Michael J. Fox, Julie Warner
In a movie era of hectic violence and speed-of-light personality shifts, there's something to be said for an affable, semicalm romantic comedy.
Fox plays a doctor who is on his way from Washington, D.C., to become a plastic surgeon in Hollywood when he gets lost—he finally cracks up his car in North Carolina, where he runs into a Central Casting bunch of folksy characters. There's eccentric Mayor David Ogden Stiers, crotchety doc Barnard Hughes, good-hearted lummox Woody Harrelson and town vamp Bridget Fonda. Fox also runs into newcomer Julie Warner (see story, page 47), who must endure one of the most gratuitous nude scenes in movie history, thanks to director Michael (Memphis Belle) Caton-Jones. She does, however, get an appealingly spunky role as a divorcée with a young daughter. (The script is by Daniel Pyne, who cowrote The Hard Way, and Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, collaborators on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.)
The film has a pleasant tone—it's like a good TV sitcom episode. And Fox eventually makes it to Hollywood, where he runs into George Hamilton, in a splendid bit as a ponytailed cosmetic surgery guru, and Harrelson gets the movie's best line. "Was that a celebrity?" someone asks the Cheers regular in a restaurant. "Nah," he replies, "it was just Ted Danson." (PG-13)
John Candy, Mariel Hemingway
It's not this soap-opera comedy's fault that it comes so soon after Soapdish. Director Tom (Dragnet) Mankiewicz and writers Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman, a team whose credits are for TV, have only themselves to blame for turning out such a haltingly paced film.
Candy is a writer who, after an accident, finds himself living the plot of the soap he works for—and able to write himself whatever heroic scenes he's in the mood for, including a horseback rescue of the show's leading lady, Emma Samms.
Samms and David Rasche, as the show's randy leading man, are funny; Hemingway displays a nice light touch, and Raymond Burr larks it up as a malevolent patriarch. Candy's timing is splendid as usual. When Robert Wagner shows up in a brief, uncredited role, Candy sputters: "What are you doing in this part? You don't do daytime TV." (PG)
Jeff Fahey, Brad Dourif
Nobody who sees this medical horror film is going to be favorably disposed toward transplants for a while. It offers such a negative portrayal of recycling parts, in fact, that it could make you think twice about buying a rebuilt carburetor.
The plot recalls such films as The Beast with Five Fingers, Frankenstein and, who could forget, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. Fahey is a prison psychologist who loses an arm in a highway accident. He is given an immediate surgical transplant, but soon he starts experiencing strangely violent impulses. The arm turns out to have come from a freshly executed mass murderer, and the surgeon, it is clear, is operating the mad-scientist version of a chop shop.
Director Eric Red and cowriter Norman Snider, aware that they are not dealing with Chekhov here, keep things going in a cut-and-dried—make that cut and very bloody—fashion. Fahey is a serviceable tormented shrink, and the supporting performances are effectively diverting. Dourif, the most reliable wide-eyed crazy this side of Peter Loire, is an artist who got the executed murderer's other arm in a transplant; Peter Murnik has the fiend's legs. (No word on who got his spleen, but that guy is in real trouble.)
As long as Fahey is investigating the reasons for his nasty behavior, disbelief stays willingly suspended. The pace flags only on the rare occasions when he has to give a philosophical speech—for instance, "Does the arm have a soul of its own?" One is inspired to answer, "No, and the sole doesn't have an arm of its own either. Now get back to the slicing and dicing." (R)
Mel Brooks, Lesley Ann Warren
It is produced, directed and co-scripted by Mel Brooks, and it stars Mel Brooks. But what this film about the homeless really has written all over it is "well-meaning amateur."
If it had been made by a college senior it would seem dull, but coming from an accomplished movie satirist, if approaches embarrassing levels of tedium. The jokes are scant, and the message of tolerance for the destitute is heavy-handed enough to have been delivered by someone holding a 20-pound ham in each fist.
Brooks plays an unspeakably rich Los Angeles real estate tycoon who, to win a high-stakes bet, agrees to spend 30 days living on the street. His experiences are for the most part played all too straight—one character ends up dead on a sidewalk. In one scene Brooks leads a chorus of poor people in a hospital emergency room bitterly chanting "Life stinks!"; in another, Warren, supposedly a bag lady, takes offense at someone's description of the peacefulness of dying in your sleep and proceeds to mime a gruesomely painful heart attack.
Brooks's script (done with two co-writers) often rings false. Warren, for one thing, seems just a hair-fluff away from her standard movie-star looks, and a scene in which she and Brooks dance to "Easy to Love," dressed in their raggy street clothes, is the very definition of schmaltz.
There's a Chaplinesque tone to the project, with every line and gesture getting the kind of exaggerated take that was common to silent movies. Even if Brooks were as good a physical comedian as Chaplin, though, the film's broad style would still be 65 or 70 years out of date. (PG-13)
>SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY-BED BUNK
JULIA ROBERTS SYMpathetically portrays a battered wife who fakes her death to escape her brutish husband, Patrick Bergin. But the script is full of outlandish turns, and Kevin Anderson, as a goody-two-shoes type who offers Roberts solace, seems far too wispy to convince anyone that he could persuade her to become involved with another man. When the bitter drama of abuse lapses into a long, cutesy-poo scene featuring Roberts trying on hats, the film takes on an air of desperation. (Fox)
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!
