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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
THE BOXER. This slow-moving drama about provincial life
in besieged Northern Ireland is somewhat of a knock-down, drag-out
affair. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Danny, a former IRA member who
returns to his home in West Belfast after 14 years in prison.
Though the opening sequences introduce us to the IRA members'
fierce loyalties, clandestine meetings and passionate toasts to
"the prisoners" and "the prisoner's wives,"
Danny-boy strangely receives only frosty looks and stern warnings
from his former friends and leaders. When he sets about reopening
the boxing gym where he trained as a youth--a facility open to
all faiths--suspicions and rivalries reach a fever pitch. More
dangerous than his apolitical silence in the ring, however, is
the unspoken threat that he's back for Maggie (Emily Watson),
his childhood love who's now under the district's watchful, paternalistic
eye as the wife of a prisoner. Though by far the best movie of
recent memory to tackle the tragic violence and hatred wrought
by IRA activity, The Boxer is strangely boring, relying
more on contrived images and meaningful looks than emotive and
revealing storytelling. Though The Boxer has all the
right moves, it lacks the punch writer-director Jim Sheridan delivered
with In The Name of the Father and My Left Foot.
--Wadsworth
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
FIRESTORM. The manipulatively dramatic music, derivative
and heavy-handed shooting, and overblown but obviously meaningless
action sequences of the first 20 minutes of this film made me
feel like a 12-year-old being held down by bullies as I was repeatedly
punched in the stomach while they shouted "faggot" at
me. As the blazing inferno of motion slowed to allow for the requisite
expository dialogue sequence (which lasted another 20 minutes),
my emotional anguish mellowed into the steady and inhibiting ache
one has upon realizing that it's been exactly one year since a
loved one passed away. When this mixture of sorrow and humiliation
had thoroughly numbed me to thoughts of movement, my companion,
heroically, whispered to me, "Just how much more of this
crap do you have to sit through to write a review?" "No
more," I cried. "No more." --DiGiovanna
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
GOOD WILL HUNTING. Gus Van Sant directs this movie about
a self-educated mathematical genius, Will Hunting (Matt Damon),
a janitor who mops floors at MIT. Secretly, he's smarter than
all the students and most of the professors, too. When the educated
world discovers Will, he's torn between his beer-drinking, fiercely
loyal buddies and the unfamiliar world of academics. Oh yeah,
there's a sexy Harvard girl (Minnie Driver) in his life, too.
Robin Williams plays the psychologist who tries to help Will figure
out what to do with his amazing gift. There's a lot of good acting;
and the screenplay, by Will Damon and Ben Affleck, can be pretty
funny at points, though it tends to drift into sentimentality.
Van Sant has a real talent for creating arresting visual images;
he does it a little here, when he gets a chance, but a film about
the inner life and psychological changes of a young boy doesn't
really let him flex his muscles. Perhaps he should see
a psychologist and get in touch with his gift. --Richter
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
TITANIC. To anybody who sees this movie expecting subtlety
and impeccable historical detail: What planet are you from? This
is James Cameron we're talking about--the guy whose last
movie ended with a kiss in front of a mushroom cloud. Titanic
is hardly trying to steal fire from Merchant/Ivory films. What's
surprising, though, is how well the movie's simple romance carries
the spectacular disaster effects, and how well the poor-boy/rich-girl
aspect emphasizes the class stratification on the ship. (I'd take
the hot little triangle of Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet and
Billy Zane over a boring group of Poseidon Adventure-style
sufferers any day.) Cameron has always been a workmanlike director,
and despite multitudes of hackneyed situations and hokey lines,
his by-the-numbers romantic scenario gets the job done--so well,
in fact, that the little story and big one somehow manage to merge
and transcend themselves. At least for this reviewer, by film's
end Titanic became unexpectedly moving, visually arresting
and haunting. --Woodruff
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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