Heart and Souls

Omigod! I actually liked this movie.

Heart and Souls is the kind of sentimental, feel-good flick that’s usually sweet enough to cause a diabetic coma. The film could easily have drowned in its high-concept and excessive heart tugs.

But Heart and Souls successfully sidesteps most of its potential pitfalls. Even the predictable recycling of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons’ hit “Walk Like a Man” slips by as a modestly funny gesture. Besides, the song contains a mixture of dorkiness and emotional rawness that fits the mood of the movie quite well.

The story is simple. A bus crash sends four souls into a state of limbo on earth. The accident that killed them also resulted in the birth of Thomas, a young boy who these disembodied souls find themselves mysteriously drawn to. It’s not until Thomas is a young man that the spirits discover the reason for their attachment: they are to work through him to resolve their previous life, so that they can reincarnate to the next one.

On paper, Heart and Souls sounds like a New Age bestseller by Shirley MacLaine. The script begs comparison to Ghost, and the Steve Martin comedy All of Me. In many ways, the movie resembles a supernatural variation of the Quantum Leap TV series (for instance, the film shares the show’s peculiar charm).

Charles Grodin, Kyra Sedgewick, Alfre Woodard and Tom Sizemore are the very living – and slightly baffled – dead. It’s through their characters (especially Grodin and Woodard’s) that Heart and Souls achieves most of its wit and warmth. They may be souls on ice, but they know how to have fun.

Robert Downey Jr., as the adult Thomas, has the weakest role in the film. Downey is one of the better “brat pack” actors, but he’s not versatile enough to handle the radical personality changes required when the different souls enter his body. His character’s life resolution plays as a minor, belated climax.

Heart and Souls is a good test of director Ron Underwood’s ability to mine gold from a seemingly depleted vein. His production of Tremors was a throwback to the giant-mutant-beastie flicks, but its strong characterizations and plot made it fresh. Likewise, his hit City Slickers glided smoothly through what should have been the rough waters of weak material.

With Heart and Souls, he proves once again his ability to make a film that should have failed succeed.

Gay Cinema Comes Out of the Closet

There’s always been a gay cinema – but, like much of gay and lesbian culture, it’s been largely unknown and virtually invisible.

But within the last decade, gay cinema has gone from being an underground presence to holding a lead position on the art house and film festival circuit. This weekend, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which sparked the gay rights movement, three of the most acclaimed – and, in some cases, the most controversial – gay documentaries of the past year will be presented in an inadvertent marathon of the New “Queer” Cinema.

Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness, Sex Is… and Fast Trip, Long Drop are radically divergent works, but they share a common defiance of a decrepit taboo on gay and lesbian culture that still simmers behind the right-wing cultural wars of the ‘90s.

A few pockets of society still decry the very existence of gays and lesbians, let alone the expression of their various lifestyles. Not surprisingly, this position has been historically supported in many aspects of our society, including the movie industry. Section Two, line four of the Motion Picture Production Code (adopted in March, 1930) simply states: “Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.” Though the word “perversion” was changed in 1961 to “aberration,” the extensive and exclusionary meaning of these few words banned the subject of homosexuality from the American screen for nearly 40 years. Or at least it tried. The Production Code policy was a form of tyranny that was occasionally overcome by filmmakers’ cleverness and the industry’s stupidity.

During the 1930s, such foreign films as Maedchen in Uniform and Vampyr were able to slip lesbian subplots under the low radars of the censors through a combination of vague suggestiveness and difficult symbolism. In Hollywood, Marlene Dietrich got to wear men’s clothes and kiss the ladies in Morocco, as long as it was a ploy to attract Gary Cooper’s attention. But it took the B movie Dracula’s Daughter to extensively breach the code, as the title femme fatale expressed a surprisingly strong interest in bohemian lifestyles and other women.

But the gay subterfuge of old Hollywood was never more than a slightly subversive crack within the stonewall of straight mainstream pictures. It wasn’t until the American experimental movement of the 1950s that some major fissures surfaced in the national sexual zeitgeist. The overt homosexual subject matter that dominated the movies of such avante-garde filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, James Broughton and Jack Smith forced the issue to the forefront through a combination of shock (Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures) and lyrical artistry (The Golden Position).

Despite their limited audiences, these experimental movies gradually influenced Hollywood. “The mainstream always co-opts what is fashionable in the avante-garde,” observes Melodie Calvert, Assistant Curator of Media at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Scorpio Rising, in part, became the inspiration for the drive-in hit The Wild Angels, which in turn helped to promulgate the leather-and-chain biker look.

The emergence of the gay rights movement in the ‘70s created a political agenda as well as a sudden sense of public visibility that helped to pave the way for such ground-breaking documentaries as The Word is Out and Gay U.S.A.. The idea that being gay was a social statement struck like a lightning bolt in dim parts of the film industry. Such independent-themed features such as Lianna and Deserts Hearts were mild at best, but they succeeded in making their subject viable at the box office.

“But in the early ‘80s, there still weren’t that many gay features around,” explains Calvert. “It was with the AIDS movement that the gay community became very active and, in the process, they made the independent circuit more open to gay film making.”

Ironically, the grim threat of the modern plague also served as the catalyst for a flurry of tightly focused and increasingly audacious films and videos. The new queer cinema is a mix of forces that, literally, are composed of the most elementary factors – life and death. That a positive message can be found in the struggle is the theme of Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness. The movie profiles the long-term AIDS survivors who were the subject of a recent photo book, Living Proof, and who discovered that testing positive doesn’t mean that one’s attitude must be negative.

Sex Is… goes for the nitty gritty through graphic footage and surprisingly candid interviews. It covers a range of gay male experiences from monogamous bliss to bath house orgies, and takes a risk of getting stuck on director Mark Huestis’ fascination with S&M technology. But Sex Is… also takes a valiant stand in defense of life over death as it offers a vivid chronicle of gay life before and after the virus.

The most interesting and complex of the three is the video Fast Trip, Long Drop by Gregg Bordowitz. Its wild mix of experimental visuals, angry satire and psycho-drama role playing gives Bordowitz ample room to vent against everything from his HIV status to the medical community, TV talk shows and his family. Bordowitz is determined to do a number on your head, but he has a point and he makes it well.

Demolition Man:

Film Theorists, please note: Sylvestor Stallone has become a deconstructionist. Of course, Sly probably thinks that the word “deconstruction” refers to de crew at de work site around de corner. Actually, that’s not such a bad definition. It fits his newest film like a fist in a chain-mail glove.

Demolition Man is wildly violent, irredeemably awful and occasionally crazy enough to be almost watchable – especially if you are half warped and laugh at Jeffery Dahmer jokes. It’s also the oddest movie ever to be partly based on the novel Brave New World. I am not kidding. One of the main characters is even named Lenina Huxley. You just know that one of the writers of this sucker is an English Lit. major gone bad.

The flick opens as a parody of Blade Runner. It’s 1996, and the Hollywood sign is in flames above a riot-torn Los Angeles. Stallone is Sgt. John Spartan of the LAPD, the kind of cop who blows up whole sections of the city just to catch one man. Which he does while arresting Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes with blond hair). Phoenix is the self-proclaimed king of South Central L.A. and a full-time homicidal maniac. This combo insures a double-digit body count before the opening credits.

Spartan catches his man, but allows 30-some hostages to get wasted. As a result, both he and Phoenix are sentenced to serve some time frozen in a cryogenic prison. Fast skip to 2032, where a defrosted Phoenix stages a bloody escape. The 21st century cops of the San Angeles Police Force have no experience with dangerous criminals, so guess who they pop loose from the fridge?

It’s at this point Demolition Man tries to be a satire. We learn that after the great quake – and the administration of President Schwarzenegger – Los Angeles merged with Santa Monica. To prevent further war and violence, the entire society was reconditioned by its patron savior, Raymond Cocteau, who created a politically correct haven that outlawed all forms of bad language, physical contact and aggressive behavior. It’s a perfect new order that’s vaguely threatened by a pesky pack of subterranean civil libertarians. In other words, the whole place is ripe for a head-bashing fest.

This is not the dumbest flick that Stallone ever starred in. But, it’s close, real close. (Actually, someone like Roger Corman could have milked it into a great drive-in piece – it’s incoherent enough to be post-modernist, and its ironies are piled high.)

Too bad Demolition Man isn’t worse – it’s almost bad enough to be good.

Tim Burton"s The Nightmare Before Christmas

Let's set the record straight. This isn't a film by Tim Burton. It's directed by his old chum Henry Selick; Burton produced the movie and authored the story its script is based on. He also provided the inspiration for the visuals, which are faithfully copied from his other movies, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns.

What Burton didn't invest in this film was his own weird brand of gifted dementia. The Nightmare Before Christmas tries for that odd mix of grotesque manners and genuine feeling that infuses Burton's best work, but it only succeeds in being a second-rate imitation that lacks the crazy drive and energy of Burton's own movies.

What it does have is some great puppet-model animation, a very minor story and a numbingly dull musical score. It's the music that really grates on the nerves: the movie is virtually a non-stop musical based upon one melodic line and a lot of bad rhymes. The net result sounds as though it should be called Andrew Lloyd Webber's Nightmare Before the Opera.

The animation is impressive, but The Nightmare Before Christmas needs more than visuals – it needs a unique spark. When Burton's special brand of black magic works, it can be brilliant. When it doesn't, you're left pondering the self-indulgent nature of adolescent obsessions.

The Ballad of Little Jo

The Western has taken many forms, from singing cowboys to Italian epics. But The Ballad of Little Jo is the first gender-bender, feminist horse opera. If nothing else, director Maggie Greenwald has scored a footnote in the history book.

She's done much more than that, though. The Ballad of Little Jo was inspired by a real woman, Josephine Monaghan, a cowboy whose gender wasn't discovered until after her death. Much of the film attempts to recreate the harsh realities of life in the West that explain why a woman would find it preferable to pose as a man.

In The Ballad of Little Jo, Monaghan has barely arrived out West before a decrepit peddler tries to sell her as a sex slave. It doesn't take long before Josephine discovers that in the West, a woman is either a wife or a whore. Since she doesn't want either role, she quickly cuts off her hair, pulls on some trousers and passes for one of the boys. She even starts wearing her six-shooter in the crotch position favored by gunfighters. Symbolism, anyone?

Even as a man, Little Jo has to contend with a brutish society ruled by whichever man in the bar is least drunk. The Ballad of Little Jo takes a mud-in-your-eye view of the West that's grim, but also reasonably accurate.

The movie's only real problem is its slow pace. Despite its leisurely attitude, however, its gritty tale punches some solid holes in genre conventions.

M. Butterfly

There really was a French diplomat stationed in Beijing who didn't realize that his Chinese lover was actually a man. Technically, M. Butterfly is that tale. Actually, it's David Cronenberg's newest foray into the madness-charged realm of naked flesh and raw emotions. M. Butterfly lacks the overt gore and craziness of Cronenberg's previous films, but it's still a relentless drive to destruction.

Jeremy Irons plays the diplomat who's more attracted to the idea of femininity than he is to women. John Lone plays the cross-dressing Chinese opera singer who fulfills Iron's female ideal. Mao Zedong is the chair of the Chinese Communist Party, which is staging the Cultural Revolution around them.

Cronenberg is one of the most daring and interesting filmmakers currently working, but M. Butterfly is too tame for the master of such modern classics as Naked Lunch, Videodrome, and Dead Ringers. Even Cronenberg's statements about sexual and cultural conditioning are offered in a placid manner, as if he were warming up for a gig on Masterpiece Theatre.

Crooklyn

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to mind your own business. Take Crooklyn, for example. With this, his latest film, a surprisingly mellow Spike Lee makes a sentimental journey back to his old neighborhood circa 1970 – a trip filtered through the innocence and malleability of children, as they grapple with the high anxiety of the adult world. Crooklyn is a slow, subtle and often rewarding movie.

According to Time magazine, however, Lee’s trying to set a social agenda for black filmmakers.

Say what? Even Lee has given up on the idea that he can set any kind of an agenda for anyone else. Besides, if the over-the-hill white boys at Time want to blame somebody for introducing a social agenda into the African-American cinema (as if this were a unique idea), then they should take that issue to Charles Burnett (director of To Sleep With Anger). Lee himself has acknowledged Burnett’s influence on black film making, and in some ways, Crooklyn plays like an extended homage from Lee to Burnett.

Crooklyn is a will-o’-wisp of a movie held together by the slim but tender plot thread of a middle-class Brooklyn family that’s desperately holding on to its economic foothold, while the musician father (Delroy Lindo) takes a slippery gamble in the pursuit of pure music. The family’s held together by the sheer, harsh and often embittered tenacity of the mother (Alfre Woodard in the best role of her career). She frequently comes across as a shrew, but her love for her family extends even beyond death.

At its best, Crooklyn possesses a sense of emotional intimacy and an authentic feel for its place and time that makes it a joy to watch. Despite a few false steps, Crooklyn is a good slice-of-life study.

Cronos

Mexican vampire movies have long been one of the underground pleasures of the hard-core film fan. At their best, these movies are wired and weird, with a freewheeling mix of absurd narratives and easy borrowings from the lexicon of popular culture. They’re usually lacking in high-brow pretensions and, at the strangest moments, they may erupt into divine fits of stylistic ecstasy.

But what can you say about a Mexican vampire movie that’s stuck to its cob-webbed rafters with aesthetic ambitions? That’s the problem with Cronos, the generally tasteful blood fest by writer-director Guillermo Del Toro that’s received the Mexican version of the Academy Award, as well as the 1993 Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite its dabbling in the muddy waters of the horror genre, Cronos is more concerned with delivering a somber meditation on good photography.

The movie’s story centers on a 15th-century alchemist (Mario Ivan Martinez), who created a nifty looking doohicky called the Cronos Device. The mechanism possesses the mysterious ability to extend human life – and it must work, because the alchemist doesn’t die until the 1990s. The only problem with the Cronos Device is that repeated use turns the user into a vampire (like a junkie, the user is compelled to keep coming back to the nasty biting gizmo).

This sets the stage for an accelerating feud between an aging antique dealer (Federico Luppi) and a dying industralist (Claudio Brook). Ex-Beast Ron Perlman is also along as the movie’s chief thug, and his character’s obsession with getting a nose job is one of the few bright spots of the film.

Otherwise, Cronos is all nibble and no bite.

Cops and Robbersons

Chevy Chase is going through a rough spell. His short-lived talk show played like a nationally televised nervous breakdown. In his new comedy, Cops and Robbersons, Chase performs as if he were a shell-shocked vet skirting a catatonic state. The film isn’t very good, but Chase is even worse. His snotty energy appears to be gone, and even his pratfalls are limp and lifeless.

Not that he has much to work with in Cops and Robbersons. He plays a suburban drudge whose only interest in life is TV cop shows. He has less than a vague understanding of his own family, but he knows every episode of Police Woman by heart. No wonder he can’t wait to cooperate when the cops ask to use his house for a stakeout.

Chase’s new neighbor (Robert Davi) is a big-time counterfeiter and money-launderer whose work is in hot demand, despite his nasty habit of blowing up his clients. Jack Palance plays a surly copper out of the Stone Age whose orders are to catch the hood that Davi works for. So he and his partner hang around the house annoying everyone while hoping that Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez don’t sue for theft of plot device.

Strangely enough, Palance – who successfully furthers his new career as the tongue-in-check macho man of the senior citizen set – is one of the few funny things in the movie. He snarls most of the best lines and becomes a male role model for Chase’s kids.

The only cast member capable of holding her own opposite Palance is Dianne Wiest as Chase’s wife. In fact, she and Palance make for a better pairing than either of them do with Chase – and they’re not even supposed to like each other. Sadly, they’re the only things that make it possible to watch this movie at all.

Claire of the Moon

Writer’s block is a terrible thing. Especially if you insist on filming it. It’s even worse if the filmmaker’s concept of writing is a bag of clichés she picked up, presumably, in college lit classes. Unfortunately, said concept is the foundation for the lesbian romance film Claire of the Moon.

Trisha Todd plays Claire Jabrowski, a young, straight and sexually promiscuous writer who achieved success with her book, Life Can Ruin Your Hair. Claire’s hair is fine, but she’s having trouble working on her next book. So off she goes to a writers’ retreat on the Oregon coast that specializes in feminist politics and gorgeous shorelines.

Unfortunately, the situation isn’t as idyllic as the setting. Claire runs into problems right away with her roommate. Of course, the fact that she has a roommate is the primary problem: people go to writers’ retreat to retreat – not to socialize.

The roomie is Dr. Noel Benedict (Karen Trumbo), a psychiatrist/author who told The Naked Truth. The doctor (who is clothed for most of the movie) has an approach to psychology that consists of broad generalizations. She is attractive, gay and a driven professional. (She also keeps referring to Oprah Winfrey as if they just had lunch.)

The two women take an instant dislike to each other. In the logic of cinema, of course, this means that they will become lovers. It takes the entire film, however, for the characters to catch on to what the audience knew 15 minutes into the movie.

Meanwhile, back at the retreat, none of the women spend much time writing. Instead, they gather frequently to harangue each other about sexual politics. In an interesting twist, it isn’t men who are villains of their arguments – it’s straight women. Maggie, who runs the retreat, is especially hard on them. She has the personality of Norman Mailer and bullies the other women with her stridently radical line. She’s also one of the few engaging characters in the film.

The remaining characters are one-dimensional stereotypes: there is the man-obsessed Southern belle who writes romance novels filled with throbbing male parts, a valley girl New Ager and a nearly brainless housewife.

It’s fortunate that the film’s writer-director is Nicole Conn. A male director would be shot (deservedly) for such characterizations of women, gay or straight.

The closest Claire of the Moon comes to irony is in its peculiar predominance of straight sex scenes. Despite its simplistic version of lesbian-feminist politics, the film treats men as sex objects. Go figure.

Cabin Boy

Chris Elliott’s humor is an acquired taste.

Unfortunately, lots of people have trouble acquiring it. After all, his TV series, Get a Life, was canceled because of low ratings – and this was on the Fox Network for crying out loud.

He has earned a cult following, however, as a result of the Fox show and, first, because of the success he scored as a comic-writer and performer on David Letterman’s show. His new movie, Cabin Boy, is banking on the questionable size of his admiring audience.

The plot to this sucker isn’t intended to make much sense in print. It doesn’t even make much sense on the screen. Elliott plays an arrogant, condescending nitwit who’s just graduated from the Stephenwood Finishing School. He’s such a jerk that he gets bounced out of his own limo by an angry chauffeur.

Left on his own, he successfully screws up and lands on the S.S. Filthy Whore, a fishing boat that’s so grubby, even its drunken crew can’t stand it. They also can’t stand Elliott. Especially after he shanghais the ship into Hell’s Bucket – a realm populated by mansharks, six-armed sirens and colossus-sized hardware salesmen with bad attitudes.

Despite all of this, Elliott is actually good at what he does. But his shtick is based on smirks and weird ironies piled higher that the ship’s foremast. Even the funniest bits in Cabin Boy are such an uneven mixture of conceptual comedy and old-fashioned stupidity that it’s hard to know where the punchline is. And every time you laugh, you want to slap yourself for having done so. (But I have to admit that I slapped myself quite a few times during the movie.)

Cabin Boy, essentially, is a Pee Wee’s Playhouse for jaded and immature men. Not surprisingly, the movie was co-produced by Tim Burton. What is surprising is David Letterman’s cameo. He’s even more condescending than Elliott – and that takes some doing.

Beth B’s Under Lock and Key

In the doorway of the gallery is a large black box. Its brutal bulk is intensely intimidating.

It should be.

The box is actually four isolation cells. Inside each cell is a metal slab, a drain hole and a single, bare bulb. Through a speaker hidden in the cell’s ceiling, excerpts are played from convict-author Jack Henry Abbot’s book In the Belly of the Beast.

Behind the cell block, at the back of the gallery, are two large, rear-projection screens. On the right, an actor plays serial killer Ted Bundy, using material culled from interviews before Bundy’s execution. On the left, people who have been assaulted read letters that they have written to their attackers.

The alternating images are periodically joined together in blurred abstractions of trees. They form slow streaks across the screen. It’s as if they were a visualization of a scream.

This is the cold, dark heart of Under Lock and Key, Beth B’s multimedia installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The exhibit is harsh, didactic and unrelenting. It’s also a direct confrontation with evil.

The exhibit has a raw, visceral effect: it’s crudely dramatic and extremely uncomfortable.

But Beth B’s work is never comfortable. She is the punk poet of the primal scream.

She is best known as a filmmaker, gaining her initial notoriety at the end of the ‘70s with the Super-8 movies G-Man, The Offenders, and Black Box. The films are a crazy quilt of rambling narratives, primitive techniques and taboo violations – an odd mishmash of Franz Kafka, Amnesty International reports on torture and post-Oedipal loathing.

The punk “no-wave” movement was in full gear at that time and the films were tremendously popular, playing all over New York’s lower East Side. The Offenders was presented as a regular serial at Max’s Kansas City – the musical mecca of punkdom. Despite the films’ venomous anti-aesthetic approach, they found their way into such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum of Chicago.

And the films kept coming. There are her features – Vortex, Salvation! and the soon-to-be-released Two Small Bodies. Not to mention her music videos, with such catchy titles as Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.

But Beth B is a painter and printmaker (and the daughter of painter Ida Applebroog), as well as a filmmaker. Under Lock and Key unites her diverse media in a single, focused context.

The early films provide crucial references to her current exhibit. Black Box is about a man who is kidnapped, stripped, hung upside down and eventually placed within a torture chamber based upon devises used by the Chilean secret police. Another film, Letters to Dad, is a series of tight close-ups of performers delivering a dead-pan reading of letters written to Jim Jones by his followers, just before he ordered them to commit mass suicide.

Under Lock and Key carries a tremendous amount of psychic baggage – the soul-destroying weight of a faltering culture. It presents the various kinds of force and violence that are used on the battle fronts of class, racial and sexual warfare. Ironically, it forces itself upon the viewer.

And it succeeds in its intentions: it opens the door to the prison-like psyche of society’s victims.

Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior is one of the freshest and funniest films of the year. It’s also a good, matter-of-fact piece about marriage. In its own off-beat, off-center and ever-so-slightly askew way, this movie is simply great.

Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) and Sinead Cusack play a perfectly mismatched Irish couple living in London. He works for the Office of City Planning – and hates it. She’s stuck taking care of the house and kids, while hacking a part-time job at a bookstore – instead of pursuing the writing career she really wanted. She’s not too happy either. (Please remember, this is a comedy.)

Rea is a (typically Irish) master of puns, witty comments and sardonic jokes. He also (in a typically Irish fashion) uses his humor to mask his real feelings. Cusack repeatedly complains that she never knows where she stands with him. Nonetheless, she privately confesses to a friend that he’s the only man who can make her laugh. (This is a relationship movie that’s also a comedy.)

Phillip Jackson plays a Thatcher-era hustler who plays shell games with houses and rehabs. Cusack baby-sits for his kid, and he convinces her and Rea to let his guys renovate their bathroom. The workman are twins (both played by Phil Daniels) who can’t seem to agree with each other. (There’s some kind of political statement here, but it’s still a comedy.)

Meanwhile, back in daily life, Rea knows all too well that the good work he’s trying to do in city planning is going to be screwed over in back room deals. So he drinks a lot. Cusack is equally frustrated by her life. So she drinks a lot. The whole film plays like a boozy improv by John Cassavetes in a Robert Altman movie.

All of which makes Bad Behavior funny. Really, truly, honestly funny.

Aileen Wuornos: the Selling of a Serial Killer

When Paddy Chayefsky wrote the script for Network in the 1970s, he thought he was being satiric. He didn’t have much faith in the integrity of television news, but he was only half serious when he presented it as a crazy cross between mass psychosis and a money-grubbing medicine show. The movie’s wild exaggerations and outrageous jabs have, however, become the standard operating bull of modern tabloid TV. This horrifying evolution is one of the chief points examined in the documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.

Directed by Nick Broomfield for the BBC, Aileen Wuornos… focuses on the quaint American habits of random murder and mass merchandising. Broomfield is a British filmmaker well known for his confrontational approach to social issues in such documentaries as Behind the Rent Strike and Tattooed Tears. He’s also dealt with feminist issues, ranging from women in the military (Soldier Girls) to prostitution (Chicken Ranch). It’s not surprising that he was drawn to the Wuornos case, any more than the fact that he wasn’t interested so much in her crimes as in the money-fueled media stampede ignited by the case.

In case you need a factoid refresher, Aileen Wuornos is the confessed killer of seven men in Florida. Billed by the FBI as America’s first female serial murderer, Wuornos is currently sitting on Death Row for slayings that she contends were acts of self-defense. Raised by an abusive father (who was eventually jailed for raping a child), Wuornos turned to prostitution as a teenager and spent several decades plying her trade along the humid byways and in the sleazy bars surrounding I-75.

Once arrested, Wuornos became a virtual celebrity. A Current Affair and Inside Edition circled ‘round her trials like vultures at a roadkill fest, and the TV movie Overkill was hurriedly produced in order to beat the theatrical competition. Wuornos was a hot media property, and Broomfield became determined to discover the means by which multiple homicides are hyped into gory star status.

The characters in his story include investigating police officers, some of whom were overtly involved in promoting (and profiting from) the various film projects. There’s Wuornos’ attorney, a would-be folksinger who tells bad jokes and has a possible vested interest in getting his client sent to the electric chair. Then there’s the born-again Christian step-mother, a local horse-breeder who adopted Wuornos during her first murder trial. She repeatedly refers to Wuornos’ lawyer as their agent, and wants $25,000 before she’ll talk to the camera.

It’s a circus and even Broomfield has a hard time walking the thin line between documenting exploitation and joining the bidding melee. The easy allure of checkbook journalism is what makes Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer so fascinating to watch. After all, we’re all susceptible to the crass call of hard cash.

A Perfect World

Look out – Clint Eastwood is brooding again. And Kevin Costner is brooding with him. At least, it appears that that’s the mood of A Perfect World. The flick is one of those odd movies in which the superstars hardly ever appear together, so the actors mostly brood alone.

Despite the movie’s title, they have a lot to brood about. The movie’s set in Texas in late October, 1963 – President Kennedy’s assassination is but a few weeks away. (It appears that Eastwood has caught the JFK bug. Perhaps he sat too close to Oliver Stone at the Oscars.) It’s the waning days of what journalists like to refer to as the time of American innocence. Lack of innocence, however, is the whole point of the movie.

Costner plays Butch Haynes, an escaped convict whose taste for Ford cars has led him on a path from teenage joy-riding to career criminal. Oddly enough, however, this hot-rodding heister has an odd protective streak for kids. This unexpected part of Costner’s personality is displayed when a small boy joins him for a chase through the Texas hill-country.

Technically, the kid is his hostage, but Costner likes kids too much to hurt him. It’s abusive fathers Costner can’t stand. In fact, they get him half-crazy.

Eastwood, meanwhile, plays a Geritol-swigging Texas Ranger who’s sent after Costner. He’s hot for the hunt, but not for the kill. After a lot of staring, Eastwood finally confesses that he was the lawman who first railroaded the teenage Costner into jail. He thought he was helping the young man out by saving him from a vicious father. It may have seemed logical, but apparently Clint never spent time in a Texas slammer.

Now he feels guilt ridden about the whole thing and is privately hoping that he can take Costner alive. It’s just that the two bodies Kevin left in his wake make that plan a little difficult to follow through on. The itchy-fingered marksman who’s on the hunt with Eastwood doesn’t make things any easier, either. (I think we’re back to that Kennedy thing.)

A Perfect World is a strangely disjointed production. The movie suggests that it has a big, serious topic at its center, but never quite gets to it. Like its own chase, the movie keeps promising to veer off in a major direction, only to come to a dead end.

A Perfect World has its moments. It’s just too bad Eastwood couldn’t decide what kind of film he was making.

A Dangerous Woman

Debra Winger is still trying to prove herself as a dramatic actress. That's one of the driving forces behind A Dangerous Woman. The other key factor is Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment company helped press the project along. Which explains the fact that A Dangerous Woman is laced with heavy-weight ambitions. Unfortunately, the final result is closer to a TV movie-of-the-week than heavy-hitting cinema.

In A Dangerous Woman, Winger goes dowdy as the slow-witted Martha, a woman whose thoughts and feelings are hidden behind a shell almost as thick as her glasses. She survives largely through the charity of her aunt (Barbara Hershey), a middle-aged widow who's preoccupied with problems involving her married politico lover. Especially after the spurned wife comes running through her front door in a car.

The demolished porch left behind by Mrs. Politico is the least of Martha's concerns. Her best friend (Chloe Webb) has a boyfriend who's stealing money from the cash register at the dry cleaner where they all work – and he's busy framing Martha for the theft.

The closest thing to a bright spot in her life is Mackey (Gabriel Byrne), a half-drunk handyman who shows up to fix the porch. When he's sober, he's a calm but compassionate observer of her dilemma. The bad news is, he's not often sober – he gets stewed every night and turns into an erratic mix of bitterness and passion. He is, however, apparently the only man who ever stood up for Martha, which fuels the attraction she feels for him. They have a fling that's briefer than a one-night stand, but one that bonds Martha to Mackey nonetheless.

Despite her wallflower persona, Martha possesses a very dangerous quality: she's incapable of telling a lie. Ironically, she's the person most threatened by this aspect of her personality.

A Dangerous Woman is being pitched as a thriller, but it isn't. It's a moody, down-beat character study laced with some bleak ironies.

Winger's performance in the film is quite good, but it's Hershey and Byrne who stand out. This isn't surprising from Hershey, who's one of the finest and most under-rated performers around. It's unexpected from Byrne, however, who seems bent on a career of playing a poetically drunken Irishman. He's good at it, but you get the feeling he's warming up for the bio-pic on Richard Harris.

A Dangerous Woman has a good, off-beat, dramatic feel. The only problem is that it doesn't take it far enough. It ends up being a small film that would have played great on the tube.

Renaissance Man

Can somebody stop Penny Marshall before she directs again? She obviously can’t help herself from being compulsively driven to make bad comedies. Just look at her track record.

With the money-making exception of Big (which was a remake of an Italian movie) and A League of Their Own (a theatrical sit-com), she’s largely squandered both time and talent in the pursuit of such box office dross as Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Awakenings. With Renaissance Man, Marshall once again demonstrates that she can’t figure out how to make a movie, even when the whole project is strictly paint-by-numbers.

Renaissance Man is simply To Sir With Love dressed in military khaki. Danny DeVito plays a Detroit advertising executive whose abrasive approach to sales drives clients away faster than a Barry Manilow jingle. He;s supposed to be a burn-out case with a money hungry ex-wife and an emotionally neglected teenage daughter. Midway through the first reel, his troubles double when he becomes an ex-employee.

This is where the fun starts. At the unemployment office, DeVito gets a new job. An army base is looking for a teacher who can motivate boot camp underachievers, in what appears to be the Pentagon’s version of Operation Headstart. Despite the fact that there are probably several million unemployed teachers available for the job, DeVito is the stiff they hire.

So the reluctant Mr. Chips goes to Ft. McClane, where he has to take a pack of Room 222 rejects and propel them to the Head of the Class. Seizing on Shakespeare as the subject to teach, DeVito turns these future Gomer Pyles into a Dead Soldier’s Society, while helping them learn their :thees” and “thous.” With a bit of Hamlet and Henry V under their belts, these misfits shape up into fine army specimens – once again proving that where there’s a Will, there’s a way.

Renaissance Man is the kind of movie that’s been filmed a thousand times, and all Marshall had to do was deliver the predictable plot points. But despite the movie’s two-hours-plus running time, you come away feeling as if major scenes were left out. The characters, and their relationships to each other, are never adequately fleshed out, and DeVito’s change from cynical jerk to devoted teacher must take place off-screen.

DeVito is the only thing that keeps Renaissance Man from totally crumbling, but he’s much better at hostility than he is at cuddly warmth. Which is why the first half hour of Renaissance Man is the only part of the movie worth the price of admission – the rest of it simply proves that Marshall should be sent back to basic training.

North

This has been a summer of surprises. Many of the major block busters have either bombed or limped through middling box office, while low-key entries like Forrest Gump have come roaring out of nowhere. North, Rob Reiner's new comedy, is no Forrest Gump, but it's toward the top of the movie heap.

North is devoted to the basic proposition that, sooner or later, everyone gets fed up with their parents. That's especially true for North (Elijah Wood), a gifted sixth grader who feels cursed with the most boorish of parents (Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). How bad is it? Well, dad is the guy who actually inspects those pants before you buy them.

Feeling ignored and unappreciated, the kid retreats to the comfort of his favorite La-Z-Boy. The chair is located in a window of a shopping mall, where an unshaven bum (Bruce Willis), dressed as the Easter Bunny, advises him on being a free agent. That's when North sues the folks and embarks on his satiric quest for the perfect parents.

The result is a cartoonish, star-studded farce that rides unevenly between absurdity and sentimentality.

At its best, North is outrageous and hysterically funny. It's just that Reiner is a bona fide member of the TV generation and he never seems capable of abandoning the tube's conceptual universe.

Clean Slate

It seems as though many movies these days are made as if the filmmakers didn’t have a clue. So maybe it’s appropriate that Clean Slate is about a man who literally can’t remember anything from the day before. That’s the problem faced by the movie’s main character, played by Dana Carvey.

Carvey plays a private detective who, because of a head injury, is suffering from a unique form of amnesia: each time he falls asleep, he wakens with no memory of what happened before he dozed. Since he can’t even remember his own name, he’s papered his office with stick-‘em notes to himself containing such crucial information.

Complicating matters is the fact that he’s preparing to be the key witness in a major murder trial and has to bluff his way through the whole case. But he’s not sure, of course, whom to trust: his alleged girl-friend (Valeria Golino), who’s supposed to be dead; his sneaky doctor (Michael Murphy); or his old police pal (James Earl Jones).

Clean Slate is a protracted inside joke about such amnesia thrillers as Spellbound and Mirage, but it lacks the gall required for outright parody. Instead, the movie settles for a minor mystery plot peppered with a few decent comedy bits by Carvey, who succeeds, for the most part, in proving that he’s too nice to be completely outrageous, but also too clever to be completely dull.

Since all of the jokes rest, so to speak, on Carvey’s slight but sturdy shoulders, it manages to be mildly entertaining but, ironically, forgettable.

Brainscan

Brainscan is what you should ask your doctor to perform if you find yourself tempted to buy a ticket to this flick. This latest entry in the virtual-reality/horror film genre is slow, dumb, dull and utterly pointless. Granted, that's true of the entire genre, but Brainscan is even more so – it can't even deliver at the crude level of a splatter movie. It's too smart to be simply gory, but not smart enough to be anything else.

Edward Furlong (the kid in Terminator 2) plays a depressed, nerdy teen who channels his grief about his mother's death into a morbid fascination with violent interactive video games. When he receives a CD-ROM from the Brainscan company, he finds himself entering a world of murder, one that has no clear division between fantasy and reality. Frank Langella (a good actor who should know better than to be in this movie) plays the homicide detective who dogs the kid's bloodstained trail.

The net result resembles heavy metal reworked by the Bee Gees. The only interesting part is its final message about how the kids need to get a life. The same could be said about its audience.

Chasers

For a while, Dennis Hopper was the comeback kid. After grandly blowing up his life and career in the 1970s, he emerged as a wildly forceful actor in Blue Velvet and clearly demonstrated with Colors that he could direct a commercial film. He was looking good and cooking hot.

But that was then, this is now. With Chasers, Hopper is stuck with a comedy-drama so limp and ill-conceived that even the oddball characters he directs in the movie barely breath a flutter of life into this D.O.A. production.

Tom Berenger (Major League II) plays an old Navy salt stuck on Shore Patrol duty with an enlisted yuppie (William McNamara). They're assigned to escort a female prisoner (Erika Eleniak of Under Seige) to the brig, but along the way they end up taking a tour of tacky Southern tourist spots.

Gary Busey, Dean Stockwell, Fredric Forrest, Marilu Henner and Crispin Glover make brief appearances to no great effect. Only Hopper himself – as a lecherous salesman named Doggie – has any fun in his movie. No wonder. His character is just passing through – everyone else is stuck in this picture.

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It's to the Bank We Go

Once upon a time, there were no such things as feature-length animated films. They were just cartoons. And there was no such place as the Magic Kingdom. Just an office occupied by a man named Walt Disney.

But that all changed in December 1937, with the premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney had taken a major gamble – and won. Audiences proved themselves willing to sit through an 83-minute cartoon. In fact, they were enchanted by it.

They still are. That's why Snow White is returning to theater screens this Friday (re-released in 1993).

Sure, it will eventually be released on video. But why wait? You want your kids to like you, don't you?

Besides, it's more than a classic. It's a cinematic milestone.

In the early 1930s, Walt Disney had a reasonably successful career as the producer of Mickey Mouse cartoons and Silly Symphonies. These films were short, fast and funny. But Disney wanted more. He wanted to do a full-blown movie.

The popular wisdom of the era was that no sane person would sit through an hour-and-a-half of animation. When Uncle Walt announced his plans to challenge that idea, the film was immediately dubbed “Disney's Folly.” During the four years it took to create Snow White, it seemed like a fiasco in the making.

The production required the services of an army of animators. Its original budget of $250,000 shot through the roof. Disney had invested his own fortune into the film, then had to borrow. And borrow. The bankers were ready to start swigging whiskey with their Maalox.

The film ended up costing nearly $1.5 million, a phenomenal amount for the time.

The movie's jittery backers were not reassured by Disney's attitude. He wasn't a good businessman, and dumped most of the financial problems into the lap of his brother Roy. Walt was more concerned with the technical problems presented by the film. Meetings between the Disney brothers grew increasingly acrimonious.

But the expensive and protracted process was worth it. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a richly textured film with a sense of movement and visual depth that is still rare in animated productions.

It's also a lot of fun. (Though very small children are still easily scared by the evil Queen.)

The story of Snow White's creation and release is dramatic, but there is another, truly ironic aspect to it. In the '30s, Disney didn't have his own distribution company, so he released his cartoons through United Artists. But for Snow White, he switched to RKO Pictures. UA was fascinated by a new thing called television, and was demanding the TV rights to all of Disney's films. Walt never heard of TV and wanted nothing to do with it.

Keep that in mind the next time you turn on the Disney Channel.

Widow's Peak

There’s an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold. That advise serves as the main entrée in Widow’s Peak, a black comedy from Ireland that tries to serve a thick stew, but runs short of ingredients. The bitter taste of its trick ending is largely diluted by half-baked direction.

Not that Widow’s Peak doesn’t have its moments. The script has some great verbal twists that pay tribute to the time-honored Irish ability to use language as a lethal weapon. Widow’s Peak has the kind of dialogue that would make for a good play, but the movie never lives up to the screenplay’s promise.

Set in a small Irish village in the 1920s, Widow’s Peak is a back-handed picture of a culture in which the men die early and the women lead long, contented lives as repressed widows. This graveyard matriarchy is ruled by Joan Plowright, who divides her time between snotty gossip and moral hypocrisy. This keeps her busy, but not so busy that she doesn’t find time to emotionally suppress her son (Adrian Dunbar) and give the local spinster (Mia Farrow) unwelcome lectures.

The miserable peace of this society is quickly disturbed by the arrival of a new widow (Natasha Richardson). She’s young, worldly and immodest, and she has romantic eyes fixed on Dunbar. Richardson instigates a feud with Farrow, a small quarrel that quickly escalates into a full-blown war and begins to expose the town’s darker secrets.

Widow’s Peak sounds like a Celtic version of Peyton Place, except for the fact that there’s something odd about the feud – which is where the trick comes in. Without it, the film would fall completely apart.

The Favor

Unless your name is Luis Bunuel, you shouldn't devote one third of a movie to dream sequences. That's one of the first mistakes made in the sex farce The Favor. Another tip is that you shouldn't do a sex farce if you don't intend to have some sex in it. The Favor is mostly tease, without much strip. Even worse, it's the kind of comedy in which the story is possible only as long as the characters behave like idiots.

Harley Jane Kozak (Arachnophobia) plays a happily married woman who still isn't over her teenage crush on her high school boyfriend (Ken Wahl of TV's Wise Guy). They never went “all the way,” and she can't get the possibility of it out of her mind. So, she asks her best friend (Elizabeth McGovern) to do the deed and report back with the glowing results.

Golly! Just imagine the mirth-filled complications.

Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt play the chumps who spend most of their time being jerked around by their own stupidity. Not that Kozak and McGovern are much better; it's just that they, at least, have a few good lines.

Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping

Kidnapping isn’t simply a crime in Columbia – it’s a business. A very big business, as demonstrated in the documentary Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping. Directed by Colombian and first-time filmmaker Camila Motta, Secuestro focuses on her own family’s tumultuous experience when her sister, Sylvia, was grabbed off a street in Bogota in 1985 and held for ransom.

Sylvia was finally released, but only after several months of anxiety and hard-boiled negotiations between the kidnappers and Camila’s father, a businessman who was forced to bury familial feelings behind an icy wall of financial dickering.

A similar degree of cold-bloodedness is used by the filmmaker in constructing Secuestro. Though Motta is detailing an event that’s obviously left deep psychological wounds in her family, she rarely belabors the point. It’s not until late in Secuestro that we realize just how close her father is to a total emotional breakdown. Through most of his conversations with the kidnappers (we hear the actual tapes), he plays a penny-pinching jerk who seems more concerned with cutting a cheap deal. As horrifying as this sounds, his behavior was critical to his daughter’s survival – the kidnappers expected him to bargain fiercely and would have distrusted him if he’d done otherwise.

The kidnappers, meanwhile, were busy cutting their own deals. The gang’s leaders were promising people good pay in exchange for help with the job. (In the end, however, they left their business partners with nothing but chump change.) And during the protracted ransom negotiations, they discussed selling their victim to another kidnapper in order to score a quick profit. The film even implies that the gang had a financial portfolio on the Motta family. Despite some vague political allusions, the criminals were more versed in the Wall Street Journal than The Communist Manifesto.

It’s the filmmaker who brings the politics into Secuestro. Interlaced through the movie are references to the culture of violence that’s existed in Colombia since the beginning of the European conquest of the Americas. Motta argues that this has left a political legacy in which it’s viewed as acceptable for one group to brutally suppress others in order to achieve their wants and desires. The connections between conquest and kidnapping are simple: if the haves can do it, then so can the have-nots.

This crazy pattern of violence is Secuestro’s real subject matter, and Motta is chillingly accurate in her presentation of a culture drenched in the blood of a stolen land.

And Motta isn’t just talking about Latin America. She now lives in New York. It’s the entire Western Hemisphere she’s concerned with.

The Rock

Some scientists believe that during the last ice age, the male brain evolved into a rigid set of behavior patterns.

If this is true, then the first draft of The Rock may have been told round a campfire during a mammoth hunt. The movie is thoroughly drenched with testosterone as its cast of real men go out and do manly things with other real men.

Of course, that is what Sean Connery does best even if it does mean that he is coasting through his twilight years by playing the pensioners' answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Repeated comments are made in The Rock about the age of Connery's character. Then the old boy turns around and kills fifty some commandos without even getting winded. Obviously, Connery is one senior who doesn't have to take any guff from the youngsters.

He does, however, have to tolerate plenty of hooey from a loony kick-butt script. The Rock is carved from a slab of pure machismo with a strong vein of paranoia added in large portions. The movie plays like a cross between The X-Files and Ian Fleming as it presents its characters as the key players in every alleged conspiracy since the assassination of Lincoln.

For example, there is the movie's main villain. General Hummell (Ed Harris) is the highly decorated leader of Marine Force Recon, an elite team of the Special Forces who are routinely sent to wage covert war in countries that don't even know they are under attack. Hummell is a fiery-eyed idealist who despises the fact that the families of his men are never properly compensated when a Recon soldier gets killed in the line of duty. Of course, the duties that they perform are not even suppose to exist which is why the military is so stingy with the funds.

Lacking a union, Hummell handles the situation the old fashion way. He and his troops steal fifteen short-range missiles equipped with a chemical weapon so deadly that the screenwriters actually had to dig out a chemistry book to look it up.

Then Hummell and his crew take over Alcatraz prison, the stony island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. His demands are simple: either the US government finally pay these families or else San Francisco will be peppered with enough deadly toxin to rival the cleaner parts of New York City.

Ever prepared for such situations, the FBI fly in Special Agent Goodsped (Nicholas Cage). He has a doctorate in chemical weaponry and is extensively trained in demolition. Unfortunately, Goodsped has no real weaponry experience and thinks that hand to hand combat is a euphemism for bedroom hanky-panky.

Which forces the FBI to confront one of their own covert problems. For the past thirty years, they have illegally imprisoned John Mason (Connery), a mysterious British agent who was caught stealing a microfilm containing every dirty secret from the alien landing at Roswell to JFK. For three decades, Mason has refused to reveal the location of the microfilm. He has also refused to explain how he once managed to escape from Alcatraz. Since Mason was able to successfully slip out, he is also the only person who knows how to secretly slip back into the old fortress with a bay side view.

A substantial exercise in gratuitous violence is guaranteed for all. So much ammunition is used in The Rock that by the movie's final reel the heroes are having to blast guys with rockets. Which means that The Rock almost succeeds in delivering the right summertime mix of low content and high energy. It even discovers a weird and funny odd-couple team in the form of Connery and Cage as they bicker their way through every firefight.

But the last third of The Rock begins to splutter and lose stream. Ultimately, the movie becomes a victim of its own demented sense of overkill. Like its two heroes, The Rock runs out of ammo prematurely and that is a big mistake. After all, the audience isn't paying good money just to watch these people act.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

The original Jurassic Park took in more money than many countries make in their yearly GNP. This blunt fact is the main plot focus behind the sequel. Of course, director Steven Spielberg already has more money than most nations, so why he needs the extra loot is any one's guess.

If this review sounds as if it belongs in The Wall Street Journal, then it has accurately summed up the basic impact of the movie. The Lost World: Jurassic Park has its fair share of thrills and chills. It also has its stumbles. But mostly, the film has no particular reason for existing. The original Jurassic Park had at least some childlike awe and wonder to offer along with the merchandising. The Lost World primarily suggests that Spielberg simply felt the need to increase his already ample bank account. At least this theory would explain why the movie is singularly lacking in spirit and fun.

Dino action is the only thing that The Lost World has to offer. Fortunately, the sequel delivers more gut chomping moments than the original as a T-Rex family puts a Jurassic spin on the old nature-or-nurture debate. Lost World has more dinosaurs than were seen the first time, which also means that the sequel has a larger cast for the inevitable feast.

At the top of the dino menu is Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), the skirt-chasing mathematician who previously came close to being snack food. Malcolm is still upset about the mini-massacre that took place at the original Jurassic Park, but his efforts to go public about the incident resulted in getting him branded as a complete wacko. When Malcolm discovers that there is a second island that was used for breeding (and is still booming with the critters), he is torn between feelings of outrage and a need for redemption.

The realization that his current girlfriend, Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), is already on the island convinces Malcolm to again confront his primordial fears. Besides, this guy just seems to have a thing about cute paleontologists. Along for the ride is Malcolm's teenage daughter (Vanessa Lee Chester), whose only function is to get herself routinely in peril.

Malcolm and the other members of the team (Vince Vaughn and Richard Schiff) are sent to document how the dinosaurs have adapted to their environment. Apparently the earlier disaster has turned John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) into a Green Peace activist and he wants the surviving dinosaurs to romp in isolated splendor. But Hammond's company is now operated by Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), his greedy nephew who thinks that San Diego would be a swell spot for a new Jurassic Park. So while
Hammond's team is busy photographing raw nature, Ludlow's boys come swooping in to bag some specimens for display.

Oddly enough, neither team is particularly prepared to achieve their contrary objectives. Malcolm is ready to leave upon arrival while Sarah carelessly meanders among house-sized beasties. Meanwhile, Ludlow's hunters are led by a borderline psycho (Pete Postlethwaite) who is solely fixated on the idea of going one-on-one with a T-Rex. You can almost hear the dinner bell clanging away in the jungle.

The Lost World is packed with superb special effects and non-stop action. In fact, the movie suffers from too much action. Lost World never has time to adequately develop any sense of tension even while the entire cast is running for their lives. None of the characters are ever developed beyond the level of a few stock statements and the plot rarely evolves from A to B. Only the many dinosaurs hold any interest, and after awhile, their eating habits become more boorish than gruesome.

But the real surprise about The Lost World is Spielberg's willingness to create a second-rate copy of his own work. Jurassic Park was by no means a masterpiece (just a standard critter picture with a monster-size budget). Yet the original film did have moments of genuine feelings (e.g. the field of peacefully glazing brontosaurs) and nail-baiting suspense (e.g. the vibrating pools of water indicting the movements of the T-Rex). By comparison, the sequel is the kind of dim and diminished work that one might expect from a lessor filmmaker.

So what is Spielberg's problem? Does he really need the money or is he just spinning some artistic wheels while waiting for inspiration? The most likely answer is that he couldn't say no to a dumb, if oblivious, idea.

Which is a shame. If a lesser director had made Lost World, then we could spend our time dissing the guy for being no Spielberg. As it is, we have to remind ourselves that Spielberg is actually better than this film.