You can tell summer's nearly here because the movies have suddenly gotten louder. It's as if theaters jack up their decibel levels to match the rising temperatures. Con Air, a slick, violent, pumped-up action picture about a group of seriously nasty convicts who hijack the prison plane that's carrying them, is not only aurally loud, it's loud in every sense of the word.
Con Air is this summer's equivalent to last summer's aggressively entertaining The Rock, which should surprise no one since the two movies share a leading man (Cage), a producer (Jerry Bruckheimer) and a preternatural fondness for blowing anything and everything sky-high. Cage stars here as an ex-Army Ranger who defends his wife by killing a bully in a bar brawl. He serves eight years in prison, passing the time learning Spanish ("My wife and I will have our margaritas on the yacht" goes one lesson), doing origami and bulking up to Schwarzeneggerian proportions. Upon being paroled, he innocently hitches a ride home on the fateful plane. Although Cage has a chance to escape early on, he nobly stays on board to aid ailing prison buddy Mykelti Williamson (see story, page 87), protect female guard Rachel Ticotin, who is taken hostage, and—as he modestly puts it—"save the day."
As that remark suggests, no one in Con Air is taking either the plot or their characters too seriously, which is just as well given the low level of plausibility here. With long locks and a goatee, Cage looks a lot like a traditional Sunday school portrait of Jesus (if Jesus had been spending a lot of time in the weight room), and he does yet another of his eccentric, ironic action hero turns. After Leaving Las Vegas, watching Cage toy with this kind of role is like listening to Einstein go through his multiplication tables. Malkovich and Buscemi are the best of the bad guys, while Cusack, playing a frustrated federal marshal, represents the law effectively. The movie's final Las Vegas segment is long by a few too many scenes, but maybe the filmmakers were just trying to use up all the explosives in the budget. (R)
Rene Russo, Robbie Coltrane, Alan Cumming, Irma P. Hall
Been a while since you saw Born Free, the 1966 family classic about a woman raising a lion cub in Africa? Well, Buddy is Born Free for a new generation, but this time the nature-versus-nurture debate is over a gorilla. The movie is sweet and often funny, and children will probably like it a great deal.
Buddy, like Born Free, is based on a true story. Back in the 1920s, Gertrude Lintz (Russo), a New York City socialite, began raising chimps on her Brooklyn estate as if they were her own kids. She dressed them in custom-made outfits, took them to the movies, put them on roller skates and tucked them into comfy beds at night. Soon she adopted an ailing baby gorilla, naming him Buddy. With his warm, sensitive nature, the tiny primate quickly became her favorite. But Buddy packs on 100 pounds a year and, before you can say, "You're too heavy for Mama to carry," his love pats and squeezes turn potentially lethal. What's a mother to do?
Obviously made with loving care by director-screenwriter Caroline Thompson (Black Beauty), the movie features enough animal high jinks to keep kids laughing (the chimps are real; Buddy is played by an actor in a gorilla suit whose face and eyes are animatronically controlled). But adults will likely find Buddy lacking spark. Russo plays Lintz as a benevolent, one-dimensional earth mother. Viewers may end up agreeing with her beleaguered cook (Hall), who, told by Russo to premasticate Buddy's breakfast-time banana, declares, "I got enough to do without chewing up food for monkeys." (PG)
Craig Sheffer, Sheryl Lee, Terence Stamp
Bliss is anything but. A painfully dull portrait of a marriage, the movie is also a paean to the curative powers of sexual healing—all that's missing is the Marvin Gaye song of the same name. Bliss goes boringly where no movie has gone before, advocating tantric sex (an ancient Eastern sexual philosophy that puts a woman's sexual pleasure before a man's) as a solution to marital problems. For all its frank talk and entwined naked limbs, there's no steam coming off this one.
Six months after their wedding, a yuppie couple (Sheffer and Lee) sign up for marriage counseling. The wife blurts out that she has been faking her orgasms the whole time. "I just hope you appreciate the risk Maria is taking in communicating this to you," the therapist (Spalding Gray—how scary is that?) tells the husband. Sheffer next discovers that Lee is seeing a sex therapist (Stamp, at his creepiest). Sheffer also secretly signs on for sessions, during which Stamp asks such probing questions as, "How can you make love to someone else when you don't love yourself?" Try embroidering that one on a couch cushion.
It's all pretty embarrassing and completely unconvincing, like a particularly bad episode—which may be a redundancy—of Melrose Place. Bliss is the kind of movie where you find yourself coveting the clothes and furnishings, but you don't want to spend another minute in the characters' company. (Not rated)
Joe Pesci, Danny Glover
This dumb-buddies comedy, which completed filming more than a year ago, should have been allowed to go straight to the video store. Up on the big screen, Gone Fishin' is sadly out of its element. It flops about for a few minutes and dies. Pesci and Glover, two dim bulbs who take an annual fishing vacation together, this time head for the Florida Everglades. They've no sooner arrived than a con man steals their car. Then their little boat somehow gets hitched to a train and goes bumping down the tracks. There's lots more of this sort of slapstick, all poorly executed.
Pesci and Glover, two solid character actors, are perfectly capable of playing stupid—even really stupid—but they are both too grizzled to make a lack of brainpower endearing. They just seem like a couple of losers. (PG)
>Internet Critics
ROUGH BUZZ CUTS
THE INTERNET IS TAKING A BYTE OUT of a Hollywood semisecret: test-screenings of new movies. Unless you've been picked to attend, you might not know that studios quietly invite groups of typical moviegoers to see rough cuts of films months in advance of release. Filmmakers get a feel for which scenes work and which should carpet the cutting room. Because no press is invited, bad buzz is unlikely to travel farther than the next office watercooler down the hall.
Enter the Internet. Hours after Warner Bros, screened the $150 million Batman and Robin (due June 20) in San Diego last April, reactions of audience members were posted on Ain't It Cool News, a worldwide Web site operated by Austin, Texas, journalist Harry Knowles, 25. Soon some 40,000 Net surfers—including many in Hollywood and the press—had read one viewer's branding of the film as "a lemon."
"They're fanatics, the nerd-geek crowd," says Warner marketing exec Chris Pula of the maverick e-mailers. "They shouldn't be allowed to review anything other than a finished print." Studio execs fear the effect that cyber pans of Speed 2, Face Off, An Alan Smithee Film and The Jackal may have on the box office. "It's scary," says Tri-Star's Dennis Higgins. "With the Internet, anyone can review a movie. It's like revenge of the audience." Knowles, who posts the occasional rave (Men in Black), swears he's not out to get anyone. "These are only opinions," he says. "I don't want to destroy the Batman franchise. I just want to see the films better made."
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- Jeffrey Wells.
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!
