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 AT FIRST SIGHT. It's not a romantic comedy, it's not a
horror film, it's that mutant that lives somewhere in between.
It's in that special place where grown men dress like clowns and
mothers form better bonds with their daughters by dying. This
time the couple consists of the uncharismatic Virgil (Val Kilmer),
a blind man, and Amy (Mira Sorvino), his true love. She finds
a miracle cure that allows him to regain his vision, and they
hit many obstacles, such as maudlin music, Kilmer's distractingly
huge capped teeth, and bad dialogue. ("So this is what beautiful
looks like.") But when all is said and done, all those Coca-Cola
product placements Virgil can see don't mean a darn thing. Of
course not, because the best kind of seeing is not done with the
eyes, but with the heart. Please, take my word for it and stay
away from this genre-bending freak show.--Higgins
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
GLORIA. What a great movie: Gena Rowlands, as a fading
gangster moll, hooks up with a cute kid who's fleeing the same
gangsters. While this Little Miss Marker idea may seem
trite, Rowlands overwhelms every scene, completely engaging the
viewer with each raised eyebrow and wrinkled lip. John Cassavetes
quirky directing doesn't hurt, either, and while this is a much
more "mainstream" movie than Cassavetes' earlier work,
it still retains his improvisational sensibility and singular
camera style. Oh, wait a minute, this isn't that movie...it's
a lousy remake with Sharon Stone struggling to fill Gena Rowlands
shoes and Sydney Lumet's cowardly and conservative directorial
style dumbing down the more challenging Cassavetes approach. Damn.
--DiGiovanna
HI-LO COUNTRY. This boys-and-their-cattle film is a Cormac
McCarthy-esque (the sweet McCarthy of The Crossing, not
the twisted McCarthy of Blood Meridian) look at two men
(Woody Harrelson and Billy Crudup) who return from WWII to their
ranch lands and try to live a cowboy life that's fading into the
world of corporate farming. While the story is a bit obvious and
melodramatic (they're both in love with the same woman, who's
married to the factotum of the evil proto-corporate rancher),
Harrelson's performance is strong enough to hold attention. He's
just such a weird actor, playing an odd cross between his mass-murderer
role from Natural Born Killers and sweet, lovable "Woody"
from Cheers, that it's always interesting to watch his
wild mood swings and enormously overstated facial expressions.
Unfortunately, the female characters are treated like window dressing,
denied much in the way of screen time or good dialogue. In the
end, the cowboys themselves come across as less sexist than the
filmmakers, in that they make some effort to understand the women
they are attracted to and who are attracted to them. It's too
bad that director Stephen Frears and writer Walon Green don't
share this interest in women's inner lives, and can only give
us a beautifully photographed, slow and sad buddy film, which,
while not without rewards, could have been much richer in exploring
the relationships it backgrounds against the red skies and grasslands
of the Southwest. --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
IN DREAMS. It may be kind of early in the year to commit,
but my nomination for the best filmic wig of 1999 goes to the
one atop Robert Downey Jr.'s scalp. Sure, some will say it's bad,
even evil, but I cheer you on, brave little soldier. When Vivian
(Downey) wears this ambitious rug, it makes him want to rid us
of bad child actors and, more importantly, expose the false ideal
of the bourgeois family. Vivian enters career mom Claire's (Annette
Bening) head via her dreams and updates her on his latest murderous
adventures. Feeling her class status threatened, Claire attempts
to track him down so she can destroy his revolutionary thinking
and quit wearing the Communist reds he clothes her in in her
nightmares. It's nice to see an arty horror film, but it usually
helps to have more sympathy for the protagonist than the antagonist's
wig. This latest effort from Neil Jordan (The Crying Game)
is at the very least beautiful to watch. --Higgins
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 fake belly prosthesis. Really.
--DiGiovanna
SPIKE AND MIKE'S SICK & TWISTED. I don't know what
your definition of sick and twisted happens to be, but mine definitely
doesn't include farting, masturbation and O.J. Simpson jokes.
The warning before the screening stated that smuggling alcohol
into the theater was against the law, but it really should have
mandated we all consume large quantities of caffeine. The two
South Park shorts were fun, but the only other highlights--"How
to Use a Tampon" (a dancing tampon!) and "Karate Dick
Boys" (karate boys with big dicks!)--were unfortunately too
short and unparalleled. The rest relied upon lame punch lines
and mostly uninspired animation. The crowd was definitely ready
for raunch, but all it got was sore booty. For a really good time,
skip the festival and go spend that $7 on some good, old-fashioned
porn videos. Maybe Spike and Mike, who claim to bring us "all
the really cool shit you can't see on TV," will get the idea
that good animation doesn't have to be lumped into some meaningless
category, and perhaps it's time to retire the "sick and twisted"
criterion. --Higgins
Special Screenings
TUCSON JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL. There's still time to catch
the last few days of the Tucson Jewish Film Festival. Thursday's
screening features Soleil and Hannah, at 5 and 7:30
p.m., respectively, at the JCC. Soleil is the story of
a Jewish family in WWII Algeria, where the French government's
pro-Nazi laws made work, school, and a normal life impossible
for Jews. Hannah is a quirky adventure/love story, and
was Austria's submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign
Language Film. Friday the festival closes with a screening of
In Our Own Hands, the story of the only all-Jewish fighting
force in WWII. Show time is 7:30 p.m. The JCC complex is southeast
of the intersection of River Road and Dodge Boulevard.
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