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Film Clips
BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE. Martin Lawrence plays a svelte, young, Los Angelino FBI agent who likes to pretend he is actually an elderly, obese woman from South Carolina. Nia Long plays a bank robbery suspect who is on her way to visit her elderly, obese, South Carolinan grandmother, whom she hasn't seen for years. It's a cross-dressing match made in heaven as Lawrence and Long enact a strange love on the boundary line between sexualities. Don't go if you're looking for yucks; it seems that Lawrence has well understood that gender confusion is no laughing matter. --DiGiovanna
CHICKEN RUN. Peter Lord and Nick Park, the British animation team behind the Wallace and Gromit adventures, turn their attention to the lowly chicken in this tale of one hen's fight to lead her flock out of slavery and on to uncertain freedom. It's a wonderful feat of clay for adult audiences, for whom the wordplay and subtext about commercial greed and social justice (set in 1950s York) are as much fun to watch as the engineering and antics of the anthropomorphized animals themselves. Be advised, however, that at least one chicken was harmed about 20 minutes into the making of this movie, a fact that did not win over the under-8 crowd at a recent test screening. Like their plucky onscreen heroine Ginger, these fair-minded viewers did not soon recover from the cruel fate visited on the eggless Edwina. The wails of protest suggest a new generation of vegans may have been born. Not even the voice of Mel Gibson, as fugitive Yank yardbird Rocky, could persuade them that justice would ultimately be served, as it is, sans white meat. --Wadsworth
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, and 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, a 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
I DREAMED OF AFRICA. "This is a true story," this film begins. Not the ubiquitous "based on a true story," mind you, but "true." How disappointing, then, to experience nearly two hours of simpering Kim Basinger and vapid Vincent Pérez's wooden acting, following the devastating car accident that's the catalyst for a truly epic Italy-to-Africa adventure. I Dreamed of Africa's sincere script is hopelessly marred by poor editing, unimaginative photography, and a cattle ranch set that looks like the manicured backdrop for a safari-themed J. Crew catalog (fragile hurricane lamps, expensive hardwood furniture, and vast, lush lawns in a place where the leading lady boasts, in her alternately mud-splattered and sun dappled Banana Republic wardrobe, "This is the first rain we've had in six months!") More disappointing still is the preponderance of flat, panoramic helicopter shots forever looking down, like God above, on the African savanna where herd after fleeing herd of camels, elephants, antelope and giraffe cavort for our pleasure (or in panic from thudding chopper blades?). Despite apparently noble intentions, the unforgettable life of Kuki Gallmann unfortunately (even incredibly) makes for a pretty forgettable film. Too bad, as the real-life Gallmann's personal risks and losses are matched only, as the film denotes, by her enduring legacy as one of Africa's most ardent conservationists. --Wadsworth
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2. It's cuteness and more cuteness and Jesus Cute Incarnate as the incredibly photogenic Tom Cruise and the photogenically incredible Thandie Newton team up to stop some not-as-cute people from destroying the world. Well, from destroying Australia, which is really not quite so bad, and might even be welcomed by some, but is still the kind of thing that the forces of goodness and cuteness must act to stop. The perfect movie for people who like watching other people who are pretty, and who also like to look at things, at least when those things are exploding. --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
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 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. Yeehaw! --Wadsworth
WHERE THE HEART IS. It's been quite a year of revelatory road trips for actress Natalie Portman, who tore off across the desert with Susan Sarandon in a "borrowed" gold Mercedes a few months ago in Anywhere But Here. In that film, she was a wholesome, college-bound 14-year-old insightful beyond her years. This week, Portman surfaces in a similar but more clichéd context as prego 17-year-old Novalee Nation, a naive optimist and lightning rod for mixed fortune, who leaves her trailer-park existence with lean, mean Willy Jack Pickins in a rusted-out Chevy with a leaky fuel line. There's a moment of unintentional parody on the open road when, asked where she wants to go, her reply is, "Anywhere but here." Her new life begins not in Beverly Hills, however, but a Wal-Mart in Sequoia, OK, where mysterious characters like Moses the portrait photographer (Keith David), the eccentrically sainted Sister Husband (Stockard Channing), five-time single mom Lexie (Ashley Judd) and town genius Forney (James Frain) conspire to give her and baby Americus a life filled with opportunity, prosperity and creative fulfillment. This tragic-comedy is light-hearted to the point of patronizing, but in its finer moments it embraces the notion that life is too serious, particularly when you're at the bottom of the heap, to take at face value. A likely hit with the unexpectedly expecting, and fans of country-western lyrics. --Wadsworth
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