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Well Kino Kampers, I enjoyed last week's streamlined Korner so much I'm gonna try it again. It's a good thing, too-not only do we have another jumpo crop of new releases to plow through to help you through these troubled times. By the way, please note that-contrary to my expectations-Dark City is still around (sans dubbing even) and still comes more or less highly recommended.
A PERFECT MURDER
Loosely based on Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, this is another of those Michael Douglas thrillers that assholes like Boris Jordan love. As usual, Douglas opens his eyes really wide or simply overacts to indicate that his character is intense and possibly insane. Gwyneth Paltrow as unfaithful heiress wife and that drill sergeant dude from G.I. Jane as her artist lover (also intense and possibly insane) round out the stage-setting love triangle. In case you're wondering, Gwyneth is neither intense nor insane, although it's possible that she means to be. The struggling MFK Renaissance head should pay particular attention to the part where Douglas is overexposed on the market and decides that whacking his errant wife in order to grab her inheritance is the answer to all his problems. Maybe you should be taking notes, Boris. Anyway, Fugitive and Chain Reaction director Andrew Davis does a decent job of maintaining interest in his predictable premise, but the psycho-affluent-whitey thing is like so '93, ya know? The tedious music by veteran Hollywood hack James Newton Howard is a sufficient blow to render the whole production irrelevant, in my opinion.
SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS
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After this week in Paradise, they're going to need a vacation." Of course, it would be facile to extend that pat tag-line to the film's audience, but chances are you need a vacation already. Even if you don't, it doesn't change the fact that this one stars Harrison Ford as a gruff, reclusive pilot and Anne Heche as an edgy NY magazine editor who's maybe regretting her decision to leave the mag in the hands of David Remnick. She hires Ford to fly her to a remote island for an emergency photo shoot, which is where the week in Paradise comes in. Heche has just been proposed to by that Ross monkey boy from Friends (which should at least help to sedate all you Starbucks cravers-speaking of which, the chain is now in China so why don't you dweebs get the fuck outta here and leave us to our Nescafe), but when Ford's drunken maneuvering strands them both in the jungle, she falls for the thoughtful, analytical side his intoxication brings out. Maybe if she did some thoughtful analysis herself she might recall that she's a box-muncher. You won't see anything like that here, though-the action is directed with bland centrist tact by the king of the immigrant middlebrow patriots himself, Ivan Reitman. Find yourself an eXpat or eXpatella and have yourself a nice little People-approved date.
THE MASK OF ZORRO
Bad news first: it's Antonio Banderas in the role he was born to play, baby. Which doesn't necessarily bode well for you, the viewer. There's also Sir Anthony Hopkins, deeply ensconced in his embarrassing aging action-hero mold. He never breaks into his Emmy-winning Goa-trance version of "Somewhere," but he might as well. You've also got a certain Mr. Spielberg acting as executive producer and a worse-than-usual score by the much-lauded James Horner, regarding whom see modifiers attached to James Newton Howard above. If it's Zorro you're after, Zorro: the Gay Blade is still the best bet. But don't ever let it be said that I don't play both sides of the fence with equal ineptitude, because here's the good news. Director Martin Campbell has to his credit a very promising-sounding 1979 effort called Eskimo Nell. In some cases, you can tell a lot about a film from its title. Speaking of which, Campbell was also one of the co-producers of something called Scum. That's it-just Scum. After some elementary long division, my calculations yield a semi-positive response somewhere between a light snooze and a good sneeze.
THE X-FILES
It goes without saying that the best thing about this movie is its title's similarity to the name of this newspaper, right down to the obnoxious capital "X." We're especially fond of the tag-line that was rejected (for the much less evocative-and suspiciously Luddite-"Fight the Future"): "Take your greatest fear and multiply it by X." Whether that entails being sodomized in rapid succession by Johnny Chen and Mark Ames or simply opening up the latest issue of this paper to find yourself the lucky subject of a Bassy pseudo-journalistic roll in the mud (complete with pictures from your high school yearbook), you have to admit it sounds pretty scary. The movie itself is nothing special-just an extended episode of the series (perhaps slightly less comprehensible than the TV stuff) with the two leads joined by Martin Landau and various other lesser-known character actors with unusual and/or disfigured faces. Conspiracy-theory noir and extraterrestrial paranoia with lots of mysterious character with Lynchian, hyphenated names like the Cigarette-Smoking Man and the Well-Manicured Man, all put together by the man who brought us such small-screen classics as MacGyver, Quantum Leap, and Parker Lewis Can't Lose. But remember, paying to see this movie is equivalent to putting money in Rupert Murdoch's pocket, which is almost as bad as putting money in Geoff Winestock's pocket.
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