As a torrential rain steadily submerges a small Indiana town, armored-truck guard Slater and his partner (Ed Asner) head for dry land after collecting $3 million on their rounds of the area's banks. When their truck slides into a puddle the size of Lake Erie, they are ambushed by a posse headed by Freeman, who has somehow determined that the best time to carry out a heist is during conditions that would normally be declared a national disaster.
Hard Rain is an unusual mix, a combination of crime thriller, western and Johnstown flood, but the result is pretty humdrum, apart from a couple of outlandish action sequences (two of the bandits hop on jet skis and pursue Slater through the flooded corridors of a high school). Unlike Titanic, in which the surging, raging water itself seems to turn in a performance, some requisite trick of movie magic hasn't happened here. Hard Rain was shot in a gigantic tank, and it looks it.
Freeman brings a grumpy dignity to his role, and Randy Quaid, a sheriff never given much respect by the locals, glares at the world through angry hedgehog eyes, water droplets running along his long nose. (R)
Denzel Washington, John Goodman
If 75 percent of Americans believe—as a recent survey showed and Touched by an Angel's weekly ratings attest—that angels really flit about the earth doing good, then you have to figure plenty of folks will buy into this supernatural thriller's premise that demonic spirits also exist. But Fallen—the title refers to fallen angels, those Luciferian followers tossed out of heaven along with their leader way back when—is less than inspiring.
It's about a homicide detective (resolutely played by Washington) who slowly realizes that the murderer he's tracking is a bad guy whose evil can be viewed only in biblical proportions. Or, more accurately, bad guys, since this vile spirit inhabits, and passes from, human host to human host. (Hint: If someone behind you in line starts humming the Rolling Stones' 1964 song "Time Is on My Side," skedaddle out of there but fast.)
Fallen is essentially Seven by way of The Exorcist, but it delivers neither the perverse kicks of the Brad Pitt film nor the made-you-jump scares of the Linda Blair classic. Rather, as directed by Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) and written by Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune), it offers much Bible-thumping deep talk about good and evil and a visual trick I'm dubbing Demon Cam, in which everything is viewed through a yellowish filter. Remember Hannah Arendt's classic about the banality of evil? Fallen is as banal as evil gets. (R)
Emma Thompson, Phyllida Law
For his directorial debut, actor Alan Rickman (Sense and Sensibility) has chosen the cinematic equivalent of My Mother, My Self, making a chicken-soup-with-an-edge film about the fractious relationship between an aging mother (Law) and her adult daughter (Thompson). The gimmick here is that the pair is played by real-life mother and daughter Law and Thompson.
The movie is set in a small Scottish coastal town on the coldest day of the year (symbolism alert!), a day so cold even the ocean has frozen over. The daughter, a photographer, is still mourning the death of her beloved husband. Emotionally she is at subzero, keeping both her mother and her adolescent son at a chilly distance. Her mother tries to break the ice between them. The two take a long walk on the beach, during which they freeze their tootsies off but warm up to each other.
The Winter Guest might better be called The Winter Gust for all its long-winded prattle, but (and this has to be a measure of something) immediately after seeing it, I did call my own mother, just to say hi. (R)
Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri
In the 1990s, Spanish director Pedro Almódovar has been moving away from the flamboyant camp melodramas that made his international reputation (Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) toward a more subdued, emotionally richer style. But his stories, including this latest, are still melodramatic pulp fictions. He is trying to distill Coke into burgundy.
Live Flesh, based on a Ruth Rendell novel, tells a complicated yet ludicrous tale of sex and crime that spins (rather slowly) out of an armed confrontation involving an Italian diplomat's daughter (Neri), waiting in her Madrid apartment for a drug dealer; a stupid but handsome young admirer (Liberto Rabal) who enters unannounced and refuses to leave; and finally the cop (Bardem) who arrives to break up their fight. As usual, Almodóvar's performers are sensual to the point of succulent. But only Angelina Molina, as a middle-aged has-been flamenco dancer who falls for Rabal and tries to leave an abusive husband, strikes the right note: farcically, obsessively in love, yet pitiably real. She is over the top even as she sinks into hell. (R)
>Willie Nelson
BUSMAN'S HOLIDAY
AS MUCH AS COUNTRY TROUBADOUR Willie Nelson loves being on the road—he still tours 260 nights a year, often on his famed bus the Honeysuckle Rose—he does enjoy a break now and then. So when director Barry Levinson called to cast him as a whacked-out songwriter in his comedy Wag the Dog, Nelson, 64, was ready. "It's like a vacation for me," says Nelson during an interview aboard—what else?—the Honeysuckle Rose, in Austin. "You get to stay in one place for several weeks at a time, their food is good, and it's fun." Nelson, who lives near Austin with Annie, his fourth wife, is no Hollywood greenhorn. He starred as a country singer in the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose and won raves as an aged con in Michael Mann's 1981 film Thief And thanks to his old pal Jimmy Carter, he knows his way around Washington, where much of Wag's nefarious hilarity takes place. In the film, hoping to salvage an oversexed President's reelection, a cynical adviser (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) invent a war. "They come and get me out of an insane asylum to write war songs," says Nelson, who directs a Nashville chorus singing a war anthem modeled on "We Are the World." "I don't know why they wanted me for the part," says Nelson, who will next play a bounty hunter in The HiLo Country, a western starring Woody Harrelson due in the fall. "Maybe this new generation coming up now is starting to appreciate me all over again."
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Anne Maier.
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!
