 |
 BEAUTIFUL THING. A wonderfully touching story of first
love, this British film is sweet without being sentimental. In
a cramped city tenement, two teenage outsiders, Ste (Scott Neal)
and Jamie (Glen Berry), are unhappy and misunderstood until they
muddle through their adolescent emotions and figure it out--they're
in love! Together the two discover how to run the obstacle course
of parents, friends and onlookers, who all have some pretty powerful
reservations about teen boys in love. Written by playwright Jonathan
Harvey when he was 24, Beautiful Thing has a direct, unpretentious
style that's almost overwhelmingly endearing.
THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS. Screenwriter William Goldman,
who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the
President's Men and The Stepford Wives, among others,
proves once again that the nineties will never be as good as the
seventies, movie-wise. This "true" tale about great
white hunters protecting the natives from a couple of man-eating
lions endorses the standard myopic myths about colonialism, manhood,
hunting, etc. Val Kilmer plays John Patterson, an engineer who
has been sent to the African savanna to build a bridge that will
expand the ivory trade. He speaks of Africa as if it were a town,
rather than a continent ("I love Africa!"), and sets
about proving his manhood and protecting his men (various
racial stereotypes, mitigated somewhat by one or two heroic black
characters) against a pair of man-eating lions. A great hunter,
Charles Remington (Michael Douglas) comes to show him how it's
done. The two men bond, hunt, kill etc. Remington remarks with
revulsion that the pair of unnatural lions "are doing it
for pleasure," i.e., killing, but the movie doesn't have
the intelligence to draw the connection between the lion's pleasure
in killing and man's pleasure in hunting, colonization and dominance.
After a while, it's hard to not root for the lions. At least they're
resisting the conquest of their domain.
LOOKING FOR RICHARD. Al Pacino's directorial debut is a
surprisingly fresh, witty introduction to the complexities of
one of Shakespeare's more knotty plays--Richard III. Pacino,
along with a cast of famous actors, obscure academics and the
stray passerby, comments on the background and meaning of Richard,
the tale of a ruthless, hunchbacked and totally fascinating evil
guy. The actors perform scenes from the play both in costume and
in informal attire; Pacino cuts them together for a truly original
version of Shakespeare that could only be realized on film. Robert
Leacock--one of the pioneers of the cinema vérité
documentary style--is the director of photography, and at times
Looking For Richard has the feel of a concert film from
the 1960s. There's a sense that anything can happen. What's more,
Pacino is terrific as Richard.
RANSOM. A Ron Howard film is like a Hallmark card: You
know what it's going to say, but who doesn't get excited about
seeing one? This is a by-the-numbers sleazy bad-guy flick about
a corrupt cop (Gary Sinise) who abducts the son of a billionaire
airline mogul (Mel Gibson). The latter's fine-honed business sense
tells him to place a $4-million bounty on the kidnapper's head
rather than pay the $2 million ransom, which leads to two full
hours of screaming cell phone conversations and moralistic banter.
Gibson and Rene Russo turn out impressive performances as the
distraught parents, and Sinise is appropriately evil.
ROMEO AND JULIET. In his second film, director Baz Luhrman
gives the Bard's only teen-movie script an MTV/Miami-Cubano style,
producing the noisiest rendition any Elizabethan play has ever
received. Still, he remains largely faithful to the original,
not only in the language, but also in the youth and aching immediacy
of the protagonists. Claire Danes is especially good as Juliet,
uttering Shakespeare's difficult English without affect, and John
Leguizamo defines the role of the petulant Tybalt, playing the
part with an insightful butch-camp swagger. Kenneth Branagh could
learn a thing or two about bringing the Bard to the big screen
from this effort--it's not only exciting, stylish and witty in
its small details, it's also accessible without being condescending.
The action conveys so much sense that the teen audiences even
laughed at Shakespeare's puns. If you need to see bodkins and
ruffled collars to enjoy your Veronese tragedies, stay home; but
if a boy's choir singing "When Doves Cry" seems the
perfect accompaniment to the wedding of two star-cross'd lovers,
you'll surely enjoy the two hours' traffic of this staging.
SECRETS & LIES. With Secrets and Lies, acclaimed
British director Mike Leigh turns in gentler, more human effort
than his previous film, Naked. An extended family muddles
through issues of love and parenthood, spurred by Hortense (Marianne
Jean-Baptiste), a grown, adopted child searching for her birthmother
Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn). To Hortense's surprise, her mother turns
out to be white, but the friendship that springs up between these
two women quickly cuts through any racial boundaries. Leigh's
view of humanity is characteristically surly, nonetheless, and
the relationship between Cynthia and her daughter Roxanne (Claire
Rushbrook), a street sweeper, is hilariously bleak. Somehow, Leigh
has a talent for making human failings seem viciously funny and
absurd, and the most miserable characters in this film often turn
out to be the most entertaining. Still, there's a spirit of connection
and society reminiscent of Jean Renoir in this film (Timothy Spall
as the rotund Maurice bears a striking resemblance to Renoir as
Octave in Rules of the Game), and everyone emerges a little
wiser for their troubles.
SLEEPERS. Director Barry Levinson overshoots the mark in
Sleepers, a long, overly dramatic movie emphatically about
the loss of innocence. Though the first part of the film, about
a group of mischievous friends growing up in Hell's Kitchen, has
some of the neighborhood charm of Levinson's Diner, the
story unravels in the second half into an annoying series of flashbacks
that are basically all the same. The plot concerns a group of
boys who pull a prank that gets out of hand; as a result they're
sent away to a Draconian boy's prison where the guards torture
and abuse them. Fifteen years later the boys (haunted by black
and white flashbacks), take their revenge on the guards. (One
astute viewer leaving the theater commented on the similarities
to First Wives' Club.) Though the plot gains some power
through the fact that it's based on a true story, the tension
never feels genuine, and the boys never seem as real as adults
as they did as happy children. Dustin Hoffman gives a nice performance
in his plum little role, and Robert Deniro manages a kind of manly
rectitude as the neighborhood priest; unfortunately, the adult
versions of the boys aren't played nearly as well.
|
 |
