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 ANACONDA. It's been about 20 years since audiences were
scared out of the ocean by Jaws, so in these nostalgic
times why not another huge, man-eating creature flick? First off,
the snake sucks: Choose between really cheesy animatron rubber
snake puppet (smiling and looking for all the world like a reptilian
George Hamilton), or really fake looking computer animated snake,
neither of which does much in the way of terrifying. Secondly,
the script is willfully poor ("Oh, shit, look!" one
character says upon seeing a snake the size of a space shuttle
coming towards him). On the plus side, though, you get an entertainingly
mismatched cast (Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz and Ice Cube),
a couple of beautiful, screaming women (only one of whom survives),
another look at Owen Wilson (Bottlerocket), and a snake
that kills its prey by first spinning it in a fast tango and then
twisting its head like the cap on a Bud Light (I've had worse
dates). Your call. --Marchant
THE DEVIL'S OWN. Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford team up for
this trite, far-fetched "action" movie about an Irish
Republican Army freedom fighter/terrorist. Rory Devaney/Frankie
McGuire (Pitt) flees to America to escape a wrongful death, develop
a heartwarming relationship with the Irish-American family of
a Boston beat cop (Ford), and buy a bunch of missiles from a prototypically
sleazy American nightclub owner/hustler. Lots of people, mostly
Irishmen, die violently, lots of people wear ski masks, and lots
of people cry. We don't care, though, because the plot is so insidiously
stupid we know early on all their personal dramas will be for
naught. Pitt's character is fond of saying, "I told you,
it's not an American story; it's an Irish one." Nothing could
be further from the truth. Strangely enough, the most believable
aspect of the film is Pitt's affected accent. --Wadsworth
GROSSE POINTE BLANK. John Cusack and Minnie Driver hammer
out a love-hate relationship in a black romantic comedy so thick
with irony that watching it is like watching two people fall in
love on the David Letterman show, if you can imagine that. The
dialogue is hip and witty, but the love story is straight out
of a 1960s Doris Day movie, and at times, the script seems to
be groaning under decades of stress. Cusack plays a smooth, amoral
hit man who decides to return to the affluent suburb where he
grew up for his high school reunion. Driver plays the girl who
has been conveniently waiting for him for 10 years. Well, it's
convenient for him. Grosse Pointe Blank is funny,
forgettable, and aimed directly at viewers between the ages of
29 and 33. Everyone else may wonder what the hell is going on.
--Richter
JOHNS. This gritty little film features great performances
from young actors who manage to enliven this fairly run-of-the-mill
tale of sin and redemption. Lukas Haas and David Arquette play
a pair of prostitutes hustling their tails on Sunset Boulevard,
trying to find meaning and connection in a world where human interactions
are on a level with financial transactions. Fellow hustlers, grubby
customers, and a stray saint or two complicate their quest for
cash, food, love and shelter. Mix together a little bit of Mean
Streets, a little bit of Midnight Cowboy...wait, a
little bit more of Midnight Cowboy...then add a pinch of
90210 and voilà: Johns. --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
KOLYA. If Disney had a foreign film division, they might
produce something very like Kolya, a sweet movie verging
on sentimental that's just saved from being unforgivably cute
by its political content. Louka (Zdenek Sverák), a middle-aged
cellist forced from the Prague philharmonic by the communist regime,
makes a deal to marry a young Russian woman. He's a confirmed
bachelor, but she needs Czech citizenship and he needs money.
When she runs off to Germany, he's stuck caring for her adorable,
5-year-old son, who teaches Louka a little bit about love, life,
and family. Some of the filmmaking here is surprising and sensitive,
which makes the manipulative, cloying aspects all the more irksome.
--Richter
THE SAINT. Who, indeed, is the Saint? Val Kilmer twitches
his way through about 12 different roles as the enigmatic, disguise-addicted
Saint, a man so divided from any abiding notion of identity that
he doesn't even know who the hell he is. Kilmer, as always, is
fun to watch; somehow his sense of perfect self-love shines through
in all his roles, making him seem just a little psychotic, like
he really believes he's a Great Movie Star. The Saint is
a loosely based on the Roger Moore TV series, but reinterpreted
here in a darker, fuzzier vein. The Saint is hired to nab a crucial
formula from Dr. Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue), a brilliant physicist
who wears little teen-girl barrettes in her hair. Of course, he
falls in love. But can he save her from the bad guys?--Richter
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 Thornton 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 Thornton's performance
as the practical, slow-witted, vaguely monstrous Karl that helps
make this one of the best movies of 1996. --Richter
WHEN WE WERE KINGS. The legendary prize fight between Muhammed
Ali and George Foreman, set in Zaire in 1974, is the subject of
this terrific documentary. If you doubt, or have forgotten, that
Ali was at that time the coolest guy on the planet, this film
aims to remind you. The footage was shot in the '70s, but director
Leon Gast only obtained the funding to complete the film recently.
He added snappy narration from George Plimpton and Norman Mailer,
who've had more than 20 years to reflect on the big event. The
result is a tense but elegiac record of an exciting boxing match,
the most cinematic of sports. --Richter
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