Equinox

Duality is one of the themes in Equinox. The ever-shifting balance between good and evil is another. The crumbling state of the inner city is the film's recurring backdrop. And really bad TV punctuates several scenes.

In this nature vs. nurture tale, Matthew Modine plays twins who were separated at birth. One is adopted and raised by a congenial M. Emmet Walsh, while the other is brought up in an orphanage. The first man, of course, is basically good, although weak and naive. The second man works for a crime boss and is moody and cunning.

The good brother is an auto mechanic who lives in a rat hole of an apartment. He's so shy, he can barely talk to women, let alone date them, and he spends a good deal of time hiding from the world. The other bro' doesn't spend much time talking to anyone.

Equinox is an Alan Rudolph flick, which means that you can't expect the mystery to be explained by the off-beat, ambivalent storyline. Aside from that, the movie offers a good ensemble cast, a quirky tempo and dream-like photography, successfully delivering a unique sense of style that's half film noir and half black comedy. It's a strange mix, but fascinating to watch.

Dazed and Confused

It's a warm May day in Texas in 1976. It's also the last day of school. This is the minimal premise of Dazed and Confused, the newest film by Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater. He scored big critical success with his first film, Slacker, and is now veering toward commercial cinema.

Dazed and Confused centers on a fictional high school class of '76. These seniors are bored, stoned and generally disinterested in any activity that doesn't have a beer attached to it. They devote the day to humiliating freshmen, while the freshmen search for sex and a good party. A few students occasionally ponder the future, only to draw a blank every time.

The kids experience some conflicts, in spite of their generally lackluster existence. The school's quarterback is feeling rebellious and doesn't want to sign the anti-drug pledge the coach is handing out. A freshman is attempting to score with a sophomore, who happens to be a friend of his hip, older sister. A few other freshmen are aching — literally — for revenge against a sadistic, paddle-wielding senior. And one of the school's liberal intellectuals has just decided that he doesn't want to become a lawyer for the ACLU — he wants to dance, instead.

Despite these minor diversions, the bulk of the student body just wants to party, and a good chunk of Dazed and Confused is devoted to the quest for the perfect beer blow-out. When they find it, it turns out to be large, loud and dull. No wonder these kids are moody about the future — they can't even party with gusto.

The movies pervading sense of aimlessness is meant to reflect the blankness that characterized the late '70s. The kids in the film were born too late to join the counter-culture and too early for the punk rebellion. They're smart enough to discuss questions of sexual irony in Gilligan's Island, but they're not perceptive enough to recognize the irony in their own conversations. Most importantly, they define themselves by what they're not — and they never move beyond that negative perspective.

Dazed and Confused does a nice job of realistically portraying the free-floating drift of this generation. Unfortunately, the film, like its characters, doesn't have an identity of its own. It simply meanders through its own state of confusion until the screen goes blank.

Visions of Light

Movies have a quality akin to alchemy. They are, after all, images created from an illusionistic display of light. These moving pictures have always seemed so real to us, yet their reality is as translucent as the gossamer wings described in fairy tales

Behind so much of this magic is the cinematographer. And as demonstrated in the fascinating documentary Visions of Light, the cinematographer is a no-nonsense breed of magician.

Visions of Light is more than just a first-rate introduction to the art of cinematography. It's also a good reminder of the genuine beauty of the photographic image. The film unleashes an avalanche of clips — from Birth of a Nation to Blade Runner — as it condenses 100 years of cinema to the basic forces of light and shadow.

Better still, Visions of Light is stocked with interviews with a virtual who's who of cinematographers. These are the kind of people who dream movies in their sleep — and know how to film them when they're awake.

And, hey, you're going to learn things. Visions of Light is the rough equivalent of a year in film school. You learn about the lighting tricks that were used to sculpt the facial features of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Vittorio Storaro explains the use of color in The Last Emperor. Gordon Willis confesses that the dark, threatening look of The Godfather was originally designed to hide the obvious make-up job on Marlon Brando's face.

Four figures are crucial to the history presented in Visions of Light: at the beginning of time, Billy Bitzer helped D.W. Griffith form the basic vocabulary of the cinema. Gregg Toland conspired with Orson Welles to blow up a fair amount of that vocabulary in Citizen Kane. James Wong Howe steered the '50s into the direction of razor-sharp focus, while Conrad Hall guided the' '60s toward lens flares and backlighting.

Like any history, this is partly myth. But it's also partly true.

An important half of cinematography is having the knowledge and experience to produce the image you want. The other half is the ability to move fast on your feet. Sometimes a mistake makes a shot better than it was originally planned.

Visions of Light contains two major ironies. The first is that most of the interviews were videotaped on a HDTV (high definition television) system and transferred to 35mm film. Shades of technological changes to come.

The second is that the film was co-produced by the American Film Institute and NHK/Japan Broadcasting Corporation. At the moment, the Japanese and the English are producing some of the best documentaries on the American cinema.

And you thought it was just cars that we couldn't build anymore.

In the Line of Fire

Clint Eastwood is respectable now. He's got several Oscars, a Director's Guild award and a fistful of praise from the French to prove it.

The flinty, violent iceman of the '70s is now an important artist. He's even an "auteur," that elusive title first coined in a Parisian cafe.

The weird thing is, it's not Eastwood who has changed. As demonstrated in his newest movie — In the Line of Fire — the old dog is still performing the same old tricks. The only major change is his hairline.

In the Line of Fire plays like a Dirty Harry flick, with the usual psycho villain and the traditionally disposable sidekick. The Secret Service-setting and political references are, ultimately, unimportant to the film. Eastwood is once again playing an obsessive man driven by raw instincts, who must redeem himself from a major foul-up.

Of course, the major foul-up happens to be the Kennedy assassination. Okay, so it was a really big foul up. All the more need for redemption. Despite being haunted by memories of Dallas in '63, his anti-social attitudes and his retirement age visage, Eastwood has stayed in the Service. But a lone nutcase (John Malkovich) is determined that Eastwood will round out his career with another dead president.

And no, the would-be assassin is not Bob Dole. It's a highly trained hitman who had previously worked for the CIA. Presumably, the job stress got to him. It's a plot twist you see coming even before you buy a ticket to the film.

In the Line of Fire contains only one slightly unusual touch to distinguish it from a typical Eastwood picture: Rene Russo, the macho femme copper in Lethal Weapon 3. This time, she's a macho femme Secret Service agent who discovers the feminine side to Eastwood's harsh exterior.

Even the suggestive sexual undercurrent in the cat-and-mouse game played between Eastwood and Malkovich is merely a throw back to the more explosive material in the earlier Eastwood film Tightrope. Granted, when Malkovich goes down on Eastwood's gun barrel, the whole movie momentarily plunges past the point of phallic symbolism.

The more-of-the-same quality of In the Line of Fire isn't surprising.

Every time Eastwood takes an artistic step forward, he reverts to an overtly commercial follow-up. In the Line of Fire is simply the expected backstep to Unforgiven's forward motion, Clint's belated — and unnecessary — safety net.

Besides, we all know that Eastwood spent most of the Kennedy years on a trail drive.