Here's yet another film in which talented twentysomethings with no discernable sources of steady funds manage, through the magic of movies, to live in spacious, sleekly furnished, big-city apartments boasting fully stocked kitchens. Where were these places when the rest of us were using stereo speakers for chairs and munching saltines in one-room dumps?
Minor carping aside, Love Jones is a smart, sassy romantic comedy set in Chicago and focused on a tightly knit group of friends who happen to be young, gifted and black. They debate life's big questions and hang out at poetry jams, which is-where the movie's main couple, an aspiring writer (Tate) and a photographer (Long), meet. It's obvious from the start that these two are meant for each other, despite their separate but equal declarations to friends that "this ain't no love thing." Unwilling to permanently pair them off so early on, Jones spins its plot gears, splitting them apart. Along the way, there's much snappy dialogue ("Marvin is officially black history," a woman says dismissively of an ex-beau), a canny grasp of the shifting alliances within a group of friends, and strong, sexy performances by Tate and Long. Jones is director-screenwriter Theodore Witcher's first movie, and I eagerly await his second. (R)
Indira Varma, Sarita Choudhury, Ramon Tikaram, Naveen Andrews
Its title, which evokes the famous ancient Indian how-to sex manual, makes Kama Sutra sound like a cheesy dirty movie in which a pseudo-scientist in a white lab coat pontificates while sweaty couples go at it. Wrong. Kama is the latest offering from the eminently respectable Mira Nair, a writer-director whose previous films include Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Mississippi Masala (1992). That said, there is still plenty to gape at in this flawed but frankly erotic tale of love and lust in 16th-century India. The movie wants to differentiate between mere physical union and the more meaningful union of two souls. Kama's servant-girl heroine (Varma, a ravishing newcomer with swanlike grace) tolerates the first with a possessive raja (Andrews, who played the bomb-defusing Sikh in The English Patient), but rapturously discovers the latter with a longhaired, sinewy sculptor (Tikaram). The plot doesn't bear close examination, but the comely cast and the richness of the settings and costumes make Kama a sumptuous feast for the eyes. (Not rated)
Christopher Guest, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Parker Posey
Guest, best known as Nigel Tufnel, the profoundly stupid guitarist of Rob Reiner's 1984 This Is Spinal Tap, returns with his own mock documentary—this time spoofing community theater. Which tells you what a curious movie Guffman is. It is also wonderfully silly. Guffman takes place in a fictional Missouri town called Blaine, famous (but not very) for a rail stop visit from President McKinley, a UFO landing in the '40s and a footstool factory. To mark Blaine's sesquicentennial, the town elders turn to Corky St. Clair (Guest), a failed Broadway chorus boy who stages wildly ambitious local productions. (The fire department shut down his live Back-draft.) Corky, a curiously endearing nincompoop, concocts a musical tribute, cast with a handful of residents, including a husband and wife (Willard and O'Hara) who run a travel agency but have never left the state. The big show is hilariously awful yet charming. These folks have no business being on a stage except that it leaves them flush with happiness. Guffman will do the same for its audience. (R)
>Brenda Blethyn
HER SECRETS LIFE
PRIMPING IN THE LADIES' ROOM DURING January's Golden Globes ceremony in L.A., Brenda Blethyn overheard two women handicapping the race for best actress in a dramatic film. "I heard one say, 'I think Brenda Blethyn should win, but why would they give it to her? Nobody's ever heard of her,' " recalls the star of Secrets & Lies, who racked up raves for her heart-tugging turn as a London housemum confronted by the daughter she gave up for adoption 27 years earlier. "I crumbled," Blethyn says. "I thought, 'I'm out of the running.
She wasn't. She bagged the Globe, then an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Now, as she mulls offers from Armani, Valentino and Versace to design her Oscar gown, Blethyn, 51 is enjoying what she calls the "absurdity" of the stateside spotlight. "I wonder how long-lived it will be," she says wryly. "I'll keep an eye on that."
Fame seemed an unlikely prize for Blethyn, even back home in Britain. The youngest of nine children of a working-class family from Ramsgate, near Dover, she was drawn to drama classes in school but didn't consider a career in acting because "it seemed irresponsible." Instead, she became a secretary. But when a brief marriage failed in the early '70s, "I decided...to just have a go," she says. And go she did, landing a spot in the Royal National Theatre Company in 1975, then roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and TV parts, including the lead on the top-rated Britcom Outside Edge, in which she plays the fussy wife of a cricket player. "She's an original, intelligent actress who can plumb the emotional depths," says Lies director Mike Leigh, "and still maintain a sense of humor."
Still, it wasn't until 1992, when Robert Redford lured Blethyn away from the four-bedroom Georgian-style home she shares with her longtime love, theater art director Michael Mayhew, that she made her Hollywood debut. She caused ripples as Brad Pitt's stoic mom in Redford's A River Runs Through It, but nothing can top the impact of Lies. "I'm kind of on the list now," she says. Up next are roles in Remember Me, an upcoming British comedy, and Music from Another Room, a romantic comedy she's now shooting with Jennifer Tilly. While somewhat overworked, Blethyn is hardly blase. At the Globes, she says, "Faye Dunaway came over to say, 'I think you're wonderful.' I thought, Pinch, pinch.' "
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- John Griffiths.
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!
