Kissing a Fool Dir. Doug Ellin 3/98
"There are three sides to every story," say the print ads for Kissing a Fool. Here are my three:
Kissing a Fool, the new David Schwimmer comedy, is a quirky romance in which committment-phobic Chicago sportscaster Max Abbit (Schwimmer) thinks he's finally found the girl of his dreams in cerebral book editor Samantha (Mili Avital), after Max's best friend, novelist Jay (Jason Lee), fixes them up. But Max, haunted by doubts about his fiancee's fidelity, enlists Jay to test her loyalty by trying to seduce her. Romantic hijinks and misunderstandings ensue, and if the film falls short of the screwball comic energy it strives for, it's nevertheless a pleasant showcase for the talents of Friends star Schwimmer and the luminous Avital.
Kissing a Fool, the new David Schwimmer comedy, promotes itself as a quirky romance, but it's really a thinly disguised exploration of male homosocial anxiety. The relationship between the two male leads, Jay and Max, bears a blatant homoerotic coding, Hollywood-style: Jay, a sensitive writer who listens to Air Supply and Barry Manilow, disapproves of Max's dates and playboy lifestyle, while Max, disturbed by Jay's year-long celibacy following a bitter breakup, says things like "it makes me question your orientation." The film's own insecurities about this subject are further revealed by a reflexive cinematic misogyny--not just Max's promiscuous habits but also Jay's bitchy, supermodel-wannabe ex-girlfriend Natasha (Vanessa Angel), who calls Jay a "f***ing faggot" for resisting her charms. No sexist cliche goes unused in the film's effort to divert us from its implicit agenda. Rather than being a love triangle, then, it's a story about triangulation, as the relationship between Jay and Max is mediated by their mutual attraction to Sam, whose masculine nickname is another clue. At one point early on Jay actually tells Max to "hide in the closet" when Sam shows up at his apartment unexpectedly; later Sam confesses to Jay that Max has been behaving oddly, since "in the beginning he told me how sweet and beautiful I was; now he tells me how sweet and beautiful you are." The film ends, as it must, in a heterosexual marriage, but by that point the La Rochefoucauld maxim that serves as a wedding toast can only elicit in us a knowing smile: "True love cannot be found where it does not truly exist, nor can it be hidden where it truly does."
Kissing a Fool, the new David Schwimmer comedy, is a bleakly unfunny and surprisingly profane romance that strives for both humor and poignancy and produces mostly silence and embarrassment. Schwimmer plays an obnoxious sportscaster (that is, he's supposed to be obnoxious--no stretch, believe me) whose trademark phrase--"What up, Chicago?"--is grating the very first time we hear it. His best friend is played by a flat Jason Lee, who emotes mostly by yelling; the two are involved in a love triangle with Mili Avital, who doesn't offend largely because the story only requires her to look beautiful (again, no stretch). Full of unfunny double entendres ("You don't want to deny Sam the pleasure of your garlic bread"), Kissing a Fool is much worse than, say, kissing your sister--it's more like kissing a frog that afterwards just sits there, staring at you, unblinking. Until it croaks.
Knock Off dir. Tsui Hark 9/9/98
You could say that there are two kinds of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies: those in which he plays his own long-lost twin brother, and the other sort, in which he actually lets someone else have some screen time. His latest film, Knock Off, belongs to the second category, as it also features Rob Schnieder (late of Saturday Night Live), Lela Rochon (currently featured in Why Do Fools Fall in Love), and Paul Sorvino (Mira's dad). All three play CIA operatives--but it gets better. Van Damme plays Marcus Ray, a Hong Kong jeans company executive (really!) and self-proclaimed "king of the knock offs"--cheaply made imitation designer goods--who discovers that the Russian Mafia (who else, nowadays?) is planting "nanobombs"--rivet-sized, radio-controlled explosives--in his merchandise (Why? Evidently they just want to blow stuff up). Though he is about the only character in the film who doesn't work for the CIA, the Russians, or Hong Kong Five-0, Marcus still kicks and flips and shoots like a pro, and it is to the movie's mindless credit that it never tries to explain how this can be the case.
Knock Off marks the second time Van Damme has worked with Tsui Hark, who directed last year's virtually incomprehensible Double Team, a film so bad that it was actually improved by Dennis Rodman's performance. That was something of a surprise; Hark is a veteran of the Hong Kong action cinema, along with Ringo Lam (who directed Van Damme in the twin-brother drama Maximum Risk) and John Woo (whose first American feature, Hard Target, also starred Van Damme--what do you think they see in him?). He produced some of Woo's best films in the 1980s (A Better Tomorrow, The Killer) and directed as well (A Better Tomorrow III, Once Upon a Time in China--all the films one used to be able to rent at the late, lamented Bijou Movies on Delmar). Knock Off is a significant improvement over Double Team, largely because it refuses to take itself seriously at all; the acting, special effects, and camera angles all call on the conventions of Japanimation as much as the Hong Kong style. There's a little Jackie Chan thrown in too, notably in a fruit warehouse melee and a rickshaw race that stands in for the usual car chase.
The story is set in June 1997, on the eve of Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, and the city is admiringly photographed throughout; one could argue that Hark has embedded in his action adventure an elegiac tribute to the Hong Kong of the '70s and '80s, now departed. The economic subtext--the notion that cheap Asian knockoffs are truly dangerous--would add to this account. In that case, the film's title is a joke at the star's expense, implying that a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie--even one set in Hong Kong--is just a cheap imitation of the real thing.
Good Cop/Bad Cop: L.A. Confidential
Here are four things you will read in every review of L.A. Condidential: (1) the reviewer will invariably use the word stylish, an adjective essentially empty of meaning but currently reserved to describe films featuring snappy period suits and vintage automobiles. (2) The film will be described as noir (or worse, "noirish"), which critics use today to describe any urban story that is either morally ambigious or badly lit. (3) Kim Basinger's role will be described as that of a "high-priced" (or "high-class") call girl, which means that she has a nice apartment with lots of southern exposure and sleeps with community leaders. (4) Reference will be made to the prophetic modernity of the 1950s L.A. in which the film is set, a town in which the cops routinely railroad and abuse black and hispanic suspects, in which tabloid journalism controls public perceptions and breaks careers, in which the press and the police cooperate to manufacture crime-that-is-news and vice versa, in which the line between fact and fiction is blurred, particularly on TV dramas like "Badge of Honor," the Dragnet clone playing on the periphery of L.A. Confidential's story. Some critics may push this observation all the way into allegory; other may stress the way the tale intersects with the real postwar L.A. through its references to the gangster Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner's ill-fated boyfriend.
These remarks won't be wrong, but they will tend to obscure a couple of other important traits, like the film's brutality (30-odd corpses, in various states of decomposition, are unsentimentally discovered or produced by the end), or its vulgarity (L.A. Confidential, while it's got some terrific 50's slang, is not long on euphemism--which means that everybody uses the word "fuck" a lot, usually not metaphorically). In fact L.A. Confidential is as violent as anything else you've seen this summer, though it saves itself from action-film oblivion by thematizing the use of violence as an investigative technique through the character of Sgt. Wendell "Bud" White, played by New Zealander Russell Crowe (see if you can catch when he sounds like Mel Gibson). A tough cop who lours menacingly and dismantles chairs with his bare hands, White is also not nearly as dumb as everyone thinks he is. Opposite Bud is another strong personality, straight-arrow Lt. Ed Exler (Guy Pearce, another Aussie), who is not as ambitious as everyone thinks; Kevin Spacey plays Sgt. Jack Vincennes, technical advisor to "Badge of Honor," with utter suavity--though he too is not the cynical player everyone takes him to be. While it's not very hard to psychoanalyze these characters--White and Exler have some pretty melodramatic motives for being cops--it is compelling to watch them work together, grudgingly, warily, violently.
Strong performances by these three, particularly the volcanic Crowe, anchor the film, which also features Danny De Vito as a thoroughly amoral tabloid writer, David Strathairn as an imperturbable pimp/pornographer/power broker, and Kim Basinger as a high-class call girl--oops!--who was evidently cast for the part because she's required to look like Veronica Lake. Before rock and roll, before the Santa Monica Freeway, before O.J. and Reginald Denny and Rodney King and Darryl Gates (spookily recalled by James Cromwell's portrayal of Police Captain Smith), before it moved into that familiar masonic temple of a headquarters, the LAPD fretted about its image, apparently with good reason. The picture of endemic and casual corruption that emerges from L.A. Confidential is both disturbing and familiar. With its brisk pace and wry, crackling dialogue, director Curtis Hanson's vision of novelist James Ellroy's Los Angeles evokes Raymond Chandler's stories of Philip Marlowe's L.A.--a city where bright sunlight reveals nobody's motives and suggestive, noirish (damn!) shadows remind you that everybody has an angle--even if, sometimes, that angle is justice.
The Art of the Fusillade: Last Man Standing
The plot of Last Man Standing will be familiar to anyone who knows Akira Kurosawa's samurai story Yojimbo; director Walter Hill claims to have based his film on the screenplay for that Japanese classic. It will also be familiar to anyone who has seen A Fistful of Dollars, the first of Clint Eastwood's "spaghetti westerns," in which director Sergio Leone borrowed the Yojimbo story wholesale. Finally, Last Man Standing will look familiar to those who know Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, which was probably Kurosawa's source, though he's traditionally been very coy about admitting it. If you don't fall into one of those categories, here it is: an amoral but very adept stranger rolls into a desolate town ruled by two corrupt gangs, sets them at war with one another to his own profit, gets badly beaten up, recovers, and finally kills all the bad guys.
This time around John Smith (Bruce Willis) takes on the Prohibition-era gangsters who run Jericho, a Texas border town where the weather seems to alternate between daytime dust storms and torrential nighttime rain. There's a gang of Irish bootleggers led by Doyle (David Patrick Kelly) and his menacing gunman Hickey (a gaunt, scarified, hoarse Christopher Walken, who seems to be having a good time), and a gang of Italian rumrunners led by Strozzi (Ned Eisenberg) and his insubordinate sidekick Giorgio (Michael Imperioli). I hadn't heard of any of these guys except for Walken, so it's no surprise that Willis blows away about 29 of them (by my count) with his twin .45s. Those of you used to the 9mm mayhem characteristic of recent action films will feel a sort of grotesque nostalgia at the sight of those .45s, which tend to pick people up and carry them across the room before depositing them, lifeless, against the far wall. There's also an impotent sheriff (Bruce Dern, playing with folksy incredulity), a saloonkeeper who takes Smith in (William Peterson), and two depressed molls--Strozzi's Lucy (Alexandra Powers) and Doyle's Felina (Karina Lombard), both of whom the cynical-but-soft-at-heart Smith helps to escape; evidently Hill felt that one sentimental gesture wasn't enough to get the point across.
Most of the work is competent--hey, how hard can it be?--though Willis is much more solemn than usual. The one exception is Doyle (Kelly), who whether exhibiting cheerful Irish exuberance, maudlin Irish sentimentality, or a fiery Irish temper, is simply a bad actor. He was bad 27 years ago in Hill's The Warriors, in which he played a screechy, annoying teen gang member; over the years he may have been promoted to gang boss, but as far as I can tell his voice still hasn't changed.
Hill has publicly emphasized his connection to Kurosawa, but his greatest debts are clearly to Leone and Eastwood on the one hand (though we'll charitably call his shot selection "homage" and not "imitation") and Hammett on the other. From Red Harvest Hill tries to import Hammett's corrosive attitude towards American capitalist enterprise and its bloody consequences (at one point a Texas Ranger passe through to declare that he'll tolerate one gang--that's only natural--but that two is too many). But Hill and Hollywood cannot ultimately be as cynical as Hammett: instead of the Continental Op Hill gives us a 1920s version of Natty Bumppo. "John Smith" may have been "born without a conscience," as he claims, but at least he has a name; in Red Harvest the Op doesn't have one, and his conscience is the conscience of an employee, property of the Continental Detective Agency. After he makes and cleans up his mess, he still has to file a report on it, probably in triplicate.
That Natty Bumppo should come up here is not merely fortuitous, for in a significant way Last Man Standing is the sequel to Last of the Mohicans. That film released during our last presidential election season, was about another "independent" (as Doyle calls Smith in LMS) caught between the warring English and French, sure of both his own moral compass and the foolishness of both sides. Now, after four years of feeling our own consciences grow stunted on both the right and the left, Hill has given us a similar story with a less idealistic hero fighting against two sides even less distinguishable than before. And although he has returned to the era of Hammett's novel, he has changed the setting, from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. Red Harvest? Yojimbo? A Fistful of Dollars? Hell, no. It's about NAFTA.
The Feminine Mystique, Part II: The Long Kiss Goodnight
About ten years ago Gene Hackman starred in a movie called Target, playing his usual American Everyman, just a little bit smarter and a little bit more resourceful than anyone thinks. Though he looks like your average lumberyard foreman with a station wagon and an alienated teenage son (Matt Dillon), it turns out he's really a retired CIA agent who is jolted back into action when his wife is kidnapped by some old enemies. Hackman and son set out to rescue her, an along the way Junior learns to appreciate Dad's newly revealed competence (especially after he wastes a guy in the airport). Imagine that--boring old dad is really a secret agent!
The story of parental omnipotence overcoming adolescent skepticism is ultimately a grownup fantasy and does not, I think, necessarily reflect the deep-seated desires of the teenaged target audience for such tales (ironically enough). At least, that's the way it seems to be when Dad is the subject of action-film recuperation (see, e.g., True Lies). But what happens when the gun-wielding, knife-throwing, neck-breaking, omnicompetent parent turns out to be June Cleaver rather than Ward? Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Mom?
Well, we do, now, thanks to The Long Kiss Goodnight. In this over-the-top action romp, single mother/schoolteacher Samantha Cane (Geena Davis), a victim of "focal retrograde amnesia," is led to the discovery of her lost identity by low-rent private detective Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L. Jackson). Surprise! It turns out that she's really CIA assassin Charlene Baltimore. Charly's sudden resurrection after eight years of being presumed dead alarms her former colleagues, who are worried that her reappearance jeopardizes their latest illegal, Congress-evading, collaboration-tainted scheme (though how someone who has been out of the loop for almost a decade could endanger the CIA plot-of-the-week escapes me. But when increased government funding is at stake--I swear to God, that's what motivates the plot--you can't be too careful.). They try to kill her; she waxes platoons of bad guys, saves her daughter and civilization as we know it, and in the end gets to keep her family, her memories, and a suitcase full of cash, in good Hollywood style.
Samantha's transformation into Charly--she starts smoking, swearing, and instinctively shooting suspected villains--is accompanied by the expected phallic jokes; at one point she retrieves a much-needed weapon from a dead man's crotch-holster, and later she coos to a knife-wielding attacker, "Oh, honey, only four inches?" Samuel L. Jackson's Hennessy supplies the requisite incredulous looks after each stunt (acting the part of the audience, clearly). He also presses Charly (delicately) on the question of her "real" identity; when she complains about having missed eight years of thrills while playing the part of a mother, he replies that "Sam's" personality had to come from somewhere, suggesting that the domestic instincts are part of her core. The truth of the film, though, is the opposite of this claim--"Charly" had to come from somewhere inside of "Sam." And as the masculine nicknames indicate, there may not be much to choose between them. One thing is for sure--when this woman dices a carrot, it stays diced.
Renny Harlin, Davis's husband, directed Long Kiss; if this is his valentine after directing her in the colossal flop Cutthroat Island, I'd say there are some serious problems in the marriage. But anything with Samuel L. Jackson in it is worth a look. Let's see--so far he's sidekicked for Bruce Willis (in Die Hard with a Vengeance) and Davis. Next up on the action-film rotation should be an animal, an alien, or an android. Stay tuned.
The Song Remains the Same: The Lost World
There are three basic models for the Hollywood action-movie sequel. You can follow the franchise approach, having the same character doing essentially the same thing, as in the Die Hard series, or the Rocky and Rambo films. Or you can take an entirely new cast of characters through the same perils, in the vein of Airport '77 or Predator 2. Or you can follow the trickier third way and let a new group of victims be guided through the same old adventures by a veteran of the previous disaster. (That sentence, incidentally, constitutes my entire review of Speed 2: Cruise Control.) When this approach works well, as it does in Aliens, the sequel to Alien, it often requires some generic tinkering (Alien was largely a ghost story in space, while Aliens emphasized action) and permits some small growth in character (Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, scared but resourceful in the first film, grew into an angry, indomitable valkyrie-mother in the second).
When it doesn't work--and boy, does it not work in The Lost World--what you get is a series of lugubrious reminders that you've seen this all before, that it was a whole lot more interesting the first time around, and that if you'd gone to the Art Museum instead of the movies to get out of the heat you would have saved a few bucks.
You might remember the premise of Jurassic Park, the prequel: if you put dinosaurs and people on an island, the dinosaurs will try to eat the people. Well, The Lost World has another island, some new dinosaurs, and an appetizing new cast of characters, with the exception of mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). The big difference between the two films is that whereas in Jurassic Park Malcolm's frequent observations that bringing dinosaurs back to life was a bad idea were mostly speculative, in The Lost World his similar (that is, identical) remarks are based on previous experience (ours, in fact).
Evidently Steven Speilberg couldn't pass up the chance to direct The Lost World because he really wanted to shoot the scenes of a T-Rex searching for its lost baby in downtown San Diego. Before we see these original frames (a dinosaur loose in a city? Where does he get such crazy ideas?), Goldblum's Malcolm remarks to the film's villainous lawyer (yes, he gets eaten) that bringing dinosaurs to the mainland is "the worst idea in the long history of bad ideas." If that's a sound-stage in-joke, it's a whole lot funnier than Speilberg intended it to be--and it's on him.
Two notes: The Lost World is vastly different from Michael Crichton's novel of the same name; that book read like a clone of the Jurassic Park screenplay, but it was evidently not the screenplay Speilberg wanted. And the best image in The Lost World is not dinosaur related, but a part of the background in a San Diego video store: a poster advertising Arnold Schwarzenegger's King Lear. Now that I'd pay to see.
The British Colonial Invasion: MAXIMUM RISK
Jean-Claude Van Damme now has the distinction (among many others, of course) of having starred in the first Hollywood films of two noted Hong Kong action-film directors: John Woo, who made Hard Target with Van Damme in 199X, and now Ringo Lam, who has cast the "Muscles from Brussels" in Maximum Risk. Lam, pioneer of the "bullet's-eye view" shot (and there's a great one at the end of this film), tends to depict action scenes with a little more carnage and a lot more explicit homoeroticism than the more graceful Woo (though those who saw John Travolta and Christian Slater duke it out in Woo's Broken Arrow may find the latter claim hard to believe), and he remains true to form here with a memorable steam-room scene in which everybody gets to be half-naked. Overall, though, the film is disappointingly paced; rather than just asking us to accept the preposterous plot (identical twin brothers separated at birth; one becomes a decorated French soldier, the other a Russian mafioso who is killed in the opening sequence), the film spends time trying to underscore the poignancy of the situation--time which would have been better spent blowing stuff up. The closing scenes in Nice are exciting enough, and include a few mayhem-moves that haven't been seen before (that's what we're here for); Natasha Henstridge, who spent a lot of time covered with mucus in Species, is on hand to do a bad Julia Roberts turn as Van Damme's cleavage interest.
A couple of notes on Van Damme. First, he needs to get over this twin-brother thing, which was pretty thoroughly explored a few years ago in Double Impact. How much screen time does the man need? And second, this film clarifies yet again the difference between Jean-Claude and the ataman of action films, Arnold Schwarzenegger: Hard Target was set in New Orleans (you know, Cajuns) and Maximum Risk mostly in France because Van Damme has that accent, you know. Arnold's latest films--True Lies and Eraser--have him working for the U.S. government right there in Washington DC. Sure, he still talks kind of funny--but who's going to tell him?
Mirth Versus the Flying Saucers: Men in Black
Men in Black is the second coming of Ghostbusters. Each film shows us an extranormal realm (the spirit world; extraterrestrial activity) in the hands of competent professionals who protect an oblivious and sometimes willfully ignorant public from harm. The joke in each is that the professionalism is of the most mundane order; the Ghostbusters are a high-tech pest-control company ("When the light is green, the trap is clean!"), while the Men in Black of Barry Sonnenfeld's new comedy are essentially immigration agents ("INS, Division Six," one of them barks in the opening scene), supervising the 1500 or so aliens living on earth--"most of them right here in Manhattan, most of them just trying to make a living" (and most of them still ethnic--a jeweler named Rosenberg, a pawn shop owner played by Tony Shalhoub).
It's an inspired if not completely original premise: that the twilight zone is as bureaucratized and regulated as the "real" world--more so, in fact, since the aliens are licensed, have a longer wait at Customs, and are under the kind of surveillance that makes Jeremy Bentham look like Ray Charles. (As such MIB is the perfect anodyne to the darker fears about immigration embedded in Independence Day.) And the movie is filled with witty asides and clever cameos: the National Enquirer and its fellow tabloids contain the best investigative reporting available; velcro is actually an off-planet import; Elvis isn't dead, just back home (though Newt Gingrich, Sylvester Stallone and Dennis Rodman are still here); Riff Raff, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, appears as an earthling. (For hometown fans, former Cardinal Bernard Gilkey appears as a Met, planet of origin unknown.) And then there is the Neuralyzer, a memory-erasing device that helped produce one of the film's best print ads: "Get Neuralyzed and see it again for the first time!" Finally, there's an interesting inside/outside theme throughout: aliens wear human bodies like costumes (in one scene explicitly parodying the biomechanical armor of the aliens in Independence Day); humans must battle their way out of aliens who've eaten them; some people are in the know, while others are out of the loop.
Though engaging overall, however, Men in Black is (like Ghostbusters) ultimately a little disappointing, or maybe just overhyped (imagine that!). The plot gets in the way of the premise a little bit; the chemistry between stars Tommy Lee Jones (who looks tired throughout) and Will Smith (who is funnier in more serious situations--e.g., Independence Day) has been, perhaps, overrated in the popular press; and Linda Fiorentino, who plays a coroner who keeps coming across aliens (and who keeps getting Neuralyzed), clearly has several moments in which she is silently reminding herself how much she was being paid for her appearance. One leaves the theatre musing about how much better Men in Black could have been with a little more wit and a little more care. On the other hand, how much can you expect from a movie based on a comic book? At least it wasn't inspired by a video game or an old TV sitcom, you think . . . as you walk by the promotional poster for Leave it to Beaver in the theater lobby.
Cut to the Chase: Metro
There are of course two cinematic touchstones for San Francisco cop movies like Eddie Murphy's new Metro. The first one is Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, which gave us the cop who asks questions first--or rather, asks you to ask questions first ("You have to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?") before cutting loose with the most powerful handgun in the world. The other is Bullitt, in which Steve McQueen's Fastback Mustang gave us the Archetypal San Francisco Car Chase. That memorable scene has also given us, unfortunately, the Obligatory San Francisco Car Chase. Consider: Basic Instinct? Car chase. Foul Play? Car chase. Shattered (a movie about a car crash)? Car chase. The Presidio? Yep. Innerspace (a movie ostensibly about what goes on inside Martin Short's body)? Car chase (with Mustang). The Rock (a movie that's supposed to be about Alcatraz)? Yessir. The only recent Bay Area film I can think of that doesn't feature a car chase is Star Trek IV, and that's because half the time the Enterprise crew uses public transportation and the rest of the time they just beam themselves where they want to go.
Now, a car chase per se isn't so bad, and in San Francisco films it gives us a chance to enjoy the scenery in what is without a doubt the most dramatic and beautiful city in the world (and the fact that I lived there for seven years has nothing to do with that entirely objective assessment). But too often (most of the time, really) the pursuit cheats us, substituting motion across the screen for advancement in the plot. Metro has a car chase--a pretty good one, involving a Cadillac and a cable car--but here as elsewhere in the film it's more of a symptom of Creeping Cliche Syndrome than an example of inspired filmmaking. Metro also kills off Eddie Murphy's best friend, puts his girlfriend in jeopardy, saddles him with a neophyte white partner, gives him a gambling problem, and--I kid you not--has his captain say "I can't put you on the case; you're too close to it." "Wait," I wanted to say as I was running down the checklist, "what about the ex-wife? Shouldn't he have one of those, too?"
Murphy plays Scott Roper, the SFPD's top hostage negotiator. At the start, then, Metro presents itself as a sort of anti-Dirty Harry, with the garrulous Murphy a clear contrast to the laconic Eastwood in both style and substance--he wants to talk people out of dangerous situations, not blow them away, and he despises the SWAT team's blunt instrument approach to delicate situations. This potentially interesting premise lasts for about ten minutes, at which point he blows someone away (well, wounds him); the next villain--a volatile, raspy Michael Wincott--turns out to be wise to all of Roper's negotiating techniques and unpredictably violent, which quickly turns Metro back into standard fare.
What enlivens it, of course, is Murphy's presence, who is his engaging, mercurial, profane self here. And that's part of the problem: watching the latest work of a fallen star like Murphy is often like watching a series of film clips: hey, there he is on the beach, just like at the end of Trading Places! There's that low chuckle he always used in Beverly Hills Cop! Now he's cursing somebody out, like in 48 Hours! How cool, how...nostalgic. Murphy was always at his best (in the three films just mentioned, for example) when he could play the maverick against some establishment authority figure, but in Metro (as in other recent middling successes) he's the hero from the start, and those he plays against never have the power (in the plot) or the authority (on the screen) to threaten his preeminence, or even to slow him down. In a way it's no wonder that his most successful recent film is The Nutty Professor, where Eddie Murphy plays against...Eddie Murphy.
Mighty Joe Young dir. Ron Underwood 12/23/98
Nowadays Disney movies need two reviews each. The first one would have to describe the transparently sentimental yet always moving story, and the latest astonishing advance in animation or special effects that it features: in the new Disney remake of Mighty Joe Young, that story concerns the touching relationship between Jill Young (Charlize Theron) and the 15-foot, 2000-lb. gorilla (no kidding, they use that phrase) she has cared for in the mountains of Central Africa. When poachers encroach on Joe's habitat, Jill follows the advice of zoologist Gregg O'Hara (Bill Paxton--who else?) and moves him to a California animal preserve. Eventually--though for perfectly understandable gorilla reasons--Joe runs amuck in the streets of LA, a la The Lost World's T-Rex. If the endangered-species subtext of this version robs it of some of the B-movie glee of the original (the scene in which Joe destroys the nightclub in which he's been forced to perform remains one of the great barroom brawls in cinema), the effects and the rich color in which they are rendered make this Mighty Joe Young visually compelling. Even kids who have been brought up on a steady diet of digitized dinosaurs will be amazed by the nimble, natural Joe, who also has as much emotional range as any of the humans in the film--a fact that should make him less scary but no less impressive to younger children. Special effects wizard Rick Baker is a worthy heir to stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, who animated the original Joe in 1949 (and who has a cameo appearance in the new film).
The second review would consider any new Disney film as a cultural artifact, acknowledging the influential position of Disney/Cap Cities in the world of infotainment. In the case of Mighty Joe Young, this review might note the irony of Disney releasing a film about transporting wild animals to sanctuaries in the U.S., given the negative publicity surrounding the opening of Disney's own wild animal park earlier this year; in that context the demonization of poachers in this version--absent in the original, but of course only natural in this day and age--takes on additional significance. Or one could lament the way in which Joe's heroic actions at the end of the story are made much more spectacular in this version, and then much more sentimental--that is, how the ending of the original has been fully Disneyfied. Or--and this is what I'd do--one could observe that in the grand tradition of Bambi, Dumbo, and The Lion King, Disney has once again released (on Christmas, no less) a film in which the main character is orphaned in the first twenty minutes. In fact, given that this is a remake and thus must outdo its original, two of the main characters--Joe and Jill--are orphaned in the same scene. And we parents, happily oblivious to the little displaced Oedipal psychodrama Disney keeps reproducing for our children, keep on driving them to the mall or the multiplex for another formula feeding.
It sure is one cute gorilla, though.
back to indexMission Impossible 2 (or M:i2, as we acronymically refer to it around our house) is a movie about why you should never, ever take a vacation in the New Economy. Government agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) does, and look what happens to him: his amoral boss (Anthony Hopkins) has to call on one of Hunt's co-workers, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), for the latest can't-wait, highest-priority top-secret mission, and Ambrose not only takes over Hunt's job (and, temporarily, his face--more on that later) but decides to strike out on his own, stealing the mysterious viral antigen he's been assigned to acquire, crashing a 747 into the side of a mountain, and vanishing without a trace. This means that when Hunt finally gets back to work, not only does he have a big pile of emails to respond to, but he must find Ambrose, recover the antidote, and save the world.
To do this he must first "assemble" his "team," which is the diegetic way of saying "cast the other parts"; in Mi:2 the team includes Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), his computer whiz pal from the first Mission (1996), and Nyah Nordolf-Hall (Thandie Newton), a skinny but dazzling jewel thief with a crooked smile who happens to be Ambrose's old girlfriend, and who is the key to tracking him down. Ethan also falls for Nyah, which adds a novel jealousy angle to the tale--novel, that is, if you've never seen Hitchcock's Notorious, on which M:i2 is often little more than a bombastic gloss.
The script's overall poverty of ideas is evident in the whole "rogue agent" scenario too, which was an old idea when Chretien de Troyes used it 850 years ago and made Meleagaunt, a former knight of the Round Table, the arch-enemy of Lancelot (or Richard Gere, for those of you still in your first semester here). One of the film's tag lines, first uttered by the creator of the "Chimera" virus and the "Bellerophon" antigen but repeated twice more, is "Every search for a hero must begin with a search for what a hero requires--a villain" (i.e., we had to invent a really bad virus before we could invent a potentially profitable cure). But writers Ronald d. Moore and Brannon Braga didn't look very hard--no further than the first Pierce Brosnan James Bond adventure, Goldeneye (1995), in which 007 takes in turncoat 006. Now, exploring the uncanny (in the Freudian sense) resemblance between good guys and bad has always been a favorite theme of director John Woo; it's apparent in The Killer (1989) and in Broken Arrow (1996), and Woo took it to its absurdly logical extreme in Face/Off (1997). But M:i2 is like a Face/Off hangover: everyone seems to be wearing Tom Cruise masks all the time. Now, to be sure, they are more attractive than the Jon Voight mask Cruise himself wore at the end of Mission: Impossible, and they do help divert attention from the surprisingly nondescript villain Scott, who at one point is reduced to torturing his subordinate to prove that he's the one we're supposed to be paying attention to. But one suspects that all the "mask" moments are really just a way to increase coproducer Cruise's own face-time; even when the script has his character offscreen, the camera can still lovingly caress his features on someone else. I would have preferred more Ving Rhames.
Though--that is, because--its plot is old, everything else about M:i2 tries to be new, and the film is also a kind of general guide to the New Economy and its workplace toys: Ambrose shows off his theft on a digital camera (which means, of course, that we must Steal The Disk!); everyone gets tracked by Global Positioning Satellites to within three feet of their lives; and Ambrose's nefarious plan turns out to be not world anarchy but insider trading: he will release the deadly virus in Sydney--make an initial public offering, as it were--only after he has blackmailed pharmaceutical tycoon John McCloy (Brendan Gleeson--may he appear in more American films soon) out of millions in stock options in his company, which will then produce the antidote. Its stock price will soar--the inflexible law of supply and demand--and he and his cohorts will cash in, or rather, cash out. M:i2 thus gives us the rogue agent as rogue day trader: he doesn't shoot up his brokerage, but he is willing to sacrifice all of Sydney to his understanding of how the market works. It's a plot that only makes sense--or only makes the sense it does--in a world of dot-com millionaires and dreams of making the big score on-line. And it has a real cut-and-paste feel.
Where, in all of this, is John Woo, one of my favorite directors? Largely quiescent--this is an action film with long stretches of inaction, though Woo tries to make up for that in the last twenty minutes, with exploding SUVs, jousting motorcycles, and those damned fluttering doves of his. At the very end, when Sean has the drop on Ethan, Ethan spies a gun half-buried in the sand--they've been fighting on a beach--and in a very characteristic Woo stunt, he kicks the gun up out of the sand, catches it, spins, falls and fires. It reminded me of a moment in early The Killer, when Chow Yun-Fat, momentarily disarmed, kicks down on one end of a low table, sending the revolver on the other end up into his hands. In The Killer, that's one of the very first stunts in a film crammed with action; in M:i2, by contrast, it's one of the last things we see, and it's filmed in super-slo-mo--unfortunately, an emblematic moment.
Men Are From Mars, and So Is Everybody Else: Mission to Mars
Monument Ave. Dir. Ted Demme 11/4/98
Monument Avenue runs southwest away from the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, a north Boston neighborhood that was for more than a century a working-class Irish enclave with a reputation for insularity--in fact, the neighborhood is literally a peninsula, bordered by water on three sides. It was also one of the first streets to be gentrified in the 1980s, during a Yuppie invasion of Charlestown. That conflict between old ways and new wealth is partly what drives the funny and bleak Monument Ave., the latest collboration between Denis Leary and director Ted Demme (The Ref), which tells the story of one close-knit group of townies that has accommodated to the arrival of these affluent neighbors by stealing their expensive cars.
Bobby O'Grady (Leary) and his fellow lowlifes steal at the behest of the unctuous and brutal Jackie O'Hara (Colm Meaney), blow their money on cocaine and bad wagers, and obey a rigid code of silence about their activities, even when Jackie orders the shooting of Bobby's cousin Teddy (Billy Crudup), who has been talking too much to the Feds. But as all students of Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature know, conflicts between kinship loyalties and the extrafamilial social order--not kingship here, but the gangster hierarchy represented by Jackie and his camelhair overcoat--can only end in violent confrontation.
Demme and company have done an astonishing job capturing the spirit of a hidebound and increasingly hopeless way of life, not just the jittery, strung-out Charlestown underworld but its aging mothers and priests, its grimy and childless streets, and its pale triple-deckers and townie bars--or rather, "bahs," where people drink "beahs" and laugh at "hulairius" jokes (that is, "wikkid funny" ones) and wonder if it's too late to "staht ovah" with their lives. (I will admit that I grew up about twenty-five miles away from Boston, and I found the dialogue almost musical--though it's possible that its rapidity could make it occasionally incomprehensible to non-New-Englanders.)
The generally outstanding cast includes Ian Hart, John Diehl, and Famke Janssen, who plays Katy--Jackie's girlfriend who's sleeping with Bobby on the side. The Dutch Janssen, an archetypal Bond girl in Goldeneye, here turns in a performance that is by turns manic and weary, sadly knowing and hopeful. But Leary, who lived in Charlestown during the 1980s, is our anchor in this film. He is smarter than his pals (no stretch!), though the moments when he profanely demonstrates this are sometimes moments when he is more Denis Leary than Bobby O'Grady. Overall, though, it is fine character work: when he laments the lost good old days, he means a time when thugs used bats and shovels instead of guns. He hesitates to pull off a dealership theft because it means going all the way to Saugus, three towns away. And when he dreams of getting away from it all, it's a small dream--a few days on Cape Cod to clear his head. The view down Monument Avenue includes the raised section of Route 93, where it crosses the mouth of the Charles River and heads south towards the Cape, but in this film, every time we see it it looks more like it's fencing us in than offering us a way out.
All the President's Movies: Murder at 1600
When Air Force One opens later this month it will cap a remarkable year for presidential appearances on the big screen. Not counting the recently released Contact, full of President Clinton's cameos, eight major Hollywood productions have featured presidential protagonists, a string that began with last summer's science fiction blockbuster Independence Day, continued through two comedies (My Fellow Americans and First Kid) two thrillers (Absolute Power and Murder at 1600), and two more sci-fi films (Escape from L.A. and Mars Attacks!), and will end--perhaps--with Harrison Ford's hijacking next week. Overall, it's been a good decade for presidential films, from comedies (Dave, 1993) to romances (The American President, 1995) to documentaries (The War Room, 1993); one could widen the circle to include In the Line of Fire (1993), Guarding Tess (1994), and Clear and Present Danger (1994), not to mention Oliver Stone's historical fictions JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995).
We probably shouldn't be too surprised that presidential films have become a growth industry; after all, we live in an era when real presidents play the saxophone on late-night talk shows and discuss their undergarments/underwear on MTV (and when near-presidents go directly from campaigning to commercials). But these films are more than just another symptom of how inextricably intertwined are our media and our politics. They also identify and try to address the anxieties we have about our political institutions, as popular entertainment has always done. The comedies, for example, assure us that the difficulties of divided government and increasingly strident partisanship in the capitol are essentially personality conflicts, not matters of principle. Thus Dave, a prisoner-of-Zenda fantasy, implies that party-line politics are a kind of split-personality problem: when the hard-nosed president is incapacitated after an adulterous tryst, a naive look-alike is recruited to replace him and promptly (if briefly) makes the government more humane. The nation responds with mild surprise, but quickly grows complacent, as if changes in character are indistinguishable from changes in policy. In My Fellow Americans, a sort of "Grumpy Old Presidents", ideological differences are reduced to the level of Odd-Couple bickering as on-the-lam ex-presidents James Garner (a randy Democrat) and Jack Lemmon (a parsimonious Republican, and of course one of the original Odd Couple) alternately argue and bond. Worried about influence-peddling in Washington? Watch The American President, possibly the ultimate Beltway date movie, in which the power of romance is used to purify the self-evidently corrupt scenario of a widowed president sleeping with a lobbyist. This liberal apologia rationalizes this spectacle by assuring us that it's really, you see, a matter of true love.
Not all of these films offer warm (if necessarily fuzzy) reassurance, however. Exhibit A is Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power, the story of a president with a reputation for philandering who tries to cover up his responsibility for the death of his latest sexual partner with the help of his chief of staff and two secret service agents (who are ordered to eliminate the only witness, director/star Eastwood).
Though based on a 1996 novel by David Baldacci, the script for this film could have been written by David Brock, Gary Aldrich, or one of the other Clinton conspiracists; it's the snuff version of the Paula Jones affair, made even more transparently referential by gratuitous details like the "I Supported Desert Storm" sticker on Eastwood's footlocker and Scott Glenn's unprompted remark that before he became a secret service agent he had been a state trooper for ten years. In Arkansas, perhaps? The story even ends with a murder represented to the press as a suicide, alluding to right wing accounts of Vince Foster's death. Watching Absolute Power I was reminded of a Watergate-era Doonesbury cartoon, in which a legislator frustrated by presidential stonewalling during the hearings sighs and muses "If only he'd knock over a bank or something." A colleague replies brightly "By God, then we'd have him!" Absolute Power represents the same kind of desire for a smoking gun, some undeniable evidence that would incontrovertibly convict a president whose approval ratings remain unchanged--even improve--despite the efforts of his detractors to unearth scandal after scandal ("If only he'd accidentally strangle some bimbo." "By God, then we'd have him!").
That Absolute Power is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the radical Clinton-hating right is only part of its perverse charm. For while it salves, in the realm of the imagination, the frustration that the conspiracy cohort must experience in its inability to get the nation interested in its charges--"Where is the outrage?" demanded Bob Dole querulously--such a film may actually help to create that frustration, by allowing the rest of us to exorcise our doubts about Clinton safely on the cinematic plane.
Instructive here is Murder at 1600, the perfect left-wing companion piece to Eastwood's darkly Republican movie. In this film, released two months later, the dead woman's body (evidently the standard opening prop for a dramatic American film nowadays) has been planted by the liberal president's enemies precisely so as to provoke a scandal that will drive him from office; one of the chief conspirators is the president's National Security Advisor, who chides the commander-in-chief for his weakness during a hostage crisis and rebukes him for never having served in the military and for not knowing the "code" of the armed forces. In case we were out getting popcorn and missed this not-so-oblique reference, a later scene shows the president descending a staircase framed by two portraits--Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, the last two Democratic presidents before Bill Clinton. While in Absolute Power the president's cover-up is carried out by his female chief of staff and the two secret service agents--one black, one white--in Murder at 1600 the president is exonerated by two D.C. cops--one black, one white--and a female secret service agent. A perfect bookend to the earlier film, the story even opens with a government bureaucrat threatening suicide, and ends with the secret service agent taking a bullet for the president, just as Eastwood's character did at the end of In the Line of Fire.
All of these films permit us to engage in the imaginary correction of presidential venality and Beltway corruption, concepts that these films simultaneously cement into our cultural vocabulary and remove from our moral consideration beyond the four walls of the multiplex. They titillate us with exaggerated versions of the behavior that we otherwise accept as mundane political business-as-usual and then reassure us with the spurious if just harmony of their neat conclusions, in which the system characterized a few frames earlier as inherently corrupt miraculously repairs and purges itself. Or perhaps, with a nod to the subtext-on-the-surface of Absolute Power, rights itself.
Which brings us back to Air Force One. It's another "heroic president" story, and since Harrison Ford plays a Medal of Honor- winning combat pilot, it's pretty clear whose fantasies are going to be indulged in the film's politics. But who will be the real villain, the power behind the Russian nationalists who take over the plane? Well, none of the recent spate of White House films have featured a woman as vice-president--but Air Force One does. Keep your eye on Glenn Close--"close," as in "a heartbeat away from the presidency."
My Giant dir. Michael Lehmann 4/15/98
Evidently Billy Crystal is fascinated by really tall guys, and apparently he didn't get it all out of his system with Forget Paris (1995), in which he appeared with half the NBA. In his latest film, My Giant, Crystal's costar is 7'7" Gheorghe Muresan, another NBA star (center for the Washington Wizards, and the league field-goal percentage leader over the last two seasons), though it's not a sports story. Crystal plays Sammy Kamin (nee Kaminsky), an all-but-washed-up agent who stumbles upon the giant Max (Muresan) in a Romanian monastery and decides to make him a movie star.
While this height thing might make for an interesting psychological study, it doesn't make for much of a movie. There is some charm to seeing Sam next to Max--they barely fit into the frame together--and the physical disparity between the two is mirrored on the level of character: Sam is emotionally stunted, estranged from his wife and son and sure that only spectacular professional success can bring about a reunion, while Max, though a virtual recluse and deeply conscious of the monstrous impression he can give, is romantic and sentimental, and has been sending unanswered love-letters to a childhood sweetheart for twenty-two years (she moved to Gallup, New Mexico, you see). But the story is really only an allegory of its own production; that is, it's a story about a man who wants to make a movie star out of a very tall guy, who is played by a very tall guy trying to break into the movies. And the movie suffers from its excess verisimilitude: since Max's height is not a special effect (except perhaps in the glandular sense), when the story introduces worries about Max's health ("Have you ever seen an old giant?" asks a doctor), we are naturally led to speculate about Muresan's own condition, about his lifespan rather than his life's story. Is he a character, or a prop? Is this his story, or is he just a device meant to enable Sam's reconciliation with his family? The movie isn't quite sure. It keeps setting up almost gothic situations in which Crystal's usual shtick seems inappropriate, but keeps feeding his patter to us anyway. Moreover, at a number of points Sam resorts to emotional blackmail, promising Max that the only way he'll ever see his sweetheart Iliana again is to follow Sam's orders--a threat that backfires on him in a decidedly uncomic way.
Director Michael Lehmann, who once upon a time gave us a gem called Heathers, has not entirely lost his satiric touch, though here it's mostly noticeable in the margins: Sam takes Max to his first-ever movie, and it's Dirty Harry dubbed into Romanian; later on Steven Seagal has a terrific cameo as himself. But the scene that got the biggest laugh at the preview involved projectile vomiting, and the filmmakers themselves were so impressed with it that they used it again as the film's final image. I can't argue with that.
No Looking Back dir. Edward Burns 6/17/98
No Looking Back is a terrific film, though it pains me to say that, because almost no one is going to see it. It's an utterly unerring and unsentimental evocation of life in a working class seaside town that's entirely untroubled by asteroids, aliens, or credulous F.B.I. agents, in which nothing explodes, no one gets shot, and love certainly does not conquer all. What hope does such serious fare have in summertime, when plot resolution is easy?
No Looking Back is the third feature film from Ed Burns, whose The Brothers McMullen won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, after which Burns went into a sophomoric slump with the largely unwatchable She's the One (1996). But he's back, and if anything, he's better--he's a better actor himself, a better writer (the occasional cliches that marred the dialogue in The Brothers McMullen are long gone), and a better director, getting subtle performances from his whole cast. Lauren Holly plays Claudia, a young woman who finds herself settling into a familiar, unambitious life in her hometown; she works as a waitress at a local diner, lives with the hardworking and loyal Michael (Jon Bon Jovi), visits with her depressed mother (Blythe Danner) and sardonic sister Kelly (Connie Britton), and hits the local bar with the usual friends after work. One day her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Burns) drifts back into town after three years away--once again having failed to make anything of himself--and begins to stir things up, pursuing the not-entirely-reluctant Claudia and generally irking just about everyone else.
This is not the stuff of high drama, but it is the kind of drama people actually experience in their lives, where infidelity plays neither as comedy nor suspense, but as disappointment. Burns fills out his story by meticulously depicting the material conditions of those lives, the long-neck Buds and the bent-up bottle caps, the mismatched garbage cans, the cramped houses full of plastic colanders and dishracks and sewing machines and ashtrays and first-generation answering machines. Claudia's black 1981 Firebird (okay, I'm guessing on the year, but it's a good guess) is emblematic here--it's just the right car.
Bon Jovi, whom I was predisposed to dislike, is flawless; he should be too pretty for the role, what with those lips, but he is completely convincing and ultimately quite moving as the thoroughly decent Michael. Britton, one of the best things about The Brothers McMullen, gives just the right depth to the wisecracking young spinster Kelly. And Holly, though she is clearly too tanned for the role, makes no missteps; she and Burns--who looks more and more like a dissipated John Cusack--show an effective if wary chemistry. The soundtrack of No Looking Back is peppered with Springsteen tunes, which are perfect Jersey shore music and give things an appropriate 1987ish atmosphere--no one in this town is loading up on mutual funds or riding the Dow towards 9000. Evidently some Patty Scialfa songs were packaged with Bruce's--this (and the general lack of asteroids) may be the film's only flaw. Ed Burns is now two for three--and not even Mark McGwire hits it out of the park that often.
The Odd Couple II Dir. Howard Deutch 4/15/98
I'll confess that I wasn't exactly looking forward to seeing The Odd Couple II. Despite fond memories of the 1968 original and the 70s TV series that followed it, there was something foreboding about that Roman numeral. I know what "II" means attached to, say, Die Hard or Speed: bigger explosions. But does adding the digit to a comedy promise bigger and better jokes, or just staler ones?
The film itself wasn't half bad. Seventy-five percent would probably be a more accurate figure. This is actually the fourth geezer-buddy movie for stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, following Grumpy Old Men (1993), Grumpier Old Men (1995), and last year's Out to Sea (Lemmon also made My Fellow Americans, with James Garner, in 1996--a "grumpy old presidents" variation that's probably the best of the lot). The Odd Couple II not only lets them reprise their familiar, bickering roles of Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison, but also reunites them with Neil Simon, who wrote the screenplay for the film.
Simon won a Tony for the original stageplay back in 1965, but there won't be any awards this time around. The contrivances start with the story's premise: Oscar and Felix are brought back together after seventeen years apart by the wedding of Oscar's son and Felix's daughter (that's the subplot of Grumpier Old Men), to which the erstwhile roommates decide to travel together. A road-trip wedding plot departs pretty significantly from the defining premise of the original tale, which took place in the close quarters of a New York apartment and whose basis was not marriage but divorce (and why do the children give their respective dads only a week's notice of their impending nuptials?). This Southern California odyssey quickly reveals a number of things about Simon's screenplay, including his reliance on devices rather than actual character traits. For example, Felix's hyperallergenic fastidiousness vanishes whenever the plot doesn't immediately require it: in one restaurant scene he worries loudly about the likelihood of pesticides in the drinking water, but fifteen minutes later utters not a peep when he and Oscar are thoroughly sprayed by a passing cropduster. Then there are the cliches: when our boys, hitchhiking, accept a ride from a sunburned, Spanish-speaking amigo, you know his truck is going to be filled with illegal immigrants. (Hey, it worked in My Fellow Americans, didn't it?) In fact, the film frequently seeks to confirm its New York mentality by contrasting it with the Hispanic culture of Southern California, even inventing two locations whose names--"San Malina" and "Santa Menendez"--are grammatically impossible, at least in the Spanish I studied in high school.
The plot of The Odd Couple II is amusingly recursive in a few places, and occasionally Lemmon and Matthau manage to infuse Simon's tired material with a little life--usually during one of Felix's vigorous, venomous, semi-profane harangues about Oscar's various shortcomings (which means that the rage underlying the film's comedy is often at odds with the sentimentality of its plot). But overall seeing the movie is a high price to pay for the nostalgic satisfaction of hearing that theme song again. My one rueful consolation was that the two couples ahead of me in line were planning to see My Giant.
The Opposite of Sex written & directed by Don Roos 6/24/98
The Opposite of Sex begins when bad girl DeeDee Truitt (Christina Ricci) runs away from her Louisiana home to live with her gay half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan), a high school teacher in a quiet Indiana town. There she seduces Bill's gorgeous-but-dumb lover Matt (Ivan Sergei), announces that she is pregnant, and runs away to L.A. with Matt (the putative father) and $10,000 of Bill's money. Matt's ex-lover Jason (Johnny Galecki), furious over Matt's departure and sure that Bill somehow drove him away, vengefully accuses his former teacher Bill of having made "predatory advances" on him while he was a student, thus putting Bill's career and reputation in jeopardy.
All this takes about twenty minutes--it's just the setup, not the actual plot. Oh, and it's a comedy, which is something we learn right away when DeeDee begins her sly voiceover narration, reminding us to pay attention to moments that will turn out to be foreshadowing, "like Dickens." In fact, that's just one of the metacinematic gimmicks at DeeDee's disposal; she can also fiddle with the music in a given scene to artificially enhance its emotional appeal, show us home movie shots of the other characters' early lives, and comment on the likely reaction of the boyfriends in the audience when two men kiss onscreen (that is, she gives us hints on how to recognize the "closet cases" among us). None of this is good-humored--it's mostly designed to show us what deluded saps we viewers and the other characters are--and most of it is very funny, crudely colloquial (a gay man is a "'mo", short for "homo"), and keenly unsentimental about the sentimental appeal of certain cliches of romantic films. As DeeDee, Ricci is all bosoms, baby fat and bad attitude; she's charmless but irresistible, and she carries the film.
DeeDee's various victims are also well-played: Martin Donovan as Bill, who reflexively if gently corrects people's bad grammar, captures the affectless demeanor of someone who thinks he's motivated by decency but is in fact driven by loss and grief, in this case the memory of his longtime lover Tom's death from AIDS. His partner in grief is Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), Tom's sister and Bill's colleague, who has turned her loss into anger and cynicism and who delivers some of the film's most bitterly funny lines in a striking performance, and a striking departure, by Kudrow. DeeDee doesn't fool Lucia for a minute, but of course nobody takes her advice. And then there is Carl (Lyle Lovett), the town sheriff, loyal friend of Bill's, and frustrated but patient admirer of Lucia's. Let's just say that any movie is better when Lyle Lovett is in it.
The Opposite of Sex is hard to categorize; it's a black comedy that seeks to deliver some serious thoughts about love and loss and renewal, all under the corrosive scrutiny of the more-or-less irredeemable DeeDee. It's In and Out meets Longtime Companion meets Ferris Bueller's Day Off--at least, that's where you should look for it at Blockbuster, if you're not lucky enough to catch it on the big screen.