 |
Film Clips
NOVEMBER 10, 1997:
 A LIFE LESS ORDINARY. The third film from the team that
brought us Trainspotting and Shallow Grave has the
same startling sense of composition and color as these previous
efforts, but none of the wit. Ewan McGregor plays a poor janitor
who falls in love with a beautiful rich girl (Cameron Diaz) due
to the influence of some bizarre angel-creature-things. The film
lurches from fantasy to romance to road movie without rhyme or
reason; even worse, the Boy and Girl don't even seem to like each
other, much less light up each other's lives. If you crossed the
1932 Hollywood romance It Happened One Night with Touched
by an Angel and stirred in a little bit of Tommy
and then doubled your dose of Prozac, then you'd be watching A
Life Less Ordinary. The question is, why would anyone want
to do this? --Richter
RED CORNER. After a one night stand that finds his Chinese
lover dead and her blood on his shirt, an American lawyer on business
in China gets inserted into the Chinese penal and judicial systems.
Trapped like a gerbil stuck in an unfamiliar dark maze from which
there's no escape, the cocky businessman, played by Richard Gere's
stylishly tousled hair, must rely on his wits and his plucky female
Chinese lawyer to save his life. The movie's vision of China is
like Steve Martin's old stand-up routine on France: everything
is different there! The courts aren't like ours, cameras everywhere
spy on the populace, and sometimes people with butcher knives
chop the heads off chickens! The conspiracy is a recycled one
and the characterizations are wafer thin, but fans of Richard
Gere's buttocks may find solace in a couple of seconds of his
nude backside as he is tossed into a prison cell. --McKay
SWITCHBACK. Jeb Stuart, the scribe behind such moneymakers
as Die Hard and The Fugitive, directed this low-key
but reasonably good thriller based on one of his early screenplays.
The plot, which leads from Texas to the beautiful, snow-clogged
Rocky Mountains, has an FBI agent (Dennis Quaid, sad-eyed and
brooding) tracking the serial killer who kidnapped Quaid's son.
Action-movie clichés abound, but Switchback has
a surprisingly honorable feel to it; all the main characters,
even (inexplicably) the villain, are granted heavy doses of sympathy
and integrity. Danny Glover and Jared Leto are interesting as
an unlikely pair of travelers (one of whom may be the killer);
but the best is R. Lee Ermey as a scrupulous sheriff. Ermey, best
known as the sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, has been cool
in nearly everything he's done. --Woodruff
A TOUCH OF EVIL. This great, 1958 classic crime thriller
directed by Orson Welles features one of the most famous, continuous
tracking shots in Hollywood history--a three-minute crane shot
running under the opening credits. Based on Whit Masterson's novel,
Badge of Evil, the film was a box-office flop in its time
and was reviled as a glaring example of the worst cinematic sleaze.
Of course, it's widely loved now for the same reasons. This tale
of good and evil in a corrupt, decaying border town features all
of the exaggerated characters and moody, technical tricks of which
Orson Welles was such a master. Starring Charleton Heston, Janet
Leigh and Orson Welles' lumbering girth. --Richter
|
|
