It's hard to imagine any viewer leaving this extravagantly demented, 2½ hour low-life lalapalooza without carrying away at least a few indelible moments. Mine are 1) an unprintable line uttered by Harvey Keitel, a courtly but no-nonsense mob fixer called in to dispose of a badly disfigured corpse, urging his henchmen to get on with their work; and 2) a flashback sequence featuring Christopher Walken, that poker-faced totem of strangeness, as a Vietnam prison-camp veteran named Captain Koons. This scene, too, culminates in a punch line that is wildly profane and very, very funny.
But there's much more to enjoy in director-writer-costar Quentin Tarantino's anthology movie about smalltime, pea-brained crooks in L.A. Their tales all start slowly, then careen into outlandish twists. The two strongest stories involve Travolta, whose long, limp hair and thick body suggest Bryan Ferry in a gorilla suit, taking his gangster boss's wife (Thurman) to dinner while the big man is out of town; and Willis, as a boxer who has been paid to take a fall, deciding instead to take the money and flee with his girlfriend (moon-faced Maria de Medeiros, who talks with erotic dreaminess of blueberry pancakes).
The entire cast, like Tarantino, seems to revel in sloshing around in this muck, the knowingly hip distillation of several generations' worth of film noir, cheap crime novels and indifferently shot television shows. Travolta, charmingly dim, gets unexpected laughs from the slimmest bits of comedy, whether trying to answer the intercom while coked up or making his voice childishly tiny for the line, "Bacon is good. Pork is good." Jackson, as Travolta's partner, is perhaps the standout, frighteningly intense whether he's about to shoot a rival through the head or convinced that he has just witnessed a miracle. Willis, actually, is the only one who doesn't seem to quite get it. He's fine, technically—even enjoyable—but the performance has inappropriate hints of cool. No man dast enter Palookaville and keep his dignity.
If there is any other fault with Pulp Fiction, it's that—unlike, say, 1990's The Grifters—it never rises above pulp or at least the preposterously vivid brand of it that Tarantino has been developing with such movies as Reservoir Dogs and True Romance. But ultimately this is also what makes the movie so unexpectedly buoyant. Despite the drugs, the blood, the language, the grit, Pulp Fiction is fundamentally light-hearted. It's fluff. (R)
Marisa Tomei, Robert Downey Jr., Bonnie Hunt
If you dream of the perfect Italian vacation, this is the movie to see. It brims with gondolas cruising the canals of Venice, olive trees dotting the hills of Tuscany, crumbling ruins in Rome and the beachside cliffs of Positano. As a travelogue, it's the equivalent of a superb full-course Italian meal. As a wacky romantic comedy, which is what Only You aspires to be, it's SpaghettiOs.
Long on plot and short on sense, this movie follows a hopelessly romantic bride-to-be (Tomei), a woman who cries while watching Ezio Pinza sing "Some Enchanted Evening." Tomei runs off to Italy in pursuit of the man that a Ouija board and a fortune-teller have told her will be her soulmate.
Director Norman Jewison appears to have been hoping for another Moonstruck, which he also directed. No such luck. Only You has neither the beguiling comic characters nor the demented passion of that 1987 film. Tomei and Downey—he's a poetry-spouting American shoe salesman she meets in Rome—both try hard, but labored comedy is merely labor. Hunt plays the Eve Arden role of Tomei's wisecracking pal to perfection, making her the single best reason to see the movie. (PG)
Michael Riley, Stephen Rappaport, Soupy Sales, Eve Plumb, Lou Ferrigno
Playful, good-natured and often disarmingly funny, this low budget, subtle comedy is more a spoof of moviemaking than it is of religion.
It is presented as an ersatz documentary in the style of This Is Spinal Tap (whose director, Rob Reiner, even appears in a clip from an Oscar telecast). Riley and Rappaport play a pretentious independent producer-director team whose previous films include Dial S for Sex, Nude Ninjas and Alpha Beta deCappa. Their venture into big-budget epics with a book based on the Bible is herewith meticulously chronicled by director Arthur Borman, from the casting (the auditions for God, after Brando and De Niro pass on the role, are the most fun in the film) through the reviews (the funniest of which—from the Daily Worker—says irrelevantly, "This is the best possible movie for a communist to see"). That the film, like the play Springtime for Hitler in Mel Brooks's The Producers, ends up being a cult success seems not unreasonable, considering that Moses is played by Sales, who comes away from his summit with God carrying not only the Ten Commandment tablets but a six-pack of Coca-Cola, thanks to a product-placement deal. Plumb—"Jan" from The Brady Bunch—is Mrs. Noah, while Ferrigno is Cain, fighting Abel in a scene choreographed by a martial-arts expert. A few more similarly familiar faces would have enhanced this film, which relies on lots of inside jokes, such as a predatory casting director, a hyperfussy production designer who models the Ark on some wood chips his mother brought him from Israel, a continuity woman who loses count of the Disciples, as well as an arrogant editor who splices crowd scenes from Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same into the Bible movie so that Jesus will have a bigger following.
Christopher Guest's The Big Picture is a funnier, more pointed spoof of the movie industry; Monty Python's Life of Brian is a funnier, more pointed spoof of religion. But...And God Spoke is funnier, more pointed—and less tasteless—than any other comedy in theaters these days. (R)
William Hurt, Christopher Cleary Miles, John Hurt, Keith Allen
William Hurt plays a bachelor postmaster in a village in Wales, who, with his own aged (and long-since estranged) father dying, decides to adopt a child. At an orphanage he meets Miles, a 10-year-old whose shattered family (displayed in disjointed, tough-to-follow flashbacks) has left him susceptible to violent, self-destructive tantrums.
Hurt is stranded in a one-dimensional character. Still, the actor marvelously evokes hopelessly confused feelings of father-son attachment. Hurt must sort out not only his and the boy's lives but his relationship to his father, played strikingly, despite a stroke-induced muteness, by Alfred Lynch.
Director Chris Menges seems to rush the film to its conclusion, resolving a half dozen crises in the last 10 minutes. A suicide is recalled, AIDS appears in the village, and, least convincingly, Hurt unnecessarily pressures the boy to accept him because he doesn't want to be second best to his son, as he was to his father. (PG-13)
- 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!
