Maybe filmmakers ought to just stay out of the water. With the exception of James Cameron's Titanic, recent filmic forays into the deep have sucked seaweed, including Cameron's own The Abyss (1989), as well as Waterworld and Speed 2: Cruise Control. Sphere, a soggy sci-fi thriller directed by Barry Levinson and based on a 1987 novel by Michael Crichton, proves another sinker stinker.
Which is doubly disappointing since Sphere, at least for its first half, is an involving, if conventional, film. It begins with a government agency secretly flying four elite eggheads—a psychologist (Hoffman), a biochemist (Stone), a mathematician (Jackson) and an astrophysicist (Schreiber)—to a cruiser in the middle of the South Pacific. A thousand feet below on the ocean floor lies a downed spaceship with possible alien life aboard. The scientific quartet is to serve, as Stone sarcastically puts it, "as the welcome wagon for the aliens." Once the contact team boards the downed ship, they come upon a giant, shimmering gold sphere that looks much like a humongous, gilded golf ball. This sphere is the alien. Or is it? Soon bad things start happening to the team and their support staff (Peter Coyote, Queen Latifah and Marga Gomez): Increasingly hostile messages flash from a computer screen ("I am going to kill you all"), and jumbo jellyfish and other nasty sea creatures attack.
It's also at about this time that the movie springs a noticeable leak. The main characters start sniping at each other—years ago the Hoffman and Stone characters had a fling that ended badly, and Sphere, briefly, threatens to turn into Fatal Attraction Under Water. Things get murky and, finally, laughably touchy-feely. Hoffman and Jackson come off best here if only because their characters get the most punch lines. Stone has a rockier time of it, having been saddled with a character who often seems to be pointlessly bouncing off the walls. All in all, it's hard to get into the Sphere-it for this one. (PG-13)
Dan Aykroyd, John Goodman
See this and you'll get the blues. A truly dull sequel to the first, 1980 movie—no masterpiece itself—Blues Brothers 2000 tracks recently released ex-con Elwood Blues (Aykroyd) and new bandmates Goodman, Joe Morton and kidlet J. Evan Bonifant as they get themselves into all kinds of trouble while going from Chicago to Louisiana for a battle-of-the-bands contest. On the plus side? The film does boast three swell musical sequences: Aretha Franklin singing "Respect," a jam session with Eric Clapton, B.B. King and many others, and James Brown singing "Please, Please, Please" during the final credits. (PG-13)
Chow Yun-Fat, Mira Sorvino
This is the movie that is supposed to turn Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat into a Hollywood action hunk. I don't think so. The tale of a brooding hit man (Chow) who is targeted for assassination himself after reneging on an assignment, The Replacement Killers fails to effectively showcase, much less sell, Chow's brand of guns-in-both-hands, dive-while-you-shoot cool. Sorvino, playing a passport forger who helps him, is merely marking time here.
Then again, the two die-hard action fans sitting near me at a crowded Manhattan showing clearly loved it. They loudly named each and every weapon shown onscreen and reveled in the film's many beautifully lensed scenes of slaughter. Finally, a brave audience member (not me) requested that they shut up. No way. "You shut up," one of the guys responded, adding, "We're from Brooklyn." Not that there's anything wrong with that. (R)
John Goodman, Jim Broadbent
Based on a series of five beloved British children's novels (published between 1952 and '82), The Borrowers is an inventive, amusing and darn cute family film. It follows the survival struggles of a lilliputian-size family (not for nothing is a copy of Gulliver's Travels glimpsed here) who live behind the walls and under the floorboards of a house filled with normal-size Beans (human beings). Named Borrowers because they appropriate everyday objects for their own use (credit cards for doors, walnut shells for helmets), the clan is imperiled when an evil banker (Goodman) takes over their domicile. Young viewers will enjoy this lively film in inverse proportion to the Borrowers' size. In other words, enormously. (PG)
>Robert Duvall
OSCAR NOMINEE'S DIVINE OBSESSION
EVER SINCE ROBERT DUVALL WALKED into a small Pentecostal church in Hughes, Ark., 35 years ago, he has been obsessed with the fervid believers he witnessed there. "I'd never seen this on film," says Duvall, 67. The Apostle is the triumph of his vision: The veteran actor wrote, directed, starred in and paid for the $5 million film about a Texas minister who sins as passionately as he preaches. After no studio wanted to make it, "my CPA greenlit the film," Duvall jokes. His performance just earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor; if he wins, his Oscar will have company on the mantel: He took home the award in 1983 for Tender Mercies.
Duvall, who lives on a 360-acre Virginia farm with girlfriend Luciana Pedraza, 26, says, "I don't go to church; I have my own thing." But he acknowledges parallels between himself and the preacher: "I have a temper like him." At first Duvall, who also directed Angelo, My Love (1983), feared acting and directing would be overload. But after Francis Ford Coppola encouraged him, he went ahead, casting Farrah Fawcett as his onscreen wife and Billy Bob Thornton in a small but key role.
Duvall says he had no trouble directing real churchgoers in the film: "I try to turn it around and let it come from the people." The seven-week shoot near Lafayette, La., and in Texas went so well that he and Pedraza even had time to go dancing at night. Duvall, who has two grown daughters, met Pedraza, an events planner, on location in Argentina in 1995—after splitting from his third wife and vowing never to marry again. The subject of his next production? Another obsession: the tango. "I've fixed up a dance floor, so we practice," he says.
- Contributors:
- Karen Brailsford.
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!
