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 A CIVIL ACTION. This true story of a lawsuit gets off to
a rousing start, with snappy, somewhat Mamet-esque dialogue and
an extremely promising cast. William Macy, Robert Duvall and that
Vinnie Barbarino guy all turn in crisp performances, though sadly
the versatile Tony Shalhoub (Big Night, The Siege) is wasted
in a tiny role. The plot concerns a sleazy personal injury lawyer
who gets overly involved in a case against some polluters. There's
a lot of good moments, but the film gets desperately lost about
three quarters of the way through and trails off like a drunk
telling a story. Things get so out of hand that director Stephen
Zaillian finally resorts to the very non-cinematic move of just
putting text on the screen. Hey Stephen, if we wanted to read
we could have stayed home. Nonetheless, the fact that I enjoyed
the film at all implies that it must have been pretty good, since
my viewing of it was marred by an audience of corpulent half-wits
who babbled like a convention of Tourrette's syndrome sufferers.
Seriously, if you have nothing interesting to say, just write
it down and send it to the Arizona Daily Star's letters
page instead of barking it out like a trained dog every time something
your Paleolithic intellect is capable of understanding happens
to flicker across a movie screen. And if one more of you cretinous
semi-literates brings a laser pointer to a movie theater I'm gonna...(editor's
note: here the crayon-written text breaks off into an illegible
smear).
--DiGiovanna (on his way to a well-deserved rest at a quiet
place where he will be properly cared for)
DANCING AT LUGHNASA. None of our reviewers can stand to
even be in the same multiplex as a Meryl Streep film, so we didn't
check this one out first hand. We understand it's set in 1930s
Ireland and involves Streep playing one of a group of unmarried
sisters awaiting the return of their brother from Africa. I'm
guessing that other critics will use the words "poignant"
and "affecting" in their reviews, and that Streep will
add a fanciful brogue to her catalogue of incompetently executed
accents. I get the creeps just thinking about it.
--DiGiovanna
HURLYBURLY. It's a common refrain of first-year film school
students that film is a "visual medium." They say this
whenever a talky picture comes their way as a means of dismissing
it without too much thought. What's missing from this little axiom
is that ever since the 1920s, film has also been an auditory medium...you
can verify this by going to just about any movie and listening
for noises, sounds and sweet airs. Hurlyburly is definitely
not a visual film; its 122 minutes are filled with almost endless
chatter, delivered at cocaine-frenzied pace by Sean Penn, Kevin
Spacey, Chazz Palminteri and Garry Shandling. Needless to say,
with a cast like that the performances are fabulous, and the David
Rabe-penned dialogue is up to the challenge these actors lay down.
Hurlyburly tells the story of four misogynistic, drug-addicted,
Hollywood players who lapse into rapid-fire philosophizing between
snorts of blow and meaningless sexual encounters with underage
runaways. Penn and Spacey are roommates and a kind of post-ethical
odd couple, with Spacey's cold demeanor and imperturbable impeccability
igniting Penn's hysterical bundle of male emotions. If verbal
acrobatics and Actor's Studio performances are your cup of tea,
Hurlyburly is probably your best bet amongst the current
crop of movies. On the other hand, if you're looking for a slow-moving
meditation on the imagery of early spring, you'd best shop elsewhere.
--DiGiovanna
PATCH ADAMS. A heartily insulting moving that, strangely,
also occasionally works. Robin Williams stars in the allegedly
true story of Hunter "Patch" Adams, an early '70s medical
student whose experiments in humor therapy almost got him kicked
out of school. Tom "Ace Ventura" Shadyac's direction
is baldly manipulative and simplistic, and the music couldn't
be more syrupy and trivializing. Yet for every embarrassing moment
in the movie, there are a few saving graces. When Williams sneaks
into a hospital ward to do zany clown antics for cute chemo-kids,
it's creepy--who the hell does he think he is? But the movie rarely
plays down the negative reactions of his peers and mentors; with
the exception of one straw man (the humorless dean), it acknowledges
that their suspicions are valid. This effectively mitigates the
New Agey message, as does the fact (assuming the screenplay isn't
lying) that when not compassionately horsing around, Adams consistently
got high A's in his classes. Patch Adams is flaky, but it's a
flakiness that doesn't crumble, and it's further aided by some
swift dialogue at key moments (which Williams delivers well) and
solid supporting performances. Especially good is Philip Seymour
Hoffman--remember him as the fat guy with a crush on Mark Wahlberg
in Boogie Nights? Here he's a hoity-toity, upper-crust
med student, and his performance is spot-on. Those with a strong
gag reflex rightfully won't like Patch Adams, but they
may need a smaller sick bag than expected. --Woodruff
PLAYING BY HEART. Going to the movies is, to some extent,
a way to rent some feelings for 110 minutes. With action films,
you get exactly what you pay for, and all the feelings are returned,
intact, when the credits roll. Other films, like "feel-good"
movies, sometimes leave an audience buoyed for a few hours or
even the rest of the day. Then there are the deeply disturbing
movies--films like Happiness, Eraserhead, or the almost
impossibly painful Happy Games--that can leave a viewer
sickened and edgy for days or weeks. If you pro-rate your $7.50
admission fee over the time it takes to recover from one of these
films, they wind up being your best emotion-rental value, but
they often involve getting far more than you bargained for. Thus,
the best mid-range value in feelings for sale is probably the
tear-jerker, as it has a very strong pay-out during the time it's
being watched, and then, if well done, produces a pleasant, post-cathartic
feeling as the audience departs for the parking lot. With that
in mind, Playing by Heart is well worth the money. A five-hanky
film, it's only rarely maudlin, and is well written and well paced.
A Robert Altman-style narrative weaves together the romantic tribulations
of three sisters (Gillian Anderson, Angelina Jolie and Madeleine
Stowe) and their mother and father (Gena Rowlands and Sean Connery)
over the course of a series of evenings in Los Angeles. While
all the actors do smashingly well (except for Ryan Phillippe,
who's so beautiful that he's got an excuse for just standing around
and pouting), there are stand-out performances by Jolie as a manic
hipster with great fashion sense, and Dennis Quaid as a depressed
guy who pretends to be a lot of different depressed guys. Also
starring Ellen Burstyn, Jay Mohr, Anthony Edwards and Nastassja
Kinski, with cinematography by the over-talented Vilmos Zsigmond
(Deer Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The
Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up
Zombies). --DiGiovanna
A SIMPLE PLAN. Director Sam Raimi takes the campy, violent
and juvenile sensibility that he honed to perfection on such films
as Evil Dead and Darkman, and such television productions
as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena, Warrior
Princess, and chucks it out the window for this subtle and
very grown-up film noir piece. An accountant (the omnipresent
Bill Paxton), his mentally challenged brother (the also kind of
omnipresent Billy Bob Thornton) and his brother's trashy, drunken
friend (the largely unknown Brent Briscoe) find four million dollars
inside a wrecked plane in a snow covered forest. They decide to
hide the money until they know whether or not the heat is on.
In standard noir fashion, double crosses, murders and intrigues
ensue. The script is, obviously, not terribly original; but it
is perfectly paced and plotted, a flawless rendition of this time-worn
story. And Bridget Fonda wears this incredible fake-pregnant-belly
prosthesis...probably the finest fake-belly prosthesis since they
made the waif-like Marlon Brando look fat in The Island of
Dr. Moreau. Although you should probably see it for the disturbing
and evocative story of ordinary evil, rather than for the fake-belly
prosthesis. But it's a really good prosthesis. Really. --DiGiovanna
VIRUS. If you count a couple of TV movies, Virus
is Donald Sutherland's 99th film. Sutherland is renowned for making
quick cash by appearing in awful films that, in the old days,
wound up on the unreleased shelves of the studio's cold storage
facility. Nowadays they'd go straight to video. If you read a
list of all his movies, you'd probably only recognize the titles
of 10 percent of them. Nonetheless, he's managed to show up in
such acclaimed and important films as M.A.S.H., Johnny Got
His Gun, Little Murders and Klute. What's up with that?
In Virus, he plays an evil ship's captain who can't decide
whether or not he has an Irish accent, so he teams up with a robot
monster from outer space to put the kibosh on Jamie Lee Curtis,
William Baldwin, and four other people of varying degrees of stardom.
Reasonably entertaining, but the comic book was better. --DiGiovanna
WAKING NED DEVINE. Ah, the clever Irish. When they're not
plotting world domination or making those Tamagotchis and lederhosen
that they're so famous for, you can usually find them doing those
slithery, funky, dances to those crazy jungle beats. So, what
could be more fun than watching a village of 52 Irish persons
try to con the Irish National Lottery out of nearly seven million
Irish pounds ("pound" or "punt" is a zany
Irish word for 1.4695 dollars)? I'll tell you: nothing. Waking
Ned Devine is good, clean Irish fun, even if it does include
some shots of naked Irish men. Really old naked Irish men, so
don't get all excited. Naked old Irish people are in no way pornographic.
And Waking Ned Devine is full of non-naked fun and surprises,
too, like village intrigues, fake eulogies, pints of Guinness
and a swiftly moving plot that unfolds against gorgeous landscapes
that were shot on location in the Isle of Man. Which is just so
Irish, to shoot a movie about Ireland in another country. So rather
than waste your time going to some Babylonian or Akkadian movie
that will just try to numb you with explosions and pseudo-snappy
catch-phrases, go see this refreshing and crisp Irish film that
features spot-on acting by Ian Bannen and David Kelly as Irish
men, and funny, believable dialogue by the extremely Irish writer/director
Kirk Jones. Well, okay, Kirk Jones is English, but he's so good
he should be Irish. --DiGiovanna
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