D: Giuseppe Tornatore; with Sergio Castellitto, Leopoldo Pinto, Franco
Scaldati, Tony Sperandeo, Clelia Rondinella, Jane Alexander, Tano Cimarosa,
Costantino Carrozza, Tony Palazzo.
VHS Home Video
I Luv Video, 4631 Airport Blvd.
 The Star Maker |
Paradiso, comes this 1996 Oscar-nominee for best foreign language film,
The Star Maker. Joe Morelli (Castellitto), a charlatan with a
megaphone-topped truck filled with movie-camera equipment, drives into Sicilian
villages promising fame and fortune to those who look Lady Luck in the face
(and pay 300 lire for a screen test to be sent back to Universal Studios in
Rome). The war-worn villagers of 1953 leap at this chance for a glamorous life,
clamoring to have their go at acting. Virtually overnight, the village becomes
a Hollywood set with citizens spruced up in their Sunday best spouting lines
from Gone With the Wind. Inevitably, screen tests become more
personalized and stories and secrets that will never make it to Rome are
immortalized on celluloid. This warm, comedic drama moves into tragedy when
Joe’s messy past and the old-world mafia catch up with him. The Star
Maker‘s characters move through honest revelations with exacting precision,
capturing the essence of hope and desperation associated with post-war village
life. — Stephany Baskin
Shattered Steel
InterplayPC CD-ROM
I’m not sure that I can find words strong enough to express the degree
of disappointment I felt when I fired up Shattered Steel for this
review. Of course, I’ll still give it a shot. The game is a horrendous
disaster. While the game fails on many levels — the missions, the story, the
characterization, and the animation are all sub-standard — what stands out
most is the abysmal graphics engine used to display the playing environment.
With games like Quake and Wing Commander IV currently popular,
players expect a game that takes place in a 3-D world to look
three-dimensional. Somehow, the creators of Shattered Steel contrived a
hideously unconvincing psuedo 3-D game. It looks terrible and it plays
awkwardly. The only saving graces for this sad attempt at entertainment
software is the art for some of the game set-up screens as well as one or two
decent cinematic sequences, but these are hardly of enough value to even
justify the expense of producing the box the game is shipped in.
— Kurt Dillard
Full Contact
D: Ringo Lam; with Chow Yun-fat, Simon Yam, Anthony Wong.VHS Home Video
Vulcan Video, 609 W. 29th St.
Before he became blandly assimilated into the American filmmaking machine with
the muddled Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Maximum Risk, Hong Kong action
director Ringo Lam was giving us brilliantly out-of-control offerings like
Full Contact, a beautifully shot, jaw-dropping hour-and-a-half of seedy
characters, wild double-crosses, and even wilder action sequences.
Hard-Boiled‘s Chow Yun-fat stars as a bad-ass, butterfly knife-wielding
nightclub bouncer and sometime criminal seeking revenge after he is betrayed by
his best buddy who has fallen in with a flamboyant, gay gangster (Simon Yam,
absolutely incredible) and his outrageous entourage. Loud, violent, sexed-up,
and politically incorrect as hell, Full Contact is a one-of-a-kind
action film full of scene-stealing performances and the sort of loopy thrills
that could only be made in Hong Kong. — Joey O’Bryan
Brief Encounter
D: David Lean; with Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, CyrilRaymond, Joyce Carey.
VHS Home Video
Vulcan Video, 609 W. 29th St.
Written and produced by Noel Coward, Brief Encounter (1945) tells the
tale of two happily married but adulterous Brits from different towns who
pursue one another when fate and the train schedule allows… and also when it
doesn’t. Framed as a flashback in which a routinized, fragile wife mentally
narrates to her daft yet lovable husband what must be the cinema’s most unique
pseudo-confessional, this lush melodrama does not wallow in emotion, but makes
it a catalyst for the film’s action. Lean’s cogent direction utilizes
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 as effectively as it does the actors.
For all the analysis, however, Brief Encounter somehow defies
dissection. Perfectly paced, dramatic, and intelligent, it is a film to fall in
love with. — Clay Smith
Tekken2
NamcoSony PlayStation
 |
Tekken2 has finally arrived, and no other beat-’em-up currently
available for the platform can come close to touching it. Following a
breathtaking graphical intro, the player is confronted with a veritable
plethora of game options, the best of which is a highly useful practice mode to
help hone fighting skills. Tekken2 has 25 playable characters (including
a dinosaur with boxing gloves), most of which have to be earned through combat.
The game’s graphics are exceptional, and the music is, well, quite punchy.
Although many moves and combos require skill and patience to master,
successfully pulling them off can be quite satisfying. A must-have for fighting
fans. — Bud Simons
This article appears in November 29 • 1996 and November 29 • 1996 (Cover).