Web pages (7/13/98)

____________

The release of Armageddon was announced the preceding Sunday in the New York Times by an enormous glossy insert which unfolded into a poster; too large, alas, for my refrigerator. — What can I say? like Julie Brown, I like them big and stupid.

Lethal Weapon Four: — Well. — Maybe not this big. Maybe not this stupid.

Out Of Sight: And rapidly out of mind. — Difficult to believe that this was the work of the director of Schizopolis, Kafka, Sex/Lies/Videotape, et al. So much for the auteur theory.

The Opposite of Sex: Presumably the first third of a trilogy to include The Obverse Of Drugs and The Contrapositive Of Rock And Roll. — Cute and in patches very very clever. Christina Ricci does wonders for babyfat.

The Truman Show: Jim Carrey as, well, The Prisoner. Hardly the work of genius I’d been led by preliminary critical opinion to expect; not even close to the best I’ve seen from Peter Weir, director of The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, etc. — Obviously this would have been much better if they hadn’t given the whole thing away at the outset; just as obviously Hollywood couldn’t have it any other way. — I hope Kafka’s estate turned down the royalty check.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: This tanked so rapidly that when (after only a modest delay) I got around to going to see it, it had already been consigned to the secondrun theater. Mysteriously, the discount house was packed with an appreciative crowd. And, what can I tell you, I rather liked it myself. No one has ever mastered psychedelic cinematography, despite a number of painfully labored attempts; but Gilliam has more luck with it than anyone previous. Johnny Depp is perfect. The cameos are hilarious. And the most memorable passages are rendered exactly. — Also a great and really representative soundtrack: Joplin, Dylan, even a brief hilarious lapse into that skeleton in the musical closet of the Sixties, bubblegum.

The Last Days of Disco: The third in a trilogy [following Metropolitan and Barcelona] by Whit Stillman, the preppie anthropologist. I can’t tell you how pleasant a surprise it was to discover this at the multiplex; there may be hope yet.

Passion In The Desert: Boy meets cat. Boy loses cat. Boy gets cat. Cat gets boy. Boy gets gangrene. Boy loses arm. Boy gains a deeper wisdom. Audience loses interest. Balzac gets paid. [Well, maybe not.]

Sliding Doors: Gwenneth Paltrow either does or doesn’t just barely make an elevator, and therefore does or doesn’t come home from work unexpectedly and find her boyfriend porking a stranger in the bedroom. Thereby hangs a tale; or rather a pair of them, developed simultaneously. This sounds much more interesting than it is.

Alien Resurrection: After watching this several times in reruns, my critical estimate has been revised upward. Though not so visually striking as Jeunet’s Delicatessen or City of Lost Children, still, beautifully designed and composed. Sigourney is great. The plot is fairly silly, but, then, it would have to be, wouldn’t it.

The Fifth Element: Ditto, but somebody ought to put out a contract on Chris Tucker.

Britannia Hospital: Malcolm McDowell in a weird but fascinating comedy directed by the great British auteur Lindsay Anderson [If, O Lucky Man.] Anyone who once sees this will never be able to take an episode of ER seriously again.

A Heart in Winter: Emmanuelle Beart falls for the protagonist; fortunately, he manages to restrain himself from responding in kind. I’m sure we all aspire to such selfcommand.

The Blue Light: Leni Riefenstahl stars in her directorial debut, 1932. An essay in a genre peculiar to German Romanticism, the mountain film; it seems odd that it’s so much better photographed than the run of contemporary climbing videos. — Leni of course did her own climbing, barefoot up rock walls without rope or net. What a babe she was. No wonder Goebbels wanted into her pants.

The Lower Depths: An early Renoir, hitherto unavailable. Based on a play by Gorki, and, not surprisingly, savoring throughout of the leftwing boilerplate of the Thirties.

The Beast: Call this Suckers: Peter Benchley rewrites Jaws with a giant squid and a small fishing village in Oregon. Inferior.

Deep Rising: A really great octopus movie; a better shipwreck movie than Titanic; tongue in cheek right up to the wow finish. With the perennially underemployed Treat Williams in the lead and Famke Janssen [the bad girl in Goldeneye] as the babe.

The Invader: Aliens land in the Northwest and impregnate Sean Young. Not a bad idea. Warm up my flying saucer, Grpzx; I may go slumming.

Suicide Kings: Christopher Walken as, duh, a mafia don kidnapped by a gang of college boys. Predictably, the guy strapped into the chair rapidly masters the circle of buffoons arrayed around him. Amusing.

The Big Lebowski: A personal favorite, though I’m predisposed toward the Coens and forgive them their eccentricities: essentially a parody of The Big Sleep with Jeff Bridges as a clueless LA stoner trying to play Marlowe. John Goodman assists as a loudly confused Vietnam vet. — Bridges is priceless; the fit he throws when he can’t get his cabbie to turn the Eagles off is in itself worth the price of admission. — Is this or Kingpin the greatest bowling movie ever made?

Hope Floats: Ex-cheerleader/promqueen Sandra Bullock discovers her ex-quarterback/promking husband has been popping her best friend Rosanna Arquette on the livingroom rug when they all get together on a television confessional; Sandra and her daughter then leave Chicago to re-establish contact with reality in Hollywood’s idea of Texas. — Thus far it’s been very amusing, but these were only the first couple of minutes. The rest is unbearably tedious.

Killing Time: An action movie in which most of the characters spend most of their time not even talking but staring at the floor trying to think of something to say. Incredibly bad.

Titanic: That perennial Hollywood favorite, a movie that sucks on a really grand scale. Further comment would be superfluous.

Godzilla: Alas, this did not succeed in sucking on the grand scale: the lizards are obviously derivative, indeed, mere copies of the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park; the movie runs too long, thanks to one or several of those structural errors which see to be typical of Devlin/Emmerich [compare Stargate]; and, of course, the essential turn of the plot, that the Big Green One manages to hide from the military in the ruins of Manhattan while we’re waiting for his/her eggs to hatch, seemed to pull me from my seat to shout jibes at the screen about people too dumb to find their asses with both hands. — The fact that this turkey was so rapidly rejected by the popcornmunching public may slow the meteoric rise of the auteurs, and so much the better: one might suggest they try their hands at a few small art movies, and let someone else [say, Hal Hartley or Whit Stillman] destroy New York for a change.

The Wedding Singer: Hilarious. With Alexis Arquette as a Boy George clone and Billy Idol as himself.

Travolta as Clinton: no. But I have enjoyed Clinton as Travolta.

Justice v. Microsoft: I’m betting on Microsoft. Of course in 1940 I would have bet upon the Nazis.

The Big Hit: Another effort featuring The Artist Formerly Known As Marky Mark; a better actor than you’d expect in a better movie than you’d expect.

Barry Lyndon: A Kubrick oldie re-examined on laserdisc, the better, I suppose, to find its flaws. There aren’t any.

Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine: Still hilarious. Somebody should try a remake.

Stalker/Solaris: A couple of the celebrated essays in science fiction authored by the formidable Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. The fact that Fredric Jameson regards these as works of genius says you [of course] absolutely nothing. — Deep, certainly, but not as deep as they pretend to be.

Deep Impact: Rocketships notwithstanding, I still detest disaster movies.

Les Miserables: Good albeit not excellent. Neeson is all right; Uma is luminous. The chase through the sewers is rather disappointing. I could have lived without the teenage romance.

He Got Game: We still await the Great American Basketball Movie. As always Denzel Washington is completely unconvincing as a loser.

Lost In Space: Painfully dumb but on balance enjoyable by virtue of astonishing special effects. Still I think it needed a scene in which Boy Wonder invents Xray vision and watches his sister Heather Graham taking a shower; if indeed she should not play stuff-the-electronic-sausage with the robot. — Do you remember the scene in After Hours where Rosanna Arquette explains that her husband screamed “Surrender Dorothy!” when he got off? I fancy the mechanical man yelling “Danger, Will Robinson!” —

A Chinese Ghost Story Three: after a wait of several years, finally this appears on laserdisc. It is in fact remarkable. The bumbling apprentice of a wandering Chinese sage falls in love with an equally incompetent ghostgirl, understudy to an evil demon who’s trying to train her to seduce unwary travellers. The demon kidnaps the sage; the two have to try to rescue him. Numerous magicians’ duels punctuate the development, which culminates in a fairly impressive Wow Finish. — It would be interesting to see this sort of thing attempted [again; Carpenter didn’t have much luck] with American special effects. — I don’t know what to make of the apparent moral, that dead babes are the best babes. Maybe I should reconsider that woody I’ve been harboring for Lillian Gish.

Operation Condor: Indiana Chan in the Temple of Doom. Memo to Jackie: do this again.

Scream Two: Comment would be superfluous, but I should put on record the prediction that Scream Three will resurrect the film nerd from the dead and reveal him to have been the motivating force behind the slaughter all along. — Or [rather] forward the suggestion to Kevin Williamson and hope he cuts me in for a percentage.

Doctor Caligari: The granddaughter of the original runs his asylum. A stunning essay in production design.

The Replacement Killers: Mira Sorvino assists in the English-language debut of the legendary Chow Yun Fat. — Naturally I attended the premiere attired in a long black trenchcoat. But I didn’t put a toothpick in my mouth. — For that matter I didn’t whip out a pair of fortyfives and slide through the floor of the lobby on my back in slowmotion blasting every glassy surface in the entry of the theater. — A pity. They might have given me a bigger bag of popcorn.

Having heard the fairly respectable English of Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh, incidentally, I find myself wondering how well American movie stars would do in Cantonese. [It is to laugh.]

Mimic/Relic: Actually the same movie: Mira Sorvino chases giant bugs through abandoned subways/Penelope Ann Miller chases mutant lizardmen through the catacombs beneath a museum. An embarrassment apparently to the perpetrators of Relic, who changed the setting of their flick from New York to Chicago at the last minute to try to cover their tracks. — Relic is nonethelesss marginally better.

Relic began as a grocerystore paperback, one which [strange but true] I’d actually read, one winter evening fraught with tedium, and I must say it proved amusing to see just how much excess narrative baggage the screenwriters threw out and how completely they improved the story; particularly in view of the fact that the original authors had so obviously designed their turkey for a movie sale. Apparently no one ever told those morons that brevity is the soul of wit.

Outbreak: I think my Berkeley girlfriend now has Rene Russo’s job, though I haven’t heard that she’s saved the world from any new flavor of Ebola. As if the original weren’t good enough to kill everybody.

Deadly Outbreak: Bmovie knockoff of the bigbudget version shot in Israel and starring Rochelle Swanson. Actually I think I liked this one better than the bigbudget version: Rochelle is a lot cuter than Dustin Hoffman.

Sphere: Pathetic. Big stars, dumb idea, no action.

Wild Things: A piece of trash so superlative that I went back to see it again the very next day. — The barrage of plot twists attendant on the denouement betrays the influence of The Usual Suspects; let’s see more of it. — And who is this babe? if she’d pulled her shirt off in Starship Troopers I might have paid attention to something other than the bugs.

The Sweet Hereafter: The most recent work from Atom Egoyan, the Canadian writer/director of Exotica. This won three prizes at Cannes last year but was not released in the US; at least not anywhere near me. Go figure. — With Ian Holm and the remarkable Sarah Polley, whom you may recall as the child star of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; weird but true, at twentysomething she could now pass for Uma’s little sister. — The best movie of the year until proven otherwise.

Tomorrow Never Dies: Out finally on laserdisc. — A story about Michelle Yeoh: though Jackie Chan insists always on performing his own stunts, no matter how outrageous, to maintain a sort of existential authenticity, he usually won’t allow women to attempt anything dangerous. Except Michelle. There’s a shot in Police Story Three [aka Supercop] in which she jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train; not only did she perform the stunt herself, but she learned how to ride a motorcycle [right there on the set] in order to be able to do it.

Air Force One: I finally got the video and tried to watch it, but couldn’t make it all the way through. Did Harrison Ford rescue his family? Did Gary Oldman die horribly? Was terrorism vanquished? Was patriotism rewarded? — No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.

I saw Das Boot in the the new laser rerelease, incidentally, and it’s still one of the best war movies ever made. What has Hollywood done to Wolfgang Peterson?

Burn Hollywood Burn: Joe Eszterhaz’ version of The Player, though one must expect of course that it will prove inferior in every way. Seems not to have made it to theatrical release; will appear in a month or two on video.

The Jackal: Pathetic, but I watched it a couple of times anyway just to see the incomparable French bombshell Mathilda May. — The laser edition shows an alternative ending: as you might expect, in the original version the girl shoots the villain at the last; naturally, the studio had to amend that. — Ah well: if they weren’t morons they wouldn’t have greenlighted this piece of shit to begin with.

Dark City: No worse than the second-best movie of the year. Before I saw this I had the uneasy feeling that I was being beaten to publication, but, fortunately, the authors though incorporating perpetual night the placeless city and amnesia explained too much [always a mistake, in my view; see Keats on negative capability] and left untouched the themes of the Doppelgänger the femme fatale the descent into Hades the sinking of Atlantis and surf music.

U-Turn: The title apparently refers to a manuever I should have performed in the parking lot as I pulled up to the theater. Is Oliver Stone over yet? I want to go home.

DVD: I keep looking at players, but they seem for the moment too expensive; though the lower price of buyable movies is attractive. Probably this isn’t going to make sense in the near term except as a computer peripheral; when I have another AV Mac that will play videos on a progressive-scan display I’ll look into it more seriously.

The Buffs: I keep hearing the rumors they’ll follow the example of CSU et al. and jump ship to the Pac Ten. I’m all for it. If they start playing football against schools with higher academic standards than theirs it can’t help but straighten the heads of the athletic department. Anyway, they’d have an easier time recruiting in California. And the Dog and Albino can start meeting for those notorious working lunches in the bistros of Beverly Hills. — One or two stories in the Hollywood Reporter and those two will have to face up to the consequences of their liasons. We can only hope it won’t be too late; too late for all of us...

Later.

____________

Conversations on the plurality of worlds (2/14/98)