This is one of those big, sleek soulless movies that hums along, impressed with itself and the Big Issue it allegedly tackles—here it's sexual harassment, with the twist that it's a man leveling the charge at his female boss. But like Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal, its predecessors in casting and in feel, what Disclosure really does best is appeal to your most prurient instincts while simultaneously making you covetous of the characters' designer wardrobes and swank home-and-office furnishings.
Douglas plays a happily married executive at a computer company who is finessed out of a promotion by his ex-girlfriend, a business whiz (Moore). After his new boss invites him to her office for an after-hours cocktail, she plays tug with his zipper. Initially responsive, he then just says no. Moore screeches a caustic and specific response that is destined to become a camp classic, right up there with "No wire hangers, ever!" The next day she announces that he attacked her. He, in turn, hires a hotshot lawyer (Roma Maffia, who nails her every line) and charges sexual harassment.
As directed by Barry Levinson and adapted by screenwriter Paul Attanasio from Michael Crichton's best-selling 1994 novel of the same name, Disclosure has a slick veneer and fast pace that help gloss over the plot holes, which are gaping by the movie's end. As for the cast, righteous indignation becomes Douglas, but Moore is less successful with her dragon lady. She's fine when either predatorily sexy or fuming, but embarrassingly unconvincing in scenes where she is required to talk computerese or financialese. In smaller roles, Sutherland is appropriately silky as the company owner, Caroline Goodall labors mightily to add a touch of steel to the wimpy part of Douglas's wife, and the hypersnide Miller, playing one of Douglas's colleagues, gets off a couple of hilariously proto-Millerian lines. (R)
Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil
This 2-hour-plus adaptation of the 1845 Alexandre Dumas novel takes an eternity to get going, but the final third is deeply satisfying and every bit as gallopingly passionate as a 16th-century French costume drama ought to be. Even as King Charles IX lies on his deathbed, sweating blood from his pores, over at the Bastille the executioner's ax is being sharpened for an undeserving neck. Actually make that a couple of necks. Meantime the beautiful Adjani, lost in the throes of a desperate love, is doing her specialty—a sort of open-mouthed reverie that suggests an erotically charged sleepwalker. Better still, a significant chunk of this melodrama has been set in motion by the entertainingly ludicrous plot device of a falconry book with poisoned pages. How sobering to think that, in today's world of mass publishing, it would probably be a trade paperback about angels.
To get to the conclusion, though, you have to sit—very patiently—through a good deal of exposition and prodigious amounts of blood as Catholic princess Margot (Adjani) is married off to the Protestant Henrei of Navarre (Auteuil). The match is made ostensibly to quell the country's dangerous religious tensions, but—given the machinations of Adjani's scheming mama, whose last name, not for nothing, is Medici—it only ends up fanning them. Then, lo and behold, one fine day the king falls from his horse during a boar hunt—the movie's best-shot sequence, with white horses gleaming amongst the gray-green trees—and is gored by his quarry. No one, including the two brothers in line for the throne, initially seems inclined to save him. As the king shrieks and the boar charges and the princes look on impassively, you know you are entering the realm of melodrama.
And you begin to be happy. (R)
Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz, Dana Carvey
Asweet-natured comedy about three brothers who rob a bank in Paradise, a small Pennsylvania town where all the residents are nice, this film has the makings of a good 10-minute sketch. Unfortunately it's 111 minutes long. Order the extra large popcorn. And a flashlight and a good book.
Playing the least criminally minded of the trio, Cage does a variation on his now familiar fast-burn-then-scream routine. As the most venal bro, Lovitz proves wearing because his character is too one-note. Carvey, playing the dimwit kleptomaniac brother, has little to do and tries to do too much with it. The movie's most ingratiating performer by far is whiskey-voiced Florence Stanley, who spews and cusses as the trio's mother. When her sons return from jail, she gets all teary, telling them, "I've missed all the creature comforts we used to have when you boys were home—VCRs, big TVs." (PG-13)
Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond, Henry Thomas
Big sky, big emotions. That's what you get in this sprawling, romantic period film, which follows the fortunes of three Montana brothers who all love the same woman. Depending on your mood and sensibility, it either sweeps you up in its rapturous emotional wake or—and it's a big or—you just sit there and snicker. I found myself alternately doing both, though fortunately more of the former than the latter.
Based on Jim Harrison's engrossing 1979 novella of the same title, and directed with a-man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do sensibility by Glory's Edward Zwick, Legends features Hopkins as a U.S. Cavalry colonel who, fed up with enforcing government policy of rounding up Native Americans and marching them off to reservations, retires to a ranch with his three sons in the early 1900s. Quinn plays the responsible eldest son, Pitt the gone-native middle one and Thomas the sensitive youngest. Their easy camaraderie is forever disrupted when Thomas returns home from Harvard with a fiancée (Ormond) who lights the fires of all three brothers.
As the most troubled of the trio, Pitt is front and center, with mixed results. Sometimes his portrayal of a man at war with himself is moving; at other times, he seems to be all attitude, like the models in Calvin Klein underwear ads. Quinn brings a thoughtful gravity to his part that perfectly balances Pitt's intensity. Hopkins is fine for the first two-thirds of the film but, after his character suffers a stroke, makes like Quasimodo in the movie's final third. Thomas, all grown up from his E.T. days, is sweetly appealing, and Ormond, though lovely, has a role that is essentially both underwritten and unplayable, and she seems as if she's nursing an ulcer in many scenes. (R)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Tom Gliatto.
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!
