At the screening for critics that I attended in Manhattan of Trainspotting, a jocular but depressing film about a bunch of Scottish junkies, we were all given paperback copies of the screenplay. Good move. Although Miramax, the American company releasing this British film based on Irvine Welsh's 1993 cult novel, reportedly had the actors redub portions of the dialogue to make it more comprehensible to us Yanks, the accents are still so strong and the slang so colloquial that I found myself at times wishing for subtitles. Sorry to say, but Miramax has no plans to hand out the screenplay when Trainspotting unspools at your local film palace.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Well, actually, Trainspotting confirms that director Danny Boyle, who made a flashy debut here last year with the black comedy Shallow Grave, is a talent to reckon with. His new film is often amusing and always visually nimble (love that syringe's-eye view of heroin being injected). It is, however, a little too exhilarated by its own decadent hipness as it follows a group of heroin addicts spending their days shooting up, stealing, hanging out at the pub and otherwise failing to improve society. The smartest and most self-reflective of this crew (McGregor), the only one with a chance at a successful life if he could just stay off junk, sums up the group's nihilistic philosophy when he says, "Who needs reasons when you've got heroin."
All this doped-up ennui eventually proves wearing. Junkies, given to nodding out and living in squalor, don't make good company for too long. (Note: If you're squeamish, know that there are shots of heroin being mainlined and a used condom being removed, and a lavatory scene that out-grosses Jeff Daniels's tour de toilet in Dumb & Dumber.) (R)
Mary Kay Place
Place, who 20 years ago played irrepressible country chanteuse Loretta Haggers on TV's Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and was in 1983's The Big Chill, is a wonderful actress who doesn't work often enough. When she first shows up in this pleasingly quirky little drama, it's like seeing an old friend after too many years spent only exchanging Christmas cards. She is middle-aged now and looks like Geraldine Page on a really good day. But Place still has a down-home warmth and the twinkling eyes of a born dreamer.
Manny & Lo, the debut feature by writer-director Lisa Krueger, is about two sisters, Manny (Scarlett Johansson), 11, and Lo (Aleksa Palladino), 16. After their single mom's death, they take off in her station wagon, surviving by bunking in model homes and boosting junk food from mini-marts. When the older sister becomes pregnant, the two kidnap Place, a know-it-all clerk at a store stocked with baby supplies. As Lo puts it, "We take stuff from stores all the time." Place, it turns out, is as much in need of a family as the sisters and turns out to be more of a mom than a hostage.
Manny & Lo rambles at the end, but mostly it's a small pleasure. And gives you a great sense of Place. (R)
Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, John Astin, Jeffrey Combs, Dee Wallace Stone
For a few amusing moments it looks as if this lame comedy is going to spoof our national epidemic of credulity, as manifested in such tributes to wishful thinking as Ghost, Poltergeist and The X-Files. But then director Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures) loses his nerve, and The Frighteners peters out into a run-of-the-cemetery horror film.
Fox plays a psychic investigator and con man who shows up in Fairwater, a coastal northeastern town where he keeps running into the specter of Death, all done up in a red cape and toting a scythe. He also meets Combs, who as an FBI agent seems to be sending up both David Duchovny's punctiliously wussy X-Files investigator and Jim Carrey's reliance on exorbitant mannerisms.
While the film fails to mine the rich satiric possibilities of America's obsession with the paranormal, the script does touch on our overorganized culture, with a black ghost who is a leader of the AAAC—the Afro-American Apparition Coalition. At the movie's heart, though, there's a void. Ghostbusters, High Spirits and even Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost all exorcised our society's specious demons in more entertaining fashion. (R)
>The White House
THE PRESIDENT'S DOMESTIC POLICY
LONG BEFORE THE SCI-FI BLOCKbuster Independence Day invaded Cineplexes, a scene from the trailer—showing an alien spaceship zapping the White House to smithereens—had audiences cheering. Oddly enough, the current residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue also enjoyed that apocalyptic vision. On June 22 the First Family—Bill, Hillary and Chelsea—got a sneak preview of ID in their private screening room. "Watching the White House blow up from inside the White House, it was like the twilight zone," says ID's producer Dean Devlin, who, with director Roland Emmerich and actor Bill Pullman, sat in with the Clintons. The President shared a big bag of popcorn with Pullman, who plays the Chief Executive. Afterward, Clinton gave the film a glowing review. "He said it's terrific," Devlin recalls.
ID is hardly the first film to get a friendly reception from the Clinton Administration. The White House staff was "very gracious and good to us," says Lilly Kilvert, production designer for both 1993's In the Line of Fire and 1995's The American President. Not only did Kilvert get to chat with the Prez, she also carried First Cat Socks around while taking measurements of the East Wing, the Grand Foyer and the State Dining Room. (Filmmakers must re-create the interiors from sketches. Photography is banned for security reasons.)
But the producers of Dave, a 1993 comedy starring Kevin Kline as a presidential impersonator, and Without Warning: The James Brady Story, a 1991 HBO docudrama about the Reagan press secretary disabled by an assassin's bullet, got only limited access to the Bush White House. "Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush were very concerned about the Presidency not becoming a movie prop," explains Marlin Fitzwater, who, as a Brady successor, served both Administrations. Even so, he adds, "the settings in Dave were very realistic."
So were the $2 million American President interiors, which Oliver Stone borrowed for 1995's Nixon and Devlin leased for ID (at a bargain $150,000). What wowed the First Lady, however, was not the scenery but Pullman's give-'em-heck performance. "Gosh, you were so good," she teased him. "Maybe Bill could take a couple of days off, and you could fill in for him."
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Ralph Novak,
- John Hannah,
- Margie Sellinger.
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!
