As talky and crisis-laden as a soap opera but appealingly offbeat, this is a modest little drama. While it breaks no new ground, it could be a nice change of pace for action-sated moviegoers.
Burns produced, directed and wrote the film. He costars as one of three brothers, from New York's Long Island, who have in common a loathing of their late alcoholic father, little ambition and an abject inability to deal with women.
The two younger brothers, Burns and McGlone, fresh from soured affairs, move in with older brother Mulcahy just as his marriage starts to founder. As all three young men wrestle with relationship problems, Burns spends a lot of time blaming the Catholic church for the McMullens' problems. Things get so bad that when McGlone tells him God frowns on adultery, Mulcahy snarls, "F—k God!" That's about as close as things get to serious content.
The movie is not helped by Burns's flimsy female characters, who are either sexual predators or pitiably malleable. Exemplifying the former, Elizabeth P. McKay won't let her lover use the phrase "make love," insisting he say "do it" instead. And the comely Bahns, as the actress girlfriend of would-be filmmaker Burns, seems to vacillate between weird coquetry and helpless dependence. (Like the rest of the cast, Bahns is an unfamiliar face, though the principals are all likable enough to stay basically sympathetic.)
Everyone agonizes relentlessly without seeming to grow in any real way until—shazam!—all the problems are summarily bagged. It's hardly real life, but then nobody ever said soap operas had to be plausible. (R)
Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, James Le Gros
This is a shrewdly funny, if narrowly focused, film about the seat-of-the-pants world of low-budget, independent filmmaking. Smartly scripted and directed by Tom DiCillo, who spent six years as an actor before directing the wanly hip Johnny Suede in 1990, Oblivion follows a single disaster-filled day in the life of a director (Buscemi, oozing angst) as he desperately tries to fulfill his vision and shoot his movie despite whining actors, bumbling crew members, exploding lights, malfunctioning fog machines and a makeup man who relies on Preparation H to erase the bags under an actress's eyes ("It shrinks tissue," the guy reasons). Le Gros is particularly droll as studishly monikered Chad Palomino, a posturing young star who picks his nose between scenes and comes on to every woman on the set with the line, "Do you like jazz?" (Though the director denies it, the character is reportedly based on Brad Pitt, who was in Johnny Suede.) When Palomino and the director fight, the actor screams, "The only reason I took a part in this movie was because someone said you were tight with Quentin Tarantino." (R)
Thomas Ian Nicholas, Art Malik
This lame effort, Disney's latest live-action motion picture for children, owes a big, fat nod for its plot to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In no way, however, does it improve upon the original, not to mention the two earlier film versions of Yankee—the first starring Will Rogers and the second featuring Bing Crosby.
A suburban California teen (Nicholas) is magically transported back to King Arthur's court, where he introduces to the Middle Ages such 20th-century necessities as mountain bikes, in-line skates, rock and roll, Big Macs and such vocabulary expanders as "dweeb" and "boogie." He also foils an evil lord (Malik) intent upon undermining the king. Kids may work up moderate excitement over these perfunctory proceedings (they already will have seen all the best jokes and bits in the TV ads and trailers), but accompanying adults, unimpressed by the cheesy sets and able to see the jokes and plot twists a jousting lance's length away, will want to bring along a Game Boy.
Kid is preceded by Runaway Brain, a new Mickey Mouse short in which a mad scientist switches Mickey's brain with that of a King Kongish monster. Brain has more good jokes in its seven minutes than Kid does in 91, and Minnie Mouse gets to do a swell Fay Wray impression. (PG)
>EEK—A SPOUSE!
JUDGING BY HIS LOOKS, THERE'S nothing Mickey Mouse about Wayne Allwine. A burly six-footer, Allwine, 48, even has a Big Bad Wolf gruffness to his voice. Hard to believe he provides the falsetto for the world's most famous rodent—and that he's married to the voice of Minnie Mouse, Mickey's Significant Other. "We're not used to appearing as ourselves," Allwine says, sitting in the Pasadena house he owns with his wife, Russi Taylor.
The petite Taylor, 51, is a lot more, er, animated than her Mouse spouse of four years as they smooch on the sofa. "We do that all the time," chirps Taylor, in a treble almost as high-pitched as Minnie's. She and her mate can now be heard in Runaway Brain. The first new Mickey Mouse short in 42 years, it shares the bill with Disney's A Kid in King Arthur's Court.
The Cambridge, Mass.-born Taylor was a 6-year-old kid visiting Disneyland when she happened to meet Walt Disney back in 1950. "He asked me what I wanted to do," says Taylor, "and I said, 'To work for you.' And he said, 'Then you will.' " She did—sort of. In 1984, after years of doing TV voices, including Pebbles Flintstone and the Muppet Babies, Taylor was hired by the late Disney's company to quack for Donald Duck's nephews; two years later she became the exclusive spokesmouse for Minnie in movies and commercials.
Allwine, a native of Burbank, Calif., started at Disney at 20 in the mailroom. In 1977, after an actor failed to show up at an audition for Mickey, Allwine, then a sound-effects man, was asked to fill in—and squeaked into the role. When Taylor met him in 1986, both were emerging from unhappy first marriages. Five years later they wed. "The key to Mickey and Minnie's relationship," says Allwine, "is lots of love and a good script. The key to ours is just a lot of love. We ain't scripted."
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
