Radio raunchmeister Howard Stern is a human whoopee cushion. What he's doing isn't polite, but it does make you laugh. A lot. And out loud. Which is exactly what you'll do during Private Parts, a surprisingly droll film based on the popular potty-mouthed deejay's bestselling 1993 autobiography of the same name.
Stern, who plays himself, gets to have it both ways in Parts. On the air with his 18-plus million listeners, he is as offensive as he wants to be—lusting over lesbians and groping porn stars in his Manhattan studio. But once he steps out of the sound booth, he's a bundle of insecurities ("Everything I do is misunderstood," he whines) and a loving husband who faithfully heads home to suburban Long Island and his saintly wife, Alison (played here by McCormack), and their three children. Think of Stern as Ozzy Osbourne (who has a cameo) on the job and Ozzie Nelson off.
Just as she did with the first Brady Bunch movie and HBO's The Late Shift, director Betty Thomas here shrewdly transforms pop detritus into pop tart. Parts won't turn those of us who avoid Stern's adolescent boy burblings on the radio into fans, but it will make us think more kindly of him. (Note: Scenes with naked ladies and a hilarious bit with a woman who slips a 13-inch kielbasa down her throat put Parts off-limits for children.) (R)
Skeet Ulrich, Bridget Fonda
A young woman (Fonda) hesitates before tossing her new boyfriend's bloodstained shirt into the washer. "Do you think it's all right? I mean, stigmata blood going into the wash?" she asks her beau (Ulrich), an expriest who can heal the sick simply by touching them and whose palms bleed from wounds like Christ's when he performs these miracles.
Problem stains are the least of the woes afflicting Touch, a limp satire based on a 1987, noncrime Elmore Leonard novel, adapted here by director Paul Schrader. In Touch various unscrupulous folks in Los Angeles try to exploit Ulrich, but his character is so sketchily drawn that you're more likely to feel apathy than outrage or amusement. Ulrich does, however, strike real movie-star sparks, while Fonda, though spunkily sweet, seems ill at ease in her role. (R)
Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne
In this mystery, based on Peter Høeg's 1992 international bestseller, Ormond plays a most disagreeable young woman trying to solve a murder in Copenhagen. Her father, an American doctor, removed Smilla from her native Greenland—which was colonized by Denmark in the 1700s—after the death of her mother, an Inuit Indian. Given her cold-climate childhood, Smilla is an expert on snow and ice, but she's so angrily uncomfortable in Danish society, no one will employ her. So instead, she sits home alone and studies an ice chunk shaped like a tuna sushi.
After a boy in Smilla's building falls to his death from the snow-topped roof, she spots foul play in his footprints. A neighbor (Byrne) offers to help. Bristly Smilla can't decide whether to trust him. The movie is lovely to watch, with lots of blue-lit snow and deep Nordic gloom, and Ormond is frostily pretty. But she's as ploddingly earnest as Nancy Drew. (R)
>Joe Pistone
OUTSMARTING THE WISEGUYS
YOU DON'T CALL JOE PISTONE—HE calls you. Twenty-two years after he infiltrated the Mafia in Brooklyn, the Mob still reportedly has a $500,000 price tag on the head of the now-retired undercover FBI agent they knew for six years as Donnie Brasco, a jewel thief who moved on to helping run gambling and extortion operations and nearly became a "made" man. "Most of those guys from the '70s are dead now, or old," says Pistone, who helped put over 100 members of several crime clans behind bars and whose story is told in the new film Donnie Brasco, starring Johnny Depp (as Pistone) and Al Pacino (as a low-level mobster). "But you gotta watch out for the guy who wants to be noticed, wants to-make his bones."
Having crossed the bad guys, the Paterson, N.J., native, now in his late 50s and married with three grown children, will spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder. But, he notes in a phone interview from an undisclosed location, "I got no regrets about what I did"—or what he wrote in his 1988 book Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia. Though careful (he never goes anywhere without "a couple of guys with me"), he leads a relatively normal life: "I lift weights, I run every day, I feel wonderful." To prepare for filming, Pistone and Depp worked out together and often conferred on the set. "He's one of the warmest, kindest guys I ever met," Pistone says. And Depp's performance? "Fugeddaboudit! He's so much like me, it's eerie."
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- Jeffrey Wells.
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!
