Reviews

A cinematic triumph. Pamela and Tommy Lee's Sex Video, supposedly stolen from the newlyweds' house, is nothing but buoyant fun. Pamela Anderson Lee, the internationally lusted-after Baywatch star, is positively unsinkable as she frolics in the buff off the Lees' Jacuzzi-equipped pleasure cruiser.

Speaking of pleasure cruisers, Tommy's is cinema's real Titanic, although in this case it never founders. (Tommy Lee first made his name -- for what it's worth -- in the brainless 80s teen-rock band Motley Cru. You can certainly see where he got his self-confidence.)

Even Pamela's famously plasticized accessories don't ring a false note. Who's to say what's real; they show up on videotape, right? Besides, there's no faking dialogue like:

Pamela: "Where's my cocktail?"

Tommy: "It's right here, baby." (he pans downward)

It's too bad the happy couple's dissolute pleasures are marred by excessive expressions of love and devotion.

"You're the best f---ing husband in the world!" Pamela squeals.

Other than that bit of sentimentality, this is forty-five minutes worth of premium Americana -- show-biz success enjoyed the way God intended it: in a four-wheel-drive truck, rocking its shocks to pieces in the breakdown lane of the I-5.

(Note: If IMDb doesn't want certain words included in reviews, even when those words are actual quotations from the film, then perhaps IMDb should not include films that contain such nasty words in its database.)

It's not a porn movie, declares the box that holds Hustler White, a mid-90s look at the gay prostitute scene in LA. True enough, although some of the acting's not much better.

What is better is that there's the ring of truth beneath the silly plot and stilted dialogue. These hold together numerous scenes that are nothing like what you've seen before. But you'll enjoy it more if you can keep from distancing yourself, so try.

You may have no problem, or you may run screaming from scenes that include duct-taping, train-pulling, and, um, stumping. Your loss if you do.

If it doesn't irk you when a plot hinges on inexplicable errors made by supposedly intelligent characters, then you may not be annoyed by 'The Truth About Cats and Dogs,' a romantic comedy starring Janeane Garofalo as Abby, a supposedly intelligent, supposedly insightful, and supposedly unattractive veterinarian who hosts a radio call-in show.

A shy photographer (Brian or Eric or something) calls in to the show having trouble with a large dog he's mounted on roller skates for a shoot. Oh, he's so cuuuute!!! Our heroine is in a tizzy. They make a date, but too insecure to face him herself, Abby sends her neighbor, Uma Thurman. How this plan is supposed to work to Abby's advantage, I can't say. Time after time Abby and Uma pass up opportunities to straighten out the confusion. It's a good thing too, because that gives them time to learn a valuable lesson about looks and love, which is: Nice guys don't care about looks. Uh huh.

But audiences do, saith the producers. Thus we have the famously fabulous Thurman cast against girl-next-door Garofalo, who is no slouch in the looks department. So, as Abby, she is frumped up from the start in dowdy, fat-girl clothes and flat hair. It's the oldest trick in pictures. As the credits slowly approach, Abby magically acquires better clothes, a more flattering hairstyle, and a makeup job that gives her lush lips and discernible cheekbones. I guess looks still count for something.

I was riding a bus fitted out with a video screen when I saw Speed. The bus was the overnighter from Sarajevo to Zagreb, and I was rocking along in the upper deck as Keanu and the passengers rocked along in LA. I was in a nice new bus going through a bomb-shattered landscape, and Keanu was in a crummy old bus, with a bomb, going through, well, a more or less bomb-shattered landscape. I was trapped. He was trapped. I was tough. He was tough. I needed a bathroom break. He didn't seem to need one, but you couldn't really tell.

With Keanu, you never can really tell. He's the young Kevin Costner, an actor so wooden he resembles a newel post with eyes painted on. So here he is, trapped on the bus which (in case you've been off-planet for a while) has been rigged to explode if it goes under 50 mph (that's about 80 kph, if you live in a normal country).

The insufferably spunky Sandra Bullock was the passenger pressed into service as the driver. Why there's a cult of Sandra fans I'll never understand; the only theory I can generate is that she starred in a movie called 'The Net,' one of those things where Hollywood demonstrates its inabilily to grasp the real meaning of technology, and a bunch of geeks who showed up to make fun of it were swept off their feet. Thus are usenet newsgroups formed.

Anyway, before long I was wishing her bus would just crash. Failing that, I would have gladly settled for having my bus crash. Except I wanted to live, actually, if only to see Dennis Hopper in some other movie where his talents wouldn't be so ignobly wasted.

A Life Less Ordinary takes its place alongside last year's "Fierce Creatures" as one of those productions that makes you wonder how so much money could be spent without any of the professionals in the film industry saying "Stop, this is madness!"

This is a movie which is not only terribly misconceived but appears to have been semi- aborted, then reconstructed Frankenstein-style to be presented to you, the audience, with the goo still dripping out of its seams.

One can only guess that those professionals just figured there would be a guaranteed audience, loyal to the team which made "Trainspotting" last year. They should have stuck with heroin. What they are trying to achieve here is unclear, although I would believe it if they said they just wanted to make "True Romance" but it had been done already a few years back.

A Life Less Ordinary's problems begin with the script and end only with the credits. The characters' motivations reverse themselves from one line to the next. The editing which is either traditional and incompetent, or non-traditional and ineffective, I couldn't tell. And the plot shifts jerkily and randomly between romantic comedy, thriller, and 'Pulp-Fiction' rip-off. It's as if the makers sat around with the spinner off an old kiddie game. OK, what next?(spin) violence (spin) surrealism (spin) romance. She (spin) cries (spin) kisses him (spin) shoots him. There's no sign that anyone thought even one minute ahead -- any idea, no matter how irrelevant or disconnected, was immediately written in.

These poor, poor actors. You can almost hear the director telling them, "You're supposed to be having an argument, so just yell each line louder than the last." That's not at all to put the blame on the direction, which, like the acting, must have been an impossible job.

Holly Hunter, Dan Hedaya and a couple of others are humiliated in a set-up plot out of 'Here Comes Mr Jordan,' or 'It's a Wonderful Life.' You know, the angels with a job to do thing. Their struggle to rescue what must have been an obviously failing vehicle is genuinely depressing to watch.

Ewan McGregor, as the inexplicably Scottish kidnapper, at least manages to come off likable. I think his strategy was to form a casual alliance with bewildered viewers by maintaining an air of complete confusion.

Cameron Diaz plays the kidnap victim who comes to enjoy her captivity and collaborate with her captor. (Would that audience members could do the same.) I didn't recognize her, but she was so bad that for a few minutes I thought she might be Madonna. Doubtless I've missed her fine work in other films. If she made no effort at all one could hardly blame her, as her character has no consistent qualities or drives, being made up of a series of nearly disconnected sketches. She has at least mastered that careful overenunciation typical of models who go into acting (a trait that I suspect results from a fear of being labeled as thick). There is one moment when you get a real insight, sort of behind-the-scenes of the acting world. McGregor says his line, the camera cuts to Diaz, and she hesitates in apparently real confusion, then flashes what looks like a smile of relief as she suddenly thinks of a way to deliver her line: uh, angrily.

At the end, there's a sort of epilogue in which the completely unconvincing protagonists try to convince you that you've learned a big lesson about love from them, while behind them, key scenes are replayed in a style that seems calculated to give you a feeling of nostalgia about events that changed you forever, just like when you hear Stairway to Heaven. Except in this case they happened on screen within the past two hours and caused only puzzlement.

It's hard to understand why this movie isn't simply savaged by every reviewer. I actually walked in without any idea of what it was going to be about, who had made it, nothing. My only fear, based on the title, was that it would be a terrible-disease-or-handicap movie. Now I wish it had been.

Far be it from me to detract from the luminescence that surrounds everybody's favorite lama. Well, not everybody's -- I've heard he's none too popular with certain tyrants in Beijing. Suffice it to say that I admire His Holiness as much as the next heathen does.

I like Martin Scorsese too. But something tells me that when he took on Kundun, which tells the Dalai Lama's story from his selection as a small boy to his flight into India, Scorsese's story-telling skills were put on hold. Yes, the D.L. is inspirational. And yes, his story -- and the shocking story of China's brutal and criminal occupation of Tibet -- is one of the world's most riveting dramas, one that is still being played out.

But as a movie there just has be more structure or the story just doesn't engage us. I even felt guilty that I wasn't engaged -- I certainly wanted to be. Melissa Mathison's screenplay is surprisingly linear. You are left watching a series of events and disconnected vignettes. It's not a story, but rather a timeline, and there aren't many real-life situations that arrive packaged to work as stories.

Scorsese and Mathison's nobility of purpose also seems to underlie the decision to use only actual Tibetans in Tibetan roles. This is a nice idea, and doubtless infused the set with a sense of mission. But that's not enough to overcome the weak plotting. One wonders if a few trained actors in key roles could have closed the gap a little.

Kundun is a decent introduction to the recent history of Tibet. The scenery is gorgeous (although the panoramas are often cut short, just as you wish to linger), and the visuals a delight. But I was an easy audience. I should have walked out of this movie feeling angry and inspired, not disappointed.

It may have been a clever idea, but Wag the Dog is not a clever movie, no matter what its creators think. Instead it's tedious and insulting. Would that it were not so.

Robert DeNiro as a political fixer, Dustin Hoffman as a Hollywood producer and Anne Heche as a ninnyish White House aide create a hoax war to distract the nation from a presidential sex scandal in the run-up to Election Day.

Despite some snappy dialogue here and there, the movie fails because it it can't decide if it's a political slapstick like Woody Allen's Bananas, or a chilling indictment of political system gone wrong, like The Candidate or Bob Roberts (a vastly better movie).

The cast take a variety of approaches to this problem. DeNiro plays confident but never chooses a route, Hoffman goes slapstick and saves his own skin. So does Woody Harrelson, who wisely plays his role as a dangerous convict as if he's in Police Academy XIV. Heche appears confused, directionless and not up to the task.

It looks as if Barry Levinson wanted to use big names and slapstick to lure in the masses, so they would see how they are being manipulated -- to expose political fraud for the benefit of the presumably benighted, while satirizing it for the amusement of the presumably clever. No wonder it's a guaranteed box office flop: the public doesn't want to be told how idiotic and gullible it is -- especially when the perpetrators of the elaborate hoax are shown as such incompetents. If Hollywood can't make a convincing movie about a fake war, how are we supposed to believe it could make a convincing fake war?

The reality is that the people running the real show in the US are sometimes scarily competent, and they have more resources at their disposal than are shown in this movie. As DeNiro's character points out, the US invaded Grenada less than 24 hours after the disastrous truck-bombing in Lebanon which more than 200 US Marines were killed.

They don't throw phony wars -- it's easier to throw real ones.

You're just sitting there, waiting, and waiting for something to happen. Dazed characters wander listlessly through the shadows. Now the camera is just sitting there on somebody's expressionless but dramatically lit face. There is no soundtrack. You can have a whole conversation about how bored you are while you wait. Then you realize what's happened: David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch have exchanged places. Jarmusch's formerly molasses-slow movies now bop along at a sprightly pace, while Lynch's have ground down to a glacial one. All this could have fit easily into one episode of "Silk Stalkings."

Robert Duvall's devotion to his subject drives his intense portrayal of The Apostle. It's a story of sin and redemption in the life of a Southern preacher, and requires of the viewer a willingness to open up to messages that might usually be shut out. If you can't do that, you may find the pacing too slow and the plot developments too flatly handled. It's not that nothing happens, but the steady building pace and near-documentary delivery don't hit hard enough on their own.

I enjoyed it for the chance to see an honestly delivered demonstration of the attraction that southern-style gospel -- the music, the words, and the tradition -- has for so many, as well as for Duvall's extraordinary and loving performance

Is it my excess of cynicism or my tradition of dislike for anything Spielberg (or are they the same thing?) that leads me to wonder why there's so much hype about Saving Private Ryan?

Sure the battle scenes are grippingly shot, but not more so than Oliver Stone's 'Platoon' was more than a few years back, and more annoyingly for all the MTV camera tricks, like strobing and tacky colors out of old Life magazines. Sure the sets and scenes are done up perfectly, with lots of expert consultants on hand, just as in Schindler's List, which seems to be the WWII partner movie to this one. (Must be another one on the way; Stone had three on Vietnam.) And sure the cast delivers up solid performances, led by Tom Hanks who breaks as far out of his light comic mold as his very respectable talents allow.

But you can't forget it's Spielberg. The assault on Normandy is the meat of the story, just as the concentration camps were in 'Schindler.' But again, Spielberg can't just tell it. He make a sandwich, wrapping the meat with his specialty: white bread. As in 'Schindler', present-day survivors -- in modern color -- visit the graves of the dead who so bravely gave, or at least risked, their lives that others might live. In case your head is impervious to Spielberg's hammer, the deal is that the living owe it to the dead to prove they deserve the gifts of life and liberty.

Get it? We owe it (BANG) to the greatest generation to be "good people" (BANG). That's right, because (BANG) we are Private Ryan! (BANG BANG BANG)

Of course Spielberg being Spielberg, he leaves us with a reassurance rather than a challenge. Based on his wife's affidavit and his family's all-American good looks, our avatar turns out to be well-deserving.

And so are we all, everyone! Now we can sink back into our smug torpor.

Among the worst films I have had the displeasure to see, and not in a way that can be good, on any level. There can be no pleasure gained from seeing it, just a sense of acute discomfort and vicarious embarrassment, especially on behalf of Michael Palin, a talented actor whose desperate struggle to rescue this failing vehicle is admirable, but painful to witness. A Fish Called Wanda was hilarious, but this one is went very rotten.

I'm at a loss to understand the appeal of this movie to anyone who doesn't have a thing for hairdressers. Pretty but unspectacular cinematography can't rescue it from being essentially a fantasy designed for a middle-aged man who would like to imagine that he could attract a gorgeous young woman who would smile sweetly at the only even slightly engaging behavior he displays (a sort of cute way of dancing to Indian music). The conclusion gets him off the hook perfectly, but there's not much to keep you entertained along the way. I kept wondering when it would pick up.