The Master of Disaster - Roland Emmerich

"I believe in the great 'What If?' What if aliens showed up, what if tomorrow morning, you walked out of your door and these enormous spaceships hovered over every single city in the world? Wouldn't that be the most exciting thing that could happen?"

Better still, what if the director could film it for you wholesale?

This is the unique skill that has helped to turn Independence Day director Roland Emmerich into a major Hollywood figure. The German-born filmmaker has succeeded in creating spectacular American-styled fantasies with a European sense of financial restraint.

Which is to say that Emmerich has come a long way from his early days as an art student in Munich. Though his studies were originally devoted to painting and sculpting, he quickly changed to production design and film making. Since The Towering Inferno was Emmerich's idea of an old masterpiece, the jump was not so surprising.

What remains surprising was the speed with which Emmerich scaled the commercial ladder. His student film, The Noah's Ark Principle(1984), blossomed into a sizable success at the Berlin Film Festival and was released through out 20 countries. This paved the way for his next two movies, Making Contact and Moon 44. It was especially with the production of Moon 44 (1989) that Emmerich demonstrated his remarkable skill at producing impressive special effects at bargain basement prices.

Or as Emmerich would put it, he made "the biggest low-budget film in history."

Seemingly, he was a natural for the commercial driven German cinema of the 1980s. Under the conservative government of Helmut Kohl, Germany was seeking to create a movie industry that could directly challenge the wild fantasies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. But Wolfgang Petersen's production of Enemy Mine(1985) turned into a Volkswagen built at the cost of a Mercedes. It was an expensive stumble that sent the Germans back to the drawing board.

Though Emmerich was already proving himself to be a better fantasy filmmaker than Petersen, he wasn't that interested in being limited to the European scene. Emmerich had a passion for the disaster epics of Irwin Allen (whose films he can quote without irony) and a detailed familiarity with pop American culture that would be the envy of any Yankee "trash hound."

He also had an emerging work relationship with the actor-turned-writer Dean Devlin, a man who could fill in the narrative gaps to Emmerich's wild fits of cinematic vision. The two quickly formed into a non-sibling version of the Coen brothers, including the odd ability to seemingly finish each other's thoughts.

From the start, the Emmerich-Devlin team brought a distinctive quality to their films. Though Universal Soldier (1992) was only given passing approval as a respectable Jean Claude Van Damme thriller, the movie actually had a surprisingly serious tone to its off beat storyline about dead American commandos who are turned
into zombified heroes.

But it was the surprise hit of StarGate (1994) that fully represented the Emmerich-Devlin universe. The movie was a freewheeling combination of UFO folklore, tabloid newspaper fabrications, paranoid interpretations of ancient history, and good clean fun.

StarGate also managed to put most of its $60 million dollar budget onto the screen, which is more than can be said about a recent
$200 million dollar bathing epic (Waterworld). Better still, StarGate also
managed to have a sense of humor about itself without developing a bad case of self-parody.

Which is one of Emmerich's great strengths as a filmmaker. He has an ability to laugh along with his movies, but he doesn't laugh at them. He can entertain an audience without feeling superior, and he is just as in love with his own giddy concepts as his fans. When he says that "I believe in fantasy," the man is actually sincere.

It is a sensibility that happily filters through his movies.

The Other Man Behind Schindler's List

Above the main gate at Auschwitz was a sign that read: “Work shall make you free.” In truth, only a few inmates who worked at the infamous death camp survived. Branko Lustig was one of them. Now he works as a movie producer and with the successful release of Schindler's List, his creative efforts may finally grant him freedom from his own past.

Lustig is the co-producer of Schindler's List – along with Steven Spielberg and Gerald R. Molen – and he recently delivered a lecture on the making of the film to students at the Department of Film, Ohio University. However, his talk was not a gossipy discussion about Hollywood. Instead, it was about his memories of the Holocaust.

“I was in a lot of camps,” said Lustig. “It was during my second time at Auschwitz that I got my number.”

He gestured toward his left forearm where he still carries the concentration camp tattoo that the Nazis branded inmates with.

At the time, he was ten years old. He was from a Jewish family in Croatia and was captured in 1942 after his parents made an unsuccessful bid for refuge in Hungary. For the next three years, Lustig lived as a slave laborer surrounded by the gas chambers and the crematories. For several months, he even worked on the construction of the gate at Auschwitz.

“That kind of experience is overwhelming. You forget lots of things. But when you think about it later, or when someone is telling you a story, you suddenly start to remember.”

Lustig is now in his early sixties and still has a youthful and vigorous appearance. He speaks in a soft voice with a slight accent and a precise tone that is obviously accustomed to describing the right visuals as the means to convey a complex set of emotions. That's what makes him a good producer and he has worked on more than 100 movies in both Hollywood and the former Yugoslavia. But he still has trouble finding the right words, images, and memories for his three years as a prisoner within the murder mills of the Final Solution.

“I worked for three or four months on the gate at Auschwitz, but I barely remembered it. Then, sometime back, I was in Tel Aviv when a man came up to me and said 'I remember you from Auschwitz. You were wearing black boots.' When he said that – boom – it all came back to me.”

The sensations return like a frightening flash in a dark room. It nearly obliterates everything else.

“I don't remember much about my family before the war,” Lustig calmly conceded. “I know that my father use to be the head waiter at a big hotel. The King of Yugoslavia use to play poker there.”

While filming Schindler's List, Spielberg asked Lustig if he had any photos of himself as a boy. Through his brother back in Croatia, Lustig was able to locate some. “I discovered that I was a pretty little boy dressed like an Austrian. That is what remains of my past before the war.”

But Lustig does have a vivid recollection of the day he almost died in 1944. He had been selected for the gas chambers and was already in line when he realized that he was standing next to a group of new prisoners who were just being processed into the camp. Thanks to his small size, he was able to hop into this other line without being noticed. He was still trapped in Auschwitz, but he got to stay alive that day.

However, by May of 1945, Lustig was finally close to death. Illness and starvation was devouring what was left of his weakened body. “My bed was near a window and I thought I was dead and going to heaven because I heard music unlike any I had ever heard before. The camp was being liberated by a Scottish brigade. They were marching in, playing their bagpipes.”

Lustig was 13 years old when he got his second chance at life. He eventually would study theatre at the University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia and became an actor. He got into movies as a combination actor and translator for a German-Yugoslavian co-production in Hungary and he became an assistant director at Jadran Films, Yugoslavia's main film and television studio. By the 1960s, he began working extensively with American producers who came to Yugoslavia to make movies about World War Two. In those days, the Yugoslavian army could be cheaply rented to stage pretend battles for the cameras.

Lustig earned his stripes as production manager with Fiddler on the Roof and Sophie's Choice and was the assistant director for The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. He even received an Emmy as producer of the mini-series Drug Wars: the Camarena Story. He had a promising career ahead of himself in television.

“But I wanted to make movies,” shrugged Lustig.

More to the point, he wanted to make a movie about Oskar Schindler. Lustig first heard about Schindler's story in the mid-1960s when MGM came to Yugoslavia to scout locations for a possible film version. The movie never got off the ground, but the tale stuck with Lustig for the next 20 years. When the book by Thomas Keneally appeared in 1982, Lustig began pursuing a film version. So was Steven Spielberg. Lustig needed someone who had the clout to get the film made; Spielberg needed someone who knew the subject.

“One day in 1985, the telephone rings and it's Steven Spielberg's office,” explained Lustig. “Steven wants to talk to me about the project. So I went to this meeting and Steven said 'I only have 10 minutes time for you'.” Lustig had already been involved in several previously unsuccessful efforts to launch a movie about Schindler and he wasn't interested in failing one more time. He proceeded to engage Spielberg in an enthusiastic 90 minute discussion about the movie.

“It was then that I knew that Spielberg would make a great film out of Schindler's List.”

And Lustig is still impressed with Spielberg. He is currently developing two other projects for Spielberg's company, Amblin Entertainment. Lustig has a script ready to go for The Last Days of Don Juan and is working on pre-production of The Legend of Zorro.

But the making of Schindler's List has brought one part of Lustig's life to a major conclusion, both personally and morally.

“When I was there, with people dying in front of me, everyone said 'Be my witness. Let the world know what happened to us'. And I think I survived in order to fulfill my obligations to them.”

Caught

Have you ever wondered what The Postman Always Rings Twice might have been like if Edward Albee had written it? At its best, Caught occasionally plays like a low key version of Who's Afraid of James M. Cain. But the movie never quite succeeds in developing enough of the juicy, crude texture of either writer as Caught repeatedly gets snagged on the rusty hooks of its own second-hand devising.

Not that there is anything wrong with the film's initial premise. It is a grand tradition in film noir that an older man with a younger wife will inevitably meet up with a likable young stud. Obviously, Caught is hoping to catch up with a long line of famous movies that have taught mature men to eye youth with a grave sense of foreboding.

But the three main characters in Caught border too close to parody. Joe (Edward James Olmos) is an aging fish monger in New Jersey who is weirdly obsessed with deboning the morning catch. His wife Betty (Maria Conchita Alonso), spends way too much time in the bathtub while perfecting her Liz Taylor pout in hopes of projecting unfulfilled sexual longings. Nick (Arie Verveen), the young drifter who they inexplicably have taken in as a lodger, spends his time wearing towels and waiting to get into the bathroom. Sooner or later, he and Betty are going to discover a mutual interest in plumbing.

Unfortunately, Nick doesn't know better than to get involved with a married woman who has a kid. In Betty's case, its her psycho son Danny (Steven Schub). He is a comedian wannabe who has all of the retro soused charm of a bad Tarantino impersonator (or is that an oxymoron). Danny is also the poster boy for the Oedipus complex and is more upset about mommy's continuing fling than is Joe. By all appearance, Joe is finally getting some good sleep.

Which means that Caught has some modest potential for producing a bout of sexual fireworks. But the movie never catches fire, despite several fine performances and a decent, smokey jazz score. There's just too much cod liver oil in the way.

Long, Long Ago....

"I may never get to ever again direct a big budget movie."

This was George Lucas talking to reporters twenty years ago. He had just finished filming Star Wars and was predicting that the movie most likely would bomb. In early 1977, nobody took science-fiction seriously at the movies. Not even the filmmakers.

Lucas knew better than most the kind of gamble that he was taking. A mere six years earlier, his production of THX-1138 had tanked at the box office through a combination of audience indifference and critical scorn. The film had also become the focus of intense Hollywood hostility as movieland's old guard attempted a final, futile effort to circle the wagons against the young turks with beards who were taking over the industry.

Though Lucas did have one hit movie to his credit (American Graffiti), he was not viewed as a powerhouse director. A quiet and very self-effacing man, he was still primarily hidden in the shadow of his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola. Likewise, Coppola's edgy and naturalistic Godfather films helped set the tone for movies in the 1970s.

Realism was in, fantasy was out, and some executives at 20th Century Fox were privately debating about what they were doing with the world's most expensive space opera. As the summer of '77 grew near, Fox began a campaign among theatre exhibitors to undercut the release of Star Wars.

Advance market research suggested that Star Wars would quickly fade upon release. Besides, many senior Fox executives were convinced that the impending hit of the summer would be The Other Side of Midnight, a Sidney Sheldon kiss-and-tell epic about old Hollywood. During the spring of '77, Fox's distribution people successfully convinced many of the major regional exhibitors in the US to skip Star Wars and to go "for a movie with a proven formula."

By May, Star Wars became a phenomena hit. In June, many booking agents for the major theatre chains were out looking for new jobs. By the fall of '77, Fox was trying to strong arm second-run theaters by offering them Star Wars on the condition that they also had to book The Other Side of Midnight.

What did this all mean? Simple. The young men with beards were now in control of both the camera and, now, the banks.

And Hollywood was never quite the same.

When a Man Loves a Woman

There are a few good things to be said about When a Man Loves a Woman. Now that the movie is released, we don't have to watch the lousy preview trailer anymore (it's been playing since last September). It's also nice to see Andy Garcia play something other than a street-wise ethnic type. Instead, he gets to play a upper-middle-class anal retentive type.

But good performances by Garcia and Meg Ryan are When a Man Loves a Woman's only real merits. This rehab drama about an alcoholic mother lacks the hard grittiness of The Lost Weekend and the emotional resonance of The Days of Wine and Roses. You don't even see much drinking, despite the fact that Ryan's supposed to be on a protracted binge. She simply shows up drunk. It must be magic.

Which is indicative of what's wrong with this movie. It refuses to delve into any of the reasons why Ryan drinks, or why Garcia's such a model of co-dependency. It also refuses to unload on Garcia's character, even though he plays a husband who's clearly a controlling jerk. Everything in When a Man Loves a Woman is cookie-cutter clean – which does a disservice to families that are dealing with the hard realities of alcoholism and recovery. But mostly, it's just a drag.

Threesome

Eddy (Josh Charles) is a film student who's unsure of his sexual orientation. Alex (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) are his college dorm roommates. Alex likes Eddy, and Stuart likes Alex. Eddy likes both of them. Gosh, do you suppose...?

Threesome is the latest entry in the new Generation X genre of boy-meets-boy-meets-girl movie. It has a few minor jokes and some terribly overwritten dialogue. It also forces viewers to go a long way for its climactic menage a trois (that's French for complex body movements). But despite the characters' almost continual chatter about bisexuality, the movie sidesteps the issue until the very end – and then drops it into the story like a lead balloon.

The movie might have slipped by as a low-key comedy, if the cast was more engaging. But Flynn is shrill, Charles is annoying and Baldwin is mostly crude and dumb. All three of them are perpetually horny, and only Charles is ever seen near a classroom. They're the world's oldest undergraduates, and they carry on like a pack of high schoolers who just discovered sex. It's not a pretty sight.

Threesome is occasionally funsome, but mostly it's tiresome.

Kika

Pedro Almodovar may be preparing to self-destruct. His latest film, Kika, is rife with the tensions and contradictions of a filmmaker who’s in the process of subconconsciously bolting from an earlier phase of his work while lumbering toward a new, but dimly perceived direction. In other words, Almodovar may be having a so-called artistic crisis, and Kika is either the Spanish wunderkind’s first step toward maturity or the smoldering remnants of his youth.

At the moment, it’s a tough call.

On the surface, Kika has all of the trappings of a typical Almodovar farce: his trademark mix of sex, absurdity, campy sets, warped brutality, B-movie histrionics and avant-garde pretensions. For most of Kika’s first half, bits and pieces of Almodovar’s previous movies are casually recycled. It’s as if he has nothing better to do than photograph footnotes to his career.

Kika (Veronica Forque) is a sweet-faced innocent who divides her time between her work as a make-up artist and her pursuit of a man who may be capable of returning the love she feels for him. Ramon (Alex Casanovas) just might be able to love her – if he can ever get over his mother’s suicide and his interest in voyeurism. Ramon’s step-father is Nicholas (Peter Coyote), an American writer who had a fling with Kika while married to Ramon’s mother. Nicholas is also busy having an affair with Amparo (Anabel Alonso), Kika’s best friend. Rounding out the sexual geometry is Andrea Scarface (Victoria Abril), a psychologist turned host of the grisly, but popular, TV crime show, Today’s Worst. Andrea is Ramon’s ex-lover, a relationship that left her with a facial slash and a taste for videotaping violence.

Kika plays out its initial tale of romantic misadventure against a backdrop of bright, solid colors and horny non sequiturs. It’s another cartoonish romp by Almodovar, as he appears to cash in on his own brand of formula filmmaking.

Or at least it is until he derails his own film with a protracted scene in which Kika is raped by a porno star/escaped convict. The scene is played – as only Almodovar can – for both laughs and shock; it’s a mad plunge into the abyss. It also marks the beginning of a different movie, as a darker, despairing mood descends upon the screen. The comic strip gives way to realism as murder and betrayal intrude into the picture.

This radical departure of Kika’s second half plays as if Almodovar is acknowledging that his own brand of black comedy simply isn’t fun anymore. The director of Law of Desire, Matador, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! seems to be tired of his own inflated universe, as he evokes the last stretch of Kika to a study on misogyny and post-modernist nihilism.

In making this very calculated and risky maneuver, Almodovar is potentially abandoning both his films and his audience. In a way, it’s about time he did. He’s often been compared to both Luis Bunuel and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but Almodovar is neither. He lacks the intellectual daring of Bunuel and doesn’t come close to the stylistic audacity of Fassbinder.

But Kika could be Almodovar’s first move toward something genuinely different. It may be a step toward a period of major new work, or it may prove to be a blunder of career-wrenching proportions. It may even turn out to be simply an anomaly.

I’m not sure. I’m not even certain what I think about this movie. But so much uncertainty is already a plus for Almodovar – this time, he’s truly earning his reputation as a daring filmmaker.

Independence Day

When he first spots a gigantic alien ship hovering over Los Angeles, Will Smith's character firmly insists that "I don't think they flew over 90 billion light years just to pick a fight." Obviously, his character is in need of a major attitude readjustment. In Independence Day, everybody is looking for a fight.

Everybody finds one, too. The aliens in Independence Day are firm believers in the Pax Roma concept of peaceful co-existence. which means that they will only negotiate after every human is dead. Which also means that Independence Day promises a hi-speed joyride through Armageddon and the movie does largely succeed in delivering a deliciously intense visit to the apocalyptic fun house. Though it occasionally falters during its final stretch, Independence Day is undeniably the most action-packed science-fiction movie since Star Wars. It even has a better cast.

It also has a wildly jingoistic sensibility that is already setting the tone for virtually every other major fantasy film this year. Even the mellow crew of the USS Enterprise is making sure that the Borg's First Contact will be their last. All aliens beware: 1996 is the year when Earth kicks ass.

Not that Independence Day is lacking in nice guys. In fact, the President of the United States (Bill Pullman) is in political trouble for being too much of a nice guy. Though he has an heroic war record as a fighter pilot, the President has spent most of his term unsuccessfully trying to appease every cause with the result being that he is viewed as weak and indecisive.

Likewise, David (Jeff Goldblum) is such a nice guy that he routinely allows himself to be used as a door mat. Though he is suppose to be an electronic wizard with eight years spent studying at M.I.T., David has inexplicably settled into a position as a computer technician with a cable television company in New York. But mostly, he quietly pines for his ex-wife (Margaret Colin) who left him for her career as a presidential press secretary.

Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) is divided between his ambition to be an astronaut and his romantic involvement with Jasmine(Vivica Fox), a Los Angeles stripper with an out-of-wedlock son. He loves his girlfriend, but he also knows that NASA will not accept someone whose personal life is anything except squeaky clean.

Meanwhile, Russell (Randy Quaid) is busy drinking his life away. Russell is a Vietnam Vet turned crop duster pilot who claims to have been abducted by a race of terrifyingly hostile aliens who performed nasty experiments on him. Since nobody believes his story, Russell spends most of his time getting drunk at the local trailer park.

The sudden appearance of an armada of massive spaceships over the major cities of the world becomes the crucial focal point for all of these characters. Where all of their good intentions have failed, seemingly raw fear will finally give meaning to their lives. Especially after David inadvertently discovers the aliens' count-down signal and realizes that the visitors are about to cancel more than just the cable service.

Obviously, Independence Day operates like an Irwin Allen production of The War of the Worlds, mercifully minus either Charlton Heston or Shelley Winters. As in such Allen epics as The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Independence Day offers brute catastrophe as a therapeutic form of personal redemption. Likewise, the movie strictly adheres to St. Irwin's view of calamity as an essential form of social leveling. By the finale of Independence Day, the President is whizzing off to the big interplanetary dogfight with a rag tag team of drunks and yahoos as the movie becomes an equal opportunity provider of do or die heroics.

But the film making team of Roland Emmerich (director/writer) and Dean Devlin (producer/writer) are better at priming these rusty old pumps than Allen ever was. They have no shame at using every cliche in the book, including a dog in peril bit. But they also have a refreshing sense of sincerity about the proceedings. It is almost as if they thought that they had just invented every standard twist for the first time and in so doing, the movie snaps and crackles with a surprisingly zesty sense of genuine thrills. Independence Day may indeed be the biggest B-movie ever made, but it is also one of the most entertaining films of the year.

Much attention has already been given in press stories to the special effects in Independence Day. The film is a visual extravaganza that is capable of provoking an "Oh wow" effect about every ten minutes. But one of the movie's most impressive feats is actually to be found in its editing, most notably the extended montage sequence used for the simultaneous destruction of three different cities. At the very least, the scene should earn editor David Brenner an Oscar nomination in the Sergei Eisenstein look alike category.

But the real energy that pounds through out Independence Day is provided by its actors. On paper, the characters are all two-dimensional constructs with barely a breath of life to hold them up. On the screen, they actually resemble real human beings chock-full of quirks and frailties. Especially notable are the performances by Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum, as well as the minor turns provided by Harvey Fierstein and Brent Spiner.

All of which means that Independence Day is a gripping good yarn that will hold the audience enthralled. More than anything, it is a pure crowd pleaser that unloads its rip-snorting, old-fashioned goodies without a single note of back-handed condescension. Independence Day may indeed be nothing more than candy, but it is candy of the richest and most crunchy type.

Besides, the only truly implausible thing in Independence Day is the idea that the American President doesn't know about the existence of Area 51. In reality, everybody knows about Area 51. You just drive along the Extraterrestrial Highway (this is its real name) and turn at the dirt road marked only by a black mailbox in the middle of nowhere. Then after a bunch of heavily armed policemen force you to turn back, you can go on down the road to a local bar that serves a drink called the Beam Me Up, Scotty (one thirds Jim Beam, scotch, and 7-Up).

Sometimes, truth is just as strange as fiction.

Terminal Velocity

There used to be an old SCTV skit called “The Farm Film Bureau Report.” In it, two guys wearing bib overalls rated movies by how well everything blew up. Terminal Velocity is their kind of flick, since its only redeeming virtue is that a few things “blow up good.” You even get to see a car fall five miles and splatter across half of the Southwest.

Unfortunately, the movie's two negligible stars are not in the vehicle. It's a shame – some people would pay full admission to see Charlie Sheen and Nastassja Kinski crash something more than just their careers.

Of course, with a cast headed by this dubious duo, Terminal Velocity instantly earns a footnote in the annals of “Le Bad Cinema.” Its goofy plot line doesn't help: it's an incoherent story about good ex-KGB agents battling it out against bad ex-KGB thugs with ol' Charlie as a red-blooded American skydiver/stripper (I'm not making this up) who gets involved because he wants to jump Kinski's bones. Obviously, the end of the Cold War has put a real strain on the “patriotic ideal” bit.

Some of the movie's stunt work is spectacular, but the film's sluggish pace causes attention spans to drop as fast as a brick. It doesn't help that Sheen's method of fleshing out his character is to play dumber as the plot drags on. (He may set a record for the amount of penis jokes used in a motion picture, however). Sometimes, you have to wonder if Martin Sheen ever considered changing his stage name.

Sugar Hill

Wesley Snipes is back, and in a black gangster film, so the screen is going to be ablaze in non-stop action, right? Think again homeboys. Does the title Rumble Fish mean anything to ya? In some ways, that’s what Sugar Hill most resembles, and many of ol’ Wesley’s fans may wonder what this half-loopy, left turn to drama is all about.

Snipes plays a drug lord who spends a lot of his time – i.e. the whole movie – brooding. He broods about his mother, who OD’ed in front of him when he was a kid. He worries about his addict father (Clarence Williams III), who’s wasting away because of drugs and bitter memories. He’s frustrated with his brother (Michael Wright), who’s become his hot-headed business partner on the streets. He’s concerned about the impending gang war that the mob is provoking and the strain it’s placing on his oddly personal relationship with his Mafia connection (Abe Vigoda). Last but not least, he’s confused about his deepening feelings for Theresa Randle.

But what Snipes should be worried about is the fact that Sugar Hill doesn’t go any place. It’s nice to see Snipes handling a major dramatic role; he has a greater range than he’s given credit for, and his performance always contain an edgy quality that’s captivating. But Sugar Hill only allows him to look worn out and serious. Even the almost embarrassing conclusion of this movie – in which the Oedipus complex goes for an odd-ball triple hitter – doesn’t give Snipes any emoting room to act in. Besides, the two-part ending simply confuses all of the movie’s issues, instead of resolving them.

So, what is Snipes doing in this thing? At this very moment, he may be asking his agent that very question.

Household Saints

You can always tell a good Italian-American neighborhood joint by the two oil paintings hanging over the bar: one is of the Pope; the other is of Frank Sinatra. This vision of life, split between the Catholic church and life according to Frankie, is one of the underlying elements in Household Saints. The movie is sort of a mix of the sacred and profane stirred together with spicy sausages and household cleaning tips.

Vincent D'Onofrio is a neighborhood butcher in New York's Little Italy who wins his wife (Tracey Ullman) in a pinochle game. Ullman isn't altogether happy with her new life. Specifically, she has problems dealing with her mother-in-law, a vulture-eyed woman of the Old World who has an icon for every ailment and a superstition for any situation. Mama also goes for advice from her dead husband, who pops up in the living room and dispenses wisdom about god and playing cards.

Ullman's family is just as odd. Her father, unlike that of her new husband's, is alive, but he's normally two sheets to the wind (in which state he used her as a bet in the pinochle game). Her brother is equally odd, being obsessed with the opera Madame Butterfly and Japanese women. Stranger still, Ullman is destined to give birth to a daughter who will become an unofficial saint of housework and religious faithfulness. (The child's power is so great that even the sausages made in her father's shop become legendary for their curative powers.)

Household Saints is a rambling tale that veers unexpectedly between moments of surreal splendor and grim realism. It also walks a fine line between ethnic humor and crazy tragedy. The movie's strong first half gives way to a moody, slower finale. The whole movie's genuinely off-beat in ways that are both touching and amusing. Consider, for instance, the image of Christ at an ironing board, which works as an appropriate and lasting irony.

Haile Gerima Returns to the Roots

“As a child, I liked Tarzan movies and John Wayne,” said Haile Gerima, an African filmmaker who's worked primarily in the United States – and who has become accustomed to the ironies inherent in living within two very different worlds.

“But it's like playing cowboys and Indians. You always want to be the cowboy and never the Indian. That's how much the colonizer makes you hate your own culture.”

The need to remember, and review, a dispossessed culture is at the heart of Gerima's latest movie, Sankofa. The film's harsh and vivid depiction of the 19th-century slave trade has garnered international praise, while earning it the dubious distinction of being a movie that no U.S. Distributor wanted to handle. Gerima screens Sankofa at the Drexel Theatre April 21 as a special presentation for the National Black Programming Consortium.

The title Sankofa is a word from the Akan language that means “to return to the past in order to go forward.” That process takes place in the story when an African-American fashion model travels to a shoot in an old fortress in Ghana, only to find herself reliving an earlier life on a Caribbean slave plantation. The experience is a nightmare of beatings, rape and torture. It is also her critical first step toward rediscovering her own heritage.

“Part of the struggle is in reclaiming the past,” Germina explained by phone from his distribution office in New York. “Slavery was about disconnecting black people from their link to Africa. Slavery was a great negation, and the bridges to the past were cut off.”

Gerima's own life reads like a bridge between the two continents. Born in Ethiopia in 1946, Gerima grew up in an intellectual family, which influenced his early interest in theater – his father was a prominent African playwright. Gerima arrived in America in 1967 and began studying at Chicago's Goodman School of Drama. “But one day I stumbled into the wrong building,” he joked, “and saw a screening of student films.” He became fascinated with cinema and made tracks for the film department at UCLA.

He quickly became a favorite on the film festival circuit, with such works as the documentary Harvest: 3000 Years as well as the drama Bush Mama, a realistic look at life in central Los Angeles. For the past 17 years, Gerima has lived in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at Howard University. But film making is his real passion. “Every movie is another step in an imperfect journey toward expressing myself.”

Gerima may view his own work as flawed, but his view of Hollywood is much harsher. He describes it as “a brutal mind-set for black intellectuals.” He's not fond of such Hollywood forms of black film making as Menace II Society.

“Every 10 or 15 years there's a new round of these types of movies,” he explained. “But to take a small section of young people and exploit them with these films is simply a form of racism.”

Given his outlook on Hollywood, Gerima wasn't completely surprised by American movie companies' strong resistance to Sankofa, a response that convinced him to handle the film's distribution himself.

Which is fine with him, if it allows him to control the perspectives on African-American history and experience expressed in his films. For Gerima, the important battleground is the media-created images of one's people.

“African-Americans don't control films, TV, the banks that finance these things or anything else. But African-Americans are trying to take control. You can see that struggle taking place every day.”

Guelwaar

Ousmane Sembene is the living granddaddy of African cinema, and one of the finest filmmakers anywhere. He's also virtually unknown to the general American movie-going public. Which is too bad, because Sembene has more hard truths to reveal about the human condition than any 20 Hollywood types combined. His newest movie, Guelwaar (The Noble One), is a sharp and biting reminder of the old master's gift for satire.

Guelwaar is the title given to Pierre Henri Thioune, the dead man whose missing body becomes the focal point for the movie's plot. The setting is modern Senegal, a predominately Muslim country, where Thioune was a prominent Catholic. When his body turns up missing at the morgue, the case takes on a suspect political tone. When it's discovered that the body has been accidentally buried in an Islamic cemetery, the whole matter becomes a major social crisis.

The misplaced body is an embarrassment, but it's only a symptom of the real problem, which is the contradictory condition of modern Senegalese society.

Thioune was viewed as a political dissident not only because of his religion, but also because of his family's strong leaning toward French culture. (His oldest son, for instance, is a French citizen.) Senegal, being an ex-French colony, doesn't take kindly to influences from the European power that once enslaved it. On the other hand, the official language of Senegal is French, and the Senegalese still cling to many of the bureaucratic structures of the old regime.

The question of cultural identity fuels the fires that simmer beneath Guelwaar's calm surfaces. Sembene's film is funny, but it takes bites that draw blood out of both sides of the conflict. Guelwaar's aim is especially deadly when it comes to women's status. As Sembene demonstrates, Senegalese women can't get a fair shake from either side.

Greedy

Greedy stars Michael J. Fox. You won’t necessarily realize that from the way the movie’s being advertised, but it’s a Fox vehicle. Not that you can blame the studio for wanting to downplay its star – his last two movies have thoroughly bombed at the box office. But why pick on Michael? It’s the screenwriters and the director who should be shot.

As the Beatles might note, Greedy is a dirty story about a dirty man, whose clinging family just doesn’t understand. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to understand. The McTeague clan is a pack of grasping vultures who can’t wait for their rich Uncle John (Kirk Douglas) to drop dead. Likewise, Douglas can’t stand his family and jerks them around at every opportunity. He also has a new nurse/companion (Olivia d’Abo), a former pizza delivery girl who dropped into his lap – repeatedly.

Fearing that the old geezer is becoming d’Abo’s sex slave, the McTeagues recruit Uncle John’s long-lost nephew (Fox) to help. As a kid, Fox’s impersonation of Jimmy Durante won favor in Uncle John’s teeny, tiny heart. (Obviously, it doesn’t take much to be cute in the McTeague family.)

There’s supposed to be really biting black comedy going on here, but Greedy plays like Married…With Children minus any real kicks or jabs. What’s more, the movie suddenly goes sentimental for no apparent reason. It’s as if the screenwriters – Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel – ran out of material after the first 20 minutes.

Greedy was directed by Jonathan Lynn, who previously scored a good hit with My Cousin Vinny. I saw My Cousin Vinny. I laughed through My Cousin Vinny. This is not My Cousin Vinny.

Go Fish

If you can imagine a cross between She’s Gotta Have It, Annie Hall and The Women, then you’ll have a bit of an idea why Go Fish is viewed in Hollywood as the first lesbian romantic comedy with the strong potential to win a mainstream audience.

The fact that Go Fish is extremely funny and very accurate in its observations about sex and love is a big plus in its favor. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female, straight or gay – the jokes are on target either way.

That’s one of the reasons why Go Fish is the must-see independent film of the year. Its all-female ensemble cast and girl-meets-girl storyline is a rare treat in the male-dominated American cinema. But its shrewd and knowing look at the confusion zone that lies between raw sex and genuine romantic yearning finds a universal rapport that’s both fresh and time-honored.

The freewheeling plot is centered around Max (Guinevere Turner) and Ely (V. S. Brodie), a mix-matched couple that seems to be anything except made for each other. Max is a would-be writer in her early 20s who hasn’t dated for more than a year and is waiting for Ms. Right to come along. Ely is middle-aged and reclusive, and has an out-of-state girlfriend who rarely telephones. On the surface, the only thing connecting Max and Ely is a string of mutual friends who’ve decided that the two lonely hearts should get together.

While Max and Ely hesitantly view each other’s merits, their pals form a Greek chorus that voices the movie’s brash survey on the thorny contradictions between love and sexual politics. Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), one of Max’s university professors, is a theorist divided between her own gently jaded feelings about love’s longevity (and lack thereof) and her ever-increasing involvement with a new flame. On the other side of the choir is Daria (Anastasia Sharp), who argues that everything is about sex and who’s determined to have as much of it as she can.

Filmed in Chicago on a low-budget, Go Fish has the grainy black-and-white look of a documentary. But it also has a well-tuned script by Guinevere Turner and director Rose Troche, as well as a sense of youthful charm that enlivens nearly every scene. Go Fish is an exercise in go-for-broke film making, and it comes up a winner on most of its bets.

One of the best things about Go Fish is its warm sense of the heart’s desire. It has feelings without being mawkish and satiric flippancy without being icy. It knows the score, but still wants to chase after that elusive thing called love. And that’s a truth that goes for everyone.

Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm

Lots of people have been telling us about the sorry state of the current generation of young folks. The documentary Frosh is one of the few films that have actually taken the time to talk with them, not at them. Frosh has no social agenda or cultural axes to grind. Instead, it reaches for a sympathetic overview of new college students who are about to undergo that awkward transition from teenage angst to an uncertain adulthood.

Videotaped during the 1990-91 academic year at Stanford University, Frosh opens with a picture post-card presentation of fresh faces, blue California skies and parents practicing their last rites of familial grasp. But once the luggage is unpacked and the final goodbyes are made to departing station wagons, the freshman students begin zeroing in on each other, discovering both common pursuits and just how different they are from each other. They don't realize it, but they've just taken the first steps toward realizing how little they actually know. This is called “the college experience.”

Since cultural diversity is virtually the motto of Stanford, the young men and women who reside in the freshman dorm represent a wide sampling of racial and social backgrounds. Nick, the resident bi-sexual, has a deft ability to disarm the concerns of the more conservative dormies. Shayne is the good-girl-from-a-Catholic-background who discovers feminism. Brandi, who's from a very proper, upper-class African-American family, initially has problems understanding Monique, a black woman from Oakland who has to deal with a crackhead mother and a mostly absent father. Then there's Cheng, a Chinese-American man from Ohio who's solidly Midwestern. (This group sounds like a cast for a TV sit-com.)

But Frosh isn't concerned with a parade of one-liners. The filmmakers (Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine) stick with these people through nine months of rap sessions, beer blasts, paper writing, and test cramming. A few of the kids end up either dropping out or transferring to easier schools. They all undergo changes, especially in the ol' ego department.

What's most refreshing about Frosh is its direct and honest approach to college life. We've been bombarded by such mediocre films as PCU, Threesome, and With Honors, in which the average student age is 30 and the main area of interest is hormonal.

Not that sex is far from the thoughts of many of the students in Frosh, but it's obvious that they're still trying to figure it out. Several of the men conduct a hysterically funny debate about why it's called a blow job, while another guy simply pines for a nice girlfriend.

Now, that's college as I remember it.

The Fifth Element

Someday in the future, theoretical physicists will discover an alternative universe composed solely of extreme hipness. Until then, The Fifth Element will suffice as a close approximation. The movie is cool, way cool. In fact, it is too way cool for its own good at times. It takes nearly forty minutes of viewing before it becomes apparent that The Fifth Element is actually a very sly and campy parody of itself. But once established, the movies snaps together as a strangely brilliant tour-de-farce.

This tongue-firmly-in-cheek attitude allows The Fifth Element to skip through a plot that unloads like a consumer's guide to the past twenty years of science-fiction. Even visually, the movie is a bizarre composite of designs freely lifted from everywhere else. Then it adds in a thick veneer of Parisian chic and Arabian Night gloss. The Fifth Element is less a movie and more of an exotic photo spread for Vogue magazine. Even the odd casting of Milla Jovovich is merely a logical extension of the movie's obsessive concern with its haute couture appearance.

So don't worry about the fact that The Fifth Element doesn't make much sense. Narrative coherency is not the movie's primary focus. Even the hair stylists were obviously ranked above the scriptwriters, with one of the funnier gags being a subtle but devastating take on the Princess Leia look. Of course, this is not counting the odd sight of Willis with a blond shag. The French are a little bit caustic, non?

But the latest fads in post-punk fashion wear is not the biggest worry faced by Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis). He's more worried about keeping his cabby license, especially since taxi driving is virtually the only job he has been able to get since leaving his post as a space commando. Though he was trained to be the 23rd century equivalent of Rambo, Dallas finds the high flying traffic of New York to be just a tad dangerous.

Dallas knows better than to get involved with a half-naked woman with bright orange hair who literally falls into his cab's back seat. Even worse, she only speaks the ancient language of a divine race whose mission is to save humanity from ultimate evil. Though Le-Eluu (Jovovich) promises to be a lousy tipper, Dallas impulsively decides to help her evade the police.

Good thing, because ultimate evil in the form of a fire-belching comet is currently heading straight for the earth. Only Father Cornelius (Ian Holm) and a ruthless millionaire named Zorg(Gary Oldman) are knowledgeable about the object's intentions. But while Cornelius is bumbling his way toward discovering the primal power of good, Zorg is hell bent on scoring a profit from the complete destruction of mankind. Since Le-Eluu is the chief component to an ancient weapon designed to defeat evil, Cornelius needs her. He also needs Dallas, because somebody has to blow up all of those nasty alien mercenaries that Zorg employs with a giddy abandon.

Between its metaphysical mumblings and two-dimensional characters, The Fifth Element rambles even more than Oldman's eccentric version of a Southern accent. The movie is essentially a warped comic book, minus the dialogue bubbles. Sort of a Judge Dredd II, only this time it's fun. Though the ending is a disappointment (visions of the Apocalypse never fare well in the cinema), most of The Fifth Element is a fantastic flight of smart (and smart aleck) wizardry.

The movie's extensive use of CGI results in a fantastic stream of outlandishly effective, otherworldly scenes. The cluttered texture of the 23rd century is played for both laughs and shocks, with an amazing degree of success on both counts. The visual effect plays as a wild union between American crassness and Euro trash decadence, with an unpredictable dash of classical art thrown in on the side.

Director Luc Besson has always been a great believer in style over substance. In such films as Subway, La Femme Nikita, and The Professional, the image conveyed more merit than any traditional dramatic point. With The Fifth Element, Besson scores his best exercise yet in the realm of pure visualization. The film is often bold, breathtaking, and audacious. If it made any sense, it would even be a masterpiece.

But then, whoever said that everything had to make sense? Sometimes, you just kick off your shoes, relax, and breath it all in. Besides, The Fifth Element finally explains to us what the most powerful force is in the universe. As the Beatles once said, all you need is love. Too bad that this final sentiment in The Fifth Element is the one thing that the filmmakers couldn't digitally enhance.

Tim Burton: The Phantom of the Playroom

"But this isn't exactly a normal world, is it?"
‑Michael Keaton to Kim Basinger, Batman

The executives at Walt Disney Studio already knew that it wasn't going to be a typical test screening. After all, it was not everyday that a major studio lavished a million dollars on a short children's film by a young and totally unknown filmmaker. Tim Burton was only 24 years old and he still had the shy, boyish features of a reclusive teenager. But some people in the animation department thought that this kid was a promising talent and Disney was on the prowl for fresh directors.

On the other hand, the movie was filmed in black and white for crying out loud. It also had the warped title of Frankenweenie. (There had to have been a note to PR: Is this a Freudian joke or something?) Of course, no one really had a clue as to what would click with a kid in 1984, so what the heck. The men in suits only knew for certain that Burton was chronologically closer to the intended audience than they were.

Or was he? As the first few tykes came streaking out of the theatre, they could ignore the kid's terror filled fit. Some kids freak out during Snow White. But as the first trickle turned into a steady stream of hysterical youngsters, the Disney people realized that they had a major problem.

Though the Frankenweenie incident is a mixture of fact and fiction (contrary to some reports, most accounts indicate that only a few children were really going ballistic), it neatly summarizes the weird underlining to Burton's career. He is a filmmaker who has the magical gift of a child's wondrous imagination. But Burton also has the repressed rage and nasty humor of an evil Peter Pan.

This odd combination has actually been crucial to Burton's enormous success in Hollywood. It has also been a problem. Even people who didn't particularly like the original Batman nonetheless went back to see it four or five times. But Batman Returns was too cold and distant for even the film's defenders, few of whom were willing to risk a second viewing.

It would be an understatement to call Burton's career meteoric. He has risen higher, and fallen faster, than a modern day Icarus strapped to a rocket. Despite the $60 million dollars that Warner Bros. was willing to lavish on Burton's current production of Mars Attacks!, he is a filmmaker teetering on the brink.

No one in Hollywood ever understood how Burton's Beetlejuice became the surprise hit of 1988. Most studio executives couldn't even understand what the movie was even about. They only understood that Tim Burton had a weirdo's version of the Midas touch. Beetlejuice was a potentially gruesome black comedy with a title character who was a boorish motor mouth with a chalky white face that was continuously twisting into a non‑stop display of leers, jeers, and sneers.

There was little in Beetlejuice that could have been termed normal. Even the "nice" dead couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) were so normal as to be utterly abnormal. The whole movie presented death as if it were an old TV situation comedy reassembled by a bratty kid who was feeling bored in some brainless but sunny, ghastly yet affordable American 'burb.

Which means that Tim Burton is indeed the poet laureate of Burbank, California. Born in 1960, Burton grew up in that uniquely American twilight zone of little box houses and pink flamingos. Though Burton is never very forthcoming on personal matters in his rare interviews, he seemingly spent a large portion of his childhood glued to the TV tube. To this day, he takes great pride in his extensive TV Guide magazine collection.

Burton also acquired an extensive familiarity with horror movies (especially the films of Vincent Price) and cartoons. He began creating his own animated productions and displayed enough early promise to earn a Disney fellowship to the California Institute of the Arts. Burton quickly became a master of stop‑motion animation. Elements of this technique surfaces in most of Burton's movies, ranging from various effect scenes in Batman to the jerky movements of the Martians in Mars Attacks! George Lucas may devote his time to developing incredibly advance techniques, but Burton has persisted in fine‑tuning the cutting FX edge of the 1960s.

The atavistic nature of his technical passion is just one of the unusual traits that distinguishes Burton from many of his contemporaries. The other is the singular (even monotonous) obsessions that have repeatedly turned every movie by Burton into an oddly autobiographical text. Tim Burton is the most supremely ironic creature in Hollywood: an avant‑garde performance artist hiding behind the mask of a budget busting movie director.

Which may explain why Burton often seems oblivious to his audience. The self‑indulgent qualities so readily apparent in such movies as Batman Returns and Ed Wood are the results of a filmmaker who quite simply isn't concerned with the tastes of the mainstream audience. In each instance, Burton was busy pursuing some elusive vision from his own childhood that seemingly defied any open engagement with the outside world. At times, the result echoes the subconscious arrogance of a coach potato who keeps hogging the remote control.

But Burton has occasionally demonstrated a remarkable ability to connect with an audience as well. Despite its jumbled narrative, Batman successfully unleashed a quirky but raw sense of operatic grandeur that struck a primal emotional chord among many viewers. Likewise, Edward Scissorhands successfully enthralled enough otherwise jaded sensibilities to qualify it as a demented successor to the weepy throne of Now, Voyager.

Ironically, Burton's successes and failures are both firmly rooted in his intense preoccupation with freaks and monsters. Just as he clearly prefers the villains in the Batman movies, Burton is intensely drawn to anything that appears contrary to the standardized rigidity of a typical suburban existence. Perhaps it could be termed The Rocky Horror Picture Show Complex (though Janet‑damnit Syndrome may be a more apt title). Either way, this is the source of his visionary inspiration and the cause of his extreme state of alienation. No wonder audiences have such a love/hate relationship with his movies.

However, audience indifference is the current problem facing Burton. Despite its record‑breaking opening weekend, Batman Returns quickly dropped from the chart. Ed Wood received much critical praise and very little viewing. With Mars Attacks!, Burton seemingly has to find an audience or else. The poor American reception for the movie does not bode well for a director whose sensibilities tend to display a distinctly American sense of adolescent psychosis.

Curiously enough, the apparent rise and fall of Tim Burton bears some resemblance to the one filmmaker in Hollywood history who clearly has influenced Burton. From the mid‑1920s to the mid‑1930s, Tod Browning scored a weird and spooky hold over viewers with such oddball movies as The Unholy Three (from which Burton derived the make‑up for the Penguin), Freaks (also referenced in Batman Returns), and Dracula (starring Ed Wood's pal, Bela). Like Burton, Browning was morbidly fascinated with pathological behavior and unusually sympathetic to the emotional angst of deformed outsiders. In many of Browning movies, the villains were the real center of emotional engagement. Likewise, normal people were often vindictive figures who deserved their cruel fate.

But Browning's popularity quickly vanished during the later years of the Great Depression. By 1939, he retired from film‑ making, placed a bogus obituary notice in Variety and entered a 30 year state of seclusion in his Santa Monica home. Until he died in 1962, Browning devoted his final years (according to most accounts) to heavy drinking and excessive TV watching.

Most likely, he was already watching most of the movies that Burton would catch on the tube a few years later. Heck, Browning even directed some of them.

And Santa Monica is only a half hour drive from Burbank.

Body Snatchers

They don't make paranoia like they used to. After all, the two previous versions of the sci-fi classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers left viewers with the sneaky suspicion that they should double-check the identity of all their friends and relatives.

But the new production, bearing the trimmed-down title of Body Snatchers, isn't even scary enough to make you want to spy on your neighbors. It just doesn't have the juicy fear factor of the earlier movies.

What Body Snatchers does have is a preponderance of foreboding that finally gives way to surprisingly lackluster fits of hysteria. It also offers a vaguely competent performance by Gabrielle Anwar, as a teenager who's trapped on a pod-infested army base with her father (Terry Kinney) and step-brother (Meg Tilly). That's the new twist in this version – the brain-stealing veggies from outer space have taken over the military. But since military intelligence is an oxymoron, who can tell the difference?

Certainly not Anwar's father, who's an inspector for the EPA, and has been sent to the army base to test for toxins in the local water. Despite his presumed expertise on aquatic ecosystems, he never notices that alien seed pods are beginning to hatch in the river by the thousands. He's so out of touch with his own environment that he's hardly aware that most of the troops are acting like zombies. He's even slow on the uptake when his own wife starts behaving oddly.

Not that Anwar is any smarter. She's so busy seething at her step-mother that she doesn't realize that the local MP's are dragging people out of their houses in the middle of the night. She doesn't figure it out until the truth literally comes crashing through her roof.

Forest Whitaker, as an army psychiatrist who goes nuts from his efforts to stay sane, provides the movie's only engaging character.

The first half of Body Snatchers spends too much time warning us that something other-worldly is going on. The second half explains everything too quickly and sets the stage for a final firefight that's neither very exciting nor frightening. The movie is stuck between a pod and a hard place – it's too serious to have any fun with its crazy plot line, but it's incapable of presenting an intelligent, coherent story. Even the central question of who is – and who isn't – human is treated with virtual indifference.

The Story of Qiu Ju

It takes a while before you realize The Story of Qiu Ju is a comedy. It's played with impeccable seriousness. The first image is of Qiu Ju and her sister-in-law dragging her injured husband to a shabby doctor's office. You're braced for a realist story. Then you learn the nature of his injury.

Qiu Ju's husband was kicked in the family jewels by the village chief. A business dispute turned into an insult-throwing match about which man was more capable of producing sons. The chief went straight to the heart of the matter.

The husband's wound isn't serious, but Qiu Ju wants a basic sense of justice fulfilled. The chief offers to pay the medical bills, but does so with a flippant contempt, not wanting to admit that he may have done something wrong.

In fact, no one wants to admit wrong doing, and no one want to lose face. Therefore, a minor brawl becomes a major incident.

This is modern-day China, where a staunch patriarchal tradition has collided head-on with the government's strict, one-child-only policy. (And its particular application – the chief has four daughters.) It's also a post-revolutionary China, where the Maoist man is being hastily reshaped into the new consumer. At a market stall, posters of Mao share space with shots of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Story of Qiu Ju is a remarkably subtle satire by Zhang Yimou, one of the more prominent of China's so-called “Fifth Generation” filmmakers. His previous productions, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, received international attention.

Before becoming a director, Zhang Yimou was one of China's best film photographers. His camera work on the seminal Chinese film The Yellow Earth is truly breath-taking. The Story of Qiu Ju is a visual treat, too (especially its emotionally effective use of color). The film overwhelms the senses without even trying.

Qiu Ju's droll presentation of Chinese bureaucracy lacks some of the caustic bite of earlier Fifth Generation works, such as The Black Cannon Incident. But Qiu Ju has a sense of irony that's often quite funny and, in its surprise conclusion, unsettling.

Star Trek: First Contact

In case you haven't heard, the Borg are back and they are itching for a fight. This simple idea is the overwhelming focus of Star Trek: First Contact, the eighth big screen entry in the series and the first full blown excursion by The Next Generation crew (minus those old guys). The result is the wildest and most action-packed adventure since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Occasionally,the movie is almost too exciting as it attempts a tricky balance between humanitarian ideals and raw terror. Both ethics and good judgement can take a pounding when the Borg are on the loose.

The horror of it all is already bothering Capt. Picard(Patrick Stewart) when he jolts awake from a nightmare rooted in his own experience with Borg-style assimilation. Picard is equally bothered by the fact that Star Fleet still doesn't
trust him where the Borg are concerned. Despite rumors of a Borg ship heading toward Federation space, the Enterprise E has been sent to chill out along the Neutral Zone. No wonder Picard is in such a foul and snappish mood.

But the Federation's effort to destroy the Borg vessel through a massive attack turns into a disastrous failure(again) that is barely salvaged by the traditional wiliness of the Enterprise crew to conveniently disobey orders whenever they feel like it. But Picard's uncanny (and unexplained) ability to blow up the enemy's big cube doesn't help him to comprehend what is happening when a small sphere escapes from the exploding Borg ship. The sphere rushes for Earth, does the time warp bit, and presto - the 24th century is now thoroughly assimilated.

Thanks to an irrational combination of pseudo-science and techno-babble, the Enterprise E follows the Borg sphere back to the 21st century. Suddenly it becomes clear that the real target of the Borg attack is the legendary inventor of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell). It is the eve of Cochrane's first test flight (and mankind's first encounter with an alien race) and the Borg intend to end humankind involvement with interstellar history at its origin.

Too bad the Borg didn't go for the easy way. Another round of drinks should be enough to put Cochrane out for a couple of years. In the history books, Cochrane is a great man. In the flesh, he's a bit of a drunken lout who seems quicker with the leer than the equations. If history is to be fulfilled, Picard has to successfully fend off the Borg(who have seized the Enterprise's engineering room and begun assimilating the crew) as well as sober up the world's shakiest rocket scientist.

The double narrative of Star Trek: First Contact is both its strength and weakness. Many of the scenes with Cochrane provides the movie with a zesty sense of fun, especially when Troi (Marina Sirtis) makes the mistake of trying to keep up with the tequila habits of this seasoned, soused pro. Likewise, the dim awakening of Cochrane to his historic role provides Star Trek: First Contact with a nice dose of Gene Roddenberry's old-school concerns about humanity.

But the real action takes place on the Enterprise as Picard turns the battle against the Borg into a very personal(and increasingly demented) campaign. The cybernetic bad boys of deep space have just assimilated over half of the ship's crew, are converting portions of the Enterprise into a Borg environment, and have kidnapped Data so he can be a boy toy for their queen (Alice Krige). So what. Picard is solely interested in avenging himself. It's Capt. Ahab time on the USS Enterprise as Picard picks up a phaser, drops some quotes from Moby Dick, and starts blasting at anyone who even has a lousy paper clip dangling from their face. In other words, he goes slightly nutso.

Which may explain why Star Trek: First Contact has an odd, distant feel to it. The movie is strongly dependent upon the viewer being familiar with the TV series and runs the risk of being difficult for the non-Trekker to follow. In turn, it deviates enough from the show's standard characterizations (as well as from its continuity) to be slightly confounding to the fans.

But a combination of strong acting, and surprisingly solid direction from Frakes, pulls Star Trek: First Contact through most of its weaker moments. Stewart is able to keep the increasingly obsessive Picard sympathetic, even while ripping a circuit out of the entrails of a Borgized shipmate. Likewise, Spiner is allowed to return to his more low key portrayal of Data ( the recently acquired emotion chip is mercifully down played). When the Borg Queen goes to seduce Data, Spiner is able to maintain the android's childlike sense of naivete without a single false moment of bad histrionic (unlike Star Trek: Generations).

The new movie is also more generous with the rest of the cast than was its half-baked predecessor. Marina Sirtis has a great drunk scene while Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Picardo unloads one of the funniest moments in the movie. As Cochrane, Cromwell manages to breath life into a weakly written role as he successfully transforms the deadhead professor into a figure of destiny. Only Alfre Woodard comes across as substandard, and her poor showing is clearly the result of playing a character who has no real function in the story. Even Woodard's one big moment in the film was obviously "borrowed" from another character (hey, only Dr. Crusher is allowed to talk to Jean-Luc in that manner).

But thrills are the main focus of Star Trek: First Contact as the movie takes the Enterprise on one of its most harrowing rides. Not only do the Borg get to be as bad as they want to be, but their Queen (Alice Krige) manages to throw in a bizarre set of sexual come-ons and snotty put-downs. Besides, Krige is also given one of the most impressive entrances in recent movie memory.

Best of all, Star Trek: First Contact is a sure sign that The Next Generation crew is bound to live long and prosper on the movie screen. That prospect alone turns the new film into an absolute must-see for fans.

Their Hearts Belong to Daddy

In case you haven't noticed, August is the month for the “serious” children films. And I do mean serious – movies backed by big names and loaded with big, ambitious themes. Heck, some of these films are actually too serious for kids. Drop'em off at Tom and Jerry, instead.

This month, Hollywood is apparently trying to reconcile with dear, old – and absent – Dad. The central themes of The Man Without a Face, The Secret Garden and Searching for Bobby Fischer revolve around this issue. As these films conclude, absence (whether physical or psychological) doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It simply makes the kid more bitter and confused.

Get with the program, pop. Hollywood is telling you to get in touch with your kids' feelings. And it's telling you this via some of the more intelligent films of the summer.

Gibson Comes of Age

Intelligence is one of the surprise ingredients of each of these films. Even Mel Gibson – the man of a thousand bun shots – has taken on a weighty subject and role in The Man Without a Face. In many ways, it's the most difficult of the three films. It's also the most flawed.

The Man Without a Face is Gibson's directorial debut, and the raw sincerity of his intentions is surprising. With a few exceptions, Gibson has rarely stretched himself as an actor. After two too many Lethal Weapon films, he seemed content to coast on his good looks and stunt man's prowess.

But The Man Without a Face is Mel striving hard to be both lyrical and psychologically insightful. To top it off, he tackles a role in the movie that is part Elephant Man and part Phantom of the Opera.

The film's main character, however, is 12-year-old Chuck Norstadt (Nick Stahl). Surrounded by two half-sisters and a mother who is perpetually between marriages, Chuck is a troubled boy lacking male guidance. He has turned his dead father into a dreamy hero figure and is desperate to attend the military school his father graduated from. But bad grades, hyperactivity and an anti-social attitude stand in his way.

Enter McLeod (Gibson), a horribly scarred recluse who has shut himself off from the world. McLeod also happens to be a gifted artist and an ex-teacher. Chuck soon finds that McLeod is a more manly mentor than his mother's latest beau.

But Chuck receives bad news: his daddy was no hero, and his mentor was convicted of something that nightmares are made of.

In The Man Without a Face, Gibson demonstrates that he has guts – but that he's not a good director. He has a weak grasp of editing continuity, and his obsessive use of close-ups nearly butchers some great cinematography by Donald M. McAlpine.


It's All in How You Look

Great images are virtually the point of The Secret Garden. Executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and directed by Agnieszka Holland, the film opts for a largely visual translation of the classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Beginning like a fairy tale, with a gaudy prologue in India, The Secret Garden turns into a bleak and monochromatic vision of 19th-century England. You can't wait for the garden to start sprouting color.

The lives of the movie's child characters are equally bleak. Mary Lennox (Kate Maberly) is ignored by her parents – so much so that she hardly misses them when they're killed in India by an earthquake. She is sent back to England to live with her uncle, a widower who spends most of his time moping around his estate.

Not that Mary is a joy to be around. She's snotty, repressed and doesn't know how to dress herself. But the situation begins to transform when she meets her sickly cousin and a wise farm boy. What starts as simple gardening with the boys becomes a process of amazing healing for each child. The only challenge that remains for one boy is getting Dad's attention.

The Secret Garden skirts with Hallmark card-like predictability. But it works, largely due to Holland's shrewd and sensitive direction. The nearly inevitable reconciliation of father and son is touching primarily because it's so well photographed. (Hey, they don't have to like each other. They just have to look good together.)


Hard Life Lessons

The crowned price of this summer's “where's poppa?” competition is Searching for Bobby Fischer.

Based on a true story (whatever that means these days), Searching for Bobby Fischer follows the quest of seven-year-old Josh Waitzkin to become a chess prodigy like his elusive idol, his dad. Josh is driven, in part, by a need for his father's approval. But the august parent, of course, is slow on the uptake.

With dad initially out of the picture, Josh receives most of his life lessons from his two mentors. One is an aggressive chess hustler (Laurence Fishburne), who can wipe a board clean in a dozen moves. The other is an embittered grand master (Ben Kingsley), who is more enamored with the art of the game.

What Josh learns is that the approach of each man is right – and wrong. Ultimately, it's his father who helps him learn to accept the best in each method, while sidestepping the worst.

Most importantly, he learns how to be a kid.

Wyatt Earp

Before Kevin Costner agreed to play the title role, Wyatt Earp was intended to be a six-hour TV mini-series. It's not clear how they were going to fill all of that time on the boob tube with the debatable details about the old West's most dubious self-made legend, but it might have played better than this movie. Even with its three-hours-plus running time, Wyatt Earp is a choppy production with large narrative gaps and an excessively narrow focus.

The partly fabricated plot of Wyatt Earp attempts a sweeping biography of the frontier lawman, from his early childhood in Iowa to his bloody career in Dodge City and Tombstone. The movie wants to present Earp as a contradictory mix of idealism and violence, so when the teenage Wyatt witnesses his first killing, he instantly vomits from shock. Two hours into the movie, he's gunning men down with the steely precision of a mob hit man. Unfortunately, the long stretch in between doesn't really explain how Wyatt so thoroughly progressed from a naive lad to a harsh and oppressive gunman. All we get is the vague suggestion that he was mindlessly ensnared by the clannish dictates of his sternly aloof father (Gene Hackman).

Costner plays the singularly most colorless Earp ever to cross the screen. His performance wavers between blank looks and painful stares, and he's totally lacking in the off-beat Western charm that the real Earp reportedly possessed. Dennis Quaid is surprisingly good as Doc Holliday, but he and the rest of the all-star cast are wasted in roles that are primarily glorified cameos. Only Wyatt is given any emphasis, and he's duller than a rusty tin badge.

So if you're enamored of Earp's story, you're better off renting last year's loony-tune production of Tombstone. At least it was lively.