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 CRASH. A trippy, pointless exercise in style from David
Cronenberg, director of Naked Lunch and Videodrome,
among others. Crash looks great but delivers little. The
story, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard, tracks the adventures
of a bored, empty movie producer (James Spader) whose erotic sensibility
and sense of physicality are radically altered after he suffers
a serious car accident. He's discovered by a subculture of like-minded
individuals, headed by a sleazy character named Vaughan (Elias
Koteas), who abandon themselves to their "benevolent psychopathology."
This basically involves engaging in sexual activity in, around,
or after violent car crashes. Like a super-8 porno loop, Crash
contains only a rough idea of beginning, middle and end--and there's
so much sex that after a while, it just gets boring. The wonderful
cast, including Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette, is so poorly
directed they literally seem to be wandering around aimlessly.
Crash received a special jury prize at Cannes "For
Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity," but obviously
not for intelligence, artistic merit or even entertainment value.
--Richter
DONNIE BRASCO. Zesty Italian mobsters shoot, hack and smash
each other to smithereens one more time in this reprise of the
Mafia flick. There's nothing new here, but if you're a fan of
the mobster drama, this one's entirely passable. Johnny Depp,
that pretty, pretty man, is really quite good as Donnie Brasco
(a.k.a. Joe Pistone), an undercover agent burrowing deep into
the structure of the Brooklyn (or is it Queens?) Mafia. His special
gangster friend is Al Pacino, an aging, rat-like professional
killer who somehow elicits more love and loyalty from Brasco than
his adorable daughters and hot-fox wife. The sweeping themes of
loyalty, honor, manhood, and manly death seem to aim for some
sort of marriage of the worlds of Shakespeare and John Wayne;
but Brasco lacks sincerity and originality and really only
succeeds in invoking other, better, gangster movies. --Richter
KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE. Mira Nair, the director of
Mississippi Masala and Salaam Bombay! delivers a
sexy, good-natured, and slightly self-indulgent meditation on
love and sex in 16th-century India. Indira Varma plays Maya, a
saucy servant girl talented in the art of love. Her beauty and
cunning take her from the palace to the street and back again
in this sexy Cinderella story featuring bare-chested hunks wrestling
and dark-eyed beauties making out with each other. Nair's visual
sense is stunning and lush, cinnamon and rose-colored; you can
practically smell the spices on the breeze. The sex scenes are
torrid too--Nair has apparently confounded the censors in India,
who allow depictions of violent sexuality like rape but prohibit
the portrayal of direct physical contact. It's easy to commend
Nair for wanting to introduce positive images of sexuality to
Indian cinema; it's a little more difficult to sit through the
second half of Kama Sutra, after the plot starts to wind
down and all the principals have already done the deed with each
other. --Richter
LIAR, LIAR. A haiku: a disturbing man contorts
himself like a spaz he is a lawyer --Richter
PRIVATE PARTS. The movie version of the life of Howard
Stern, the wildly popular New York disc jockey known for his adolescent
humor, doesn't even attempt to be a comedy. Instead, Private
Parts is a shamelessly self-congratulatory eulogy for Stern,
whose hair will surely continue to grow long after he's dead.
Stern's rise to fame and his fierce commitment to maintaining
a monogamous relationship with his wife form the core of this
movie; a joke or two are thrown in now and then for good measure,
but really, it's all about family values. Okay, it's also about
Stern's quest for unconditional love from everybody in the world.
Will he find it? Do we love him? --Richter
PRISONER OF THE MOUNTAIN. A really good Russian film about
a pair of soldiers captured by mountain people (who are sort of
a warlike, Eastern European version of the Amish), Prisoner
of the Mountain deserves its Academy Award nomination for
best foreign film. Hokey, out-of-date production values combined
with a story that's moving without being manipulative, Prisoner
of the Mountain bears a rough relation to American films from
the 1970s. Not only does one of the leads have a center part and
blown-dried hair, but the general understatement and attention
to detail recalls the days before bad soundtracks dictated the
entire emotional tenor of movies. --Richter
ROSEWOOD. In the early 1920s, a small, prosperous black-owned
and -operated town was brutally wiped out by an angry mob of whites
from next door. This true story, which only came to light recently
when the few remaining survivors finally broke their silence,
would seem a powerful statement of prejudice and mob-rule hatred
against well-adjusted, self-empowered African Americans. But in
the hands of director John Singleton, it instead descends disappointingly
into vacuous, hokey Hollywoodism. There are moments, especially
in the first half, of anxiety and outrage, and credible acting
from Ving Rhames and Jon Voight, among others; but Singleton and
his screenwriters veer wildly from known accounts in order to
make the film "marketable," mixing in elements of westerns,
after-school special sermonizing, and unlikely (however welcome)
moments of good fortune on which the actual survivors almost certainly
could not have counted. Care and effort have been put into this
film. It's a shame Singleton was unable to trust the material
to stand on its own. --Marchant
SLING BLADE. A movie that's both grim and oddly feel-good,
this low-key, independent production has a terrific script and
an even better cast. Billy Bob Thorton plays Karl, a man who,
as a child, murdered two people with a big knife; 17 years later
he's "well," according to the state institution where
he's been warehoused, and is summarily ejected into the big, wide
world. He meets up with kind strangers, including a little boy
(Lucas Black) who adopts him like a lost puppy, and takes him
home to live in his mother's garage. The mother's boyfriend (Dwight
Yoakam) is a prick, though, and soon Karl finds himself in the
middle of a domestic drama that seems to remind him of his own
twisted childhood. Sharp, understated performances from J.T. Walsh
(who's really terrifying as a sex offender), John Ritter, and
Robert Duvall round out the movie, but it's really Thorton's performance
as the practical, slow-witted, vaguely monstrous Karl that helps
make this one of the best movies of 1996. --Richter
SUBURBIA. Director Richard Linklater continues his investigation
of Gen-X angst in this adaptation of the play by Eric Bogosian.
A great cast helps counteract the lingering theatricality of the
production--sometimes it seems like guys in black leotards are
about to run on screen and
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