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 CITY OF ANGELS. Meg Ryan plays a doctor who operates on
human hearts, but is--oh so ironically--unsure of the nature of
her own. Nicolas Cage plays Seth, a creepy angel of God who falls
in love with her. Though reportedly inspired by Wim Wenders' wonderful
Wings of Desire, City of Angels has none of the
intelligence or charm of its predecessor. Instead, Cage follows
Ryan around Los Angeles in a late-eighties trench coat, striking
poses as though in an Aramis commercial. Who wants a guardian
angel if all he does is stare at you, and touch you all the time?
The rest of the time he hangs out with the other angels, who are
as thick as flies at the public library, where they "live."
Living, in this case, consists of shuttling from one side of the
library to the other with zombie-like detachment. I don't think
anyone in the audience would have been surprised if the angels
started feasting on human flesh like actual zombies, their salient
characteristic being that they are not human (as opposed to, say,
spiritual). Seth perks up a little when he becomes Ryan's boyfriend,
but overall this movie falls tantalizing close to the so-bad-it's-good-category,
without actually making it over the hump. Not surprisingly, annoying
drone/chant music is featured throughout. --Richter
GINGERBREAD MAN. Director Robert Altman evokes a dark,
gothic vision of the South in this adaptation of a John Grisham
story. Kenneth Branaugh plays a lawyer who gets himself involved
with a spooky waitress with a deranged stalker father. He tries
to save her, but, predictably, she's not the helpless waif he
thinks she is. The atmosphere in this movie is wonderful; a hurricane
named Geraldo threatens the cast from beginning to end, and the
countryside is perpetually choking on ash-colored Spanish moss.
But the plot is limp and inconsistent, and isn't it time that
we all faced the fact that lawyers make lousy heroes? --Richter
HE GOT GAME. Spike Lee can't help himself--he's always
taking on the grand themes, with varying levels of success. Here,
he takes on The Game, i.e. Life, i.e. Basketball--and he scores!
We Got Game is a long, ambitious movie about the country's
best high-school basketball player negotiating the difficult terrain
of success. Everyone wants a piece of Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray
Allen), a focused, talented, and personable kid--including his
father Jake (Denzel Washington), a murderer who's been let out
of prison briefly to try to persuade Jesus to sign up with a university
referred to only by the Kafkaesque moniker, "Big State."
The plot is so contrived that it actually turns a corner and becomes
believable again. (Who could make this up?) Somehow Lee pulls
it all off with aplomb. His filmmaking style is as fresh and wonderfully
visual as ever, and the story has some of the heart-stabbing tension
of Hoop Dreams. The score is by Aaron Copeland and Public
Enemy--which gives some indication of Lee's territorial range.
--Richter
MEN WITH GUNS. John Sayles takes us on a tour through a
jungle full of evil soldiers, exploited workers, and ruthless
guerrillas in Men With Guns, the latest offering from America's
most determined independent filmmaker. Our guide on this tour
is a complacent, middle class, Central American doctor (Federico
Luppi), who acts as a sort of stand-in for all complacent, comfortable
audience members. The doctor, safe in his shell, doesn't believe
the tales of atrocities and power abuse that he hears until he
voyages into the jungle himself, in search of a group of students
he trained to give medical care to isolated peasant villages.
Once there, he finds that most of his students have fled or been
murdered in the aftermath of a brutally suppressed peasant rebellion.
On his journey, the doctor picks up traveling companions, Wizard
of Oz-style, as he searches for some shard of justice and
humanity. Sayles tells this difficult story with style and grace,
despite a certain amount of visual clunkiness. And he had the
guts to write the dialogue in Spanish. --Richter
THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION. This film has been deceptively
marketed and shot as a fuzzy-wuzzy romantic comedy. Actually,
it's a difficult and long-winded melodrama. Jennifer Aniston plays
a pouty Brooklynite who dumps her boyfriend because she's smitten
with her gay male roommate; Paul Rudd is the sweet-faced love
object who reluctantly agrees to help the pregnant Aniston raise
her child. Their intimate but sexually frustrating relationship
would be plenty compelling if the movie could focus on it for
more than two seconds. Instead, peripheral characters are repeatedly
introduced and developed while the leads become disturbingly remote.
The more the plot shifts in emphasis (with Rudd flaking out on
the increasingly whiny Aniston to pursue a male lover), the more
the two come across as outsiders in their own story. Not much
rings true here: For all the script's insights about unrequited
love and the meaning of "family," the picture is too
leaden to be effective. One plus: Nigel Hawthorne (The Madness
of King George) almost saves the show as a gay theatre critic
who struggles to maintain dignity in the face of romantic humiliation.
--Woodruff
PAULIE. SKG Dreamworks finally got something right--a kids'
movie about a parrot. This is easily the finest talking-animal
story since Babe, with a tone just as sweet and effects
just as seamless. I tried my damnedest to locate the scenes where
animatronics or computer-generated effects replaced the real feathered
thing, only to fail miserably. The forgivably flimsy story follows
"Paulie" on a quest to reunite with a little girl he
once helped overcome stuttering. He flies and insults his way
from episode to episode, briefly teaming up with such thoroughly
watchable character actors as Gena Rowlands, Cheech Marin, Tony
Shaloub and Jay Mohr (who also provides the parrot's nasal-but-nice
voice). You know somebody's doing something right when even a
Buddy Hackett cameo is enjoyable. Okay, I might as well admit
it: This is the best parrot movie I have ever seen. --Woodruff
PRIMARY COLORS. In this wide-ranging, thought-provoking
movie, director Mike Nichols takes a hard look at how our political
system methodically churns out idealistic hypocrites just aching
to run the country. in This thinly disguised account of the 1992
Clinton primary campaign centers on Governor Jack Stanton (John
Travolta), a manipulative skirt-chaser with a big, throbbing heart;
his lovely wife Susan (Emma Thompson), a behind-the-scenes power
player; and the starry-eyed Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), the
campaign manager who wants to believe that Stanton truly cares
about the common man. Governor Stanton's supporters stick by their
man through bimbo flare-ups and a general array of dirty tricks,
but they suffer from his lack of moral sense. Nichols raises some
interesting questions about who believes in what, and why they
even bother, without being pedantic about it.
--Richter
SPECIES II. According to this movie, we shouldn't send
astronauts to Mars, because apparently they'll be infected with
alien DNA, come home, have dimly-lit sex with lots of large-breasted
women, impregnate them, and then produce alien offspring that
burst forth from the poor women's stomachs with the force of a
massive, right-wing conspiracy. Then there'll be more nudity and
violence and more nudity and violence and more nudity and violence,
until sensitive parents are forced to remove their youngsters
from the theater (oddly, the parents who did this when I saw Species
II did it during the sex, and not the violence). In fact,
this film has more naked people bumping in bed together than most
HBO After Dark movies. Plus, the dialogue is so abysmal that normally
astute character actor Michael Madsen just grunts all his embarrassing
lines at Marg Helgenberger, who just shouts all her lines back.
The weirdest part is that this abomination was directed by Peter
Medak, who made such critically acclaimed films as The Ruling
Class, Romeo is Bleeding, The Krays and the
extremely dark and intelligent A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
That one is about a couple who must care for their severely brain
damaged daughter. They pretend to speak for her, make odd little
jokes in her uncomprehending presence, and debate whether or not
it would be better to kill her. Not exactly the normal precursor
for a space-porno-horror flick that features alien sex fiends
and the highly naked "acting" of supermodel Natasha
Henstridge. --DiGiovanna
TARZAN AND THE LOST CITY. Casper Van Dien of Starship
Troopers anonymity stars in this uninteresting outing wherein
Tarzan must defend his beloved Africa from white looters. The
film gains points by portraying the Indiana Jones-styled Nigel
Ravens, an archeologist who thinks nothing of stealing local treasures,
as a ruthless and cowardly villain. I never understood why we
were supposed to cheer at the beginning of the first Indiana Jones
movie when he robs those people of their sacred gem. If only they'd
killed Indy and feasted on his imperialist flesh. Oh well. Jane
March, of The Lover, loses the last of her art-house cred
by appearing as Tarzan's fiancée Jane, but she at least
provides a beautiful face to distract audiences from this poorly
paced tale, which eschews clever storytelling for a deus-ex-machina
ending and several improbable assists from an African shaman with
the supernatural power to fill in plot holes. Maybe youngsters
would enjoy the scenes of Tarzan freeing trapped and caged animals,
and teaming up with gorillas to fight the white boys, but Tarzan
and the Lost City's 100 minutes will feel quite a bit longer
to adult moviegoers.
--DiGiovanna
TWO GIRLS AND A GUY. James Toback wrote the screenplay
for this playful, racy, one-set movie, but much of the dialogue
and action was improvised. It shows: Not only does Robert Downey
Jr. have an extended scene babbling weird noises in front of a
mirror, but there are times when Two Girls and A Guy comes
to a complete standstill, or heads off at a 90-degree angle for
no clear reason. Toback's smart, machine-gun-fast dialogue, which
abruptly kicks in whenever the actors run out of improvisation,
is so good it left me wishing Toback had spent more time developing
the story. Hovering over the movie like a bad smell is the question
of why the two female leads, Heather Graham and Natasha Wagner
(the most vital and engaging of the three), even bother to stick
around Downey's studio apartment after they learn he's been lying
to each of them for 10 months. We get an answer, but not soon
enough. Toback does have some challenging things to say about
the battle between sexual fidelity and emotional reality, but
he hasn't said enough here, and the film feels terribly unfinished.
Send it back! And while you're at it, rewrite the cop-out ending!
--Woodruff
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