Steven Seagal, William Forsythe
Going to a Steven Seagal movie and complaining about violence would be like going to a stagnant pond and complaining about the muck.
But the sadistic violence in this film—sadism for the sadistic voyeur's sake—is nonetheless alarming. So is what must be a record number of uses of the F word. The F word in question is not farfetched, although that applies too. Seagal plays a Brooklyn cop whose partner is murdered by crack-head-psycho Forsythe on the street in broad daylight in front of his family. Then, during Seagal's inevitable one-man vendetta, he takes on a whole saloonful of unscrupulous villains and naturally reduces them all to bleeding lumps, thanks to the fact that they politely fight him one at a time.
Little happens that isn't predictable. The Detroit-born Seagal does adopt a passable Brooklyn accent whose resemblance to the New Jersey dialect Marlon Brando used in On the Waterfront may not be coincidental; a woman character in this film is named Terry Malloy, the name of Brando's Waterfront pug.
There is also a sprightly bonk-out in a butcher shop that's choreographed with dexterity. Seagal ends up clubbing one thug with a salami.
Forsythe is a strong enough actor to survive this, but Jerry (Crimes and Misdemeanors) Orbach, as Seagal's boss, embarrasses himself roundly with a wishy-washy performance.
More strange, the movie is filled with cheap gaffes, non sequiturs and clumsy dialogue. Cars come to abrupt but hardly panic stops, and on the sound track their tires screech as if they had been going 115. Jo Champa, playing Seagal's wife, at one point begs him to "call off this manhunt," which would be reasonable except that the manhunt hasn't started yet.
In one scene, Seagal slavers all over a Mafia don, all but kissing his boots; a few minutes later, with zero motivation, he's trashing the same gangster, as if writer David Lee (Roadhouse) Henry had realized it doesn't do Steve's reputation much good to have him cozying up to hoods.
Another mobster, referring to Forsythe, has the puzzling line, "That piece of s—couldn't be a gangster if he owned New York." And Seagal, reminiscing about his immigrant dad's knife-sharpening cart, laments that his father never recovered from the advent of disposable scissors and knives. (Disposable scissors: an idea whose time has come.)
Seagal, who coproduced, Henry and director John (Lock Up) Flynn have a peculiar notion of morality. They are prissy about showing sex, yet think nothing of having the hero say, "You tell your brother I'm gonna cut off his head and piss down his throat."
Now if that isn't justice, what is? (R)
Judy Davis, Hugh Grant
Portraying 19th-century French novelist George Sand (née Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) as a prevideo-era Madonna, this drawing-room comedy sometimes gets a bit precious. But it has a whimsical charm, and Davis (A Passage to India), steely, sexy and vulnerable all at the same time, is characteristically splendid.
Extrapolating from real events, scenarist Sarah Kernochan (cowriter of 9½ Weeks) concentrates on Sand's crusade to seduce Frederic Chopin, part of a Parisian brat pack that includes composer Franz Liszt, poet Alfred de Musset and painter Eugene Delacroix.
Grant (Maurice) plays the moralistic Chopin, the Polish-born composer. He makes an ideal foil for Davis.
On the one hand, she is scandalizing Paris by wearing men's clothes and conducting very public affairs. ("You're not with the army anymore," she tells one ex-lover, a soldier who keeps wanting to reanalyze their relationship. "We had an affair, not a pitched battle.") On the other, to please Chopin, she not only puts on a dress but a dress in red and white—the colors of the Polish flag.
Kernochan and debuting film director James Lapine (Kernochan's husband and Broadway collaborator of Stephen Sondheim) display a capricious approach, one that does not pay undue attention to the problems of anachronism or literal history. At a triumphant moment, for instance, Davis's two young children shout, "Yes!" as if they had just beaten the eighth board of Super Mario Brothers III.
There are fine performances by Julian (Warlock) Sands as Liszt, Bernadette Peters as Liszt's bitter mistress, Mandy Patinkin as Musset and Emma (The Tall Guy) Thompson as a duchess who invites the whole artsy crowd to her chateau but soon finds them to be ungrateful and boring.
And Kernochan has a way with an acerbic line. When someone suggests to Patinkin, another ex-lover of Davis, that he still lusts after her, he snarls, "I'd rather chew glass." Davis, tiring of Ralph Brown as Delacroix (known for his macabre works), tells him, "Go home. Paint something dead."
There are serious subtexts, mostly about the difficulties faced by strong-minded women—presumably now as well as in the 19th century. "I used to think I'd die of suffocation when I was married," Davis says. "Now it's my freedom that's killing me."
The strongest impression this film makes, though, is as a meditation on the truth that love always has its limitations—for better, for worse and to the ultimate benefit of the generally invigorating qualities of desire. (PG-13)
>MEMPHIS BELLE
AS THE YOUNG PILOT of a World War II B-17 crew about to make its last bombing run, Matthew Modine evokes all the forced maturation processes of war. Among his crew, Eric Stoltz is especially good, and singer-pianist Harry Connick Jr., in a neo-Sinatra turn, does a gratuitous song as well as some decent acting as a tail gunner. The film, however, does little that wasn't done far better—and with more immediate passion—by such World War II-era action films as Howard Hawks's Air Force. (Warner)
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!
