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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 |
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Enjoy! We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Enjoy is just one among scores of titles showing in the 1999 SXSW Film Festival. The Festival begins today March 12 and continues through next Saturday, March 20. Over the course of a brief few years, the SXSW Film Festival has developed into one of the world's most prominent and respected showcases of American independent filmmaking. Premiering around town for the next nine days will be a wide selection of narrative features, documentaries, short films, music videos, and retrospectives. These categories are further broken down into films in competition and out of competition, special all-shorts programs, director tributes, a free outdoor screening, and a special star-studded premiere screening of the soon-to-be released Matthew McConaughey movie EDtv (for which public tickets are still available; call 322-0145). Most of the filmmakers whose works will be screening have indicated that they will be in attendance to discuss their movies during post-screening Q&As. In this issue of the Chronicle, there's a detailed eight-page pull-out section that provides program descriptions, schedules, admission info, and more. Check it out. There's something for everyone. And most of all ... enjoy. (3/12/99)
Alamo Drafthouse, Austin Convention Center, Dobie, Paramount
D: Harold Ramis; with Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palminteri, Joe Viterelli. (R, 103 min.)
You don't need a psychology degree to catch all the Freudian subcurrents in Hollywood gangster flicks. All those gun barrels getting stuffed down men's throats, all those big cigars, all that Oedipal conniving to knock off and supplant dominant (god)father figures. So why not explicitly combine the two themes? Take 70 years of clichés about Sicilian Mafia culture and Freudian psychoanalysis, stir 'em up, and see what happens. Ramis, whose directing résumé includes one of the more successful high-concept comedies in recent years (Groundhog Day) and several others of that general ilk (Multiplicity, the original National Lampoon's Vacation) was an obvious -- and smart -- choice to helm this project. His work has a reliable medium-voltage consistency about it, with periodic spikes and surges into the minor genre-classic zone. Ramis' breakthroughs have tended to happen when his casts are strongest. This bodes well for a movie that features wiseguy icon De Niro in a self-parodying lead role and the reliable, versatile Crystal as his foil. And sure enough, the Crystal-De Niro chemistry is the best thing about this farcical tale of a powerful mobster named Paul Vitti who consults a shrink when mysterious anxiety attacks start hampering his ability to perform routine murders and beatings. I was suckered right in by not only the clever setup but also Ramis' skill at manipulating stock imagery and characterizations for his own ends. From the made men's f-word-intensive dialogue to the clam sauce and opera Muzak at the Mafiosi Italian eateries, every stereotype is rendered with Kabuki-like precision, the better to savor their incongruity in the let's-talk-about-our-feelings milieu of clinical psychology. I wouldn't say that Analyze This greatly exceeded my expectations, though. Too often, screenwriters Ken Lonergan and Peter Tolan seemed content to harvest easy laughs from the ground directly underneath the concept's wide canopy. I'd have appreciated a little more willingness to shake the branches for less obvious jokes. Still, De Niro was hilarious in registering believable gangster takes on topics such as the Oedipus Complex ("That Freud was one sick fuck!") and the psychoanalytic method ("I tell you all this stuff and you never say nothin' but 'how did that make you feel?' I could get jelly to do that for me!"). Crystal, as the hapless shrink getting dragged kicking and screaming into Vitti's PuzoWorld theme-park realm, is equally deadpan, and equally good at infusing his role with just enough verisimilitude to keep the broader elements from totally overwhelming the story. But as enjoyable as it is, it's hard to escape a sense of Analyze This being the work of competent talents who knew exactly where the good-enough line was and didn't feel particularly inspired to push far beyond it. And a better definition of a three-star movie I cannot offer. (3/12/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Metropolitan, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
D: Bob Clark; with Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd, Kim Cattrall, Peter MacNichol, Dom DeLuise, Ruby Dee. (PG, 94 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. Kathleen Turner plays the ambitious owner of a baby products company who (along with her partner in crime Christopher Lloyd) secretly funds a research lab that is devoted to cracking the code of the special baby language all infants are supposedly born with but lose by the age of two. With the key to baby talk she will rule the world. Director Bob Clark has helmed such diverse projects as Black Christmas, Porky's, and The Ransom of Red Chief.
Great Hills, Lake Creek, Lincoln, Metropolitan, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
D: James Foley; with Chow Yun-Fat, Mark Wahlberg, Ric Young, Paul Ben-Victor, Willy Ung, Byron Mann, Elizabeth Lindsey, Brian Cox, Jon Kit Lee, Marie Matiko. (R, 110 min.)
You have to feel sorry for Chow Yun-Fat. In his native Hong Kong and under the direction of auteurs such as John Woo and Stanley Kwan, he consistently turned in breathtaking performances ranging from the idiot-savant of God of Gamblers to the tragic assassin in The Killer. With the emigration to these shores of nearly 90% of the Hong Kong film industry's key players over the last few years, Chow found himself buoyed by rabid stateside fans such as Quentin Tarantino and others -- it seemed his future here was as assured as it had been in the Crown Colony. His stateside debut, The Replacement Killers, proved Chow could insinuate himself into American action films with a modicum of ease, though with the release of The Corruptor it has become clear that even a great actor like Chow can fall prey to bad decisions. No one mistook Antoine Fuqua's muddled, video-centric Replacement Killers for anything other than cheap pop glitz, and judging from the amount of unwarranted giggles emanating from the peanut gallery during a recent screening of Foley's film, Chow is once again the victim of a wildly clichéd script and cookie-cutter direction. Here, he plays NYPD officer Nick Chen, the much-lauded head of the city's Asian Gangs Unit, which keeps tabs on Tong head Danny Lee (Young) and a newly arrived Chinese street gang known as the Fukienese Dragons, led by the peroxide-streaked Bobby Vu (Mann). Both gang leaders are stirring up more than their share of trouble. Into this Mott Street mess saunters Wahlberg's Danny Wallace, the first Anglo officer assigned to Nick's beat (ostensibly in the interests of keeping the suits upstairs happy). Cocksure and decorated, Danny at first encounters tremendous resistance from his Asian-American counterparts who firmly believe he's out of his league. No matter that he speaks Mandarin and knows his Triads; Danny's put through the rookie wringer as mercilessly as any Hill Streeter ever was. When he discovers that working in Chinatown comes at a stiff price -- mainly that compromises are as inevitable as corruption -- he wavers and then charges full on into the muck. "You don't change Chinatown," warns Nick, "Chinatown changes you." Maybe it's the MSG? Less-than-clever dialogue like that litters The Corruptor like shell-casing in a Woo spectacular, and though Foley is adept at handling the action, the film is a grim washout peppered with too many earnest, good-cop/bad-cop conundrums and not enough solid police work. Even the car chases seem borrowed from some other, better film. That's not to say that Chow has lost his Cary Grant sheen -- he hasn't, not by a long shot. But with ultimately listless material such as this to work with, it's no wonder people miss his HK glory days. Then again, remember this: Once he got off the boat, it took Woo himself no less than three tries before he got it right. (3/12/99)
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Metropolitan, Northcross, Riverside, Tinseltown North
D: Ulu Grosbard; with Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams, Jonathan Jackson, John Kapelos, Ryan Merriman, Whoopi Goldberg. (PG-13, 105 min.)
Not reviewed at press time. A three-year-old son disappears in a split instant only to reappear nine years later at the age of 12, with no memory of his real parents or his troubled older brother. The film is based on the book by Jacquelyn Mitchard and focuses on the heartbreak of losing a child and its effect on the family.
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Robert Mandel and Katt Shea; with Emily Bergl, Jason London, Amy Irving, Dylan Bruno, J. Smith-Cameron, Rachel Blanchard, Zachery Ty Bryan, Kayla Campbell, Mena Suvari. (R, 105 min.)
Sometimes you just have to relax and realize that sequels -- bad sequels, awful sequels -- are going to be a part of the cinematic landscape until the end of the world. Nobody I know asked for Psycho 2, and it certainly wasn't me who put in a requisition order for more Halloweens. Weekend at Bernie's 2? Don't even get me started. It should come as no surprise, I suppose, that this quickie updating of the seminal De Palma horror show Carrie is marginally less palatable than a veal smoothie. Hollywood's golden rule -- if the first film makes money, make more -- is by now permanently engraved at birth on the foreheads of the execs and power brokers of Los Angeles as surely as is that tiny triptych of sixes. What surprises me, frankly, is how woefully amusing this one turned out to be. As a horror film, The Rage: Carrie 2 is a body dump of cheap shocks, even worse dialogue, and musical cues so bizarrely out of place that they seem to have carried over from another theatre entirely; as an unintentional comedy, it's a tour de farce with a gooey red dab of Grand Guignol on the side. Twenty years after the events of the first film, in which telekinetic time bomb Carrie White met her end in the wake of a tragic (though dramatically inevitable) school fire, a fresh, new progeny of the White clan blossoms forth into estrogenetic vengeance. Rachel, the girl in question (played by the charming Bergl; she has a beautiful, hesitant smile that flares across her face like some solar detonation), is one of the not-so-beautiful people, at least to the sterling jocks and their gamines that run the local high school. It doesn't seem to matter much that her striking beauty would be the toast of even the most backwater varsity squad. Here, her stylish fashion sense and wicked smarts are cause for pariah status. (Hasn't anyone involved in the production of this film noticed that Sperry Topsiders are out? Someone didn't do their homework, clearly.) When Rachel's best friend Lisa propels herself from the roof of the campus parking garage after realizing her new beau was only out for one thing, she enters into a telekinetic funk, rattling drawers and coffee cups alike. Enter London's Jesse, the jock with the heart of, if not gold, then certainly beryl, who takes to Rachel's sly wit and unconventional beauty in the proverbial heartbeat. Nothing lasts forever, though, especially in high school, and things turn dark (albeit very slowly; the film moves with a glacial pace and relies on far too many flashbacks and unnecessary zooms to trundle along) by reel six. Bergl is the film's saving grace, if there is one. The film lights up when she's onscreen, but even that can't save audiences from the sight of a disheveled, ranting Irving reprising her role as good-girl Sue Snell. Almost but not quite in the "so bad it's good" league, The Rage: Carrie 2 instead toils in high school hell and doesn't even manage to come up with one good shock. (3/12/99)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Metropolitan, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
D: Chris Roberts; with Freddie Prinze Jr., Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard, Tchéky Karyo, Jurgen Prochnow, David Suchet, David Warner. (PG-13, 99 min.)
Wing Commander opens with a lovingly rendered CGI shot of the Japanese bombing the American fleet at Pearl Harbor back to the Stone Age, seen from above, with hundreds of Mitsubishi Zeroes pummeling the dry-docks. Except it's not 1941, it's 2564, and that isn't the United States' Pacific fleet, it's the Confederation's Vega System fleet. And those aren't the Japanese, they're the feral, deadly Kilrathi, alien invaders only filling in for our Pacific theatre foe as Roberts updates WWII for forward-thinking gamers everywhere. Ostensibly WWII in space, Roberts' tale of derring-do and sacrifice in the face of insurmountable odds plays like a collision of Run Silent, Run Deep and Star Wars, minus the latter's Joseph Campbell histrionics. It's rife with combat clichés -- hot shot pilots, flight deck romances, that grunt you just know is going to die before the film is half over -- but curiously, these work to Wing Commander's advantage. While much of the film is taken over by enormously entertaining dogfight sequences (courtesy of Roberts' Austin-based Digital Anvil), much of it also rests on the narrative drive, which seems clipped part and parcel from one of those old Why We Fight documentaries that Frank Capra doled out to keep our G.I.s in fighting mode. That's not so recidivist as it sounds. Prinze is eminently likable (though far too earnest) as Lt. j.g. Christopher Blair, who's pressed into service to stop the Kilrathi from a planned attack on the Sol system, home to Earth and all things cool and good. Blair is a half-breed, part human and part "Pilgrim," a group of early space travelers who forsook their humanity in favor of mastering space and time. Universally loathed, the Pilgrims are a nearly dead breed, of which Blair is presumably the last. His genetic skills in maneuvering Confederation ships through dangerous situations make him the Confederation's last, best hope for survival, and so off he goes. Along for the ride are his buddy Todd "Maniac" Marshall (Lillard, one of the most consistently entertaining young actors working today), and newfound paramour (and wing commander) Jeanette "Angel" Marshall (Burrows). All three characters could easily be dismissed as walking combat veteran clichés if not for the fact that they're clearly having a helluva time defending the universe from what are, essentially, mutant kitties with bad karma. In fact, the Kilrathi are one of my chief sticking points with Wing Commander: Who are they? Where did they come from? Why are they so intent on taking earth? All of these tactical questions are given short shrift in the film, leaving the race perhaps more of a cipher than it ought to be. And, of course, the latex-suited, whisker-faced costumes don't do much to help. Still, Wing Commander triumphs on sheer old-fashioned melodrama despite these flaws. It's Hellcats of the Navy parsecs out in the cold void of space, and like the Confederation it chronicles, against all odds it succeeds. (3/12/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Metropolitan, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
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: "... 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, forces 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, Tinseltown South
D: Hugh Wilson; with Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone, Sissy Spacek, Christopher Walken, Dave Foley. (PG-13, 112 min.)
... 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, Lakeline, Lincoln, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Walter Salles; with Fernanda Montenegro, Vinicius De Oliveira, 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)
Village
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)
Great Hills, Metropolitan
D: Roger Kumble; with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair, Christine Baranski, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid, Swoosie Kurtz, Sean Patrick Thomas, Louise Fletcher. (R, 95 min.)
The lure of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses proves irresistible for a fourth film rendition as the novel is adapted for the high-school set and given the same update treatment recently afforded Great Expectations and Romeo and Juliet. It works only sporadically, and more as a comic outing than as a vicious battle of sexual predation. Phillippe, with that pouty lower lip that might be better put to use as the prow of a polar icebreaker, plays Sebastian Valmont, the achingly bored Upper East Side poor-little-rich-Lothario who concedes to a hellish wager with his equally treacherous half-sister Kathryn (Gellar): If he can deflower virginal Annette (Witherspoon) before the onset of the school year, he wins a night with sis, and if Kathryn can turn her ex's new girlfriend Cecile (Blair) into a notorious slut, she wins his '54 Jag. On such familial firefights are great works of art founded -- there's no question that the source novel is a great, rich, sink-your-teeth-into-it-and-chew-away work for actors and directors alike. Of all the principals involved in this production, though, only Blair, as the dizzy, boy-crazy Cecile has any spark. The awakening of her sexuality is done as a comic romp, with much rolling of eyes, squeaky utterances, and weak-in-the-knees outbursts. In fact, Blair's performance here is a comic tour de force; she's far and away the best thing in Kumble's film, a potty gamine manhandled into adulthood by her domineering, society mother (Baranski) and the disreputable Valmont. Gellar's Kathryn is another matter. Both she and Phillippe seem ready, willing, and able to essay these scurrilous characters, but their interaction has the dull ring of fallacy to it. They plot and scheme and make outlandish sexual advances toward each other, but like the faces they show to the world at large, it all feels coolly false. Despite the steaming heaps of innuendo and sexual brinkmanship, this brother and sister for the incest set just don't smolder like they ought to. Witherspoon, too, is off-base. The flagrant one-dimensionality of Annette -- she's so chaste she's actually won an award in Seventeen with an essay on the importance of purity -- grates maddeningly; by the time she finally has it out with Valmont you're ready to slap her silly. Apart from Blair's riotous performance, the only other inspired work comes from the lavish production design by Jon Gary Steele, who surrounds the cast with lush, toney baronial halls and outfits that call to mind a pair of the Valmont's film predecessors -- Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie's vampiric society bloodsuckers in The Hunger. A vampire by any other name remains a vampire no matter what they suck -- it just helps when the film in question doesn't blow. (3/5/99)
Gateway, Highland, Lake Creek, Lakehills, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Alex de la Iglesia; with Alex Angulo, Armando de Razza, Santiago Segura, Terele Pavez, Nathalie Sesena, Maria Grazia Cucinotta. (R, 104 min.)
Let it never be said that Alex de la Iglesia is a man lacking an artistic vision. His previous film, the outrageous Accion Mutante, was a bizarre melding of superheroes and freak show gore, and this subsequent comic horror film is nothing short of a hangman's slapstick masterpiece. Day of the Beast (1995) garnered rave reviews in its native Spain and took home no less than six Goya Awards (the equivalent of our own Academy Awards), even though this film is a far cry from your typical awards fodder. To paraphrase James Ellroy, it's a film for the whole family, if the name of your family is the Charles Manson family. It's Christmas Eve, and Pedro Almodovar regular Alex Angulo plays Father Angel, a Madrid priest who believes that he has found a secret code that reveals that the Antichrist will be born before dawn. The film's shocking and darkly comic opening scene sets the tone of the film, and though I'm not about to give that cinematic sucker punch away, it's a wonder de la Iglesia is able to keep upping the ante as the film progresses. Angel, scorned by his superiors and pretty much everyone else to whom he attempts to explain his revelation (which is understandable since he appears scrawny, wears a tattered beret, and has the earnest zealotry of a prime wingnut), embarks on a mission to seek out and eradicate "the Beast" while utterly forsaking his priestly duties. Casually knocking old men down manholes and toting a 12-gauge, he's like some karmic Father Badass, the Very Bad Priest with a monstrous chip on his quaking shoulder. Descending into Madrid's seamy underbelly, Angel aligns himself with two other fractured denizens of the night, a bloated death metalhead with the unlikely name of José Maria (Segura), and Professor Cavan (de Razza), the unctuous host of an occult-oriented reality-based television program called The Dark Side (think Jerry Springer with a more astrological bent). Through the course of this endlessly gory Christmas Evil, Angel and his allies struggle to find, defeat, and possibly even align themselves with the Devil's henchmen. While the film is rife with ultra-violence and crimson goo, make no mistake, this is also a howlingly outrageous comedy and frankly as original a horror film as I've seen in some time. It's certainly not for everyone -- the shot of a hellish ram standing erect on its hind legs and grinning out at you, a real ram, mind you, is almost too creepy -- but there is no mistaking de la Iglesia's wildly unique vision. This is a director with a fresh and startling (if somewhat disturbing) voice, and for fans of the genre a welcome addition to the international pantheon. (2/26/99)
Dobie
D: Joel Schumacher; with Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare, Anthony Heald, Chris Bauer, Catherine Keener, Myra Carter, Amy Morton. (R, 119 min.)
It used to be that Brian De Palma was the one who made folks antsy. Now it's Joel Schumacher. That's chiefly because Schumacher lacks De Palma's stylized visual aesthetic -- when Schumacher goes for the sleaze, it really creeps you out, and not in ways the director likely intended. 8 MM is mainstream Hollywood's first attempt to tackle that great old urban legend, the snuff film, in which unwitting young women are ritually raped and then butchered for the express purpose of distributing the film to a select clientele. No solid examples of real snuff films have ever seen the light of day (though several years ago actor Charlie Sheen got his hands on a Japanese slasher film that so terrified him he rushed it over to the LAPD convinced it was the real deal), but the myths persist, as they always do, and have fueled the grimmer side of caffeine-fueled collegiate discussions to this day. Like those Mexican donkey shows, everybody knows they're out there, but no one's ever actually seen one. As surveillance expert Tom Welles, Cage is enlisted by wealthy dowager Mrs. Christian (Carter) to discover the identity of a young girl who appears on a Super-8 reel found in the late Mr. Christian's private safe. The film appears to be pure snuff, with a leather-hooded steroid case wielding wicked hunting knives and gobs of fear and loathing. Looking to up his profile in the cutthroat world of the modern private eye (the poor guy lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), as well scare up some future funding for his baby girl's college years, Welles takes the case and in quick order discovers the girl's identity and that the film is indeed real (although truthfully it looks like an edit-reel from David Cronenberg's Videodrome). Saddling himself with streetwise porn-store clerk Max (Phoenix) as an "in" to the nebulous world of extreme pornography, Welles tackles Los Angeles' grimy back alleys before finally chasing down his quarry in New York City's odoriferous meat-packing neighborhood. Cage, always prone to histrionics, makes the most of his hangdog face this time out -- clearly it's a role he could savor, with action, pathos, tenderness, and outright horror all over the place. What can you say about him? He's Nicolas Cage, and you either think he ought to back off the act-phetamines or push it even further. Not surprisingly, he pushes it further, and to a point, it works. It doesn't hurt things that the actor is surrounded by an ensemble of powerful character actors, including Coen Brothers regular Stormare as well as Gandolfini, Heald, and -- a welcome sight -- Keener. Still, adventurous though it may be, 8 MM has that Hollywood patina all over it. I'd like to think the project would have fared better in more eclectic hands, say Gus Van Sant, or perhaps Roman Polanski, but what's done is done and what's done is maybe not what it could have been. (2/26/99)
Barton Creek, Great Hills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Metropolitan, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
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
D: John Boorman; with Brendan Gleeson, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball, Jon Voight. (R, 120 min.)
I'm no expert on Irish history, but I can only assume that when one of their criminals is singled out as unusually flamboyant, this should be viewed as a pretty heavy-duty superlative. Martin Cahill, the hood in question, was definitely a rare bird in the annals of modern crime: a ruthless armed robber, racketeer, and extortionist who somehow managed to attract all the public adulation we associate with Robin Hood-type crooks without actually sharing much of his ill-gotten swag with his fellow working-class Irishmen. John Boorman's fascinating biopic seeks, with a large measure of success, to explain this peculiar cult of personality. In the process, it also gives us one of the few truly original gangster movies made in recent years by a non-Asian director. From its striking look -- the film is shot entirely in widescreen black-and-white -- to the rich, unfailingly authentic performances by Gleeson (as Cahill) and Voight (as the decent-hearted detective who pursues him), everything here conveys a refreshing sense that the genre rulebook has been thrown completely out the window. Which makes sense, given the one-of-a-kind nature of Martin Cahill himself. As Boorman makes clear, it wasn't just Cahill's flair for extravagant tour de force heists that endeared him to the hoi polloi. It was also his knack for twisting the knife afterward by beating the rap in ways that emphasized the cops' ineffectuality. For example, he once used $80,000 in stolen cash to obtain a cashier's check. He then crossed the street to the police station and chatted with puzzled flatfeet as his men slipped into the bank and stole back the original cash. Cahill thereby doubled his money while setting up the station cops as his alibi! Predictably, these antics had the effect of taunting a rabid pit bull by bashing a stick against its chain link pen. The screws tightened on Cahill, pushing him toward disastrous decisions (chiefly involving run-ins with the IRA) and paranoia-driven abuse of his own loyal gang members. Cahill was a vexingly complex man who didn't neatly conform to any of our pat understandings of either real or movie crooks. A sentimental, teetotaling family guy with a fondness for T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon pigs, he also threatened jurors, openly fathered children by his sister-in-law, and once disciplined one of his men by nailing his hands to a pool table. Gleeson, a remarkable actor known for both the quantity and quality of his work (Braveheart, I Went Down, and The Butcher Boy among others) never cheats for a millisecond in his balanced portrayal of the dark and light elements in Cahill's nature. The resulting picture is as muddled and murky as life itself, "unmovielike" to an often disturbing extent. But Cahill's story -- outlandish and contradictory as it is in Boorman's retelling -- made me think, feel, and reflect more than any crime-themed movie I've seen since Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks. Funny, scabrous, disturbing, tragic, and improbably life-affirming, The General travels its own idiosyncratic path with more real style and substance than the past half-decade of Hollywood gangster movies combined. (3/5/99)
Arbor
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 ... 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 absurd... it's a human drama thang." "I'm gonna just wait out the night and see what transgresses.") Ethereal Jesus freak Norma grooves blissfully to her stack of gospel tapes. Mellow J.D. sucks down unfiltered cigarettes and beams like a shitkicker Buddha. Gap-toothed Janice seethes with righteous fury at unpunished rule violations. Further obviating any doubt that we're meant to laugh with, not at, these people is the filmmakers' direct involvement in the drama. Speaking with obvious empathy to contestants, cracking up at their jokes, underscoring their powers of endurance with frequent shots of the sun and moon crossing the sky, Bindler's affection and respect for his subjects is unimpeachable. As with Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the documentarian's receptive spirit makes us collaborators in -- not just observers of -- the peculiar quest we're seeing. We've been blessed with an amazing run of great documentaries over the past couple of years, and Hands on a Hard Body ranks with the very best. The cost-cutting measures endemic to DIY filmmaking are clearly reflected in bare-basics production techniques and the rather dodgy look created by blowing up an original Hi-8 video print. Yet a nigh-miraculous blend of high spirits, poignancy, gentle satire, and unpretentious insight into the nature of human aspiration make this one of the most impressive films you're likely to see this year. (7/10/98)
Dobie
D: 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)
Village
D: James Moll; with Alice Lok Cahana, Renee Firestone, Dario Gabbai, Tom Lantos, Irene Zisblatt. (Not Rated, 88 min.)
Co-produced by Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, this documentary speaks with five survivors of the Holocaust, all of them originally from Hungary, and all of them present at the end as Hitler's war machine shuddered to a listless halt. Unlike the burgeoning cottage industry that documentaries about the Nazis and their crimes sometimes seem to have become, The Last Days doesn't end with a shot of the camp's dead occupants lying about like so much jackstraw cordwood, grim and sorrowful. Instead, Moll somehow manages to find some small scrap of good to use as closure -- I won't give that away but I will say that it involves Rep. Tom Lantos, D-California, one of the more remarkable interviewees. Lantos and the other four were corralled late in the war by the Nazi SS. It was 1945 -- a full six years into the blitzkrieg and well after the point of no return for the Fuhrer's tactical fortunes -- that the Nazis came for the Jews of Hungary. One of the most frequently asked questions regarding Hitler's bizarre machinations -- one asked again in this film -- is why Hitler expended so much time and so many resources trying to blot out those last few handfuls of European Jewry when, by virtue of allowing them to remain unmolested, he could have marshaled his strength elsewhere and almost certainly caused the war to slog on another six months if not longer. Why waste precious personnel on the Final Solution? There is, of course, no easy answer to that one, and the film, thankfully, doesn't dip into the pedantic, clumsily trying to offer one final answer. Instead, Moll takes us through those last days of the war with newsreel footage, German camp footage, and most affectingly, newly discovered color footage shot by American GIs after the liberation of the camps. Moll briefly interviews a trio of these grunts, as well, but it's the five survivors who are his main focus. Hesitantly, sometimes frail with age but clearly very much alive, they recount their stories: lost parents, brothers, sisters, things, and events we've all heard somewhere before, but personalized in an alarming and urgent fashion. Moll takes his camera along to interview Dr. Hans Munch, the only surviving Nazi doctor who worked alongside the infamous Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz's sister camp, Birkenau. Cleared at Nuremberg, Munch declares his innocence, saying that he actually helped save Jews by experimenting on them and then keeping them inside the hospital where they could not be shot. Later in the film, Munch is introduced -- face to face -- with one of the five profiled survivors who prods him for answers about her sister. At once, Munch becomes vague and uncommunicative -- a grim turtle pulling back into his carapace at the first hint of trouble. Moll's film is a far cry from the elegiac poetry of, say, Night and Fog; it's a document more than an examination, and its power of record is inarguable and incorruptible. And then, at the end, somehow you find yourself with that least likely of expressions on your face, a smile, courtesy of Representative Lantos. (3/5/99)
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 ... 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)
Gateway, Highland, Metropolitan
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 ... whatever. Otherwise, we feel cheap, exploited, used. Not exactly the stuff of true love, eh? (2/12/99)
Great Hills, Lakehills, Lakeline, Lincoln, Northcross, 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, Round Rock, 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 by 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, Tinseltown North, 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, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
D: Garry Marshall; with Juliette Lewis, Diane Keaton, Tom Skerritt, Giovanni Ribisi. (PG-13, 129 min.)
From Benny & Joon to Angel Baby to Forrest Gump and beyond, there has been no shortage of recent movies addressing the implications of (non-platonic) love among the mentally disabled. Somehow, though, all this laudable gusto for getting down to the nitty-gritty of a complex, challenging social issue has produced very few films that work at the base level of simple believability. In these movies, of which The Other Sister is a textbook example, disturbed or mentally impaired lovers' unconventionality is generally portrayed as the sole barrier to their acceptance as fully sexual beings. The blatant unfairness of this situation establishes an easy dramatic framework in which the opposition of well-intended normals reveals them to be, as it were, retards in matters of the heart. The Other Sister is basically the same song, umpteenth verse. Lewis plays Carla, a mildly retarded rich girl who's back with her family after spending most of her teen years at a school for "special" kids. This involuntary banishment was the doing of her neurotic, over-protective mother, Elizabeth (Keaton) who ramrodded the decision past strong objections from her husband (Skerritt) and two other daughters. Though mom's love is unquestioned, she's so warped by her guilt, control-freak tendencies, and overdeveloped maternal instincts that she can't even begin to grasp the concept of Carla as any kind of autonomous being. So when Carla, a proud and surprisingly self-aware young woman, starts demanding to go to a mainstream trade school, live in her own apartment and maybe even (gasp!) acquire a boyfriend or two, it all hits mom with the force of an Evander Holyfield haymaker. The real crisis comes when Carla, as feared, not only falls in love but picks a similarly impaired guy named Daniel (Ribisi) as her swain. From the standpoint of the father, sisters, friends, viewers, and basically every other living organism on the planet save for dear old mother, this love is a blessing from the gods. The romance, even the tentative sexual stuff, is innocent, demure, and shot against an exquisitely beautiful backdrop of Frisco Bay-area scenery. Daniel, needless to say, is the most benign creature imaginable, a largely asexual lad who seems to have far greater passion for marching band music than for the old in-out in-out. Who could object to this situation? No one, of course. The only tension, such as it is, comes from Elizabeth's glacial journey toward accepting her daughter as she is. Lewis' acting, though elaborately stylized in the way we've come to expect from her, deserves special commendation. A classic case of bravely firing all one's rockets in a losing battle, it's the kind of work that, in a better world, would earn some kind of special-recognition Oscar. Otherwise, there's little to recommend this movie, which is part and parcel with Marshall's schlock-dominated body of work, to anyone -- especially viewers who are still waiting for an honest, courageous examination of this latently powerful subject matter. (2/26/99)
Barton Creek, Gateway, Highland, Lakeline, Metropolitan, Northcross, Riverside, Round Rock, Tinseltown North
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)
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, Riverside, Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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, 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, 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)
Gateway, Lake Creek, 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 ... 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, 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)
Gateway, 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
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 ... and for that precious gift we should say amen. (1/15/99)
Tinseltown South, Village
D: Risa Bramon Garcia: with Paul Rudd, Courtney Love, Ben Affleck, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, Dave Chappelle, Jay Mohr, Gaby Hoffman, Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Janeane Garofalo, Angela Featherstone, Guillermo Diaz. (R, 97 min.)
There's plenty of smoke in 200 Cigarettes, but not much fire. A comedy of manners for the hipster set, the movie aimlessly follows the converging paths of several New Yorkers trying to make their way to a New Year's Eve party, circa 1981. Because this is an MTV production, the trendy characters are all under 30; the calculated soundtrack features a different song about every three minutes; and the unfocused storyline is tailored for an audience nurtured on television that panders to attention deficit disorder. This isn't a movie, really; it's a marketing ploy. Hoping to capitalize on nostalgia for the go-go 1980s and the decade's tragic cultural accouterments (what has The Wedding Singer wrought?), 200 Cigarettes is a veritable fashion show of spike haircuts, cheap costume jewelry, fingerless net gloves, and bad dye jobs, set to the music of Elvis Costello, Blondie, and Kim Carnes. Beyond that, there's not much else to it. Even the title acknowledges the movie's triviality: It's nothing more than a marker, referring to the number of times the characters light up over the course of the film. (No doubt, the anti-tobacco lobby will protest the abandon with which the twentysomethings here glamorously inhale their nicotine pleasures and subliminally encourage impressionable filmgoers to dash to the nearest convenience store to buy a carton or two after leaving the theatre. Ardent nonsmokers will surely view 200 Cigarettes as the cinematic equivalent of Joe Camel.) While director Garcia has had an estimable career as a casting director, her inexperience behind the camera is evident throughout the film. She never finds the loopy energy this movie needs. Instead, the variously intertwined narratives seem segregated from each other; they don't work toward a common end. This lack of unified purpose might be less obvious if the characters in Shana Larsen's screenplay were the least bit interesting, but with a few exceptions, they're ciphers in a Manhattan demimonde. As a result, the actors have little with which to work. Courtney Love is surprisingly supple and sexy as a good-time girl secretly in love with her best friend, played by a hypertheatrical Paul Rudd. Dave Chappelle is a hoot as a taxi driver who dispenses romantic advice to his passengers, a cross between Barry White and Ann Landers. ("Music makes the booty spin 'round," he opines.) And as a clumsy debutante on a disastrous date, Kate Hudson (Goldie Hawn's daughter) channels her mother's vocal inflections and mannerisms with a precision that's scary. Although these three actors make this movie occasionally pleasurable, their impact is fleeting. As far as movies go, 200 Cigarettes is as forgettable as a puff off a generic-brand butt: filtered, flavored, and ultimately unsatisfying. (2/26/99)
Arbor, Barton Creek, Lake Creek, Metropolitan, Tinseltown North, Village
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)
Tinseltown North, Tinseltown South
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)
Metropolitan
COLUMBIA PICTURES 75th ANNIVERSARY FILM FESTIVAL
A week-long series of the studio's classics celebrates some of their most popular films. @Arbor; Fri-Thu.
Lawrence of Arabia, Fri (3/12) - Sat (3/13); 1pm, 7pm
Dr. Strangelove, Sun (3/14) - Mon (3/15); 1pm, 4:40pm, 9pm
Easy Rider, Sun (3/14) - Mon (3/15); 2:45pm, 7pm
It Happened One Night, Tue (3/16); 1pm, 4:40pm, 9pm
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Tue (3/16); 3:30pm, 9:30pm
The Bridge on the River Kwai, Wed (3/17); 4:30pm, 8pm
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Thu (3/18); 1pm, 5:15pm, 9:40pm
Tootsie, Thu (3/18); 3pm, 7:30pm
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.
ACCESS AUSTIN ARTS:
October Sky (1999) D: Joe Johnston; with Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, William Lee Scott, Chris Owen, Chad Lindberg, Laura Dern. This audio-described screening uses words to paint the picture and key visual elements for blind or visually impaired audience members. The descriptions are created live, with a trained volunteer describer, and are transmitted via unobtrusive FM radio signals. Access Austin Arts is dedicated to making the cultural arts accessible to people with disabilities and the group audio describes at least one movie a month as well as two to three live theatre events. For more info call 454-9912 or visit http://www.main.org/accessarts. (PG-13, 124 min.) @Great Hills 8; Sun (3/14), 2:15pm.
ALL AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL
A.A.F.F. is in its second year and will be showing 10 short films and videos produced or directed by Austin residents. Projects were filmed on 16mm, 8mm, 35mm, and digital video, and range in budget from $2,000 to $200,000. The event is sponsored by Giant Pictures, Fireroads Productions, Live Oak Brewing Co., and Dub Masters Video Services. Food will be provided by Carrabbas Italian Grill. For more info call 291-0060.@Ritz Lounge, Mon (3/15), 7-11pm; free admission.
CHOW YUN-FAT FESTIVAL:
Full Contact (1992) D: Ringo Lam; with Chow Yun-Fat, Simon Yam, Anthony Wong, Ann Bridgewater, Bonnie Fu."While it may lack the self-assured, stylistic integrity of John Woo's films, this recent Hong Kong import more than makes up for it in its unabashedly frenzied pacing and its obvious love for a well-placed exit wound. China's answer to Steve McQueen, the suavely inscrutableChow Yun-Fat stars here as "Jeff," a tough-as-nails nightclub bouncer who becomes mixed up with a gang of Thai killers when his pal Sam fails to pay back a vicious loan shark on time. Led by Judge (Hong Kong fashion model Yam), a preening dandy with a penchant for Day-Glo handkerchiefs and underage boy-toys, this odd triumvirate also includes a Mohican Neanderthal and the ironically named Virgin, a creepy moll so sex-mad that she makes Madonna look like a pale imitation of Mother Teresa. As in most other Hong Kong shoot-'em-ups, things go from bad to worse at roughly the speed of the subtitles: Sam has a contract put out on him, double-crosses Jeff and steals his streetwise, ravishing girlfriend. Jeff is almost killed, hides away in beautiful downtown Bangkok, then reappears, to Sam's dismay. Judge tries to seduce Jeff (and anyone else he fancies) and gets nowhere fast, etc. Although the story is more or less the same old thing, director Lam and star Chow Yun-Fat keep the action moving at somewhere close to light speed, with fireballs and muzzle-flash galore. This may be the first Hong Kong action film with a smooth and seductive gay villain, too, which injects a note of slightly skewed reality into what otherwise might have ended up as just another cartoon bad guy. Despite the obvious comparisons to Woo's films, Full Contact survives on its own gritty merits. It's a down-and-dirty little actioner that leaves you squirming, breathless in your seat." -- M.S., 5/7/93 (NR, 96 min.) @Dobie Theatre; Fri (3/12)-Thu (3/18).
CINEMAKER CO-OP
"Texas Film Art"exhibit at Pro-Jex Gallery includes stills from Texas-produced films such as Rushmore, The Faculty, The Newton Boys, Lone Star, Dazed and Confused, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Contributors include Richard Linklater, Lee Daniel, Alan Pappe, and others. In conjuction with the exhibit, the Cinemaker Co-op will present a screening of its new Best of '98 reel on Fri (3/12), 9pm, in the seminar room. On Saturday during the Artists' Reception, 6-10pm in the main gallery, two installations will be in place. One features selections from Bob Ray's Rock Opera, which is screening at the SXSW FIlm Festival, and the other showcases the Co-op's Super-8 Massacre compilation. (NR, 82 min.) @Artplex Building (1705 Guadalupe), Fri (3/12) - Sat (3/13); free admission.
CONDUIT.3: DIGITAL FILM AND GAMING FEST
Conduit returns for its third year with two nights of festival screenings and parties including two features and over 30 shorts, including 14 world and U.S. premieres. Highlights include the recent Academy Award-nominated short "Bunny," the short documentary about Lars von Trier, Lars From 1-10, the documentary feature The Gods of Times Square and the recent Sundance feature The Item. A program of computer games, PlayStation and N64 cinematics, and an exhibition of retro arcade games set the playful tone for this year's featival. Other programs include experimental/ambient excursions, Digital TX (a spotlight for Austin's own digital filmmakers), parties featuring a live performance by Seattle's Live Nude Girls, and a screening of Res Fest's Cinema Electronica. After-screening parties are set for both nights at Twist (505 Neches). For more info see the Web site at http://www.conduitfest.com or call 485-3147. @Jazz (214 E. Sixth), Sun (3/14) 3-11pm, Mon (3/15), 2pm-mid; $12/$7 students, $20 two-day all-access pass, free admittance to SXSW Film and Interactive badge-holders.
HIGHFALUTIN FILMS
40 (1999) D: Stephen Davis; with Troy Grant, Lyn Montgomery, Matthew Steven Tompkins, Chad Mitchell. This feature comedy, made by a Dallas filmmaker, is a road picture about an independent film director and his actors, who embark on a road trip to the Sundance Film Festival and undergo a collective midlife crisis.(NR, 82 min.)@Quackenbush's (2120 Guadalupe), Sat (3/13) - Sun (3/14), 8pm; and Cue Lounge (409-A Colorado), Mon (3/15), 8pm; free admission.
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.
RHINOS
Rhinos (1998) D: Randy Olsen; with Chad Nell, Adam Warren, Kelly Coffield. "Be a rhino" is the advice bellowed to them by the motivator who is training Mace and Brick to become thick-skinned perfume salesmen. That career doesn't last although the advice does, as the two shiftless twentysomethings follow their fortunes into such varied occupations as sperm donors and house cleaners. The advice could well be extended to the audience, who must endure prolonged episodes of aimless activity before getting to the occasional moments of nicely paced comedy. The Austin-based filmmakers (Randy Olsen, Chad Nell, and Adam Warren) seem to suffer from the same "get rich quick" delusions that plague the film's two heroes. More time developing the storyline instead of padding it out with such things as extended dry-heaving sequences might have better demonstrated the team's comic sensibilities and narrative ambitions. Rhino slackers like Mace and Brick are on nobody's endangered species list, however. -- M.B., review excerpted from movie's debut at the 1998 Austin Heart of Film Festival(NR)@Alamo Drafthouse; Thu (3/18), midnight.
TEXAS COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITES
TCH is celebrating its 25th anniversary on Saturday, March 13 with a daylong festival of humanities activities that are free and open to the public. The featured speaker is Dr. William Ferris, the recently appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose talk will take place 3:30-5:30pm in the Bass Lecture Hall on the UT campus. The celebration also includes the presentation of three prize-winning documentaries that received their initial funding from the TCH.
Orphan Trains D: Edward S. Gray. The film offers an account of the thousands of children who, beginning in 1860, were transplanted from the streets and alleys of New York City to homes throughout the Midwest and western United States. More than 100,000 orphans and abandoned children were moved by concerned social reformers, many of whom provide first-hand testimony of their experiences in this documentary. For more info see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/orphan.(NR)@Bass Lecture Hall; Sat (3/13), 9am.
Divided Highways D: Lawrence Hott and Tom Lewis. A winner of both Peabody and Emmy awards, this documentary details the story of our interstate highway system and the impact it has had, for good and for ill, on American life. Examined are the effects the highway system has had on neighborhoods, the economy, and the American family. For more info see http://www.pbs.org/weta/divided highways. (NR)@Bass Lecture Hall; Sat (3/13), 11am.
The Death of Davy Crockett D: Brian Huberman. At issue are the swirl of controversial stories that are attached to the mythic life and deathof the Tennessee/Texas folk hero, Davy Crockett. (NR)@Bass Lecture Hall; Sat (3/13), 1:30pm.
THE TEXAS DOCUMENTARY TOUR:
Kurt and Courtney (1997) D: Nick Broomfield. Hours after Kurt Cobain's shotgun-disfigured corpse was discovered in April 1994, the conspiracy theories began to fly fast and furious. Broomfield, master of in-your-face interviewing, gamely dives head-first into the muck and rakes for all he's worth. Did wife Courtney Love have Cobain killed in an effort to secure his fortune before a possible divorce? Broomfield interviews everyone from Love's estranged father ("I think she did it") to a Los Angeles private eye hired to sort through the wreckage of the couple's faltering marriage ("You bet she did it"). Of course, the bottom line is, "Did she or didn't she?" and Broomfield's film fails to offer much support either way. It's all backyard gossip with nary a shred of solid proof. The Seattle County Coroner's office's ruling of Cobain's death as a suicide still stands. Kurt and Courtney is a gold mine for Cobain fanatics -- recordings of a two-year-old Cobain singing giddily, home-movie footage, and lots of dreary Seattle locations abound -- but as for clearing up the mystery, there's nothing new to be found. -- M.S., 4/10/98 (NR, 99 min.) Nick Broomfield will conduct a Q&A after each screening. (See related story in this week's "Screens" section.) The Documentary Tour is co-sponsored by the Austin Film Society, the UT Department of RTF, The Austin Chronicle, and SXSW Film. @Alamo Drafthouse; Wed (3/17), 10pm (one show only), tickets go on sale at 9:15pm.
TEXAS FILMMAKERS' PRODUCTION FUND:EDtv Premiere (1999) D: Ron Howard; with Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres, Sally Kirkland, Martin Landau, Elizabeth Hurley, Rob Reiner, Dennis Hopper, Clint Howard. Matthew McConaughey stars in this TV culture comedy about a video store clerk who is plucked from obscurity and becomes the blockbuster hit of the season when he agrees to have his life aired on cable TV 24 hours a day. The screening is being presented as a benefit for the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund and is sponsored by the Austin Film Society, SXSW Film, Universal Pictures, and Imagine Entertainment. Attending the screening will be Howard and producer Brian Grazer, along with stars Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres (and traveling companion Anne Heche), Martin Landau, Sally Kirkland, and Clint Howard. Tickets are $150 and $200 and include orchestra or mezzanine seating, Q&A, and entree to an after-party with Jimmie Vaughan, Joe Ely, and other entertainment, hosted by Universal Pictures. Call the Film Society at 322-0145 to purchase tickets. @Paramount Theatre; Wed (3/17), 7pm.
UNDEAD FILM FESTIVAL
This upstart film festival dedicated to the rights of mummies, zombies, and the undead features Death and a Salesman by Joe Grisaffi and Richard Watts, All Cheerleaders Die by Lucky McKee, The Collegians Are Go!! by Dean and Chuck Collegian, Rock n' Roll Frankenstein by Brian O'Hara, and a special encore presentation of Her Dog Satan by Scott Conn. There will also be live music by the Collegians, the Secret Lovers, and suprise guests. For more info see http://www.flojo.com/undeadfest. @Club M (716 Red River), Fri (3/12), 8pm; BYOB; $4 admission.
