A sprawling, often ponderous would-be epic from director Roland (The Killing Fields) Joffé, City of Joy is about a dispirited American doctor (Swayze) who finds redemption in tending to the poor in a Calcutta slum. One wants to like this well-meaning movie but both Joy and Swayze are too doggedly earnest, will a capital E.
Swayze, a younger Jeff Bridge's without Bridges's range, plays a surgeon who deserts his practice in Houston after a child dies on his operating table. Stranded in Calcutta (he forgets his passport at an ashram), he is beaten unconscious by street toughs. He wakes up—to find his wounds being ministered to by a selfless Irish woman (British stage star Collins, whose part seems truncated) who runs a clinic in one of Calcutta's worst slums. Discovering that he's an M.D., she tries to recruit him. No way, says Swayze, adding, "I hate sick people." Eventually, thanks to his involvement with a poor but noble Indian family (and a surfeit of plot that includes a monsoon flood. delivering a baby, several stabbings, dealing with a labor strike, a battle with an Indian mob and too much more), Swayze does the right thing.
Swayze deserves credit for taking on an ambitious role, after the frivolous Ghost and Point Break. He is fine in comic scenes that call for him to show exasperation at the intractability of the Indian system, but in his big emotional scenes he is as stiff as Ed Sullivan was. (PG-13)
Animated
Elvis lives...in the hearts of hens everywhere! That's the conceit behind Don (An American Tail) Bluth's lively adaptation of the storybook tale of Chanticleer, the rooster who crows the sun up in the morning. In this version, Chanticleer (whose voice is provided by Glen Campbell, doing a fowl Elvis imitation) is a loose-kneed rooster with a pompadour who sets barnyard hearts afluttering when he belts out a tune. About a quarter way through, the film switches to live action, wherein a young farm lad (Toby Scott Ganger) is awakened by his mother with the news that floodwaters are rising. Convinced that only Chanticleer can call the sun, stop the rain and thus make the waters recede, the boy, transformed into a kitten by an evil owl (the voice of Christopher Plummer), sets out with Chanticleer's barnyard pals to find the rooster, who has been lured into show business. It's all haphazard. But the tunes (by T. J. Kuenster) are sprightly, and faithful to Presley-style material. (G)
Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard
A tedious movie about an Important Topic, this conspiracy film is set in the late 1970s and depicts the FBI's efforts to arrest an Indian-rights activist. It's the kind of movie in which, after nearly two hours of car chases, shoot-outs and clue-dropping, one character turns to the other and says, "Oh, you mean so-and-so was shot because....explaining the movie for those who have arrived late, grown confused or nodded off.
Kilmer, most of whose acting consists of letting sweat drip down his face at strategic moments, plays an FBI agent dispatched to a reservation in the Badlands of South Dakota to track down a man suspected of murder. He gets the assignment because he's part American Indian, an aspect of his heritage he has never dealt with but which whacks him big time once he starts hanging out with his own people. Pretty soon he's having supernatural visions and questioning the motives of his FBI boss (Shepard, in a winningly droll performance).
Thunderheart's real treat is Graham (Dances with Wolves) Greene. Playing a clever tribal cop, Greene is reminiscent of Robert Mitchum, all shambling grace and dry delivery. Thunder-heart's scenery—director Michael (Gorillas in the Mist) Apted shot the movie at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota—is spectacular, but scenery rarely saves a misguided movie. It sure doesn't here. (R)
Dolly Parton, James Woods, Griffin Dunne
Three things keep this genial, simpleminded movie from being a TV sitcom: the absence of a laugh track, the absence of commercials and the presence of the unsinkable Dolly.
Fired as a dance instructor for counseling her students on their personal lives, Parton leaves her Arkansas home and loutish beau (Michael Madsen). Landing a job as a receptionist at a Chicago radio station, she is mistaken for a new on-air psychologist and becomes everyone's favorite "doctor of the heart," dispensing homespun advice by the gingham bale. "Get off the cross," Parton counsels one martyred caller. "Somebody needs the wood."
She even shows up a stuffy Harvard-trained shrink (Spalding Gray). The only skeptic is a reporter (Woods) who wants to get the scoop on Parton but falls in love with her. Dunne is wonderfully hyperkinetic as the station manager who convinces Parton to take on the title "Dr." After all, he tells her, "Captain Kangaroo wasn't really a captain." Director Barnet Kellman moves the flimsy plot along briskly, apparently on the theory that if the ride is fast enough, the potholes will seem less bothersome. Lucky for him, Parton is driving. (PG)
Rodney Dangerfield. Jackée. Jonathan Brandis
This movie, a kind of feminist descendant of The Bad News Bears, can pride itself on one thing: a careful matching of humor level (pre-teen) with target audience.
The always stunned-looking Dangerfield is a salesman for a large company. Bent on moving up the corporate ladder, he signs on to coach the Lady-bugs, a girls' soccer team sponsored by his hard-charging, win-at-any-cost boss. Unfortunately for the none-too-athletic Dangerfield and his secretary-assistant coach (Jackée), the team, which includes the boss's daughter, has far less than even a nodding acquaintance wild soccer. In desperation. Dangerfield prevails upon his fiancée's son (Brandis, 16) to suit up like a girl and lead the Ladybugs to victory. It's tough to decide which is more offensive: the movie's attempts to derive humor from incidents misinterpreted as sexual molestation of children or die antediluvian notion that girls need males to develop teamwork and leadership skills. Then again, maybe it's such double entendres, addressed to Dangerfield, as "This time next year you'll have 10 men under you." "Could you make it women?" He asks.(PG)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Mark Goodman,
- 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!
