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 GANG RELATED. It's not "gang related" at all;
the title is undoubtedly an attempt to capitalize on Tupac Shakur's
death. The actual story follows two cops, played by Shakur and
Jim Belushi, who spend their off-hours setting up phony drug deals
so they can murder the dealers and make some quick money. When
they unknowingly kill an undercover DEA agent, their attempts
to find a suitable scapegoat lead them on a downward moral spiral
that would make Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant character
proud. In spite of the script's excuses for them--Belushi dreams
of buying a sailboat, Shakur has a bad gambling debt and a torturous
guilt complex--there's really no feeling sympathy for these guys,
or caring about their fate. The filmmakers seem to know this,
because they play up Belushi's despicable behavior for laughs,
though that doesn't work either. Things improve slightly with
the introduction of seasoned actors like Dennis Quaid, as a hapless
transient accused of the crime (the exact same role he played
in Suspect), and James Earl Jones, as a lawyer who calmly
tears the case apart. While their presence makes the movie more
watchable, it doesn't make it any less pointless. You'll spend
most of the movie counting the multitudes of F-words in each
scene, and marveling at how little "acting" it takes
for Belushi to make a convincing asshole. --Woodruff
HOUSE OF YES. Perhaps the most notable aspect of House
of Yes, a low-budget independent film, is the appearance of
Tori Spelling in a rare "dramatic" role. Spelling plays
an agreeable, innocent girl-next-door-type who falls in with the
decadent Pascals, a family of Washington blue-bloods who indulge
one another in the most shocking improprieties, including a sexualized
re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination. House of Yes
is based on the play by Wendy MacLeod and it both benefits and
suffers from all the standard problems of transferring a play
to film: It's static and claustrophobic, though the characters
are colorful and the dialogue witty. The movie (like the play--in
fact, like most plays) is about a stress-filled Thanksgiving weekend
when all the members of a crazy, memorable family reach a crisis
and reveal their deepest secrets. It's diverting, but basically
pointless, unless you count the vaguely suggested Amish-style
theme that wealth and power have an unlimited potential to corrupt
the family. For an actor who's inherently annoying, Spelling does
just fine; Parker Posey and Josh Hamilton, as an unstoppable brother-sister
pair, are even better. --Richter
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. Four teenagers suffer
through guilt, anonymous taunting, and ice-pick impalement a year
after they accidentally run over an unidentified man and dump
the body in the ocean. Who knows their secret? Is one of them
the culprit? And will the road to revelation be paved with creatively
grisly murders? Actually, this time the killer's murder methods
are pretty standard (no garage doggy-door executions here), so
Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson just fills the picture
with dozens of jolting scares. This old-fashioned emphasis works
fine--the almost entirely teenage audience shrieked on several
occasions--and Williamson sneaks in all the witty, self-referential
lines he can. It's just too bad the story, based on Lois Duncan's
1934 book, resorts to so many conventional mystery mechanics.
With its many dull, talky stretches, the movie often plays like
a violent episode of Scooby Doo. On the plus side, I
Know What You Did... wins teen bonus points for its attractive
if not necessarily charismatic cast of cocky hunks and chesty
nymphs, many fresh from the land of television: Freedy Prinze,
Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five) and Sarah Michelle
Gellar (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer show). And Anne Heche
is amusingly creepy as a lonesome hick; somebody should set her
up with the kid from Deliverance. --Woodruff
MOST WANTED. Keenan Ivory Wayans stars as an ex-Marine
who must blow things up when he's framed in a secret government
plot to make the world's worst movie. Don't miss the special guest
appearance by Jon Voigt's career as it spirals down the drain.
--DiGiovanna
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
ROCKETMAN. You may remember Harland Williams from Dumb
& Dumber, as the highway patrolman who unwittingly drank
a beer bottle filled with urine. That scene pretty much sums up
all of Rocketman, which is essentially a big-budget excuse
for fart jokes in space. Williams, who looks like a runty Kevin
Costner and is about as funny, plays a goofy computer-programming
nerd who, at the last minute, is enlisted to be the third man
on a NASA expedition to Mars. His oblivious idiocy turns out to
be one of his strengths, somehow, and he manages both to make
a fool out of his egotistical male shipmate and to woo the female
one with childlike affection and low-voiced renditions of "When
You Wish Upon A Star." It's sort of Oedipal, really; too
bad it isn't also fun. --Woodruff
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
U-TURN. Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight,
Powers Boothe, Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Bob Thornton,
Bo Hopkins and Liv Tyler just want to get out of Arizona, but
get so disoriented by pointless camera tricks and meaningless
close-ups that they wind up talking with Southern accents. Then
there's lots of blood and shooting and double crosses and cheating
and backstabbing and surprise revelations, and when there are
no more film noir clichés left the movie is over. In spite
of all the killings, the character of the Incompetent Director,
played by Oliver Stone, remains alive at the end of the film,
threatening to come back again to slash audience sensibilities
with his deadly pretense and sharpened vacuity. --DiGiovanna
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