When Robin Williams careers into antic overdrive, it's a rare talent who can keep up with him, much less steal a scene. Meet Flubber, a Prell-green, gooey substance with the personality of a mischievous 5-year-old. It bounces circles around Williams in Flubber, a hyperkinetic, gadget-stuffed remake of the 1961 family comedy The Absent-Minded Professor.
Bounce is one of the main properties of Flubber—a neologism for "flying" and "rubber"—along with its ability to absorb and increase energy. Williams plays the brainy scientist (My Three Sons' Fred MacMurray in the original) who invents the stuff. Unfortunately for the professor, his Flubber breakthrough comes on the eve of yet another scheduled trip to the altar with his fiancée (Harden), whom he has already stood up twice at vows time. The next morning, Harden is in no mood to hear his excuses for missing their wedding again. She sputters, "You broke my heart so you could stay home and make some green goo?" Williams must then spend the rest of the movie convincing Harden of Flubber's worth and flummoxing the bad guys who are out to steal the Flubber formula from him.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist, much less an absent-minded professor, to figure out that this frantic Flubber will appeal more to kids than adults. For grown-ups, Flubber's main diversion comes in comparing and contrasting it with the black-and-white '61 film. Harden's character is now president of a college rather than just a secretary to the college president; Williams drives (and flies) a 1963 Thunderbird rather than a Model-T; and his sidekick is a floating robot instead of the cute dog and elderly housekeeper of the original. But it's the Flubber, now computer-generated and pulsing color, that really asserts itself here. Why, it even mambos its way through a gala production number worthy of Busby Berkeley. (PG)
Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Polley, Alberta Watson, Gabrielle Rose
As the ice on the frozen lake cracks in this somber, extraordinarily fine film, so do the hearts of those living in a rural Canadian town. The lake has swallowed 14 of their children, drowning them when a school bus skids off a snowy mountain road and slides into the water.
The bus driver (Rose), who barely survives the accident herself, tells everyone she hit a patch of ice and slid. Nothing is that simple, maintains a lawyer (Holm, in a stellar performance), who comes to town hoping to convince the parents of the dead children to file a lawsuit. "There is no such thing as an accident," he tells them. "You need to do this for the protection of other innocent children." The parents see in the lawsuit a chance to focus their anger and grief and, possibly, land some big money. The lawyer is driven by his own failure as a parent; his daughter, now an adult, has been lost in a haze of drugs for the past 10 years.
Is anyone to blame, and will blaming anyone actually make going on any easier for the living? And who among us is without fault? Those are the questions at the heart of The Sweet Hereafter, a film of rare insight and wisdom. The director is Canadian Atom Egoyan (Exotica), who adapted his screenplay from a 1991 book by novelist Russell Banks. (R)
Lothaire Bluteau, Clive Owen, Brian Webber, Ian McKellen, Mick Jagger
Bent, the 1979 stage play that drew much needed attention to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, has now been turned into a movie. Not very successfully.
In transferring the play to film, screenwriter Martin Sherman, who wrote the original play, and director Sean Mathias have failed to do enough to expand the stage-bound Bent. When they try, as with the debauched Berlin nightclub scenes early on, it all seems too, too Cabaret. Instead of Joel Grey, however, we get Mick Jagger, encased in a slinky, sequined red dress, matching lipstick and hanging from a trapeze high overhead, warbling a faux Brecht-Weill ode to "The Streets of Berlin." Then it's off to a concentration camp, where the movie's two main characters, both gay (Bluteau and Owen), move rocks from one pile to another and then back again. The movie's message, that it's better to die proud of who you are than live a lie, seems as thuddingly heavy as those rocks. (Ian McKellen, who played the lead role in the original London production, has an amusing cameo here.) (NC-17)
Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson
An impassioned, advocative film, Welcome to Sarajevo tells how the citizens of what was once one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the former Yugoslavia suffered while the world did nothing. Their pain during the three-year bombardment that began in 1992 is seen through the eyes of a veteran war journalist (Dillane)—the movie is based on the stories of British reporter Michael Nicholson—who finds himself deciding it is no longer enough just to tell the world what is happening. He's not even sure the world cares, particularly after a grisly mortar explosion in Sarajevo is bumped off the top spot on the evening's newscast by the Duke and Duchess of York's marital split. While reporting on, and helping, an American aid worker (Marisa Tomei, compelling in a small role) who is trying to get children out of the country, Dillane decides to adopt an orphaned girl himself. "She seemed to think I could get her out, and then I realized I could and there didn't really seem to be any reason not to," he tells his wife. Dillane and Harrelson, as a brash but softhearted American reporter, are both effective. Director Michael Winterbottom, who weaves in real news footage of the carnage and world leaders' equivocating, has made an angry, in-your-face movie, but he makes his indignation seem wholly justified. (R)
>John Berendt
SEE NO EVIL
DELIGHTED AT SEEING HIS BESTSELLING book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil turned into a movie, author John Berendt nonetheless decided to skip the birthing classes. "I didn't want to see the dailies," says Berendt. "That was [director Clint Eastwood's] first draft. No one asked to see my first draft."
Being hands-off was easy for Berendt, 58, whose nonfiction murder mystery, set in Savannah, was published in 1994, sold more than 2 million copies and has spent 176 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. "If I had written the screenplay," he admits, "the movie would be 25 hours long."
A movie wasn't what Berendt, whose precocious talent landed him an editing job at Esquire at 21, had in mind when he visited the sleepy southern town on a whim in 1982. Fascinated by the lore and the locals (particularly Jim Williams, an antiques dealer accused of murdering his gay lover, and the Lady Chablis, a drag queen who plays herself in the film), he moved there to write his book.
At work on "a tale of ambition and duplicity," set in the high society of Venice in the late 1980s, Berendt says he's pleased with the film. Despite tepid reviews and a paltry $5.2 million box office take during its first weekend, the movie, he says, was always "going to be a different entity and succeed on its own terms."
- Contributors:
- Lyndon Stambler.
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!
