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 ARMAGEDDON. Sorry to give it away, but the world doesn't
end in Armageddon. Instead, it's saved from a menacing
asteroid by a wild bunch of oil drillers who have the good old
American know-how it takes to drill a big hole in space rock so
they can put some nuclear weapons in there. The special effects
in this flick are great; everything blows up all the time, and
it's also very loud. (This is what $140 million looks like, friends.)
Other than that, Armageddon doesn't have a plot so much
as it has a series of chains that attach to the audience, then
jerk them. Director Michael Bay seems to be approaching Alfred
Hitchcock's dream of manipulating the audiences' reactions at
every moment, and it's hard not to resent this, at least once
the movie is over. But while it's going on, it's actually sort
of fun to be jerked. --Richter
CHINESE BOX. Wayne Wang, who directed Smoke, has
managed to make an almost entirely unintelligible movie about...it's
hard to say, exactly. It's kind of about the transfer of Hong
Kong to the Chinese, and it's sort of about a journalist, John
(Jeremy Irons), who rather conveniently comes down with a bad
case of incurable leukemia that has him scheduled to die at the
same moment the British are scheduled to pull out. John is an
odd fellow, an antihero from the old school--macho, self-obsessed,
frequently drunk. As soon as he's diagnosed with cancer, he runs
out and begins to stalk a young girl (the adorable Maggie Cheung)
with a video camera. Then he goes back to his apartment, where
he and his buddy Jim (Ruben Blades), another middle-aged ex-patriot,
obsessively ruminate over her image. Despite his fixation with
the girl, John is hopelessly in love with Vivian (Gong Li). But
Vivian loves Chang (Michael Hui), who refuses to marry her, because
she was once a prostitute. Watching these two blowsy, middle-aged
actors compete for the favors of Gong Li, indisputably one of
the most beautiful women in the world, is like watching two bulldogs
fight over an orchid. The melodrama heats up even more as John,
increasingly fascinated and repelled by Vivian's disreputable
past, takes a tour of Hong Kong's seedier sex dives. It's not
long before the whole thing degenerates into a pretentious version
of Showgirls, only more misogynistic. Sharing the blame
for this travesty are co-writers Jean-Claude Carriere, Larry Gross
and the ever-annoying Paul Theroux. --Richter
DIRTY WORK. Norm Macdonald has the sort of face and attitude
that's funny even if he just stands there doing nothing. Unfortunately,
in Dirty Work, Macdonald runs around spewing stillborn
half-jokes and pulling unimaginative revenge schemes on stereotypical
villains. Big dogs hump big dogs; skunks hump little dogs; Macdonald
gets ass-raped in jail; the highly obnoxious Artie Lange (Mad
TV) and highly dead Chris Farley try to squeeze laughs out
of their corpulence; Gary Coleman and Adam Sandler appear for
so-over-the-top-they're-under-the-bottom cameos; Chevy Chase and
Don Rickles do what they always do, tiredly--and none of it is
funny. Then again, if you willingly go to a movie directed by
Bob Saget (of America's Stupidest Home Videos fame), you
have no one to blame but yourself. --Woodruff
DOCTOR DOLITTLE. The Eddie Murphy version of the classic
story spends almost all its screen time on the frustrating issue
of whether or not others believe in Murphy's ability to talk to
the animals. At home, Murphy has problems with his wife (the ever-glaring
Kristen Wilson) and children, from whom he is alienated; at work,
Murphy struggles to overcome his own medical cynicism (as exemplified
by his greedy partner Oliver Platt, who wants to sell off their
practice). Everybody thinks he's going crazy, so Murphy spends
time in a mental hospital, and then goes into denial about his
powers. What this means is that the animals, including a dog voiced
by Norm MacDonald and a tiger voiced by Albert Brooks, seem to
exist solely to help Murphy overcome his problems. Their wisecracks
are somewhat cute, but there's little magic surrounding the animal
world. Mostly, we're supposed to laugh at how much their comments
(stuff like "Hey baby, whassup?") mirror those of humans
in stereotypical situations. Not much fun in my book. --Woodruff
DON'T LOOK BACK. One of the best documentaries ever made,
D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back follows 23-year-old Bob
Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. Pennebaker helped invent the
unobtrusive, cinema verité style that's become the common
visual grammar of documentaries, but when this film was released
in 1967 it was daring and new. Toting a 16mm black-and-white news
camera, Pennebaker trails Dylan backstage, at concerts, through
parties. Dylan eyes the camera with a suspicion the MTV generation
can only regard with overwhelming nostalgia. The famous opening
sequence alone is a study in self-conscious cool, as Dylan stands
in an alley, flipping through a stack of cards printed with (some
of) the lyrics to Subterranean Homesick Blues, blatantly
looking off camera for instructions, with an expression on his
face that says when is this going to be over? (A rabbinical
Allen Ginsberg lurks in the background.) This is the only part
of the film that's staged; the rest has a spontaneous feel, though
Dylan continues to be a bit of a cipher, alternately generous
and mean-spirited as he enthusiastically plays bits of songs he
loves for friends, then enthusiastically makes fun of people less
smart or less cool than he is. Pennebaker takes it all in without
being overwhelmed by judgment or reverence. The result is an astonishing,
potent portrait of the artist as a young man. --Richter
HANGING GARDEN. The word "haunting" seems to
have been invented to describe this film about a deeply unhappy
family who live on a hill in a lovely house surrounded by a wonderful
garden. But surely this is a post-fall garden, as nothing really
good seems to grow between any of the family members. There's
William, the prodigal (and gay) son returning for the first time
in 10 years to attend his sister's wedding; his mother Iris, who
has decorated the house all in purple and named her tomboy daughter
Violet; and Poppy, the alcoholic patriarch who has made damn sure
that no one in his family is any less unhappy than he is. During
a long weekend, family secrets are revealed, new alliances are
forged, etc., but somehow this film manages not to be clichéd,
probably because of the unsentimental, quiet portrait of just
how unhappy an unhappy family can be. We haven't seen a childhood
this bad on film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. But unlike
Welcome to the Dollhouse, Hanging Garden allows its characters
to escape their horrible past, or at least try to. --Richter
HIGH ART. "High melodrama" would be a more apt
description of this ambitious but annoying soap opera by first-time
director Lisa Cholodenko. Radha Mitchell plays Syd, a twenty-something
Manhattanite stuck in a boring heterosexual relationship. When
her ceiling starts to leak she goes to meet the Bohemian upstairs
neighbor, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), a heroine-snorting lesbian.
Syd seems to have no choice but to fall for Lucy, given the boringness
of her job and the one-dimensionality of her boyfriend. It's a
walk on the wild side, but a predictable one. Cholodenko has a
good eye and the cinematography is appropriately lush, but rather
than being beautiful, it just makes it all seem pretentious. --Richter
I WENT DOWN. Male-identified films, especially those grouped
within the buddy genre, often go out of their way to direct audience
attention away from queer interpretations of male-male relationships.
In some ways that holds true for this Irish production--we get
the mandatory female love interest; a three-second sex scene;
and plenty of discussions about female hardware. The much more
interesting and consequential narrative, however, involves the
burgeoning Odd Couple-esque relationship between a doe-eyed
ex-con named Git and his bumbling partner. They're brought together
because both are working off debts of sorts to a mob boss, and
initially their personality differences result in animosity and
frustration. The satisfying and self-referential ending is welcome
after the increasingly tedious and annoyingly weak comedic elements
(madcap antics, pratfalls) that occur throughout the film. --Higgins
LETHAL WEAPON 4. The idealized masculinity initially presented
in the first Lethal Weapon is finally called into question
in the fourth installment in the series. This makes for an overall
engaging action film, especially as the genre tends most often
to present clichéd, unsympathetic, hypermasculine fighting
machines. The former polarization of the nihilistic Martin Riggs
(Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) collapses into
the middle, resulting in numerous references to the aging bodies
of the characters (and, by extension, the actors) and their inability
to live up to former expectations of themselves. This reconfiguration
of masculinity is perhaps an attempt to update a series which
began over a decade ago, though it still offers a rather narrow
definition of manhood. The story itself is standard cop-chase-villain
fare, largely an excuse to showcase the fine-tuned banter of Riggs
and Murtaugh. Rene Russo and Joe Pesci return in supporting roles;
and though the addition of Chris Rock is an obvious attempt to
attract younger viewers, he's nevertheless enjoyable as Murtaugh's
son-in-law. The generic convention of foreign adversaries is forced
and outright offensive at times, as the jokes often poke fun at
the ethnicity of the Chinese bad guys (to wit, the tired "flied
lice" dig). Though we can expect to find such stereotypes
in other incarnations of the genre, it appears that this film
closes the book on the series as the lethal weapon of the title,
Riggs, concludes his inner struggle by becoming a family man.
--Higgins
THE OPPOSITE OF SEX. Forget about wholesome sincerity in
writer/director Don Roos' tale of unrequited love among gays and
schoolteachers. Sarcastic self-cancellation rules, as the story's
narrator, Christina Ricci, sourly criticizes all the storytelling
conventions that come with the depressing territory. The result
is a funny, energetic movie with a severe case of multiple-personality
disorder. The travails of the spurned Martin Donovan form a fast-moving
but not terribly compelling plot that provides Roos plenty of
material for the bitchy Ricci (a manipulative catalyst throughout
the story) to verbally trample. The movie's inability to keep
its heart in one place might become annoying if it weren't for
Roos' great lines of dialogue, most of which he gives to Lisa
Kudrow, playing Donovan's cynical best friend. Kudrow's gift for
sharp comic delivery ensures that the picture remains the opposite
of dull throughout. --Woodruff
OUT OF SIGHT. In the hierarchy of adaptations based on
Elmore Leonard books, this one ranks up there with Get Shorty.
The direction (by Steven Soderbergh, of Sex, Lies and Videotape
fame) expresses the Leonard style perfectly, nudging humor out
of naturalistic dialogue and displaying a whimsically carefree
attitude about matters of life and death without letting all the
steam out of the story. George Clooney, as a bank robber, and
Jennifer Lopez, as his police pursuer, make an extremely good-looking
couple; and their two verbal tennis matches (one in a car's trunk,
the other in a hotel) are the film's sexual-spark-filled highlights.
The smoothly developing romantic mood begins in sunny Miami and
ends in snowy nighttime Detroit, so even if you see Out of Sight
during the middle of the day you might walk out expecting a cool,
dark sky. A standout supporting cast includes Albert Brooks, Catherine
Keener, Ving Rhames, Get Shorty alumnus Dennis Farina,
and a couple of uncredited surprises. --Woodruff
SMALL SOLDIERS. Director Joe Dante and a team of five writers
have given the Child's Play concept a military spin: Now
instead of an evil spirit inside a plastic moppet, a super-destructive
munitions chip has been mistakenly installed in the latest line
of military action figures. The result is a bunch of wisecracking,
pop-culture-quoting commandos who proceed to tear up part of a
suburban neighborhood. Their mission: to destroy a similarly intelligent
set of pacifist dolls, the leader of whose whiskered face literally
implies "underdog." The movie contains loads of talent,
including the late Phil Hartman and vocalizations by the primary
leads from both The Dirty Dozen and This Is Spinal Tap.
Copious special effects blend seamlessly with the live action,
and the ideas are overflowing--the creators have even thrown in
the kitchen sink (complete with garbage disposal). But unlike
Dante's similar Gremlins movies, the anarchy becomes too
chaotic for its own good. The satiric sensibility has no focus,
and the human characters have less personality than the dolls.
Though there are clever minds behind the screenplay, the hypocrisy
is overwhelming: a mind-numbingly violent criticism of military
figures? Which, by the way, are for sale at your local toy store?
Talk about self-contradiction. Twelve-year-old boys will love
it; everyone else can expect a headache. --Woodruff
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