Adrian Pasdar, Cecilia Peck
No doubt well-meaning, this film about a tragic romance between a young Israeli man and an Arab woman is painfully obvious and snail-paced.
The film, directed by an Israeli, Jack Fisher, opens with a flashback to 1961, when the lovers were childhood neighbors in Jerusalem. By 1973 the boy, Pasdar, is in the Israeli Army and the girl, Peck, lives among embittered Arabs on the West Bank.
Anybody who has heard of Romeo and Juliet knows what's going to happen, and it happens in stilted fashion. To cite one especially bizarre image, Peck's father tells her, "Your heart moves faster than your head."
While Pasdar (Vital Signs) laughs in a ha-ha fashion, he's competent, as is Peck (TV's Dress Gray), Gregory's daughter. They're backed, though, by a corps of supporting actors who would, in a less kosher-Muslim context, conjure images of half-baked ham.
Given the artificiality, it's hard to muster sympathy for the main characters' plight, which (in case you've just awakened from a 50-year nap) symbolizes the chronic inability of Arabs and Jews to live together. (R)
Lothaire Bluteau
Let's reconsider the proposition that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. For one thing, there are probably more scorned women in purgatory—shrinks' offices, anyway—than there are in hell. For another, it would be hard to outdo the fury of a lapsed Catholic who apparently thinks his prayers weren't answered expeditiously enough.
Such, it would seem, is the writer-director of this furious, often furiously funny film, Canadian Denys (The Decline of the American Empire) Arcand. In a satirical updating of the Bible, Arcand's plot has a mysterious young man, Bluteau, come to Montreal, where a priest asks him to form a troupe and modernize a Passion play.
The modernization takes wide liberties with the Gospels, such as having Jesus be the son of a Roman soldier. Meanwhile, Arcand runs through his own versions of Genesis (a lecture on the big-bang theory of the universe), hell (a subway station) and crucifixion (Bluteau splayed across a bed in a hospital emergency room). There are allusions to a fornicating priest, church bureaucracy and commercialization of religion.
Arcand's cast makes his story work. Bluteau, somber and gaunt, looks enough like traditional renderings of Christ to carry off the parallel. Catherine Wilkening, as a model who has never acted, and Johanne-Marie Tremblay, in a Mary Magdalenish role, are ingratiating. So are Robert Le-page, first seen overdubbing two men's voices for a group-sex scene in a porn film, and Rémy Girard, who wants to recite a passage from Hamlet in the Passion play.
Though the ending ingeniously incorporates New Testament theology, it's not likely to redeem Arcand to Fundamentalists—or to liberal Christians either. Let he who is without critical thoughts about his religion cast the first stone. (R)
Nicolas Cage, Tommy Lee Jones
Cage, whose films include Vampire's Kiss, Birdy and David Lynch's new Wild at Heart, is an odd choice for an action hero. With his hangdog look and mushy monotone, he seems like a guy you'd agree to follow only if you were stuck behind him in a traffic jam.
Other than that, though, this is a lively B adventure movie—Pentagon budget promotion film about new attack helicopters used to roust Latin American drug dealers.
Director David (Buster) Green apparently got full Defense Department cooperation—to include equipment and personnel—in filming balletic aerial sequences over the Arizona desert. Aircraft haven't been shot this lovingly since John Wayne's P-40 peeled off in Flying Tigers—or at least since the F-14 Tomcats in Top Gun. (Richard T. Stevens choreographed Green's aerial sequences; Stan McClain directed them.)
Jones also gives the film a boost as a warrant officer training pilots for the AH-64A Apache helicopters, which look like flying dumpsters but seem capable of astonishing maneuvers. Jones's easy, self-deprecating style relieves some of the heavy mood cast by Cage. He even pulls off a patriotic speech when he talks about "cookin' full tilt boogie for freedom and justice."
The love interest between Cage and Sean (No Way Out) Young has a twist to it. She plays a helicopter pilot too, but she has a line that mangles the feminist attitudes she represents, pleading, "Come on, Jake, save my ass!" to Cage when they get into combat.
The script, by veteran TV writers Nick Thiel and Paul F. Edwards, is often laughable. When Cage socks a man who's dancing with Young, she informs him, "I'm not a piece of steak for you two to fight over."
Never mind. We're here to watch helicopters hover, dive, loop, spin and generally go through your-tax-dollars-at-work routines. The film moves along smartly and is often intriguing to watch, like a gorilla pounding his chest. (PG-13)
>HARE RESTORER: HARVEY About a 42-year-old alcoholic who talks to an invisible giant rabbit, this 1950 film is still funny, thanks to a cynical-sentimental script and a cast led by James Stewart. Stewart provided a charming preface to this tape release, reminiscing (off-camera, alas) about such things as letters he got from people with invisible friends. And as Elwood P. Dowd, he shows why he is held in so much affection and esteem, mixing world-weariness and whimsy as he says, "I wrestled with reality for 35 years, and I'm happy to say I won out over it." (MCA)
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!
