MOVIES - Wide Release
All reviews based on a five star rating system
Backbeat
Given the galactic fame of its subjects, you could expect Backbeat to count on our collective investment in John, Paul, George, Pete, and Stu (doesn't have quite the right ring, does it?). Happily, our Liverpudlian heroes look and talk with startling verisimilitude, especially in the case of big Beatle John Lennon. He's played by Ian Hart, who already assayed a slightly older bandleader in The Hour and the Times. Here, the teenaged John is all teddy-boy leathers, quiffed-up hair, and the baddest attitude on either side of the Mersey.
The film is mainly about his friendship with art-school chum Stuart Sutcliffe (American Stephen Dorff), whom he convinces to pick up a bass guitar in 1960, just before the former Silver Beetles head for a baptism of fire on Hamburg's sleazy Reeperbahn .
As a musician, Sutcliffe can barely keep up with the band's rough 'n' ready R&B covers, but he's as handsome as James Dean, and his serene aura of cool inspires and calms the perpetually insecure, verbally corrosive, Lennon. That's until the bassist, actually more interested in painting than pop, meets Astrid Kirchherr (played stunningly by Twin Peaks's German-born Sheryl Lee) and gets introduced to Euro-groovies who don't give a pfennig for Gene Vincent. Eventually he asks "Who needs the Beatles anyway?", triggering a major crisis for John, jealous of just about everyone in sight.
Much has been made of the homoerotic underpinnings of this bohemian triangle, but the actual nature of the sexuality at hand is virtually irrelevant. What Backbeat excels at depicting is the intense emotional bonds that develop between anxious young men.
Given what we know about the parentless Lennon, his desire to hold onto the aristocratic Sutcliffe and reach the even more sophisticated Kirchherr, who would shape the band's early image, seems perfectly understandable. The psychology is sound--John went on to depend on the reliable-but-dull McCartney and find his own Astrid in Yoko, a boho from another Axis power--but Ian Softley, a former video director who did some of the writing, is less handy with narrative development. Softley compensates with a strong visual eye and an over-theatrical hand: characters are forever walking in just on cue, and John's big explosion at a trendy Hamburg jazz club is one of several scenes which seem more histrionic than historical. And the way he ogles female flesh is all too authentically '60s, man.
These shortcomings, although systemic, don't interfere with the raw energy of the acting or the music. With the rights to Lennon-McCartney tunes prohibitively expensive (see a certain Mr. Jackson about that), the film-makers stuck with the black American music which intoxicated our lads in the first place, and wisely hired Don Was to assemble first-rate alterna-rockers, from Sonic Youth, REM, Nirvana, et cetera, to pound out "Twist and Shout" and other spine-tingling raveups. The real Beatles weren't this tight, but more than 30 years later, we've earned the right to hear a better-sounding racket.
Being Human
Is this where Bill Forsyth, the Scottish director of such charming fare as Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, has ended up? Washed up on the shoals of empty-headed self-importance? Being Human isn't just a bad movie in search of a nonexistent audience, it's five bad movies, lasting more than two sad hours together. Each stars Robin Williams as an eternal shnook called Hector.
Unlike the proud fellow who led the Trojans in battle and was eventually killed by Achilles, this Hector is a true non-starter, forever falling into the cracks of history. First he's a neolithic hunter who watches his family get taken away by marauding boat guys. Then, in the most effective sequence, he's a Roman slave to a businessman (John Turturro) so pathetic, the local hotshots want his head. Next, he's travelling through Medieval Europe (actually Scotland again) with a tough-minded priest (Vincent D'Onofrio), and finds himself distracted from going home by a lovely Italian woman. A member of a Portuguese party shipwrecked on the coast of Morocco, the 16th-century Hector is (almost) more preoccupied by a failed love affair than with survival. Finally, he's a modern New Yorker, too involved in his various shady enterprises to keep up with the children of his broken marriage.This last sequence is supposed to tie things up with a sweetly jaundiced eye towards where evolution has, or hasn't, taken us. Too bad it's just depressing.
The whole film substitutes unrelieved melancholia for profundity and adventure, and the contemporary part is so ennervated, it makes cave-dwelling look fun. The acting isn't even good: Lorraine Bracco, as Hector's brassy new girl-friend, is a poor foil for Williams, who remains in tight-lipped, aw-shucks mode throughout. Could anything have saved Being Human? The director's attempt at unifying the tales, by having an actor named Dave Jones appear in all of them, is too feeble to matter. Still, somebody out there might have mildly enjoyed the movie's sulky mood if Forsyth hadn't scoured the globe for the worst possible narrator. Theresa Russell, the only woman with a voice more grating than Bracco's, introduces each segment like it's a bedtime story for the mentally deranged--when she's not cloyingly patronizing, she makes words like "woman" and "love" sound like epithets of contempt.
Crooklyn
A definite change of pace for Spike Lee, Crooklyn looks at a lower-middle-class brood much like his own in the bell-bottomed '70s. At times, the film rides high on this autobiographical surge, but its episodic nature is exhausting--the first half-hour consists of little more than the sibling noise most parents would gladly pay $8 to escape. Fueled by the memories of his sister, Joie Lee, it's surely the closest the cranky filmmaker has come to embracing a female view, but even this is muddled by deep ambivalence.
The main mover of the Chamberlain clan is Carolyn (Alfre Woodard), an overworked mom whose patience has given way to non-stop reproach. Her ire is directed not only at the forever-squabbling kids--five, I think--but at her husband (wonderfully played by Delroy Lindo). A gentle jazz musician who hasn't put much meat on the table lately, he's struggling to maintain some dignity in the children's eyes. Woodard is typically magnetic, but she's stuck with a collection of angry speeches substituting for a coherent personality.
Meanwhile, the score is packed with truly great oldies (if the Stylistics' "People Make the World Go Round" doesn't earn a revival, I'll eat my 45s), but this only adds to the confusing barrage of undefined characters and repetitive domestic events. After some highly questionable sidesteps, the focus rests on the couple's lone daughter, 10-year-old Troy. The choice of Sesame Street veteran Zelda Harris for this pivotal role is fortuitous; she's got plenty of precocious lines, but they're delivered with such unsentimental clarity, she becomes your signpost of sanity amidst all the ruckus.
Then the director pulls another boner: when Troy visits her Virginia relatives, super-Christian suburbanites convinced they're white, he films the entire segment with an anamorphic lens, compressing the action like an El Greco home movie. Obviously, he's expressing Troy's disorientation. Even more clearly, he's demonstrating his patented ability to shove a perspective in the audience's faces (which may be why crowds roar with approval when an Afro-haired Lee himself, as a neighbourhood glue-sniffer, gets bopped on the head with a baseball bat).
For all its messy aggression, Crooklyn does leave you with the tang of some strong moments: Troy watching a drag queen (RuPaul, no less) vamp a customer at a Puerto Rican corner store; little girls arguing about "good" (meaning straight) hair; and a houseful of black kids chiming in gleefully with The Partridge Family. Above all, the film offers some of the tenderest father-daughter scenes you've ever seen. That suggests hope for Lee's vision of humanity. Now, if he could just learn how to tell a story...
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Even cowgirls get the blues? Why should they be spared the depression engendered by this disastrous sidestep for film-maker Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho). Just about everything in this weak attempt to capture the tacky values of the 1970s has the ring of wrongness to it, from the exaggerated twang of narrator Tom Robbins (who wrote the musty book from which the film was adapted) to the most godawful acting since Keanu Reeves came along.
The director recut Cowgirls after audiences stampeded away from its festival debuts, and the film may be shorter now, but its troubles still start and end with Uma Thurman as Sissy Hankshaw, an all-American wanderer whose oversized thumbs have made her a champion hitch-hiker. (This is one of those Aquarian-age conceits, like reading a Richard Brautigan poem on peyote, that worked perfectly at the time and seem inexplicably stupid today.)
Neither Van Sant nor Thurman--who engages in humiliating contortions and a lugubrious Southern accent while her foam-rubber appendages flap laughably--show any interest in who this modern-day Thumbelina is, except as a foil for much more outrageous beings. These start with tossed-off cameos from Buck Henry and Roseanne Arnold in truncated childhood sequences (and isn't that writer Ken Kesey as Sissy's pa?), and move on to William Burroughs, Crispin Glover, Sean Young, and Ed Begley Jr. as creepy New Yorkers. Then there's John Hurt as the flaming-queen Countess (played like Quentin Crisp as a serial killer), Angie Dickenson as the dragon who runs the Rubber Rose ranch for the woman-hating Countess, and Pat Morita as a Japanese-American mountain man who, Robbins tells us, is "the kind of ol' kumquat who would fuck a snake and then write a little poem about it."
Competing with the the ol' kumquat for Sissy's vague affections is Bonanaza Jellybean, played by River's sister, Rain Phoenix, with the cue cards just a little to the camera's left. It may not be all her fault: everyone here is handled as if flatly reciting coy homilies is the very height of expressive control. Maybe it is, but it sure-as-shootin' kills any feeling the viewer has for the characters, or at least for being in on the cosmic joke. And you know a movie is mega-weird when Lorraine Bracco comes off looking authoritative.
The soundtrack from k.d. lang and Ben Mink adds considerable gloss, as does the Van Sant's slick photographic eye--at least until the fuzzy Wild Kingdom shots of whooping cranes show up. But the good bits only serve to keep the film from reaching the truly ghastly, midnight-cult level of a Russ Meyer film. There's a hint of the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls it could have been when Sissy uses a prodigious digit for some non-highway exploration (hey, these things could make men obsolete!). Laid out in the Oregon sagebrush, she's staring up at fluffy cumulus clouds when suddenly a face appears in the heavens: it's Keanu Reeves, in shoe-polish makeup and brilliantined hair as an asthmatic Mohawk watercolourist (I swear). If that doesn't get your thumbs throbbing, maybe you're just too damn critical.
The Flintstones
So it turns out that the Hanna-Barbera TV 'toon was an early stab at pop-culture post-modernism. The Flintstones are a page right out of history all right: The pre-nuclear family in the ranch-style cave was always a riff on Eisenhower-era conformism, and now we've got a zillion-dollar, Spielberg-backed tribute to a mild satire of a sharp '50s sitcom, which itself canonized working-class humour from the Great Depression. In case we've forgotten the series was an animated knockoff of The Honeymooners, John Goodman and Rick Moranis sound more Brooklyn than Bedrock as quarry-hounds Fred and Barney. Elizabeth Perkins and Rosie O'Donnell are appropriately primitive as their no-nonsense wives, Wilma and Betty (although I always thought Betty was supposed to be the svelte babe of the show).
Adding considerable spice are Kyle MacLachlan and Halle Berry, as a smooth Slate & Co. executive and his so-slinky secretary who have nefarious plans for Homer... I mean Fred, as the fall-guy for their embezzlement scheme. And the mere presence of Elizabeth Taylor, as numb-tongued as she is, adds lustre to the role of Wilma's social-climbing mother.
Of course, the sets and special effects are the real stars here, with actors merely parading our prejudices, old and new, against an artificial antiquity. That still makes sense, since the main hook--perhaps the only hook--of the original Flintstones was its injection of "today's" technology into a prehistoric world that never was (funny how it never worked as well in The Jetsons's future).
So what can high-gloss cinematography, and a soundtrack adding new meaning to the term "rockabilly", possibly add to the original's two-dimensional concept? Well, the film-makers are so aware of the question, they incorporate it into the fun. Fred's tip-toed "doink, doink, doink" and other sounds are sampled directly from the old show, and the surprisingly witty script (chiseled out by a record 32 scribes!) takes full advantage of the deliriously pre-PC set-up, complete with hokey sentiment and rampant male bonding.
On paper, it doesn't bode well that the main screenwriters were responsible for such laugh-free fare as Major League 2 and Super Mario Brothers, or that director Brian Levant cut his teeth on such dorky shows as Happy Days, Mork and Mindy, and the oxymoronic New Leave It to Beaver. But maybe these folks have toiled so long in the belly of the corporate brontosaurus, they're in a choice position to appreciate the irony of their outmoded craft and the cookie-cutter world-view it sprang from. For them, glancing back now yields franchises; for us, it offers plenty of laughs--mainly at our own imagined pasts.
When a Man Loves a Woman
Your first tip-off to sincerity is that the Percy Sledge original, not the grunting Michael Bolton cover, is on the soundtrack. That's as deep as things get, though.(Try humming the melody to Significant Other, the film's original title.)
They could have called it Let's Go Get Stoned. Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan star as Michael and Alice, a picture-perfect San Francisco couple whose veneer cracks when her furtive vodka-guzzling gets out of hand. Maybe she picked up a loopy gene from her alcoholic father, or is still reacting to belittlement by her mother. Or maybe it's because hubby's an airline pilot while she's a junior-high counselor. Whatever. In the blink of an eye, Alice goes from being a fun date, egging the neighbour's noisy Porsche, to whacking her 8-year-old and smashing through a glass shower-door.
But motivation doesn't really matter here; the film-makers are interested in the cure, not the disease, and as soon as Alice heads off for detox (which seems to consist largely of switching from booze to cigarettes and confession), the movie turns into a long-form infomercial for 12-step programs. There's more jargon than insight, thanks to the skin-thin psychology of a script from Rain Man's Ron Bass and writer Al Franken--suggesting that Franken's smarmy "Jack Handy" character on Saturday Night Live might not be as ironic as previously assumed.
Even with this little to work with, the performers almost pull it off. If the fluidly shot tale hits a public nerve, it will be because of Garcia's soulful gaze and the fact that Ryan extends her range admirably. She might not have "600 different smiles", like her screen hubby claims, but she gives the performance a haunted, yearning quality that will have many women nodding in recognition.
Unfortunately, the leads have been chosen precisely for the kind of glamour which can over-ride the dour nature of the material. And downbeat it is--lurching from one emotional confrontation to the next-- this Man drains without giving much in return. Director Luis Mandoki's urge to entertain overwhelms any real message at hand. Worst of all, after two hours of preaching about the abstract evils of drink, it makes you want one to drown the movie out.
Widows' Peak
With so much talent behind Widows' Peak, just where did things start going wrong? Top playwright Hugh Leonard (Da) did the script, director John Irvin (Turtle Diary, Dogs of War ) savoured his comedic change-of-pace, and the actors whoop it up. The costume-laden effort, set in the 1920s, is intended to have the light touch of an Agatha Christie tale, as handled by Merchant-Ivory. It doesn't.
Joan Plowright plays Mrs. Doyle Counihan, the queen of the old ladies in black who run the little Irish town of Kilshannon. She stars opposite Mia Farrow as Miss O'Hare, a mousy peasant with a dark secret hanging over her head (the part was originally intended for her mother, Maureen O'Sullivan). Into this odd community comes Edwina Booth (Natasha Richardson), the young widow of an English army officer, and a personality too strident and glamorous to be left alone for long.
Although Plowright is always fun to watch, all three leads struggle with their accents; Brit Richardson's Yank drawl is explained somewhere in the script, but it's one of many elements that never gel. Actually, nothing about Richardson works; her character is supposed to be unlikable yet magnetic, and she only manages the first part. When twists finally come into her character, you have to marvel at the many opportunities for shading she misses completely.
There are two men featured: Adrian Dunbar as Mrs. Counihan's weak-kneed son, and Jim Broadbent as a local dentist after Miss O'Hare's hand. Dunbar co-wrote Hear My Song, Broadbent is a Mike Leigh regular, and both were in The Crying Game; their poor showing here is proof that something's off in the direction. The dentist seems to be a sadistic buffoon, and there's no grasping why he happens to be narrating the tale. In fact, there are so many factors and moods working at cross-purposes in Widows' Peak, even the surprise ending comes as a downbeat yawn. The film's no fun, and its strained pretense at frivolity induces resentment, not mirth.
