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 Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Those saddened by the recent
loss of Benny Hill will be pleased to learn the tradition of breast-based
humor still lives on with Mel Brooks. And may keep living on and
on, though eternal life would surely be hell if Mel Brooks were
in charge of the entertainment. This standard story of an undead
foreigner sucking the life force out of stacked young women features
no less than a lousy joke-a-minute. And basically, they're all
the same joke. Every now and then, something mildly funny happens,
but it's not worth all the cringing that goes on in between. Leslie
Nielsen, after doing the same act for the last zillion movies,
finally admits the truth: He's dead.
FATHER OF THE BRIDE PART II. A squeaky-clean peek at the
stress of fatherhood, with Steve Martin doing double-duty as the
expectant father and the expectant grandfather. Something about
Steve Martin is just so damn likable; even watching him run through
idiotic gags barely worthy of a sitcom is mildly pleasant. Still,
his performance here is awfully safe. In fact, everything about
this movie reeks of safety and suburbia, from the family's nice
middle-class house to the nice middle-class plot. Father of
the Bride Part II is a remake of the 1951 film Father's
Little Dividend, and retains traces of a stereotyped, 1950s'
kind of birth anxiety. Remember when fathers fainted in the waiting
room? Haven't we grown up just a little bit since then?
Grumpier Old Men. Walter Matthau is the boy and Sophia
Loren is the girl in this boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl comedy
that will disabuse you of the notion that age lends finesse and
wisdom to love. Jack Lemmon and Ann Margret play Matthau's next
door neighbors who weather a few romantic storms of their own.
Between misunderstandings, the men go fishing and bungle the wedding
plans of their respective progeny. Yes, they're grumpy; yes, they're
old; yes, it's as corny as Kansas in August. There are a few funny
moments, and Burgess Meredith is delightful as the Dirty Old Man,
but the greatest part of the whole movie are the out-takes that
run beneath the closing credits. If only the script were as funny
as Matthau is when he's forgetting his lines.
NADJA. Chain-smoking vampires and disaffected grunge kids
get together at last in this stylistically daring but conceptually
weak flick. Director Michael Almereyda mixes black and white film
with grainy pixelvision footage (shot with a toy camera) in an
exuberant, low-budget vision of what it means to be undead. Fans
of cheap filmmaking will love spotting the occasional microphone
taking a dip into the frame and noting the complete lack of a
special effects budget. Nadja tries to make fun of the
whole vampire genre and occasionally succeeds. Unfortunately,
it also falls prey to the same predictability and pretentiousness
it seeks to mock. Elina Lowensohn is lovely as the sultry bloodlapper
Nadja, but her lines are so over-the-top insipid that by the end,
you'll want to drive a stake through her heart.
Nick Of Time. Yes, it's 90 minutes of screen action shoe-horned
into one 90-minute movie. The only other film I know of set in
real time is the first half of Ingmar Bergman's 1962 Winter
Light. Winter Light is the existential tale of a priest
confronting his lack of faith. Nick Of Time is the thrill-packed
story of a man forced to attempt a political assassination to
ransom his kidnapped daughter. Winter Light observes subtle
nuances between frustrated characters. Nick of Time has
Johnny Depp in it. Both movies have a lot of clocks. Which is
the better film? You decide.
Sabrina. Everyone is filthy rich and everything is beautiful
in this light, breezy remake of the 1954 Billy Wilder film. Through
a combination of sets remarkably true to the original and an updated,
expanded plot, the new Sabrina achieves that sparkly Hollywood
feeling that's so thoroughly enjoyable and deliciously empty.
Though those who remember Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart from
1954 may have some trouble accepting Julia Ormond and Harrison
Ford this time around, they do surprising well negotiating their
way through a plot that involves a young girl falling in love
with a man old enough to be her father. The weirdness of this
only heightens the guilty pleasures of a silken ride through pure
Hollywood Fantasyland.
TOM & HUCK. Any living girl under fourteen can tell
you Jonathan Taylor Thomas (JTT to his fans) is the hot
boy in the universe, and he's just dreamy as Tom Sawyer in this
lively interpretation of Twain's classic. He and Huck Finn (Brad
Renfro) run around the 19th century with blown-dried hair, perfect
teeth and immunization scars, eating pies off of windowsills and
chasing treasure maps. There are no peaks to this movie but no
valleys either: It's a nice, solid kid's adventure story. Best
of all, Renfro and JTT are totally cute and non-threatening, though
Renfro is a couple of inches taller and can't completely suppress
all signs of puberty. The story stresses the meaning and importance
of friendship between the boys, and sometimes, I swear to God,
it looks like they're going to kiss. They don't though.
Waiting to Exhale. The story of four African-American women
looking for Mr. Right and finding, for the most part, Mr. Already
Married. This movie starts out with some gleeful, man-bashing
humor, then tapers out into sentimental overkill. Though the story
is ostensibly about women learning to feel complete by themselves,
the movie is actually obsessed with men, man-hunting, looking
pretty for men, and how great it is to have a man around, if you're
a woman. Angela Bassett gets stuck playing a completely unsympathetic
character, while Whitney Huston is saddled with the role of the
boring good girl. Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon are quite good
though, and this movie gets extra bonus points for portraying
affluent, African-American women in Arizona.
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