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 CAREER GIRLS. Mike Leigh's impressionistic portrait of
the changes in the lives of two young women is sweet, refreshing,
and original. When Annie (Lynda Steadman) comes to London to visit
Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), her former best friend, the two haven't
seen each other since graduating from college. Their initial awkwardness
fades away as the pair re-visit the site of previous betrayals
and adventures; Leigh pops us back and forth in time so we can
observe the changes in the character's lives. We see them in college,
neurotic, full of ticks (Hannah has the annoying habit of using
her hand as a talking puppet) and incessantly listening to The
Cure. This alternates with footage of the two in the present,
well-dressed and still slightly off-kilter, but with the grace
and perspective to finally understand the confusion they'd gone
through as undergraduates: Imagine Mary and Rhoda having a reunion,
but with thick British accents and adult situations. What's more,
the acting in this movie is wonderful--strange and natural at
once. --Richter
EXCESS BAGGAGE. Alicia Silverstone plays an irascible rich
girl who stages her own kidnapping to get attention from daddy;
Benicio Del Toro plays a hapless thief who complicates the plan
by stealing Alicia's car while she's tied up in the trunk. It's
an inspired premise for a romantic comedy, but the rest of the
movie feels as lackadaisical as an afternoon at a truck stop.
Del Toro does an interesting sleepy-eyed Brando shtick, and the
roadside Pacific Northwest locations have a misty charm, but it
seems like somebody squeezed all the juice out of the plot and
dialogue. Nothing much happens, and even the love story seems
half-hearted. One minute the spoiled Silverstone is kicking Del
Toro, the next she's asking him if he likes her tummy, and all
it takes is a "Yes" for bam--true love. Say what? Time
for the screenwriters to take It Happened One Night 101
again. Edgy supporting performances from Harry Connick Jr. and
Christopher Walken don't hurt, but they're nothing we haven't
seen before. --Woodruff
FIRE DOWN BELOW. Perhaps the best feature of this film
is that they can use the same title for the inevitable pornographic
parody. Steven Seagal, dressed in some of the most appalling leather
outfits since Pamela Anderson's few clothed scenes in Barb
Wire, stars as a bizarrely violent E.P.A. agent on the trail
of evil polluter Chris Christofferson. Posing as a missionary
carpenter (you figure out the symbolism), he goes to a small Appalachian
community and starts repairing porches in the hopes that someone
will be grateful enough to turn state's evidence. When this bone-headed
plan doesn't work, he just blows his cover and starts hurting
people until the pollution stops. Then he hurts more people because
he thinks the judicial system wasn't tough enough on the polluters.
Then he marries the woman whom the community has ostracized because
they think she murdered her father when really her brother, who
had been molesting her, murdered their father and got her to take
the rap before joining the evil polluters and getting caught in
a cave-in within the toxic-waste-filled coal mine after a shoot-out
with Steven Seagal, who escapes so he can marry the aforementioned
ostracized woman. Then the movie is over and nobody else gets
their ass kicked while the credits roll. --DiGiovanna
G.I. JANE. In this calculated women-in-the-military story,
Demi Moore pulls out all the stops (not to mention all her hair)
to make a career comeback, while Ridley Scott pulls out all his
telephoto lenses to score another feminist hit like he did with
Thelma & Louise. The results are powerful yet trite:
Scenes of intense Navy SEALs training provoke an almost S&M
fascination but very little direct meaning; and Moore's aggressive,
muscled performance, while gutsy, only exacerbates the script's
lack of nuance. According to G.I. Jane, it's somehow a
"victory" when a woman proves she can endure torture
and kill Arabs as good as any man. This moral has far less to
do with society evolving its perspective than it does with women
simply emulating men in order to inhabit the man's world. Moore's
triumphant line, "Suck my dick," says it all--since
she has symbolically become male, sexual politics no longer matter.
Gee, wouldn't it be great if all women could be just like Demi?
--Woodruff
IN THE COMPANY OF MEN. This terse, low-budget feature by
first-time director Neil LaBute presents a hyperbolic, deeply
creepy vision of American manhood. Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard
(Michael Martin), two corporate ladder-climbers, coldly decide
to woo, bed, and ditch a beautiful, vulnerable deaf woman to obtain
a kind of blanket payback for every woman who's ever hurt them.
As David Mamet's spirit chuckles in the background, LaBute shows
us a nasty, competitive, male-dominated world that thrives on
cruelty--or at least hides it really well. Chad and Howard exist
in a misogynistic whirl, as they try to find someone to blame
for the fact that the world hasn't given them everything they
believe they've been promised. LaBute shows us more than we want
to see about how aggression, competition and romance blur together
in one ugly blob in this sick, old-boy company--and he does it
from a sly, satirical vantage point that allows him to criticize
that culture at the same time. Special bonus note: In this movie,
someone is always eating a sandwich. --Richter
KULL THE CONQUERER. Kull is essentially a porno film without
the hardcore: hyper-muscular guys, and women in bad Frederick's
of Hollywood outfits mouth inane dialogue that they seem to have
just memorized, all in the name of getting to the sex scenes.
Kevin Sorbo, TV's Hercules, plays Kull, who goes from barbarian
peasant to King in the first five minutes of the film. He then
moves swiftly to marry evil goddess Akivasha, played by Tia Carrera's
leather-uphostelered breasts. This is obviously a big mistake,
and leads to a number of swordfights choreographed to heavy metal
music. In fact, with all the men in long hair, bangs and codpieces,
Kull sometimes seems to be a collection of MTV videos from the
late '80s. In spite of all this, Kull is campy in a way that's
not overly cute and moves at a swift enough pace to keep adults
from falling asleep while junior thrills to the manly fight scenes
and makes faces at the yucky parts where Kull kisses girls. --DiGiovanna
MIMIC. Mira Sorvino stars in this dim-witted, dimly lit
monster flick about gigantic cockroaches living in the New York
subway system. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Chronos)
and co-penned by John Sayles and Stephen Soderbergh, you'd expect
the film to be a triumph of independent invention and spirit,
but no luck. Despite intriguing Kafka-esque possibilities in which
las cucarachas take on the appearance of humans in order to walk
the streets undetected, the picture soon devolves into Alien-style
cat-and-mouse games full of shadowy corridors and dripping bug
goo. Tons of dripping bug goo. Though always attractive and likable,
Sorvino is rather embarrassing as an action hero, and the huge
cockroaches never prove as creepy as the real-life little ones.
Get out of my sight, you steenking cockroach movie. --Woodruff
SHE'S SO LOVELY. This movie, starring Sean Penn, Robin
Wright Penn and John Travolta, was made from a screenplay written
by John Cassavetes, founding father of independent film. His
son Nick directed She's So Lovely from a script that's
vintage Cassavetes--full of confused, screaming, warm-hearted
barflies overflowing with a voracious,
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