Insightful where it might be glib, compassionate where it might be pitying, poignant where it might be maudlin, this portrait of a hospital ward for rehabilitating spinal-cord-injury patients is a deftly acted story of human resourcefulness.
The plot revolves around the unlikely friendship between Stoltz (Memphis Belle), a novelist injured in a fall, and Snipes (White Men Can't Jump), a stereotypical free spirit hurt in a mugging. While Stoltz tries to handle the pressures of his complex relationship with Hunt (Project X), who is both his assistant and his married lover, Snipes' marriage is falling apart. Codirectors Neal Jimenez, who wrote River's Edge, and Michael Steinberg toughen the mix by throwing in the crude William Forsythe, who is rapidly becoming the Ernest Borgnine of his generation, as an injured racist biker.
Forsythe, defiantly boorish, Snipes, taking his torment almost casually, and Stoltz, vividly portraying the frustration brought on by his newly diminished condition, are all convincing victims. Hunt's confusion complements Stoltz', and theirs is a grown-up love affair, performed and directed with an understanding of the power of affection and respect as well as of sex.
Jimenez and Steinberg (the former wrote the script) use one stagy device—an off-camera patient whose pathetic cries for help seem ostentatious. A conclusion in which one patient breaks out of the hospital seems artificial too. Otherwise, this is a worthy addition to the genre of films about profound disability that already includes The Men, Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July. (R)
Tom Selleck, Don Ameche
Throughout this minor disaster—a tasteless comedy about a middle-aged man who, trying to cope with aging, ailing parents, decides that the best thing would be to help them commit suicide—Tom Selleck performs with a frisky, puppyish desperation, even as he is being slowly dismembered. Falling over a balcony, he loses a testicle from an encounter with a flagpole. He also loses one toe (infection), his hearing in one ear (gunshot), and has all the fingers broken on one hand (mafiosi). And yet Selleck—minus the trademark mustache—has been directed to smile and hop about with sitcom élan, as if he were John Ritter trying to conceal Suzanne Somers in a Hide-A-Bed.
Don Ameche and Anne Jackson are the parents, and they both look absolutely miserable. You almost wish they could be abducted by aliens—the ones in Ameche's Cocoon movies, say—and taken to the Planet Where the Young Are Reserved for Waxing Shuffleboard Courts. (PG-13)
Michael Biehn, Matt Craven
This is a movie about men who wear fluorescent-colored Lycra tights and vacation together. Don't jump to conclusions, though. These guys are straighter-than-straight macho mountain climbers, intent on scrambling up the big ones—not just because they're there, but because, as one character tells his wife, when he's at the very tippy-top of a peak, "I feel the truth of my life. I have to have that." Who says men can't talk about their feelings?
K2, a Broadway play translated into an anemic adventure film, has less on its mind than it thinks it has. The plot follows two yuppies, the first a hard-driving, skirl-chasing lawyer played by Biehn (The Abyss), the second a happily married research scientist played by Craven (Jacob's Ladder), as they attempt to ascend all 29,064 feet of K-2, a snow-covered rock pile in Kashmir that is second in height only to Everest. Climbing is a mere pretext, of course, for allowing this odd couple—one swings, the other doesn't—to discover great truths about friendship, love, manliness, courage and, uh-huh, the human spirit.
The drama is flat, but K2's climbing sequences, shot on location in Pakistan and on several mountains in British Columbia, are soaring, offering a cram course in the thrills of the sport. Biehn and Craven appear to know what they're doing with their crampons and pitons; they hold their own despite having to act, in mountaintop scenes, with icicles dangling from their beards. Franc (The Bride) Roddam directed. May he scale greater heights next time, artistically if not topographically. (R)
Penelope Ann Miller, Timothy Daly
This is what you might get if you took one of Alfred Hitchcock's great thriller-romances—The 39 Steps, say, or To Catch a Thief—-and ran it through a filter that took out all the wit, intelligence and editing genius.
Daly (TV's Wings) and Miller (Other People's Money), two especially attractive, versatile and likable young actors, meet cute and early. They then spend the film trying to get a valuable bottle of wine (vintage 1811, a Flaugergues's comet year) out of Scotland, where Miller, a wine broker's daughter, finds it while evaluating a wine cellar for an estate. The project is complicated by some villains, led by Louis Jourdan, who think the wine label carries part of a formula for a fountain-of-youth drug.
The film was written by William Goldman—his first original screenplay since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (though he did adapt The Princess Bride, among other '80s hits). Goldman has spent recent years kvetching in his books, Adventures in the Screen Trade and Hype and Glory, about the sorry state of the movie business—a state to which this film testifies convincingly. The director is Peter Yates, whose career has been sporadic since Bullitt, Breaking Away and Eyewitness, the last of which appeared in 1981. He exhibits a halting presence in this film, whose focus vacillates between the building Daly-Miller romance and the wine-bottle intrigue. Meanwhile, both Daly and Miller walk around talking to themselves ("The wine selection of a 7-Eleven," Miller mutters while inspecting one wine cellar).
If Jourdan (once the suave romantic star of such films as the 1959 musical Gigi and the 1949 Madame Bovary) had not already terminally abased himself in Swamp Thing and its sequel, he would be hitting rock bottom in this role. The movie's most enjoyable (if unwittingly so) moment, in fact, comes when Jourdan, having injected himself with the rejuvenation drug, exults, without a touch of irony, "In a short while, the vigor of youth will be coursing through my groin!" then breaks into a chorus of "I've Got a Lot of Living to Do."
Everyone ends up chasing around the reliably picturesque French Riviera with lots of hectic energy but no sense of style. Daly musters some macho appeal slugging bad guys and climbing walls, while Miller, forced to be more passive than most contemporary heroines, mostly just hangs out looking comely.
The casting of the peripheral characters is dull. A lummoxy Scottish thug, for instance, as played by the nondescript Nick Brimble, is a nonentity, while Richard Kiel, Hulk Hogan or Andre the Giant could have made the character a comic factor. Only Arturo (Captive) Venegas, as one of Jourdan's henchmen, shows much flair.
The movie doesn't reach a climax so much as it just winds down, a profoundly damning trait in a film that has suspense aspirations. (PG-13)
Rutger Hauer, Kim Cattrall
Here is that crossbreed of Predator and Blade Runner everyone has been waiting for. Hauer, the very poor man's Schwarzenegger (though the Dutchman Hauer has lost almost all of his accent), is a lone-rider American cop in London in the year 2008, when ecological disasters have all but submerged the city. When he gets involved in tracking a serial killer who disembowels his/her/its victims, he ends up hanging out with his dead partner's widow, Kim Cattrall (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) and criminologist Neil (Deadline) Duncan.
Their search takes them into the sewers, where they meet a monster and the even scarier professional weirdo Michael J. Pollard, Hollywood's modern equivalent of Peter Loire. Pollard is a rat hunter in this case, but he, as well as Hauer and the others, is laboring under hardship conditions, since young writer Gary Scott Thompson's script is mainly devoted to various declensions and conjugations of the F word.
The monster is a prosaic, run-of-the-sewers fiend even if he does have a bizarre taste for organ meat. His and Hauer's final scuffle is predictably violent and unimaginative. Director Tony (The Burning) Maylam, unlike Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (in which Hauer costarred), seems to have had not one original approach to what is essentially a standard horror film, its futuristic setting and ecological pretexts aside. (R)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Tom Gliatto,
- 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!
