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Young Lust
Of teen sex and sci-fi
By Noel Murray and Rob Nelson
AUGUST 3, 1998:
On the wall recommended new releases
Childhood's End. Set in Minneapolis, this is a teen-sex
melodrama like no other, portraying a handful of intimately connected
high-school grads as they work, screw, make friends, and defy their
mothers. In fact, one of them even works on screwing his friend's mother,
who also happens to be his own mother's friend. This Mrs. Robinson (Cameron
Foord) leads the graduate, Greg (Sam Trammell), on a series of unusually
down-to-earth trysts in one post-coital scene, she casually squeezes the
zits on the kid's neck, while a hard white light reveals her stretch marks
and his shriveled penis. In a more typical teen-pic, Greg would easily hold
the center; but writer-director Jeff Lipsky audaciously cedes his film to
the older woman's lesbian daughter (Colleen Werthmann) and her new lover,
Rebecca (Heather Gottlieb) a shy and heretofore straight girl who'd
previously admitted her attraction to Greg. Individual scenes evolve
unpredictably and with tremendous daring, as when the girls' tentative
first clinch becomes a matter-of-fact, explicit sex scene over the course
of one five-minute shot. (RN)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Collector's
Edition. Twenty years, one re-edit, and one way-overlong TV version
later, Steven Spielberg is still tinkering with Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. Like a middle-age facelift, this "collector's edition"
video release makes a few minor nips and tucks to pull the narrative more
tightly across the whole, combining elements from the 1977 original version
and the 1980 "special edition" that featured gratuitous FX from inside the
Mothership. As you may recall, the story of Close Encounters is a
fantasy of regression in which an overburdened family man (Richard
Dreyfuss) catches the next spaceship off the planet, leaving his wife and
kids to fend for themselves. Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls charges the auteur with similarly selfish behavior as regards the
Close Encounters screenplay, for which he insisted on receiving sole
credit even though he'd drawn liberally on the work of friends like Paul
Schrader and Matthew Robbins. In any case, this "collector's edition" will
probably go down in film history as the definitive one unless, like me, you
think the movie works best in its original version, wherein the special
effects of adult delinquency are left unknown. (RN)
Jerusalem. Luckily for director Bille August, he had this
religious drama in the can when he started working on the patently
ridiculous Smilla's Sense of Snow. Clearly, this true story is also
the more personal one, relating the impact of religious dissent on two
young lovers in a rural Swedish community at the turn of the 20th century.
The small town of Ingmargaden is split when a fundamentalist preacher
(Sven-Bertil Taube) leads a band of emigrant settlers to Palestine to
prepare for the Second Coming. Meanwhile, August gives history a human face
by focusing on Gertrud (Maria Bonnevie), whose beloved Ingmar (Ulf Friberg)
abandons her to keep his family's farm and to keep his hold on what's left
of the community. In the same way that Gertrud interprets this romantic
betrayal as a sign from God, Jerusalem unleashes various natural
disasters that simultaneously punctuate the melodrama and hint at divine
intervention. (RN)
Oscar and Lucinda. It's criminal how the success or
visibility of a movie depends so much on a release date. Oscar and
Lucinda, directed by the acclaimed Gillian Armstrong, would seem to
have been a natural for arthouse success; but it was released sporadically
at the end of 1997 for Oscar consideration, then limped into a few theaters
at the start of 1998 while critics were preoccupied with Titanic,
As Good As It Gets, and Good Will Hunting. And just what did
the zeitgeist miss? A poignant, haunting period tale of unrequited romance,
wherein a gambling-addicted Anglican minister (Ralph Fiennes) wagers that
he can transport a glass church across the Australian outback to prove his
devotion to a wayward Sidney socialite. The film's novelistic origins are
betrayed by some loose ends and awkward subplots, but what sticks with the
viewer is the way the plot twines across decades without ever losing the
intimate detail. Also memorable is Fiennes, whose apologist rants about the
divinity of gambling transform his reedy, nervous character into a
spiritual dynamo. (NM)
Work. Loosely following the affair between a white,
married young woman and her college-bound African American neighbor, this
stark indie drama takes The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in
Love to more uncommercial (read: truer) ends. It's set in a depressed
factory town where 22-year-old Jenny (Cynthia Kaplan) grows tired of
cooking for her clueless husband (Peter Sprague); gets treated with
condescension during interviews for dead-end jobs; and whiles away the
summer with June (Sonja Sohn), who's heading off to school and thus feels
less pressure to sell her time for an hourly wage. Commendably,
writer-director Rachel Reichman refuses to draw simple connections between
Jenny's marital discord and her affair, or between her unemployment anxiety
and her faint resentment of June's scholarship; she's more interested in
capturing the tumult of her heroine's life than explaining it. Reichman's
elliptical editing and verit cinematography are riveting; and her title is
provocative when applied to the film's vast scope. Marriage, love, looking
for a job, merely "living" it's all work. (RN)
Off the wall alternatives to new releases
Class Action. Upon reading John Grisham's The
Rainmaker and later watching Francis Ford Coppola's weak film version I
found myself thinking of this crisp little courtroom drama, directed by
Michael Apted in his "entertainment-with-a-socially-relevant-edge" mode.
(See also: Thunderheart and Extreme Measures.) Gene Hackman
stars as a legendary liberal attorney who files a suit on behalf of a group
of people who were badly burned by automobiles with faulty wiring. Opposing
counsel is his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a budding corporate
shill who harbors a grudge for all the times that Dad broke Mom's heart by
sleeping around. Class Action is one of the rare films that combines
a truly affecting family crisis with a good potboiler. In its tense
courtroom scenes, where father and daughter conspire to stick it to a
heartless bean counter, you'll thrill to both the medium and the message.
(NM)
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