Cine-Moi

Orlando

2010-09-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Kinks once musically suggested that "boys will be girls and girls will be boys." In Orlando, British director Sally Potter takes the idea just a bit further: the boy Orlando eventually becomes a woman. Even odder, Orlando is immortal, and it takes several centuries for anyone to notice the change.

Contradictions are at the heart of Potter's brilliant and slyly funny adaptation of Virginia Woolf's bold fantasy tale. The novel was originally written as a satiric pseudo-history of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Since the book's first publication in 1928, a film version of Orlando has been one of those elusive projects that never quite got off the ground. The gender-bending nature of the story was one obstacle. Another drawback was the casual manner in which the novel trips through nearly 400 years of history.

But Potter makes the film work. Even more amazing - given that Orlando is definitely an "art film" - it's a reamrkably straightforward and accessible movie. It's as if the avant-garde has just discovered entertainment.

Orlando begins in 1600, as the youthful lord (Tilda Swinson) becomes the court favorite of Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp). Elizabeth bestows an estate on the androgenous-looking lad; eternal life and youth just happen to be part of the gift. (It's a fantasy, remember).

Orlando's sex change, meanwhile, takes place with barely a raised eyebrow. During a battle in the 18th century, he's shocked by the sight of a violent death. After fainting (the male Orlando is a good fainter), and a protracted sleep, he awakens to a brand-new biological destiny.

Even Orlando her/himself doesn't comment upon the change until the 1990s, finally saying, "Because this is England, everyone pretends not to notice."

But issues of sexual identity are only one aspect of the film. Orlando also offers a delicious romp through English society. Orlando remains a constant (despite the gender shift), while the culture surrounding her/him becomes battier with each passing year. (So do the costumes. By the end of the 1700s, Orlando begins looking like a Monty Python revue.) Aside from the film's deft handling of its subject, Orlando has an opulent look.

Orlando is a project that Potter has been dedicated to for some time. Working with "only" a $4 million budget ($4 million would barely pass for lunch money in Hollywood), she's spent the last four years acquiring a large cast, detailed sets and permission for extensive location filming in England, Russia and Uzbekhistan.

Not bad for an experimental filmmaker whose previous credits consist of a few shorts and the quirky feature The Gold Diggers. With Orlando, Potter has placed herself at the forefront of the new British cinema, along with Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman.

But she's not tried-and-true yet - Potter is hoping that her film version of Woolf's eccentric homage to her lover will find a wide audience. The chances of this happening are excellent. Orlando is one of the most original and engaging visions of the summer. And you don't have to be afraid of the big, bad Woolf to enjoy it.

Survivor's Guilt

2010-09-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

Survivors Guilt, the latest effort by Columbus-based filmmaker Sheldon Gleisser, has provoked responses ranging from enthusiastic approval to hostile denunciation. The film is barely 13 minutes long, but its strident attack on theories that the Holocaust never happened has stirred up a tempest of criticisms and memories.

"One of the oddest events was when I screened it (earlier this year) at the Cultural Arts Center," says Gleisser, "Afterwards, two guys came up to me and started to get into an argument with each other. They were both old enough to have been in World War Two, and one of them was sort of hedging around about 'Who knows? Maybe it never happened.'

"Then the other guy just cut loose. He said that he had served in an American unit that liberated a death camp. 'We were
shocked,' he said. 'We just rounded up every Swastika-wearing S.O.B. we could find and shot them.' "

The literal and figurative battlelines of history are only part of the controversy generated by Survivor's Guilt. Set at an unnamed Midwestern university, the film begins with a student newspaper editor (Erika Hewitt) choosing to print an anti-Holocaust editorial in the name of freedom of speech. In protest, an elderly Jewish man (local actor Harold M. Eisenstein) takes her hostage at gunpoint and takes her hostage at gunpoint and forces her through a re-enactment of his own first day at a concentration camp.

Survivor's Guilt has been praised by some actual death camp survivors, and it's in the process of being acquired for inclusion in the collection at the American Holocaust Museum in Washington. But the film has also been attacked for everything from alleged naivete about the freedom of the press, to its negative presentation of women.

"When I showed the movie up in Delaware a while back," recalls Gleisser, "I got criticized for presenting a stereotypic view of a violence-prone Jew. Personally, I didn't even know that there was such a stereotype."

That criticism may have stemmed from a crucial misassumption on the writer's part: he may have assumed that Gleisser wasn't Jewish. But despite Gleisser's thoroughly Midwestern, white-bread looks, he is Jewish. Survivor's Guilt was his attempt to deal with his Jewish heritage. Ironically, his recent trip to Dresden, Germany — where the movie was invited to a competition screening at the Dresden International Film Festival — reminded Gleisser of just how Midwestern he is.

"All they eat is sausage and bread, and everyone was dressed in black," says Gleisser. "By the second day, I thought I was
trapped in a Saturday Night Live routine. But I've got to admit, you haven't seen Star Trek until you've heard Worf speak in German."

Unfortunately, Gleisser didn't bring an award home from Dresden, but he did receive surprisingly strong verbal support
from some of the independent European filmmakers who attended the festival.

One impression of Dresden that struck home for Gleisser was a photo he found at the railroad station. It was taken during the aftermath of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. In one night, this picturesque city was reduced to charred rubble in one of the greatest massacres of civilians in modern warfare. The photo simply showed a long row of burnt bodies stacked nine-feet high along the railroad tracks.

"See that shot of the railroad station..." said Gleisser, shaking his head as he trailed off into momentary silence. "These people didn't deserve that. But the persecution of the Jews started earlier. The fire-bombing of Dresden was awful, but it was nothing like the Holocaust."

Equinox

2010-05-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

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.

The Cement Garden

2010-01-20T09:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T09:16:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T08:55:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T08:47:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-20T08:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Fearless

2009-09-17T14:17:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-17T13:41:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-17T13:17:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Black Beauty

2009-08-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

It's that time of summer when the the days get shorter, the nights get cooler and the list of sticky-sweet children's movies grows longer. Last year at this time, every other new film was about a kid playing baseball. This summer's theme is the return of the critter flick, as animal sagas unspool across the multiplex screen. First, it was Lassie doing her super-smart, collie-to-the-rescue thing. Coming soon is a girl-and-her-seal caper. Luckily, the current production of Black Beauty is the obvious class item of this pack. See it, then stop while you're ahead.

Based more closely than previous versions on the 1877 children's novel by Anna Sewell, Black Beauty is often more melancholy than sweet, offering a distinctly grim view of 19th-century England. Narrated by the horse itself, the film follows Black Beauty's rise and fall through the British class system as he's sold to a succession of masters. Most of his journey is a harsh, downward spiral that's made bearable primarily by the horse's sense of ironic detachment and knowledge of human foibles. Though the narration technique has resulted in a bunch of stupid Mr. Ed jokes by some critics, this Black Beauty is actually a reworking of Robert Bresson's Au Hazard Balthazar. Granted, it's a little odd to compare a kiddie movie to a French masterpiece, but Black Beauty is that well done.

This film marks the directorial debut of Caroline Thompson, who's previously worked as the screenwriter on Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the most recent version of The Secret Garden. In some ways, she's not her own best director, but her sense of story craft and sympathy for outsiders still makes her one of the finest scriptwriters in Hollywood.

Barcelona

2009-08-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

It's the last decade of the Cold War, and the two American yuppies in the movie Barcelona spend their time carrying on a rivalry that seems to have begun when they were kids. They're cousins and they're from Midwestern, old-money stock. They're also dim bulbs who haven't the slightest idea what's going on around them, in this cross between Reality Bites and The Ugly American.

Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols) plays a Barcelona-based sales representative for a Chicago company. His cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman) is a U.S. Navy officer who's been sent to Spain as an advance man for an impending visit by the Sixth Fleet. Ted is very introverted and shy, especially around women, and has maintained only limited contact with the culture and people around him. Fred, on the other hand, is a jingoistic Yank who fancies himself a romantic hero and behaves as if he hasn't a clue as to what country he's in.

Which pretty much sums up Barcelona, a movie by yups, for yups and about yups. You almost have to wear a school tie just to be admitted to the movie, and having endured a stint at Yale is a must for enjoying it. Otherwise, it's a little hard to relate to these two well-bred bozos, who behave as if they cold utter the immortal line, "Tennis, anyone?" at any moment.

Of course, this character-as-caricature irony is part of the joke in Barcelona. Ted and Fred are neither the brightest nor the best. They're Reagan-era clones of Kennedy-era idealism, warts and all, a mixed bag of old-fashioned patriotism, youthful naivete and untested convictions. And, despite their presumably important jobs, they spend most of the movie arguing endlessly about Spanish women.

Ted is obsessed with Monteserrat (Tushka Bergen), a translator with the World Trade Fair in Barcelona. It seems, however, as if he can't quite reconcile their love affair with her continued relationship with her boyfriend, Ramon (Pep Munne). In turn, Ramon is a radical anti-American journalist, who's writing articles fingering Fred as a CIA agent. Fred, meanwhile, is chasing after Marta (Mira Sorvino), who appears to be always willing and waiting.

At times, Barcelona is sly and genuinely satiric. But director Whit Stillman (who also did Metropolitan) is so thoroughly a by-product of the upper-crust culture he's trying to rib that the jokes lack any deflating quality. The result is a little like being stuck at a debutante ball, where you can't escape any of the inane chatter.

32 Short Films About Glenn Gould

2009-08-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

Classical musician Glenn Gould was generally considered to be a gifted performer and one of the most brilliant interpreters of Bach. He was also an intensely neurotic man who devoted a good portion of his relatively brief life (he died at the age of 50) to distancing himself from as much direct human contact as possible. Gould retired from live concert performances when he was 32, claiming that audio recording was a more democratic means of reaching a wide audience. But in truth, he was simply happier dealing with machines than with people. Not surprisingly, extreme isolation was a recurring theme both in Gould's music and his life.

That's why the opening shot of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is a vista of an icy Canadian field. Gould (Colm Feore) moves through the distance looking like a hobo (his sense of fashion was often appalling) and lost in a state of complete self-absorption. This scene also sets the tone for a movie that avoids the traditional pitfalls of bio-pics by opting for indirect impressions of both the man and his music. The effect is a film that's both fascinating and slow, intellectually incisive and emotionally detached. Much like its own subject, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould has an impassioned feel for its material, but no direct way to express it.

The 32 sections of the movie range from conventional interviews with people who knew Gould to recreations of odd moments in his life. Some scenes are as brief as "45 Seconds and a Chair" (which is an exact description of the vignette). Others frame strange moments of revelation about Gould, such as his habit of hanging out at truck stops in order to hear the conversations of average people.

Gould loved humankind — it was people he couldn't deal with.

Derek Jarman's Blue

2009-08-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Okay. The film's actually 76 minutes of nothing but a blue screen. It's a deep, dark, rich shade of blue — but it's the only visual image you're going to see. The movie, the "action," takes place on the soundtrack. That's where Jarman, the dying wunderkind of modern English cinema, unleashes an audacious barrage of narrative and music detailing his losing battle against the AIDS virus. It's a freewheeling mix of controlled anger, mocking humor, surreal visions and genuine melancholy, as Jarman confronts his impending death. Blue not only works, it works brilliantly. So don't be scared by either its experimental structure or subject matter. Blue is a piece of visual music that soars.

Blue Chips

2009-08-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

William Friedkin continues his downward plunge as a filmmaker with another ill-conceived and poorly made movie. Nick Nolte plays a tightly strung college basketball coach who's shocked to discover that great players are bought, not recruited. Ed O'Neill is the sports reporter who starts riding him about the scandal. (That's right, Bobby Knight gets nailed by Al Bundy. And this flick isn't even a comedy.) J.T. Walsh plays the satanic director of the alumni association with a constant emphasis on overstatement. Only Shaquille O'Neal acts as if he knows what he's doing, both on and off the court. Even the basketball scenes (and there are only a few) are so badly shot that they're impossible to follow. Let's face it, this movie is so bad that it makes OSU's current season look good.

8 Seconds

2009-08-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

Luke Perry of Beverly Hills 90210 mega-fame gives up his Beverly Hills zip code for the rodeo ring in this slow-moving bio-pic about world champion bull rider Lane Frost, As played in the film, Frost is a dull sweetheart of a guy who suffers only momentarily from a swelled head when he becomes famous, In between numerous sunsets (and this movie is loaded with them), he tries to win the love of his aloof father James Rebhorn) and regain the respect of his wife (Northern Exposures Cynthia Geary). But this saga about an all-American boy has no spark — even the bull riding scenes are unimpressive. Only Stephen Baldwin gets a few good scenes as Frost's abrasive redneck pal. Otherwise, the mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy delivered more exciting rodeo action.

Six Degrees of Separation

2009-08-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

There's an old Simon and Garfunkel song that lyrically lampoons the aching emptiness of mainstream intellectual conversation. At its best, Six Degrees of Separation, deftly directed by Fred Schepisi, does much the same. But in its dissection of verbal pretentiousness and upper-class vanity, the movie often runs the risk of becoming infected by the very snottiness it's kicking.

Six Degrees of Separation is adapted from the critically acclaimed play by John Guare (who also wrote the screenplay) which, in turn, was based on an actual incident that took place a few years ago in New York. The basic storyline sticks close to the real case about a gay con artist who successfully film-flammed a who's who list of the Upper East Side elite into believing that he was Sidney Poitiers' son. The discovery that Poitier doesn't have a son punctured a few balloons on the social circuit that year.

But gullibility is the least of the characters' problems in Six Degrees of Separation. Their delusions about themselves are what makes them such perfect targets for the sting. That, combined with some old-fashioned liberal guilt and a desire to believe that their own children might actually like them (the con artist claims to be a college chum of their kids and worms his way into the parents' affections with cozy tales about their children's respect for them). Unfortunately, the adults are politically naive and the families are all basically dysfunctional.

Will Smith (of NBC's The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) does a surprisingly decent turn as the con man with a knack for tall tales. His pathological narcissism and fondness for rough trade are the only obvious kinks in his carefully manufactured personality. At first glance, he's the ideal son. (After we meet some of the real kids, Smith still looks good.)

It's Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing, however, who carry the weight of this film. Sutherland plays an art dealer who peddles his second-hand knowledge of great artists with the superficial sincerity of a man who's substituted learning for living.

The concluding irony is old hat, but parts of the ride we take to get there are
genuinely funny. Most of the characters in Six Degrees of Separation are the biggest windbags you'd ever hope (or hope not) to meet, but their never-ending babble is often both hysterically funny and emotionally touching.

Just in case you're wondering, the movie's title refers to the theory that everyone on earth knows someone who knows someone, until the whole thing comes full circle. The theory suggests that only six contacts exist between you and everyone else.

How about that - life is just a cosmic chain letter.

A Good Man in Africa

2009-07-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

A movie that satirically mixes British diplomatic idiocy and Third World corruption should have the fizzy kick of a gin and tonic. Unfortunately, A Good Man in Africa,
the latest film by Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), serves up flat, warm cola as it meanders pointlessly to its obvious conclusion. The movie's attempts at dry, cynical wit have all the bite of a toothless old dog, while its jabs at post-colonial African politics consist mostly of stereotypical English attitudes toward any country that has too many consonants in its name.

Colin Friels plays a mid-level English diplomat, a secretary to the West African nation of Kinjanja. He's a burned-out government employee who devotes most of his time to sex and drinking, activities he interrupts only with occasional bursts of sarcastic monologue about everyone he knows. His embassy is the kind that, normally, would be most noted for the staff's soiled white suits. In this case, however, it receives a bit more respect due to the fact the Kinjanja possesses rich oil reserves along its shoreline.

Friels is sent to work on Professor Adekunle (Louis Gossett Jr.), the man most likely to emerge as president in the country's upcoming election. Likewise, Adekunle goes to work on Friels, for the seemingly noble scholar has a bad case of dictatorial ambition. He wants to own the country — literally. The only thing standing in his way is the movie title's "good man" — Sean Connery, who plays a Scottish version of Mother Theresa with a nine-par handicap.

Beresford, who forayed into Africa previously with the equally empty-headed film Mr. Johnson, seems to think that his Academy Award for Driving Miss Daisy made him an expert on race relations. Unfortunately, he doesn't know enough to quit when he's not ahead.

Timecop

2009-07-16T14:31:00.000-07:00

Not many actors look impressive while leg-splitting over a sink in boxer shorts. That's one accolade Jean-Claude Van Damme wins hands down, er, feet up as the case may be. Most amazing, the seams of his shorts don't tear. I think I understand what is meant by the phrase "star power." It's all in the BVDs.

Come to the think of it, it's a major plot point in Timecop that Van Damme survives an assassination attempt in 1994 because he was wearing a Kelvar vest for an undershirt. I thought this movie was about time travel, but I'm beginning to detect another theme.

Van Damme's wife (Mia Sara) was not wearing any underwear when she was killed. This puts the guy with the million-dollar kickboxing legs into a royal snit 'til the year 2004. It's a good thing he joined the Time Enforcement Commission (TEC). He might get a chance to go back and change the past. Besides, Sara has second-billing on the credits, demanding that she have more than a five-minute appearance.

It seems that TEC was secretly formed in the 1990s when a crackpot scientist from the Star Wars program discovered time travel. When the government realizes the danger of people going back to loot old movies for ideas, they quickly create a police force to cruise the space/time continuum for felons and really good doughnuts. (The cream puffs really were much better in the' 50s.)

Ron Silver is put at the head of the Senate committee in charge of the TEC. Since Silver manages to combine the warmth of Bob Dole with the strict ethical standards of Richard Nixon, it's a safe bet that he's the villain of the movie. Strangely, his main ambition is to steal from the past in order to buy the presidency in 2004. The plot has a dopey, desperate feel to it. Or else Silver is a Democrat, in which case he is simply being pragmatic.

He and Van Damme whisk back to 1994, and old JC gets a second chance to save his wife. He also gets a chance to beat the stuffings out of lots of bad guys, though Van Damme should have started with the screenwriters. Timecop doesn't make a whole lot of sense, past or future. It also fails to achieve the oddball emotional touch that it reaches for during the last stretch. Instead, the movie ends up all kicks and no heart.

But I still want to know where the guy buys his shorts.

Guarding Tess

2009-07-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

Being the First Lady isn't easy. But according to Guarding Tess, being a former First Lady is even worse. After all, with all of those snoopy, gun-waving Secret Service agents around, how is she supposed to get any shopping done? And what about the lousy treatment she gets from the president? He owes his career to her late husband, but the big lug still can't show up to the dedication of the presidential library.

Worse still, this former First Lady is stuck in central Ohio, Cripes! Jackie O. got New York and the jet set scene. Even Nancy Reagan got Rodeo Drive. What does this lady get? Sawmill Road?

Actually, that's about the sum of Guarding Tess. The movie has a few funny moments, a couple of cheap attempts at heart-string tugging and a very ill-conceived thriller plot line near its end. It's not exactly a Grumpy Old First Ladies, but Walter Matthau might have been an improvement in the title role.

Not that Shirley MacLaine is bad. To the contrary - she's too good for the part. She even manages to breath some life into this borderline caricature of an elderly widow who has nothing better to do with her time than tyrannize the Secret Service men who protect her, She's supposed to be a wounded soul full of strong, unbending ideals, but as the role is written, the character comes across as a petty egotist who needs relatively powerless people whom she can safely shove around.

Not that Nicolas Cage isn't shovable. As the head Secret Service agent assigned to this detail, he gives a flat performance as an uptight yup who's mostly concerned about his career stagnating in a dead-end job in mid-Ohio, Eventually, he comes to an understanding of MacLaine's eccentric behavior — but I still think that she should have just slugged him. If nothing else, it would have juiced up the movie.

It's no surprise that Guarding Tess plays like the set-up for a sit-com. Director Hugh Wilson is a far better producer of TV fare than he is a filmmaker. Perhaps he needs to realize that there isn't anything wrong with doing TV; Wilson is wasting his talents on the big screen.

And yes, Guarding Tess is the movie that, in theory, takes place in and around Columbus, but which was actually filmed in and around Baltimore, But that's not so surprising; many parts of Baltimore bear a striking resemblance to Parsons Avenue. It's a natural as a stand-in.

Crush

2009-04-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of steaminess in Crush, but most of it's coming from the bubbling mud pits surrounding Rotorua, the geothermal resort in New Zealand that's the setting for the film. Despite the movie's storyline, the sexual tensions in Crush are surprisingly marginal. The film wants to be a hip, mordant film noir thriller, but it ends up playing more like a kinky version of an existentialist drivers ed. flick. Sort of a Blood on the Highway, Ingmar Bergman style.

The really big crush takes place at the beginning of the movie. Lane (Marcia Gay Harden)and Christina (Donogh Rees) are driving across New Zealand's exotic landscape to Rotorua. Christina is a literary critic who's heading there to interview a novelist whose career is in eclipse. Lane and Christina may, or may not, be lovers — Crush leaves that question hanging. Either way, Christina is clearly the better driver.

Unfortunately, she discovers that fact only after letting Lane behind the wheel. Lane is an American: she's brash and wild, she drives way too fast and she can't steer to save her rear. She promptly looses control on a curve and totals both the car and Christina.

Lane survives the wreck with barely a scratch. Christina is nearly crushed by the car. Presumably, she's even more crushed when she discovers that Lane has decided to walk the rest of the way to town, casually abandoning her to the New Zealand health care system.

For reasons that are never clear, Lane becomes determined to move in on the novelist. She first meets up with his daughter, the boyish-looking Angela (Caitlin Bossley). Lane takes the kid on a wild night through bad bars and cheap motel rooms. She seduces Angela, which is how she's introduced to dad.

Colin (William Zappa) is, at first, crushed to find them in bed together. Then he gets a crush on Lane. (Why not? Everyone else seems to have a crush on her.) This time, at least, there's no question about whether the pair is having sex. They do. Lots of it.

But now, Angela feels a little crushed by the situation. And poor flattened Christina isn't out of the picture. There's bound to be crushing events yet to come.

Crush is the first feature film by Alison Maclean, a New Zealander by way of Canada. The flick has the rough-and-tumble style of a good B-movie, but it's too overt and predictable for its own good. In fact, it has all the subtlety of a sledge hammer's crushing blow.

Sirens

2009-04-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Sirens may be the first art film ever to attract the beer-swilling residents of sport bars without it having to be "date" night. The reason is simple: you get to see Elle MacPherson naked. A shrewd theater owner would already be lining up a kiosk in the lobby stocked with the swimwear edition of Sports Illustrated.

That is the obvious selling point for Sirens, and it's a film full of seemingly obvious points. The movie flaunts a kitsch-ridden veneer that resembles a Gustav Klimt poster posed for by Fabio. Part of the fun of Sirens is contained in its calculated mix of flagrant tackiness and half-baked profundity. Sirens is part serious, but it is also part satire. It is also a very sexy, funny movie.

It's the early 1930s and the Archbishop of Sydney has a problem. An Australian painter infamous for his ability to shock has submitted to an international exhibition an etching of a voluptuous Venus nailed to the cross. Hugh Grant (of Maurice and Impromptu) is the English-bred cleric who is sent to persuade the artist to withdraw the work. Grant is young, well mannered, and he claims to know something about art. He also can't go to the toilet without his copy of The Decline of the West.

Along for the journey is his wife, Tara Fitzgerald (Hear My Song). She's a pale English rose and behaves like a runaway from a James Ivory production. They are both very civilized and ever so slightly modern (hubby even smokes Turkish cigarettes). However, the Australian town they arrive in is populated mostly by filthy, belligerent drunks who casually greet strangers with a hearty "fuck off." The James Ivory-type movie comes to an abrupt end.

Instead, they encounter Sam Neill, a painter whose displays of wanton sexuality are overtly rooted in his latent sense of voyeurism. He's also something of a scatter-brained intellectual who divides his time between rantings about the evil of Christianity and mumblings about his own past life. He has a unique outlook on life. He also has a unique living arrangement, sharing his house and family with his three models (now you see where MacPherson comes in).

Neill lives in a kind of Eden, as long as you don't mind the assorted snakes, spiders, lizards and large insects that infest virtually every scene. It's a warped, sensual paradise that briefly offers a strange illusion of sexual innocence.

Sirens offers some solid humor and an elusive charm. Even the movie's predictable structure — plus the clipping of the Indian shipwreck scene that concluded the Australian version — gradually melts into its own distinctive brand of wit.

Hard Target

2009-04-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

It's almost impossible to take Jean-Claude Van Damme seriously. After all, he combines the bland screen persona of Chuck Norris with the thickly accented blankness of Christopher Lambert. And in Hard Target, he sports Steven Seagal's hairdo. But he also possesses the vaulting ambitions of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Jean-Claude is anxious to Van Damme his way to the top of the action heap. Hard Target is just crazy enough to place him closer to that goal.

Violence — and lots of it — is the point of Hard Target. Until a few last-minute cuts were made, the movie was threatened with an NC-17 rating. Even with the snips, Hard Target scores well on the Joe Bob Briggs' meter. It uses enough hi-tech firepower to be a visual trade show for the National Rifle Association.

The truly weird thing about this pyrotechnic debacle, however, is that it's supposed to be making a social statement about the plight of the homeless. (I can't wait to see Jean-Claude tackle health-care reform.)

Hard Target is set in New Orleans. Perennial movie villain Lance Henriksen is operating a unique service for chubby millionaires who want the thrill of hunting human prey. Homeless vets are recruited as targets in exchange for $10,000 — if they survive the chase. Since the rules of the hunt are totally stacked against them, Henriksen doesn't have to worry about overhead.

All goes well until our villian runs afoul of the Gene Kelly of high-flying kicks. The bad guy has about 6,000 thugs working for him. Van Damme has his uncle, who's played by Wilford Brimley. Guess who mops up the place?

Despite its extreme stupidity, Hard Target is Van Damme's best film. The whole movie crackles with the energy of an MTV production gone mad. It's the American debut of Hong Kong action director John Woo, who choreographs violence as if he were Busby Berkeley on steroids. Woo has garnered a sizable cult following in the States, even though American access to his chop suey epics such as A Better Tomorrow II is limited.

Hard Target almost works, in spite of its sheer ludicrousness. Granted, it's unremittingly bloody, suggestively homophobic and politically insincere. But by Van Damme's standards, it's almost Gone With the Wind.

Besides, it's a comedy — isn't it?

Maverick

2009-04-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

There's nothing I like better than a good Western. Someday, I even hope to see one.

Maverick, the latest movie to come down the genre's pike, isn't a good Western. It's not all together bad — it has a few daffy moments, for instance, but the gap between each joke is wider and drier than the Mojave Desert. It doesn't help that Maverick's storyline is lousy and was pretty much lifted from The Sting II (yes, The Sting II — they couldn't even steal well). These points, as well as Mel Gibson's school boy sense of humor, leave the movie running nearly on empty.

Loosely based on the old TV series, Maverick begins with a nice parody of the hangman bit from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But the minute that Gibson fades into the flashback that takes up most of the film, the story becomes hopelessly locked into a tired exercise of predictable con artist stunts and pointless inside jokes. When Danny Glover pops up to make his unbilled cameo appearance in a Lethal Weapon gag, you suddenly realize that Maverick is closer in spirit to a mediocre Road movie, minus Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

The gist of the story is that the title character, Bret Maverick, is on his way to
St. Louis for a high stakes, winner-takes-all poker championship. To raise the money for the entry fee, he plans to collect debts from old friends. But his pals keep stiffing him, so he starts working his way through some fast card hands on the trail. That's how he meets Annabelle Bransford (Jodie Foster), a lady-like thief who's also headed for St. Louis. They're quickly joined by Zane Cooper(James Garner), a stern lawman who spends his time telling everybody else what they ought to do.

Garner still has an easy charm about him, and Foster provides some good come-back material, but Gibson.is down right annoying. He delivers a smirking portrayal based upon excessive eyeball rolling and bad fits of the giggles. You half expect him to start twitching his ears like Dumbo. Anything for a laugh, mate.

When we do finally get to the poker game, Maverick loads up a river boat with TV stars. But does anybody really remember Doug McClure, Henry Darrow and Robert Fuller these days? And even if they do, shouldn't they just keep it to themselves? There's also a sprinkling of cameos by such country and western singers as Waylon Jennings and Clint Black, but they're largely wasted in throw away bits that would barely pass muster in a Kenny Rogers' Gambler opus.

And let's face it, when a movie can't out do Kenny Rogers, then it's in pretty bad shape. Maverick earns one star for Garner, one for Foster and a half star for the landscape.

Forbidden Love

2009-04-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

"The whole world was full of stupid myths about women."

That comment is made by one of the interviewees in the documentary Forbidden Love. Stupid, pulp-mentality myth about lesbians — and women in general — is what the film successfully exposes in its recreation of cheap novels and sexual realities from the 1950s.

Produced for the National Film Board of Canada, Forbidden Love is a fascinating study of the pop culture and poignant realities of that eta. It begins with the lurid gay novels that filled paperback racks during die waning years of the Eisenhower age. Interspersed between the close-ups of melodramatic book covers are interviews with women who survived the mentally -— and sometimes physically — violent repression of the period. And guess what? Those women are still queer, and quite happy about, thank you very much.

The 1950s was a seriously screwy decade. The fact that these women, or any lesbians, survived it intact is a great tribute to their sheer fortitude.

Much Ado About Nothing

2009-04-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare's back and Branagh's got him. Again.

And Kenneth Branagh s production of Much Ado About Nothing is a good, solid piece of work. Too often, people behave as if Shakespeare requires a Ph.D. to be understood. Actually, Old Willy frequently pitched his plays to the rubes in the back bleachers. In his direction of the film, Branagh is reaching for the same mass audience.

The Anglo-American cast of Much Ado is part of that pitch. While Branagh cast many of his chums from the Royal Shakespeare Company in the film, he also sprinkled it with an odd assortment of Yanks. In turn, the Brits have toned down their accents, and the dialogue sounds like a mellow, mid-Atlantic symphony.

The performances are as well-executed as the film itself. As Benedick and Beatrice, Shakespeare's flirtatiously quarrelsome lovers, Branagh and Emma Thompson play off each other with the witty agility of a seasoned couple (which, of course, they are). But it's Thompson who carries the real spark of the film, successfully providing her heroine with fierce intelligence and suppressed passion.

Keanu Reeves' performance, however, is a notable exception to those of his colleagues. As the conniving Don John, Reeves conveys a spooky blank look — as if he is constantly searching for the cue cards.

Much Ado About Nothing is a well made film, but Branagh can't quite overcome the long-standing suspicion that it's minor Shakespeare. The play itself often reads like a mere diversion — a quick comedic study tossed off in a rush. A bit of sex, a little slapstick and a fast resolution.

Despite Branagh's reputation as the wunderkind of British cinema, he is actually a visually weak filmmaker. And, he is often incapable of exploring the material for anything more than the obvious.

Several years ago, when he directed Henry V, he coasted along on the play's grand, epic structure. When he tries to deal with the scaled-down subtleties of Much Ado, his ambitions shrink as well.

Both the strengths and weaknesses of Branagh's film making lie in his derivative approach. Henry V worked, in part, because Branagh found a good model in Orson Welles' Falstaff. In fact, Henry was essentially a sequel to Welles' more complex and audacious masterpiece. With Much Ado About Nothing, Branagh borrows from the populist school of Franco Zeffirelli.

Specifically, Branagh copies Zeffirelli's production of The Taming of the Shrew. But where Zeffirelli effectively pushed the material to extremes, which resulted in a sharp mix of Italian earthiness and farce, Branagh doesn't push far enough in any direction. The closest Much Ado comes to challenging the material is Michael Keaton's truly bizarre performance as Dogberry — but it stems from the actor's sense of high energy.

Still, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Much Ado About Nothing has a good feel for the bard's more biting barbs about men, women and the contrariness of love.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

2009-04-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

Let's face it — Woody Allen should never have abandoned comedy. Oh sure, Crimes and Misdemeanors was a distinguished statement film, and Husbands and Wives inadvertently acquired a confessional touch. But Woody is no Bergman(either Ingmar or Ingrid). Which is fine. After all, Bergman is no fun.

Comedy is Allen's true art. One of the great pleasures of his latest work, Manhattan Murder Mystery, is that it's funny. Off-beat, to be sure — but funny.

In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Allen and Diane Keaton play a middle-aged couple whose long marriage is swamped by mid-life crisis. He's a book editor whose newest author is an alluring female adventurer(Anjelica Huston). Keaton s temptation comes in the form of an old friend (Alan Alda), who's suffering through a divorce.

Fortunately, a mysterious death in the apartment next door intervenes in their unraveling marriage. Murder soon becomes the adhesive that rebonds their relationship.

The movie almost works as a neurotic variation on The Thin Man films. Somewhat reminiscent of Nora Charles, Keaton enters the chase with an increasingly manic sense of excitement. For most of Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody is the skittish straight man to Keaton's hyper sleuth. This is Keaton's finest performance in years (though it's a bit like Annie Hall possessed by Jessica Fletcher).

The quirky chemistry that previously clicked between her and Allen is still there. Though her role was originally written for Mia Farrow (who was too busy filing charges against Allen to do the film), Keaton resonates in the part.

The only weak link in the movie is Allen himself. His performance seems distracted, as if he was spending most of his time conferring with attorneys (which he was). But he also seems uncomfortable returning to his early, nebbish persona.

He does, however, get some of the best lines in the movie. When Keaton warns him that they could be living next door to a murderer, he shrugs, "Well, New York is a
melting pot."

Manhattan Murder Mystery is Alley's most enjoyable film in years. But it does make one wonder what it will take to drag him out of the confines of New York's upper West Side. It's nice-looking, but isn't there a city that goes with it?

Kalifornia

2009-04-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

Maybe we can blame David Lynch. After all, Blue Velvet helped to popularize the artsy-smarty psycho flick.

But I liked Blue Velvet. In fact, it's funnier every time I see it. And it offers the definitive statement on beer brands and class structure.

I didn't like Kalifornia, and its self-consciously hip misspelling with a "K" is only one of the reasons why. (It also doesn't know a thing about American beer-drinking habits. At least Lynch did his research.)

Here's the set-up: David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes are an ultra-cool couple. They wear a lot of black. He's a grad student and would-be journalist who's obsessed with serial killers. She's a photographer whose work resembles Robert Mapplethorpe's. Together, they decide to drive cross-country to visit famous murder sites for a photo-book they're compiling.

But they're low on money, so they advertise for a rider to join them on the magical mayhem tour. Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis play the couple that hops aboard. Immediately, we realize that Duchovny never bothered to do a simple reference check.

But their poor fashion sense isn't the only problem. Pitt just happens to be your typical, workaday serial killer. You know, the kind who whacks the landlord before moving. The rest of the film writes itself. The journey becomes a hellish descent as Kalifornia gets downright mean and nasty. And only Lewis picks up any fashion tips.

Kalifornia is even worse than its cheap plot, which was cloned from The Hitcher (the Rutger Hauer film with the infamous french fries scene). The movie is another volley in the new yuppie horror genre of anti-working class films. It's as if the displaced labor force has become an exotic, dangerous threat to the children of the managerial class.

In Kalifornia's violent collision between Tobacco Road and the Village Voice, no cliches are spared. What's more, in the movie's journey from the industrial wasteland to an abandoned nuclear test site, it flaunts a political pose that it doesn't believe in.

The whole gory mess is a misguided missile in contemporary class warfare.

The Darkening Mirror

2009-04-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Surrounding Los Angeles are hills both bleak and black. They are the barren sentinels of an arid landscape and if it were not for the winding highways carved through this desert, the whole scene could be mistaken for the far side of the moon.

For a passenger gawking out of an airplane window, these mountains offer a proper welcome to a region cursed by its own geology. Their dull colors and hulking shapes form a vivid reminder of the natural forces that have created Southern California.

These hills are real. The palm trees are not. Though they line the runways of the Los Angeles International Airport like a merry contingent of hula dancers, they do not belong to the harsh land that forged the mountains. Like so many others in LA, these palm trees are simply visitors.

Which is one of the reasons why most writers have found it impossible to describe Los Angeles as anything other than a dream. It is more a concept than a city, like a restaurant chock full of ambiance but lacking in tables. Even the geography suggests illusion since there is no real center to anything and everybody seemingly lives 35 minutes away from everybody else.

All of which is appropriate. After all, this is the city that formed around the film industry as an ironic hybrid of cultural center and company town. Dreams are to Los Angeles what smokestacks once were to Pittsburgh: the primal symbol of the business that fuels the engines and greases the wheels.

But the business of Los Angeles is fantasy, and despite the elusive nature of such a commodity, it has become the primarily item of export for the entire nation. American movies and TV shows have rolled across the globe like a conquering army of invincible shadows. Videotapes of Rambo and Rocky are popular in Kathmandu and in the streets of Beijing, vendors hawk posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger right next to the obligatory portraits of Mao Zedong.

It's a small world after all, and the planet's name is Hollywood.

Or as the German filmmaker Wim Wenders once explained, the Americans have colonized the subconscious.

The great dream factory has engulfed the world as if it were a modern substitute for the old Hegelian bugaboo so quaintly called the Universal Spirit. Though these mass produced images are spat out like sausages from a meat packing plant, they have become the basis for an international phenomenon that simultaneously strokes the viewers' imagination and denies any real or rational engagement. Instead, it simply invites us to sit back and enjoy the show.

Hollywood insists that it is in the business of producing art and entertainment. Unfortunately, post-modernism (which is the dominate term of this post-everything age) has relegated art to the ash heap of history, much like leisure suits and the Soviet Empire. This theoretical maneuver was done, in part, to accommodate the overwhelming influence of mass media and advertising. If you can't beat them, redefine everything in order to join them.

As for entertainment, who cares? The word itself is slippery and bear baiting was once considered quite amusing. Besides, the term is usually invoked as an easy excuse for the ideological function of mass media. Basically put, to control what people see is the first step toward controlling what they think. The entertainment value is simply part of the ideological package (good or bad).

But the "looking-glass" model of mass media is not invalid, either. In many ways, the media is a reflection of its society. Film and television both function as a mirror, and mirrors offer an image which we mentally amplify. That reflection of our face which we see in the looking-glass appears full size, but it is actually no larger than our fist. Likewise, our perception of media images are routinely filtered through a distorting haze of assumptions, convictions, prejudices, and desires. We carry the extensive weight of this baggage with us every time we enter a theatre, which may explain why theatre seats have such a short life span before they break.

Despite the convoluted nature of this process, film and television have become the predominate means by which we view our world. The media is our mirror, not because it actually reflects reality but because we mistake it for reality. For some, it is a mistake made out of naivete. For most, it is an error caused by the sheer and overwhelming persistence of the material. There is no way to escape the influence of television and virtually the entire world knows the name Schwarzenegger.

Brute pervasiveness has provided mass media with the illusionary quality of communal bonding. Hip theorists of the TV generation argue that a working knowledge of The Brady Bunch is a solid substitute for a national culture. Of course, no one can live on white bread alone. So a thick slice of Cosby is offered on the side.

The commercial demands of mass media precludes any real engagement with reality. The media is simply a forum for the consumer marketplace and the ideal audience is composed of people with the greatest amount of disposable income. In other words, adolescent males. The hard-ball politics of demographics has forced most of Hollywood into a wild chase after testosterone. That is why the term "chick movie" is bandied about as an insult, one that strongly suggests that estrogen has no economic value except in relationship to the boyfriend's wallet.

Ironically, the enormous economic factors that makes mass media so powerful are the very same forces that reduces it to a marginal level. The world reflected in this mirror is false and the gap between the viewer and the viewed widens every day.

There is a mathematician at UCLA whose house is systematically being rearranged by the ever increasing seismic activity in Los Angeles. Thanks to his scientific curiosity, he has developed a peculiar fascination with charting the slow but resolute progression of his main staircase as it follows a westward journey away from the rest of the house. After each quake, he excitedly calls his brother in Ohio to rely the newest measurements.

Much the same is the function of a film critic as we lurk before the darkening mirror, in a fearful wait for the next, low rumble.

My Father the Hero

2009-04-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

This review comes with a warning: My Father the Hero is the first comedy I've seen since Car 54, Where Are You? - an experience that's undoubtedly clouded my judgment. My Father the Hero is really just a mediocre, recycled, French farce, but after Car 54, anything looks like a comic masterpiece. Even a Jerry Lewis movie.

A very chunky Gerard Depardieu plays a father who's facing more than just a weight problem. He's been divorced from his American wife {Lauren Hutton, who appears in an inexplicable cameo) and living in Paris for the past five years, which means he's racked up quite an absentee dad record with his 14-year-old daughter(Katherine Heigl), who's been stuck in New York with mommy, pining for her father's attention. Depardieu realizes he has some major lost time to make up for and tries to rectify the situation by taking her on a vacation to Nassau.

The trip is far from a relaxing turn on the beach, however. Heigl discovers that dad is seriously thinking about marrying his Parisian girlfriend (Emma Thompson, in another inexplicable cameo) and becomes mad at him. A lot of other people are, too, because in an attempt to appear more mature, Heigl has convinced everybody that she's really Depardieu's underage mistress, not his daughter. Naturally, it takes him most of the movie to figure out what's going on. (By the way, what is the French term for "dim bulb"?)

My Father the Hero is a minor (no pun intended), contrived comedy that plays like a lost episode of The Love Boat. In fact, Van Johnson should probably be playing the lead in this sucker — Depardieu is largely wasted in a role that primarily consists of his accent and waistline.

But, after Car 54, I can't complain too much about this movie. Snore through it, maybe, but not complain.

Ayoka Chenzira Sidesteps the Hollywood Shuffle

2009-04-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

"I get very suspicious about what I see in films," says Ayoka Chenzira. "You don't see movies that look at the grass-root issues of this country. Films that deal with the dreams and aspirations of blacks simply don't get made in Hollywood."

Chenzira should know. She's an independent black filmmaker whose new feature, Alma's Rainbow, is beginning to open doors in Hollywood. February 17, Chenzira hosts a screening of the film at the Drexel Theatre in Bexley as a fundraiser for the National Black Programming Consortium.

She's already scored impressive critical accolades with such short movies as Hairpiece and Zajota and the Boogie Spirit, and has earned the curious distinction of being a prominent "emerging" director — for nearly a decade. With Alma's Rainbow, Chenzira may finally get out of the gate. In fact, she's currently developing a new feature for Paramount Pictures. But she's not uncritical of the process.

"Hollywood chooses its people very carefully. There are people like Julie Dash
(director of Daughters of the Dust) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger) who are never offered a deal in the Hollywood industry."

Chenzira doesn't say this in anger. These are just the facts, the kind of facts that she knows all too well. She's able to reel off such facts with lightning-fast precision and a straightforward gaze that cuts through you with the cool efficiency of a laser. For some people, she can be as intimidating as a ruler-wielding nun, which may explain why she plays one in Alma's Rainbow. But she's also very funny.

The spine of Alma's Rainbow is about a mother-daughter relationship," she explains. "At first, it appears to be a coming-of-age film about the daughter, but it's really the mother who discovers that she's being anal retentive."

Chenzira's laughter is quick and tinged with a tacit acknowledgment of the personal concerns underlying Alma's Rainbow. She has a 13-year-old daughter (who also appears in the film) and admits that "children generally don't see mothers as people." In part, her movie is an attempt to bridge the inevitable gap that evolves between parent and child.

But the director is also concerned with how people — especially black people — view themselves through media. Film and TV function as a sort of mirror to society, and the media-drenched reflections that people absorb have, in turn, some influence upon their perceptions of themselves. And the reflections that people are seeing in many commercial movies disturbs Chenzira.

"The current trend of what Hollywood calls 'black film making' isn't really about African American culture. The primary interest in Hollywood are movies about urban black pathology — images of young black men playing gangsters. Screenplays that aren't about this aren't getting produced. That's one of the reasons why you don't have many films being released about black women."

Chenzira is concerned about the effect such limited images have upon society, black or white.

"There's a value system in America that's out of whack with reality. These films are emotionally exploitative by concentrating on the violent edges and not on the healing process. And there's a lot of healing that needs to be done in the community."

This healing is part of what Alma's Rainbow is about. It's also what Chenzira hopes to do in Hollywood. But it's very unlikely that she'll give up her independent base in Brooklyn for nothing more than pipe dreams in LaLa Land. This is one filmmaker who's too smart to get lost in the Hollywood shuffle.

I'll Do Anything

2009-04-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those spooky experiences at the movies where you become convinced that an evil projectionist has spliced two totally different films together? James L. Brooks' new movie, I'll Do Anything, gives you that weird sensation. And no wonder — it started off last year as a musical, but was re cut into a straight comedy after a disastrous test screening. What remains is an erratic, slightly incoherent mix. Parts of I'll Do Anything drag with the dead weight of its confused editing. But when it works, it's brilliant.

Nick Nolte plays an aging actor whose career hasn't been quite successful enough to qualify him for the status of washed-up-has-been. He's still humping his chops through the audition mill in hopes of landing any part he can. All he gets, however, is the dubious honor of driving a megalomaniac producer (Albert Brooks) around town. Presumably, there's the faint possibility that if he drives well enough, he might get the lead in a remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

What Nolte also lands is custody of his obnoxious six-year-old daughter (Whittni Wright). He hasn't seen the girl in years, but is now stuck with her because his ex-wife (Tracey Ullman) is going up the river due to her romantic involvement with a businessman whose deals were less than legal. Thanks to his wife's departure, he's trying to raise a kid who drives him nuts, especially after she gains a major part in a TV series.

The script for I'll Do Anything rambles, as if director Brooks couldn't decide whether he was making a retread of Terms of Endearment or a film industry version of Broadcast News.

But the Hollywood insider sections of the movie are great. Albert Brooks' yapping, vulgar producer is a hysterically accurate parody of Joel Silver, the manic maestro of such mindless action films as the Lethal Weapon series. Paired with Brooks is Julie Kavner, as his compulsively truthful lover and audience opinion researcher. Her innate honesty is a handicap in both jobs, which results in Kavner (who also does the voice for cartoon character Marge Simpson) getting to deliver some of the funniest lines of any movie in the past several years.

Mix in odd cameos by Rosie O'Donnell, Woody Harrelson and Ian McKellen, and parts of I'll Do Anything begin to resemble an updated version of Day of the Locust. Unfortunately, the other half of the movie could have been retitled Bachelor Stage Mother. The two plots never mesh, and the result plays like a head-on collision between a Mercedes and a Yugo.

But there's so much good material in I'll Do Anything that it's hard to dislike. Half of it's some of the best stuff that James L. Brooks has ever directed — it's the follow-through that backfires.

Spike Lee's Magical History Tour

2009-04-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Spike Lee is no stranger to controversy. In fact, he willingly pursues it.

His films have repeatedly jabbed into some of the most explosive issues of race relations in America. He also has a fondness for violating political taboos.

Lee loves to simply argue. His career his been clocked by a multitude of professional feuds. But most of all, he likes to engage the audience in debate — real, hard-driven debates about real issues.

No wonder he's so annoying: he wants to make people think.

Lee speaks at Mershon Auditorium May 20 to kick-off "A Weekend of African American Heritage," sponsored by OSU's Student Events committee. As usual with Lee's presentations, ample time for questions and answers with the audience will insure a lively, spontaneous evening.

Lee's first feature film, She's Gotta Have It, was the surprise hit of 1986. The film's ability to draw both white and black viewers paved the way for the current boom of productions by African-American filmmakers.

Lee's shrewd ability to raise production money from Hollywood while retaining
independent control over his films has served as a model for many other black filmmakers. His habit of presenting himself as the self-ordained spokesperson for African-American filmmakers, however, has often encountered resistance from many of his colleagues.

Lee is more of a Hollywood hustler than he might publicly care to admit. He has a drive for merchandising that rivals that of George Lucas and Walt Disney. While his film Malcolm X was attempting to deal with one of the most important political figures in modern America, he was trying to slap an X logo on every piece of fabric he could hawk from coast to coast.

For Lee, the dividing line between politics and advertising has the bouncy flexibility of a pair of Air Jordan's.

There is no denying, however, that he is one of the more gifted and distinctive
figures currently working in the cinema. That is simply a fact. At his best, in such films as Do The Right Thing and Jungle Fever, Lee can deliver an in-your-face argument balanced with a sense of irony and depth that is rarely given due credit. Even in a weak work such as Mo' Better Blues, his command of visual lyricism almost redeems the film's snail-like pace.

But most of all, Lee is a much-needed agitator. Right or wrong, for better or for worse, he stirs debate. In many ways, he is no radical, a fact that he slammed into head first while filming Malcolm X. Some of the most severe criticism of the film has come from African-American intellectuals. Yet Lee is the person who has forced many issues into a broad public forum.

That alone is an achievement.

Fresh

2009-04-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

"We read everyday about kids caught in the cross fire," says Samuel L. Jackson. "There are kids out there, 12 or 13 years old, making life and death decisions that they shouldn't have to make."

Jackson, an actor whose career has run the gamut from Jurassic Park to the upcoming Pulp Fiction, has acquired a hard-edged screen persona through his vivid portrayal of angry black men. In the new film Fresh, he tackles the difficult combination of repressed bitterness and equally repressed affection.

"To me, the great thing about Fresh is that this kid seeks out his father," explains Jackson. "But (the father's) not a very demonstrative guy, and he doesn't know how to reach out to his son. Instead, he passively reinforces the kid's own anger by teaching him speed chess."

Fresh is a determinedly off-beat movie that plays like a cross between Menace II Society and Searching for Bobby Fischer. The title is the street name of the movie's lead character, a 12-year-old kid (Sean Nelson) whose quiet, almost soulful exterior masks an interior of sensitivity, intelligence and rage. Fresh is trapped within the mean streets of Brooklyn, but he desires an imaginary world of sunlight and family togetherness. The reluctant employee of several drug lords, Fresh becomes convinced that his only means of escape from the streets is via a series of Machiavellian power plays that pit various gang members against each other.

"Through the speed chess games," says Jackson, "the father inadvertently teaches the kid aggression and strategy, but he doesn't pass on any positive ways to use them."

On the surface, Fresh may appear to be just another fast-buck turn on urban pathology and the modern gangster genre. But it goes much deeper than that. Its visuals are haunting, almost dreamlike, and it's more concerned with emotions than gunfire.

It was this depth of feeling and story that attracted Jackson and fellow actor Giancarlo Esposito to Fresh. "I'm offered drug dealer parts all the time," Esposito points out. "Normally, I don't want to do those kinds of roles. That's why I only appear in one or two films a year."

Esposito has had major roles in such films as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, as well as the lead in the critically acclaimed (though short lived) TV series Bakersfield PD. He looks like a matinee idol — a crucial element of his performance in Fresh, in which he plays a drug lord who's both vile and perversely understandable.

"Today, movies are all about the evil part," continues Esposito. "Hollywood has created an, atmosphere where people are titillated by violence. It gives them a sense of power, but it doesn't give them any regard for human life. They don't know what death is."

The reality of death is presented in Fresh in a single, shocking gesture in a school yard shoot-out scene. The young girl who Fresh is attracted to is accidentally shot in the neck, and her last seconds of life are visually clocked by the spastic, but gradually slowing, kicks of her feet. The image's focus is small, but its impact is overwhelming, and it clearly places the movie's emphasis on the consequence of violence rather than the thrill of action.

Fresh is a radical departure from the typical 'hood movies that centers on a nightmarish rite of passage during which innocence is betrayed and lost. Ironically, this poetic black thriller is the debut feature film of a young white filmmaker whose previous credit was the screenplay for the Clint Eastwood bomb The Rookie.

"It's not about being either black or white," argues Boaz Yakin, a twenty-something drop-out from both film school and Hollywood. "It's about being an artist. Artists should be able to express themselves anyway that they want, about any subject they want. When you get down to it, people are very similar."

A few years ago, Yakin was on the fast track escalator in LaLa Land, but quickly discovered that he only wanted off. "I was working on a lot of stupid Hollywood action films. I lost my feeling for the work and began hating myself."

Yakin fled to Paris and started writing novels. But his time in the shoot-'em-up mills of the dream factory had left him with a nagging question: "Who is the most powerless type of hero possible?" A question that, in turn, kept bringing him back to an offbeat story idea about a child.

"Then a friend of mine, Lawrence Bender, called me," recalls Yakin. "He has just finished producing Pulp Fiction, and he told me that he could get the money to make any movie I wanted to do."

Yakin doesn't make any pretense of being street-wise or especially knowledgeable about African American life. He did extensive research and was very dependent on the movie's cast for advice. "I'm not trying to pretend that this movie is real," he admits. "It's a reflection of various things, of my feelings about these things."

Indeed, it's at the emotional level where Fresh most definitely succeeds.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

2009-04-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

"People are always surprised ' to learn," says actor Terrence Stamp, "that I never wore diapers as a child."

Odd variations in toilet training were not the subject of the press conference held last July in Los Angeles, but Stamp has spent most of the past decade sorting through the psychoanalytic reverberations in his life. Such details were connected to both his career and his decision to play an aging transsexual in the Australian comedy The Adventures of Prisclla, Queen of the Desert.

"I was one of those eldest sons who always had to be perfect," Stamp continues. His drive for perfection has always been evident in his acting, even though Stamp has spent a long stretch of his career coasting through easy-money parts as the fancy English villain in expensive American films. Though he gained critical respect in the early '60s in such movies as Billy Budd and The Collector, Stamp has mostly made his living with such parts as the evil General Zed in Superman II and the world's meanest Mr. Potato-Head in Alien Nation.

Such typecasting was, admits Stamp, part of the reason why he was interested in playing Bernadette, a very prim gender-bender who joins two young drag queens on a campy excursion through the sand-blasted Outback.

"I've often boasted that if I'm frightened by a role, then I'll take it. That's how I grow. But when this role came up, the fear threshold became so rarefied. There were times when I was absolutely petrified and had to counter years and years of conditioning."

Stamp, a 54-year-old straight man, has a handsome and youthful appeal that even his snowy white, widow-peaked hairline cannot alter. But as a woman, Stamp's sharp facial features form a crow's nest of repressions. The shrewish quality of his performance was accentuated by the discomfort of his costumes: a parade of house dresses, sequined tights, pantyhose that tucked in his genitalia and water-filled condoms that propped up his bra. "I looked like the worst kind of draggy old tomcat. I finally started yelling, 'Come on! Make me look even more stupid!.'"

Added to this was the rigor of a 39-day shooting schedule, most of which took place on a seemingly endless sweep of road that cuts across the sweltering wasteland. The filming, like the movie, was an absurd journey through arid terrain best known for its enormous flies. The sight of three actors in drag, tooling around in a pink-colored bus named Priscilla, must have been a dubious spectacle for the miners in the region.

"Not really. The locals were actually pretty laid back," insists Stephen Elliot, the director of Priscilla. "What they're into is much weirder. Really weird. It's mean out there in towns like Coober Pedy. You get on someone's wrong side and they blow you up."

Priscilla is Elliot's second feature and its success on the film festival circuit has given him a rep as the hot, new talent from Down Under. At 30, he looks excessively boyish, with a gap-toothed smile and an Aussie accent that practically screams for a translator.

"I didn't want to make a gay film," argues Elliot when pressed about the audience he intended for Priscilla. "As far as I'm concerned, the film is not a gay movie. I wanted to make a musical, and drag was a great vehicle for it." Ironically, that contradiction has been both help and hindrance for Priscilla. The overt gayness of both its story and humor doesn't always click with a straight audience, and some homosexual groups have been upset with the movie's refusal to tackle political issues. Priscilla has a compromised quality: as it avoids the thornier parts of its own concerns, settling instead for a gaudy display of feather boas.

"I honestly wanted to do a film where you start by laughing at these characters," explains Elliot. "They are freaks, and people come into the cinema to see the freak show feeling unthreatened. Then, very slowly, it changes, 'til you're laughing with them. You end up having complete sympathy with them.

"That's my way of making films."

Art Night at the Drive-In

2009-04-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Art house movies and drive-in theaters don't often mix. The whole idea would strike Joe Bob Briggs as being a communist conspiracy. But on May 7, the Kingman Drive-In in Delaware (it's located 9 1/2 miles north of 1-270 on SR 23) will host "Drive-In Surreal," an evening of experimental flicks and fresh country air.

"What could be better than watching surrealist films in the privacy of your own car under the stars?" asks Tim Lanza, the screening's organizer. Lanza is the U.S. distributor for the Rohauer film collection, a specialty movie company that's been located in Columbus for the past eight years. Developed from the estate of the late Raymond Rohauer — an art house theater owner and former business partner of Buster Keaton — the collection is an impressive list of titles from the avant-garde and the silent cinema.

The Rohauer Collection has a great line-up of films, but they're not often shown publicly due to the tastes of modern young viewers. "These films are part of a different era," Lanza notes sadly. "Just like drive-ins."

At the ripe old age of 30, Lanza teeters between Baby Boomer status and Generation X. His life-long passion for movies led him to earn a bachelor degree from the now defunct Department of Film and Photography at the Ohio State University, and to serve an extensive internship as a research assistant with the now defunct film program at the Columbus Museum of Art. With "Drive-In Surreal," Lanza is looking forward to being involved in something that doesn't have the word "defunct" attached to it.

But, he warns about the event, "I don't want people to come expecting a lecture. This is going to be more of a carnival."

The evening kicks off at 8:45 p.m. with Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Made in 1928 with money borrowed from Bunuel's mother, it's the definitive surrealist movie, veering between moments of supreme shock and long passages of total craziness. The movie is littered with insects, severed hands, dead donkeys and several priests. Naturally, it's a cinematic classic.

Equally daring is Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, the 1930 underground masterpiece by the director of the old French version of Beauty and the Beast. It's a barrage of dream images and vivid nightmares that were partly based on Cocteau's brief addiction to opium.

Two of the rarest films on the program are Dementia and Salome. Dementia is an oddball horror film from 1953 that used only music and sound effects to express the mental states of a female psychopathic killer, who may — or may not — be dreaming. Salome was an infamous production in, its day — 1923 — produced by the Russian avant-garde dancer Nazimova. The movie plays like a three-way collision among Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss and Aubrey Beardsley.

Rounding out the night are two comedy shorts by Buster Keaton: The Goat and One Week, which are among his funniest films. Keaton was the only Hollywood filmmaker who was held in high regard by the surrealists. "Drive-In Surreal" promises a wildly unusual night — one that's unlikely to happen twice.

Christine Vachon: Mogul on a Shoestring

2009-04-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

"There's a part of me that would love to make an epic," admitted Christine Vachon. She was taking phone calls during a break in the New York editing room where her newest production, Postcards From America, was undergoing its final cut.

"There's something to be said about making a film that appeals to lots of people," she continued. "But there's also something to be said about making a movie that really moves a few people. Actually, I would like to be able to do both."

Christine Vachon is the Manhattan-based producer of such extremely controversial (and highly acclaimed) movies as Todd Haynes' Poison and Tom Kalin's Swoon. She has been hailed as one of the leading figures behind the so-called "New Queer Cinema" and as one of the major players in the new American independent film movement. Vachon was even profiled last month in The New Yorker, and Hollywood studio executives are closely monitoring the impending release, this summer, of her lesbian romance movie Go Fish. At the age of 32, Vachon is the latest, hottest trendsetter in sight.

All of which boils down to, on one level, the fact that "I don't have much of a personal life," she moaned, explaining that she just spent most of the week working on budget figures. "And I'm not sure how much good I would be in Hollywood."

But she's one of the best independent producers around. Her films are risky, audacious and — like them or not — hard to forget. They're unconventional, daring and often disturbing, — but they're also visual feasts.

"When I take a film on," said Vachon, "I not only have to be able to sell it, but I also have to be able to live with it."

Producing movies isn't simply a line of work for Vachon. It's her life. She works primarily with friends and close associates and views each movie as a collaboration of equals. She's an admirer of the films of Jean Renoir and uses a "democratic" production system similar to the co-op movie-making methods used by the old French master.

"Each time, I try to form a collaboration that will last forever," she laughs. These work relationships may not last forever, but so far they've held together well.

On April 8 and 9, Vachon presents a two-part artist-in-residency program at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The Friday evening presentation is an advanced screening of Postcards From America — a wild, nightmarish journey through a mythical America that's loosely based on the life of the artist David Wojnarowicz. On Saturday afternoon, Vachon offers a workshop on the ins and outs of independent film producing.

"I would like to demystify the process for other people," said Vachon about the workshop.

That means she intends to get down to the brass tacks (and taxes) of how you do it. Take a notebook when you go. Vachon knows what she's talking about.

Confessions of a Cult Movie Star

2009-04-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

Dressed like a lab technician, actor Michael J. Anderson is bent over a dead body. He slowly recites a long, fragmented string of sentences that plays like a parody of stream-of-consciousness writing. The camera does a De Palma-style track around him as he stares at some ill-defined point past the key light. There's a tight zoom onto Anderson's face - a move that finally allows the actor playing the stiff a chance to breathe.

It was "B" movie time in February on the set where Columbus' Film Group II was shooting its direct-to-video cult item First You Live and Then You Die. Anderson plied his trade in this locally produced movie, which is currently going through the Los Angeles video distribution mill for international release. Anderson not only stars in the movie, he has also been active in promoting it.

"I'm impressed with the filmmaking in Columbus," said Anderson during a conversation that took place in February. "And I've enjoyed working with Mark Burson and Dyrk Ashton," the producer/director team behind the film.

That isn't too shabby a compliment considering that Anderson is accustomed to working with infamous TV and film director David Lynch. Anderson's three-foot-eight-inch height and other-worldly looks landed him the unusual part of "The Little Man From Another Place" in Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series. His first appearance on the tube, as a disco-dancing, backward-talking denizen of some unearthly realm, was the perfect capper to an episode that was the most bizarre 60 minutes of television since Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. It was intense, absurd, vivid and surreal: a bundle of contradictions exploding in the viewer's face.

Anderson's life is full of such unlikely contradictions. His gait, for instance, is both graceful and jerky, the result of having broken more than 300 bones due to the congenital bone disease that stunted his growth and makes his skeleton extremely brittle. (He's broken bones simply by moving.) He also has a distinct speech impediment which he's successfully tamed into something that sounds like a vague accent.

No wonder his face betrays a strong sense of strength and suffering. Anderson is only 40, but he looks ageless, as if he were both a youthful elf and a wizened spirit.

"I'm not a candidate for a role about a large, black basketball player," he laughs. "But it's also nice to do roles in which everything doesn't revolve around my being a little man."

Nonetheless, Anderson's size has been his meal ticket into major guest-starring roles on TV's Picket Fence and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In addition, Anderson has continued his association with Lynch (for better or worse) - he appeared in the critically disastrous Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and is on hold for the long-awaited (and still stalled) production of Ronnie Rocket, the movie that could succeed in making Eraserhead look like The Brady Bunch.

"I have four different versions of the script for Ronnie Rocket," confided Anderson. "But Lynch has, for the moment, lost confidence in the project. Which is too bad. If he stays to his vision of the film, it would be like a cold wind blowing through this room."

His eyes momentarily twinkle. Anderson likes to work in movies that are bold, daring and different. That's what brought him to Columbus for First You Live and Then You Die.

Most of the movie was originally shot several years ago, during a rambling, cross-country trip. The movie didn't make much sense, but it received a few screenings and, more surprisingly, a favorable review from Joe Bob Briggs. Burson and Ashton decided to take a try at clarifying the footage, but they needed a way to tie the storyline together.

So they invented the concept of a "necroscope," a telepath who can read the memories of the dead. Since the pair was looking to land a video distribution deal with a Pacific rim-based company, they needed an American actor who was unique enough to handle the part, but also well known in Asian markets. Anderson had the look, and the huge popularity of Twin Peaks in Japan made him an established star.

But there was an ulterior motive to their recruitment of Anderson. Burson and Ashton are also working on a movie based on a series of mystery novels about a dwarf detective.

Despite his claim that he "sits around a pool in Los Angeles, looking abstract," Anderson is a busy man.

"The way I see it," he says, "the more balls I can juggle at the same time, the more likely that one of them will hit me."

His eyes fill again with that magical sparkle. Despite his old nickname of "little man Mike," Anderson's persona is finally beginning to grow.

Eva Marie Saint

2009-04-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

"When I first came to Ohio by bus," said Eva Marie Saint, "I cried because everything was so flat."

It was the 1940s and she had just left her home in Upper New York state to attend school at Bowling Green State University. The young Eva Marie arrived at Bowling Green convinced that she was going to become a third grade teacher.

"My mom had always been a teacher, and I thought that that was what I wanted to do," she explained during a recent telephone interview. "But then someone got me to try out for a play and I suddenly realized what I wanted to do."

It was those early, faltering steps on stage in the flat lands of Ohio that eventually led Saint to a successful career on Broadway and then in Hollywood during the 1950s. Much admired for her performances in such films as On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, Saint was able to handle a wide variety of roles, ranging from fragile, working-class idealist to cool, sophisticated spy.

She also worked with such legendary leading men as Marlon Brando and Cary Grant - which is why she returns to the stage May 26 at the Palace Theatre to host a presentation of Grant's romantic melodrama An Affair to Remember. Both the screening and Saint's appearance are being provided by American Movie Classics and Coaxial Communications. An Affair to Remember is the 1957 weepie classic that was recently repopularized by the movie Sleepless in Seattle. Prior to the screening, Saint will lead a discussion of her friend Cary Grant from her "insider's" viewpoint.

"I never saw a flaw in Cary Grant," said Saint. "He was larger than life and a total professional. Midway through North by Northwest I started to feel a little guilty. I thought I should be paying the studio for the chance to work with Cary."

It will be an evening of sweet nostalgia as one legend pays tribute to another. It also, ironically, will continue Saint's association with crying in Ohio.

"It's such a great movie," Saint remarked about An Affair to Remember. "I just hope people have their hankies ready."

Addams Family Values

2009-04-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

Uncle Fester is howling at the moon, the kids are burying cats in the backyard and Gomez is arm wrestling with a severed hand. Just another evening at the Addams' house. Then Morticia announces that she's having a baby. Literally - at that moment.

This is as close as Addams Family Values gets to a plot. The hurried sequel to 1991's monster hit shares all of the original's strengths and weaknesses. The movie has its moments, but there's not much connecting any of the scenes or jokes.

Okay. There's a bit more to the plot. When the children, Pugsley and Wednesday, try to bump off their new baby brother, the family decides that it's time to hire a nanny. Appropriately, the new nanny (Joan Cusack)is a serial killer who marries, then murders, wealthy men. She targets Uncle Fester as her next victim and sets out to deftly win his heart. But she quickly discovers that you can't easily kill an Addams - Fester thinks the murder attempts are just displays of her love.

Some of the flick's best jokes are saved for the kids, when they're sent to summer camp, where they're surrounded by the next generation of the WASP elite and forced to watch videos of The Brady Bunch. You can't wait for the two little ghouls to threaten the entire place with mass scalping. While at camp, Wednesday finds her soul mate, in the form of a pint-sized Woody Allen look-alike.

Addams Family Values is occasionally funny. But it's all punchlines with no build up. It plays like the highlights to another movie.

The Lion King

2009-04-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

Things have been a little rough around the Magic Kingdom lately. Walt Disney Studios - and their numerous subsidiary companies - have spent the past year releasing a ton of bad movies to well-deserved critical beatings and lackluster box office. EuroDisney has taken a financial bath in a sea of red ink and has virtually provoked the French into declaring war on Mickey Mouse. Then Nancy Kerrigan showed up with a crappy attitude and blurted out how silly she felt taking their money.

But you know what they say: when the going gets tough, the tough get back to animation. The Lion King is the sort of film that the Disney empire was built on, and it's still the kind of movie that Disney does best. Sure, it's a typical production that you can just about write in your sleep. But on technical points alone, The Lion King ends up being one of the more impressive movies of the summer.

The story is a mix of The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone, with a good lion king squared off against his evil brother. Mufasa (voice of James Earl Jones) has just produced a son, and his sneaky sibling, Scar (voice of Jeremy Irons), can't stand the thought of being passed over by his new nephew. Scar joins forces with a pack of hyenas (voice of Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Martin and Jim Cummings) and plots a little regicide. But prince Simba (as an adult, the voice of Matthew Broderick) survives, and once he reaches maturity, he finds himself forced to return to his father's now crumbling kingdom.

The animation work in The Lion King is one of the most masterful jobs done by Disney's artists, as they successfully create a visual design that's more realistic and slightly less sentimental than the mouse that roars usually produces. Only the musical score comes close to a few false steps. For once, the empire gets it right.

Two Small Bodies

2009-04-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

"If you want false hope, go to church," snaps Fred Ward in the film Two Small Bodies. "This is reality."

Ward (Henry and June)plays a police detective who's investigating the disappearance (and possible murder) of two kids. Suzy Amis (Ballad of Little Jo)plays the missing children's' mother, a cocktail waitress with loose morals and bad luck. She may have committed the kidnappings, but Ward is mostly interested in her sexual habits. They're the only characters in the movie, but they succeed in taking sexual politics to the level of full-scale war.

"It's a little bit in the manner of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Night Porter," says Beth B., the director of Two Small Bodies. "But it also has touches of Sam Fuller and Joseph Losey."

She was barely able to squeeze in the time to talk by phone from Los Angeles while pursuing a hectic week of meetings. Since the late '70s, Beth B. has been the most critically prominent filmmaker of the Punk movement. But with Two Small Bodies, she's now entering the major leagues with a film that invokes favorable comparison to the works of Robert Altman and R. W. Fassbinder. Two Small Bodies is her most polished and emotionally satisfying movie, and it easily ranks as one of the finest films of the year.

"After doing several larger films - Vortex and Salvation - I was finding it very hard to raise money," explains B. "So I decided to go back to my roots with a simpler production."

A friend suggested making a film version of the play Two Small Bodies by Neal Bell, and B. felt an instant rapport with the text. "A lot of it borders on the question of fantasy and reality, and is really about the internal drama between the two characters."

The twists and turns contained within the vitriolic exchanges between Ward and Amis plays like a witch's brew of seductive gestures, macho posturings and marital recriminations. "But I think it has a very hopeful ending," says B. "You have to go through a lot of shit to get there, but that's the way life really is."

In many ways, Two Small Bodies is a radical departure from the director's earlier, more rough-hewn movies. Aside from the intense performances by Ward and Amis, the film is structured with a series of complex camera movements that visually entangle the actors in the intricate web of their own deceits. "I wanted the camera to become a third person in the room with them," B. explains. "That way, I could chart the psychological differences and changes taking place between them."

The result is something akin to a feverish dance by the damned. Yet in the end, when their characters have reached the point of crazed exhaustion, Ward and Amis discover the meaning of compassion.

"I'm still attracted to the dark side of life," B. confesses. "But I'm feeling that there's more hope now in things involving men and women."

The Master of Disaster - Roland Emmerich

2009-03-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-03-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

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....

2009-03-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-03-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

“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

2009-03-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-03-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-08T04:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-08T04:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Phenomenon

2009-03-08T04:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, sincerity is simply not enough to save a movie. Phenomenon has enough sincerity to drown thirty other movies in baths of protracted pathos, but barely a drop of genuine emotion ever really splashes off the screen.

Instead, the viewer is treated to a long haul through dry territory. Phenomenon promises a quirky character study framed within the world of the paranormal. What it delivers are a few stock characters and some dubious medical science.

The movie plays like a Frank Capra rewrite of an episode of The X-Files with John Travolta standing in for Jimmy Stewart. As such, Travolta is a pleasant enough of a stand-in, but did anyone really ask for a film that could be retitled It's A Wonderful, Feel-Good Life?

Travolta is George Malley, an easy-going auto mechanic in Northern California who seems unusually unperturbed by the fact that his small-town existence is without any real point. Sure, he's a nice guy and his only real crisis is figuring out how to get a rabbit out of his garden. But his low stress level is imbalanced by the fact that he has no particular place to go on Saturday nights. The man can't even get a date to his own birthday party.

Which is unfortunate. When a sightly tipsy George leaves the party, he doesn't have any witnesses to the intense white light that streaks out of the sky and zaps him. The only immediate evidence he has to offer as proof for the experience is a minor headache and a nagging sense that he needs to be doing some major work.

So George starts reading every book in the library within a matter of days; learns new languages within twenty minutes; and invents enough solar panels to power half of the state. He also discovers that he can break complex codes and make inanimate objects dance in the air. In his spare time, he accurately predicts earthquakes and redesigns the combustion engine. Who knows. He may be experiencing the most productive mid-life crisis of any man in history.

But all he really wants to do is romance Lace (Krya Sedgewick), the local artiste with two kids, a bitter past, and a proclivity for making fancy but unusable chairs. Unfortunately, Lace is sort of a nightmare vision of the kind of person who places personal ads. She wants a man who is down-to-earth without being to crude; smart without showing too many brains; honest without being too complex. Most of all, she wants a guy who is manly without any of those annoying masculine behavior traits.

With or without his paranormal powers, George is too good for this woman. But the whole plot of the film is about getting them together and it takes most of Phenomenon's two-hours plus running time to do the job. Along the way, George gets arrested by the FBI for being a suspect citizen with a high I.Q. (a major offence these days in the States) and freaks out the local town folks with a few modest psychic displays.

Which also means that Phenomenon never gets off the ground. A cast of good solid performers try their best, but even Robert Duvall as George's doctor has a hard time trying to pump zest into his role. Only Brent Spiner has a few fun moments as a slightly whacked out government scientist (a role that is rapidly emerging as Spiner's new forte).

If Phenomenon had been more tightly written, more subtly directed (and edited down by about twenty minutes), it might have resulted in a minor diversion. Likewise, it might have been more intriguing if it had stayed with its paranormal topic rather than the game of bait-and-switch that takes over the last third of the movie. Better still, if it had been made for television, it might have actually been interesting (anymore, TV deals better with off-beat character studies).

But as a theatrical film, Phenomenon is a long meander to nowhere.

Multiplicity

2009-03-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

Some men lead lives of quiet desperation. But Doug Kinney(Michael Keaton) is simply desperate. So desperate that he would do anything to try and balance the constant friction that exists between his job and the demands of his family. The situation is so extreme that he would have to be at least two people to do everything in one day. Hey, isn't there some scientific thing called cloning?

It sounds like a reasonably good premise. Someday, it might even make for a funny movie. But for now, viewers are stuck with Multiplicity, the film that conclusively proves that more is not necessarily merrier.

The plot of Multiplicity sounds like a bad math test. Doug is a building contractor whose job demands eighteen hours, six days a week. His two kids require another eighteen hours, seven days a week. Add in his wife Laura (Andie MacDowell) with a set of needs that easily tally up to thirty-six hours a day, eight days a week. Not surprisingly, Doug is incapable of successfully fulfilling any one's expectations.

So he decides to change the arithmetic through a fast round of multiplication. Thanks to a crackpot scientist (Harris Yulin) who can create clones with the ease of a baker cutting cookies, Doug has himself duplicated. Suddenly, he is a total workaholic (Doug 2) who does all of the housework (Doug 3) while still finding time for a leisurely session on the golf course (Doug 1). Once again, division proves to be the miracle worker of mathematics.

But just think of the many madcap situation that might ensue. If you can think of any, then you are already several steps ahead of the screenwriters. Multiplicity goes blank with the whole idea as the movie runs aground with Doug's protracted mid-life crisis. While everyone else does all his work, the original Doug spends his time sneaking off to basketball games and fretting about the prospect of his clones having a go at the wife.

What Doug should be worried about is the fact that his copies are almost as boring as their master. Doug 2 is an aggressive lout who spends his time firing people and cruising the secretarial pool. Doug 3 is a prissy fussbudget who devotes entire evenings to wrapping leftovers. When the inevitable Doug 4 arrives, he turns out to be a mentally stunted slob who behaves like a demented five year-old. This guy doesn't need therapy. He needs a whole new identity.

Keaton is a talented actor and the few genuine amusing moments in Multiplicity are tributes to his skill at milking the material. But Keaton's unusual screen persona is due to the often unpredictable and edgy range that he can project into a character. He can shift his face from child-like innocence to dark and dangerous impulses with just a single flick of his eyebrows. However, he doesn't play one-dimensional caricatures worth a lick and all of his Dougs suffer as a result.

The rest of the cast is shoved into the background. MacDowell alternates between domestic shrillness and sexual panting. As Doug's boss, Richard Masur lets his loud clothes do the talking. John deLancie does an easy day's work as the company's chief toady who is after Doug's job.

The one good gag in Multiplicity is the name of the condo that Doug is building. Unfortunately, Vista de Nada also sums up the movie.

Fear of a Black Hat

2009-03-08T03:52:00.000-07:00

Rap may indeed be the music of modern urban rebellion. It's also the boom-box harbinger of fast-buck fashion, pseudo macho posturing and crotch-grabbing misogyny.

But most of all, rap music is often guilty of being more style than substance – its hostile sense of social defiance often bends under the enormous weight of its performers' gold-plated jewelry.

The whole scene is primed more for parody than revolution, which is what the comedy Fear of a Black Hat does with relative ease and effectiveness.

Overtly modeled on the rock spoof This Is Spinal Tap, Fear of the Black Hat is a faux documentary about a year in the career of the rap group N.W.H. (Niggaz With Hats). They're an odd mix of pop radical attitudes, inner city bravado, half-baked pretensions and Dr. Seuss-derived headgear.

N.W.H. violently opposes censorship (unless threatened with arrest), oppression by the white man (well, actually, they're really against their ex-manager, who's name was White) and gun control. They spend most of their time in violent backstage shoot-outs against rival rap group the Jam Boys.

Writer-director Rusty Cundieff plays Ice Cold, the closest thing the group has to a leader. The only problem is, neither Tone Def (Mark Christopher Lawrence) or Tasty-Taste (Larry B. Scott) want a leader. Whether or not they want a leader, they certainly need a road manager who's better at ducking bullets than the last five guys who had the job.

Any parody of a single subject starts to drag after awhile, but for the most part, Fear of a Black Hat is a sly and hysterical treat that lampoons several ripe targets.

Dialogues With Madwomen

2009-03-08T03:43:00.000-07:00

Madness isn't just a clinical state. It's also a storm of primal emotions, painful memories and dubious treatment. This twilight zone of the heart and mind is the focus of Dialogues With Madwomen, a video documentary by Allie Light, the Academy Award-winning director of the 1991 film In the Shadow of the Stars. Light herself was briefly institutionalized in the 1960s for severe depression, and she includes herself in the video as one of the interviewees.

Schizophrenia, multiple personalities, manic depression and states of euphoria form only part of Dialogues With Madwomen's subject matter. It also covers such territory as the ironic points of confusion between madness and sanity – such as when one woman relates how a doctor told her to ignore a man who was running down a hallway screaming that the president was dead. It was the day of Kennedy's assassination and the patient knew more than the doctor about what was happening.

Dialogues With Madwomen presses hard – and successfully – on the treatment of women within the mental health field. Light's first-hand experience convinced her that women's stereotyped roles and limited social options place then within a category that makes it easier for them to be classified as insane and more difficult to be considered otherwise. Further, the women she interviews come from various social, racial and economic backgrounds, yet their histories are similar enough to suggest that society itself is insane.

All of which makes Dialogues With Madwomen an important, fascinating piece of work that's both powerfully moving and, at times, very difficult to sit through.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

2009-03-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

Freddy Krueger isn’t dead, he simply gone post-modernist. That’s the bizarre twist that cult director Wes Craven has given to his cash-cow horror creation in this painfully intellectualized epilogue to the Nightmare on Elm Street series. In a way, you’ve got to give Craven high marks for sheer gall – not everyone would take a basic slasher-movie concept and turn it into a ponderous thesis on contemporary film theory. But when it comes to revitalizing a moribund genre, Craven earns only an E for effort.

In this film-within-a-film-within-a-film-with-a-film puzzle box, Craven has gone crawling back to the original Nightmare in an attempt to grapple with the meaning of terror, but he succeeds only in totally confusing his audience. Original cast members Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund and John Saxon play both themselves and their characters from the first film in a storyline that threatens to give the term “self-referential” a bad name. Also along for the deconstructionist joy ride are filmmakers Craven and producers Robert Shaye and Marianne Maddalena. Depending upon your outlook, this piece of gamesmanship is either daringly audacious or artistically vapid. Unfortunately, it seems as though the latter may be more accurate – New Nightmare wears thin after 30 minutes as it turns into a post-graduate bore that fails to deliver the basic blood-curdling chills. By the time he finally appears on screen, even Freddy Krueger seems muzzled into lackluster silence by the movie’s self-induced sense of muddled posturing.

Of course, if you see this film in a packed theater, the audience can offer some real entertainment. For example, at the showing I attended there was an on-going debate about who was who (including, even, some random confusion about who played Freddy). It’s not often that you see this many people engaged in a loudly vocal discourse on post-modernist aesthetic theory. Besides, the “Freddy Bobbitt” joke that one guy yelled out was pretty funny.

Tombstone

2009-03-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Wyatt Earp is back. Just accept it – you can’t have the return of the Western without the self-made legend of Wyatt Earp thundering back onto the screen. Tombstone is just the beginning. Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp arrives next summer. So gitty up, hombre. The marshal’s back in town.

Tombstone is one of the more schizophrenic film versions made of Wyatt and the Earp’s brothers’ exploits. On some levels, it’s the most accurate retelling of their story. But in other ways, Tombstone manages to launch so many rockets through the roof of credibility that it makes some of the older fantasy movies about the Earps look like documentaries.

Kurt Russell delivers a flat performance as a moody Wyatt who moves to the newly formed boom town of Tombstone. Being something of a family man, he brings with him two of his brothers and the wives of all three men. Lucky thing he has his brothers, too. Virgil (Sam Elliott) handles the flick’s early action, while Morgan (Bill Paxton) does all of the emoting for the clan. Along for the ride is Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. He gets to deliver the one-liners. Since everyone else takes care of the acting, Russell presumably has lots of time to wax his moustache.

Wyatt views Tombstone as a place to make a quick fortune since he feels that he did his bit for law and order back in Dodge City. But there’s an army of bad guys (who resemble a cross between the Wild Bunch and the Crips) threatening Tombstone, so, like good Republicans, the Earp boys strap on some leg iron and tin badges and start kicking butt. Before the movie’s even half over, they’re trooping off to their infamous appointment at the O.K. Corral.

As Tombstone correctly presents, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was only one in a long list of battles the boys fought. The real Wyatt’s motives for participating in the shoot-out were, at best, debatable. Some historians see Wyatt as one of the greatest lawmen who ever lived. Others view him as self-serving bullmeister whose greatest claim to fame was that he outlived virtually all of his peers – friend and foe alike (Wyatt died in Los Angeles in 1929). Tombstone strides firmly down the middle path between these perspectives and tries to have it both ways. Maybe that’s why Russell’s performance is so negligible – he really didn’t know what his character’s motivation was.

But if Russell needed to pump up his volume, the rest of the cast could have toned theirs down. Powers Booth does a hammy impersonation of Lee Marvin, while Stephen Lang plays Ilk Clanton as a nasty variation on Gabby Hayes. Dana Delaney, like the rest of the women in Tombstone, is marginal to this men’s only club. Only Kilmer stands out in this sage-brush saga of pasted-on facial hair. He’s not even that good, but he plays Holliday as such a sassy bitch that the whole movie nearly threatens to veer into some truly twisted camp masterpiece.

And, once again, Charlton Heston collects a good paycheck for two minutes worth of work. I want his agent.

The War Room

2009-03-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

See Bill run. See Bill stumble. See James Carville and George Stephanopoulos jump to the fax machines to perform heavy duty CPR. It’s all in a day’s work for the pair, who were the head honchos behind Bill Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, which is the elusive subject matter of The War Room, a documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

The subject is partly elusive by choice. The filmmakers weren’t given access to the inner sanctum of the Clinton campaign until after the New York State primary. Furthermore, neither Carville nor Stephanopoulos was dense enough to allow a film crew total access to every private meeting held during an election year in which mud flew like rain during a downpour.

The War Room does capture some of the outrageous high points of one of the most bizarre election years ever to unfold. There’s Gennifer Flowers doing a press conference that starts to play like a warm-up for Howard Stern’s show. George Bush goes on the attack, but winds up sounding more like an irate Chihuahua than the pit bull image he was trying to project. H. Ross Perot enters the race. Then he’s out. Then he’s in. Then he’s…ah, the heck with it.

Through it all, Clinton’s staff broke the world’s record for speed, as they zipped out corrections, refutations and their own brand of dirt and gossip. They were wired into the information superhighway and were determined to reinvent the techniques of electoral politics.

What The War Room captures best are the personality differences between Carville and Stephanopoulos. Amid the typically frantic state of the campaign headquarters, Craville cruises like a hungry shark caught snacking between meals. Maybe it was just the insistent munching of candy giving him a sugar rush, but Carville is repeatedly presented as carrying on like a tightly strung lunatic. Stephanopoulos has his moments of boyish enthusiasm, but most often he’s the calm center to Hurricane Carville’s storm.

There are a few surprises in The War Room, and its main weakness is that the actual campaign was more surreal than it appears on film. But it offers a good feel for the hardball maneuvers and idiotic scrambling that make up our political system.

The Triumph of the Tube

2009-03-06T08:32:00.000-08:00

The Fugitive and The Coneheads will hit theaters very soon. Also barreling down the production pipeline is The Addams Family sequel and an expensive, live-action version of The Flintstones (produced by Steven Spielberg’s company, no less). Right behind them are films of The Beverly Hillbillies, The Brady Bunch and Car 54, Where Are You.

Surrender, Dorothy! The wicked witch of the little box has won. TV no longer threatens Hollywood – it owns the place.

There was a time when the dividing line between film and television was almost as rigid – and certainly more hostile – than the border between the free world and the Eastern Bloc. When TV first appeared, many in the film industry viewed it as a mere novelty. Radio with pictures, as Fred Allen dubbed it. But as the tube’s influence began to spread faster than a wild fire in the Hollywood hills, many studio executives viewed the box as a threat to the American way of life.

They were almost right. It was a threat to their way of life.

Studio bosses loathed the box, but they were anxious to exploit it financially. They began dumping butchered versions of old movies onto the airwaves with the greedy indifference of a junk dealer. A few popular TV shows of the 1950s – such as Dragnet and The Line Up – were quickly churned out as “B” features.

But there was a dividing line. A few TV directors – such as John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn – were able to make successful transitions to the big screen. Others, like Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah, were growing intensely restless with their televised servitude.

The situation was even worse for actors. To appear on television was a little like dying – except its effect was more lasting. There were film stars and there were mere TV players. Never would the twain meet.

That is, not until Clint Eastwood blasted his way from the box to the screen. When CBS canceled the Rawhide series in the early ‘60s, Eastwood became the town’s youngest has-been. He actually had to choose between truck driving and the lead in a low-budget Italian Western. With A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood became the first major star to mutate out of the cathode-ray prison.

The message was clear. TV could be good for your career.

But the turning point came in 1979. The enormous success of Star Wars sent Hollywood into a sci-fi frenzy. Like everyone else, Paramount was looking to cash in. Unlike everyone else, they already had ownership of an old sci-fi series that was being redeveloped as a sequel program. What started out as Star Trek II for television suddenly became Star Trek – the Motion Picture.

The floodgates were opened. Like William Shatner’s toupees, TV began its relentless movement across the theater screen. With its prepackaged concepts – and an audience preconditioned by its pervasiveness – television took control of cinema.

There is simply no way to stop it.

Charlie’s Angels – The Movie is bound to be next.

(Note: At the time this was published, I thought I was joking. Instead, I became a prophet for Drew Barrymore.)

The Specialist

2009-03-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

There should be a law against casting Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and James Woods in the same movie. There isn’t, of course, though if our state representatives see The Specialist, legislation may be pending. In the meantime, you can wallow in the thunderous thespian talents of the terrible threesome without fear of being arrested. And if you really think that any of these people can act, then The Specialist is just the kick you need.

Loosely based on a series of macho novels that are written for the kind of guys who move their lips when they read and subscribe to Soldier of Fortune magazine, The Specialist tries for a softer and more sensitive brand of machismo. Its half-baked storyline is about an explosive vendetta, but large chunks of the movie consist of Stallone and Stone panting over telephones at each other. This film is the closest you can get to phone sex without dialing a 1-900 number. Granted, most of their chatter is about bumping off drug lords, but the topic gets them so hot and steamy.

Actually, The Specialist plays like an oddball sex triangle, with Woods as the third angle. He and Sly start out together as commandos working for the CIA. Their job is blowing up kingpins of the cocaine trade, and their high-tech expertise is evenly split between demolition and detonation. Or, as Woods repeatedly puts it: he’s the trigger and Stallone’s the rigger. Does this sound like sex talk, or what?

The pair ends their personal association, however, when Woods insists upon killing a kid. Years pass, during which Sly broods a lot. He’s tired of all the violence, though he doesn’t mind taking the occasional job as a hitman.

Which is how he meets Stone. She’s a client with two distinct peccadilloes. The first is that she wants Sly to get the mobsters who killed her parents. The other is her inability to use a phone while wearing clothes (who knows, maybe she has an allergy).

Unbeknownst to Stallone (but beknownst to us), Woods is working as the mob’s security chief. When flaming thugs start shooting through the air like Roman candles, Woods gets all hot and twitchy about seeing his old amigo again. You can tell that this is one trigger who misses his rigger.

The Specialist is loaded with atmosphere, but moves at a snail’s pace. It has some major booms, but you never feel the earth move. You may want to smoke a cigarette after seeing it, though.

The Pelican Brief

2009-03-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

Julia Roberts is back, and everyone’s out to get her. That’s what you get when you make your return to the screen in The Pelican Brief, a paranoia thriller based on the novel by attorney-cum-author John Grisham. After all, if the movie’s villains are willing and able to kill two Supreme Court justices, then it’s a sure bet that they’ll have no qualms about bagging Hollywood’s most elusive star. But don’t worry, the mysterious assasins of The Pelican Brief seem to turn myopic when she’s around.

Their vision is fine, however, when it comes to the rest of the cast (including the aforementioned justices, whom the killers bump off in one night in enough time to catch the red-eye back to France). The President (Robert Culp) is worried. His chief of staff (Tony Goldwyn) is conniving. The FBI director (James B. Sikking) is vaguely incompetent, and nobody knows what the CIA is up to. In other words, standard politics.

No one can make sense out of the murders, except for a bright law student (guess who) in New Orleans. Roberts turns the double-hitter into a research project, and within a week she stumbles into a conspiracy so evil that even Oliver Stone didn’t know about it. Unfortunately, she gives the research paper to her professor/lover (Sam Shepard), who then hands it to a dubious FBI friend (John Heard). Before you can say Warren Commission, people around Roberts began having nasty little accidents.

Back inside the Beltway, Denzel Washington is also pursuing the case. He’s a hard-working, dedicated, serious investigative reporter whose main source of information is a White House butler. Which explain why he spends a lot of his time on TV talk shows.

Sooner or later, you know that Roberts and Washington are going to pool their resources. Likewise, you know that a John Dean-type is going to begin spilling his guts. If this all sounds familiar, it should. The Pelican Brief was written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, of All the President’s Men fame. The only thing missing is Richard Nixon.

The Pelican Brief is Pakula’s return to the kind of political thrillers he did so well in the ‘70s. It’s neither as intense, nor as exciting, as his earlier movies, but it does have its chilling moments. Unfortunately, as a whole, this movie is more half-baked than frenzied, and its plot is as clear as mud.

In case you’re interested, this is the fourth installment of what’s critically known as Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy.” Okay, so who’s counting?

The Panama Deception

2009-03-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

The award-winning video documentary The Panama Deception is highly controversial: some of its assertions have been indirectly attacked by the U.S. Congress House Armed Services Investigative Subcommittee. Right-wing newspaper columnists – and a few liberals – have called it propaganda. And the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gave it an Oscar this April for best documentary film.

The Panama Deception takes on the “official” line about the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. Dubbed “Operation Just Cause,” President Bush and the U.S. military insisted that the invasion was a necessary police action taken to arrest Manuel Noriega for drug dealing.

According to the U.S. government, the invasion successfully reinstated democratic rule in Panama, causing only minimal casualties in the process. The U.S. Army claimed to have ended Panama’s role as a banking center by the Colombian drug cartel. (The Army also had to admit that its troops couldn’t tell the difference between cocaine and tortilla flour.)

These facts are disputed by a wide variety of sources. Many human rights organizations have placed Panamanian civilian death toll at anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 people. Mass graves dug by the U.S. Army are still in the process of being discovered and searched. The largest ghetto in Panama City was destroyed by invading U.S. forces.

And, as many reporters have recently pointed out, drug-dealing and money-laundering are still big business in Panama. The only difference, according to some, is that Noriega ran a tighter ship.

But The Panama Deception goes even further. It argues that the invasion was a calculated plan to renege on the Panama Canal Treaty negotiated by President Carter and former Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos. It also suggests CIA involvement in the mysterious plane crash that killed Torrijos – and helped bring to power “The Company’s” good pal, Noriega.

The director of The Panama Deception is Barbara Trent, who previously produced Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair. Trent is an activist, and her documentaries make no claim to objectivity. In a sense, the propaganda charge is true – Trent is fully intent on arguing her case.

And much of the video is thoroughly convincing. With eye-witness interviews and rarely shown footage of the actual invasion, Trent exposes the basic brutality that has become a substitute for diplomacy.

In spite of its occasionally shrill tone – found mostly in the over-bearing narration by Elizabeth Montgomery – The Panama Deception is a hot and critically important piece of work.

The Last Bolshevik

2009-03-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

Alexander Medvedkin was a Russian filmmaker whose career reads like a half-mad journey through the Marxist ideals and Stalinist nightmares of Soviet history. Chris Marker is a contemporary French filmmaker whose work routinely challenges our basic assumptions about movies. With his video documentary The Last Bolshevik, Marker uses Medvedkin’s life as a stunning example of the dangerous meeting point between artistic brilliance and ruthless political expediency.

Medvedkin was an old school communist, a true believer in the new social order promised by the 1917 revolution. This spirit of radical conviction is what led him to join the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and, in the 1920s, to direct educational and propaganda films. That same spirit resulted in his construction of a “film train” – a movie projection unit on rails – that traveled the immense length of the Soviet Union in order to document the creation of a new collective society.

But Medvedkin’s revolutionary idealism hadn’t prepared him for what he encountered during the journey. The collective farms weren’t producing crops, the new factories were shabby and unworkable, and the living conditions of the peasants were as miserable as ever. The footage shot by the film train crew didn’t match official claims about a budding utopia – but instead of using it to document reality, the project was abandoned.

Medvedkin couldn’t reconcile the contradictions between his politics and the realities around him. So, like many Soviet filmmakers, he made the facts fit the politics. In The Last Bolshevik, Marker tackles the visual distortion of history with a precision that manages to be both sympathetic and damning. The result is a chilling portrait of a filmmaker who had to learn to lie with his movies.

The Hudsucker Proxy

2009-03-04T11:52:00.001-08:00

Joel and Ethan Coen (Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink) may indeed be the last of the great American filmmakers. Certainly, that’s the way they make their movies. Every production from the brothers plays as if it were a summation of a century’s worth of cinema. Their newest, The Hudsucker Proxy, is no exception. It borrows wildly from everywhere, and presents virtually every scene as if it were the final statement on the cosmically grim farce of big business. It has both a crazed brilliance and a sappy layer of adolescent excess. It’s the supreme over-achiever – and seems destined to a quick death at the mainstream box office.

And no wonder. The Hudsucker Proxy is so baffling it defies description. On the surface, it’s a slapstick tale about a naïve young man (Tim Robbins) who goes to work for a company whose executives tend to end their board meetings by jumping out of the windows. When the head of the firm, Warren Hudsucker (Charles Durning), takes the plunge, Robbins finds himself inexplicably propelled from the mailroom to the president’s chair. It never occurs to him that his lightning-fast rise has nothing to do with his school book savvy from the Muncie College of Business Adminstration.

Instead, his success has everything to do with the fact that he’s dumb. The board of the Hudsucker Corporation needs an idiot who can run the company into the ground, preferably before the stocks of the late Mr. Hudsucker are put on the market. The board wants to buy the stocks themselves and they want them cheap. As the second-in-command of the firm, Paul Newman carefully grooms Robbins to be the wrong man doing all of the wrong things.

The plan is a shoe-in, except that everyone has underestimated Robbins’ one good idea. And no wonder – graphically represented, it’s a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. How are the board members supposed to know that it’ll be the biggest selling gizmo of 1958?

At its surface, The Hudsucker Proxy feels like a demented retread of a Frank Capra comedy. This is impression is furthered by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s part as an undercover reporter, a part too overtly lifted from Meet John Doe. But Leigh’s weird impersonation of Katherine Hepburn is stolen from about six other films. Likewise, the movie’s verbal exaggeration is more of a throwback to the chaotic farces of Preston Sturges. Visually, the whole thing is a bizarre mishmash of Batman and Brazil.

But The Hudsucker Proxy takes seriously (sort of) its key premise that the forces of good and evil have locked into battle over the soul of one nitwit. The miracle ending of The Hudsucker Proxy is partly an inside joke – one that reveals the Coen brothers’ tendency toward metaphysical grandstanding.

But at either level, The Hudsucker Proxy is one of the best movies of the year. It’s also one of the more aggravating, especially in the way it bobs and weaves between cartoonish humor and dark rumblings about universal duplicity. But it’s worth the viewing. In fact, it’s worth several viewings.