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.

Fearless

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

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.