Film Clips

DEVIL'S ADVOCATE. This pile of Faustian fluff doesn't win any points for subtlety--but then again, what movie about Satanic lawyers does? Al Pacino plays the seductive, know-it-all head of a law firm that specializes in defending corporate evildoers; Keanu Reeves plays the firm's latest acquisition, a hotshot lawyer whose virtuous conscience is only exceeded by his vanity about having a perfect trial record. It takes Reeves a full two-and-a-half hours to figure out that Beelzebub's on his side of the Bar, though his wife, played appealingly by Charlize Theron (she's the sole bright spot in the cast), catches on right away. In some parallel universe, this is a shrewd, scary movie, with disturbing images of murder, materialism, and women whose faces turn demonic moments after they expose their breasts. In this universe, The Devil's Advocate is uproariously bad in much the same way as Showgirls: It's mindlessly exploitative, filled with gaudy set design, and bursting at the seams with overacting. How can you hate it? The funniest thing about the movie is that it's about Pacino's attempt to seize control of Reeves' soul, yet it's obvious from the dude's performance that he doesn't have one. --Woodruff

Film Clips FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY. So which is it: a fairy tale, or a true story? If only director Charles Sturridge and screenwriter Ernie Contreras could make up their minds! As it stands, their movie is a meandering pile of nothing: neither magical enough to sustain children, nor containing enough of a thematic through-line for adults. The facts of the 1918 spiritualist sensation--which occurred after cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright photographed "fairies" outside their Cottingley Glen, England, home--are served up right alongside brief special-effects sequences that show actual fairies mindlessly frolicking. Peter O'Toole plays Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who'd become unhinged after the death of his son and desperately championed the cause of fairy belief. Harvey Keitel, of all people, plays Harry Houdini, an outspoken skeptic of such things. There's a conflict there, but the wussy filmmakers don't pursue it--they just want everybody to be happy so long as their delusions don't directly hurt anyone (never mind the value of truth for its own sake). The only way this movie could have worked is if the filmmakers had scrapped their "true story" pretensions and agreed to lie outright. That's what the little girls did, after all: In 1981 one of the women admitted the fairies were cardboard cut-outs they'd propped up with hat pins. --Woodruff

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

GATTACA. Imagine, if you will, a future society so obsessed with flawlessness that Uma Thurman fails to measure up to the standards of perfection. Also, there are two brothers: The genetically perfect one grows up to be a cop, but the genetically imperfect one becomes a criminal--so they must fight! And then there's this one scene where a drop of snot dangles at the tip of Uma's nose, never falling, as she turns her head a bit to the left, a bit to the right. It's arguably the best snot scene ever filmed. While much of the film is preachy, pretentious and slow, the snot scene is easily worth the $7 admission price. See, she has the snot coming out of her nose--because she's not perfect! Oddly, genetic anomaly Danny DeVito produced this film. --DiGiovanna

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: Freddy 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

PLAYING GOD. David Duchovny plays a drug-addicted doctor in this laughably bad thriller about medicine, crime, and the shocking redness of human blood. Duchovny is Dr. Eugene Sands, a surgeon who's had his license revoked for slicing a patient's artery while zoned out on an Elvis-style cocktail of speed and barbiturates. He's not only a drug addict, he's a junkie for practicing medicine, and when a bad guy offers to make him a surgeon again, he jumps at the chance to feed his evil habit. The result? More white clothing covered in spurting blood. There's something very odd about the directorial style of this movie--it's definitively '80s, with a 1970s drive-in edge. The clothes are out of style, the furnishings are out of style, and the music is weird. Far more interesting than the movie itself is the question of what, exactly, the director thought he was doing here. Being hip? Retro? Low budget? Straight to video? God only knows. --Richter

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

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

YEAR OF THE HORSE. Jim Jarmusch consolidates his reputation as the Kurt Cobain of filmmaking with Year of the Horse, a gritty documentary about the original grunge band, Crazy Horse. The opening credits declare "proudly filmed in Super-8, 16mm, and hi-8," three low-budget formats that Jarmusch enhances with expensive post-production so they look as much like 35 mm film stock as possible. The film documents Neil Young and his bandmates over about 20 years, interspersing then-and-now interviews with footage from a recent tour. Okay, I like Crazy Horse, but only an absurdly devoted fan could be entranced by concert footage of three middle-aged guys standing in a half-circle clutching guitars and bobbing from the knees as though they were cranes engaged in a mating dance. Jarmusch is apparently such a fan. The concert footage takes up most of the film, and it's even more stale for being filmed in hi-8, a consumer-grade video format. This fandom extends to the respectful, fawning interviews with the band members. It's too bad Jarmusch didn't learn more from all the great documentaries that have been already made about bands. One of the strengths of D.A. Pennebaker's terrific Don't Look Back is that it portrayed Bob Dylan as an enormously talented artist who could also be a real asshole. But Neil Young could take his grandmother to Year of the Horse. --Richter


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