This is essentially a one-joke movie, but it's a nifty joke. Carrey plays an unscrupulous lawyer who finds himself suddenly unable to tell anything but the truth for 24 whole hours. This curse, as he calls it, has been wished upon him by his son (Cooper) after Dad misses the kid's fifth birthday, the latest in a long string of promised dates for which the divorced father has failed to show.
Carrey's sudden compulsion to blurt out the truth means he owns up to breaking wind in a crowded elevator, objects to his own arguments at trial, declares "I've had better" to his sexually predatory female boss after their roll in the hay, and so on. It also means, this being a Carrey vehicle, that he contorts both his face and body into countenances and positions that make Silly Putty seem like it suffers from rigor mortis.
Is Liar Liar, directed by Tom Shadyac (The Nutty Professor), funny? Yes, if you like your humor broad. Think Ace Ventura, Attorney-at-Law, but with family values (Carrey learns that fatherhood matters). Is Carrey back after the debacle that was The Cable Guy? Yes, his fans will love this. How about the rest of us? Well, it's sharper than Dumb and Dumber, and Tierney (TV's NewsRadio), as Carrey's ex-wife, has a wry way with a line that nicely balances her costar's excesses. Let's just leave it at that. (PG-13)
Tim Allen, Sam Huntington
Like Liar Liar, this family comedy is about an absentee father who finally discovers the joys of parenthood when he starts hanging out with his son. Jungle 2 Jungle's strained setup has Allen, a commodities trader, learning that he's a father after his son (Huntington) is already 13 years old. The boy has been raised by his free-thinking mother, Allen's long estranged wife (JoBeth Williams), among natives in the Amazon jungle.
Dressed in a loincloth, the kid accompanies Dad back to Manhattan for a get-acquainted visit. Their first morning home, Allen explains that one doesn't have to shoot pigeons with a bow and arrow for food. Shaking a box of Cap'n Crunch, he says, "This is what kids eat for breakfast here." At the showing of Jungle I caught, a gleeful little voice in the theater piped up loudly, "That's what I like too."
There's a lot that children will like in Jungle, an American reworking of a dopey French film called Little Indian, Big City that was a big hit in France. Specifically there are jokes about peeing in potted plants, eating lizard guts, barbecuing pet fish, setting loose a humongous spider, and the Statue of Liberty's tribal name being Woman Who Holds Fire Up Sky's Butt. Adults with more evolved senses of humor will find the movie cute but labored. Home Improvement's Allen, a naturally engaging performer, has to work mighty hard here for his laughs. (PG)
James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger
Talk about hot wheels. The sicko characters who populate this purposefully perverse drama, as repellent a film as has come down the pike in years, consider car crashes sexually stimulating. For them, watching a video of a mannequin catapulting through a windshield or a staged reenactment of movie star James Dean's fatal smashup is as potent an aphrodisiac as Taster's Choice is for that panting couple in those coffee ads. Soon, however, merely watching isn't enough. Before you can say, "Hey, isn't that a red light?" these folks are bombing down the highway actually bumping bumpers—in every sense.
Their fictional fetish is fraught, of course, with greater meaning. Cult director David Cronenberg, who wrote the script based on J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, seems to be asking whether these well-off Toronto professionals (and by extension, the rest of us) have become so inured to sensation that it takes ever closer brushes with death to stir any real feeling in them. Maybe, but Crash never develops its thesis or characters. Instead it becomes a repetitive, boring blur of scenes that alternate between car crash, sex, car crash, sex, until you wonder whether there is a single traffic cop on duty in all of Toronto.
With the exception of a howler of a last line, Crash doesn't even offer the satisfaction of being unintentionally funny. The actors are all glumly serious, and the sex (much of it quite explicit) is deliberately impersonal and unappealing. It was very brave of Cronenberg and his cast to make Crash, but the final result turns them all into crash dummies. (NC-17)
Gregory Hines, Vincent D'Onofrio
Good Luck is a small picture with a huge heart. Lovingly directed by Richard LaBrie, this comic drama follows two disabled men—one's blind (D'Onofrio) and the other (Hines) is in a wheelchair—as they journey from Seattle to Oregon to take part in a raft race. Luck is about doing the best you can, even when best—don't read any further if you don't want to know the ending—means coming in dead last, which is exactly what our heroes do in the race. And their finish is just as moving and exhilarating as if they had come in first. (R)
Anne Meara, Parker Posey
Cleaning up one morning, a young suburban schoolteacher (Hope Davis) discovers what she suspects is an extramarital love letter to her husband. Not the world's most excitable person, she pops over to her parents' home nearby, where she shows the letter to the folks with no more alarm than if it were an unpaid electric bill. Her mother (Meara), a take-charge personality, insists that Davis confront the husband, who works in Manhattan. Well, why not? The whole family—including sister Posey and her beau (Liev Schreiber), an aspiring novelist—piles into the station wagon to drive into town for the day. From that flaky, deceptively simple premise unfolds a string of wry misadventures culminating in a stinging revelation. This beautifully constructed little comedy is the first feature film from writer-director Greg Mottola. He clearly was born to the driver's seat. (Unrated)
>Leon Gast
FROM OFF THE CANVAS
IN THE END IT WAS THE INDOMITABLE spirit of Muhammad Ali himself that kept Leon Gast's hopes up during the two decades it took him to complete When We Were Kings: The True Story of the Rumble in the Jungle—the Oscar-nominated documentary of Ali's 1974 bout with George Foreman in Zaire. "Over these 23 years...everybody got to see that [Ali] really stood for something and that he was willing to sacrifice everything for what he believed in," says Gast. "There's nobody else in my life that I've ever seen like that."
Maybe so, but when it comes to real-life rope-a-dope—taking the punches while gearing up to deliver a knockout—Gast, 60, is no slouch either. When he headed for Kinshasa, he was a still photographer with only one documentary, on Latin music, to his credit. When he returned a few months later, he had 300,000 feet of film—and no money. His home stuffed with boxes of footage, Gast paid the bills by making films about the Grateful Dead and the Hell's Angels, searching all the while for the means to bring Kings to the screen. It wasn't until 1989 that Gast's former lawyer David Sonenberg put up nearly $1 million to finish the project. Director Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) signed on to help Gast update the film with commentary by Spike Lee, Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. After winning an award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, Gast accepted a $3.5 million advance from Gramercy Pictures. But while making Kings may have changed Gast's life—when he started, he notes, "My boys were in grammar school. Now I'm a grandfather"—he vows the payoff won't. "The biggest change is that I now keep my car in a garage," jokes Gast, who lives in Manhattan. And the Oscars? "Everything is a dream come true," he says. "This magic of Ali's that I talk about, somehow it rubbed off on the project. And it somehow rubbed off on me."
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