This is MacDowell's best acting since her breakthrough performance in 1989's sex, lies and videotape. She plays a housewife and mother dying of cancer in the early '60s. Unstrung Heroes, a very tender, very addled movie, is actually about how Watt, as MacDowell's 12-year-old son struggling to come to grips with her illness, chooses to spend more and more time with his father's two extremely eccentric brothers (Richards and Chaykin). But MacDowell always remains the emotional center of the movie: quiet, sad and receding—a rose reluctantly folding up her petals.
The rest of the movie could have used some weeding. Actress and now director Diane Keaton, whose previous directing credits include Heaven, a doofy little documentary about the afterlife, and Wildflowers, a well-received Lifetime drama about an epileptic girl, has given the movie an unusual tone and style that, with a few-spins of the pinwheel, would tilt into the surreal. The strange uncles' apartment, with its prettily lit arrangements of memorabilia and thrift-shop bric-a-brac, is somehow pristine and uncluttered. The place looks as if an interior decorator were given too big a budget and told, "Think rat's nest."
And those uncles! Richards scampers about, bellowing humorously inappropriate comments—in short, doing what he already does on Seinfeld, except that here he is supposed to be clinically paranoid, constantly adding up lists of his supposed enemies. The performance is in the twinkly old tradition of Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. The bewhiskered Chaykin is quieter, and sweeter, but just as artificially cute. He's Harvey the bunny as a human. (PG)
Keith Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Moira Kelly, Vincent Spano, Julia Devin
This trifling thriller, lacking in surprises or transcendent kinks, ought to do wonders for promoting adoption and foster care. Here, the 6-year-old daughter of a psychopathic pair (Carradine and Hannah) lands in an orphanage after Mom and Dad, surprised by the cops while robbing a home, escape without her. The loving yuppie couple (Spano and Kelly) who plan to adopt the girl (Devin) can only wonder why their new daughter, once she arrives home, hides a knife under her pillow. Soon the kid's real folks resurface, only too eager to whack anyone getting in the way of their snatching back their honeybunch.
First-time director Wesley Strick (who wrote the genuinely scary 1991 remake of Cape Fear) resorts here to such hoary horror film standbys as curtains billowing ominously near open windows. Carradine and Hannah are showily effective as the sick duo, Carradine dancing a maniacal jig before a campfire and Hannah, in a Julia Child Moment, cooking up something she calls steak à la Coke. While sautéing a slab of beef, she douses it with Coca-Cola, advising, "It's gotta be Classic." Can't wait till Mike and the robots have a go at this delicacy on Comedy Central's Mystery Science Theater 3000. (R)
Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo, Stockard Channing
The makers of this comedy seem to have exhausted their imaginations by thinking up the marathon-length title. It refers to a souvenir photo stolen from a Chinese restaurant by three gay New York City cross-dressers (Snipes, Swayze and Leguizamo) just before they set out on a cross-country drive to Hollywood. En route, the trio's car breaks down in a small midwestern town, where they come to the aid of, among others, Channing, in a one-dimensional role as a battered wife.
With his slight build and soft features, Leguizamo makes the most convincing ersatz female. Swayze, who tries hardest to act like a woman, bears a resemblance to both Valerie Perrine and Kathie Lee Gifford. Snipes, clearly the funniest, evokes both Pearl Bailey and Garrett Morris. But Wong Foo mostly provokes renewed appreciation of 1959's Some Like It Hot, a cross-dressing movie with wit and brains behind it. (PG-13)
Marina Sudina
Director-writer Anthony Waller has set this low-budget but confident little thriller in post-Communist Moscow. Waller's premise: Three Americans are shooting an English-language slasher pic in an old studio, using a Russian cast and crew. Why? Like Lenin's waxy corpse, the movie offers no explanations. The American makeup girl (Sudina), who has never been able to speak—she communicates mostly by signing, with her sister (Fay Ripley) translating to others—is accidentally locked in the studio overnight. She witnesses, or thinks she witnesses, two of the Russians filming a snuff movie.
This portion of Witness, in which poor Sudina has to hide in elevator shafts, race for emergency exits and conceal herself beneath garbage bags containing a red fluid that is not borscht, is both spooky and funny. Waller comes up with all sorts of inventive variations on such old thriller staples as shoes peeping beneath curtains and dagger-wielding shadows.
But Waller eventually moves beyond the damsel-in-distress conceit and onto a more elaborate scenario involving the KGB and the Russian mafia. This requires more resources, and more sophistication, than Waller apparently had at his disposal. He's obviously more a student of DePalma than LeCarre. Ah well, as Tolstoy once said.
>LADIES' MAN
HOLLYWOOD, AS WE KNOW, IS NOT ALWAYS a rational place. For example, when producers want to work up a warm, sensitive women's movie, whom do they call? Often, a 53-year-old man named Ron Bass. Why a guy? And why Bass, who has created roles for Julia Roberts (1991's Sleeping with the Enemy), Meg Ryan (1994's When a Man Loves a Woman), Michelle Pfeiffer (this summer's Dangerous Minds) and Whitney Houston {Waiting to Exhale, due out in December)?
Actually, says Bass, "I don't think I'm particularly qualified to write about women. It's just that I'm motivated to write for them. Women are not afraid to explore their inner lives. Men don't want to know they have one."
Novelist Amy Tan, with whom Bass cowrote the screenplay for 1993's The Joy Luck Club, thinks she knows why he excels at creating female characters for the screen. "He's surrounded by women," says Tan, "his wife [Christine, a homemaker], daughters [Jennifer, 15, and Sasha, 11], sister [Diane, a social worker] and mother [Mildred, 79]," all of whom live in L.A., where Bass was born and raised. "And he's a very sensitive guy, not into watching sports or being competitive."
"I was never macho," agrees Bass, though his early work consisted largely of crime stories and spy novels. In 1985 he sold his first screenplay, Code Name: Emerald, a World War II thriller. The movie dive-bombed at the box office, but Bass soon quit his career as an entertainment lawyer to write full-time. In 1989 he won an Oscar for Rain Man, a warm, sensitive flick about, well, a man.
His next project, however, is an NBC pilot about a male, blue-collar police psychiatrist whom the screenwriter describes as "rough and ready." Bass may be "vulnerable and kind," as Tan calls him, but hey, he's still a guy.
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- Leah Rozen,
- Ralph Novak.
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!
