The pleasures of a Spike Lee movie lie more often in the characters than in the narrative, more in the small, deftly observed moments than in the Big Picture. That's because with Lee, the big picture is frequently imbued with strident moralizing. Crooklyn, the saga of a black family struggling to make ends meet and make sense of things in '70s Brooklyn, holds to the pattern. Both slight and affecting, it is Lee's most conventional, most affectionate work.
As in most Spike Lee movies, the director has a cameo, this time as a neighborhood pariah with a glue-sniffing habit. Woodard is a schoolteacher and mother of five, a woman with a gimlet eye and a terrible swift sword. She's quite capable of hauling her contentious brood out of bed in the middle of the night when they have neglected to clean the kitchen. Woodard is no less fierce with her husband (Lindo), an unemployed, idealistic jazz musician. But Woodard's wrath is essentially turned away by her winsome, scapegrace, petty-thief only daughter (Harris), through whose eyes Crooklyn unfolds.
It's a small, slice-of-life story of a block where games of hopscotch, jump rope, stoopball and stickball are hotly contested, of a very loud home where dinners of black-eyed peas are greeted with dismay, penny candy is consumed eagerly and television is watched surreptitiously and constantly. In one of the movie's best ironic moments, the five children lustily sing along with the Partridge Family. But Crooklyn, while marvelously enriched by the period sound track, is not as well put together as it ought to be. Harris's trip to Virginia to visit her uncle, cousin and religious fanatic aunt, for example, seems snipped from a reel of another film. And while this movie seems to want to explore the relationship between a mother and daughter and is about a young girl's coming of age, little happens onscreen or even subtextually to support such themes. But Woodard does her usual fine, fine work, and Harris is a real find. (PG-13)
Brandon Lee, Ernie Hudson, Rochelle Davis, Michael Wincou, Sofia Shinas
Buried somewhere within this chaotically directed mess may be an exciting fantasy adventure film. Of course, it is so ill-lit and muddy-sounding that Wuthering Heights may be in there somewhere, too, and maybe Claudia Schiffer Does Dallas or the lost episodes of The Hollywood Squares.
While filming The Crow last year, Brandon Lee was accidentally killed in an on-set shooting mishap during one of the movie's countless bad fight scenes. That accident is no excuse for the seemingly purposeful lack of focus in the camera work.
The unimaginative David SchowJohn Shirley script, adapted from the comic-book series by James O'Barr, concerns an aspiring rock musician in an unnamed city who is killed in an incomprehensible—and frenetically staged—attack by a drug gang led by Wincott. A mysterious, mystical raven, visiting Lee's grave, helps him come back to life (with intermittent superpowers) so he can hunt down Wincott and avenge himself and his murdered girlfriend, Shinas. Lee, supported by a little girl admirer, the precocious Davis, and cop Hudson, then sets off for the film's clunkily arranged showdown. Australian Alex Proyas, a music video veteran, directed without distinguishing himself in any positive way.
As The Crow flies—not at all—it is a very short distance from the credits to stultifying tedium. (R)
Harley Jane Kozak, Elizabeth McGovern, Bill Pullman, Brad Pitt, Ken Wahl
This supposedly giddy romp, which compares unfavorably with a Love, American Style segment and the coffee commercial in which two close friends reminisce about a cute French waiter, focuses on best pals Kozak and McGovern. While happily married to a sweet, absent-minded math professor (Pullman) who plays the blues on his harmonica as he works through quadratic equations, Kozak continues to have heavy-breathing dreams about her high school beau (Wahl). Sure, they are only dreams, but they are starling to affect her marriage—and starting to get in the way of a good night's sleep. So Kozak concocts a scheme: What if her best friend (McGovern), a single, sexually adventurous art gallery owner, goes to Denver, looks up Wahl, inveigles him into bed, then returns home and gives Kozak a full accounting? That should certainly put an end to that inconvenient fantasizing once and for all. Besides, what are best friends for? McGovern, who is in a seemingly meaningless though sexually superlative relationship with an artist (Pitt), agrees to the plan with, of course, unforeseen consequences. The Favor cannot lay claim to a single plot twist that is at all new or interestingly redone. Nor can it boast one single piece of dialogue that merits anything more than a pained smile. The cast members, particularly Pullman and Pitt, deserve an audience's deepest, deepest sympathy. (R)
Jeremy Piven, Chris Young, David Spade, Megan Ward, Jessica Walter
Few aspects of American culture make such a fat, deserving target for derision as political correctness, the compulsion to overcompensate for past prejudice by behaving as if women, blacks, gays and all subcultures are above criticism and beyond reproach.
This crude college comedy is not the perfect lampoon the PC phenomenon warrants. It rather suggests an archer who doesn't hit his target that often but kicks it over frequently.
"Young is a prospective student visiting the campus of a fictional Connecticut university where self-righteous students protest everything, including protests. Most obnoxious is a protofeminist group called the Womynists that maintains a perpetual demonstration against the "phallocracy" and chastises any woman who dates a white male. The school's president, Walters, has two preoccupations: the students' "sensitivity level" and changing the school's sports team mascot from the ostensibly offensive Indians to an endangered species, the whooping cranes.
Screenwriters Adam Leff and Zak Perm lean heavily on the Womynists, but they're evenhandedly heavy-handed, using Saturday Night Live's Spade as their politically incorrect stalking horse. Spade plays a "Reaganite" fraternity president who laments, "This place used to be a bastion of elitism, but now there are homosexuals on the football team, and the minute you seduce a woman into having sex, you're brought up on charges."
The film is funniest in its few subtle moments, such as when an on-campus queue breaks down into an argument over whether women, gays or blacks are the most oppressed. There is also the school's only serious student doing a thesis on the Caine-Hackman theory, which supposes that there is always a movie starring Michael Caine and/or Gene Hack man on TV
It's damning with faint praise indeed to call this the best of the current college comedy movies, but there you go. (PG-13)
- Contributors:
- Joanne Kaufman,
- 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!
