Because virtually every scene takes place at night in dimly lit, opulently furnished chambers from centuries past—and let's not overlook those seductive Parisian crypts, done in a style that one might guess to be late Empire—this adaptation of Anne Rice's famous vampire novel, directed by Neil Jordan, has intense claustrophobic power. And the scenes of bloodletting, as Cruise and comrade-in-damnation Pitt drain their female victims to alabaster perfection, have a stunning, painterly beauty. There is also a homoerotic subcurrent, since Cruise's chief pleasure is evidently in witnessing Pitt's. As he showed in 1992's The Crying Game and his other films, director Jordan knows a thing or two—possibly more—about how to film forbidden impulses with a ravishing flourish.
But come on: What is Tom Cruise doing here with that mossy blond hair, those foppish lace cuffs and—the better to urge on the reluctant Pitt—a maddening, oh-my-dear-chap-please-we-are-vampires-so-do-get-with-the-ticket laugh? Cruise, whose chief strength as an actor is virile pep, can no more pull off this sort of sneaky, slightly mildewed camp than Jeremy Irons can play Vegas. Whenever Cruise enters a room, the movie feels like Brideshead of the Damned.
The other performances are better, but I don't think one of them vaults past the great dramatic hurdle confronting vampires, which is that one is so often expected to pity them. Isn't that silly? Even Dunst, whose initial scenes as a child vampire are both touching and creepily funny, eventually degenerates into Little Orphan Annie, cursed to an eternity of moppetdom. Rea, at least, is luckier: Comically fey even by vampiric standards, he gets to dance, bat-style, upside-down, and stars in his own little theater company. Rea has the long face and velveteen charm of an Oscar Wilde, only with some still rarer, stranger blood coursing through his veins. (R)
Tim Allen, Eric Lloyd, Wendy Crewson, Judge Reinhold
This is the most playfully amusing, inventive new cinematic Christmas fable in several decades. Title notwithstanding, this tale is not a contradiction of the classic line from A Night at the Opera, where Chico Marx tells Groucho, during a contract negotiation, "You can't fool me. There is no sanity clause." Here, thanks to writers Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick, Santa carries an emergency card that authorizes anyone who finds it to take his place should old Kris himself become incapacitated during his present-delivering rounds. The catch is that there's no escape clause—or no Claus escape—for the pinch-Santa.
Home Improvement's Allen is a divorced toy-company engineer who is reading Visit from Saint Nicholas to his young son Lloyd, 8, when they hear reindeer on the roof. That sets up a great joke: Allen finds a product of the "Rose Suchach Ladder Company" (as in "arose such a clatter") leaning against his house. Then he finds Santa on the roof and takes the emergency card after Santa collapses in the snow and disappears. Since the reindeer guide the sleigh automatically, Allen takes Lloyd and flies around the world delivering toys (although he's the surly sort of Santa who asks a skeptical girl, "So, do you want the doll or not?").
Most of the plot comes from the objections raised to Lloyd's sled-setting lifestyle by Allen's officious, humorless ex-wife, played convincingly by Crew-son, and her new husband, a patronizing psychiatrist played idly by Reinhold.
The writers and director John Pasquin stay true to the Santa myth, even if they toy with such details as the elves' identity by making them seem to be precocious children. The effects are fun, and so are such supporting actors as Mary Gross as a politically correct teacher ("We don't call them 'elves,' we call them 'small people.' ") and Peter Boyle as Allen's all-business boss. Everything is accomplished with sweetness and reverence for the institution it addresses. (PG)
Linda Fiorentino, Peter Berg, Bill Pullman
A woman proposes to her earnest young lover that he kill a man for money. He's appalled. No way, he tells her, can he commit murder.
"You would if you loved me," she snaps.
Welcome to the wonderfully perverse world of The. Last Seduction, one of the funniest, most entertaining movies of the year. And one of the meanest, too. Seduction, briskly directed by John Dahl (Red Rock West) and featuring a clever script by Steve Barancik that's as full of twists as it is twisted, revels in the nastiness of its sexy, criminally minded leading lady (Fiorentino). She's convinced, rightly as it turns out, that all men are saps put on earth to serve her. Love is not in her vocabulary; sex will do for now, but money is what she really wants, and she does not want to share it.
This is one bad girl. Early on, she scampers off with the $700,000 her medical-student husband (Pullman) has just brought home from a drug deal she pushed him into undertaking. Then, holed up in a small town while hiding from hubby, she takes up with a trusting local (Berg) and brings him in on her murder scheme.
It's all great fun, and it moves at a fast clip. Fiorentino, with her husky voice, long legs sheathed in black stockings and evil cool, is mesmerizing. As her dupes, Pullman and Berg also shine. Last Seduction, a B picture made for a mere $2.6 million, puts most Hollywood A pictures to shame. (R)
Richard Attenborough, Elizabeth Perkins, Dylan McDermott, Mara Wilson
At the risk of sounding like Scrooge, I feel obliged to warn potential viewers that sitting through this remake of the 1947 Christmas classic starring Maureen O'Hara and Edmund Gwenn is akin to having a saccharine drip inserted in your forearm. The problem is not Miracle's basic point that every child has the right to believe in Santa. The problem is the sanctimonious adult characters debating that point.
As updated and adapted from the original by producer John Hughes (who shares the screenwriting credit with the late George Seaton, writer of the 1947 movie), Miracle is about a little girl (Wilson) who wants desperately to buy into Santa despite having already heard the truth from her mother. Mom (Perkins), you see, was badly hurt years ago when her alcoholic husband ditched her, and now, as she says bitterly, "believing myths and fantasies just makes you unhappy." When Perkins, a department store executive, hires an old man (Attenborough) with a suspiciously authentic twinkle in his eye as the store's Christmastime Santa, both she and her daughter find themselves wanting to believe. Might he really be Santa?
Attenborough is a supremely kind Mr. Claus, and his scenes with Wilson and other kids are the best in the movie. The rest of Miracle is given over to the troubled romance between Perkins and her Eagle Scout of a suitor (McDermott), a lawyer who, in the movie's tediously extended courtroom sequence, must argue on behalf of jolly obese men in scarlet outfits. (PG)
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- 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!
