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 BIO-DOME. That's right, it's based on the big sphere right
here in our own Sonoran Desert, but don't expect to see any saguaros
in the background. Cool, green hills frame most of the outdoor
shots, and you'll have plenty of time to examine the foliage in
this movie as you wait for something funny to happen. Pauly Shore
and Stephen Baldwin play two dumb junior-college students who
accidentally get locked in the bio-dome, a large, glass-encased
ecological experiment. While they're inside, they do the same
things they did outside: make fart jokes and hit on chicks. If
this is your idea of a good time, maybe you'll enjoy Bio-Dome--but
don't bet on it.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Those saddened by the recent
loss of Benny Hill will be pleased to learn the tradition of breast-based
humor still lives on with Mel Brooks. And may keep living on and
on, though eternal life would surely be hell if Mel Brooks were
in charge of the entertainment. This standard story of an undead
foreigner sucking the life force out of stacked young women features
no less than a lousy joke-a-minute. And basically, they're all
the same joke. Every now and then, something mildly funny happens,
but it's not worth all the cringing that goes on in between. Leslie
Nielsen, after doing the same act for the last zillion movies,
finally admits the truth: He's dead.
FATHER OF THE BRIDE PART II. A squeaky-clean peek at the
stress of fatherhood, with Steve Martin doing double-duty as the
expectant father and the expectant grandfather. Something about
Steve Martin is just so damn likable; even watching him run through
idiotic gags barely worthy of a sitcom is mildly pleasant. Still,
his performance here is awfully safe. In fact, everything about
this movie reeks of safety and suburbia, from the family's nice
middle-class house to the nice middle-class plot. Father of
the Bride Part II is a remake of the 1951 film Father's
Little Dividend, and retains traces of a stereotyped, 1950s'
kind of birth anxiety. Remember when fathers fainted in the waiting
room? Haven't we grown up just a little bit since then?
Grumpier Old Men. Walter Matthau is the boy and Sophia
Loren is the girl in this boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl comedy
that will disabuse you of the notion that age lends finesse and
wisdom to love. Jack Lemmon and Ann Margret play Matthau's next
door neighbors who weather a few romantic storms of their own.
Between misunderstandings, the men go fishing and bungle the wedding
plans of their respective progeny. Yes, they're grumpy; yes, they're
old; yes, it's as corny as Kansas in August. There are a few funny
moments, and Burgess Meredith is delightful as the Dirty Old Man,
but the greatest part of the whole movie are the out-takes that
run beneath the closing credits. If only the script were as funny
as Matthau is when he's forgetting his lines.
Heat. Somewhere inside this three-hour, overblown cops-and-robbers
epic there's a good movie hiding, but Michael Mann, the guy who
brought us Miami Vice, just couldn't keep it simple. The
action portions of the movie are tense, exciting and often beautifully
shot in desolate industrial landscapes as Robert DeNiro, playing
a thief, tries to outwit Al Pacino as the cop. The personal-relationships
parts of the movie, on the other hand, are boring and trite. The
characters slink around shiny LA hotspots talking like they've
been reading a lot of airport fiction and chasing it down with
self-help books. Pacino is annoyingly over-the-top as Lieutenant
Hanna, though the lousy script doesn't really make naturalistic
acting a possibility here. DeNiro is better as the thief McCauley,
engineering nifty Mission Impossible-style heists and turning
in a performance eerily reminiscent of the one he gave earlier
this year in Casino.
Jumanji. Need a break from ambiguity and complexity? Is
the meaninglessness of existence getting you down? Then shell
out some cash and retreat to Jumanji, a special effects-jammed
cross between an adventure movie and a haunted house thriller.
Robin Williams stars as a man who's been trapped inside a magical
board game for most of his life. When a couple of kids set him
free, they're obliged by the rules to finish playing. It's a conservationist's
dream: The game spews out endangered species like water from a
garden hose. The special effects are cool, but the computer-generated
animals aren't nearly as endearing as the dinosaurs in Jurassic
Park. Most of the animals don't interact with the human characters
much--they just run around. And you know that talent Robin Williams
has for being weirdly funny and manic? He doesn't use it here.
Nadja. Chain-smoking vampires and disaffected grunge kids
get together at last in this stylistically daring but conceptually
weak flick. Director Michael Almereyda mixes black and white film
with grainy pixelvision footage (shot with a toy camera) in an
exuberant, low-budget vision of what it means to be undead. Fans
of cheap filmmaking will love spotting the occasional microphone
taking a dip into the frame and noting the complete lack of a
special effects budget. Nadja tries to make fun of the
whole vampire genre and occasionally succeeds. Unfortunately,
it also falls prey to the same predictability and pretentiousness
it seeks to mock. Elina Lowensohn is lovely as the sultry bloodlapper
Nadja, but her lines are so over-the-top insipid that by the end,
you'll want to drive a stake through her heart.
12 Monkeys. A dark, elliptical thriller about a prisoner
sent back in time from a bleak and authoritarian future. Bruce
Willis turns in a convincing performance as the time-traveler
Cole, a man seduced by the past he's supposed to be studying.
Of course, when he arrives in the 1990s and mentions he's from
the future, he's thrown in the loony bin and left to rot. There
he meets fellow crazy man Brad Pitt and fetching psychiatrist
Madeline Stowe. Director Terry Gilliam presents an unsettling,
quasi SM view of a future world dripping with rubber and chains,
and the present doesn't look much better. The result is a gripping,
pessimistic story of both the arrogance and fragility of human
society.
Waiting to Exhale. The story of four African American women
looking for Mr. Right and finding, for the most part, Mr. Already
Married. This movie starts out with some gleeful, man-bashing
humor, then tapers out into sentimental overkill. Though the story
is ostensibly about women learning to feel complete by themselves,
the movie is actually obsessed with men, man-hunting, looking
pretty for men, and how great it is to have a man around, if you're
a woman. Angela Bassett gets stuck playing a completely unsympathetic
character, while Whitney Huston is saddled with the role of the
boring good girl. Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon are quite good
though, and this movie gets bonus points for portraying affluent,
African American women in Arizona.
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