The Cable Guy, Purple Noon, and now this. That's three buddy movies in a single summer in which one of the guys turns out to be a psycho. If Star Wars were made today, Luke Skywalker would probably clobber Han Solo with an astrobrick.
Here, De Niro is a middle-aged sad-sack in San Francisco, recently fired from his job selling hunting supplies. With nothing to live for, he becomes fixated on Snipes, a center fielder just signed by the Giants for $40 million. Snipes himself is depressed. His lucky number, 11, has been assigned to another player, and he goes into a slump. De Niro, whose sales specialty was sharp, pointy knives, decides to help.
De Niro has done so many psychos that it's hard to tell if he's parodying or simply repeating himself. He snuffles, cricks his neck, sings "Start Me Up" off-key and rattles like a bad carburetor. I think he's swell. And Snipes, a no-fuss actor with great physical presence, makes an excellent foil. Between the two of them, there's enough electricity to jolt the seats in the Cineplex stadium. (R)
Kurt Russell, Valeria Golino, A.J. hanger, Cliff Robertson
The best thing about this dark, obscure action sequel is that Carpenter has used up his two best cities to escape from, New York and Los Angeles. Escape from Detroit? Maybe. Escape from Las Vegas? Sure. But Escape from Des Moines has a puny ring. And Escape from Secaucus seems obvious.
In this followup to 1981's Escape from New York, Russell is again Snake Plissken, a sleazy but resourceful career criminal who is sent by a tyrannical U.S. President (Robertson) to earthquake-ravaged L.A. The city is now an island and is being used as a prison. Robertson orders Russell to find his rebellious daughter (Langer), who is trying to overthrow her dad and has stolen a doomsday device. Also in town is Peter Fonda. As a residual surfer who calls everyone Dude, he lends L.A. its only splashes of humor.
Director Carpenter, who wrote the film with producer Debra Hill and Russell, veils the story in dim lighting and loud peripheral noises that drown out dialogue. While the general murkiness creates an appropriately somber mood, it also makes the proceedings hard to follow. Whatever city Carpenter uses for the next sequel, let's hope he at least leaves the lights on. (R)
Harry Belafonte, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dermot Mulroney
Like a ballplayer who hits .350 one year and .110 the next, director Robert Altman creates erratic extremes with his movies, from the expansive brilliance of Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to the whiney. causticity of The Player, the impenetrability of Quintet or the convoluted artsiness of this pretentious film.
Altman and cowriter Frank Barhydt, having set their movie in Alt-man's hometown, Kansas City, Mo., make an apparent attempt to tell their story in a style similar to the loose, hard-driving approach of Kansas City jazz. They dispense here with chronological order and instead resort to multilayered flashbacks that strand their characters in dense, often confusing scenes. This muddles the movie's motivating event, a holdup by ne'er-do-well Mulroney, who robs a black gambler. Local hood Belafonte (see page 61) has Mulroney kidnapped, which prompts Leigh, Mulroney's wife, to kidnap a politician's wife in hopes that the pol will help rescue Mulroney.
Belafonte is amusing as a gruff hood, but Altman allows Leigh free rein to grimace, snarl, vamp and flounce. Like Leigh's performance, the movie is too silly and disjointed to be much fun. (R)
>Andy Warhol
THE ART OF BEING ANDY
IT HAS BEEN NEARLY A DECADE SINCE his death, but Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame continue to stretch into hours, at least on the screen. First, in Oliver Stone's 1991 The Doors, there was Crispin Glover doing a fleeting turn as a freakish, lip-licking Warhol all aflutter at meeting Jim Morrison. Last spring the master of pop art popped up again when Jared Harris played him in I Shot Andy Warhol, a drama about Valerie Solanas, a Warhol hanger-on who shot and almost killed the artist in 1968. Harris's Warhol was a nervous, withdrawn, flighty genius. "I was trying to do him so people who knew him would miss him once they saw him," says Harris, who prepared by watching film footage of Warhol. "I was not trying to do a hatchet job or satirize him."
Now Warhol is back in movie theaters, this time played by rocker David Bowie in Basquiat, a new film biography of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Bowie's Warhol is more self-aware, well-spoken and effeminate than the others.
So which screen Warhol comes closest to the real thing? Director Paul Morrissey, who made many of the movies that Warhol produced, says, "Bowie was the best by far. You come away from Basquiat thinking Andy was comical and amusing, not a pretentious, phony piece of s—t, which is how the others show him." But writer Bob Colacello, who edited Warhol's Interview magazine from 1970 to '83, says each actor had his Andy moments. "Glover walked the most like Andy, Harris talked the most like Andy, and Bowie looked the most like Andy," says Colacello. "When I first saw Bowie on the set, it was like Andy had been resurrected."
To be fair, Bowie had a big advantage: He borrowed—and wore—Warhol's actual wigs, glasses and leather jacket from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. And, as Morrissey notes, "David Bowie at least knew Andy. They went to the same parties."
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