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Film Clips
BATTLEFIELD EARTH. Would that I had made this plot up: business school graduates from outer space have conquered the earth, and, after a thousand years of occupation, are planning to kill the few remaining humans. These humans have been reduced to caveman level, but somehow miraculously learn to fly jet fighter planes and use nuclear weapons, all in the course of one week. Battlefield Earth may be the most relentlessly stupid movie of recent memory, and is a testament to the utter badness possible when one man's vanity (producer John Travolta) is allowed to reign supreme. --DiGiovanna
THE BIG KAHUNA. Kevin Spacey is no doubt one of the finest actors in American cinema, but vanity pieces are unbecoming to anyone, and The Big Kahuna is, indeed, Spacey's vanity piece. His endless monologues get a bit tiring, but Kahuna succeeds at points in spite of this because of the fine performances of Peter Facinelli and Danny DeVito. Set in a single room, Kahuna is a filmed play about three businessmen at different points in their careers. Spacey is the mid-life maniac, living solely for the job. Facinelli is the young man whose dedication to Jesus outweighs his dedication to his work, and DeVito is the older man who's come to realize the hollowness of his profession. The best bit by far is DeVito's final monologue, where he equates religion and salesmanship, and pleads for something beyond either of them. You'll have to love very talky movies to enjoy Kahuna, but the whole enterprise becomes worthwhile in the final moments, when DeVito, who evades his tendency to be a scenery chewer, gives the performance of his life. --DiGiovanna
CENTER STAGE. What does it take to be a ballet dancer? Center Stage, a dance flick intended exclusively for starry-eyed young ballerinas, lets us know: good shoes, good feet and good attitude. Three young women deficient in these skills struggle to get them during a year of training at the New York school of the American Ballet Company (read: American Ballet Theatre). Jody, played by lovely real-life dancer Amanda Schull of the San Francisco Ballet, can't seem to get her legs to turn out properly but she absorbs much in her Bildungsroman year. She learns (surprise!) that star danseurs are not necessarily nice men and that a girl with the wrong body type can still become a prima ballerina (this is a surprise). There's a sweetness about this movie's affection for dance, and the dancing is the best thing about it. Ethan Stiefel, one of the world's best male dancers and a real-life principal at ABT, plays the cad who wantonly beds young Jody, but he makes up for it by dancing spectacularly through some Balanchine works and new choreography composed just for the movie. --Regan
ERIN BROCKOVICH. Steven Soderbergh directs this based-on-a-true-story about a personal injury lawyer and fallen beauty queen, the unlikely legal team to stumble across the most lucrative toxic tort case in U.S. history. Julia Roberts and Albert Finney star as Brockovich and attorney Ed Masry, who represent the small, desert town of Hinkley, California, against monolithic utility Pacific Gas and Electric. Exactly 10 years after her Pretty Woman debut, Roberts returns to the screen with the same makeup and wardrobe, augmented by three small children, a Hell's Angel boyfriend with a heart of gold, and a finely honed sense of outrage for all powers-that-be. This virtuous fight for truth and justice may be a box-office hit nationally, but it's sure to flop down the Cali coast in Avila Beach, where a post-Hinkley Brockovich and Masry blew in like ambulance chasers in 1996 after the disastrous Unocal oil spill, conflating fears and charming hundreds of clients with Brockovich's trademark cleavage. Their trumped-up charges were trounced in court, leaving Masry to a hasty retreat with 50-percent of his clients' property damage settlements. Oops. Moral of the story? Hero today, pawn tomorrow. --Wadsworth
THE FLINTSTONES: VIVA ROCK VEGAS. A comedy with but two jokes, The Flintstones is an inverted paean to despair, the "stone age" standing in for the stoniness of the human heart, the pre-historic era signifying the eternal absence of an earlier innocence. The film tells of how Wilma and Fred, amidst the dinosaurs of desperation, find each other and attempt, in a mime of love, to create a bulwark against the pain of existence and the hollowness of life. At the theater where I saw this film, young children sat in an unselfconsciously stony silence, not laughing, sometimes stirring restlessly in their seats, having hoped for an experience, having found only the meaningless glory of special effects. --DiGiovanna
GLADIATOR. Sort of a historical variant on the old Marvel Comics What If stories--you know, like "What if Spiderman had been Emperor of Rome?" or "What if the Hulk had fought in the ancient gladiator arenas?" Russell Crowe stars as Maximus, Roman legionnaire who falls out of favor with the mad emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Maximus is sold into slavery and eventually becomes more popular than the emperor when he starts winning big in the gladiator fights. Worth seeing for the massive battle sequences and great photography, but, despite some pretensions, Gladiator is only about as deep as any other swords-and-sandals epic. --DiGiovanna
RETURN TO ME. I loved the short-lived sitcom The Bonnie Hunt Show, which years ago was written by and starred the flaxen-haired Second City comedienne as an intrepid TV interviewer. It was charming, witty, good-natured and believable, and I was apparently the only person in the country besides producer David Letterman who watched it. Return to Me, co-written and directed by Hunt and set in her old stomping grounds of Chi-town, brings that gift of good character to the screen with a star-studded cast: David Duchovny, Minnie Driver, David Alan Grier, James Belushi, Hunt herself and Carroll O'Connor (who, far from his Archie Bunker persona, plays a grandfather who sounds like an Irish Winnie-the-Pooh). Unlike your typical romantic comedy about obsession and low self-esteem, this love story is saturated with sweet relationships. It's as if the writers were assigned a list of all things universally heartwarming--big dogs, little kids, Italian restaurants, wisecracking old men, great apes that speak sign-language, a life-saving heart-transplant, etc. etc.--and told to spin a story out of them. In lesser hands, it would be a ghastly mess, but the writing sparkles and the chemistry hums like a Sinatra tune in spring. You'd need a heart full of vipers and mustard gas to resist its feel-good vibe. --Wadsworth
ROMEO MUST DIE. People who live under the disempowered delusion that "violence doesn't solve anything" have never enjoyed a Jet Li movie. Here, the kick-ass Black Mask hero breaks out of a Hong Kong prison to avenge his brother's death on the mean streets of San Francisco. Rival black and Chinese gang warfare provide the backdrop for this über-violent ballet of martial arts, automatic weapons, expensive car crashes and high-powered explosives. The only parts that hurt, though, are Isaiah Washington and D.B. Woodside's cringingly bad dialogue. Despite the hangings, betrayals, innocent deaths and gunshot wounds, this remains a good-natured action-comedy built on Republican family values like free enterprise and the power of patriarchy. Woo hoo! As Li says while buying weapons and stealing cars on the open market, "What a country!" Also starring Aaliyah, Delroy Lindo and Russel Wong. --Wadsworth
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson give great performances as decorated U.S. Marine veterans who served together in the jungles of Vietnam. They are, unquestionably, fun to watch. Thirty years later, in 1998, Jackson is being court-marshaled for the slaughter of 83 unarmed Yemenite women, children and elderly people. Hung out to dry in this political op, he turns to Jones--a second-rate, semi-retired alcoholic lawyer--to defend him. While on the surface Rules is a battlefield and courtroom drama tackling the sticky issues of protecting conflicting U.S. interests abroad, the particular path it follows is blood-soaked and laughably propagandist. Based on a story by former U.S. Secretary of the Navy James Webb, in the hands of director William Friedkin this fiction quickly abandons moral ambiguity in favor of emotion, manipulating common fears and our sense of justice to deliver the antiseptic message that no matter what front-page pictures and outraged politicians have to say, you can bet the stars and stripes our military has a right to shoot civilians in a crisis. The closeups of black-veiled women and Arab children firing UZIs at American soldiers is second only to the scene where the North Vietnamese soldier testifies in court on Jackson's behalf, solemnly saluting him afterwards. The end notes further add to the illusion that this is a true story. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, indeed. --Wadsworth
SMALL TIME CROOKS. Woody Allen pretty much gives up on originality in this collection of rejected Catskill comic gags. While there are few laughs, there's an endearing quality to this tale, which focuses on older people taking one more shot at their dreams. Woody even makes the daring move of pairing himself with Tracey Ullman, who's only young enough to be his daughter, not his granddaughter. Older audiences seem to be enjoying this movie, and it's nice to see something aimed at that age bracket, but one wishes there had been a little more ingenuity in the comedy. --DiGiovanna
U-571. If you like war movies, you'll really like U-571, which packs even more tension, claustrophobia and brinkmanship into its tale about a young Naval officer whose dream of commanding a U.S. submarine is unfortunately fulfilled during a costly covert op during the Battle of the Atlantic, 1942. Bill Paxton commands the ancient S-33, the American sub disguised to rendezvous with crippled Nazi sub U-571; Matthew McConaughey is the young lieutenant forced to man the German tub when his own and attendant captain and crew are blown to sub-smithereens in an ambush. Young Lt. Andy Tyler (McConaughey), steely Chief Klough (Harvey Keitel) and a passel of greenhorn enlisted men with names like Tank, Trigger, Griggs and Rabbit then attempt to turn the tides of war with one torpedo, a sinking ship, and almost no hope for survival. Writer/director Jonathan Mostow's formulaic dialogue is more than compensated for by dramatic underwater camera work, tension-building sound effects, and a war made real by live bodies rather than dead ones (e.g., German-speaking German soldiers, who get equal billing with the Americans). All that, and you get to see ER's annoying Dr. Dave (Erik Palladino) shot out of a torpedo cannon. Woo hoo! --Wadsworth
VIRGIN SUICIDES. They say good books make bad movies (just check out all those crappy Jesus flicks), but in this case it turns out not to be true. Sophia Coppola's adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides Virgin Suicides is both cinematic and true to the novel. It's not without problems (notably some of the worst wigs ever) but this odd story of a house full of beautiful teenage girls, and the boys who obsess over them, is moody, eerie and beautifully photographed. Well scripted voice-over narration by Giovanni Ribisi, and overall good casting help to make this one of the most interesting first films of recent memory. --DiGiovanna
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