Crush

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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?