 |
Film Clips
MAY 4, 1998:
 HE GOT GAME. Spike Lee can't help himself--he's always
taking on the grand themes, with varying levels of success. Here,
he takes on The Game, i.e. Life, i.e. Basketball--and he scores!
We Got Game is a long, ambitious movie about the country's
best high-school basketball player negotiating the difficult terrain
of success. Everyone wants a piece of Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray
Allen), a focused, talented, and personable kid--including his
father Jake (Denzel Washington), a murderer who's been let out
of prison briefly to try to persuade Jesus to sign up with a university
referred to only by the Kafkaesque moniker, "Big State."
The plot is so contrived that it actually turns a corner and becomes
believable again. (Who could make this up?) Somehow Lee pulls
it all off with aplomb. His filmmaking style is as fresh and wonderfully
visual as ever, and the story has some of the heart-stabbing tension
of Hoop Dreams. The score is by Aaron Copeland and Public
Enemy--which gives some indication of Lee's territorial range.
--Richter
MEN WITH GUNS. John Sayles takes us on a tour through a
jungle full of evil soldiers, exploited workers, and ruthless
guerrillas in Men With Guns, the latest offering from America's
most determined independent filmmaker. Our guide on this tour
is a complacent, middle class, Central American doctor (Federico
Luppi), who acts as a sort of stand-in for all complacent, comfortable
audience members. The doctor, safe in his shell, doesn't believe
the tales of atrocities and power abuse that he hears until he
voyages into the jungle himself, in search of a group of students
he trained to give medical care to isolated peasant villages.
Once there, he finds that most of his students have fled or been
murdered in the aftermath of a brutally suppressed peasant rebellion.
On his journey, the doctor picks up traveling companions, Wizard
of Oz-style, as he searches for some shard of justice and
humanity. Sayles tells this difficult story with style and grace,
despite a certain amount of visual clunkiness. And he had the
guts to write the dialogue in Spanish. --Richter
TARZAN AND THE LOST CITY. Casper Van Dien of Starship
Troopers anonymity stars in this uninteresting outing wherein
Tarzan must defend his beloved Africa from white looters. The
film gains points by portraying the Indiana Jones-styled Nigel
Ravens, an archeologist who thinks nothing of stealing local treasures,
as a ruthless and cowardly villain. I never understood why we
were supposed to cheer at the beginning of the first Indiana Jones
movie when he robs those people of their sacred gem. If only they'd
killed Indy and feasted on his imperialist flesh. Oh well. Jane
March, of The Lover, loses the last of her art-house cred
by appearing as Tarzan's fiancée Jane, but she at least
provides a beautiful face to distract audiences from this poorly
paced tale, which eschews clever storytelling for a deus-ex-machina
ending and several improbable assists from an African shaman with
the supernatural power to fill in plot holes. Maybe youngsters
would enjoy the scenes of Tarzan freeing trapped and caged animals,
and teaming up with gorillas to fight the white boys, but Tarzan
and the Lost City's 100 minutes will feel quite a bit longer
to adult moviegoers.
--DiGiovanna
TWO GIRLS AND A GUY. James Toback wrote the screenplay
for this playful, racy, one-set movie, but much of the dialogue
and action was improvised. It shows: Not only does Robert Downey
Jr. have an extended scene babbling weird noises in front of a
mirror, but there are times when Two Girls and A Guy comes
to a complete standstill, or heads off at a 90-degree angle for
no clear reason. Toback's smart, machine-gun-fast dialogue, which
abruptly kicks in whenever the actors run out of improvisation,
is so good it left me wishing Toback had spent more time developing
the story. Hovering over the movie like a bad smell is the question
of why the two female leads, Heather Graham and Natasha Wagner
(the most vital and engaging of the three), even bother to stick
around Downey's studio apartment after they learn he's been lying
to each of them for 10 months. We get an answer, but not soon
enough. Toback does have some challenging things to say about
the battle between sexual fidelity and emotional reality, but
he hasn't said enough here, and the film feels terribly unfinished.
Send it back! And while you're at it, rewrite the cop-out ending!
--Woodruff
|
|
