If it were any cornier or mushier, it would be chowder, but this vehicle for country singer Strait generates a charming sweetness, the music is lively, and both Strait and Glasser are ingratiating new faces.
The script by Rex McGee doesn't seem very knowing. Strait is a hotshot country star who quits in the middle of a tour, disillusioned by the commercial aspects of his huge success. (His bank account is never revealed, but that aspect of stardom presumably doesn't irk him.) He takes refuge on a Texas rodeo family's ranch, where he rides horses (well, too) and starts courting Glasser—in genteel, old-fashioned cowboy fashion.
As Strait gears up for his comeback, he sings tunes by such composers as Eric Kaz, Mel Tillis and J.D. Souther. While Glasser doesn't sing, she hangs around prettily and makes her erratic romance with Strait appealing.
Warren, characteristically actressy, plays Strait's manager. Kyle Chandler is funny as a roadie who aspires to write hit songs and sleep with Warren. The movie's best casting is old cowboy star Rory Calhoun, who plays Glasser's father. He looks alarmingly thin but can still muster up the swagger of a hero.
The romance is the point, though, leading up to a crisis at Strait's big comeback concert.
It's just as well Glasser and Strait make such an attractive couple, because this is a cowboy movie where the good guy, when he finally confronts his main foe, doesn't sock the villain or call him out for a gunfight; he threatens to sue him.
Somewhere, John Wayne must be curling his lip.(PG)
Glenn Plummet, Christian Coleman
While this drama about black gang life in Los Angeles isn't terribly exciting, that's partly because of its virtues: the solid direction of Steve Anderson and the sturdy, well-nigh foolproof drama of Plummer, a reluctant member of a gang called the Deuces, struggling to save his son from sharing his fate—which has included a couple of decades in prison as well as a drug-addicted wife. The movie could have used a more personable child actor than Coleman, and Anderson's script (based on the novel Crips, by Donald Bakeer) is over-explicit in spelling out the need to break the cycle of violence that has afflicted generations of blacks. Plummer, though, is always worth watching—unsentimental and slightly remote. This is a man who has learned who he wants to he and now is terrified that he might forget. (R)
Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen
Here is the ideal date movie, assuming you re dating a psychopathic sadist with a high tolerance for dillydallying.
Written and directed by a young Tennessean, Quentin Tarantino, the film is a convoluted, pretentious combination of Diner and such crime caper movies as The killing and The Asphalt Jungle. Tarantino, though, is no Barry Levinson, Stanley Kubrick or John Huston. He jumps capriciously from standard narrative to flashback and flashforward, never showing the crime that is the movie's pivotal event, the robbery of a diamond wholesaler. Only the deed's aftermath, as the gang meets in a warehouse, is depicted.
Tarantino displays little understanding of human behavior in general and criminal behavior in particular. He seems to think, for instance, that your average armed robber-murderer spends his off-duty hours sitting around philosophizing about tipping waitresses, engaging in pompous textual analysis of Madonna songs and playing movie trivia games.
As the gang's mastermind, character actor Lawrence Tierney, affecting a how-gruff-I-am voice, seems like a loser in a Brodcrick Crawford imitation contest. The younger actors who are doing his dirty work all seem fresh off the campus of the James Woods—Willem Dafoe Institute for Acting Surly, Nervous and Disheveled. Roth, as an undercover cop who has infiltrated the gang, is the most evocative. Madsen is the groups trigger-happy psycho (in one voyeuristically protracted scene, he tortures a captured cop by, among other things, slicing off one of his ears and dousing him with gasoline in preparation for setting him on fire); he musters an eerie, Widmarkian malevolence. Chris Penn, Sean's burly brother, is convincing as Tierney's playful son, and Tarantino himself portrays the gang's other member. Keitel, overdoing everything as usual, grimaces like mad and when he is supposed to be mourning a dead buddy, wheezes and bellows like a wounded water buffalo. No woman has a substantial part.
The film ends without a satisfying resolution, since these characters are so ugly only an agonizing affliction would qualify as just deserts. Crime doesn't exactly pay in this case, but it doesn't cost enough either. (R)
Mike Dytri, Craig Gilmore
This is one of those movies—think of it as an HIV-positive Thelma & Louise—that you're not allowed to hate. It wouldn't be politically correct even if it did show sound critical judgment. As Gilmore, a magazine writer, notes in his daily audio diary, the film begins on the day he takes his first AIDS test—and tests positive. His first mistake was falling for a man who was infected but kept the news to himself. His second mistake is picking up Dytri, a pistol-packing hotdogger who is also HIV positive and sure he isn't long for the world; thus, he figures, it couldn't matter what he does: Run up someone else's credit card, ignore safe sex, clobber homophobes—even kill a cop, then beat a retreat out of town, taking a newly lovesick Gilmore with him.
They wander aimlessly, pondering the meaning of AIDS ("a neo-Nazi Republican final solution," raves Dytri) and of life and death, stopping at various intervals to make love and collect phone calls. The Living End succeeds most at being self-conscious. When at a loss for convincing dialogue, writer-director Gregg Araki, who does far better by his male than female characters, resorts to rat-a-tat sprays of profanity. But there are funny, touching moments—for example, a sequence in which the two doomed men pass the drive time playing a word game they enjoyed as children—and Gilmore and Dytri make the most of them. (Unrated)
Larry Drake, Holly Marie Combs, Glenn Quinn, Cliff De Young
A notably unimaginative horror movie of the modern lamebrain, gore-dripping school, this film may serve as vindictive therapy for people with grudges against physicians, but otherwise it is neither scary, funny nor has it a sign of intelligent life.
Drake, the L.A. Law regular, thumps around as a loony physician, doing more simpering than giggling as he randomly stabs, saws and clubs people. The only practice he doesn't resort to is refusing to accept medical insurance. (In one bit of doctor-bashing, writer-director Manny Coto even has Drake assail a victim with a golf club (an allusion to doctors' clichéd obsession with playing golf.)
Coto's dreary sense of humor runs to having someone drop a condom in a toilet bowl, then use a toothbrush to fish it out. While Quinn and Combs are tolerable as the threatened, innocent teens, they don't generate very much tension as they natter through a tepid romance while waiting for Drake to make his move.
The standard horror accoutrements are here: haunted house, carnival, house of mirrors, inept cops, naive parents (De Young is Combs's father). Drake makes a feeble monster, though. The average dentist, giggling or not, is far more menacing. (R)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Tom Gliatto,
- Joanne Kaufman.
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!
