The Devil's Own starts off with a bang, literally. Gunmen burst into a house in Northern Ireland during supper and blow away the father as his family, including his 8-year-old son, watch in horror. Flash forward to 20 years later when that same little boy, now a hardened IRA killer (Pitt), travels to America under an assumed name to buy missiles for the cause. Clueless as to Pitt's real identity and intending only to help a young fellow from the old country get a start in the new one, a New York City cop (Ford) agrees to put Pitt up in the basement of his home. The two hit it off and soon are downing brews, playing pool and acting like father and son. But when the talk turns to the troubles back home, Pitt warns Ford, "Don't look for happy endings. It's not an American story. It's an Irish story."
Fair warning. The Devil's Own, an honorable but ultimately disappointing film, can't make up its mind whether to be an American story, with chases and shootouts, or an Irish one, with heartbreak, insoluble conflict and the pull of old ties too strong to break. It keeps wavering between the two, perhaps because at least three different writers labored on the film. (Both Pitt and Ford have grumbled publicly that shooting started without a finished script and that the film suffered as a consequence.) Once Ford learns Pitt's true ID, Devil clunks along to a finish, failing to build to the tragic grandeur one finds in Donnie Brasco, another current film in which an older man befriends a younger one only to be betrayed by him.
What Devil's Own does have are fine performances by Pitt and, especially, Ford. Pitt shows off a passable Irish brogue and continues, after Seven Monkeys and Sleepers, to challenge himself as an actor rather than just coasting on his tawny beauty. Ford, looking grizzled here, really collars his veteran cop character. Also contributing good work is Independence Day's Colin who, as Ford's loving wife, makes married life seem fun. (R)
Jennifer Lopez, Edward James Olmos, Jon Seda, Constance Marie
Remember the opening line in Love Story: "What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?" Well, the same question might have occurred to the filmmakers behind Selena. What can you say about a 23-year-old, mono-monikered, Tejano superstar who died? Not enough, the moviemakers seem to think. This worshipful two-hour-plus movie traces in excessive detail the brief but bright career of Selena Quintanilla Pérez, the Mexican-American singer murdered by her ex-fan club president in 1995.
Not that Selena is without interest. Her millions of fans will love seeing Selena (Lopez) depicted as a nice, caring person who loved her husband (Seda) and was really, really close to her family (her father-manager, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., is the film's executive producer). Those less familiar with the Spanish-language star may be intrigued to learn that Selena grew up speaking only English and, as a 9-year-old, had to be taught Spanish lyrics phonetically by her father (Olmos). "They're gonna be surprised I learned English so fast," she jokes after she records her first songs in English shortly before her death.
What the film lacks is any sense of serious conflict other than Selena's insistence on marrying her guitarist beau over her father's objections. Lip service is paid to the fact that Tejano music was dominated by men before her arrival, but her rise to the top seems relatively effortless. When one of the movie's key moments is Selena's singing a slow ballad to calm surging fans who are endangering other audience members at a concert, you know you're hurting for material.
The curvaceous and likable Lopez looks and moves like the singer and convincingly lip-syncs to Selena's voice. What she doesn't do is send you out of the theater saying, "Wow, who was that actress?" the way you did with Angela Bassett after she got so deeply inside Tina Turner in What's Love Got To Do With It. (PG)
Alan Bates, Theresa Russell, Sting
Sting strips down to his impressive birthday suit, but even that's not nearly enough to save Gentlemen Don't Eat Poets. This disastrous little vanity production, a black comedy produced by and starring Trudie Styler (the real Mrs. Sting), features the singer as an amoral butler and Styler as his tippling wife, a cook. Poets strives to parody all those chintzed-to-the-max British movies about murder among the landed gentry (Bates and Russell portray the gentry), but instead plays like an interminable game of Clue. (R)
>Bill Paxton
THIS TIME, NO FLYING COWS
THE PARTY IS FOR HOLLYWOOD'S NEWEST auteur, but the revelers at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Tex., aren't sipping chardonnay. Beer in hand, Bill Paxton, 41 (Apollo 13, Twister), shouts above the butt-kicking country roar of Jimmie Dale Gilmore and hundreds of guests including Sandra Bullock and Forest Whitaker. The old-fashioned Texas hootenanny is for Paxton's new low-budget drama Traveller, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film and Music Festival in Austin "Instead of cashing the big check after Twister," he yells, "I wanted to make a serious, character-driven movie."
Traveller, which hits theaters in big cities in mid-April, isn't likely to top Twister's $241 million at the box office. But after Paxton's wife, Louise, came across Jim McGlynn's script—about what the actor calls "a flimflam man who...has lost the enthusiasm for the life"—in a stack Paxton had lying around, he jumped aboard as producer and star, coaxing Julianna Margulies and Mark (don't call him Marky Mark) Wahlberg into costarring. Working almost around the clock in North Carolina, Paxton pushed the project to completion in 35 days. "He's got more energy than the whole state of Texas," says Margulies. Paxton calls Traveller "the kind of interesting, independent, Five Easy Pieces sort of movie that studios would have made in the early '70s." He's ready to go practically door-to-door selling the $5 million film to audiences. "It's grassroots, baby," he says. But if summer's coming, so is another blockbuster: Paxton costars in director James Cameron's $150 million-plus Titanic, due out July 4. For Paxton, who did a comic turn in Cameron's True Lies, it's the special effects epics that make the arty movies possible. "When Jim calls," he sighs, "it's like the Batphone ringing."
- Contributors:
- Todd Gold.
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!
