Nose plugs should be dispensed along with the tickets to Wild Wild West. The stink is that bad. Following last year's awesomely awful The. Avengers, the Curse of the Recycled TV Series strikes again as director Barry Sonnenfeld manages to transform a mildly amusing mid-'60s TV show into a bloated big-screen bore.
So how bad is it? Wild Wild West's single good joke is a visual pun playing off RCA Victor's old His Master's Voice icon with a dog and an ear trumpet. You'll laugh out loud, if only to exercise those muscles after enforced silence. Savor it. You will sit slack-jawed and checking your watch the rest of the show.
What makes all this doubly disappointing is that the period action comedy reunites director Sonnenfeld and star Smith, who teamed up so successfully on the lightweight but genuinely funny Men in Black (1997). Lightning didn't strike twice.
Smith plays U.S. agent James West, who, back in 1869 and aided by fellow agent Artemus Gordon (Kline), must save President Ulysses S. Grant from the clutches of a legless megalomaniac (Branagh). The big difference between the TV show and the film is that, with Smith subbing for series star Robert Conrad, West is now African-American, a fact the movie isn't about to ignore. Hence the awkward scene in which Smith tries to fast-talk his way out of a lynching and another in which Branagh baits him: "How nice of you to add color to these otherwise monochromatic proceedings."
The real problem here, besides the dead haddock of a script, is Sonnen-feld's infatuation with the movie's clanking gizmos (including an 80-foot mechanical tarantula) at the expense of his actors. Smith is athletic and eager to please, but it's not enough. Kline huffs and puffs mightily, but he can't inflate a lead balloon. And Hayek's role is dumb fluff requiring her to bare cleavage and the upper half of her dimpled rear. It's a tough job, but she took it. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Vile vile West is more like it
John Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino, Adrien Brody, Jennifer Esposito
Featured attraction
Summer of Sam is director Spike Lee's 13th feature film. "While the number may be unlucky, the movie itself is far from cursed. Uneven, yes. Too long, yes. But Sam has moments that are as dramatically intense and visually exciting as any in Lee's best work, including Do the Right Thing and Clockers.
Like this ambitious director's other movies, Sam brims with strong, visceral performances and plot, plot and more plot. Using a sprawling script he cowrote with actors Michael Imperioli (Christopher on HBO's The Sopranos) and Victor Colicchio, Lee follows the lives of fictional Italian-American residents of a Bronx neighborhood during the summer of 1977 when the real-life Son of Sam serial killer was blasting away. Caught up in the sweaty paranoia and terror are a philandering husband (Leguizamo), his wife (Sorvino), his punk-rocker pal (Brody) and a neighborhood tramp (Esposito) who's sweet on the rocker. As the killer—who would turn out to be a demented loser named David Berkowitz (Michael Badalucco)—stalks strangers and leaves taunting notes for the cops, the neighborhood's collective anxiety level rises, lives unravel, friendships fray and anyone who is different becomes an immediate target of suspicion.
Like a shimmering horizon on a broiling afternoon, Sam never quite settles into focus. It has flashes of brilliance and audacity (love the talking dog), but Lee goes overboard with some scenes (enough already with the sex orgy at Plato's Retreat) and is maddeningly elliptical in others. While the four leads are all impressive, Brody's character is woefully underwritten. Maybe Sam is best summed up by Jimmy Breslin, the veteran Gotham newspaper columnist. Appearing here as himself, he describes New York as "the city that I love and hate equally." Ditto for the movie. (R)
Bottom Line: Earns a halfhearted Bronx cheer
Animated
Longing for the bygone days of big musicals with strapping heroes, wacky supporting casts, elaborate production numbers and paper-thin plots? South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut brings back the musical, now with a toilet-paper-thin plot. But forget strapping heroes. South Park's leads are four potty-mouthed third graders and, for the supporting cast, Saddam Hussein and Satan as homosexual lovers trysting in hell.
Yes, this is the same South Park that had teachers and parents in a lather when the cartoon series first showed up on Comedy Central in 1997. The film version, by SP co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is the show minus the bleeping. You might chuckle (I did), but you won't feel good about yourself at the time, much less in the morning.
Bigger has our peewee heroes—Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman—sneaking into and becoming rabid fans of Asses of Fire, a "foreign film from Canada" boasting a musical number celebrating flatulence. Talk about a big wind from the north. Anyway, Kyle's mom disses Fire ("nothing but foul language and toilet humor," she complains) and launches a crusade against the movie. This soon leads to war being declared between the U.S. and Canada, with Saddam and Satan taking part and the four boys forced to save the day. You expected Mighty Mouse? (R)
Bottom Line: Bigger, longer and totally sophomoric, but we laughed
Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant
"Watching this French film about homeless lovers (Binoche and Lavant), one thought continually occurs: Thank God it's in another language because this would all be too embarrassing in English.
Directed by Leos Carrax and released in France in 1991, Lovers is just now being distributed stateside thanks partly, one suspects, to leading lady Binoche's 1997 Best Supporting Oscar win for The English Patient. Here, she plays a painter from a bourgeois background who is losing her sight; Lavant is a street performer who drinks heavily. They fall in love while living on a Paris bridge. Excessive plot complications follow, and there's a delirious, must-be-seen-to-be-believed set piece in which Lavant pilots a stolen police boat down the Seine while Binoche water-skis and fireworks go off around them. As overripe as week-old Brie, Lovers nonetheless has an odd, out-there appeal. (R)
Bottom Line: Bizarrely ooh-la-la
>the Weitz Brothers
When Chris and Paul Weitz first took their new film to Hollywood ratings board, they were immediately told: bye-bye, American Pie. The raunchy tale of randy teens—sort of a Porky's 2000—got a kiss-of-death NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America before the filmmakers (Paul directed; Chris produced) made cuts to get an R. "APG-13 movie about kids and sex," says Chris, "doesn't fly."
Sons of fashion designer and raconteur John Weitz and actress Susan Kohner, Manhattan reared Chris, 29, and Paul, 33, previously worked on family-friendly screenplays {Antz, Madeline). Paul, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with his longtime girlfriend, writer Miranda Thompson, and the unattached Chris, who lives in Beverly Hills, may be this year's Farrelly Brothers (the-guys who brought you There's Something About Mary): Hollywood smells a hit despite Pie's no-name cast. Already, says Paul, "our casting director told us he can't get the [actor] kids on the phone now."
- Contributors:
- Susan Christian Goulding.
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!
