Orlando

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dazed and Confused

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visions of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Line of Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cement Garden

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

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

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

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

Camp Nowhere

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

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

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

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

Milk Money

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

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

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

Corrina, Corrina

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

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

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

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

Eat Drink Man Woman

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

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

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

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

Natural Born Killers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Color of Night

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

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

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

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

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