#22 | November 20 - December 3, 1997  

Once again, there are way too many movies playing to choose from. I suppose that makes my job more important than ever. As ever, I will do my krazy best to guide you through these troubled waters in this troubled time.

First up--G.I. Jane. Demi Moore is the G.I. Ridley Scott is the director. That's probably about all you need to know. This is a pretty stupid piece of movie magic, but most folks will probably like it, even if I didn't. Ridley Scott seems to be going through the motions in this, his second attempt to reinvent himself as Mr. Feminist Filmmaker. Still, he has made movies that are a lot worse, and Ms. Moore isn't half as annoying as usual. I dug that 70s porn-star mustache on the updated Christopher Walken-style drill sergeant.

Cop Land is a bit tougher to make sense of. The biggest mystery of all is how the impressive supporting cast--which includes Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Ray Liotta--was conned into taking part in what is essentially an attempt to present Sylvester Stallone as a serious, talented actor with real sensitivity.

You gotta give him credit, though--he really does seem to be trying. Unfortunately, his portrayal of the half-deaf puppet sheriff of a New Jersey town populated and controlled by the NYPD's 37th precint (which in turn is run by the mob) consists mostly of putting on excess weight, copping hang-dog expressions and listening to old Springsteen LPs while moping on the couch. It gets a little better once he's inevitably pushed too far and enters pseudo-action mode, but all this movie proves is that Stallone can't even keep up with the likes of De Niro and Keitel when they're half asleep and acting on auto-pilot.

On the plus side, Cop Land has a great story (squandered, unfortunately, by a director who appears to be absent). Liotta is excellent when he goes into full-on paranoid coke-head mode, and T-2's Robert Patrick shows that he's really good at being an asshole. This is also a good one to watch if you couldn't get enough of the ridiculous mustache and hideous suits on De Niro in King of Comedy. And you've gotta like a movie that dares to clock in at just over 90 minutes in this, the age of two and a half hour action movies.

This week's big winner is Face/Off, a 1972 love story involving a Canadian professional hockey player and a hippy folk singer. Their union is tumultuous, as both try to come to terms with their differences in careers and lifestyles.

Of course, this being the post-post modern 90s, director John Woo smartly plays it way figurative as a psychological action thriller. John Travolta plays the folk singer fairly straight as a top-secret FBI agent, while Nicolas Cage turns the hockey-playing Cannuck into a charismatic, Chicklet-abusing terrorist who also happens to be Travolta's nemesis. The real confusion sets in when the two swap faces and identities via some futuristic plastic surgery.

I was a bit apprehensive going into this one--Woo's last one (Broken Arrow) was on the shite side, Travolta has been disgracing himself at least tri-annually since his Pulp Fiction rebirth, and the once-superb Cage has been on a downslide ever since Wild at Heart tanked so surprisingly. Nothing like that here. Woo's signature balletic action sequences haven't looked this good since The Killer (and the sucking sounds when the faces get pulled off are choice), and Cage returns triumphantly to cool motherfucker form. But the big surprise is Travolta; unlike the other two, he was never that great to begin with. It helps here that he gets to play the villain for most of the film, and his performance is absolutely captivating.

That's more than enough gushing outta me, so I'd like to turn to a discussion of an issue that was a bit troubling. When the two leads undergo the face-switching surgery, there are also changes made in their bodies (for example, Travolta loses his love handles, while Cage gains them). When Cage takes over Travolta's life, he has to screw Travolta's wife (an act which he claims to enjoy, although this may just be to piss Travolta off), and she notices nothing unusual about his member (which, being a physician, she almost certainly would have, even though it had been two months since she and Travolta last had intercourse). Discounting the possibility that their ding dongs would appear identical to the informed observer, are we then to assume that the two men swapped penises (or that each had his own altered to match the other's)?

This issue is not mentioned during the surgery scenes, and my first instinct was that no man would allow his organ to be removed or messed with. I know I wouldn't, would you?

Then it occurred to me that the surgeon might have undertaken this part of the procedure without mentioning it to Travolta ahead of time. But this too seems dubious, especially considering that John's mission is only to get some information out of Cage's brother--presumably the dimensions and contours of his tool would not become an issue. Considered from this angle, the member manipulation only seems plausible in the event of a surgeon who values his anal-retentive side and obsession with minutiae more highly than he does the Hippocratic oath. Given the characterization of the surgeon, I would rate the chances of this as somewhere between low and fair.

In the final analysis, however, I think it played out like this. Since each man was more or less in control of his own surgical procedure (Cage especially so), you would have to assume that Travolta's unit went untouched. Cage, on the other hand, assuming that his mission would involve at least one roll in the hay with Mrs. T (and obviously being psychotic), would almost probably have opted to undergo this delicate manipulation. The only real variable I see is the relative sizes of their schlongs. Given that Cage's character is a definitely a man of the "It's not the size but what you do with it that counts" school, even this potential source of error can be factored out of the equation.

Any questions? Good. Class dismissed.