Sorry, Pull and Oliver J. fans, this bio movie is about another dragon, martial-arts movie star Bruce Lee ("Little Dragon" being his Chinese nickname from his birth in San Francisco). But even those who found Lee's films more risible than rousing can enjoy this only mildly earnest, briskly paced retelling of his life, which encompassed a youth in Hong Kong, a stint as Kato on the '60s U.S. pop TV series The Green Hornet, bouts with racism—both anti-Oriental and anti-caucasian—his eventual international stardom and an abiding relationship with his wife, Linda, upon whose book about Bruce this film is based.
While Jason Scott Lee is no relation to Bruce, he looks more like him than Bruce's late son, Brandon, did. He is also athletic enough to emulate Bruce's martial-arts prowess, down to the gratuitous gymnastics. Jason is also a superior actor to Bruce, which helps him handle the racism-centered subtext of the film. Holly, as Linda, is refreshingly convincing too, even though she is cast as a patient, understanding martyr-going-on-saint. Wagner, overdoing the sleaze factor by half, is less effective as the Green Hornet producer who eventually let David Carradine walk away with the Bruce Lee TV idea that became Kung Fu.
The film bogs down only in the sequences director Rob Cohen mounts involving mystical mumbo jumbo about an armor-wearing demon who haunts Bruce's dreams—as well as in a few outrageously overwrought scenes dealing with the actor's real life. Even Bruce's mysterious death at 32 in 1973 is connected to the demon, almost as if the raggedy old fiend lurched up and put Lee into the inexplicable illness from which he never recovered.
Things could have been worse though. Imagine Oliver Stone directing this film: Bruce turns into one of the most significant cultural figures of the century, and he gets murdered by the CIA. (PG-13)
Alan Arkin, Elizabeth Perkins, Diane Lane, Matt Craven, Kevin Pollak, Vincent Spano, Julie Warner, Kimberly Williams
While it is essentially The Big Chill Goes to Summer Camp, this helium-weight comedy seems fresh and funny, thanks to an attractive ensemble east and writer-director Mike Binder's minimizing his lapses into serious melodrama.
Arkin, whose versatility as a comic actor is turning him into a kind of American Peter Sellers, is the owner of a summer camp in Ontario. About to shut it down, he invites some alumni from his favorite summer for a reunion.
These alumni have stayed much closer than most ex-campers. And their original experience seems to have been heavier in sex and pot smoking than arts and crafts. But they are all likable, even the obsessive practical joker played by Pollak.
The serious subplots-involving Spano and Warner's unhappy marriage, the grieving of recent widow Lane, Arkin's racism and Craven's sexist relationship with Williams—cast occasional palls.
The wry Perkins and acerbic Pollak are, however, reliably funny, and Binder gives them enough physical comedy to maintain the high-spirited mood. It's also fun to see Spano, noted most recently dining on his fellow passengers in Alive, getting a chance to exploit his Jeff Goldblum-like looks and talent for romantic comedy.
It's all amusing enough for even the campophobes among us to wax nostalgic! about those summers spent under the sun, stars, leaky roofs and clouds of mosquitoes. (PG-13)
Danny Aiello, Dyan Cannon
It ends with Ally Sheedy in a farm-girl costume waving at us through the porthole of a giant space-traveling cucumber floating above Trump Plaza. And what comes before isn't much better. The Pickle, directed by Paul Mazursky, is a completely flat comedy about a famous middle-aged movie director (Aiello) desperate to make a comeback after a siring of flops. He agrees to film a fantasy epic about a bunch of farm kids who fly a giant cucumber to another planet, which turns out to look like Manhattan, although it's called Cleveland, and is peopled by meat-eating creeps who wear trendy black. This movie-within-the-movie (which also features Isabella Kossellini, Griffin Dunne and Little Richard) is stupendously bad-some sort of deliberately dim-witted allegory that suggests Gulliver's Travels rewritten by Sherwood (Gilligan's Island) Schwartz. The movie that surrounds it is just dim, acted by a cast—Cannon as Aiello's ex-wife, Shelley Winters as his mother and Jerry Stiller as his agent—whose energy level falls somewhere below a gherkin's. (Mazursky, in a small part as a projectionist who's getting ready to retire, is actually quite good.) Michel Legrand's score, at least, has some high-flying sparkle. (R)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Tom Gliatto.
