Heading through an airport on their way to a six-week work assignment, two junior executives in an unspecified business discover that they have both been dumped by their girlfriends. After commiserating about the heartlessness of women, the studlier of the pair (Eckhart) suggests, "Let's hurt somebody." His proposal: While in the unnamed town, where they're headed for business, they find some vulnerable young woman and both begin to court her. They will sweep her off her feet and then, just before leaving town, each will dump her. "It'll be a little payback on all this messy relationship stuff we're dealing with," Eckhart explains. His colleague (Malloy), though a step above Eckhart on the corporate ladder and therefore supposedly wiser, readily agrees to this sordid scenario. Their plan becomes even more repugnant when they zero in on a potential target: a lovely deaf secretary (Edwards).
And so goes the singularly most chilling film so far this year. In the Company of Men, an impressive debut movie by writer-director Neil LaBute, is a provocative look at male gamesmanship that raises as many questions about its characters as it answers. After seeing Men (which deservedly was named best dramatic film by La Bute's fellow filmmakers at last winter's Sundance Film Festival), either you will stay up half the night discussing it, or you will find the story so profoundly disturbing that you will feel too wrung out to talk about it at all.
Men features strong performances by its trio of relative newcomers, particularly Eckhart, whose potent leading-man charm proves all the more disturbing when it becomes clear what a manipulatively malevolent knave he is and just who his real target is. And Edwards (TV's Santa Barbara), who is not deaf in real life, is both radiant and heartbreaking as a woman who blossoms under the sudden attention of two seemingly ardent swains. (R)
Samuel L. Jackson, John Heard, Kelly Rowan, Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez
Yes, teachers may often feel like Rodney Dangerfield—they get no respect—but this confused, self-important drama, in which a Los Angeles high school teacher (Jackson) brutally metes out vigilante justice to his nastier students, isn't likely to raise society's view of the profession. The movie, named 187 after police code for a homicide, plays like a cross between Charles Bronson's vengeful Death Wish and Michelle Pfeiffer's more heartwarming tale of urban schooling, Dangerous Minds. (The end result is more likely to appeal to fans of the former.)
It's too bad that 187 is such a dog, since the always watchable Jackson has some fine moments as a brooding science teacher who cares just a little too much about keeping order in his classroom. Most of these scenes, however, come before he turns into a full-fledged Bronson wannabe, praying for guidance beneath a crucifix nailed to his bedroom wall and telling a comely computer teacher (Rowan), who astutely senses that something's amiss with his attendance rolls, "We can't trust the system to protect us."
As directed by Kevin Reynolds (Waterworld) and written by Scott Yagemann, himself a former teacher, 187 can't decide whether it's a valentine to courageous inner-city teachers or a revenge fantasy. Either way, the movie has misplaced delusions of grandeur, and the ending—which pays bizarro homage to The Deer Hunter—is too loony to be taken seriously. (R)
John Turturro, Sam Rockwell
When a hitherto painfully uptight fellow leaps, clad only in his white boxers, off a rock and into a forest lake, even the most literal viewer will catch the symbolism. The guy is taking the plunge—not just into the water but into life.
Box of Moonlight, an appealingly whimsical offering from writer-director Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion), is a feel-good movie for fans of independent films. It's about a straitlaced electrical engineer (Turturro, as good as ever) and how he loosens up after spending time in the woods with a wacky forest sprite (Rockwell, impressive in his first major role). A free spirit who dresses in buckskins and a Davy Crockett cap, Rockwell's character serves up cookies and milk in a dog bowl for breakfast and survives on the few bucks he makes selling purloined lawn ornaments. Catherine Keener (a veteran of DiCillo films) and Lisa Blount turn up briefly, and to amusing effect, as decidedly oddball sisters with whom the men spend the Fourth of July. (R)
>Cabbies in the Movies
HOLLYWOOD'S CHECKERED PAST
ROBERT DE NIRO'S TURN IN TAXI Driver may have made cabs as darkly forbidding as Psycho made motel showers. Except to actors, that is, who always relish the chance to climb inside and take the wheel. This week, Conspiracy Theory moviegoers can flag down cabbie Mel Gibson, who joins Bruce Willis (The Fifth Element) among this year's hailable heroes. Why the fascination? Cabdrivers are men of mystery with "a kind of cowboy, gypsy quality," says Conspiracy screenwriter Brian Helgeland. "There's always potentially more there than meets the eye...some past there you don't know about or another life going on when the cab is parked and put away."
Gibson's paranoid, Net-surfing New York City taxi driver may be uniquely '90s, but Hollywood's yellow streak began long ago. In 1928's Speedy, Harold Lloyd took Babe Ruth for a wild ride. Spencer Tracy (1937's Big City) and James Cagney (1932's Taxi!) took spins in the front seat. Recent cabbies have included Mr. T (D.C. Cab, 1983) and Winona Ryder (1991's five-stories-in-five-taxis flick Night on Earth). But few come close to real life, says L.A. cabbie (and comic) Naja Divi, 33. "De Niro was about 30 percent right—slobby and tired and all crazy," he says. But 1989's Look Who's Talking? "They got John Travolta driving a cab, and all of a sudden a beautiful girl gets in, and then la-di-da. Man, stuff like that never happens!"
- Contributors:
- Champ Clark.
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!
