*½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Julian Sands, Chris Young, Paula Marshall, Joanna Pacula
screenplay by Kevin Rock and Sam Bernard
directed by Anthony Hickox
by Bill Chambers
"In the old days, warriors would make love before going off to battle."
*½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, F. Murray Abraham, Anthony Zerbe
screenplay by Michael Piller
directed by Johnathan Frakes
by Bill Chambers Stardate: 12/13/98 Everything about this ninth entry in Star Trek's feature-film franchise seems on the cheap, from its Roger Corman-grade special effects (the series' worst since Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) to its highly derivative and ugly ad campaign (the poster is nearly identical to that for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). But Michael Piller's not-even-half-baked screenplay should ultimately claim responsibility for the failure of Star Trek: Insurrection. I'm about to give the same unsolicited advice to Trek producer Rick Berman that I've given to the financiers of James Bond movies: it's time to breathe life back into this workhorse by hiring solid genre writers and a real director. While we're at it, put that visor back on La Forge!
Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies
FFC rating: 9/10
edited by Mark C. Carnes
by Bill Chambers Steven Spielberg’s nineteenth-century-set Amistad was criticized in the pages of Roger Ebert’s “Movie Answer Man” for its characters’ use of the greeting “Hello,” an uncommon conversation-starter until well after the introduction of the telephone. Experts are wont to nitpick such details, and the collection Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies has provided a panel of experts a forum for their criticisms of so-called fact-based motion pictures. For trivia buffs like myself, who learn as much from what a movie gets wrong as from what it gets right, the book is page after fascinating page of Hollywood getting caught taking liberties great and small.
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey
screenplay by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron
directed by Nora Ephron
by Bill Chambers I'm no grammarian, but AOL's syntactical redundancy of a catchphrase "You've got mail!" has always been nails-on-a-chalkboard for me. Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail the movie is somewhat redundant, too: It bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1993 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan-Ephron outing Sleepless in Seattle while also being the second remake of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, which I'm embarrassed to admit I've never seen. (Have since rectified.-Ed.)
***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving
written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski (née The Wachowski Brothers)
by Vincent Suarez There's an early moment in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves's character retrieves contraband from a hollowed-out copy of one of the canonical texts of Postmodernism, Simulacra and Simulation, in which Jean Baudrillard suggests that modern reality is little more than a series of items and experiences replicating all that has come before; that ours is a reality comprising resemblances. It's details like these which elevate The Matrix above the vast majority of recent science-fiction films. Yet, like the strain of contemporary philosophy informing it, The Matrix is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, holes you could drive a truck through… But it's a scenic drive.
½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C-
screenplay by David N. Weiss & J. David Stem
directed by Norton Virgien & Igor Kovalyov
by Bill Chambers Demographically challenged, I nonetheless looked forward to spinning The Rugrats Movie DVD because:
**½/****
starring Robert DeNiro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palminteri
screenplay by Peter Tolan and Harold Ramis and Ken Lonergan
directed by Harold Ramis
by Bill Chambers Robert De Niro is not a comedian. He used this to his advantage in what is arguably his best performance, as The King of Comedy's Rupert Pupkin. In that 1982 media-age satire from Martin Scorsese, a film that becomes more prophetic with each passing year, Pupkin is a struggling comedian obsessed with talk-show host Jerry Langford (a self-parodying Jerry Lewis) and the thought of appearing on his program. Pupkin's routines, however, are painfully unfunny; moreover, he is blithely unaware of their mediocrity. That his jokes don't sound like they were written to bomb (they're like warmed-over Henny Youngman one-liners) is because of De Niro's desperate delivery–the actor has awful comic timing in his bones.
First Strike
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chen Chun Wu, Jackson Lou
screenplay by Stanley Tong, Nick Tramontane, Greg Mellott, and Elliot Tong
directed by Stanley Tong
RUSH HOUR
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, Tom Wilkinson, Elizabeth Peña
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Ross LaManna
directed by Brett Ratner
by Bill Chambers Early on in Rush Hour, the smash-hit buddy-cop movie from last fall, there’s a shot of Jackie Chan clinging tenaciously to a Hollywood street sign as he dangles several feet above the L.A. traffic. It’s a powerful metaphor for Chan’s career: Rush Hour represents his last-ditch effort to become a Stateside action star after finally finding a measure of Hollywood success with the popularity of HK imports like Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop. (Indeed, Chan includes said image in the colour stills portion of his autobiography I Am Jackie Chan, annotated by this caption: “On the set of Rush Hour–hanging on to another chance at Hollywood success.”) This final gamble, after striking out in the early-’80s with Cannonball Run II and The Big Brawl, his English-language debut, paid off handsomely. But why?
by Bill Chambers Pete and I exit off the highway and discover that parking at the Colossus will require turning the corner in the opposite direction, driving to the end of that street, making a U-turn, and keeping our eyes peeled for access to the giant lot. The name is fitting: the cinema is huge. One can see it from hundreds of metres away. From space, maybe. It's an eyesore, really. The building itself is the size of a shopping mall, capped by an old-fashioned, Day the Earth Stood Still-style spaceship with two antennas (antennae?) jutting out of it. No wonder they premiered My Favorite Martian here.
**/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise, Carla Gugino, Stan Shaw
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Brian De Palma
by Bill Chambers The setting: an Atlantic City hotel casino. Homicide detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) excitedly attends a big heavyweight showdown with his best bud, Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), a Washington yes-man assigned to protect Kirkland, the Secretary of Defense (Joel Fabiani), who has a seat in the second row. As a buxom blonde (Carla Gugino) quietly converses with Kirkland, the fighter (Stan Shaw) is knocked down for the first time in his career. Simultaneously, sniper shots are fired into the crowd. An assassin is immediately caught, though not before Kirkland has expired and his mystery woman (farsighted and bereft of her specs) has escaped in the ensuing stampede. Santoro launches an impromptu investigation, his detective skills consisting mainly of screaming at people until they yield. He is the verbal correlative to the boxer in the picture.
***½/****
starring Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Russell Banks
directed by Paul Schrader
by Bill Chambers
Wade: "I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days, Rolfe. And some night I'm going to bite back."
Rolfe: "Haven't you already done a bit of that?"
Wade: "No, not really. I've growled a little, but I haven't bit."
Why Paul Schrader chose to adapt Russell Banks's disquieting literary novel Affliction is no great mystery: its story follows an arc similar to that of Schrader's best known works, such as his screenplays for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and his own Hardcore. Affliction's Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), like Travis Bickle before him, is a man who fixates on exposing corruption in repression of his own violent past. In Bickle's case, planning the assassination of a governor perhaps defers the pain of Vietnam, from which he was honourably discharged; Wade has been afflicted for years by his father Glen's wickedness.
RUMBLE IN THE BRONX
***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jackie Chan, Anita Mui, Francoise Yip, Bill Tung
screenplay by Edward Tang and Fibe Ma
directed by Stanley Tong
MR. NICE GUY
**/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jackie Chan, Richard Norton, Miki Lee, Karen McLymont
screenplay by Fibe Ma and Edward Tang
directed by Sammo Hung Kam-Bo
by Bill Chambers Prior to his breakout stateside hit Rush Hour, Chinese box-office sensation Jackie Chan's Hollywood forays were the terrifically unsuccessful films The Cannonball Run I & II and The Big Brawl (which planted Jackie in Prohibition-era Chicago!). When American studios–namely, "mini-majors" New Line and Miramax–elected to give him a second chance, not by casting him in their movies but by importing, dubbing, and retitling his more recent Hong Kong hits and putting the full force of their niche-adept marketing machines behind them, the results were much different: Rumble in the Bronx made a small mint for New Line, which almost immediately signed him up for Rush Hour (review forthcoming), last year's sleeper hit. (Sadly, Chan's masterpiece, Drunken Master II, has yet to be distributed in North America by a North American company. Perhaps it's too, well, drunken.)
Editor's Note, December 24, 2012: I didn't make a list in 1999. And Life is Beautiful? Sheesh. The prose here is also a particularly embarrassing shade of purple.
The following Ten Best list reflects only the opinions of Bill Chambers–Film Freak Central's webmaster–and not necessarily those of this site's other contributors.
10. Henry Fool
Hal Hartley movies never make Top 10 lists; they're considered pompous and pretentious by people who are just those things. Simon's metamorphosis from garbage man to renowned author under the tutelage of worldly Henry Fool was one of this year's most thoughtful character studies; Hartley, ever the pop intellectual, mines issues of classism and censorship in a grunge landscape like some poet of the street.
*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, Bill Paxton, David Paymer, Rade Serbedzija
screenplay by Lawrence M. Konner & Mark Rosenthal, based on the 1949 screenplay by Ruth Rose
directed by Ron Underwood
by Bill Chambers The most absurd remake of 1998? It's a toss-up between Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Mighty Joe Young, the new Disney picture based on the old RKO one. I knew I was in trouble when a polished, computer-generated version of that famous radio-tower logo appeared before the opening credits; like Psycho, this is less a remake than a simulation of one. There was no great demand for another giant ape movie–make that ape movie, period. (Witness the quick deaths of Buddy, Born To Be Wild, and Congo.) And while this latest entry in an inexplicably prolific genre is an inoffensive time-waster, it's also an assembly-line product through and through, lacking the charm and idiosyncratic plotting of vintage jungle pulp.
**/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Harrison Ford, Anne Heche, David Schwimmer, Jacqueline Obradors
screenplay by Michael Browning
directed by Ivan Reitman
by Bill Chambers Still smarting from back-to-back high-profile failures (the Arnie-gets-pregnant comedy Junior and the Billy Crystal/Robin Williams team-up Father's Day), director Ivan Reitman needed a hit, badly. In casting Six Days Seven Nights, he took out the closest thing to a living insurance policy you will find in Hollywood: Harrison Ford. For Ford's co-star and the female lead, he chose Anne Heche, who's spent a few years in the trenches (best friend and wife roles) gaining traction as the next Meg Ryan. Then Ford seemed to go through a mid-life crisis, sporting an earring and a hip new look on the talk-show circuit that felt like a rejection of his stoic image and the fans thereof. And Heche came out as a lesbian in a public declaration of love for Ellen DeGeneres. It created a lot of static for both their performances and audiences to overcome, yielding Reitman's third flop in a row. Does this mean Six Days Seven Nights is some buried treasure you'd be lucky to discover at the video store? Not really, because the movie is pretty unremarkable except as a PR train crash. Let's be honest: Reitman has coasted since Ghostbusters; sometimes he hits a double, but this is not one of those times.
***/****
starring Brad Renfro, Ian McKellen, Elias Koteas, David Schwimmer
screenplay by Brandon Boyce, based on the novella by Stephen King
directed by Bryan Singer
by Bill Chambers "No man is an island," goes the famous John Donne poem, effectively summarizing Apt Pupil's central themes. Though hardly a great film, Bryan Singer's ambitious adaptation of Stephen King's same-named novella* is nonetheless challenging, a bleak picture destined to be misunderstood by the masses. But perhaps the most shocking aspect of this inclement psychological thriller is that a major studio got behind it.
**/****
screenplay by Todd Alcott and Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz
directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson
by Bill Chambers Directors Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson as well as “stars” Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Danny Glover, Jennifer Lopez, and Christopher Walken file into the sweaty, crowded Tudor Room of Toronto’s Four Seasons hotel to discuss the Dreamworks/PDI production Antz, a computer-generated movie that took two-and-a-half years to complete. Antz will beat the not-dissimilar Disney/Pixar project A Bug’s Life to screens by a month. That’s why Jeffrey Katzenberg–Michael Eisner’s former right-hand man, and the K in Dreamworks SKG–is there, tucked between some cameras and journalists. He looks to be gloating–does he have cause to?
**/****
starring Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Robert Towne and Kenny Moore
directed by Robert Towne
by Bill Chambers Does Robert Towne deserve his reputation as a Hollywood Great? (I'm not playing Devil's Advocate here.) After all, Roman Polanski is responsible for Chinatown's brilliant ending (Towne, its screenwriter, bowed out when Polanski opted to alter his comparatively bittersweet finale); Warren Beatty extensively reshaped his screenplay for Shampoo; Towne caved to studio pressure and destroyed the climax of his sophomore feature as writer-director, Tequila Sunrise; and it took him several years to pen the misfire Love Affair.
**½/****
starring Kenneth Branagh, Embeth Davidtz, Daryl Hannah, Robert Downey Jr.
screenplay by Robert Altman (as Al Hayes), based on a story by John Grisham
directed by Robert Altman
by Bill Chambers It's nice to see Robert Altman doing studio work again. After 1980's disastrously-received Popeye, the director steered clear of mainstream Hollywood entirely. Perhaps this is a chicken-egg scenario and it steered clear of him, but no matter: his return to a more formulaic brand of filmmaking showcases the director at his best and not-so. The Gingerbread Man is based on a dusty screenplay by John Grisham; curiously, for such an airport writer, several Important Filmmakers have adapted Grisham in the past (Sydney Pollack, Alan Pakula, and Francis Coppola), but nobody's done it with more personality than Altman.