Quirky and a half, maybe quirky to the 12th power, this film about love among the mentally ill is also as artificially sweet as a mouthful of saccharin. Still, it is irresistibly appealing in an old-fashioned, fantasy romance way.
Masterson is a young Washington State woman who is afflicted by an unspecified mental condition that turns her manic and disconnected under even minimal stress. Quinn is her doling brother, a car mechanic with infinite patience for his sister's unsettling instability but only a scant life of his own. Depp is a ditzy cousin of one of Quinn's poker pals (his lovable neurosis manifests itself in his perching in trees like a leopard, and he is also an old movie buff, even dressing and acting like Buster Keaton). Depp moves in and helps Quinn lake care of Masterson. Depp and Masterson don't just meet cute; they live cute. The romance is inevitable and director Jeremiah Chechik lets it unfurl without surprise.
While Depp trots out his eerie Edward Scissorhands grin and shows an atavistic flair for physical comedy (he does Chaplin shtick better than Robert Downey Jr.), he pales in comparison with Masterson and Quinn, two of the most attractive as well as most talented actors of their generation.
But the film's intellectually dishonest undertones, suggesting that menial illness is merely an entertaining peccadillo, are disturbing enough to undercut the considerable enjoyment it generates. (PG)
Robert Redford, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson
They don't make 'em like this anymore, and with good reason. Indecent Proposal is a big, swank star romance that has as much interest in reality as Hillary Rodham Clinton has in redecorating the White House. It suckers you in early on through its sheer professionalism and glitz, but soon its sappy heart and lack of substance will leave you feeling like a sap for watching it.
Moore and Harrelson play the perfect married couple—she sells real estate, he's an architect—blessed with love, looks and a fabulous sex life. Cleaned out by the recession, they head for Vegas with their last $5,000 to raise the $50,000 they need to cover their debts. Enter Redford as a billionaire high roller. He offers the couple a cool $1 million if Moore will spend one night with him. Oh, no: What to do? (Hint: Check out the similarly plotted, but funnier, Honeymoon In Vegas.) If the filmmakers—director Adrian Lyne and producer Sherry Lansing, the same team responsible for the equally slick Fatal Attraction—honestly think Indecent Proposal explores a moral dilemma, it's time they enrolled in Ethics 101.
What's best is the high-wattage cast. Moore looks great and makes the most of her limpid brown eyes and throat) voice, Harrelson, sincere. sexy and boyishly charming, continues to establish himself as a welcome big-screen presence. Least effective is Redford—looking every one of his 55 years—who seems more intent on convincing us, and Moore, that he is really a nice guy than in exploring his character's darker side. (R)
Tom Guiry, Mike Vitar, Karen Allen, James Earl Jones
Anti-Eureka! This youth-sports movie is dull and unfocused enough to evoke nostalgic feelings for The Mighty Ducks.
Its ostensible point is that Guiry, a new kid on his 1962 suburban Los Angeles block, has a rough lime fitting in with the other kids in the neighborhood, who have an unofficial baseball team that plays in a vacant lot.
As an actor, Guiry is on the colorless side, a kind of preadolescent Christian Slater. But Vitar, who plays the team's leader and best player, is poised and charismatic, as well as good-looking enough to suggest that some day he might become a Richard Gere-style idol (without the brain-waves-to-Tibet notions, one hopes). Patrick Renna, no relation to ex-major leaguer Bill Renna, plays the team's requisite chubby kid without embarrassing himself. Marlee Shelton is lively and likable as die neighborhood dream girl, who as a lifeguard inspires one of the boys to fake drowning so he can become the beneficiary of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Among the adults, Allen, that walking monument to bad career moves, is typically underused as Guiry's concerned mother. Like her, Jones languishes on the bench, getting only a few lines as owner of a house next to the boys' sandlot field.
Cowriter and director David Mickey Evans squanders a lot of time with a silly, tedious subplot involving a monstrous. slobbering and often obviously artificial mastiff that is supposed to live in Jones's yard, devouring stray baseballs and boys. The dog story line leads to some slapsticky physical comedy but not much else.
Evans avoids the cliché of a Big Game showdown for Guiry and his new buddies, but for a film that pretends to celebrate baseball and its mythology, The Sandlot bobbles a lot of details. A grandiose prologue that recalls Babe Ruth's "called shot" home run in the 1932 World Series, for instance, mistakenly says he hit it in the bottom of the ninth inning: in fact, the Yankees were the visitors, and he hit in the top of the filth inning. And production designer Chester Kaczenski fills Guiry's new L.A. neighborhood with an inordinate amount of pennants and plaques cheering the Milwaukee Braves, in 1962 the bitter foes of the Dodgers.
Any of Charles Schulz's baseball-oriented Peanuts strips contains more understanding of baseball and more insight into children, as well as more pointed fun. (PG)
Burt Reynolds, Norman D. Golden II, Ray Sharkey, Ruby Dee
When sweet oversteps its bounds, as it does in nearly every scene in Cop and a Half', it becomes cloying. And what we have, in this formulaic movie about a smart-mouth 8-year-old who persuades the cops to let him carry around a badge and handcuffs in exchange for information about a crime he witnessed, is about 87 minutes of cloying.
The kid, played by newcomer Golden, is teamed up with a gruff, aging detective, played by Reynolds. That these two will end up developing a father-son bond is a foregone conclusion.
Golden mugs big-time and delivers his lines with annoyingly smug precocity. Reynolds, making an uninspired return to feature films, yells a lot and grunts. As, respectively, Golden's grandmother and Reynolds's boss, Dee and Holland Taylor give better performances than the movie deserves; Sharkey, playing the head villain, seems to be auditioning for a dimwit-crook role in Home Alone HI. (PG)
- Contributors:
- 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!
