Grant is parked in his car with a sexy woman other than the woman with whom he shares his life. This hot number asks him if he would like to come up for coffee. He declines. "How about for sex, then?" she asks. At the screening I attended, an audience member yelled out, "I'll pay for it."
It was the truest laugh of the night. Nine Months is a romantic comedy that will appeal most to those who like their laughs broad and obvious. It ham-handedly follows the fluctuations in the relationship of a child psychologist (Grant) and his ballet-teaching girlfriend (Moore) after she announces that she is pregnant. She longs to change diapers, he doesn't.
Director-screenwriter Chris Columbus, whose previous films include both Home Alones and Mrs. Doubtfire, lacks a light touch. Take the Rollerblading scene: Grant and a buddy set out to skate and, as the camera pulls back, we realize that the duo are atop one of San Francisco's steepest hills. It's a nifty sight gag and one that improves as a wobbly Grant helplessly rolls out of frame. Columbus, however, loads on a shot of Grant flailing and grimacing—and another of Grant, still wearing blades and pads, being carried down the ramp of a parked truck.
Making his big American movie debut, Grant displays a winning charm, though his hand fluttering and eye crinkling fast become annoying. Moore, while lovely to look at,-gets to show none of the acting chops she demonstrated in Short Cuts, Vanya on 42nd Street and Safe. And Williams, returning to his Moscow on the Hudson accent, plays a Russian-émigré physician ("Do you want some anastasia?" he asks) as if he were auditioning for a spin-off of his own. (PG-13)
Catherine Deneuve
The estate of the late producers Robert and Raymond Hakim has only now consented to a rerelease of Luis Buñuel's famous 1967 comedy, previously available only in such odd formats as a French-language videotape with Japanese subtitles. Time proves to have been very good to this heartless tale of a well-off, sexually repressed Parisian housewife (Deneuve). Initially she gets what satisfaction she can by letting her mind drift off into sadomasochistic fantasies, but eventually she passes her afternoons working, under the name "Belle de Jour," as one of three prostitutes in an elite brothel.
Belle de Jour isn't especially erotic. Director Buñuel is more interested in ridiculing the pointless life of a bourgeoise than in making psychological sense of his main character. But Belle de Jour remains thoroughly kinky, thanks to Deneuve. Her classically beautiful features are glacially impassive, suggesting a melancholy fashion mannequin, until she is forced to submit sexually. Then there is the hint of a smile, a perverse flicker of joy. It's impossible to pin down whether this is brilliant acting or the magic of the camera's eye opening wide with delight at the chance to explore such an extraordinary face. Deneuve's Belle ranks with the great movie performances either way. (R)
Natasha Henstridge, Ben Kingsley
Someday, Hollywood may be interested in my idea for a sci-fi film about a common kitchen sponge that turns out to be an alien spore. A drop of water, it springs to life and hurls plates and cutlery to the floor! Then it dries out and returns to its deceptive quiescent state. In the end it is killed in a dishwashing machine. (Or is it?) When all is said and done, Species isn't much more sophisticated than Sponge (as my movie would be called), but its production values are certainly top-notch.
A group of government scientists, who apparently are dumber than cows, mix human DNA with a genetic structure beamed to Earth by aliens they believe are friendly. The resulting creature, a cute little girl with pulsating growths on her back, escapes from the laboratory and mutates into the beautiful Henstridge (see page 164). Whenever Henstridge, whose biological clock is ticking, gets thwarted in her search for a man to impregnate her, she reveals her true, lethal, alien form, which suggests a strange mix of dominatrix, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Balinese string puppet.
Director Roger Donaldson handles the violence discreetly and keeps the whole thing moving along. Horror audiences will get their money's worth. But Species is set up as a chase film, and on that level it fails miserably. Henstridge is being pursued by a team that includes one of her creators (Kingsley), a molecular biologist (Marg Helgenberger) and a sort of top secret, federal bounty hunter (Michael Madsen), but most of the sleuthing is left to a psychic (Forest Whitaker), who is always pulling up short and whispering, "She's here," or "She's not here." As plot devices go, that one is decidedly lazy, and it drains the film of suspense. (R)
>CLEAR AND PRESENT DEADLINE
HARRISON FORD MAY NOT HAVE A BIG movie out this summer—but his wife, Melissa Mathison, does: The Indian in the Cupboard, the screen adaptation of Lynne Reid Banks's 1980 children's book, opened last week. The tale is about a boy who has a cupboard that can turn his toys into living beings. But you won't see Mathison in the movie. The 45-year-old mother of two—she and Ford are parents to Malcolm, 8, and Georgia, 5—wrote the screenplay. And rewrote it. Says Mathison: "Rewriting is what this business is all about."
She should know. One of five children of the late Richard Mathison, Melissa spent much of her youth in L.A., where her father served as West Coast bureau chief for Newsweek. The family's friendship with director Francis Ford Coppola landed Melissa a job as Coppola's assistant on 1974's The Godfather Part II. On a lark, she handed Coppola a script she had written. He read it—and asked her to write The Black Stallion. Her fate was sealed with her following project, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in 1982 (the year before she married Ford, whom she met on the set of 1979's Apocalypse Now). "I don't remember saying I wanted to write scripts," she says, "as much as being told that I could."
These days, Mathison plies her trade from an office her superstar-carpenter husband built her a few feet away from their home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The kids know the rule: a closed door means Do Not Disturb. "But that doesn't mean someone's not going to come screaming in with a scrape or complaining about her brother," says Mathison. "And they do."
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