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 Courage Under Fire. Meg Ryan and Denzel Washington star
in this Roshomon-style tale of a fighter pilot being investigated
to see if she deserves the Medal of Honor for her performance
in Operation Desert Storm. Not only is the pilot a girl,
but the stories of her surviving squad-mates don't match very
well and Washington must work overtime to try to sort the mess
out. What's more, the investigator has some skeletons to clean
out of his own closet before he can bask in the hard, clear light
of The Truth. The structure of this movie is interesting, but
the content is sort of revolting. Washington is consumed with
remorse for killing some of his men with friendly fire, but feels
nothing but lasting jingoistic triumph over blowing away scads
of faceless Iraqis, whom he also refers to as "fuckers."
If the thought of the strongest army in the world crushing a much
weaker force in order to protect its economic interests strikes
you as heroic, buy a ticket and have your patriotic chain yanked.
The Frighteners. Peter Jackson's follow-up after the critically
acclaimed Heavenly Creatures is a surprisingly unambitious,
B-style horror movie. Michael J. Fox stars as Frank Bannister,
a "psychic investigator" who uses his genuine ability
to commune with the dead to swindle the bereaved into using his
services. Then a real, totally malevolent ghost shows up and begins
knocking off townspeople left and right, and Bannister must finally
use his powers for good. Part horror movie, part comedy, The
Frighteners tries to play both ends against the middle and
ends up not being consistently funny or consistently scary. The
special effects are great though, and you can't beat that campy,
seventies, B-movie feeling.
JACK. Francis Coppola, director of Apocalypse Now and
Captain Eo, brings us a "heartwarming" comedy
about a 10 year-old boy who has a disease that makes him look
like Robin Williams. Jack's parents have kept him home because
they're afraid the other kids will taunt him for being different;
but Jack is lonely, and after considerable prodding they consent
to send him to school. At first the other children do tease him,
but eventually they come to love him. The intersection between
the idealization of childhood as an unfallen, perfectly natural
state and the sexuality of an adult male body in this movie is
completely bizarre. Robin Williams is supposed to be ten, but
he reads Penthouse, makes passes at his teacher and tongue
kisses his best friend's mom, all while teaching his friends and
family about the spontaneous beauty of childlike behavior. It's
interesting, but kind of disturbing, too.
Lone Star. Director John Sayles delivers an offbeat, thoughtful
examination of border life and love in this winding tale of one
lawman searching for his roots. Chris Cooper plays a divorced
Texas sheriff trying to sort out fact from legend, particularly
in regard to his father, who may or may not have been a bad kind
of a guy. His search leads him across the big, dusty state and
into a half-dozen different recollections of a puzzling past.
Though the characters have an annoying propensity for explaining
their motivations in gruesome psychological detail, and though
Sayles (as always) can't resist an opportunity to preach the liberal
cause; and though the production values of this movie are so shoddy
that nearly 20 annoying minutes of it are out of sync, Lone
Star still somehow manages to be an engaging, surprising film.
Phenomenon. It's hard to spell and even harder to watch:
Phenomenon, a corny, cloying, life-is-a-gift type of flick
that tries its darnedest to recreate the optimism of Frank Capra
movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a
Wonderful Life. The marvel of Capra's movies though, is that
they're actually incredibly bleak stories with a burst of light
at the end, while Phenomenon keeps to a steady level of
saccharine drivel throughout. John Travolta stars as a dimwitted
mechanic who sees a light in the sky and then becomes breathtakingly
intelligent, except that he can't figure out how to do practical
things, like consult with the faculty at Stanford when the guys
at Berkeley refuse to see him. Sentimental music and hazy, gold-filtered
shots sabotage any chance at dignity this project may have ever
had. This is one of those movies that might have been kind of
good if it wasn't so idiotic.
A Time to Kill. An overblown but entertaining courtroom
drama, based on a John Grisham novel, about racial strife in the
deep South. Samuel L. Jackson plays a humble working man driven
to take the law into his own hands when a pair of good ol' boys
rape his young daughter; Matthew McConaughey plays the white-bread
attorney who decides to defend him. (Chris Cooper is also in this
movie, in a strange reprise of his role in Lone Star.)
Somewhere in there is Sandra Bullock, playing an eager young law
student who both helps and distracts the white guy from his lawyerin'.
Yes, morality is laid out on a nice flat grid, but the fact that
there even is a moral battle here gives this movie a heavy,
heavy dose of tension and drama, despite the fact that its view
of the South and the people in it are so stereotyped they're practically
cartoons. If only director Joel Schumacher (of Batman Forever
fame) would leave out the swelling music, this movie might have
some real power.
Trainspotting. Based on the novel by Irvine Welsh, this
hip, streetwise movie meanders through the underworld of Scottish
drug culture with a cold, steely eye. A group of disillusioned
blokes sneer, shoot-up and slug their way through the stupefying
sludge of middle-class life, hoping drugs or crime or a combination
of the two will help them transcend the boredom and humility of
being young, without ambition and Scottish. The funny, fast-talking
characters don't have enough direction in their lives to allow
this movie to have a plot, but who needs a plot when you have
such a great script?
Special Screenings
GREAT MASTERS. The Screening Room concludes its Great Masters
Series with the third in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's trilogy about
post-war Germany. Veronika Voss (1982), set in the 1950s,
is Fassbinder's homage to UFA studios and Billy Wilder's Sunset
Boulevard: a journalist becomes involved in the life of a
faded screen idol of the '40s (possibly an intimate of Goebbels)
who's descended into the desperate throes of morphine addiction.
Screenings are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, August 9 and 10;
and 3 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, August 11. Call 622-2262 for show
times.
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