For Spring 2006
Broadcast News (1987, 132 min, R) *** - Directed & written by James L. Brooks, starring William Hurt, Albert Brooks, and Holly Hunter. “Broadcast News” uses a love triangle to embody the delicate, troubled balance between sensationalism and responsible content in mass media journalism. On one hand we have a well-meaning dunce (Hurt, playing dumb for possibly the only time in his career) whose good looks and charisma land him a spot as anchor; he is envied by a hardworking and camera-unfriendly reporter (Brooks); and both adore the producer (Hunter) who has to strike a balance between what’s ethical and what sells. Oscar-winner James L. Brooks (“As Good as It Gets,” “Terms of Endearment”), himself always balancing what’s sincere and what sells tickets, is the definition of what’s stylistically conventional and mainstream. But the movie’s strength is in its ambivalence: the central question of whether recreating real tears is more honest or unethical is left unanswered. And it helps that all three leads are well-meaning and each sells out bits of his integrity along the way. No one is made into an easy target—the dunce proves that anchoring is a skill like any other, not to be scoffed at—although there have been perhaps too many movies about people addicting to high-stress work since 1987 for parts of “Broadcast News” to seem all that fresh. Amazingly, no one goes to bed with anyone else, either. If the romance sometimes veers toward treacle, there’s usually a TV playing something to do with bombings and genocide in the background to put things in perspective. Not a blow-you-out-of-the-water good movie, but an affable, thoughtful entertainment, with a few virtuoso sequences of how a news studio runs (Pauline Kael says, not without reason, that Brooks himself “represents the corruption of movies into TV). Keep your eyes peeled for a great cameo.
Cape Fear (1991, 128 min, R) *** - Directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Ileana Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Martin Balsam, and Joe Don Baker. Scorsese covering Hitchcock, complete with an adapted Bernard Hermann score and crazy-colored close-ups of eyes. A brutal convict (De Niro, having a blast) is released from prison and begins stalking the lawyer (Nolte) who provided a sloppy defense because he knew the convict was guilty. It’s a classic monster from the id: the guilt Nolte feels for betraying his oath to the law and the Constitution has made him a crap husband, a cruddy father, and finally taken corporeal form in De Niro. The first half of the movie is paced almost for laughs (nervous laughs) by Scorsese and his brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It’s only when De Niro switches from his bible to Nietzche that the tone changes and he really goes out of control. When Nolte finally confesses his crime, it’s as if God Himself has intervened to put an end to the object lesson. A great supporting cast includes the stars of the original film (Mitchum and Peck), Joe Don Baker doing what he does best (“you white trash piece of shit!”), and, as Nolte’s boozy wife and floozy-ditz daughter, Lange and Lewis seem to be competition for his affection.
Chungking Express (Chung hing sam lam) (1994, 102 min, PG13) ***1/2 – Directed & written by Wong Kar-Wai, starring Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Brigitte Lin, and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Utterly charming art-film that plays like a Chinese “Breathless,” in which what happens is not nearly as important as the energetic, oblique, break-all-the-rules way of telling it. Kar-Wai uses hand-held camerawork, bizarre compositions, freeze frames, and different shutter speeds to create a crazily-paced world that stretches far beyond the frame that we see. The movie follows two stories that are almost like one story. In each, a cop with a broken heart falls for a wild woman. The first half is like a fantasy, revved-up version of the second, and the shift from one story to the other is so quick and blurry that you might not even notice it. The first cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro of “House of Flying Daggers”) is a frantic detective who jogs away his heartache and beats suspects. He becomes entangled with a dangerous blonde (Bridget Lin) with a revolver in her pocket and a condom full of drugs up her hooty-hoot. In the second story, the cop is no longer an on-the-edge detective but a workaday patrolman (sad-eyed heartthrob Tony Leung—even I think he’s hot). His routine brings him in contact with a music-up-too-loud cash register girl (Hong Kong pop star Faye Wong). Too shy to approach him, how she decides to court him, behind his back, is delightful. “Chungking Express,” like “Breathless,” has a blast doting on throwaway details and tangents, and so do we. We always seem to be eavesdropping from one room over.
Dr. Doolittle (1998, 85 min, PG13) ** - Directed by Betty Thomas, starring Eddie Murphy, Ossie Davis, Oliver Platt, and Norm MacDonald. Part of the kinder, gentler Eddie Murphy comeback around the same time as the amusing “The Nutty Professor.” Murphy plays a vet who discovers he can hear what animals say. There are enough amusing bits to fill a few “Saturday Night Live” sketches, but then the animals teach him to spend more time with his family or something else trite. Not a mean-spirited or offensive movie, but it’s so insubstantial that it looks odd on a movie screen.
Edward Scissorhands (1995, 114 min, PG13) *** - Directed & co-written by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, and Alan Arkin. Not Tim Burton’s best film, but perhaps his most quintessential. A lonely, pale outsider, who combines hilarity with freakiness, has a love-hate relationship with the candy-colored suburbia that refuses him membership. “Edward Scissorhands” is a comedy of manners crossed with the structure of a horror movie. Burton does it all up as a rainbow fairy tale, fraught with fantastical production design and hyperbolic types: housewives in too-small stretch pants, empty-headed patriarchs who act like they know everything, and monotonous rows of houses going on and on. The title character is a friendly-but-shy Frankenstein’s monster who’s spent his whole life in the crumbling castle on the end of the street. He’s played near-silently by Johnny Depp in the first of his weirdo roles, and he’s coaxed out of his castle by a friendly Avon lady (the great Dianne Wiest). The surprise of the first half is that the locals DON’T hate Scissorhands; instead, the movie seems to say that abnormality is tolerated only as long as it can be turned into a commodity. Winona Ryder is the girl whose picture wins Scissorhands’ heart. Anthony Michael Hall is her troubled boyfriend, dreaming of how great their future will be when they have their own shaggin’ wagon. Hall’s vibrancy makes us forget what a wholly hackneyed character he’s playing. His dialogue is solely responsible for the PG13 rating. Burton is a true original, keeping cinema down to sweeping gestures, Danny Elfman’s grand scores, and only the necessary spattering of chit-chat. His narratives don’t always add up, but let’s not bitch and moan.
More Reviews in a Hurry for Spring 2006.