|
 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
FALLEN. Aside from an eccentrically amusing but all-too-short
performance by Elias Koteas as a mass murderer singing in the
electric chair, this film is relentlessly boring. It's hard to
believe this made it past test audiences, as my informal poll
revealed that 40-percent of viewers spent the film thinking about
work, 35-percent had unrelated sexual fantasies, 20-percent worried
about environmental issues, 4-percent were there as part of a
field trip from a traumatic head injury clinic, and the remaining
1-percent actually paid attention to the screen. The film's format
is oddly cyclical: There are three minutes of plot, then Denzel
Washington does a voice-over describing what just happened, then
he tells his partner (John Goodman) what happened, then he tells
an Angelologist what happened, then he walks around in the mist
and the rain, then there's another three minutes of plot and the
cycle starts again. This allows for nearly 12 minutes of action
in a five hour film. At least I think it was five hours...I kind
of lost track of time when I realized there were only two years
left until the millennium. --DiGiovanna
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
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; 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
HALF BAKED. Why would anyone make a movie about drug-addled
losers in the nineties? I mean, Cheech and Chong were killed by
an angry mob in 1984 for a reason. Watching people pretend to
act stoned is not exactly my idea of a good time, but there were
some brief and amusing cameos. Janeanne Garofalo's three-minute
sequence is a gem; and oddly enough, Bob Saget, who only has three
lines, is sort of fabulous, mostly by playing against type. Still,
the whole thing can basically be explained by switching a couple
of nouns in the old joke, "What did the Deadhead say when
the drugs wore off? Hey, this music really sucks!" --DiGiovanna
HARD RAIN. If you flushed your toilet non-stop for the
rest of your life, you wouldn't come anywhere near the quantity
of water wasted in Hard Rain. An action thriller set during
an ever-rising flood in a small Midwestern town, the flick is
overflowing with freaky situations like high-school halls that
become jet ski highways, jail cells turned into drowning traps,
and rooftops that double as boat ramps. At first, there's an almost
surreal quality to the film, like we're inside some sort of symbolic
dream world. But the blandly calculating script soon turns everything
into soggy cereal. Other than Morgan Freeman, who plays a refreshingly
non-sadistic villain, most of the characters just tread the usual
action-cliché waters, and the movie forfeits any claim
it had to inventiveness when it climaxes with a last-minute bad-guy
revival in slow motion. Ugh, get me a towel. With Christian Slater,
Minnie Driver, Randy Quaid, and, in sadly humiliating roles, Ed
Asner and Betty White. --Woodruff
STAR KID. Hey, it's E.T. meets Robocop! As
combinations between Steven Spielberg and Paul Verhoeven films
go, we could do a lot worse ("Hey, it's Schindler's List
meets Showgirls!") than this pleasantly executed--if
completely unoriginal--boys' movie. Joseph Mazzello, best remembered
as the little scrub who got zapped off the electric fence in Jurassic
Park, plays a frustrated lad whose workaholic, widower father
hasn't the time to help poor Mazzello overcome his persistent
bully problem and his catatonic shyness around the cute girl at
school. What better solution than the alien-assisted omnipotence
of an extraterrestrial cybersuit? If the film's revenge and love
fantasies aren't enough, Mazzello must also fight an intergalactic
war--complete with a scary, slobbering morphing monster. Totally
awesome! Star Kid too often resorts to gratuitous destruction
and bodily functions scenes, and will never be mistaken for a
children's classic. But it's cute, and displays enough overall
restraint to keep parents (and reviewers) from going bonkers.
--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
WAG THE DOG. Director Barry Levinson makes a brave attempt
at political satire, but he can't resist the impulse to water
it down. And what is it with the aging big stars? They can't resist
playing it cute. Dustin Hoffman is an adorable movie producer;
Robert DeNiro is a cuddly spin doctor working for the President.
Together they concoct the ultimate diversionary device--a war.
(This is necessary because the President seems to have broken
one of the Ten Commandments with a girl scout). Occasionally Wag
the Dog is very funny; the first half hour is especially good.
But then it starts to repeat itself, and Levinson and his screenwriters
seem to feel far more comfortable making fun of Hollywood than
of Washington. Eventually, it all degenerates into the regular,
old, predictable ruts. --Richter
|
 |
