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 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
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 thematic enough 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 of 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: Freddie 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
A LIFE LESS ORDINARY. The third film from the team that
brought us Trainspotting and Shallow Grave has the
same startling sense of composition and color as these previous
efforts, but none of the wit. Ewan McGregor plays a poor janitor
who falls in love with a beautiful rich girl (Cameron Diaz) due
to the influence of some bizarre angel-creature-things. The film
lurches from fantasy to romance to road movie without rhyme or
reason; even worse, the Boy and Girl don't even seem to like each
other, much less light up each other's lives. If you crossed the
1932 Hollywood romance It Happened One Night with Touched
by an Angel and stirred in a little bit of Tommy
and then doubled your dose of Prozac, then you'd be watching A
Life Less Ordinary. The question is, why would anyone want
to do this? --Richter
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
RED CORNER. After a one night stand that finds his Chinese
lover dead and her blood on his shirt, an American lawyer on business
in China gets inserted into the Chinese penal and judicial systems.
Trapped like a gerbil stuck in an unfamiliar dark maze from which
there's no escape, the cocky businessman, played by Richard Gere's
stylishly tousled hair, must rely on his wits and his plucky female
Chinese lawyer to save his life. The movie's vision of China is
like Steve Martin's old stand-up routine on France: everything
is different there! The courts aren't like ours, cameras everywhere
spy on the populace, and sometimes people with butcher knives
chop the heads off chickens! The conspiracy is a recycled one
and the characterizations are wafer thin, but fans of Richard
Gere's buttocks may find solace in a couple of seconds of his
nude backside as he is tossed into a prison cell. --McKay
SWITCHBACK. Jeb Stuart, the scribe behind such moneymakers
as Die Hard and The Fugitive, directed this low-key
but reasonably good thriller based on one of his early screenplays.
The plot, which leads from Texas to the beautiful, snow-clogged
Rocky Mountains, has an FBI agent (Dennis Quaid, sad-eyed and
brooding) tracking the serial killer who kidnapped Quaid's son.
Action-movie clichés abound, but Switchback has
a surprisingly honorable feel to it; all the main characters,
even (inexplicably) the villain, are granted heavy doses of sympathy
and integrity. Danny Glover and Jared Leto are interesting as
an unlikely pair of travelers (one of whom may be the killer);
but the best is R. Lee Ermey as a scrupulous sheriff. Ermey, best
known as the sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, has been cool
in nearly everything he's done. --Woodruff
A TOUCH OF EVIL. This great, 1958 classic crime thriller
directed by Orson Welles features one of the most famous, continuous
tracking shots in Hollywood history--a three-minute crane shot
running under the opening credits. Based on Whit Masterson's novel,
Badge of Evil, the film was a box-office flop in its time
and was reviled as a glaring example of the worst cinematic sleaze.
Of course, it's widely loved now for the same reasons. This tale
of good and evil in a corrupt, decaying border town features all
of the exaggerated characters and moody, technical tricks of which
Orson Welles was such a master. Starring Charleton Heston, Janet
Leigh and Orson Welles' lumbering girth. --Richter
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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