observing that strange intimacy in the context of the bustling and impersonal streets of New York City. (The joke goes that the one, true love of your life may walk right past you on the sidewalk, and you'll never know it.) Things get complicated when the two chatliners unknowingly meet and end up disliking each other upon discovering that they are Upper West Side business rivals: She owns a quaint children's bookstore, a neighborhood fixture for over 40 years, while he's building a nearby superbookstore that sells everything at a discount, except for the cappuccino. The war between competing enterprises escalates into a war between the sexes, with the embattled finding themselves oddly attracted to the other without knowing why. Eventually, one of them finds out who the other is, a development that you could characterize as either a vaguely sexist plot device or a canny means by which to entice the movie's female audience. As in Ephron's other directorial efforts (Sleepless in Seattle), the secondary characters in You've Got Mail are flat and almost superfluous; when Hanks and Ryan aren't onscreen together, you're antsy until they reappear. That's how good the two are as a pair -- everyone can't help but pale in comparison. In many ways, You've Got Mail is a valentine to the happenstance miracle of lovers and other strangers, a movie that regards modern romance as something that is, ultimately, old-fashioned to its core. It's that classic sense of timelessness that makes You've Got Mail an appealing love story for these and all other times. (12/18/98)
Gateway, Northcross
GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995) D: Mamoru Oshii.Ghost in the Shell is a slick but plodding recycling of tired cyberpunk clichés that adds nothing new to the genre. This exposition-heavy Japanese anime (by the producers of Akira) chronicles the adventures of a shapely, angst-ridden 21st-century female supercop as she and her equally badass colleagues attempt to track down and capture "The Puppet Master," a mysterious computer criminal who may or may not be the enemy he seems to be. The action sequences, especially the ones in which our heroine dons a nifty veil that renders her invisible, are certainly exciting, but there just aren't enough of them to make us forget the convoluted storyline, or the relentlessly silly dialogue -- made even more laughable by the lifeless, hysterically foul-mouthed English dubbing. Of course, Ghost in the Shell does have its good points, not the least of which is the film's superb animation -- a dazzling mixture of high-tech computer graphics and traditional hand-drawn cels -- that depicts backgrounds, weapons, and other machines in remarkable detail, while leaving most of the lead characters' faces curiously devoid of emotion. It's a risky visual concept well-suited to the movie's themes of humanity being slowly eclipsed by technology. True to the tradition of popular contemporary Japanese animation, the imagery here displays an intense obsession with naked female bodies, complex machinery, and heavy-duty firearms. (-- Joey O'Bryan (3/22/96)(NR, 80 min.) @Dobie; Fri-Thu, 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; Fri-Sat, midnight.
AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY "Struggle, Survival, and Redemption: The Films of Charles Burnett":
Nightjohn (1996) D: Charles Burnett; with Carl Lumbly, Alison Jones, Lorraine Toussaint, Beau Bridges, Monica Ford, Danny Nelson. Made for the Disney Channel, this made-for-cable movie is the final film in this Charles Burnett retrospective. Based on the novel Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen, the film tells the story of a self-taught former slave who goes back to the plantation in the 1830s to teach other slaves the forbidden practice of reading. (TVM, 95 min.) @Texas Union; Tue (2/23), 7pm; free admission.
FESTIVAL OF ARGENTINEAN CULTURE:
New Directions: Contemporary Argentinean Cinema The New Directions Film Series is being shown as part of the Festival of Argentinean Culture held at the University of Texas, January-June 1999. All the films are feature debuts by new filmmakers from Argentina and represent the country's cultural renewal following years of repression. All films are shown in Spanish with English subtitles. This film series is co-sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Studies, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, and the Austin Film Society. For more info call 471-9207. @Texas Union; continues Thu (2/18)-Sun (2/21), free admission.
Thu (2/18), 7:30pm: La sonámbula (The Sleepwalker). D: Fernando Spiner (1998). A political/psychological thriller based on an original science-fiction screenplay by Ricardo Piglia about a population that suffers mass amnesia.
Fri (2/19), 7:30pm: Prohibido (Forbidden. D: Andrés Di Tella (1997). This documentary addresses cultural repression and resistance during the military dictatorship.
Sat (2/20), 7:30pm: El día que me quieras (The Day That You'll Love Me). D: Leandro Katz (1997). This film investigates death and the power of photography and will be accompanied by a special presentation by Leandro Katz.
Sun (2/21), 3pm: Un muro de silencio (A Wall of Silence). D: Lita Stantic; with Vanessa Redgrave (1994). A semi-autobiographical story about a woman haunted by her husband who "disappeared" during the military dictatorship.
IMAX THEATRE (San Antonio):
Amazon (1997) D: Kieth Merrill; with Julio Mamani, Mark Plotkin, Sydney Possuelo, narrated by Linda Hunt. A tribal shaman and an American ethnobotanist search for the medicinal qualities of native plants in the Amazon, while a modern-day explorer investigates the recently discovered Zoë tribe. (NR, 38 min.) All seating is assigned and may be purchased in advance. Other daily IMAX shows include Mystery 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.
QTIII
The Third Annual Quentin Tarantino Film Festival The Austin Film Society presents this unique, only-in-Austin film festival in which Quentin Tarantino programs and presents nine days of film screening culled from his personal archives. The selections are as wide-ranging and as ungovernable as the man who chose them. Here's what we know of the schedule; it consists of a lot more broad themes than specific titles. Screenings are at 8 and 10pm each evening, with midnighters on Fridays, all-nighters on Saturdays, and G-rated children's matinees on Saturdays at 1pm -- plus loads of trailers & surprises every night.
Fri (2/19): Action With an Edge: Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers (8pm) and The Four Musketeers (10pm); Zulu Dawn (midnight).
Sat, (2/20): Children's Matinee (1pm): Visit to a Small Planet (with Jerry Lewis). All-Nighter (8pm-dawn) -- Offbeat Exploitation Films.
Sun (2/21): Seventies Double Feature: Pretty Maids All in a Row, a perverse high school sex and murder farce starring Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, and Telly Savalas (8pm); Mother, Jugs & Speed, an ambulance-driving comedy featuring the unlikely combination of Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel, and Larry Hagman (10pm).
Mon (2/22): Sixties Spy Films.
Tue (2 23): Neglected Seventies Crime Films.
Wed (2/24): Spaghetti Westerns
Thu (2/25): War Films
Fri, (2/26): Surprise!
Sat, (2/27): Children's Matinee (1pm): Frankenstein Conquers the World. All-Nighter (8pm-dawn) -- Men, Women, and Chainsaws (a horror all-nighter)
Single-evening passes for the weekends (Friday and Saturday nights) are sold out, but five-day passes are still available ($75). Single-evening passes for weeknights (Sunday - Thursday) are still available ($20 double bill; $10 single admission). After pass holders are seated, any available seats will be sold at the box office 15 minutes before showtime. Beginning Friday 2/19, tickets are available only through the Alamo Drafthouse box office (409 Colorado), noon - midnight. All proceeds from QTIII will benefit the Austin Film Society's Free Cinema Series. QTIII is co-sponsored by the The Austin Chronicle. @Alamo Drafthouse; Fri (2/19) - Sat (2/27).