Fearless

If you ever want to experience an airline crash, then the final reel of Fearless is a must see. Unfortunately, the time it takes to get there may seem like a long wait between flights.

Jeff Bridges plays a San Francisco architect whose business trip to Houston is rudely interrupted by a nose dive into a corn field.

He's one of the few survivors of the crash and, despite his long-standing fear of flying, emerges from the wreckage as a calm and confident hero. In fact, regardless of a mysterious wound in his side, he's gotten it into his head that he's invulnerable and that something special about his presence is what saved his fellow survivors. You almost expect him to start turning water into wine.

Another survivor, Rosie Perez, copes with the ordeal in a different manner. Her baby son was killed in the landing and she's heading toward a catatonic state. The only person who can help her recover is Bridges.

Fortunately, he's able to squeeze her into the schedule of his new-found occupation as life-affirming savior.

Fearless has potential, but it goes off-track midway through and collides with its own style. The movie is torn between allegory and psychology, and ends up going neither direction.

It's as if Fearless lacks the strength of its own convictions.

Gift

An ambiguous mix of reality and fiction underlies Gift, the drug-laced eulogy to the punk generation by Perry Farrell and Casey Niccoli.

Farrell, formerly of the band Jane's Addiction, is now with Porno for Pyros; co-director Niccoli is his ex-girlfriend. In Gift, they play a husband-and-wife team whose lives take a walk on the wild side, a destructive ride through rock-and-roll, bad managers and enough Percodan and Darvon to start a pharmacy.

Gift is hard-edged, darkly humorous and unsparing in its view of the downward slide of the L.A. punk scene. It offers a high energy kick, along with some good concert and recording-session footage.

Fatal Instinct

Another parody, another dollar. That seems to be the rationale behind Fatal Instinct, since it attempts to spoof half a dozen thrillers and to copy the incredibly stupid joke formula of The Naked Gun flicks. It fails on most counts — which is hard to understand, considering how little it's trying to do in the first place.

Armand Assante plays a lawyer/police officer. He arrests suspects at night and defends them in the morning. Sherilyn Fenn is literally his straight-shooting secretary. She loves Assante, but is haunted by memories of an abusive husband, who's stalking her. Kate Nelligan plays Assante's wife, a lust-driven schemer who's just discovered that her husband's insurance policy contains a triple indemnity clause. Sean Young is an ice-pick-wielding femme fatale with a taste for bizarre sex, blackmail and plot loopholes.

The gags are obvious, and the punchlines mostly refer to key parts of Assante's anatomy. Fatal Instinct is more than just a bad comedy: it's such a dreary, unimaginative farce that it can't even get a Three Stooges gag right.

The movie's only unique wrinkle is Assante's odd performance, which creates a character reminiscent of an underplayed version of William F. Buckley. The real Buckley is actually funnier to watch, however — especially when he rolls his eyeballs.

The best thing to be said about Fatal Instinct is that there probably won't be a sequel.

The Remains of the Day

It's a little difficult to describe The Remains of the Day without making it sound veddy British, veddy proper and veddy boring. Granted, it's quiet and reserved. It's also engrossing and surprisingly poignant.

The Remains of the Day works as a subtle critique of emotional repression and the neo-fascist direction taken by upper-class English society prior to World War II. It also clicks as a "non-love story," as it dissects the peculiar mind of a perfect servant. And yes, stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are probably going to be nominated again for Oscars.

Hopkins plays a joyless Jeeves, a head butler who has completely submerged himself into the act of serving. He has an exact eye for detail, and is totally devoted to his master. But he acts like a detached automaton, and his voice registers with the impersonal politeness of a recorded phone message. Even when informed of his father's death, Hopkins keeps working through a dinner party with barely a wrinkle in his demeanor.

His life takes a turn for the romantic, however, when the new housekeeper (Thompson) arrives. He finds himself increasingly attracted to her, but simply incapable of dealing with his feelings. Her youth and livelier manner appeal to him, but he's too repressed to admit to the slightest glimmer of feeling.

Meanwhile, his master (James Fox) is busy selling-out the country. It's 1936, and Fox is desperately trying to make peace between England and Germany. It becomes increasingly obvious to everyone except Hopkins that his master — who's mistaken Hitler for a reasonable man and is advocating appeasement — is a dangerous idiot who's being played for a sap by the Third Reich.

Hopkins, on the other hand, stays busy chasing dust bunnies in the hallway while history unfolds around him.

One of the remarkable feats accomplished by The Remains of the Day is its ability to be emotionally moving while presenting a character who's so thoroughly out of touch with his own feelings.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

In the summer of 1990, war almost erupted in a small town in Canada — over a golf course. The Mohawk Nation squared off against the Canadian police and army in a land dispute that traced back to the 17th century, when the French first tried to seize the area surrounding the island of Montreal.

The documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance presents a no-holds-barred account of the tense stalemate between the two sides that dragged on for months and nearly resulted in a full-scale battle. The movie is directed by Alanis Obomsawin, a Native American filmmaker who belongs to the Abenaki Nation. She and her crew stayed with the Mohawks through the entire confrontation, even after 1,000 Canadian troops surrounded their camp with guns and barbed-wire fences.

The basic issues of the confrontation seemed, at first, straightforward. The Mohawk village of Kanehsatake owned land that bordered the Canadian town of Oka. The folks of Oka wanted to expand a golf course, and that meant building on tribal land. The mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, decided to handle the affair in the old-fashioned way — he simply proceeded to take the land, without talking to the Mohawks. Not surprisingly, the Nation got mad.

In retaliation, the Mohawks erected a barricade across the dirt road that led to the golf course. Increasingly violent confrontations took place between members of the Nation and police, resulting in the death of an officer and the seizure of the Mercier Bridge by Mohawk warriors.

When the Quebec Human Rights Commission attempted to intervene, Canada's government knew it had a major problem on its hands. Technically, the Mohawk Nation is accepted by the Canadian government as a separate political entity from Canada. However, the administration of the conservative prime minister at the time,Brian Mulroney, didn't want to admit it. So,for all practical purposes, Canada and the Mohawk Nation entered a state of war.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance successfully captures the pain, panic and confusion that dominated the events of 1990. Obomsawin is clearly concerned with the Mohawks' view of the confrontations, but she presents a clear and balanced understanding of both sides' perspectives. She also conveys the degree to which each side was miscommunicating with the other. (After a while, the townspeople of Kanehsatake and Oka wouldn't even speak to each other.)

The Air Up There

Wasn't it Will Rogers who once said that the reason you don't see too many great basketball movies is because there ain't any? Okay, he didn't really say that, but he might have after seeing The Air Up There.

It's not such a bad movie — it just isn't much of anything. The Air Up There tries to be an uplifting comedy, but mostly ends up being dull and pointless. The whole movie is so lacking in focus that even the line that explains the title goes by with barely a notice.

Kevin Bacon plays an assistant basketball coach at St. Joseph University. He has a bum knee, a bad attitude and a big mouth. He's supposed to go to Boise to recruit a new player, but follows a hunch and winds up in Kenya, instead. He's seen pictures of a tribal chief's son who's 6' 8", and knows how to slam dunk. All Bacon has to do is teach him how to play the rest of the game.

Well, Bacon does have a few other problems. He has to win the tribe's trust,
reconcile the chief with one of his sons and coach the whole village through a winner-takes-all basketball game against the greedy copper company that's threatening to steal the tribe's land. (If you can't guess how the movie ends, you're just going to have to splurge for a ticket. Though if you can't figure out who wins the game, you probably can't figure out how to drive to the theater.)

Wouldn't it be easier to just buy the player a new car and give him straight As?

Shadowlands

You don't have to know who C. S. Lewis was to enjoy Shadowlands, but it helps if you do. Many people know him best for his children's novel The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, For others, Lewis is notable for his writings on God, ethics and religion, in such works as The Allegory of Love and The Screwtape Letters. (However, since Lewis never addressed the topic of professional hockey, he may be unknown to some of our staff.)

Lewis was a glaring example of the English intellectual who wrote passionately about lofty ideals, but who led such a cloistered life that he had little direct experience with much of anything. Even when he wrote about sex (as he did in That Hideous Strength), it was so abstract that no one was sure what the heck he was talking about.

That's where Shadowlands comes in. The movie deals with Lewis's brief marriage to an American woman whom he barely knew, but who was a fan of his books. She was fleeing a lousy ex-husband, she wanted to remain in England and she needed to be married to do so. The marriage was more than one of mere convenience, however. There was real affection between the two, which provided Lewis with a rare encounter with his own feelings - which he desperately needed.

In the lead roles, Anthony Hopkins continues his reign as the British master of repressed gentility, while Debra Winger proves, once again, that she's a solid performer. Richard Attenborough directed Shadowlands, and was able to do it without a cast of thousands or an entire continent to film on. The result is a fine, though occasionally predictable, character study.

In fact, I can honestly say that Shadowlands is the best film I've seen so far this year.

(Ed. Note: This review was published on Jan. 5. That is way I could say the final line.)

Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine is a horror movie set in Cleveland. Already I'm scared. The movie's monster lurks in computers. Now I'm terrified. Even worse, he's capable of running up your phone bill with calls to 900 numbers. AAAAHHHHH!!!!!

Despite all this mayhem, Ghost in the Machine starts out as a bucolic tale about an electronic repair guy who just happens to moonlight as a mad dog serial killer. They call him the Address Book Killer, because he steals address books, then murders everyone who's listed in them.

One day, Nancy Allen comes into his shop and accidentally leaves her address book. The killer is instantly smitten by her (you can tell by the way he keeps sniffing at her addresses). But while speeding to her house to slaughter Allen and her teenage son, he smashes up all over the freeway.

Now, this is the tricky part. He's rushed to the hospital and placed inside a Cat Scan. Lightning strikes the main power lines and there's a massive power surge. The killer dies just as his brain wave patterns are being processed by the computer during the surge. The killer's now "inside" the computer and is interfaced to the Datanet system. (I hope you were taking notes on this. A quiz may appear later in this review.)

Allen's life suddenly becomes a living nightmare. She discovers that her phone bill has been jacked up, her bank account has been shut down and her friends are being bumped off. Her life as a single mother of a teenage son (read: it's already nightmarish)has just taken a turn for the worse. (And she's still in Cleveland.)

That's when she meets Chris Mulkey, a chain-smoking computer hacker on the side of goodness. Unfortunately, he's not on the side of fashion or personal hygiene, but Allen is in no position to be picky about the company she keeps.

Ghost in the Machine's main claim to fame is that it was directed by Rachel Talalay, the director who scored some minor critical notice for Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (on Elm Street, that is). She has a strong visual style, but no apparent grasp of narrative logic. Her sense of pacing is nothing to write home about, either.

But these weaknesses won't bother the movie's audience. During the screening of Ghost in the Machine, I sat behind three teenagers who kept playfully slugging each other in the head through the whole flick. There really is too much violence in the cinema.