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1998
Film Reviews
by Dr. Bob Blackwood
These articles
appeared in the Near North News, Chicago and are copyright, Bob
Blackwood.
The Apostle and Blues Brothers 2000: A Holiness Explosion
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Love
that Shakespeare
by Bob Blackwood
John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love" is funny,
sexy and authentic. It is funny to see an Elizabethan actor and playwright
(Joseph Fiennes--yes, the brother of Ralph--as Will Shakespeare) trying
to woo a highborn maiden (Gwyneth Paltrow). The scenes of their "forbidden
love," as an actor she is dressed as a man often too, are quite hot.
And thanks to the script of Marc Norman and especially Tom Stoppard ("Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead" and "The Fifteen Minute Hamlet"), it was authentic
in speech and in situation.
No, unlike Judi Dench's perfectly realized Queen Elizabeth, no one was thinking of throwing his cloak down to provide a dry walkway for an impoverished playwright trying to write "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." Shakespeare was scrambling for a living, just like any New York writer-director in the alternate film world today.
The sets and costumes are both gorgeous and functional. The script is filled with jokes for those who are familiar with Shakespeare's works and with a lively plot filled with romance and excitement for all.
It is truly a film for the whole family unless the Elizabethan dialog throws you. And if it does, you are probably not reading this review in Chicago's Near North News.
Madden, whose previous films have included "Mrs. Brown" (1997) with Judi Dench (who has a lock on assertive British female monarch roles) as Queen Victoria, is in the running for the Oscars with this entertaining film. True, he does use Elizabeth as the "deus ex machina" to solve a plot problem. But, unlike my more theoretical critical brethren, I can accept it on the grounds that this is a comedy and the solution gets a laugh. That's what impoverished playwrights do to become affluent playwrights.
Robert Rodriguez's "The Faculty" reveals how the teachers at a mid-American high school can really be alien invaders who are out to destroy the stereotypes of high school films--the jocks, the nerds, the outsiders, etc. There was nothing there that I have not seen done better in other films--"The Body Snatchers," "The Puppet Masters," "Scream," even the fabled "Henry Aldrich Gets a Hickey."
I really think that there is a good film to be made about alien teachers--people who read novels, magazines and newspapers--who are trying to communicate with average U.S. students--people who don't read anything except traffic signs and channel selectors. I see it as a musical comedy with the teachers doing operatic arias and the students doing all the dance numbers on top of the cafeteria tables.
Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" (La Vita e Bella) is really two films. It opens as a romantic comedy, reminiscent in situation to those early Fellini films--"Variety Lights" (1950), "The White Sheik" (1951)--with wandering poor folks trying to find someone to love them. Benigni is an accomplished comic. You may have seen him in Blake Edwards' "Son of the Pink Panther" (1993) or in Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth" (1991).
In the second part of the film, the Benigni character is in a Nazi death camp trying to create a fictional gameworld to explain the horrors than enfold for the benefit of his approximately 7-year-old son. I know I was supposed to see this half of the film as a triumph of the human spirit and imagination over the Nazis' banality of evil.
Unfortunately, I did not buy a minute of it. The death camp background was there. The father's lies to the son were not at all convincing for any bright boy, which the child was. Maybe it is my problem.
But this film is not Billy Wilder's "Stalag 17"
(1953) filled with a crew of bored U.S. soldiers who rarely were facing
death in their camp, nor is it Philippe De Broca's "King of Hearts" (1966)
in which the inmates of an insane asylum have taken over a small town in
the midst of a World War I battle. "Life Is Beautiful" is something
less, and they are something more.
Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog" is a good concept for a film, but the execution is lame. The comedy is forced from the start.
To cover up sexual misconduct, an American President hires a spin doctor (Robert DeNiro) to cook up a phoney war for 11 days. The spin doctor seeks the help of a bigtime Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) and uses a presidential staffer (Anne Heche) to help him. Woody Harrelson appears as a lunatic chosen to be the military hero of the supposed war with Albania.
It should be funny, but it just does not generate many laughs. Hoffman does his best with the material (Larry Beinhart's novel "American Hero") as worked over by Hillary Henkin and David Mamet. I was hoping for better dialog with Mamet along, but, when you have three writers, you get what you get.
If the writers were trying for Juvenalian satire's bite, they would have been better off doing a docudrama of George Bush's Operation Just Cause, or, Why We Have to Get the Guy Now that We Were Paying Off Yesterday.
I am sure Hoffman caused some winces in the executive suites of Hollywood as he mixed fact with fiction, earnestness with deviousness. After the opening, DeNiro seemed to be counter-punching with Hoffman. I have the feeling that if Levinson had asked for more from DeNiro, the film might have picked up the pace and generated some laughs. But it would have necessitated another re-write.
Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry" is a funny film which borrows a lot of its structure from Fellini's "8 1/2." If you are going to mix reality with a creative artist's imagination, what better film to borrow from?
Allen's Harry Block is a New York novelist facing writer's block. Periodically, throughout the film, people from his life and, later on, characters from his novels appear to tell him off as a perennial adolescent, sexual adventurer and, basically, a no good bum. But you keep laughing.
Yes, there was a feeling of characters walking off a movie screen, sitting next to you in the audience and talking to you directly a la Allen's "Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985).
At the end of the film, all the "real life" characters and all of the "fictional" characters from Block's novels appear to applaud Block in a dream sequence. Fellini did it better by having them dance in a ring at the end of "8 1/2."
Fellini, who started out as a cartoonist, always has a keen visual sense. Allen, who started out as a script writer and comic, often seems limited to dialog alone to make his points these days. And, the distracting jump cuts were a visual metaphor for the author's confused state of mind, but they were still distracting.
Some of Allen's earlier films, like "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)" (1972) and "Sleeper" (1973), were visually quite entertaining. "Manhattan Murder Mystery" (1993), on the other hand, looked like it had been shot by a nearsighted film school freshman.
Yes, Allen is one of the true auteurs in American film. Yes, he should keep his independence. No, he should not compromise with the the studio system to get more production money. And, no, I could care less about his private life.
But, Woody, go for some memorable visual concepts.
The
Apostle and Blues Brothers 2000: A Holiness ExplosionBetween Robert Duvall's "The Apostle" and John Landis' "Blues Brothers 2000," there is a wealth of good music to be heard and something to see too.
"The Apostle" tells the story of a most intemperate preacher, a believer, a man searching for community and a builder of a number of communities, but a man with problems. When my fiancee walked away from this film, she said, "There is something in that film to offend everyone."
I agree, but I often wonder about the men who built the early Christian church. I suspect men like St. Paul were not the easiest men in the congregation to get along with. Men with a mission are often abrasive, but they do get the job done.
Robert Duvall's preacher, Sonny Dewey, AKA The Apostle E.F., has carried out his mission not only to his congregation but throughout the state of Texas. But Sonny was never able to cross over that bridge to his wife and children as he should have. He founds a new holiness temple and finds salvation for himself in Louisiana.
In an interview, Duvall told of interviewing Pentecostal ministers, of learning of their real problems. The film succeeds because you believe in every character he builds. You see his wife, a wonderful Farrah Fawcett getting back to her Texas roots, fearing physical contact with him when he is angry.
You believe Sonny is sincerely religious; he is no hypocrite. And you also believe that he is really out of control in his personal life. Those of you who cannot accept this contradiction must be without sin yourself.
Just keep in mind the attitude of the congregations of some of our television evangelists. The preachers' private lives always give the folks something to talk about after the service. In fact, perhaps our President shares in some of this white Southern soul.
On the soundtrack album (with other music), Lyle Lovett's "I'm a Soldier in the Army of the Lord" is moving. Lari White's "There Is Power in the Blood" is rocking. And Johnny Cash never sounded better than in his version of "In the Garden." Now there's a man whose life story could almost match Sonny's.
In 1980, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd made John
Landis' "Blues Brothers" come alive. In 1998, Aykroyd and Landis
put the script together to make "Blues Brothers 2000" a powerful film.
Landis and Aykroyd went for a fantasy trip with John Goodman (body), Joe
Morton (soul) and J. Evan Bonifant (spirit) replacing Belushi.
It works.
The music cooks--blues most of all, rhythm and
blues, soul, ballads, rock. The film includes almost everyone from
the original film (yes, Aretha Franklin and James Brown strut their stuff
again) and concludes with the greatest bluesfest in history--B. B. King,
Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes, Lou Rawls, Koko Taylor, Stevie Winwood,
and many more.
The film itself is a fantasy about musicians on the road. If you have known musicians on the road, and I have, you know that many of them are in a fantasy anyway. Now, I understand how a lot of whitebread film critics have to jump on Landis. I can only say, if you left the popcorn alone and had a little Jack Daniels instead, you might have appreciated the film for the fine musical that it is. Giving a great musical a bad review for its script is as logical as panning Verdi's "Aida" for its libretto.
On the soundtrack album, Paul Butterfield's Blues
Band "Born in Chicago" sets the tone for one side of "Blues Brothers 2000."
"John the Revelator" with Taj Mahal, Sam Moore, The Faith Chorale and others
touches the spirit. And "How Blue Can You Get" by the bluesfest
supergroup is memorable.
"Film noir" is a term coined by French film critics in the post-WWII years to exemplify certain American films, usually set in a corrupt city, which often had dark frames or were set in the evening, hence the "noir" (black)--e.g. Huston's "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), Howard Hawks' "The Big Sleep" (1946). Bogart, the private eye with a cigarette, was the star in many of these films, and there was usually a femme fatale.
But there were other creations that fit into film noir. Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" (1944) had Fred MacMurray totally vamped by Barbara Stanwyck. There were no gangsters here, just human greed and murder. In Tay Garnett's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946), another two lovers, John Garfield and Lana Turner, condemned a husband to death.
Film noir has grown since the Forties. It used to be simply a style, a visually shadowy black and white depiction of people engaged in double-crossing each other in every sort of endeavor. Now, it has become at least a subgenre and in Technicolor, too. Currently, Curtis Hanson's "L.A. Confidential" is billed as a "noir thriller" and is up for a bag of Oscars.
In the old days, the film noir detective hero had a private code, a la Sam Spade. He might bend the law a bit. He might get rough with a bad guy. He might pick up a dollar where he could. But he would never commit a violent crime unless it was to even up the score for a partner--shades of Owen Wister's "The Virginian."
As the femme fatales grew more tempting and as even private detectives became too close to law and order for the writers, some film noir male central characters dropped their codes--a la Fred MacMurray. Maybe the most complex characters--e.g. Harrison Ford's Deckard in "Blade Runner"--still had them, but others did not.
In Volker Schlondorff's "Palmetto," Woody Harrelson is a film noir hero without a chance in Florida. More than a taste of Lawrence Kasdan's "Body Heat" (1981) is in the atmosphere. A former ex-con and former newspaper reporter, imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Harrelson's character is out to make a quick buck. Elisabeth Shue makes a sizzling femme fatale. The problem is, not only does Woody's character not have a code, he does not have any street smarts either. He is a sap.
So you sit there for about two hours watching this sap blunder from one mess into another, and you just don't care. The pacing is slow. The dialog is not memorable. Couldn't anyone have done something else with this good cast?
In "Twilight," Robert Benton took a great cast--Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman--and made a good film noir. Paul Newman is a perfectly believable aging private eye among the beautiful people of Hollywood, usually doing the right thing and usually getting hurt. Susan Sarandon does the femme fatale well. Gene Hackman as the dying power broker, stuck in the middle of a complex plot, is flawless.
Unlike almost all film noir, this film has a lot
of humorous takes. Part of it may be the many aptitudes of the players;
part of it is the script. Recall that Benton also wrote and directed
"The Late Show" (1977), another complex and humorous detective film with
Art Carney and Lily Tomlin. Certainly both James Garner and Stockard
Channing have a bit of tongue-in-cheek. I wish the pace were a bit
faster, but, after "Palmetto," "Twilight" seemed to move like the Kentucky
Derby.
Summer
Cinema Picks and PansAt times, Warren Beatty's "Bulworth" is very funny. At all times, it is very satiric of the games played in Washington between big business and the congress.
Bulworth (played by Beatty), a liberal California congressman turning neo-conservative, has a nervous breakdown before the last week-end of the primary campaign. Thanks to the inspiration of Halle Berry and some other African American folks, he begins to rap out the truth to the public.
What he says about a few large companies making the key decisions in Washington is nothing new. Gore Vidal did it in his essays and in his comments during the Vietnam war era. It is refreshing to hear it again, however, and to have a few laughs at the same time. The ending is appropriately somber.
Filled with the satiric concepts of our politics which surfaced in the Vietnam era and also with an unhinged protagonist, Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" reminded me of "Bulworth."
"Fear. . ." is based on Hunter S. Thompson's semi-autobiographical narrative from 1971 of a journalist and a giant alleged-Samoan lawyer, consuming an incredible number of mind-altering substances, who enter Las Vegas determined to cover a motorcycle race and an anti-drug meeting of district attorneys.
Gilliam, the Monty Python who directed "Twelve Monkeys," "The Fisher King," "Brazil" and many other fine films, has created a world which captures the bizarre and disgusting aspects of drug dependency. Given the complexity of his original text, that is not easy. It is a tribute to Thompson's prose style, however, that no film will capture it all.
He has captured Thompson's fear of the society, but the loathing he feels for our country's bloodthirsty characteristics is not developed. Gilliam has given us a tribute to the wide-angle lens in the first part of the film and a desire to attend a twelve-step meeting by the end of it.
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" with good performances by Johnny Depp and Bernicio Del Toro is strong medicine, not for the weak of stomach or mind, even Dr. Thompson, the doctor of gonzo journalism, should agree to that.
Roland Emmerich's "Godzilla," by the director of "Independence Day" and "Stargate," is one long chase sequence. Like almost all films which are one long chase, it sags in the middle.
It runs two hours and 18 minutes. If it were 80 minutes like the 1956 American-edited version of the film, it would be a real winner. There is a great chase sequence at the end with taxi vs. Godzilla, more improbable but as exciting as the car chases in William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (1971) and Peter Yates'"Bullitt" (1968).
Robert Redford's "The Horse Whisperer" is two hours and 48 minutes long. The horse cinematography is wonderful. The last half of the film is an insipid soap opera. If Redford had stayed with the horse and forgot Kristin Scott Thomas, he might have had a good film.
With Anthony Minghella's "The English Patient"
as another touchstone, Thomas has the distinction of being in two films
with excellent cinematography which run far too long.
Lost
in Space, Last In Line
I remember as a young father occasionally watching my daughter viewing the TV series "Lost in Space." With the little boy, Will Robinson, it was something like the "Lassie" show with a robot as Lassie, though even the robot was not as well groomed as Lassie. This middle-class family roamed the universe in a rocket ship seeking to find a way back to earth and PTA meetings.
As I recall, Dr. Smith, who was always willing to sell everyone out, was always hanging around the pre-adolescent boy instead of the adolescent girl on the series. Since Penny Robinson, the teen daughter, was the last unattached female within several thousand light years, I wondered. I had Dr. Smith figured as a repressed homosexual stereotype.
I was just a bit surprised, therefore, when Stephen Hopkins' film, "Lost in Space," came out with the same stereotyped casting. It was just the same old script with $20 or $30 million in superb special effects.
Who's going to buy the 1950's "Ozzie and Harriet" in outer space with 1970's sensibility in the 1990's? No one but the brain-dead. Wasn't it time to bring Gary Oldman, as Dr. Zachary Smith, out of the closet for what he was, shudder.
The hot part of the film is where Heather Graham as Judy Robinson kisses Matt LeBlanc as the macho pilot? Hey, if they are not going to demonstrate 21st century condoms in free flight, who is going to watch the movie?
I think "Lost in Space" is a perfect film for the 8-year-olds among us, though I am still nervous about Dr. Smith.
Mike Nichols's "Primary Colors," the tale of a
presidential candidate who keeps letting his busy sex life get in the way
of his election, is funny. Now I think that Barry Levinson's "Wag
the Dog" was a better idea for a funny movie--let's pretend we have a war
to get the heat off the Prez's sex scandal--and he had wonderful actors
too--Dustin Hoffman (with an Oscar nomination yet) and Robert DeNiro.
But "Wag the Dog" just wasn't that funny, and "Primary Colors" was.
Nichols took John Travolta as Clinton,
though Travolta is not up to Hoffman or DeNiro's standards. Emma
Thompson, as Hilary, is wonderful but had little to do. Billy Bob Thornton
and Kathy Bates went all out for a laugh.
"Primary Colors" made me laugh. "Wag the Dog," like some bad English satires, made me feel that I should laugh to show that I appreciated the wit of it all. But, frankly, I still think you should not build a joke on a joke.
The thought did occur to me, though, that Mike Nicholls, director of "Bird Cage" (1996) and "Carnal Knowledge" (1971), could have done a successful "Lost in Space." Gary Oldman is the fumbling pederast; Jack Johnson is his clever "Zazie"-like foil who outwits him. Mimi Rogers is the flirt who drives her husband (poor William Hurt), the pilot (Matt LeBlanc) and her sexually frustrated daughter (Heather Graham) crazy.
Randall Wallace took a story that has worked many times, Dumas' "The Man in the Iron Mask," a wonderful cast featuring Anne Parillaud, and a large budget to produce a competent sword and cape epic. Despite some of the finest actors to trod a stage or a movie soundstage, that's all that he did, but he did it well.
Gerard Depardieu shows an unexpected talent for physical comedy. Leonardo DiCaprio shows that the good young actor of "This Boy's Life" has not disappeared completely, despite the overblown "Titanic." John Malkovich fleshes out his small role. Jeremy Irons sounds wonderful in the voice-over which we usually expect in a 40's film noir. And Gabriel Byrne does his best with the worst written role in the film, except, of course, for DiCaprio's.
Peter Weir's "The Truman Show": Remember Patrick McGoohan in the British television series "The Prisoner"? An ex-intelligence agent (McGoohan from the "Secret Agent" series), McGoohan was trapped by a mysterious intelligence agency in a seaside village. He was constantly under observation and constantly trying to escape. It was a wonderful series with visual metaphors, interesting characterization and lots of action.
Peter Weir evidently thought so too, so he set "The Truman Show" in a seaside village with constant television surveillance. The twist? Truman's life was broadcast to the world. And Truman was too stupid to pick up on what was happening until he was in his late 20's. Jim Carrey plays the lead.
The premise is pretentious at best, plagiarism at worst. Gee, do people really use Truman's broadcast as a nightlight? The dialog in the film would suggest that this is the best use for the broadcast.
The kind of person who will really like this show are the hard-core Carrey fans (well, they have to have somebody since Jerry Lewis grew up) and the kind of critic who wants to spend 10 jargon filled pages talking about the horizon line on Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975).
Since the Sony and Cineplex/Odeon lock-out of qualified union projectionists (I've seen what amateurs do to 35mm projection; I prefer to see second run films at the Patio Theater), I've had time to do more reviewing of books.
My favorite book recently is "The New American Cinema," edited by Jon Lewis. Its 13 very readable essays are grouped into three categories.
In the first category, "Movies and Money," David A. Cook and Timothy Corrigan give an analysis of the financial and critical ups and downs of the promising American directors from the 1970's and 1980's: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, DePalma, and Stone.
Justin Wyatt and Jon Lewis explore how the new
methods of releasing films and studio economics have impacted the content
of major motion pictures.
Under "Culture and Cinema," the effects of gender
and politics plus scientific and technological advances in science fiction
films are discussed by five competent critics.
Finally, under "Independents and Independence," four critics examine contemporary "indie" films, ethnographic films plus a comprehensive analysis of "The Black Film Wave at Middle Age" by Ed Guerrero.
The polished prose, the lack of jargon, and the extensive notes following many of the essays make "The New American Cinema" the one collection of essays on contemporary American films that would be both useful to professionals and of interest to the general reader.
The paperback version of Lewis' book is put out by Duke University Press, Durham and London, in 1998 for $19.95.
If you have some thoughts on the American Film
Institute's list of 100 American films, please let me know via e-mail:
Bob@blackwood.org, or see our Comments Page.
Elizabeth: A Mixed Bag 
by Bob Blackwood
Skekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth" has a cast of British and Aussie young actors going for it. Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I of England is alternately charming, vulnerable and imperial. Joseph Fiennes as Elizabeth's alleged lover, Robert Dudley, is properly impetuous. Christopher Eccleston as Norfolk makes the most of a two-dimensional role.
It was good to see Richard Attenborough acting again after boring us stiff in those "Jurassic Park" tributes to special effects.
Geoffrey Rush as the Machiavellian Sir Francis Walsingham, on the other hand, gives you the feeling that if Walsingham were employed by our President, Henry Hyde would be locked in the White House basement when the impeachment vote is taken. He does more with a short phrase than most actors can do with a shout and a sequence.
Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin and a very competent special effects team open our eyes in the film with the graphic burning at the stake of three Protestant heretics. Later, we see a skillfully filmed torture sequence of a papal spy. As the papal spy is a priest, I guess that makes the film politically correct and even-handed.
If you appreciated Glenda Jackson's portrayal of Elizabeth on the British television series, you should enjoy this film. It is condensed and effective, if a bit thin in characterization of everyone but Elizabeth.
Martin Brest's "Meet Joe Black" is the product of four writers. As a result, in the first half-hour, Brad Pitt, as the allegorical representative of death, does some "Dumb and Dumber" humor with peanut butter and everyone engages in trying to force a laugh out of an audience who are looking at each other and saying, "huh?"
The remainder of the film is a rather clever commentary on the worth of human endeavor conducted by Anthony Hopkins as a billionaire media mogul. We don't expect this kind of serious meditation on death in an American film, but we certainly received it. It was well done.
There is a romance between Pitt and Claire Forlani, as the mogul's daughter. They have their moments. When Pitt walks through a big party and catches Claire Forlani's eye, he looks remarkably like Robert Redford in Jack Clayton's "The Great Gatsby" (1974). Was that why Redford picked him to star in Redford's "A River Runs through It" (1992)?
Unfortunately, they are stuck with a sentimental ending, set up by the Mitchell Leisen's 1934 film "Death Takes a Holiday," which was based on an Alberto Casella play which Maxwell Anderson, among others, helped bring to the screen. The happy ending is acceptable, but only if you dump the inept beginning of the film and tighten it up.
"Joe Black" is almost three hours long; Leisen's version was 78 minutes. I never thought I would say anything like this, as a film prof who teaches "Citizen Kane," but the story doctors of the old studio system would have cut up this turkey, stitched it up, and made a good presentation out of it.
If actors received Oscars for best performance with a tedious script, Pitt would get one for his performance.
The brothers Farrelly who gave us "Dumb and Dumber" and "Kingpin" have created a few moments of memorable physical comedy in "Something About Mary." The doggie attack is funny, but Cameron Diaz never looked worse. Also, every film of theirs that I see makes me feel that there is an eleven-year-old out there, who just put gum under his seat, who will enjoy it much more than I will.
Hollywood seems to be emphasizing fantasy these days. Studio executives are pushing scripts about life after death. Is it a sign that the millennium is approaching? Are modern men and women seeking a spiritual answer to the uncertainties of their future and the possibility that their personal computers won't be able to surf the net on Jan. 1, 2000?
I haven't seen any folks in dark robes and sandals walking through the streets in processions, flagellating themselves in anticipation of the Second Coming, though I do see a lot of rather painful body piercing on my students--presumably for a different reason.
Take Vincent Ward's "What Dreams May Come," a phrase from "Hamlet." We have Robin Williams' character dying and then searching through heaven and hell for his wife (Annabella Sciorra), a suicide.
The visual effects team supervised by Joel Hynek and Nicholas Brooks make this trip worth taking. I kept getting flashbacks to Maxfield Parrish's illustrations on the heavenly journey and Gustave Dore's in the inferno. Both journeys were splendid, eliciting tranquility and horror.
And speaking of horror, let's take a look at the script. It was an attempt to overlay therapy over religious myths (without Carl Jung's help). Therapy is useful in getting along in the here and now, but it just does not cut it when mixed with the afterlife.
When you realize that the husband-and-wife dialog rarely raises above a naive young male talking to a chronically depressed female (and neither Williams nor Sciorra can be mistaken for Romeo or Juliet), you feel someone should be paying you $200 an hour to listen to their drivel.
John Carpenter's "Vampires" trails shades of similarities to other films, but it is a fun flick. The crew of anti-vampire crusaders, cruising the southwest in an armored car, reminded me just a bit of Katherine Bigelow's vampire "family," crossing the plains in a blacked-out station wagon cruising for blood in "Near Dark" (1987).
The moving soundtrack and the New Mexico setting reminded me more than a touch of Robert Rodriguez's "From Dusk Till Dawn" (1996). Carpenter takes more time to develop his plot, however, while "Dusk" scriptwriter Quentin Tarantino was satisfied with tossing blood and iron at the viewer.
It is good to see James Woods in an action film. His energy is unstoppable. You accept him as the Roman Catholic Church's crusader against vampires in the U.S.A., though his language is foul and his demeanor is threatening. He instantly commands belief, whether he is playing a white racist killer (Byron De La Beckwith in Reiner's "Ghosts of Mississippi" 1996) or a buttoned-down H. R. Halderman (Stone's "Nixon" 1995).
Maximilian Schell is superb as Cardinal Alba. He does the best possible with his small role.
What triumphs in "Vampires" is what saved so many
Howard Hawks' films--"The Dawn Patrol" (1930), "Hatari!" (1962), "El Dorado"
(1967), "Rio Lobo" (1970)--the building-of-a-team theme. As you watch
the film, you become so concerned about the leadership problems that you
accept the vampire fantasy.
Thomas Ian Griffith's Valek, the original master
of vampires, is a wonderful performance, matching Christopher Lee's in
All those Hammer films from England and Gary Oldman's in Coppola's "Bram
Stoker's Dracula" (1992).
Griffin Dunne's "Practical Magic" with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman is a wonderful little picture. Though it is about witches and magic, the driving force of the plot is the women's need to find understanding men to share their lives. Most of the men are seen as swine or dumb, and they are, except for Aidan Quinn. Each witch is not seen as Circe the Enchanter, but rather as a woman who has learned the hard way that she has to live for herself first.
The film is most alive when only the women are on screen--as in the "Midnight Margaritas" sequence. It is worth seeing, maybe on video if it leaves town soon.
John
Boorman’s “The General” (1998)
What
I liked about the film were the little asides about life in
At
one point, one of his key men was busted for making love to his own teenage
daughter when he was drunk. He castigated the man by saying:
"Chasing after children is for the priests; you're a criminal."
When Cahill's old neighborhood--the Hollyfield Buildings (slum
tenements)--was demolished, Cahill pitched a tent on the site and lived
in it until Ben Briscoe, the Lord Mayor of
The humor was in his asides which were drenched in satire and irony, sometimes unconsciously so (I'm sure that is awkwardly said, but I think you get my meaning). I remember seeing this film with a friend, now dead, in a theater with a poor sound system. I couldn't understand a "fawkin' thing" they said, but I loved the images and the flow of language. On cable TV, the Irish slum speech is a bit easier to handle. The images were frequently funny as Cahill made fun of the cops (who broke the law in order to enforce it, of course, as some police and security people may do even in this fine country, on occasion), the courts, the very rich, etc.
Hearing him talk to his cohorts at different times and places, I thought of the many parallels to myself with my colleagues when talking union business, many similarities, though the only violence is ego-tripping, put-downs, etc., but often we are up against the Daley machine and its minions.
Like
Ah well, time for a snooze before dawn dazzles us all.
Whether you agree or disagree, please feel free to e-mail your comments to me:
