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 THE EDGE. Grrrrr! A big bear threatens rich, glamorous
men in this Hemingway-esque adventure tale with a Hollywood aftertaste.
Anthony Hopkins plays a bookish billionaire with a head full of
unused facts; Alec Baldwin plays his young, taut rival. Together
they take a three-hour tour into the Alaskan wilderness where
they battle the elements, each other, and a bear with an appetite
for human flesh. Director Lee Tamahori and screenwriter David
Mamet really go macho with this one: throbbing music, tight close-ups,
and a series of tribal, coming-of-age-style obstacles to be overcome
by the mostly male cast. It's big, it's fun, it's adolescent,
but in a good way. Breathtaking alpine scenery and Mamet's offbeat
dialogue save this from being just another boy-meets-boy-and-pretends-he's-his-father
story. And the bear is excellent. --Richter
THE GAME. This is perhaps the world's longest episode of
Fantasy Island. Instead of flying to the tropics, though,
rich, bored executives pay big bucks to have a mysterious company
deliver custom-made thrills to their doorsteps. Wealthy, bored,
empty, hollow-eyed industrialist Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas)
is given a gift certificate to play the game by his black sheep
of a brother; not surprisingly, things quickly get out of hand.
Not surprisingly, he learns a little something about himself and
his capacities as he engages in a series of dangerous adventures
that seem designed to break his sanity. If you can stomach the
sheer emptiness of The Game, and if you're not pre-disposed
to paranoid episodes, this movie is kind of fun. It's so random
and senseless that the lurches of the game, as Van Orton plays,
are unexpected and jarring, sometimes in a good way. Michael Douglas
gives a polished, subtly humorous performance, and director David
Fincher has a way of making everything look expensive and shiny.
Of course, savvy movie watchers will realize this movie, like
every movie, is all fantasy, and that any debate over what's "part
of" and "not part of" the game on screen is the
kind of absurd speculation that makes computers explode on Star
Trek. --Richter
KISS THE GIRLS. Few girls get kissed, and when they do
they don't like it. If that's your idea of a good time, you might
enjoy this derivative sicko flick about a kidnapper of beautiful
women who locks them in a dungeon and forces them to act like
they love him--but don't count on it. Morgan Freeman, as a detective
trying to track "Casanova" down, seems positively bored
by his role, and the ennui is contagious. I'm sure having to play
a carbon copy of his Seven character, deliver knowing lines like
"This guy's a collector," and wear a Mod Squad-ish leather
jacket without any accompanying groovy music didn't help Freeman's
enthusiasm any. Perhaps he was attracted to the film because it
teams him up with Ashley Judd, whose tough-spirited character
escapes the kidnapper/rapist/killer and tries to help Freeman
solve the case. Unfortunately, there's no room in the script for
the feisty Judd and the sagely Freeman to display any romantic
tension or even personality, so the movie just turns into another
by-the-numbers killer thriller with a few predictable "twists."
Ho hum. The only original, amusing moment happens at the end,
when Freeman fires a gun point-blank through a carton of milk,
prompting one viewer to comment, "Got Milk?" But that's
nothing you couldn't try at home. --Woodruff
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. Glamour girls! Scandal! Gunplay! Nose
Jobs! The place is the City of Angels; the time is the 1950s.
The thrills starts when honest but prissy officer Ed Exley (Guy
Pearce) opens the door to the men's room of the Nite Owl Café
and finds a half dozen bullet-pierced bodies strewn across the
linoleum. From then on it's seedy characters, clever plot twists
and bracing moral dilemmas as a precinct full of cops harass,
pummel and caress each other and the smelly underbelly of Los
Angeles. Ed Exley goes head to head with his nemesis, fellow officer
Bud White (Russell Crowe), a thug known for his brawn but not
his brains. The two tackle the Nite Owl mystery with a passion
while their suave, detached colleague Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey)
coolly observes. L.A. Confidential courses down the same
clotted drainage ditch as Chinatown, but without Polanski's
dark and brooding spirit. L.A. Confidential is sort of
like Chinatown lite--a taut and rousing thriller that's
well worth seeing. --Richter
THE MATCHMAKER. You can bet your lucky four-leaf clover
this travesty won't stick around the theaters for more than a
couple of weeks, so if your idea of a great movie is a thin plot
about a slimy U.S. senator who sends his surly campaign flunky
(Janeane Garofalo) to drum up endearing relatives in his supposed
ancestral town in rural Ireland--populated, of course, by every
pathetic Irish stereotype to wash up on the dreary shores of Hollywood
comedy writing--don't delay another minute: Face your destiny
and meet The Matchmaker. Supposedly, this is a romantic
comedy about a lonely American political junkie and a jaded, small-town
Irish journalist; but it's terminally unfunny and there isn't
a single spark between Garofalo and leading lout David O'Hara.
On the plus side, the scene starring a shitbucket, a narcoleptic,
and a demented, cursing patriarch makes the rest of the ordeal
almost worthwhile. --Wadsworth
MRS. BROWN. Foul-mouthed Scottish comic Billy Connolly
seems like an odd choice for the lead in this relentlessly somber
film, but he aptly gives the sense of a free spirit increasingly
fettered by the Byzantine rules of the English royal household.
The story, set over 15 years, but always during autumn, concerns
the long mourning of Queen Victoria (Judy Dench) after the death
of her husband, Prince Albert, and her difficult friendship with
Connolly's Mr. Brown. While director John Madden shows a remarkable
control of the mood, he doesn't allow enough life or activity
into this tale of sorrow and stifling morals, and the film becomes
noticeably dull as it wears on. Nonetheless, it escapes the sickly
sweetness and quaint cuteness of many recent movies set in the
19th century; and when Madden allows the camera out of the dark
and stuffy palaces and into the autumnal Scottish and English
countryside, the results are spectacular. --DiGiovanna
PEACEMAKER. George Clooney ably takes over the role of
the Caped Crusader in this latest installment of the Batman series,
though there are a few changes from the earlier versions: For
example, he never dons the attractive black-and-gray bat costume
known for striking fear into the hearts of cowardly and superstitious
villains. However, he still swings from a rope to knock the bad
guys on their butts, and demonstrates his superhuman abilities
by taking out hordes of heavily armed terrorists single-handedly.
While his unerring aim and virtual invulnerability would seem
silly in an ordinary thriller, viewers are accustomed to this
level of detachment from reality in the superhero genre. Nicole
Kidman, whom fans will remember as the crime-fighting Dr. Chase
Meridian in Batman Forever, returns in this episode, having
been promoted to Chief of the White House Task Force on Nuclear
Terrorism...or something. Her forced, wooden acting is perfect
for this comic-book-brought-to-the-screen as she portrays one
of the shapeliest nuclear scientists on the government payroll.
While I was disappointed that Robin had been dropped from the
cast, I anxiously look forward to the next episode, wherein, I
hear, Batman becomes a philandering pediatrician in an urban emergency
room. --DiGiovanna
SHALL WE DANCE? This elegant, sweet-spirited comedy focuses
on Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusyo), a quiet-tempered 42-year-old
businessman who starts secretly taking dance lessons to ward off
his mid-life crisis. As his dancing gradually improves, he begins
feeling less empty, and that's great for him but not for his wife,
who worries he's having an affair. Which, in a way, he is--though
you can bet they'll be two-stepping by the end of the movie. Writer/director
Masayuki Suo's use of dancing as a metaphor for marriage and life
certainly qualifies as corny, but the story addresses its characters'
need to rise above their regimented existence with touching amiability;
and the supporting cast, a combination of frustrated dance instructors
and bumbling would-be waltzers, is terrific. The film's real strength,
though, lies in its pleasantly flowing dance scenes, which eschew
editing in favor of wide shots so that the screen becomes the
dance floor. Shall We Dance? won all of Japan's 13 Academy
Awards, and it's the only movie I've ever seen that inspired a
couple to dance in the parking lot afterwards. --Woodruff
A THOUSAND ACRES. Based on Jane Smiley's Pulitzer prize-winning
novel, A Thousand Acres is a weeper about brave farm wives
that has some fine moments despite its sentimentality. Michelle
Pfieffer and Jessica Lange play a pair of sisters battling against
their powerful, angry father for the possession of the family
farm and, metaphorically, possession of themselves. The story
is a twist on King Lear--as told from the point of view
of the selfish daughters. Here, we get to finally see what the
daughters are so pissed off about. Family secrets, illness, court
battles, love affairs: Unfortunately, there isn't enough time
for all this stuff to develop. It just keeps coming at
ya, and if you haven't read King Lear lately, it's even more perplexing.
--Richter
WISHMASTER. Ever since Scream, it's been tempting
to see any movie with the name Wes Craven attached to it, even
if he's only the "executive producer." Time to revise
that plan, because Wishmaster is pure hokey schlock; predictable,
formulaic and dumb. Its premise: that true genies, also known
as Djinn, are not the happy-go-lucky creatures depicted by Barbara
Eden and Robin Williams, but in fact evil smart-asses who want
to turn the world into a giant S&M parlor. The only way a
Djinn can do that is if the person who frees him asks for three
wishes; fortunately he's just been freed by a feisty girls' basketball
coach (Tammy Lauren) who keeps her wishes to herself by chanting
"stillness" in a Brady Bunch-style voice-over.
This unremitting wish-chastity is very frustrating to the genie
(who talks in one of those low, glottal voices that there must
be a rule all evil beings are supposed to have), so he gets revenge
by offering wishes to her friends, then making them come true
in all the wrong ways. If anybody in this movie had seen Bedazzled,
they'd know that you have to word your wishes very carefully,
saying things like "in a way so that nobody gets hurt"
at the end. But no; soon the cheesy special effects go into overdrive,
and people are vomiting their internal organs or getting their
heads pulled off by piano wires. The bottom line: See Wishmaster
at the drive-in, drunk, or not at all. --Woodruff
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