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Film Clips
JANUARY 12, 1998:
 AS GOOD AS IT GETS. This is one of the first films in what
promises to be a rich and varied genre--the Prozac movie. Jack
Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a really mean novelist with Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder and a razor-sharp wit. The first half of As
Good As It Gets, before the guy gets medicated, is honestly
funny. Udall is the prototypical nasty New Yorker. He's fair,
too. He hates everyone equally. But a saucy waitress (Helen Hunt)
makes him "want to be a better man," and, in the style
of Awakenings, he begins to snap out of his dark, dank
little world. The second half of the movie is less funny than
the first; Helen Hunt does okay in short scenes but becomes insufferable
when she's on screen too long. And of course, she's way too young
for Nicholson. Still, he is in rare form in this movie, charming
and repulsive both, and there are plenty of genuine comic moments.
This is about as good as it gets for seven bucks at the multiplex
these days. --Richter
BEAUMARCHAIS. Fabrice Luchini is extremely compelling as
playwright Beaumarchais, whose mild political satires were enough
to get him repeatedly thrown into the Bastille in pre-Revolutionary
France. However, in spite of his charming insouciance, Luchini's
performance cannot completely carry this film through its lurching,
uneven episodes. The opening segment deals with Beaumarchais the
political artist, but then the movie switches gears to become
a spy film, wherein secret plans must be recovered from a gender-bending
French agent in England. It's hard to get involved in this tale
as no information about the purpose of the mission is given until
its resolution, when everything is explained too neatly and without
art. Then it's on to another, vaguely related segment, and so
on. The only thing providing continuity is a thin tale about a
young man who idolizes Beaumarchais and wishes that he would just
stick to writing. Still, the dialogue is intermittently hilarious,
and Luchini is amusing enough to make this a viable alternative
to most Hollywood attempts at entertainment. --DiGiovanna
CRITICAL CARE. Director Sidney Lumet has had a long, prestigious
career making films like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon
and Network; but his latest, Critical Care, is pretty bad.
James Spader does a so-so Jimmy Stewart impersonation, trying
for an everyman appeal as Dr. Werner Ernst, an oversexed but well-meaning
resident sucked into a right-to-die-case, with a twist. Albert
Brooks plays an alcohol-damaged doctor who cracks jokes about,
what else, HMOs. Kyra Sedgwick is the bratty daughter of a comatose
millionaire. Each character seems to have sprung from a different
movie, and the lack of unity is startling. Throw in a not-so-distant
future setting (where critically ill patients recline on inflatable
pool toys) and some corny lines about healing the sick, and you
have one disappointing lump of a movie. --Richter
DECONSTRUCTING HARRY. Woody Allen trundles out the old
themes of love, relationships, blow jobs and creative work with
lousy results. Allen's character Harry (whom he constructs, by
the way, not deconstructs), is a philandering, irresponsible,
whining, famous novelist. He's so emotionally empty and thoroughly
unlikable that it's almost impossible to be amused by his antics--which
include goofball stunts like kidnapping his son and cheating on
his wife. Harry, the owner of a thoroughly opaque charm, somehow
manages to seduce a bevy of fresh-faced beauties; when he's not
doing it himself, his characters are acting out his fantasies
for him in little vignettes meant to represent the stories Harry
Block is writing. There are occasionally spikes of funniness--Billy
Crystal is wonderfully smooth as the devil--but overall, Deconstructing
Harry is flat and clunky, if not honestly creepy. --Richter
GABBEH. This is what happens to cultures that don't have
enough TV. They start watching rugs for entertainment.
Fortunately, the rug that's watched by the elderly couple in Gabbeh
is better than most American sit-coms. It stars a beautiful young
nomad girl who weaves a playful tale of love, courtship, family,
and (implicitly) the importance of ritual and folklore. Written
and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gabbeh gives experimental narrative
a good name, using bright primary colors and creative editing
to generate unique, magical-realist effects. Though it had a few
too many scenes filled with extended sheep baaaaahs for
my tastes, I'd still recommend Gabbeh to anyone curious
about Iranian rural culture. --Woodruff
MOUSE HUNT. You know that Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon
where Coyote is trying to kill Roadrunner but his trap backfires,
and he falls off a cliff, and then in the next scene he's fine
and tries to kill Roadrunner again, but his trap backfires, and
he falls off a cliff, and then that same thing happens again and
again and again until you just wish that someone at Acme would
invent a device that once and for all finished off the two of
them so you could just stare at the empty desert landscape? Well,
if you edited out anything that was remotely funny in that cartoon,
and then repeated the remaining scenes another four hundred times,
you'd have made a film that was almost infinitely more entertaining
than Mouse Hunt. For my part, I ran screaming from the
theater after the fifth repetition of the hunters-fall-into-their-own-trap
"gag," but I hear that many who stayed to the end were
forever scarred, and can only walk the desolate back alleyways
of life, dreaming of a better world where films have plots, characters,
and even some vague sense of craft. --DiGiovanna
MR. MAGOO. Imagine humor-blind filmmakers playing "pin
the comedy on the movie" and you've got Mr. Magoo.
Watching Leslie Nielsen act like a jackass while squinting is
almost as fun as a trip to that optometrist whose halitosis fills
your nostrils every time he says "Better or worse?"
A blind person who mistakenly walked into Amistad would
find more laughs. Director Stanley Tong, a veteran of Jackie Chan
action movies, whisks us from misused comedy setup to misused
comedy setup as if desperately channel-surfing: Click. I wish
Jackie Chan were here. Click. Where's Jackie?! Click.
I have no idea what I'm doing. Click. Malcolm McDowell
sure looks like Fife Symington. Click. Oh my god this isn't
funny. Click. JACKIE!!! Click. Maybe if I go faster
nobody will notice how bad this is. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Click. The film's only assets are Kelly Lynch, as a butt-kicking
vixen/villain who changes disguises every other scene (at one
point she looks like Mrs. Doubtfire); and Angus the bulldog, who's
obviously too talented for this movie and should get his own feature
alongside the pooch in As Good As It Gets. --Woodruff
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