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 Dead Man Walking. Sean Penn gives an amazing performance
as a death-row inmate in this Tim Robbins film. The movie is based
on the true story of Sister Helen Prejean, a nun who befriended
a convicted killer bound for a lethal injection. The nun slogs
through a moral minefield as she visits the prison, the victim's
families, and the family of the condemned man, trying to figure
out what she's doing hanging around with a low-life. Susan Sarandon
does a fine job as Sister Helen, but it's Penn who really steals
the show with his restrained, charismatic portrayal of the convict--it's
almost weird how good he is as the hate-filled, anti-social Poncelet.
The rest of the story sometimes drifts into sentimentality or
preachiness, but whenever Penn is on-screen, everything clicks.
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?
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.
OTHELLO. In spite of what you're about to read, go see
this film. It is, after all, an ambitious and faithfully rendered
version of the Shakespearean play, along the same lines as Hamlet
and Much Ado About Nothing--updated for your Big Studio
viewing pleasure. This is not the dry, unintelligible Shakespeare
you remember from high school. Skillful direction by Oliver Parker
keeps the plot rolling, and Kenneth Branagh adds a dark, comic
flare to the cunning, manipulative Iago. On the other hand, Laurence
Fishburne and Irene Jacob, while visually stunning as Othello
and Desdemona, are so earnest in their acting that all passion
withers and dies in the making. While some scenes capitalize on
the advantages of film (such as those scenes shot on location
in Venice, and a truly inspired collage sequence foreshadowing
Othello's madness), Othello is the cinematic equivalent
of using a condom: You know you're enjoying theatre, you just
can't feel it.
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.
Sense and Sensibility. Is this ever a costume drama! Emma
Thompson, Hugh Grant and practically every other British actor
you can think of romp thorough the country in funny clothes in
this clever adaptation of Jane Austen's novel about impoverished
girls hunting for husbands. Of the recent crop of movies about
Britons in by-gone eras falling in love out-of-doors, this is
by far the best. The script (by Emma Thompson) is witty and well-paced;
the crisp, brisk direction by Ang Lee (who made, most recently,
Eat Drink Man Woman) keeps the slow-paced lives of the
19th century from ever becoming boring. This movie deals with
Love and Romance like they made it in the old days--big, sweeping
and stormy.
12 Monkeys. A dark, elliptical thriller about a prisoner
sent back in time from a bleak and authoritarian future. Bruce
Willis turns in a convincing performance as the time-traveler
Cole, a man seduced by the past he's supposed to be studying.
Of course, when he arrives in 1996 and mentions he's from the
future, he's thrown in the loony bin and left to rot. There he
meets fellow crazy man Brad Pitt and fetching psychiatrist Madeline
Stowe. Director Terry Gilliam presents an unsettling, quasi SM
view of a future world dripping with rubber and chains, and the
present doesn't look much better. The result is a gripping, pessimistic
story of both the arrogance and fragility of human society.
Two if by Sea. Possibly the most painful romantic comedy
of the year, for those who don't find falling down, outlandish
wardrobe changes, clichéd lines and faux east-coast accents
the least bit charming or amusing. We hereby dub Sandra Bullock
the Goldie Hawn of the '90s: just a smidgen smarter, tougher and
more sophisticated than her predecessor, but apparently destined
to make "Sandra Bullock movies." This time around, she
tries to play the honest-but-scheming girlfriend of a sometimes-repentant
petty thief (Denis Leary). The plot involves a band of bumbling
thieves, a black FBI agent named O'Malley (yes, this is supposed
to be funny), a grand art heist and a bunch of people pretending
to be something they're not (stay tuned for the Big Lesson at
the end). Along the way, we get to see Bullock looking cute during
a high speed chase, Bullock looking cute in baggy clothes, Bullock
looking cute while arguing with her boyfriend, Bullock looking
cute while being swept off her feet by someone tall, dark and
handsome, and...well, you get the picture. Sandra, baby...wake
up and spit out the bubble-gum before it's too late!
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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