Guarding Tess

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.

The Rock

Some scientists believe that during the last ice age, the male brain evolved into a rigid set of behavior patterns.

If this is true, then the first draft of The Rock may have been told round a campfire during a mammoth hunt. The movie is thoroughly drenched with testosterone as its cast of real men go out and do manly things with other real men.

Of course, that is what Sean Connery does best even if it does mean that he is coasting through his twilight years by playing the pensioners' answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Repeated comments are made in The Rock about the age of Connery's character. Then the old boy turns around and kills fifty some commandos without even getting winded. Obviously, Connery is one senior who doesn't have to take any guff from the youngsters.

He does, however, have to tolerate plenty of hooey from a loony kick-butt script. The Rock is carved from a slab of pure machismo with a strong vein of paranoia added in large portions. The movie plays like a cross between The X-Files and Ian Fleming as it presents its characters as the key players in every alleged conspiracy since the assassination of Lincoln.

For example, there is the movie's main villain. General Hummell (Ed Harris) is the highly decorated leader of Marine Force Recon, an elite team of the Special Forces who are routinely sent to wage covert war in countries that don't even know they are under attack. Hummell is a fiery-eyed idealist who despises the fact that the families of his men are never properly compensated when a Recon soldier gets killed in the line of duty. Of course, the duties that they perform are not even suppose to exist which is why the military is so stingy with the funds.

Lacking a union, Hummell handles the situation the old fashion way. He and his troops steal fifteen short-range missiles equipped with a chemical weapon so deadly that the screenwriters actually had to dig out a chemistry book to look it up.

Then Hummell and his crew take over Alcatraz prison, the stony island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. His demands are simple: either the US government finally pay these families or else San Francisco will be peppered with enough deadly toxin to rival the cleaner parts of New York City.

Ever prepared for such situations, the FBI fly in Special Agent Goodsped (Nicholas Cage). He has a doctorate in chemical weaponry and is extensively trained in demolition. Unfortunately, Goodsped has no real weaponry experience and thinks that hand to hand combat is a euphemism for bedroom hanky-panky.

Which forces the FBI to confront one of their own covert problems. For the past thirty years, they have illegally imprisoned John Mason (Connery), a mysterious British agent who was caught stealing a microfilm containing every dirty secret from the alien landing at Roswell to JFK. For three decades, Mason has refused to reveal the location of the microfilm. He has also refused to explain how he once managed to escape from Alcatraz. Since Mason was able to successfully slip out, he is also the only person who knows how to secretly slip back into the old fortress with a bay side view.

A substantial exercise in gratuitous violence is guaranteed for all. So much ammunition is used in The Rock that by the movie's final reel the heroes are having to blast guys with rockets. Which means that The Rock almost succeeds in delivering the right summertime mix of low content and high energy. It even discovers a weird and funny odd-couple team in the form of Connery and Cage as they bicker their way through every firefight.

But the last third of The Rock begins to splutter and lose stream. Ultimately, the movie becomes a victim of its own demented sense of overkill. Like its two heroes, The Rock runs out of ammo prematurely and that is a big mistake. After all, the audience isn't paying good money just to watch these people act.

It Could Happen to You

It Could Happen to You is the kind of movie that they use to make in the 1950s with people like Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday. They were the kind of films that forced high-stakes con­flicts between urban greed and small town virtues, corrupt sophistication challenged by naive integrity. These movies were always obvious and predictable, but they were also (sometimes) reasonably good.

That's not the case with It Could Happen to You, a contrived and underhanded excuse for a romantic comedy. Instead of a charm­ing fable, the picture unloads an excessive amount of passive-aggressive hostility in a pathetic attempt to make its two lead charac­ters sympathetic. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth in the process, as its feel-good mind­set turns into an ugly display of sticky-fin­gered grasping.

The story is pure Capra-corn: a sweet-natured, virtuous cop (Nicolas Cage) finds himself short on change in a diner and promises the down-on-her-luck waitress (Bridget Fonda) half of his lottery ticket as a tip. Bingo! He wins the big money and the tip turns into a $2 million jackpot. Unfortu­nately, Cage's wife (Rosie Perez) is a pushy true believer in the fine art of conspicuous consumption — and she doesn't believe in sharing.

The first half of It Could Happen to You makes for a mildly amusing comedy, but Cage is more goofy than virtuous, and Fon­da is too pinch-faced and superficially perky (and all at the same time) to be anything more than momentarily engaging. As for Perez, she's stuck with a character about as likable as Hitler at a bar mitzvah. Oddly enough, the movie would almost have worked if Perez and Fonda had been cast in each other's roles.

Red Rock West

It used to be that a guy had to go to the city for a bellyful of murder and duplicity. In the classics of the film noir genre, cities were so packed with corrup­tion that nice guys didn't sim­ply finish last, they usually finished face down in a back alley. But those were the old days when tough guys haunt­ed smoky jazz clubs and rain-slick streets. Today, the action is located on the prairie.

Which is what Nicolas Cage discovers in this year's hot cult movie, Red Rock West. It's the latest piece of "cowboy noir," following in the boot steps of Blood Sim­ple, Flesh and Bone and Kill Me Again, Red Rock West di­rector John Dahl's previous thriller. Not only has Dahl's new effort been a major criti­cal hit on the film festival cir­cuit, but it also has generated a deafening buzz among film buffs.

In Red Rock West, Cage plays a drifter who's cruising for jobs through the oil fields of Wyoming. He's flat broke when he pulls into the town of Red Rock and willing to try almost anything when a bar owner (J. T. Walsh) offers him a gig. What Cage doesn't realize is that Walsh has him confused with a hitman from Dallas whom Walsh hired and is expecting. Cage has no intention of doing the job, which is killing Walsh's wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Then again, that money is damned tempting....

The plot of Red Rock West turns more twisty than a bad stretch of road, especially when Boyle offers Cage more money to murder her hus­band than her husband is of­fering Cage to kill her. Not to mention when the real hit­man (Dennis Hopper) shows up and offers to whack just about everybody. Add Dwight Yoakam in an effective cameo role, and you've got a movie lover's delight - a taut and surprisingly slick little gem of a film.