#27 | January 29 - February 11, 1998  

Now that all those dangle-fangling holidays are behind us, I think it's high time we went back to the cinema, h'm? And this new year the Moscow Movie Market is more mmmdillyicious than ever before, with subtitles aplenty and the last of the past summer's blockbusters and box-office bombs finally dragging their asses into town. The calendar is about to fade into February, which means the Oscars are just a month away... Hopefully, the rumors I've been hearing about a Michael Bass Oscar-night party at the Moscow Spago (with the guest list to feature such semi-celebs as Gary Coleman, Richard Moll, and Miltie Berle's illegitimate son) are not just the idle chitchat of minds unable to face up to a world financial crisis that seems poised to swallow at least three tiny Asian nations with all the gusto of a Friends-addicted White House intern soused on wine coolers. Cunning linguists be damned... whaddaya say we go to the movies!?!

In honor of a soon-to-be eX-Prez's preference in underwear, let's start with a pair of bipolar briefs. Those on the manic, clumsy-Brit-with-protrusive-nose-hair-driving-a-very-small-car side of the fence should rush to see Bean, the movie version of Rowan Atkinson's popular Mr. Bean series. The dropping of the "Mr." seems geared toward attracting more of a female following than in the past, but let me share a little secret with all you shy guys waiting around for just the right occasion to ask that special someone out on a date: chicks be diggin' on that Mr. Bean. Now calm down over there, all you depressive, middle-aged-continental-preferring-teenagers-much-more-empirically-attractive-than-was- intended-in-the-original-novel-types, I haven't forgotten you. Sadly, Mighty Ducks III: Glove Hungry isn't yet out of production, but you've got to admit that Adrian Lyne's controversial-by-default new Lolita is a pretty plausible proxy. This one boasts Jeremy Irons and Dominic Swain as the shade-crossed lovers, Melanie Griffith and Frank Langella as the comic relief, and--best of all--music by Ennio Morricone. The movie probably won't be any good, but at least it'll be one more Moscow fringe benefit you can brag about to your US cohorts, where the film still hasn't found a distributor (although a further deepening of Clinton's fibs-for-fellatio scandal could nix that). And it's subtitled to boot.

But enough about Slick Willie's undies and onto this week's really big premiere, Alien: Resurrection. You may recall my mentioning how the 5-minute preview for this flick was by far the most entertaining part of the My Best Friend's Wedding experience. But with all the really talented young directors working on movie trailers these days, that does not necessarily mean that the fourth Alien installment is any better than a Julia Roberts's tick-tock-of-the-biological-clock-fest. Scream 2's theorem that a sequel is by definition a lesser product than the original may have been a cheap postmodern pre-emptive excuse for the partial tank of that sequel, but it also happens to be completely true. I know James Cameron fetishists in particular like to take exception to this law, but without the original Alien to build on, Cameron (a Canadian, by the way) would have probably produced something along the lines of Starship Troopers.

As for the new one, it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that Sigourney Weaver's debut, for which she was paid $30,000, ought to be exactly 500 times (give or take 2.94%) better than a mid-career studio heifer for which she is paid $15 million. It may be a step in the right direction that a Weaver action hero is worth 25% more than a Demi-Moore stripper, but neither one is getting me out of the old recliner. An even more telling detail is Resurrection's Schindler-length list of producers: five money-people from the two big US and UK studios, another four executive producers from three subsidiary studios, and even Weaver herself as "co-producer."

A few casual critical remarks: Weaver is OK as an even more cynical and beefcake (but less reluctant) action hero; bring-out-the-Gen-X-audience Wynona Ryder is a 96% flop; the monsters themselves look even more like dinosaurs than the Jurassic Park sequel's computer-animated nasties. And even a Frog like Delicatessen-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet should be embarrassed to pile on the Freudian sex symbols as gratuitously as he does here. Enough with the inter-species orifice-licking already!

Gifted character actor Dan Hedaya (of Blood Simple and Clueless fame) is amusing as a hirsute general, but his early death marks the end of the film's better half (the first) and the start of the descent into sci-fi/action formula.

If you really want to know what this one is all about, just watch the last five minutes. The birth and quick elimination of the pasty white half-alien, half-human (and, hence, dumb-as-a-post) killing machine is the clearest sign that this series can no longer muster even enough juice to kill a coked-up Nicole Brown. And if that is the movie's point, simply stating it would have been more entertaining than parsing it out in the hinterland between artistic film and filmic ad.

A much better option is Alien3 director David Fincher's follow-up to Seven, The Game. The less said here, the better, because, as with the titular game itself, to reveal aspects of setup or plot is to ruin the movie's fun. As one character says, "How I envy you--to play again for the first time."

A few safely revealed details: Michael Douglas is a loaded SF investment banker. Sean Penn, his partly estranged brother, shows up on Mike's 48th birthday with a mysterious, "life-changing" gift (the game). Following is a self-consciously clever and highly stylized examination of paranoia (a hot topic nowadays), self, and contemporary American culture.

The Game shares enough incidental details with David Foster Wallace's similarly themed novel Infinite Jest that it's difficult to determine whether the movie is alluding to or shamelessly ripping off the novel. Since Infinite Jest's titular film--a perfect "entertainment"--is of a fundamentally different nature from The Game's game, I'll give the screenwriters the benefit of the doubt and call it allusion. Ultimately, though, the only substantial difference between the two is whether or not the viewer is familiar with the book. Like Wallace, Fincher is most gracefully effective when he indulges in style for its own sake rather than reveling in his own cleverness. The combination of Douglas and Penn at their best (Crash's Deborah Unger is also solid) with an assortment of idiosyncratic Fincher regulars yields an entertainment whose tautly controlled dynamics and pacing more than offset what might be perceived as a lack of genuine depth.