Peter Falk, Barbara Hershey, Keanu Reeves
The movie equivalent of a lollipop with a tart center, this is a mostly sweet comedy with a touch of satiric bite.
Adroitly adapted by novelist William Boyd from Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, it is about an itinerant '50s radio soap-opera writer, Falk, who travels from town to town conjuring up new plots that depend on sexual excess and ethnic insults.
Here he settles at a seedy radio station in New Orleans, where Reeves, a newswriter, is developing a crush on his free-spirited, older aunt-by-marriage, Hershey. Falk match-makes for Reeves and Hershey, mostly to give himself inspiration (he secretly tape records their trysts, for instance), then extrapolates their courtship into his soap plot, which involves two outlandish relationships, one between a brother and a sister, the other between the sister's husband and her mother. Interspersed are idle slurs directed at Albanians, as in "I'd rather be an Albanian goat salesman than leave you."
The radio station's cast for its soap is a glum bunch of aging actors, but Falk fantasizes a more appropriate group, who show up on screen in movie-within-movie fashion and include Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, John Larroquette and Hope Lange, all of them camping it up happily.
Director Jon {Queen of Hearts) Amiel and Boyd winningly transpose Vargas Llosa's musings about the nature of his work. When Reeves accuses Falk of exploiting him, Falk shrugs and says that's how writers are: "You feed off us. We feed off you."
Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis wrote the appropriately loose, vaguely bluesy score, and appears on-camera in a club band.
While there are times when Amiel larks it up too much, this is a pleasant distraction, ideal for those who can never quite remember whether it's supposed to be life that imitates art or the other way around. (PG-13)
Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell
There are some heartbreakingly beautiful moments in this movie about a cavalry officer who defects to the Sioux in the 1860s. Also some heartbreakingly touching moments, heartbreakingly self-indulgent moments and heartbreakingly foolish moments. It is never, however, what it is supposed to be: just plain heartbreaking.
In his first directing job, Costner lends an admirable perspective to his portrait of an American Indian community. It should go without saying that the pre-reservation Sioux, like every other people, laughed, cried, had sex, argued, were smart, were dumb, got confused—and were capable of scalping or shooting people in the back. That kind of thing has rarely been said in movies, though, and Costner, with screenwriter Michael Blake (adapting his own novel), says it eloquently.
There are memorable scenes, including a beautifully framed buffalo hunt.
Costner, who plays the cavalryman, and cinematographer Dean Semler also display the physical grandeur of their South Dakota locations in spectacular fashion, with vista after panorama after majestic landscape.
Like everything about this film, though—starting with its length: three hours—the traveloguing is overdone. Costner is given his Sioux name, Dances with Wolves, after he is seen playing with a pet wolf. But if the Sioux had seen this film, they would have called him Obsesses with People Silhouetted Against Horizons. Seeing figures marching against blazing sunsets is nice but gets old after the eighth or ninth time. In one odd scene, a glorious sunset/sunrise seems to be behind Costner as he watches some Sioux go off into another sunset/sunrise.
The film's inconsistencies muddy Costner's treatise on what he believes to be the tragic end of the old Sioux ways. When he first meets the Sioux, for instance, he is alone at an outpost; they are stealing his horse. One brave charges at him, yelling threats; Costner stands with pistol aimed but doesn't shoot even when the warrior prepares to throw his spear. (This makes Costner seem less noble than suicidal.)
Later, Costner joins the Sioux as they fight a band of Pawnees. The Sioux trap the Pawnee leader and form a circle around him about 20 yards across. Using this strategy, they have the Pawnee in a devastating cross fire. They also, however, have themselves in a devastating cross fire. Yet they blast away—using rifles for the first time—and don't end up shooting each other.
There are other distractions. Costner's outpost at times seems to be just around the corner from the Sioux camp. But when, after Costner moves in with the Sioux, a big contingent of cavalrymen move into his old place. Kevin doesn't see or hear them for days, as if the place were miles away.
As bad as this kind of sloppiness is the film's racism, which treats whites with the mindless caricaturing Indians endured in old Westerns. Though there are a few decent souls among the cavalrymen, they have no families, no context, no dimension. The impression is that when the Sioux look around at the Black Hills, they all see natural grandeur, frisky buffaloes and oxygenating greenery, while the white guys are just trying to think of how to invent the mall.
And through everything, John Barry's background music keeps rising to ecstatic peaks of intensity; he greets a nice little stretch of grass with the kind of overture usually reserved for tidal waves.
Canadian actor Graham Greene, an Oneida, is striking as the Sioux holy man who first befriends Costner. Nebraskan Rodney Grant, an Omaha, plays a hot-blooded young warrior to great effect. McDonnell, as the lifelong white captive who falls for Costner, is winsome.
Both Costner's ante-flower child demeanor, though, and Blake's script seem anachronistic. "I have become a sort of celebrity," Costner says at one point,
To say this movie is sporadically artful is to say that it is more interesting than most films around these days. But it is still a failure, if a glorious one. While there's no question that its heart is in the right place, its foot is too often in its mouth. (PG-13)
Lots and lots of rats
Slow and obvious and stupid as it is—very, very and very—this movie is most noteworthy for its vile lack of scruples.
First of all, Stephen King gives up the rights to his short story about a monster living under a vermin-infested textile mill in Maine to Ralph Singleton, who has no previous directing experience and no visible talent.
Then Singleton and writer John Esposito, whose main credit is work for Slaughterhouse magazine, turned the story into horror-movie drivel, with a joke making fun of Vietnam vets, with wretched effects (the monster looks like a glue-basted pork roast with fangs) and with woeful dialogue: "At Bachman," the mill foreman says, "we're part of one big happy family." "Yeah, the Manson family," a worker mumbles.
The cast includes Stephen (Cagney and Lacey) Macht, who as the foreman speaks with an accent indicating he was born in Bulgaria, grew up in Baton Rouge and moved to Maine to practice his pig Latin. Most of the other actors generate whose-nephew-is-he? questions, though David (Cherry 2000) Andrews and Kelly (Triumph of the Spirit) Wolf, as the two most heroic workers, are tolerable.
The film also contains a bizarre product plug. While Andrews works in the basement (the monster lives in a sub-subbasement), he amuses himself by using a slingshot to shoot soda cans at rats. That the brand of the soda is always blatantly displayed is strange, since the effect is to suggest Diet Pepsi is the soda of choice for killing rodents. (R)
>FORGET IT: TOTAL RECALL Some of Arnold's exploits are muscle-bound fun, the special effects (such as a holographic tennis lesson) are dazzling, and the plot is promising. It is about a secret agent with a rearranged memory who gets involved in a revolt among Mars colonists. But part way through, director Paul Verhoeven lets things degenerate into a gorefest of the most graphic, offensive, I'm-making-this-film-for-a-bunch-of-jerks sort. As Schwarzenegger proceeds to squeeze, boot, bonk and otherwise lay waste to the bad guys, you can practically hear Verhoeven in the background yelling (in a Dutch accent, of course), "Guts! Ve need more guts! Entrails too! Is not yet offal enough!" (LIVE)
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!
