There is a recurring bit of business in which characters assume the shoes of others, sometimes even swiping them from a still-warm corpse, in this ambitious comedy-drama about man's search for family and sense of belonging across the centuries. Whether all this footwear recycling has to do with the transmigration of souls or merely soles is never entirely clear.
In fact, there's a certain haziness of meaning and purpose that hangs over all of Being Human, making this a movie that probably requires more patience and forbearance than the average filmgoer is willing to give. In a series of five vignettes, Human time travels from the Bronze Age right up to contemporary New York City. In each segment, Williams plays a man named Hector who, whether a caveman, a slave in the Roman Empire, a medieval Crusader, a 16th century Portugese nobleman or a '90s slumlord, needs to make peace with himself and with the ties binding him to those he loves.
Director-screenwriter Bill Forsyth, whose previous films include the whimsical Local Hero and the moving Housekeeping, works better in miniature than on the grand scale he's attempting this time out. As for Williams, he's in his serious-actor mode (no antic asides or improvised riffs) and does just fine, particularly in the final segment as a divorced man trying to reconnect with his children. Human is not without its affecting moments, but in the end, it's notable more for the movie it's trying to be than for the one it actually is. (PG-13)
Sissy Spacek, Anna Chlumsky
Late in the going, one of the four characters played by Spacek gets horse manure splattered on her face—in close-up. Nice welcome for this gifted Oscar winner after a two-year absence from the screen.
Trading Mom is a wisp of a family film about three children (Chlumsky and real-life brothers Asher and Aaron Michael Metchik) who magically make their harried single mother (Spacek) disappear after she grounds them for bad behavior. They then head for something called the Mommy Market to select a brand-new mom, running through three substitutes (a Zsa-Zsaish rich shrew, a gung-ho nature enthusiast and a circus performer, all played by Spacek) before realizing that their own mom is the one they really want. Yes, it's a moral a mother can love.
Spacek plugs along gamely, but the one-joke script by first-time director Tia Brelis—based on a novel by her mother, Nancy—asks little more of her than that she change costumes, wigs and accents in nearly every scene, the equivalent of being the host of Saturday Night Live without having to introduce the guest band. (PG)
Dana Carvey, Valeria Golino, Michael Gambon, James Earl Jones, Kevin Pollak
Carvey is the most likable as well as the most talented of Hollywood's Saturday Night Live alumni, and that appeal carries this innocuous detective comedy, though not all that far.
While Carvey doesn't get to use any of his prodigious mimicking skills, he does exploit his aptitude for amusing befuddlement as a private eye who has a strange illness that erases his memory every time he goes to sleep.
The gorgeous, bright-eyed Golino, having perfected her seductive sidekick moves in the Hot Shot films, is an ingratiating comic complement as Carvey's client-girlfriend. Jones and Pollak are accomplished straight men as district attorney friends of Carvey's, and Gambon is a villain chasing a rare coin that more or less motivates the plot.
As it happens, though, producers Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck provided Carvey with little but a clever, if thin, concept and a decent cast.
The director, the heavy-handed Mick Jackson, showed the sense of humor of a brick in The Bodyguard and does little better with Clean Slate. Writer Robert King would have been better off letting Carvey improvise.
Like Carvey's 1990 movie, Opportunity Knocks, this comedy never generates anything more than a mild chuckle. But it never assaults an audience's sensibilities or insults its intelligence either. (PG-13)
Documentary
With an inanely cheerful smile plastered across her face, Eleanor Powell, a movie star of the late '30s and early '40s more noted for her vim on the dance floor than her thespian talents or beauty, sings and taps her way through the Gershwins' "Fascinating Rhythm" in 1941's Larfy Be (hod. What makes her smile all the more remarkable is that on the other half of the split screen, we see the number actually being filmed: a frantic freeway of stagehands forklifting away and repositioning sections of the stage only seconds after Powell has passed, curtains being whisked to and fro behind her and cameramen wheeling in closer and closer on the star.
The scene perfectly captures the huge effort, skill and planning that went into creating the onscreen magic of golden-era MGM musicals. One only wishes there were more backstage segments and interviews in Entertainment! Ill, a belated and tired sequel to its 1974 and 1976 predecessors. The movie dutifully trots out such MGM stars of yesteryear as Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Ann Miller, Lena Home, Howard Keel, Mickey Rooney and Esther Williams. But it gives them little to do besides display the wonders of cosmetic surgery, indulge in hokey scripted chatter—Williams describes Tom and Jerry as "more animated than some of my leading men"—and introduce clips from some 100 films, many of which weren't all that thrilling the first time around. The movie does have its moments (Joan Crawford in blackface lip-synching to India Adams' recording of "Two Faced Woman" in 1953's Torch Song and a wan, out-of-it Judy Garland singing "I'm an Indian Too" shortly before she was fired from Annie Get Your Gun in 1949), but the MGM lion's roar is decidedly at half-meow here.(G)
- Contributors:
- 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!
