|
 BILLY'S HOLLYWOOD SCREEN KISS. This is gay romantic comedy
as whipped non-dairy topping: light, sweet and cloying. Tommy
O'Haver wrote and directed this trifle about a struggling photographer
who falls for an empty-headed pretty boy who likes to drink beer.
The twist is that the pretty might be straight...or is he? Billy
(the charming Sean P. Hayes) is darned sure going to find out!
This is clearly not the stuff of high drama, and it seems like
Screen Kiss goes out of its way to have absolutely no substantive
content. There certainly are some funny scenes though, and near
the end of the film the script tends to loosen up and dares to
take a few digs. Unfortunately, they come too late. This is one
of those movies that tells us that whether gay or straight, on
some level we're all the same. It's sort if like a very long episode
of Ellen, but full of men. --Richter
54. This is essentially Whit Stillman's Last Days of
Disco and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights mixed
together and mildly dumbed down. It tells the story of Shane (played
in Greek-god-with-a-lobotomy style by Ryanne Phillippe), a beautiful
New Jersey boy who comes to the big city and finds happiness in
the drug-crazed party atmosphere of legendary discotheque Studio
54. While we're treated to endless images of tasty men cavorting
shirtless in the club of dreams, the movie lacks substance beyond
the free play of manly nipples. Mike Meyers is particularly awful
as Steve Rubell, Studio 54's Quaalude-loving impresario, hamming
it up like a drunker, gayer version of Austin Powers. Director
Mark Christopher may have meant to make a downbeat, moralizing
film, but in failing at that he at least makes something that
shows how much fun the New York club scene was. There seems to
be no consequence to any action in this fairy-tale version of
the late '70s/early '80s: Shane's drug use is condemned but never
gets him into any trouble; the marriage of his two closest friends
is strained by their club life, but not terribly so; and even
Rubell's prison sentence seems like nothing more than a brief
vacation from the rigors of all-night partying. This film manages
to capture the ambiance of the disco scene in a way that other
films have not, making 54 a lightly pleasant nostalgia
piece that casts an unwittingly kind and loving glance at that
magical era that brought us Donna Summers, the herpes epidemic,
and glittery spandex posing straps. --DiGiovanna
THE GOVERNESS. Minnie Driver plays Rosina, a beautiful
and spirited 19th-century Jewish girl whose life changes after
her father dies, leaving the family destitute. To survive she
must either marry a smelly old fishmonger, become a whore, or
pass for a gentile and go work among the uptight goyim.
So she becomes a governess (disguised under the vaguely Goth pseudonym
Mary Blackchurch), and somehow manages to combine all three. She
finds a position on an island and ends up falling for the man
of the house, Mr. Cavendish (the utterly unappealing Tom Wilkinson),
a brooding man of science. The two invent photography, oddly enough,
but Cavendish is so repressed he freaks out because Rosina/Mary
Blackchurch is forever wanting to get naked with him. (If you're
dying to see Driver in the buff, this film is for you.) Meanwhile
Cavendish's hot young son is swooning for Rosina, rolling around
in her bedcovers and such, but she'll have nothing to do with
him. This has the feel of a once-good script that's been homogenized
and dumbed down by the movie studio for ease of digestion. First-time
writer and director Sandra Goldbacher shows some spunk, but this
ends up being just another one of those pointless period movies
where everyone's always overcoming repressive times by having
sex. --Richter
ONE TRUE THING. Poor Rene Zewiggler--she perpetually looks
like she's about to cry. At least that probably made her a shoo-in
for this weepie about how a family handles their dying mother/wife
(Meryl Streep). Daughter Ellen (Zewiggler) has a crush on her
father (William Hurt and runaway goatee), and is therefore successfully
manipulated into postponing her promising writing career to play
caretaker. In the process she discovers how devalued her mom has
been as a homemaker and that her dad would not be a fun date.
While it's nice to see a film that focuses on a mother-daughter
relationship, it seems a bit cruel to show the underdeveloped
characters wading through the contrived scenes with the assistance
of alcohol without offering any to the audience. Most recent Hollywood
films about women over 40 are just plain boring, though in this
case it probably has a lot to do with the insane amount of Bette
Midler music on the soundtrack. For you Beverly Hills, 90210
fans out there, you'll be glad to see that Mr. Walsh (James Eckhouse)
has expanded his range to include a supporting role as a lawyer.--Higgins
PECKER. John Waters may not be as funny and gross as he
was in the old days, but at least you can hear the dialogue in
his movies now. Pecker weds a dash of Water's campy old
style to a heartwarming story about a young photographer (they
call him Pecker) who makes it big in the New York art world. No
one is more surprised at this than Pecker himself (Edward Furlong),
a clean-scrubbed young man with an eccentric family. Mom (Mary
Kay Place) runs a thrift shop, for example, and grandma has a
special "talking Mary" figurine. Those slick New York
scenesters, buzzing around in their black turtlenecks, try to
mold Pecker into their flavor-of-the-moment art star. But Pecker
has his own ideas of how to unleash the style of Baltimore upon
the world. Though a John Water's movie today is not as shocking
as it was in the '70s, in Pecker you can still find plenty
of his inimitable and wonderfully offensive panache. --Richter
PERMANENT MIDNIGHT. If you hate Ben Stiller's acting, you'll
want to avoid Permanent Midnight like it was a weekend
with Richard Simmons. If not, this is definitely worth checking
out. Although not long on originality, this true story of Jerry
Stahl, the heroin-addicted writer for the TV series Alf,
has some creative and engaging moments, including the best crack-smoking
scene ever filmed. In the role of Stahl, Stiller does his entire
quivering, double-talking, hyper-active shtick here, and it works
well in conveying the excited desperation of someone on the edge
of fame. Still, I know a good number of people who find Stiller
unbearable, and this is him at his most intense. Maria Bello (of
ER) turns in a creditable performance as the anonymous
woman who finds him working at a drive-through burger stand after
his rehabilitation; and Elizabeth Hurley plays her standard role
as Stahl's beautiful green-card wife, but really it's Stiller's
show. Even if you can't stand him, at least slip in for the last
few minutes where, as Stahl, he goes on all the talk shows for
the obligatory post-modern, post-addiction, post-recovery, public
self-flagellation. --DiGiovanna
RUSH HOUR. Although this is the first Jackie Chan movie
to score big at the box office in its opening weekend in America,
it's probably his worst film. Other than the five jokes that have
been spread out over the 90 minutes of this films length, all
the dialogue is incredibly painful. When asked why he's so gung-ho
about capturing the villain, Chan is even forced to utter the
line, "He killed my partner." There's a couple of good
acrobatics/martial arts sequences, but not enough to make this
worth sitting through. On the other hand, if you think you'd like
to watch Chris Tucker do an exaggerated impression of an Asian
while Chan tries to get "funky" and "down"
to some soul music, then this film's for you. --DiGiovanna
RONIN. John Frankenheimer, who directed bizarre and comically
complicated thrillers like Seconds and The Manchurian
Candidate in the 1960s (both worth renting, if only for the
yuks), takes another stab at the genre with Ronin. Unfortunately,
a lot of action film conventions have worn off on him, so in this
one explosions often stand in for dialogue or ideas. Still, this
is better than the run-of-the-mill guns and cars flick, and features
the unmatched beauty of Southern France being shot at and blown
up by Robert DeNiro. Also starring the good Natasha McElhone,
the bad Jonathon Pryce, and the French Jean Reno. The "plot"
revolves around the attempts of some hired goons to steal a briefcase.
It must be a really nice briefcase because DeNiro and company
kill about four hundred innocent bystanders while trying to get
it. The mystery of what's in the briefcase is the maguffin that
runs the show, a la Kiss Me Deadly (another campy classic
that's a must-rent). However, in an effort to do a modern turn
on the existential films of his heyday, Frankenheimer leaves a
lot of question unanswered, like "What's with the briefcase?"
"Who are these people?" "Why are they shooting
at each other?"; and "What the hell is going on here?"
--DiGiovanna
SIMON BURCH. Hollywood has the Oscars on its mind, and,
since films about mentally and/or physically challenged people
are surefire Oscar bait (Children of a Lesser God, Rain
Man, Forrest Gump), Disney goes for the jugular with
a story about the very, very tiny Simon Burch (Ian Michael Smith).
The unfortunate result is an assemblage of loosely related scenes
which milk the shock value of Smith's physical appearance in an
attempt to force viewers onto an emotional roller coaster. A weak
plot does surface about two-thirds into the movie, but by then
the audience has already been subjected to at least a dozen references
to Simon as a miracle/hero/instrument of God, a Forrest Gump-ian
use of an overly obvious soundtrack, and a whole lotta wooden
child acting (not Smith). The real tragedy of the film is that
its dramatic impact derives not from Simon's character, and the
obstacles a norm-obsessed society tosses his way, but rather from
exploiting how different Smith looks. Jim Carrey provides
cutesy narration and the always likable Oliver Platt contributes
to the few digestible scenes.
--Higgins
SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS. This manipulative, cautious and
contrived comedy came out of the stifling Sundance Workshop, and
it shows. Like every other movie these days, it's set in the '70s.
The won't-this-be-touching story focuses on a young girl coming
of age, and her efforts to accept her body and her family, who
are a little off-beat, but not so off-beat as to challenge the
audience's beliefs or sensibilities. Alan Arkin does his usual
decent job playing the aging single father. (God forbid there
should be a single mother in a lighthearted film...single mothers
equal tragedy and pain.) The jokes are all reasonably funny, there's
enough sex to make it titillating but not enough to push it into
controversy, and there's a general lack of plot. Perhaps the most
interesting thing about this intentionally forgettable film are
the body doubles: both Marissa Tomei and newcomer Natasha Lyonne
must show their breasts at least twice, but their faces are never
in the shot, and the actresses hired to stand in for them sport
bodies with no visual relation to the ones they're supposed to
represent. A real oddity, that: There's Tomei, she gratuitously
opens her robe, and suddenly there's a shot from the neck down
of someone else's body. I guess if you're doing tits-for-tits-sake
you might as well bring in the best you can find, and damn the
torpedoes. Other than the curious interest that provides, though,
the film refuses to take any chances or do anything risky, and
winds up being so benign as to be a bit boring. Perhaps this can
be blamed on the heavy and notoriously treacly hand of Robert
Redford, who produced this cowardly, if somewhat humorous, project.
--DiGiovanna
|
 |
