The Cement Garden

It isn't unusual for a teenage boy to go through a period of intense self-absorption. But the kid in The Cement Garden is a little more confused than the average 15-year-old headbanger. Jack (Andrew Robertson) is an extremely alienated, cross-dressing, narcissistic onanist who's buried his mother in the basement and is becoming incestuously involved with his sister. The kid is so underdeveloped in the old self-esteem category that he might as well be a Pauly Shore fan.

Unfortunately, this film version of Ian McEwan's highly regarded novel never rises above the ponderous neurosis of its main character. There's enough footage of Jack jerking off to send most viewers running to the nearest optometrist, but the movie comes up short on the psychological patterns underlying England's most dysfunctional family this side of Buckingham Palace. Cement Garden offers a lot of well-composed images of industrial waste heaps and bad architecture, resulting in a collection of gritty pictures that barely suggests the mental damage lurking inside the characters. (Writer-director Andrew Birkin presents himself as a protege of Stanley Kubrick, which may be why the film could be appropriately retitled A Clockwork Boring.)

What works in The Cement Garden are the performances by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sinead Cusack. As the mother of this disaffected brood, Cusack's performance balances nicely between strong feelings for her family and an almost complete inability to comprehend her son's mental state. Unfortunately, she dies from a mysterious illness midway through the movie, and Jack's sister (Gainsbourg) assumes the maternal role. Perhaps this is why the two siblings become so involved with each other. (Then again, perhaps not. The only thing the movie makes clear about her character is that she's instantly orgasmic.)

Much of the novel focuses on the world inside Jack's head. Most of the movie, however, is concerned with exteriors. The director missed the point, and the whole production turns into a bad comedy of pathological rituals and half-baked obsessions. No pun intended, but The Cement Garden repeatedly comes up empty handed.

Camp Nowhere

Sometimes, a film's misbegotten marketing campaign is more interesting than the movie itself. Take Camp Nowhere, for instance. This newest tribute to conspicuous consumption by bratty kids is obviously designed to suck in the available loose change of young teenagers with too much time to fill during summer vacation. So the geniuses at Disney unload this sappy sucker just as school starts. No wonder the theater was deserted at the showing I attended. The movie's audience had to be in bed by nine.

Camp Nowhere isn't the worst example of this basically loathsome genre. Compared to such earlier Disney efforts as Blank Check, this movie seems like a comedic masterpiece. It has a few passable jokes, one good laugh and the good sense to keep Christopher Lloyd's mugging to a minimum.

Jonathan Jackson (Free Willy) plays a nice boy with an obnoxious plan to avoid being sent for the summer to Camp Microchipawa. He and his co-conspirators create a fictitious camp that allegedly offers everything from musical theater to war games. Lloyd plays an ex-drama teacher who was fired for trying to stage a musical version of Silence of the Lambs (that's one of the passable jokes), so he's the perfect idiot to con the stupid adults into falling for their children's absurd plan.

The one unusual aspect of Camp Nowhere, is its peculiar redefining of the "family values" agenda. During their summer together, Lloyd takes the kids back to such old-fashioned basics as skinny dipping, Jimi Hendrix and (though only vaguely suggested, of course) the free love movement. Gripes! Disney's trying to cash in on Woodstock, too. I expect the next animated feature from the Magic Kingdom to be called Easy Mouser.

Milk Money

Richard Benjamin used to be a contender. Strictly a welterweight, but his direction of My Favorite Year and Racing With the Moon at least showed modest promise. Then he took a series of dives with such Joe Palooka productions as My Stepmother Is an Alien and Made In America. The guy absorbed so many well-deserved, critical poundings that it's no small wonder Benjamin has turned into a punchy has-been who can barely slug his way through a lousy sex comedy like Milk Money. He's a prime candidate for the Fat City retirement home, where he can yell "action" all day until the nurse pops him a sleeping pill.

The general gist of this substandard farce is that a 12-year-old boy (Michael Patrick Carter) can acquire a new stepmother — and improve his sex education — by recruiting a hooker (Melanie Griffith) for his dad. Since pop is a nerdy science teacher (Ed Harris) with wetlands for brains, he's the only person who doesn't realize that Griffith isn't a math tutor. His naive conversations with her about one-on-one teaching results in the most-extended double entendre in film history. It's pretty lame, but this is the only gag going for the movie.

The only interesting thing about Milk Money is its inexplicable tendency toward literary inside jokes. Griffith's character is simply named V after the Thomas Pynchon novel, and the kid goes to Owen Meaney Jr. High. This is clear proof that English grad students should stay away from movie-making and instead follow the more traditional career path of driving taxi cabs.

Corrina, Corrina

In Corrina, Corrina, Ray Liotta plays a young widower who needs a sitter for his daughter (Tina Majorino). Whoopi Goldberg plays a black woman with a college degree and an unfulfilled desire to be a writer. But it's the 1950s, so her quest for happiness is stuck somewhere between being a housemaid and a substitute mother, with the latter steering toward an interracial romance.

Which is the gist of this romantic comedy that plays a bit like an odd mix of House Boat and I'll Fly Away. Almost everything in the film is soft peddled, as the movie vaguely suggests more than it ever delivers. Corrina, Corrina depends heavily upon the performances of Goldberg and Liotta, and much to their credit, they're able to hold this film together — despite a screenplay that threatens to hit the melodramatic slopes with the fatalistic determination of a ski jumper.

The key to Liotta and Goldberg's budding romance is Majorino, a bright girl who refuses to talk because of her inability to deal with her mother's death. Whoopi is able to drag the kid out of her self-imposed shell with a casual breeziness that will make her the envy of psychotherapists everywhere. She's also good at improvising ad jingles, which keeps Liotta from losing his advertising job when he can't find a word to rhyme with "Jell-O."

Corrina, Corrina is more committed to its warm, fuzzy, feel-good glow than to the social statement lying buried beneath its script. Nonetheless, Goldberg's surprisingly strong range allows her to underplay her part while dominating the screen — one of the reasons why Corrina, Corrina is charming without being maudlin.

Eat Drink Man Woman

Romance and cooking often go hand in hand, a basic domestic fact that apparently is true both East and West. This combined need of the heart and stomach the subject of Eat Drink Man, the new comedy by Taiwanese director Ang Lee. As in his previous hit, The Wedding Banquet, Lee focuses a gently sardonic camera on the contradictions and paradoxes of the contemporary Chinese family. Eat Drink Man Woman is a slower and less satisfying film than The Wedding Banquet, but it has moments of humor and feeling that float to the surface of the movie like the taste of an exotic spice in an otherwise average sauce.

In The Wedding Banquet, Sihung Lung played the father who discreetly arranged the living arrangements for his gay son, daughter-in-law and his son's lover. With Eat Drink Man Woman, Sihung Lung carves out a career for himself as a perpetual Chinese paterfamilias, playing Mr. Chu, an aging, widowed chef whose three adult daughters are as reluctant to live at home as they are unlucky in love. Chu slightly resents his daughters, because he feels that he still has to take care of them. In turn, the three sisters resent him, because they fear that they'll end up having to care for an elderly parent. Their Sunday dinners together, which form the framework of the movie, often turn into a simmering session of repressed hostility.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the father is a traditionalist who can't quite reconcile himself to the paths chosen by each daughter. The oldest, Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang), is a high school chemistry teacher who's chosen Christianity as a substitute for a personal life. Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu) is a hard-driven airline executive with an artist boyfriend who doesn't want any sort of commitment. Stirred into this pot is the youngest, Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen), who divides her time between burning burgers at Wendy's and listening to the lost-love lament from her best girlfriend's ex-boyfriend.

Add Winston Chao (whose lead role in The Wedding Banquet made him a major star in the Far East market) as an executive hotshot with Jia-Chien's company, who has a "past history" with the oldest daughter, and you've got a low-key comedy that threatens to drown in its own cliche-ridden broth. Eat Drink Man Woman never quite gets past the innate predictablitiy of its own story, but it manages to throw a few surprises into an uninspiring recipe, nonetheless. Furthermore, Ang Lee continues to exhibit his flair for conveying the details of family life with warmth and subtlety, as well as his good feel for naturalistic humor — a grasp that allows him to make much of the film seem fresh. In that regard, he earns high marks for presentation.

Natural Born Killers

Every so often, a movie appears that becomes the focal point from which a decade is viewed. Right or wrong, for better or worse, these films become the quick and easy reference for pop historians seeking an instant fix on the zeitgeist. Such pictures aren't necessarily the greatest cinematic acheivement of a given period, but they invariably represent the key moment when the otherwise ill-defined angers and murky passions of an age explode to the surface with volcanic force.

Natural Born Killers is such a film. An ultra-violent, blood-spattered epic, it's an instant shoe-in as grist for the op-ed mill. It has the gall to romanticize mass murder. Its body count smashes through the three-digit level. It presents established forms of authority as being based upon rape, murder and coercion. But despite its anti-authority pose, Natural Bom Killers also has enough politically incorrect material to send the P.C. crowd into heart failure. Even worse, it's a film by Oliver Stone — and old Ollie, once again, is attacking the bloated carcass of mainstream American society.
 
In other words, it's the underground blasting to the surface in the guise of a multi-million-dollar movie that emotionally slaughters its audience with the same giddy abandon that its heroes murder their hostages.

Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) are the sort of kill-crazy-lovers-on-the-run who've been the obsessive subject of such classic movies as You Only Live Once (1937), Gun Crazy (1949) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). But unlike their celluloid ancestors, Mickey and Mallory aren't accidental killers — they enjoy it. As P.C.ers would say, killing gives them a sense of empowerment. More importantly, it allows them to repeatedly murder their fathers, and in Natural Bom Killers, patricide is viewed as a major step toward liberation.

The American cinema of the 1980s was fixated on the return of the father. From Star Wars to E. T. and beyond, daddy was the center of attention. It was the age of Reagan and Darth Vader, and no matter what horrors were perpetrated by fathers, the old boys' status was always redeemed by either the final reel or the next photo op.

But this archetypal theme of the '80s comes to an abrupt end when Mallory's incestuous daddy/monster (Rodney Dangerfield) is beaten to death in a slapstick rite of homicide. The message is loud and clear — the easy days of patriarchy are taking a fatal nose dive into a fish tank.

Technically, Natural Born Killers is an experimental collage of over-lapping images, freewheeling jump cuts, jerky camera movements, mixed film stocks, video inserts and enough inside references to other movies to compel half the country to enroll in film school. Philosophically, it's a neo-punk joyride through the postmodernist highways of cyberspace. It's the end of the world as we know it, as well as a bullet-riddled eulogy to media-drenched fantasies.

Love it or hate it, Natural Bom Killers is the beginning of'90s cinema.

Color of Night

Summer is indeed almost over. Just as the leaves begin to change, heralding the first cool blush of autumn, we receive our annual psycho-sex-thriller starring Brace Willis. Which means we have to view Brucie's chunky physique in the buff. No wonder some people dread the approach of fall.

Color of Night, Willis's latest effort, isn't the worst of the crappy thrillers he's done. It's even funny on occasion, though it isn't clear whether humor was the filmmakers' intention. What the point of this movie is supposed to be is an equally murky matter. Despite several murders and a few outlandish plot twists, stalling for screen time appears to be the film's only focus.

Willis plays a New York-based psychiatrist whose argumentative style of therapy sends a disgruntled client flying out of his office window. This convinces Willis to give up his practice (though I'd think that in Manhattan you could find plenty of neurotics game to try this technique) and bolt for Los Angeles. (Good idea. L.A. has lots of neurotics, but fewer high-rise buildings.)

But before he has time to mope in the California sunshine, a friend (Scott Bakula) turns up dead, and Willis has to take over the guy's therapy group in order to find the murderer. He also meets up with Jane March, who keeps popping up naked about every 20 minutes.

Color of Night's only redeeming quality is Ruben Blades, who plays a foul-mouthed police detective. Otherwise, the movie drags its way to one of the most pathetically ludicrous conclusions that a lousy scriptwriter could cough up on a bad day.