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 AMISTAD. Sure, the story is important, but the movie's
not. Though Steven Spielberg capably navigates the complex 19th-century
politics that were preventing abolition, he fails to shape them
into an effective drama. The tale's catalyst--a black mutiny aboard
a slave ship on its way across the Atlantic--is powerfully, artfully
rendered in scattered, flashback sequences. The rest of the movie,
however, turns into a long, talky yawner full of courtroom scenes
and endless exposition. And unlike Schindler's List, there's
no central character to care about: Matthew McConaughy's quickly
becomes irrelevant, Morgan Freeman's has little to do, and even
Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), the African who led the revolt, is reduced
to a banal noble-savage role. (Anthony Hopkins, playing John Quincy
Adams, shows up just long enough to give a terrific speech--which
John Williams manages to ruin with his intrusive, uninspired score.)
Amistad vividly re-imagines history, but there's no heart;
it's just a big-budget history lesson. --Woodruff
AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS. This goofy, exuberant cross
between a horror movie and a comedy is an unexpectedly refreshing
way to waste 99 minutes. Director Anthony Waller packs a whole
lot of snarling beasts, romance, rotting corpses and dare-devil
stunts into this energetic homage to John Landis' 1981 An American
Werewolf in London. Tom Everett Scott plays an American tourist
who just wants to make fun of foreigners, but ends up being pulled
into some beastly doings; Julie Delpy plays a young Parisian werewolf
trying to control her bitch of a monthly "lycanthropic cycle."
Of course, the two fall in love. One scene shows a detective carefully
fingerprinting someone's hand; the camera pulls back and we see
it's attached to a severed arm. That's the kind of movie this
is. --Richter
BEAUMARCHAIS. Fabrice Luchini is extremely compelling as
playwright Beaumarchais, whose mild political satires were enough
to get him repeatedly thrown into the Bastille in pre-Revolutionary
France. However, in spite of his charming insouciance, Luchini's
performance cannot completely carry this film through its lurching,
uneven episodes. The opening segment deals with Beaumarchais the
political artist, but then the movie switches gears to become
a spy film, wherein secret plans must be recovered from a gender-bending
French agent in England. It's hard to get involved in this tale
as no information about the purpose of the mission is given until
its resolution, when everything is explained too neatly and without
art. Then it's on to another, vaguely related segment, and so
on. The only thing providing continuity is a thin tale about a
young man who idolizes Beaumarchais and wishes that he would just
stick to writing. Still, the dialogue is intermittently hilarious,
and Luchini is amusing enough to make this a viable alternative
to most Hollywood attempts at entertainment. --DiGiovanna
CRITICAL CARE. Director Sidney Lumet has had a long, prestigious
career making films like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon
and Network; but his latest, Critical Care, is pretty bad.
James Spader does a so-so Jimmy Stewart impersonation, trying
for an everyman appeal as Dr. Werner Ernst, an oversexed but well-meaning
resident sucked into a right-to-die-case, with a twist. Albert
Brooks plays an alcohol-damaged doctor who cracks jokes about,
what else, HMOs. Kyra Sedgwick is the bratty daughter of a comatose
millionaire. Each character seems to have sprung from a different
movie, and the lack of unity is startling. Throw in a not-so-distant
future setting (where critically ill patients recline on inflatable
pool toys) and some corny lines about healing the sick, and you
have one disappointing lump of a movie. --Richter
DECONSTRUCTING HARRY. Woody Allen trundles out the old
themes of love, relationships, blow jobs and creative work with
lousy results. Allen's character Harry (whom he constructs, by
the way, not deconstructs), is a philandering, irresponsible,
whining, famous novelist. He's so emotionally empty and thoroughly
unlikable that it's almost impossible to be amused by his antics--which
include goofball stunts like kidnapping his son and cheating on
his wife. Harry, the owner of a thoroughly opaque charm, somehow
manages to seduce a bevy of fresh-faced beauties; when he's not
doing it himself, his characters are acting out his fantasies
for him in little vignettes meant to represent the stories Harry
Block is writing. There are occasionally spikes of funniness--Billy
Crystal is wonderfully smooth as the devil--but overall, Deconstructing
Harry is flat and clunky, if not honestly creepy. --Richter
GABBEH. This is what happens to cultures that don't have
enough TV. They start watching rugs for entertainment.
Fortunately, the rug that's watched by the elderly couple in Gabbeh
is better than most American sit-coms. It stars a beautiful young
nomad girl who weaves a playful tale of love, courtship, family,
and (implicitly) the importance of ritual and folklore. Written
and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gabbeh gives experimental narrative
a good name, using bright primary colors and creative editing
to generate unique, magical-realist effects. Though it had a few
too many scenes filled with extended sheep baaaaahs for
my tastes, I'd still recommend Gabbeh to anyone curious
about Iranian rural culture. --Woodruff
AS GOOD AS IT GETS. This is one of the first films in what
promises to be a rich and varied genre--the Prozac movie. Jack
Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a really mean novelist with Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder and a razor-sharp wit. The first half of As
Good As It Gets, before the guy gets medicated, is honestly
funny. Udall is the prototypical nasty New Yorker. He's fair,
too. He hates everyone equally. But a saucy waitress (Helen Hunt)
makes him "want to be a better man," and, in the style
of Awakenings, he begins to snap out of his dark, dank
little world. The second half of the movie is less funny than
the first; Helen Hunt does okay in short scenes but becomes insufferable
when she's on screen too long. And of course, she's way too young
for Nicholson. Still, he is in rare form in this movie, charming
and repulsive both, and there are plenty of genuine comic moments.
This is about as good as it gets for seven bucks at the multiplex
these days. --Richter
JACKIE BROWN. Quentin Tarantino adapted his screenplay
from the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch, with unexpectedly
lackluster results. Jackie Brown has the flat, literal
look of a made-for-TV movie, and about as much style and charm.
Tarantino does show his great knack for working with actors
and making interesting casting decisions. Pam Grier--best known
from her roles in '70s blaxploitation flicks Foxy Brown and
Coffy--does a great job playing Jackie, a down-on-her-luck
flight attendant who's a hell of a lot smarter than everyone else
thinks. Bridget Fonda is funny as a stoned surfer chick who likes
to hang out with criminals, and Robert Forster is wonderfully
deadpan as the bail bondsman Max Cherry. But despite some good
performances, Tarantino seems restrained, and concerned with keeping
things slow, smooth, and real easy to understand. There's plenty
of exposition, as well as intertitles to tell us where we are,
just in case you go for popcorn during one of the long explanations.
It's as though Tarantino doesn't trust himself to tell this story.
Even the settings--mostly apartments, shopping malls and offices--seem
tired and bland. --Richter
MOUSE HUNT. You know that Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon
where Coyote is trying to kill Roadrunner but his trap backfires,
and he falls off a cliff, and then in the next scene he's fine
and tries to kill Roadrunner again, but his trap backfires, and
he falls off a cliff, and then that same thing happens again and
again and again until you just wish that someone at Acme would
invent a device that once and for all finished off the two of
them so you could just stare at the empty desert landscape? Well,
if you edited out anything that was remotely funny in that cartoon,
and then repeated the remaining scenes another four hundred times,
you'd have made a film that was almost infinitely more entertaining
than Mouse Hunt. For my part, I ran screaming from the
theater after the fifth repetition of the hunters-fall-into-their-own-trap
"gag," but I hear that many who stayed to the end were
forever scarred, and can only walk the desolate back alleyways
of life, dreaming of a better world where films have plots, characters,
and even some vague sense of craft. --DiGiovanna
MR. MAGOO. Imagine humor-blind filmmakers playing "pin
the comedy on the movie" and you've got Mr. Magoo.
Watching Leslie Nielsen act like a jackass while squinting is
almost as fun as a trip to that optometrist whose halitosis fills
your nostrils every time he says "Better or worse?"
A blind person who mistakenly walked into Amistad would
find more laughs. Director Stanley Tong, a veteran of Jackie Chan
action movies, whisks us from misused comedy setup to misused
comedy setup as if desperately channel-surfing: Click. I wish
Jackie Chan were here. Click. Where's Jackie?! Click.
I have no idea what I'm doing. Click. Malcolm McDowell
sure looks like Fife Symington. Click. Oh my god this isn't
funny. Click. JACKIE!!! Click. Maybe if I go faster
nobody will notice how bad this is. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Click. The film's only assets are Kelly Lynch, as a butt-kicking
vixen/villain who changes disguises every other scene (at one
point she looks like Mrs. Doubtfire); and Angus the bulldog, who's
obviously too talented for this movie and should get his own feature
alongside the pooch in As Good As It Gets. --Woodruff
FOR RICHER OR POORER. A complete lack of effort marks this
"film." The plot, about an obnoxious land developer
and his stereotypical rich-bitch shopaholic wife, each redeemed
by spending a couple of weeks with an Amish family, is almost
too embarrassing to recount. Every element of this entertainment
alternative is so trite that I can only imagine it was written
by some kind of scriptwriting computer program which analyzed
all of the mediocre comedies of the last 10 years and reduced
them to their most banal moments. The only thing that stands out
is Kirstie Alley's incredibly grating performance, which almost
makes Tim Allen look good by comparison. Almost. While I was watching
this, two audience members actually fell asleep, and a third left
to rent a Pauly Shore film. --DiGiovanna
TOMORROW NEVER DIES. Prior to this year, only one James
Bond novel had been made into a film more than once: Thunderball.
Oddly, for the latest Bond flick, the producers decided to remake
Thunderball. That move sums up the lack of imagination
in this film, which is mildly brightened by a fine performance
by Judy Dench, who's inexplicably slumming here after her role
as Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown. Also of note is hot Hong
Kong action star Michelle Yeoh, who plays a Chinese secret agent
who allies herself with Bond to capture the Rupert Murdoch-like
supervillain. Pierce Brosnan gives a characterless performance
as Bond, unenthusiastically killing his way through the international
cast of bad guys. The story is, of course, mostly nonsensical,
with Bond gaining and losing the superhuman ability to defeat
any number of heavily armed foes, as the plot demands. Thus, he
is repeatedly captured by two or three thugs, then escapes by
fighting his way past entire armies. For my part, I kept hoping
he'd get his snotty British ass blown off so that Michelle Yeoh
could take over and kick some Occidental butt, because, unlike
Bond, she didn't feel the need to make an insipid pun every time
she offed someone. --DiGiovanna
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