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 The Addiction. Yet another vampire flick, this one from
Abel Ferrara, the man accountable for such whitesploitation classics
as King of New York and Bad Lieutenant. The Addiction
is a shockingly plotless outing through the halls of NYU, where
graduate student vampires prey on one another and their faculty.
Lili Taylor stars as a tortured Husserlian agonizing over both
the locus of evil and which friend to suck on next. (Apparently,
six units of philosophy are a prerequisite for initiation into
the ranks of the undead.) Black and white photography, faces smeared
with chocolate sauce, and a marvelously campy performance by Christopher
Walken can't save this from becoming a completely pointless exercise
in being and nothingness. Warning: this movie may be enjoyed by
vampire-geeks and/or philosophy majors.
Bed of Roses. If you liked Untamed Heart and Sleepless
in Seattle, then Bed of Roses is just your kind of
budding romance. Mary Stuart Masterson (last seen as an emotionally-distraught
love object in Benny and Joon) plays the tough-because-I-have-to-be
career gal who's whole life is turned upside down by an anonymous
flower delivery. Christian Slater (last seen as the mysterious,
romantic rescuer in Untamed Heart) plays the impetuous
introvert who holds the key to the mystery. Bed of Roses
is more a collection of scenes than a story, following the standard
premise that two sad lives somehow add up to one happy one. Character
development is dismally lacking, but the universal fairy tale
that true love will find us--and save us--in spite of ourselves
is so familiar we hardly notice. Enjoy the fantasy--in real life,
these people really would turn out to be psychos.
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.
From Dusk Till Dawn. If you still can't get enough of vampires,
this movie should help you reach your quota. George Clooney and
Quentin Tarantino play bad-boy brothers who hijack a nice, upstanding
minister (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to drive
their big, American RV to Mexico. There, they go to a sleazy bar
where, suddenly, everyone turns into vampires! Not quite camp,
not quite a straight adventure movie, From Dusk Till Dawn
inhabits a twilight region between the two where you don't know
if the next twist of the plot is going to be funny or frightening.
For those of us raised in front of TV sets, the buckets of blood
and media references seem like a silly joke. Those less bewitched
by the tube will probably be sickened.
Heat. Somewhere inside this three-hour, overblown cops-and-robbers
epic there's a good movie hiding, but Michael Mann, the guy who
brought us Miami Vice, just couldn't keep it simple. The
action portions of the movie are tense, exciting and often beautifully
shot in desolate industrial landscapes as Robert DeNiro, playing
a thief, tries to outwit Al Pacino as the cop. The personal-relationships
parts of the movie, on the other hand, are boring and trite. The
characters slink around shiny LA hotspots talking like they've
been reading a lot of airport fiction and chasing it down with
self-help books. Pacino is annoyingly over-the-top as Lieutenant
Hanna, though the lousy script doesn't really make naturalistic
acting a possibility here. DeNiro is better as the thief McCauley,
engineering nifty Mission Impossible-style heists and turning
in a performance eerily reminiscent of the one he gave earlier
this year in Casino.
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). 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!
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