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The man who for years was always described as a 'brooding Irish actor' lives on his own in Beverly Hills. From the outside it looks like any Los Angeles house, but inside it's definitely the home of an expatriate. There are masses of Irish poetry books, paintings of Irish landscapes, family accordions (which he plays) and even the shoes he wore as a schoolboy. Much more than an actor - he also develops projects, writes scripts and novels, and produces films - Byrne goes back home every summer 'to do movies about Ireland'. His two children, from his marriage to actress Ellen Barkin, go with him. "It's so easy to get caught up in mass culture here. It's important my children know they have another tradition and a heritage that's a gift to them". Now 48, Byrne's aquiline features are more craggy, but his sex appeal is as strong as ever. Madonna made no secret that she's a big admirer. "He's as talented as he is beautiful", she once declared. "Madonna was definitely after him", says a friend. "He found it amusing". (Photo: Stephen Danelian/Outline)

Chris, Gianni and the Flap of the Tent

Chris O'Neill and Gianni Versace. Two men with little in common, apart from showmanship and death in Miami.

by Gabriel Byrne
© Copyright: Magill (September 1997)

Some weeks ago I was invited by Gianni Versace to be his guest in Paris, the occasion was the unveiling of his much anticipated 1997 collection. Never having attended a fashion show I decided to go along more out of curiosity than interest. It was a glamorous occasion. Red carpets, limousines, champagne, beautiful models, Demi Moore, Naomi Campbell - dancing in the Ritz ballroom 'til dawn. By those in the know of such things, the show itself was declared a triumph. Gianni, who I had met briefly on a few previous occasions, has me placed next to him and Demi at the sumptuous post show dinner. He seemed tried, drained. He said he always felt like this after the stress of a major show and was looking forward to returning to his house in Miami for a vacation. Did I know the city, he asked. "Vaguely," I replied. Then I told him of a friend of mine, an actor from Dublin call Chris O'Neill who had died there, just some weeks before. I told him some of the stories and images that come instantly to mind when I think of my friend Chris. The first time I saw him he was standing with his back to the counter of the Sword Pub in Camden Street. Cassius in a river of light. The curly mop of hair, the lean smiling face, the moustache of Guinness and the elegantly disheveled clothes. His legs apart, hands in pockets, head to one side, unconsciously mimicking an early photograph of Joyce. In 1978 I had just been cast in The Riordans, largely because of Chris, with whom I had worked in the Project Theatre. He became my agent and my friend. He was generous, loving, sometimes unreachable in every sense of the word, (he was here a second ago) he was raconteur, svengali, manipulator, a wheeler dealer, a rogue, a rascal, hail fellow well met. The soul of kindness, the enemy of convention. An actor who truly loved acting, friend, father and sometimes foe. But once met never forgotten. The misshapen pockets filled to overflowing with keys, paper, biros, pound notes, newspaper cuttings, betting slips, keys, cigarettes and forgotten sandwiches. One day in Baggot Street we began to argue fiercely, he had been my agent for some time and I demanded, in a bout of diligence, to see the receipt of a cherub I should have received from RTE. "It's in your file," he informed me, and called me a Doubting Thomas, a man of no principle, a bad friend. And I in return asked if he was putting my money on a horse or what. We stared white-faced at each other outside Searson's. "Right," he said finally, "come with me" and we walk in a furious cold silence to his office, he pulls open a drawer and with great theatricality flings a file with my name hand-written on it before me. I tell him I am sorry, I should never have doubted him. I open the cover and the sole contents slip out: a single smiling photograph of the actor Jim Reid. I chase Chris around the desk, down the stairs and into the street and at last I catch up with him, and breathless we stare at each other and then we begin to laugh and laugh. Later I left for London to seek my fortune, my rather haughty new agent asked me who handled my affairs in Dublin and I gave her his office number. Her eyebrow raised as she was told that Chris should be back in a few minutes, his pint is still on the counter and he is probably over in the bookies. I really had come to believe that The Sword was his office. One day at cast rehearsals for the Riordans, he thrust a copy of a well known provincial newspaper before me. At the top of the page ran the legend "Show business Awards 1978". We had been nominated along with our fellow cast members as the showbiz personalities of that year. "Do you think Frank Sinatra will show up?" said Tom Hickey: "you never know", said Chris. I scanned the categories again; best singer 1978 nominations: Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, and Big Tom. That is going to be a closely contested category, says Chris. Best Group of the Year are The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Jerry Silicone and the Shoeshiners. "Actors?" said Hickey - Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall and the cast of the Riordans. "I'd say we're in with a chance," said Chris. And so it was that myself and Tom Hickey and Chris found ourselves wending our way to the awards ceremony. We came to a small sleepy village and enquired of a youth eating chips by a wall whether we were headed in the right direction. He peered into our car, his face beaming with recognition. "Jaysys, it's the Riordans." We asked again whether we are on the right road. "Jaysus I don't know, I don't know where it is," he finally admitted, "de yis know yourselves" he asked. At last we reached our destination and are directed to the hotel, an unctuous man with the look of a slieveen, wearing a pioneer pin, greets us in a precious voice. He is the Big Man, organizer of the whole scam. "Any chance of a sandwich?" Chris asks. "Oh you'll be looked after lads, never fear." Em, where are the other nominees?" Chris asks. "Well so far you're the only ones, but we're expecting Jerry Silicone any minute. Margo got a puncture in Mulhuddard." "So you're not expecting Frank Sinatra any time soon then," said Tom Hickey. "Well begob lad you'll never know, I'll get ye them sandwiches." We sat looking at each other, Chris in his usual state of attractive dishevelment, Tom smart as a whip and scarily calm and myself in a white suit looking like 'Our man in Havana'. When we had repaired to a nearby bar, and were suitably fortified, Tom Hickey spoke. "Look lads, if this is a flap of the tent job, we'll give it an hour and then we're out." "What does that mean?" I asked. "It refers," explains Tom, "to a celebrity engagement outside the confines of the city, usually in a marquee, where the only recourse in a situation above and beyond the call of duty is to crawl through a flap in the tent and to make good your escape, hence flap of the tent." In other words, exploitation of the guairle by the gombeen. There was only one entrance to the hall which was packed to capacity with punters who had paid in to witness the glittering awards ceremony. A small fat woman sat hunched over a turnstile, dressed in a white coat with Maor inscribed in red. She was the sliveen's mother. "That'll be 6 pounds," she said without looking up, "6 pounds!" Chris said incredulously, "but we're the nominees." We forked out the money, the pioneer pin motioned us toward center stage. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he intoned into the microphone, "put your hands together and give a rousing welcome to some very special guests. You have seen them on the screen and now you see them live here on this stage, the nominees for show business personality of 1978 are ..." there was silence. A drum roll - "Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, who fortunately cannot be here to night, and ladies and gentlemen the winners are Michael, Pat and Tom from the Riordans." Thunderous applause. Having seen off all competition from England, America and the rest of the world, we stand the disputed victors with our plastic trophies, smiling, bowing, starving and dying of the drought, as Tom Hickey in a fierce whisper keeps repeating "Flap of the Tent, Flap of the Tent." At two o'clock in the morning we wait in a line at the chip van in the town square. We are told by a swaying drunk to get up the yard, that there's a smell of shite off us and we should go back to the Leestown where we came. "Fame," says Tom Hickey, shaking his head, fame." "I hope," said Gianni, smiling when I had finished, "that your friend would not call this a flap of the tent job," and he waved his arm around the beautiful room. "I doubt," I said, "he would." It was a still beautiful day in Los Angeles, when I heard of Chris' death. I had been reading in the garden, and I dosed off and did not hear the phone. Later when I played back the message and heard her voice, my whole body weakened in shock. It was Aisling, his daughter. Her voice was calm, almost matter of fact, Daddy passed away she said - he looked at me and smiled and closed his eyes and then he died, she was saying. In Miami, I thought to myself, of all places. Two days after the Paris show, Gianni was dead too, murdered by a madman. Donatella his sister said he died like an emperor, facing the sky, his hands thrown out behind him. I like to think they've met somewhere, these men who died in the same town within weeks of each other. I know they'd get on. By the way, I still have the award and the slieveen went on to greater things in national politics. Chris, I miss you, you gave it the lash. I'll see you on the other side of the tent...

A star is Byrne....

Actor Gabriel Byrne has entered into a new production deal with Sony Pictures because word-of-mouth on their first association, Mad about Mambo, is extremely hot. Mel (Bean) Smith will direct The Lying Laird, a comedy based on the true story of an official who embezzled a large sum of money in order to buy a Scottish noble title. The other project on the boil is Early Bird about a B-17 bomber crew who crash-land in Ireland during the Second World War to be directed by Simon (Free Willy) Wincer.

(Film Review January 1999)

COOL WORLD (1)

By Roger Ebert

The DJ who was hosting the radio station's free preview of "Cool World" leaped onto the stage and promised the audience: "If you liked `Roger Rabbit,' you'll love `Cool World'!" He was wrong, but you can't blame him - he hadn't seen the movie. I have, and I will now promise you that if you liked "Roger Rabbit," quit while you're ahead.
"Cool World" is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line. Like "Roger Rabbit," it assumes that humans and cartoon characters can exist within the same reality, and it gives us human beings who find themselves in the "cool world" in another dimension beyond the animator's pen.
There is nothing wrong with this concept. There is everything wrong with the execution. Let's start with the animation itself, which seems to have been created by Ralph Bakshi with an unrealistic idea of how quickly we can comprehend visual information. A great deal of this film is so complex, chaotic, quick-cut and fast-moving that it is impossible to sit in the audience and figure out what is being depicted. The cartoon characters are so plastic that they are able to distort their shapes quickly and extremely, which occasionally leads to a good effect but often prevents us from seeing, or registering, who they are or what they are doing.
Then there is the story, beginning with a prologue in postwar Las Vegas that exists only to catapult one of the characters (played by Brad Pitt) into the "Cool World." He works as a cop there, and eventually is joined by another human, a cartoonist, Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), who has followed one of his creations, the seductive Holli Would (first a cartoon and later a human played by Kim Basinger).
The central appeal of the movie is apparently meant to be the possibility of sex between Holli Would and a human. But the climactic scene - with Holli warming up in the preliminaries - is senselessly interrupted by cross-cutting to another scene of no apparent relevance, and indeed dramatic tension in the film is constantly under mined by Bakshi's jittery cutaways.
The film misses one opportunity after another. Look, for example, at the scene where Holli has taken human form and goes to a nightclub with Deebs. The way this scene is handled is almost a textbook example of incompetent writing, directing, filmmaking, acting - and, most importantly, storytelling. A million funny or interesting things could have happened in that nightclub. None of them does. The scene is agonizing.
Look, too, at sequences in Vegas casinos, where ordinary gamblers turn into cartoons and back again. Could this be funny? Bizarre? Intriguing? Surprising? Maybe in another movie. The audience sat in soporific silence.
One of the obvious weaknesses of "Cool World" is the way it integrates animation and live action. "Roger Rabbit" was made with such precision and attention to subtle detail that it really did look as if people and "Toons" were inhabiting the same space. In "Cool World," a human character will throw an arm around the shoulders of a cartoon, and the mismatch will be so distracting it's the only thing we can look at on the screen.
Bakshi's desperation is revealed in several brief sequences in which bizarre Cool World characters hurtle about the screen, screaming and gnashing, for no reason except to kill time or cover an awkward transition. What's odd is that an animated film would be so badly planned. Animation requires so much work at the storyboard level that these films are usually well-plotted, if nothing else. "Cool World" is a surprisingly incompetent film.

 

Cool World (2)

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
July 10, 1992

The major issue to be resolved in "Cool World," Ralph Bakshi's new venture into the "Roger Rabbit"-style marriage of animation and live action, is whether Kim Basinger is more obnoxious as a cartoon or as a real person. Basinger plays Holli Would, a curvaceous pen-and-ink nymphet who lives in a cartoon universe called "Cool World." This animated parallel dimension was created, Holli included, by Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), an underground cartoonist who, without warning, is suddenly whisked into his own fantasy creation. The catalyst for this abduction is Holli herself, who lusts so mightily for life in the real world that she beckons Jack from his realm to help her make it across. Holli is a creature of lusts, as every inch of her anatomy illustrates. As a cartoon, Holli incessantly gyrates and grinds as if she's gulped a handful of Mexican jumping beans. And when the transformation from cartoon to flesh-and-blood actress occurs, the body language remains the same. The results fall far short of Jessica Rabbit's mark. What we get from Basinger here is the spectacle of the actress executing her impersonation of Marilyn Monroe while trying to twist herself into a human pretzel. It's not funny and, unless I'm the only human alive not turned on by an animated striptease, it's not sexy either. That doesn't leave much. The script (by Michael Grais and Mark Victor) includes a second relationship between a "noid," as the humans are called in the Cool World, and a "doodle," the name for animated characters. The noid is a detective named Frank (Brad Pitt) who was thrown into the Cool zone after he crashed his motorcycle, and his cartoon squeeze a foxy brunette. The couple are tight but they have a problem: Noids and doodles can't ... do it. Doing it, in fact, figures dramatically in the plot. It was "doing it" with Jack, a noid, that transformed Holli into a real person. So, like, couldn't Frank and his girl ... you know ... and transform her into a real person? What are the rules anyway? Technically, Bakshi's work is uneven; some of the characters in his Cool universe are hilarious, while others are flat. And the combination of live and animated action falls a notch below state of the art. The look of the production is fresh and, at times, even thrilling, but for the film to work, Bakshi has to make his artificial world seem real, and he never does. That's the animator's bottom line, and Bakshi leaves it blank. His only contribution is the irreverent, Vargas-girl variety sexuality that he made his trademark in" Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic." But is it really an innovation to provide a realistic jiggle to an animated breast?

Dangerous Woman (1)

  By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 03, 1993

In "A Dangerous Woman," you know Debra Winger is a bomb about to go off. The title -- not to put too fine a point on it -- is a dead giveaway. And when Winger almost clubs a woman to death in the opening scene, you know bizarre things are in store. As Martha, Winger is a "childlike spirit captured in the body of an awkward woman" -- as Gramercy Pictures' press notes puts it. Whether that means mentally impaired or not is unclear. But she's called a "screwball" behind her back. Timid and thickly bespectacled, she lives a sheltered existence in a guest house next to her aunt (Barbara Hershey), on whom she depends for emotional security. That near-clubbing comes when bitter wife Laurie Metcalf intentionally plows her car into Hershey's front porch. Climbing out of the battered automobile, gun in hand, Metcalf accuses Hershey of having an affair with her politician-husband John Terry -- who happens to be there. Winger, who's been watching the altercation in horror, retreats to her house and comes back with the hammer. Before she brings the thing down on Metcalf's head, however, she is stopped. So is Metcalf. The incident is forgotten. But we know something's ticking away. In producer/writer Naomi Foner's increasingly laughable scenario, Winger undergoes a systematic shafting from everyone around her, including Hershey, who treats her like an unwanted child, and Winger's fellow employees at the dry cleaners where she works. When Winger meets drunken Irish handyman Gabriel Byrne, who gets a job fixing that front porch, it's love at first near sight. They're birds of a feather. He sees how mistreated she is. She sees his heart of gold under all that boozy breath. In one private encounter, the besotted Irishman bursts into tears, buries his head in her lap and begs for absolution. "Oh, Martha," he whimpers. "You're like a primitive thing that's never been spoiled." Their tentative affair and various other episodes continue with slow, arbitrary and unintentionally amusing abandon. The most significant development is a growing tension between Winger and sleaze ball David Strathairn, boyfriend of one of her co-workers. Like most movie naifs, Winger speaks the truth no one else is capable of, and naturally no one believes the addled Cassandra. She also sees -- with contrived regularity -- society's deceptions. After the gun-and-hammer scene, for instance, Winger peers through a window to see Hershey making illicit love with Metcalf's husband. So they were having an affair! Winger happens to look up as Strathairn slips money from the dry cleaners' till into his underwear. But Strathairn successfully accuses her of pilfering. What's a harassed "screwball" to do? Winger, who looks like one of Gilda Radner's "Saturday Night Live" caricatures, throws herself into the acting task. But her talents and enthusiasm are counterproductive here. Her eye contact veers away from people, "Rainman" style. She squints so theatrically behind those glasses, you want to knock them off. Her ungainly waddle is meant to be poignant, but it just looks like she's imitating TV's Urkel. If mistakes are things to recover and learn from, "A Dangerous Woman" is the lesson of her career.

DANGEROUS WOMAN (2)

By Roger Ebert

      Observe the way Debra Winger plays her character in "A Dangerous
  Woman," and you will learn something about the alchemy of acting. She
  doesn't look particularly different in this film - aside, of course,
  from the details of makeup or hair style that help women express
  their beauty. You can always see that it's Debra Winger. But she
  projects such a different essence in the film, so profoundly
  different, that you wonder how she's doing it.
           She plays a woman named Martha, who is slow, or somewhat
  retarded, or whatever word you want to use. She can function in the
  world, and even hold a job at the dry cleaners, but she is odd in her
  behavior, and children in the street feel safe to follow and mock
  her. Her home is the guest cottage next to the big house occupied by
  a close relative,  Frances  (Barbara Hershey), who has sort of
  inherited Martha as a responsibility.
           Winger must have studied women like Martha in preparing for
  her performance. She must have lived beside them, observing a hundred
  different details. She puts them all together into a portrayal that
  never seems made up of those details, however; everything is of a
  piece, and after a time we are simply watching Martha, identifying
  with her. Look at the way Martha studies the movements in the faces
  of people she's talking to. She all but peers at them, looking for
  clues, trying to read emotions and meanings. Look at the way she
  walks, filled with purpose, concerned with getting from here to there
  without false effort. Look at the way she stiffens when she is
  treated unfairly. Look at how proudly she insists that she always
  tells the truth.
           The women live in a small town where everybody knows each
  other, more or less. Frances is a bit player in local politics, and
  it gradually becomes clear that she's the victim of a series of
  affairs, that she tries to find herself through the assistance of
  men, and usually fails. As for Martha, she hardly seems aware there
  is such a thing as a sex life. Then one day an alcoholic handyman
  named Mackey (Gabriel Byrne) comes drifting into their lives, looking
  for work. It so happens that Frances' frame porch has
   been caved in by an automobile driven by a jealous wife who thought,
  correctly, that her husband was inside the house. Frances sends the
  handyman away, but Mackey comes back anyway, and starts the job; he
  needs the work so badly he has no choice.
           Eventually Mackey will become involved with both women. But
  it is not as simple as it might sound,
   because he isn't bad - none of these people are bad - and in the
  loneliness and desperation of these lives many things can happen. His
  moral carelessness is fueled by alcoholism, which he acknowledges,
  although the movie in general doesn't take it very seriously.
           Mackey's involvement sets a plot into motion, a plot that
  eventually involves another local man,
   Getso (David Strathairn) a worthless petty thief at the dry
  cleaners. Things happen. The movie is not really about the things
  that happen - it's about the two women - but it's as if the
  screenplay gets seized by a desire to tell the superficial story, and
  forgets to tell the real one. There is a pregnancy and a killing and
  a secret that cannot be shared, and it's all really just melodrama.
            I guess human stories have to be linked up to the mechanics
  of a plot in order to get financed, or to find an audience. No one
  would have wanted to see a movie that simply watched and listened
  with sympathy to the events in the daily life of a moderately
  retarded woman. But why is it that violence has to be involved? Why
  do so many plots depend on violence as the shortcut for creating
  dramatic tension. What do Martha and her job and her simple hopes
  have to do with all these distraught scenes in the police station,
  and all that blood? Look at another current movie, "Ruby in
  Paradise," which by setting itself free from the contrivances of
  sensational plotting allows itself to be deep and true.
           "A Dangerous Woman" raises more questions than it answers.
  The handyman character is well-played by Byrne, and surprisingly
  sympathetic, considering he sometimes behaves in an unprincipled way.
  But he functions too much as an invention of the plot, dropped into
  the story to busily make speeches and love. He doesn't have much to
  do with the real lives of the two women. Then there is another
  character handled carelessly: the wife of Frances' politician lover,
  who drove her car into the porch. This woman reappears in the movie
  at an important juncture and takes her husband back, and it's all
  handled in long shots, without explanation, so that we can see she's
  just a convenience for the screenwriter.
           The movies are so seldom perfect that it's enough to find
  something perfect in them. What's nearly perfect in "A Dangerous
  Woman" is the Debra Winger performance. Her Martha seems to float
  above the inventions of the plot, in a world of her own. She may not
  know everything, but she knows what she knows, and acts on it to the
  best of her ability. She does not lie. She will not hurt another. She
  deserves her chance at happiness, and she knows it. It's quite a
  performance.

DARK OBSESSION (1)

By Roger Ebert

The film opens in solemn ceremony, as a group of men in military formalwear offer a toast to the queen. It is followed by countless other toasts, until finally this cream of the British aristocracy is galloping around the banquet hall on each other's shoulders, in a boozy game of horses and riders. Later that night, as they all drive home together, the car of the drunken Sir Hugo hits a woman in the middle of the street. She is not killed instantly, but Sir Hugo deliberately leaves her for dead. She dies the next day, and is described in the papers as a hit-and-run victim.

Actually there were four witnesses to Sir Hugo's crime, but they take a solemn oath not to reveal what happened. And Hugo (played by Gabriel Byrne as a monstrously selfish, jealous rich man) carries on his life as usual. There is his wife, whom he suspects of adultery, and his small child, about to be packed away to boarding school, and his doddering father, who complains "Are they roping me off?" on the days when the public is admitted for tours of the ancestral home.

The fact is, the hit-and-run was murder in more ways than one. The victim (identified as the cook of a friend of Sir Hugo's) looked, for one moment on the dark, rainy street, very much like his wife. And perhaps at that moment he avoided braking, when he could have saved the woman, because in his drunken state he was running down his wife instead. It is hard to say. And of course, sober, Sir Hugo is the soul of probity and decorum. Like many members of his class and generation, he is obsessive about performing all of his public acts in the absolutely correct way, while being completely permissive with himself about what he does in private.

"Dark Obsession," a film of murder, sexual jealousy and refined decadence, is only fitfully a murder mystery. A crime has taken place, and there is an attempt to solve it, and one of Sir Hugo's young friends is tortured by his conscience because of the bloody secret he has been pledged to keep. But the business of the crime plugs along in the background, while Hugo and his family carry out the daily pathology of lives that have become lies. About the only thing that cheers up these dreadful people is that they think they are better than everyone else. But even within their own closed circle they are snobs: "I do so want you to feel a member of the family," Hugo's mother tells his wife, making it clear that after several years of marriage she does not believe this feeling has yet been obtained.

The movie was written by Tim Rose Price and directed by Nick Broomfield, whose previous films included the documentary "Soldier Girls," and whose approach to this material is documentary, as well. He wants to show us how the very fabric of the lives of these aristocrats has undercut their human perspective, has convinced them they are above and beyond the law. When they toast the queen, it is almost because they think she needs it.
Broomfield's sequences have the feeling of carefully crafted set pieces, as in a scene that takes place at night, at a party in the ancestral country home. The garden, the pool, the gardener's shed, the disused gazebo - these all become, not architectural details, but destinations for elaborate games of hide-and-seek, as lords and ladies slip off into the night for furtive couplings. There is a particularly painful encounter between Sir Hugo and his wife, which is probably responsible for the film's NC-17 rating, but which is helpful, I think, in establishing the ways in which he can feel himself to be a man.
If you want to understand the British ruling class, the Cockney-born Michael Caine once explained to me, it will help to know that they were all shipped off to boarding school at the age of 5, and spent the next 10 years in a same-sex society, being beaten about once a week. The opening scene of "Dark Obsession" begins about where Caine's explanation left off.

Dark Obsession (2)

By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 21, 1991

Director Nick Broomfield turns a baleful eye on British sangfroid in "Dark Obsession," an infuriatingly detached first feature about the rich getting away with murder. Intended as a psycho-thriller, Broomfield's film is in fact a skimpily plotted rumination on what's rank among the privileged. Class-conscious and Thatcher-sore, it chides the gentry for an empty existence and moral turpitude. Gabriel Byrne, the broodmeister, is gargoylicious in the role of Hugo Buckton, an introverted aristocrat who becomes convinced that his wife, Virginia (Amanda Donohoe), is having an affair with a business associate. Given to NC-17-rated thoughts of passion and prodded by unreasoning jealousy, Lord Buckton grows more irrational the more he obsesses on the curvaceous Virginia. Under this wet blanket, passion smolders. Once a member of the Queen's Guard, Buckton has become a tippling dilettante who often carouses with his former cronies in the military. During one of these drunken sprees, he runs down a young woman who looks to his cuckold's brain vaguely like his cheating wife. Pheww, but it's only Lady Castlemere's cook, a commoner, so they leave her to die on the wet cobbles. It's very subtle. Only one of their number, the boyfriend of Buckton's sister (Douglas Hodge), feels any guilt whatsoever. He urges them to report the incident to the police, but the others persuade him to swear never to divulge their involvement. When the story leaks out anyway, the poor fellow is dealt with as barbarously as the good Piggy in "Lord of the Flies." Much of the story takes place at the Bucktons' ancestral estate, which to the family's discomfiture has recently been opened to the public. Hugo's mother (Judy Parfitt) is the imperious Lady Crewne, whose principal joy is lording it over Virginia, a beautiful commoner who is far too good for the over bred Crewne-Buxtons. A gothic spill from the pen of writer Tim Rose Price, they are a stock lot of stuffed shirts full of their own inbred self-importance. So what else is new?

DEFENSE OF THE REALM (1)

By Roger Ebert

"Defense of the Realm" is a newspaper thriller about a touchy investigation into British security matters. The story ends the way many newspaper stories end - inconclusively - but the movie ends with a shocking event that suggests the British and their U.S. allies would do anything to defend the American nuclear presence in the U.K.

The movie stars Gabriel Byrne as a young, ambitious newspaper reporter who covers a scandal involving a member of Parliament who has the bad judgment to patronize the same call girl used by a KGB agent. Is he a security risk, or does he only seem to be one? Byrne's paper doesn't ask too many questions before putting the story on Page 1 and forcing the politician's resignation.

But there's an older, more experienced hand at the newspaper - a veteran political reporter played by Denholm Elliott, that most dependable and believable of British character actors. He believes the M.P. may have been framed by people who wanted to silence his embarrassing questions in Parliament. Byrne half-listens to him, and halfway wants to go with the story just because it's so spicy. Upstairs on the executive floor, the proprietor of the paper likes the scandal because it increases circulation.

The film moves quickly and confidently into a net of intrigue, and the director, David Drury, does a good job of keeping us oriented even though the facts in the case remain deliberately confusing. In one especially effective scene, he shows Byrne pretending to be a policeman in order to get quotes from the wife of the disgraced M.P.; her simple, quiet dignity when she discovers the deception is a rebuke to him.

So is the dogged professionalism of the veteran reporter, who has an anonymous source who insists the M.P. is innocent. But then the old-timer dies suspiciously, and it's up to Byrne to decide whether there's a deeper story involved or if it's only a coincidence.

"Defense of the Realm" reminded me sometimes of "All the President's Men," but this is a bleaker, more pessimistic movie, which assumes that a conspiracy can be covered up, and that the truth will not necessarily ever be found. The real target of the movie is the American nuclear presence in Britain, and the exciting framework of the newspaper story is an effective way to make a movie against nuclear arms without ever really addressing the point directly.

The acting is strong throughout, but Elliott is especially effective. What is it about this actor, who has been in so many different kinds of movies and seems to make each role special? You may remember him as the Thoreau quoting father in "A Room With a View," or as Ben Gazzara's lonely friend in "Saint Jack." Here he is needed to suggest integrity and scruples, and does it almost simply by the way he looks.

Gabriel Byrne, a relative newcomer, is quietly effective as the reporter, and Greta Scacchi, as a woman who gets involved on both sides of the case, shows again that she can project the quality of knowing more than she reveals. "Defense of the Realm" ends on a bleak and cynical note - unless you count the somewhat contrived epilogue - and gets there with intelligence and a sharp, bitter edge.

 

Defense of the Realm (2)

By Paul Attanasio
Washington Post Staff Writer
February 13, 1987

In "Defence of the Realm," an efficient but impersonal British thriller, Nick Mullen (Gabriel Byrne), an efficient but impersonal tabloid reporter, notes a whiff of scandal about Dennis Markham, a left-wing member of Parliament (Ian Bannen). When it turns out that Markham, who is privy to state secrets, shared a prostitute with an East German spy, he is forced to resign. A boozy colleague, Vernon Bayliss (Denholm Elliott), himself a Red from the days when Reds were Reds, tells the dogged Mullen that he doesn't know the whole story. When Bayliss mysteriously dies, Mullen smells a rat. Assisted by Markham's gorgeous secretary (Greta Scacchi), Mullen digs away, uncovering an intrigue involving double agents, American missiles in Europe, the "national security" debate, disinformation and the death of a borstal boy. Better than most, "Defence of the Realm" captures the flavor of a news room, although part of the realism is how boring it is. Still, it's nice to see a movie where a reporter actually goes to the library once in a while and puts seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together. For the most part, director David Drury keeps things at a ripping pace. Another in producer David Puttnam's series of art school grad/commercial directors turned filmmakers, Drury knows how to compose a frame, and "Defence of the Realm" fills the eye with glossy visuals. But its slickness is also a little insular and off-putting -- it makes the movie a distant object -- and it doesn't help that Byrne is one of those swarthy, impenetrable British leading men who always have their neckties undone. Byrne rarely registers an emotion, so the plot just seems like an elaborate machine, and one that gets increasingly creaky. While you can accept "Defence of the Realm's" fantastic coincidences, it's rather harder to accept all the nefarious misdeeds the movie ascribes to the government, even if a series of horrendous coincidences have put them on the, uh, defensive.

End of Violence (1)

After his vapid "Wings of Desire" appendage "Faraway, So Close" Wenders' follow-up is, at least ostensibly, a thriller. Not, of course, the kind featuring Michael Madsen and left skulking unrented in every video shop, but a skewed union of genre staples (kidnapping, murder and adultery) with musings on communications technology, LA and the film industry itself. High in the Hollywood hills, schlock movie impresario Mike Max (Bill Pullman) is so absorbed in abusing his minions that the departure of his wife Paige (Andie McDowell) barely registers. What does get his attention, as well as that of watching government surveillance-expert Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne), is his near-execution by a pair of redneck hoodlums. The rednecks are then found decapitated, while presumed killer Max is nowhere to be seen. For other directors, this intriguing premise would simply prompt countless "car-go-boom" action sequences; Wenders, however, takes the scenic route around his insubstantial storyline, and the result is playfully cerebral without veering into pretension. It also looks magnificent, every frame composed with an obvious love for the art of movie-making. Flawed, for sure, but welcome proof that Wenders didn't lose his talent when he started hanging out with Bono (Danny Leigh). Director: Wim Wenders, Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Bill Pullman, Andie MacDowell, Udo Kier. Running time: 1 hr 57, Out: 27 July.

End of Violence (2)

Wim Wenders' sprawling urban epic looks handsomely promising as it weaves together Big Brother technology with the glitz of Hollywood, but unfortunately the German author's result slowly slides into a convoluted sea of monotony. It feels like David Lynch's Lost Highway as if directed by Robert Altman. "Highway"-man Bill Pullman stars as a stressed-out Hollywood producer who is so wrapped up in the biz that his marriage with his trophy wife (Andie MacDowell) is falling apart. One night, he's abducted, implicated in a double murder and, mysteriously, is nowhere to be found. Only one of Big Brother's lensmen (Gabriel Byrne), has an inkling as to what might have happened. MacDowell is a pleasant surprise as she finally shows some genuine sexiness and edginess, but Pullman and Byrne are wasted in their complex but underdeveloped roles. The added twist of a government conspiracy and cover-up rings excruciatingly hollow, leaving Wender's latest barren and wingless (Tom Meek)

Enemy of State (1)

Enter hotshot D.C. labor lawyer Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), who bumps into old college classmate Zavitz while Christmas shopping for his wife. (In pure red-blooded Bruckheimer fashion, the backdrop is a male fantasy of a lingerie store—when was the last time your local Victoria's Secret bustled with leggy salesgirls frolicking in panties?) Not knowing he's been slipped the dangerous evidence, Dean finds himself a marked man, losing his family, his bank account, and his job. In a deadly race against time, Dean joins forces with Brill (Hackman) a reclusive, embittered ex-NSA agent who's only too happy to seek revenge on his former employers. In true Tony Scott fashion, Enemy of the State is visually slick. It features plenty of sped-up action montages and flashy spy-cam special effects, but there's not one organic moment of suspense. Part of the problem can be attributed to David Marconi's script, in which the villains are clearly established in the film's opening sequence, and there are virtually no turnabout-style surprises from that point on. Enemy is also too damn loud: Between explosions we're left with another mind-numbing score from former Yes rocker Trevor Rabin (Armageddon). Where are all the eerie "somebody's watching me" silences these kinds of films thrive on? Luckily, the performances are fairly strong. Smith fights his every urge to shtick it up and makes a credible hero, while the supporting cast of Gen X hackers (including Jake Busey, Scott Caan, a strangely uncredited Seth Green, and Saving Private Ryan's Barry Pepper) are suitably snotty. The film wastes its talented female leads: sassy, scene-stealer Regina King and the resurrected from straight-to-video hell Lisa Bonet, as Smith's wife and ex-girlfriend respectively. But Enemy of the State's biggest casting coup is Hackman as a nerdy, hypoglycemic shut-in who's just imbalanced enough to give this standard action outing the little bit of edge it otherwise sorely lacks. --Kevin Maynard

Enemy of State (2)

GABRIEL BYRNE makes an appearance as a NSA agent who attempts to throw Robert Clayton Dean off track and get him to hand over the incriminating videotape.  Byrne is not only a gifted and highly acclaimed actor, but an Academy Award™-nominated producer as well. He executive-produced the film "In the Name of the Father," which earned several Oscar® nominations, including Best Picture, and also produced and starred in "Into the West," opposite Ellen Barkin. Beginning his acting career with the Abbey Theater and later joining the Royal Court Theater in London, the Dublin-born actor made his feature film debut in John Boorman's "Excalibur." Other European films include the acclaimed "Defense of the Realm" and "Hannah K." During this time he worked for several noteworthy European directors, including Costa-Gavras, Ken Russell, and Ken Loach. In 1990, he made his American debut in the Coen brothers' "Miller's Crossing." In 1995, he starred as Dean Keaton in "The Usual Suspects," which was nominated for two Academy Awards™. Early last year, Byrne starred in "Smilla's Sense of Snow," with Julia Ormond, and in the HBO film "Weapons of Mass Distraction," with Ben Kingsley. He was then seen in Wim Wenders' "End of Violence," and "Polish Wedding," with Lena Olin and Claire Danes. Most recently he played D'Artagnan in "The Man in the Iron Mask," opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, and Gérard Depardieu. He just completed a starring role in MGM/UA's "Stigmata," opposite Patricia Arquette. Lately Byrne has been dividing his time between writing, producing, and acting. His first book, "Pictures in My Head," was published in Ireland last year, where it became a critically acclaimed best-seller. "Pictures in My Head" was also published in the U.S. late last year. Byrne, who is a member of the Irish film board, is currently working through his production company, Plurabelle Films, where he is executive-producing the film "Mad About Mambo," which takes place in Ireland. Gabriel is in development on a number of other projects through his production company and Phoenix Pictures, where he has a first-look deal.

Frankie Starlight (1)

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

Ireland, 1995
U.S. Availability: 12/95
Running Length: 1:40
MPAA Classification: R (Profanity, sexual situations)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Cast: Anne Parillaud, Gabriel Byrne, Matt Dillon, Alan Pentony, Corban Walker, Georgina Cates, Rudi Davis
Director: Michael Linday-Hogg
Producers: Noel Pearson
Screenplay: Ronan O'Leary and Chet Raymo based on the novel The Dork of Cork by Chet Raymo
Cinematography: Paul Lauffer
Music: Elmer Bernstein
U.S. Distributor: Fine Line Features
In English and French with subtitles

Frankie Starlight is ambitious, and, as is often true of movies that attempt too much, it's only partially successful. The film tries to follow multi-character stories in three different time frames, using a voiceover narrative to connect everything. Parts work; parts don't. Individual enjoyment of Frankie Starlight will largely depend upon which aspects of the film you choose to focus on. The wraparound story tells the tale of a modern-day Irish author, Frank Bois (Corban Walker), who is submitting his manuscript, Nightstalk (as in Nights Talk, not Night Stalk), to an editor. The book is immediately snapped up by Penguin Press for publication. An overnight success, Frank can't help but wonder whether his good fortune is due to the quality of his work or to his physical stature -- he's a dwarf. So he spends long hours in his hovel of a home, drinking wine and stewing in his loneliness. According to Frank, Nightstalk is an intermingling of astronomy with the stories of his and his mother's lives. Frankie Starlight's ambitious agenda is to transform the events of Nightstalk from text to screen images by means of lengthy flashbacks. These forays into the past start out with promise, as we first meet Bernadette (Anne Parillaud), Frank's mother, in Normandy, days before the Allied invasion. The setting soon changes to Ireland. Unfortunately, once the shores of France are behind Bernadette, the story starts glossing over key plot elements. Characterization becomes spotty as the film gropes for an anchor. Ultimately, Frankie Starlight is saved from incoherent oblivion by the birth of Bernadette's son. While Parrillaud's character continues to be paper-thin, the young Frank (Alan Pentony) quickly asserts himself. Soon, our attention -- not to mention our sympathy -- is vested exclusively in him. Bernadette becomes an almost unwanted distraction. The last third of the movie is by far the best. Taking place in the present, it brings together several loose threads from the past and weaves them into a touching love story. There's more emotional depth to Frank's relationship with his soul mate than is initially obvious, with director Michael Lindsay-Hogg handling this aspect of his film adeptly. The actors give heartfelt performances and the script avoids the trap of emotional artifice which ruins so many screen romances. Throughout the entire picture, stars are a key symbol. Frank eventually becomes an amateur astronomer, and many of the film's best sequences take place on a rooftop with thousands of points of light twinkling in the darkened canopy above. It is there that father-figure Jack Kelly (Gabriel Byrne) first teaches young Frank stories about the constellations, and there that the film draws to a close. More scenes like these would have been welcome. Connections, both made and missed, and the vagaries of life that lead us to react differently to the same people in diverse circumstances, form Frankie Starlight's thematic backbone. As with most of the film's other aspects, these are generally successful as they pertain to Frank, but rarely work with Bernadette. Parillaud's acting is too flat, and the sketchiness of the screenplay, which follows her life in broad strokes with few details, doesn't help. We're sure how and why Frank connects with others; the same can rarely be said about his mother. Frankie Starlight is more satisfying taken as a whole than when its individual parts are examined. The film is flawed, but there's still enough magic and genuine emotion to make for a pleasant movie-going experience. Affability is perhaps Frankie Starlight's strongest quality. No matter how many problems you uncover along the way, when the final credits roll, you're more likely to be smiling than frowning.

Frankie Starlight (2)

From the producer of My Left Foot (Noel Pearson) comes Frankie Starlight. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Brideshead Revisted , The Object of Beauty), and starring Anne Parillaud (La Femme Nikita), Matt Dillon and Gabriel Byrne, Frankie Starlight is a film about love, life, laughter and the occasional miracle. Set in post-World War II Ireland, this is the story of Frankie and his mother Bernadette (Parillaud) who, as an 18-year old girl, left France smuggled aboard an American troop ship in return for sexual favors. Put ashore in Ireland, the penniless Bernadette gives birth to a son, Frankie. Through the kindness of customs officer Jack Kelly (Byrne), Bernadette is able to raise Frankie in Dublin. Jack teaches Frankie about the stars, sparking in him a lifelong mystical obsession with the cosmos. As an adult, Frankie weaves his love for and knowledge of astronomy into a novel based on his recollections of his mother's relationships with Kelly and an ex-GI (Dillon). After his book is published and he moves from isolation to potential celebrity, we discover how his mother's colorful exploits shaped Frankie's life. Frankie Starlight is based on Chet Raymo's best-selling novel entitled "The Dork of Cork." Raymo is a lecturer in astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, but has spent every summer for the last 16 years in the village of Vantry, County Kerry. It is the combination of his knowledge of the stars and time spent in Ireland that inspired him to write this magical tale of love and the stars. In the summer of 1993 Raymo sent his new novel to Noel Pearson, the producer of My Left Foot and The Field. "It was one of these books that had shamrocks and stars and leprechauns all over the cover so I didn't read it for ages" says Pearson. "Then one day I just flicked open the cover and there was a sticker in it saying, 'this could be your right foot.' That evening I began reading it at 9 pm and put it down at 7 am the next morning." Pearson then gave the novel to Michael Lindsay-Hogg who read it, met with Pearson a couple of times, and decided to direct the film. The story, which spans over 30 years, is set in France, Ireland and the United States. Shot on location in Ireland, a French village was constructed on a farm in County Kildare, and the Normandy scenes were done on beaches on the east coast of Ireland. The central character, Frank Bois, is played by two newcomers to the screen, Alan Pentony as the younger Frankie, and Corban Walker as the older one. Walker, a well-known sculptor in Dublin, was cast after just one screen test. Pentony was more difficult to find. Pearson explains, "We had a hard time finding young Frankie as we had to match him to someone fifteen years later. Nuala Moiselle, the casting director, searched the length and breadth of Ireland and finally stumbled upon Alan in Drogheda. He had the exact qualities we were looking for- fresh, warm and appealing." Anne Parillaud plays Bernadette, Frankie's beautiful French mother. Parillaud read the script once and her agent called to ask if she could do it. She flew from an island off Brittany on a Tuesday, met with Pearson and Lindsay-Hogg on Wednesday, and the deal was done on Thursday morning. By coincidence, Chet Raymo had used a picture of Parillaud for inspiration with the character of Bernadette while writing the novel. The character Jack Kelly, played by Gabriel Byrne, is a customs officer who befriends Bernadette after she is put off a U.S. warship while trying to escape from France to America after the death of both her parents during World War II. Jack for a brief time is Bernadette's lover, but then becomes more of a father figure to both her and Frankie. It is Jack who introduces Frankie to his lifelong interest in the stars. Byrne's reaction to reading the script was "I thought it was very simply written. It was just one of the best things I had read in a long time." The final stage in casting was to find an actor to fill the part of Terry, Bernadette's American lover. The script was sent to Matt Dillon, who had previously worked with Michael Lindsay-Hogg in the theatre, and he agreed to play the part. Interestingly enough, Dillon notes that "I always thought that because of my Irish background I would come here to play an Irish man, not an American." Chet Raymo was joined by Ronan O'Leary to co-write the screenplay, and by September 1994 Frankie Starlight was in production. It was shot for six weeks in Ireland and one week in Texas.

Gothic

By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 01, 1987

Ever had one of those weekends when leeches sucked your face, a friend went into convulsions and the guy next door kept impaling his hand on a nail? Ken Russell's "Gothic," which contains all of these elements and more, is for those of you who just have to have a blood-soaked sardonic yuk now and then. Russell, the man who gave the phrase "too much" new meaning, outdoes himself. "Gothic" ostensibly is about the famous weekend at the Villa Diodati when Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Dr. Polidori and Claire Compton went into a literary huddle and came up with "Frankenstein" and "The Vampyre." True to demented form, Russell takes that idea to the limits: In his vision, Byron and friends were a sort of 19th-century Def Leppard  -- famous young brats with nothing but devilish free time on their hands. In "Gothic," the Shelleys and Compton visit Byron and Polidori to indulge in the ultimate sex-and-spookout slumber party. Byron (Gabriel Byrne), a dandyish, jaded rake, asks his guests to play in a kind of extended Ouija-board mind game, wherein everyone must dredge up their deepest, darkest fears (to provide mulch for the forthcoming horrors). Things get out of hand. Four-posters squeak with sex escapades. There's perpetual thunder and lightning. Bugs scramble out of people's mouths. Women stroke snakes. And there are enough rats in the basement to send the Pied Piper back to music school. It's a Hell of a weekend. Russell's poets romp through mud, slime and nightmare fantasies whilst dressed in the height of Romantic fashion. By movie's end, they will have purged their fears and accrued a staggering dry-cleaning bill. Byrne plays a grim-faced, perverse Byron with great presence. Julian ("Room With a View") Sands once again bares his boyish good looks, not to mention buttocks. As a sleazy, sexually repressed Polidori, Timothy Spall seems so revoltingly convincing it makes you concerned for his family. Beyond the carnalia (and if you're still with us), "Gothic" happens to be strikingly shot, the special effects inspired, albeit gruesome. Although he slops his signature blood 'n' cleavage across the screen, Russell makes it slick, with dynamic cutting, vivid lighting and framing. Who knows, you might spot a little humor in this hyperbolic lunacy. On the other hand, after a cinematic orgy like this, you might long for 15 minutes with an evangelist.

HELLO AGAIN (1)

By Roger Ebert

I don't know about you, but I think that coming back from the dead should be a really big deal. And by making it into a little deal, the occasion for safe and predictable little laughs, "Hello Again" blows a great comic opportunity.

Meditate for a moment on the possibilities in the modern-day resurrection of the klutzy wife of a social-climbing plastic surgeon. Imagine what the supermarket tabloids would say, not to mention Jim and Tammy Bakker, not to mention the pope, not to mention Johnny Carson. Imagine what a person with a healthy sense of humor could do with a situation like that. Just for openers, you could reveal what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

There are the makings of a great comedy here, but you will not find more than scattered hints of it in "Hello Again," a movie that fails to pay off on so many opportunities that the whole film feels like an anticlimax. The story stars Shelley Long as the sweet but clumsy wife of Corbin Bernsen, the plastic surgeon. One day she chokes to death and is buried and mourned and then basically forgotten by all but her sister and her son.

The sister (Judith Ivey) runs the local occult bookstore, and in a quaint volume of forgotten lore she discovers a black magical incantation that can raise the dead. There are two catches: The ceremony must be performed exactly one year after the person has died, and the newly resurrected person must find true love within 30 days or die again. By the light of a circle of scented candles, Ivey reads from the old book, and Long materializes out of a vapor and perches on a tombstone.

The first place she visits after her resurrection is her former home, where Bernsen is already remarried to Sela Ward, her oldest friend. By blowing this scene, the director, Frank Perry, gives warning that he is going to blow many more scenes, and he does. The mistake is to go straight for the sit-com dialogue and the funny one-liners, instead of really dealing with the question of how people would respond to the reappearance of a dead person. Perhaps the challenge requires more gallows humor than this movie is prepared to permit.

It's hard to say whether the actors are to blame for the movie's low energy and slow pacing. There are scenes (notably one where Long confronts Bernsen on the roof of his hospital) that are so sloppily constructed that you wonder if they used the wrong takes. There are other scenes, such as the ludicrous final confrontation between Long and her archrival Ward, that Harriett Beecher Stowe would have found lacking in subtlety.

"Hello Again" is only truly alive when Judith Ivey and Austin Pendleton are on the screen. She plays a certified wacko who delivers her incantations with true, abandoned, conviction. He has a smaller role as a billionaire who helps out Long and falls instantly in love with Ivey. It is some kind of symptom of this movie's malaise that when Ivey and Pendleton lock eyes for the first time, it gets a bigger laugh than anything Long and Bernsen say to one another.

 

Hello Again (2)

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 09, 1987

Not too long ago, in her execrable movie "The Money Pit," Shelley Long spent most of her time with her house caving in on her head. Watching her new movie, "Hello Again," all I could think of was, "Where is that house when you need it?" In her early days on "Cheers," Shelley Long was like a cactus with brains; she was all prickly spikes and soliloquies. Now she has become the actress most likely to draw fire from passing motorists. In "Hello Again," she plays Lucy, a housewife married to a social-climbing plastic surgeon named Jason (Corbin Bernsen). You only need to watch Lucy walk a length of carpet to know everything important about her -- carpet being one of the many things in life that she has trouble with. Lucy is, as they say, accident-prone, which is another way of saying that all things edible spring to her blouse with alarming frequency. Either that or she chokes on them and dies, which is what happens when she nibbles on a South Korean chicken ball at her sister's. The movie, which was directed by Frank Perry and written by Susan Isaacs -- the team that worked together on "Compromising Positions" -- is like a sorry updating of "My Favorite Wife." One year after her death, Lucy is brought back from the dead by her sister (Judith Ivey), an occultist who put on her gypsy regalia to attend a Grateful Dead concert in '67 and hasn't taken it off since. Naturally, many things have changed, and the movie follows Lucy's progress as she adjusts to her new circumstances, including her husband's marriage to her best friend (Sela Ward), her fledgling love affair with the emergency-room doctor (Gabriel Byrne) who tried to save her life, and, once the story gets out, her new-found celebrity. All of this is presented with a broad-stroked, sitcom raucousness that's pretty tough to stomach. The movie is a Disney production, and it has that special brand of Tony brazenness -- the new Disney touch -- that a lot of its recent films have had. (If things keep up like this, Tinkerbell will have to exchange her wand for a sledgehammer.) There are some smart lines, but the scenes have no shape, and more often than not they're resolved by having Lucy knock something over. Somebody once said -- I think it was Plato -- that comedy isn't pretty, and "Hello Again" is absolute proof of that.

Into the West (1)

By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 17, 1993

To 12-year-old Tito and his 8-year-old brother Ossie, the white horse called Tir na nOg is not of this world. The beautiful steed, given to them by their gypsy grandfather, is the finest, most beautiful thing in their lives. So when Tir na nOg (whose Celtic name means The Land of Eternal Youth) is apprehended by a police officer with black-market intentions, it's time for the Dublin lads to rescue their beloved and kindred spirit. "Into the West," which stars Gabriel Byrne as the boys' down-and-depressed father, and Ellen Barkin (as a gypsy who helps Byrne pursue his on-the-lam children), is a charming children's crusade -- a rewarding journey for all ages. Scriptwriter Jim ("My Left Foot") Sheridan and director Mike Newell (who did "Enchanted April") follow the boys' quixotic mission with an acute eye for the drab depression of Dublin's low-income apartment towers, the beautiful countryside beyond it and the hermetic, lore-driven world of the "travelers," a Celtic-originated gypsy tribe. Stuck in a rat-infested flat, Tito and Ossie are forced to abide the drunken, grieving gloom of their recently widowed father, Papa Riley (Byrne). To the boys, the arrival of Tir na nOg is the promise of better things. They listen, enrapt, as their grandfather (David Kelly) recounts the story of the Land of Eternal Youth, the mythical place under the sea where their horse comes from. But to their besotted father, who has rejected his traveler roots, Tir na nOg is just another maintenance problem. When an unscrupulous horse breeder (John Kavanagh) and a conspiring police chief take the horse away, Papa Riley only half-heartedly attempts to retrieve him. Appalled, the boys take matters into their own hands. The result is a sort of Celtic junior version of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," as Tito and Ossie abscond with the horse, hide him under bridges and ride into the sunset, with the authorities -- and their contrite dad -- hot on their heels. They're headed for the west coast, where they intend to help Tir na nOg return to his mythic home under the sea. Spiritually rejuvenated by a reunion with the travelers, Papa Reilly realizes that -- should he find his children -- it's imperative to help them. Despite its twinkle eyed intentions, "Into the West" avoids the cloying, Disneyesque route. This is not a slapstick chase movie full of precious moments between a boy and his horse. The boys' dirty-faced ordeal is a very real, dangerous one, and their naive faith is the only defense against oppressive surroundings. Most of the emotional impact comes from the mutual presence of child actors Ciaran (pronounced "Keeran") Fitzgerald as Ossie, and Ruaidhri ("Rory") Conroy as Tito. With their pluckiness and perky brogue, they make two of the most memorable scalawags to scuffle across the screen in a long time. You can hear their chirrupy voices long after the movie is over.

INTO THE WEST (2)

By Roger Ebert

       If I were to tell you that "Into the West" was about two boys
  and their magical white horse, you would of course think it was a
  children's film. But it is more than that, although children will
  enjoy it. The movie is set in a world a little too gritty for
  innocent animal tales. It concerns two young gypsy boys growing up in
  the high-rise slums of Dublin, with their father, who loves them but
  has grown distant and drunken since their mother died.
           One day their grandfather, who still travels the roads in
  the ancient way in his horse-drawn gypsy caravan, gives them the gift
  of a horse. The horse is named Tir na nOg, which means "Land of
  Eternal Youth," the grandfather explains, although he may be making
  it up as he goes along. Where are two city boys to keep a horse? In
  their apartment? Of course! But of course the neighbors complain, and
  the police are called, and one thing leads to another.
           Then the horse is stolen by a rich man, who obtains spurious
  papers for it. The boys see it on television, go to where it is
  racing, and ride off with it. The rich man offers a $10,000 reward,
  and all of Ireland follows the story as the two boys and their horse
  outwit the combined efforts of the rich and powerful.
           The subtext of the movie involves the gypsy culture in
  modern Ireland. Known also as tinkers and travelers, the gypsies are
  often discriminated against, and charged with any crimes that take
  place even vaguely near to them. For their grandfather (David Kelly),
  the traveling life is still rich and satisfying, but for their father
  (Gabriel Byrne), it has been replaced by a form of imprisonment in a
  high-rise ghetto. The father enlists two friends (Ellen Barkin and
  Colm Meaney), who remind him of the ancient strengths of the
  travelers, and what is regained is not only a horse, but a family and
  a tradition.
           "Into the West" is one of many interesting films to come
  from Ireland recently: Remember, for example, "My Left Foot," "Hear
  My Song," "The Miracle," "The Commitments" and "The Crying Game." It
  was written by Jim Sheridan, who wrote and directed "My Left Foot,"
  and is directed by Mike Newell, who made "Dance with a Stranger" and
  "Enchanted April." Sheridan and Newell are not interested in simply
  shaping the material into an easy commercial form. They're interested
  in the relationships beneath the surface, and in the way the father
  is redeemed through the adventure.
           And yet there is a lot of adventure, as the magnificent
  horse seems almost able to read the boys' minds, and they think fast,
  too, the older one (Ciaran Fitzgerald) guiding his younger brother
  (Rory Conroy) as they avoid the main roads, ford streams to throw off
  the bloodhounds, and at one point even escape certain capture by
  taking a detour through the house of some strangers.
           Texture is everything in a movie like this. The bare story
  itself could be simplistic and silly: Cops chasing a couple of kids
  on a horse. But when relationships are involved, and social
  realities, and a certain level of magical realism, then the story
  grows and deepens until it really involves us. Kids will probably
  love this movie, but adults will get a lot more out of it.

JULIA AND JULIA  (Giulia e Giulia) (1)

By Roger Ebert

"Julia and Julia" tells one of those nightmare stories, like "The Trial," where the hero is condemned to live in a world in which absolutely nothing can be counted on. The story unfolds as a series of surprises, and since even the first surprise is crucial to the plot, I frankly don't see any way to review the film without spoiling some of the effect. I advise you not to read any further if you plan to be surprised by the film.

The story begins on the wedding day of its heroine, Julia, who is played by Kathleen Turner as a sweet and rather moony young woman not at all like the smart, aggressive characters she usually creates. It is a beautiful day in Italy, in a sunlit garden where even the trees seem to bow in happiness, but a few hours later Julia and her new husband (Gabriel Byrne) are involved in a road accident, and Byrne is killed.

Turner, an American, decides to stay in Italy. She moves into a small apartment across the street from the large flat that was to be her home. Time passes. One day something strange happens, which the movie shows but does not explain. She passes through some kind of dimension into a different time scheme, a parallel path in which things turned out differently and her husband did not die, and they have a small boy.

The sequence in which she discovers this is wonderful. She goes to her little flat, which is occupied by a strange woman who insists she has always lived there. She sees lights in the large flat across the street, which she had always refused to sell. Trembling, she climbs the stairs to find Byrne at home with their son and everyone treating her as if she had been with them all along and none of her tragic memories had ever taken place.

She is, of course, shattered. She does not know how this could have happened, and there is no one she can discuss it with, without appearing insane (although I kept wishing she wouldn't internalize everything). She is pathetically grateful to have her happiness back until one moment, completely without warning, she is plunged back into her other, tragic lifetime. Then she is flipped back to happiness again, sort of like a Ping-Pong ball of fate, and there is the complication of a lover (played by Sting), that she apparently has taken in her "happy" lifetime. (The rule at the center of these paradoxes is that she always remembers all of the sad lifetime, but only remembers those parts of the happy one that we actually see her experiencing.)

What's going on here? Don't ask me - and don't ask the movie, either. Even the simplest explanation, of parallel time tracks, is one I've borrowed out of old science-fiction novels. "Julia and Julia" wisely declines to offer any explanation at all, preferring to stay completely within Julia's nightmares as she experiences them.

The construction of the story is ingenious and perverse and has a kind of inner logic of its own. And if there is a flaw, it's that no woman could endure this kind of round trip more than once, if that much, before being emotionally shattered. I was reminded of Turner's work in "Peggy Sue Got Married," in which she traveled back in time to her own adolescence; think how much more disturbing it would be to travel sideways into the happiness you thought you'd lost.

This is the kind of movie that proves unbearably frustrating to some people, who demand explanations and resent obscurity. I have seen so many movies recently in which absolutely everything could be predicted that I found "Julia and Julia" perversely entertaining.

Julia and Julia (2)

By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
February 05, 1988

Kathleen Turner can't resist those other dimensions. Now she's gone and fallen into another one in the peculiar Italian-made "Julia and Julia" -- in which the former Peggy Sue gets married again, this time to a debonair architect from Trieste. Then before you can say Rod Serling, she's time-tripping (or slipping her gears) in the Zoni di Twilightoni. Here, Rod's spirit meets Italian neorealism as, for reasons beyond our comprehension, the heroine wobbles between two worlds. In the first, Julia is a widowed travel agent, still grieving for her husband Paolo (Gabriel Byrne), who was killed in a car crash during their honeymoon. "I am happy. I want to have a baby," she had just said. Six years later, she drives through a tunnel of fog to a new dimension where her husband is alive and they have a 6-year-old son. Julia is ecstatic, though she has a difficult time chatting with best friends she has never met. Controlling the portal between the two planes is a Jekyll-and-Hyde photographer, Daniel, played enigmatically by Sting. As the plot progresses, Julia shuttles willy-nilly between Door Number One and Door Number Two. One minute she's booking cruises, the next she's cheating on her husband -- an affair her "other self" had kindled -- with Daniel. When she tries to end it, the furious photographer rips off her underpants and rapes her behind a pillar in a busy piazza. Naturally, she just melts. Julia attempts to save her marriage in the other reality, and things take a nasty Gothic turn. Apparently Turner did some pasta-packing -- she's all plumped up for a part that calls for topless romping with both Byrne (wasted as droopy Paolo) and Sting. The unstable Julia must have seemed like a juicy opportunity for Turner, who likes to test herself with diverse roles -- like the prostitute in "Crimes of Passion" or the hit woman in "Prizzi's Honor." But Julia is no snake-pit psycho from the outer limits. She's a portly matron who gets a little mixed up in a beautiful, nicely photographed setting. Backed by an Italian television network, the feature is the first ever shot in "high-definition video," which means riper color and enlarged pores. Director Peter Del Monte and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, both students of Roberto Rossellini, create an authentic ambiance with marble busts and lots of plaster dust. We don't get goose bumps, we feel as if we have to sneeze and can't.

The Keep

Here we suffer from the "why make movies out of books if we are going to make them bad" syndrome that Rees covers so eloquently in his review of "Phantoms". I loved the novel as it was creepy and had a lot of depth. The movie lacks both. I thought that this was a sure thing as it is directed by Michael Mann ("Heat", "Manhunter") and stars Scott Glenn ("Backdraft"), Jurgen Prochnow ("Das Boot"), Gabriel Byrne ("The Usual Suspects"), Ian Mc Kellen, and Robert Prosky. Boy, was I sadly mistaken. A one sentence plot summary is that the Nazis are ordered to take control of a keep and when men begin to die, they bring in a Jewish professor to try and figure out why. The acting is way below what is expected from these actors and I was very disillusioned when I found out that Michael Mann both wrote and directed this. I was expecting so much more... read the book instead.

LITTLE WOMEN (1)

By Roger Ebert

   The very title summons up preconceptions of treacle do-gooders in a
  smarmy children's story, and some of the early shots in "Little
  Women" do little to discourage them: In one of the first frames, the
  four little women and their mother manage to arrange their heads
  within the frame with all of the spontaneity of a Kodak ad.
        But this is movie is not smarmy, not do Gooding, and only a
  little treacle; before long I was beginning to remember, from many
  years ago, that Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was a really good
  novel - one that I read with great attention.
      Of course, I was 11 or 12 then, but the novel seems to have grown
  up in the meantime - or maybe director Gillian Armstrong finds the
  serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a "family"
  formula. "Little Women" may be marketed for children and teenagers,
  but my hunch is it will be best appreciated by their parents. It's a
  film about how all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we're
  young, and how, through a series of choices, we narrow our destiny.
           The story is set in Concord, Mass., and begins in 1862, in a
  winter when all news is dominated by the Civil War. The March family
  is on its own; their father has gone off to war. Times are hard,
  although it's hard not to smile when we find out how hard: "Firewood
  and lamp oil were scarce," we hear, while seeing the Marches living
  in what passes for poverty: a three-story colonial, decorated for a
  Currier and Ives print, with the cheerful family cook in the kitchen
  and the Marches sitting around the fire, knitting sweaters and
  rolling bandages.
        The movie doesn't go the usual route of supplying broad,
  obvious "establishing" scenes for each of the girls; instead, we
  gradually get to know them, we sense their personalities, and we see
  how they relate to one another. The most forcible personality in the
  family is the tomboy daughter Jo, played in a strong and sunny
  performance by Winona Ryder. She wants to be a writer, and stages
  family theatricals in which everyone - even the long-suffering cat -
  is expected to play a role.
           The others include wise Meg (Trini Alvarado) as the oldest;
  winsome Amy (Kirsten Dunst) as the youngest, and Beth, poor little
  Beth (Claire Danes), as the sickly one who survives a medical crisis
  but is much weakened ("Fetch some vinegar water and rags! We'll draw
  the fever down from her head!").  There isn't a lot of overt action
  in their lives, but then that's typical of the 19th century novel
  about women, which essentially shows them sitting endlessly in
  parlors, holding deep conversations about their hopes, their beliefs,
  their dreams and, mostly, their marriage destinies.
        The March girls have many other interests (their mother, played
  by Susan Sarandon, is what passed 130 years ago for a feminist), but
  young men and eligible bachelors rank high on the list. Their young
  neighbor is Laurie (Christian Bale), a playmate who is allowed to
  join their amateur theatricals as an honorary brother, and who
  eventually falls in love with Jo. Then there's Laurie's tutor, the
  pleasant Mr. Brooke (Eric Stoltz), who is much taken with Meg, but is
  dismissed by Jo as "dull as powder."
           Jo, who moves to New York and starts to write lurid
  Victorian melodramas with titles like The Sinner's Corpse, falls
  under the eye of a European scholar, Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne),
  who takes her seriously enough to criticize her work. He knows she
  can do better - why, she could write a novel named Little Women if
  she put half a mind to it. "I'm hopelessly flawed," Jo sighs.
        But she is not. And late in the film, when she tells Friedrich
  that, yes, it's all right for him to love her, Ryder's face lights up
  with a smile so joyful it illuminates the theater.
           "Little Women" grew on me. At first, I was grumpy, thinking
  it was going to be too sweet and devout. Gradually, I saw that
  Gillian Armstrong (whose credits include "My Brilliant Career" and
  "High Tide") was taking it seriously. And then I began to appreciate
  the ensemble acting, with the five actresses creating the warmth and
  familiarity of a real family.
           The buried issues in the story are quite modern: How must a
  woman negotiate the right path between society's notions of marriage
  and household, and her own dreams of doing something really special,
  all on her own?
        One day, their mother tells them: "If you feel your value lies
  only in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find
  yourself believing that's all you really are. Time erodes all such
  beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your
  mind." Quite so.

Little Women (2)

By Monica Sullivan

The title alone suggests demureness and docility, two characteristics which were absolutely antithetical to its author, Louisa May Alcott, a strong woman of the nineteenth century who was determined to make her living, not as a servant or as a seamstress, but as a writer. It has been reported that the author found "Little Women" a bore to write and that the values in the book belong to her educator father and not to herself, but she did achieve her dream of making her living as a writer. In the latest version of "Little Women", dedicated to the memory of Polly Klaas, Winona Ryder makes a delightful Jo March for 90's audiences & she is well supported by Gabriel Byrne in one of his best performances as Professor Bhaer. Meg, Beth and Amy are effectively played by Trini Alvarado, Claire Danes and Samantha Mathis, although Kirsten Dunst, so good as Claudia in "Interview With The Vampire", is the most adorable of the bunch as twelve-year-old Amy March. (Alas, a great scene in which she is abused by a schoolmaster apparently wound up on the cutting room floor, although it made the cut in precious movies and is referred to here. Maybe we'll get to see it in the restored video release. This is one 110 minute movie I wouldn't have minded being 10 minutes longer.) Christain Bale is the best Laurie ever cast in the role and it's a treat to see Mary Wickes, now 82, still slugging out those lines as Aunt March 53 years after her feisty debut in "The Man Who Came To Dinner". As for the rest of the characters, well, here is where you miss the Oscar-winning 1933 screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heernan. Robin Swicord's new script has some wonderful stuff in it and recreates favourite sequences from the original novel unrecorded on film before. But every so often, especially in the case of Susan Sarandon's character as Marmee, it slips into revisionist dialogue clearly calculated for late twentieth century ears. Certainly Louisa May Alcott's family was a progressive family, but for its era, not our own. There is plenty of material in her book that expresses nineteenth century feminism in far more convincing terms than Swicord's anachronistic departures. Mr. March, a key figure in the book and previous versions, is reduced to a walk-on here, Eric Stoltz is wasted as Meg's love John Brooke and Mr. Laurence, an extremely critical character, is sketchily developed and badly cast. (The multifaceted Sir Alec Guiness would have been a better choice than an iceberg like John Neville.) Gillian Armstrong's obvious affection for the material gives a special glow to the girls' homemade theatrical entertainments and their romps in the snow with Laurie. After seeing her altogether worthy successor to George Cukor's "Little Women", you may want to check out the 1933 movie on video.

Mad Dog Time (Trigger Happy) (1)

In Vic's world, power is the name of the game, and the rules of the game change with every move. To win, you need brains, style and a fast trigger finger. In Vic's world, you live life to the fullest...because you never know when your number's up.
A sleek black comedy, MAD DOG TIME features an all-star cast, including (in alphabetical order) Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines and Diane Lane. Inspired by the spirit and the cool of the infamous "Rat Pack," the film is written and directed by Larry Bishop, whose father, comedian Joey Bishop, was a member of "The Clan." 
Boss of bosses, Vic (RICHARD DREYFUSS), is crazy--certifiably--and has been locked up in a mental ward for a spell. In his absence, friends, enemies and cronies have been jockeying for power and position. But now comes the news that they've all been dreading: Vic is getting out.
Returning to find his empire in chaos, Vic seems to want simply to "get the balance back." He knows it's gonna be murder to set things right...he's just not sure whose.   
Mickey Holliday (JEFF GOLDBLUM) has the most reason to worry, but you'd never know it. The image of panache, Mickey is Vic's trigger man, the fastest gun in a new-style showdown that is more civilized than those of the Old West, but just as deadly. His only weakness is women, and it just may be the death of him because he's been two-timing a pair of very dangerous dames: Vic's girlfriend Grace (DIANE LANE) and her murderous-when-crossed sister Rita (ELLEN BARKIN). 
Then there's Ben London (GABRIEL BYRNE), Vic's right-hand man, who appears to have been cleaning things up in preparation for Vic's homecoming--executing a few pink slips, so to speak. He actually has plenty to worry about, but his mouth is running ahead of his brain and he hasn't quite caught on to that yet. Ben wants things his way for a change and thinks the time has come for him to get his due. Vic is just the man to give it to him.   
Smelling weakness, rival gangster Jake Parker (KYLE MacLACHLAN) may be the only one truly glad to see Vic get out and has the perfect homecoming gift for him: a formal straightjacket. The way Jake figures it, Vic will kill Mick and Ben will kill Vic, or Mick will kill Vic and Ben will kill Mick...or whatever. Either way, Jake comes out on top. Just in case though, he's brought in a mysterious new triggerman (CHRISTOPHER JONES), rumored to be faster than Mick, deadlier than Vic and his name is Nick, which should make him fit right in. But what Jake doesn't know about Nick just might kill him.
What Jake does know is that Mickey and Vic may be too smart to play along with his little game. To ensure that things are set in motion, he has his new triggerman kill Mickey's friend and manager Jules Flamingo (GREGORY HINES).
The body count rises as debts are paid and bets are covered. It soon becomes apparent that the only thing crazy about Vic is underestimating him.
United Artists Pictures presents a Dreyfuss/James Production, in association with Skylight Films, of a Larry Bishop Film, MAD DOG TIME, starring in alphabetical order Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum and Diane Lane. The film also stars Larry Bishop, Gregory Hines, Kyle MacLachlan and Burt Reynolds, with cameo appearances by Rob Reiner, Richard Pryor, Paul Anka, Billy Idol, Angie Everhart, Christopher Jones, Henry Silva and Joey Bishop. MAD DOG TIME was written and directed by Larry Bishop and produced by Judith Rutherford James, with Stephan Manpearl and Leonard Shapiro executive producing.

MAD DOG TIME (TRIGGER HAPPY) (2)***
Starring Jeff Goldblum, Richard Dreyfuss, Gabriel Byrne, Ellen Barkin and Larry Bishop. Directed and written by Larry Bishop. Produced by Judith Rutherford James. A UA release. Comedy. Rated R for violence, language and sexuality. Running time: 93 min.
   The actor credit scroll for this UA pickup could really have been prefaced "in order of disappearance." Key characters are killed off so fast in "Mad Dog Time" that an audience can be forgiven for wondering who (if anyone) is going to be left onscreen by movie's end. Offbeat humor spliced with full-face shots and slow motion coupled with a high-caliber cast make Larry Bishop's writing/directing debut worthy of the ticket price. As an added bonus, Bishop's friends come to his aid by way of cameos; among those momentary and varied players are Richard Pryor, Rob Reiner and Paul Anka. The film also pays homage to the original Rat Pack (of which Bishop's father, Joey Bishop, was a member) by including in its jazzy soundtrack tunes from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
   After a lengthy stay at a mental hospital, mobster Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) is being released. In his absence, "Brass Balls" London (Gabriel Byrne) has taken over control of the operation. Now, though, it's time for Vic not only to reconcile differences with his wife (Ellen Barkin) but to act like a mad dog and reclaim control of his empire. Vic's rivals can walk, hop or crawl away peacefully, but challenging him could prove to be fatal.
  Bishop succeeds in creating a timeless period movie; the audience is transported to a place and time that might be called Vic's World. There are resemblances to the prohibition era, but the accents are those of contemporary technology. Patrons might not fully understand what they just watched--"Mad Dog Time" straddles the borderlines of the art-house and mainstream--but most should agree it's enjoyable. Holding the enterprise together are the suspense, tension and cunning humor supplied by Vic's right-hand man, Mickey Holliday (Jeff Goldblum). Goldblum fans are sure to have a fun time watching their favorite quirky actor turn into a suave--and forehead-shooting--playboy. -Dwayne E. Leslie

The Man in the Iron Mask (1)

All things being equal, "The Man in the Iron Mask" (* 1/2 stars out of four) makes Mel Gibson look like a great director. Gibson didn't direct this version of Alexandre Dumas' novel. It's directed by Randall Wallace who wrote the screenplays for this film and Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning "Braveheart." The latter, despite flaws, was engaging with exciting and poignant scenes. The fourth movie version of Dumas' classic has none of panache of earlier Musketeer films and Wallace, as a director, can only create a swashbuckling story that just simmers. Leonardo DiCaprio, the hottest actor around these days, has the plumb role of twins. One is King Louis XIV, a young and terrible king who seemingly only uses the throne as a great way to pick up ladies in waiting. Find one with a boyfriend? No problem, send him to the front and pounce on the bereaved (Judith Godreche). Unfortunately, the dead boy's father is Athos (John Malkovich), the fieriest of the original Three Musketeers. Long retired, Athos vows to do away with his wicked king. Former Musketeer Aramis (Jeremy Irons) has a card up his sleeve to overthrow the king and Porthos (Gerard Depardieu) goes along, hoping for a fight to steel his aging blood. The answer is Phillippe (DiCaprio, again), Louis' twin brother who knows nothing of his lineage. He has been locked away for 6 years and encased in metal mask. The three musketeers have a top opponent if they want to succeeded in their palm to swap brothers in a bloodless revolution: their old student D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne) who is now the revered leader of the king's guard. There's wonderful source material that's simply fumbled away. There's hardly a flash of energy or verve and the dramatics hardly build. Instead of interweaving thrills and humor, "The Man in the Iron Mask" has only one emotion per scene: here's the exposition, here's the swordplay, here's comic relief. The potential dramatics in the plight of the divided D'Artagnan are fumbled by a good case of foreshadowing. The movie even fails to convey any of the terror of wearing the mask. The film is a good study of the worst and best of DiCaprio's acting. As the brutish Louis, he's simply too overzealous reaching yelling stage far too quickly. However as the heartfelt Phillippe, DiCaprio handles a character very similar to the good soul Jack Dawson in Titanic, but never imitates. There's a lot of range to this actor. If the film has any worth, it's how great everyone looks in their 17th Century garb. Irons is smashing revealing a machismo that is usually hidden in his film roles. Although he never reaches the panache of his turn as Cyrano, Depardieu is born to play a Musketeer. The film's only emotional weight is carried in the searing eyes of John Malkovich. Wallace's script for "Braveheart" lacked surprise and dynamite prose but had far more passion. A claimed descendent of freedom fighter William Wallace, Randall Wallace poured more into the script. As a director, Wallace has far less potential and passion. At the least, a film like this needs the zip of Kevin Reynolds action sequences in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" to resonate at all. Any comparison to the glorious "Three Musketeers" films of the 70's stops after mentioning the impressive cast. Despise the costly production, everything looks as if it's from a stage play instead of the real thing. Special effects and backdrops are embarrassingly amateurish at times. With DiCaprio's marquee name, the movie will certainly make a boat load of cash and Wallace will direct bigger films. He hopefully will learn it's okay to remake tried and true tales, but he'll have to show us something different than just new faces. The audience is looking for some passion on film.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (2)

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Gabriel Byrne, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gérard Depardieu, Anne Parillaud, Judith Godrèche, Peter Sarsgaard. Written and directed by Randall Wallace. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and some sensuality/nudity.

Leonardo DiCaprio cements his position as one of young Hollywood’s top draws as the title character in "The Man in the Iron Mask". Based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas père and set in the 17th century, the film tells the story of a king whose tyrannical disposition prompts those in his service to replace him with a almost-unknown twin brother. This sort of swashbuckling costume drama has been missing from theaters for too long. It returns now with gusto. With a new generation of musketeers defending the king of France (Leonardo DiCaprio), the glory days of Aramis (Jeremy Irons), Athos (John Malkovich), Porthos (Gérard Depardieu), and D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne) are but a revered memory. Aramis has become a priest and is an advisor to the king while Athos is content to be the proud father of a son (Peter Sarsgaard) who wants to follow in his footsteps. Porthos, although prone to bouts of life-questioning depression, is still as randy as ever, while D'Artagnan is now captain of the musketeers. These old friends don’t get together as much as they did in the past, but each knows he can depend on the others when a mission of importance comes his way. One such mission is self-imposed when the king’s cavalier disregard for his people results in rioting in Paris. Porthos joins Aramis unquestioningly in his plan to replace the king, but Athos buys into it because the king has recently wronged him. D'Artagnan, who believes his duty to the king is absolute, is alone in refusing to participate. Nevertheless, the plan is executed without his direct knowledge. This leads to a crisis of conscience when he finds himself pitted against the three musketeers of renown by the order of the king. With the inestimable acting talents of its first- rate cast and a script that allows for action, emotion, and humor in proper proportion, "The Man in the Iron Mask" is a far cry from the smarmy "Three Musketeers" movie released a few years ago by Disney. Irons, Byrne and Malkovich are at the top of their form in this engrossing period piece, but Depardieu deserves special mention for his particularly vivacious performance. Ironically, it is heartthrob DiCaprio who fares the worst among the leads, but not by any fault of his own. As the evil king and his saintly brother, he has been bound by the largely two-dimensional nature of both characters. To his credit, DiCaprio is able to infuse each with a degree of potency not possible by many of his peers. Despite its title, this film is really about the friendship of the four musketeers and their devotion to the ideal of justice. If you ignore the unfitting voice-over at the conclusion, what remains is a rousing adventure that embraces best aspects of humanity. If you have been waiting for the next great reason to part with your money at the box office, "The Man in the Iron Mask" will end your wait with a flourish.

MILLER'S CROSSING (1)

By Roger Ebert

The room. I keep thinking about the room. The office from which Leo pulls the strings that control the city. Leo, played by Albert Finney, is a large, strong man in late middle age, and he lacks confidence in only one area. He is not sure he can count on the love of Verna, the young dame he's fallen for. That causes him to hesitate when he knows that Verna's brother, Bernie, should be rubbed out. He doesn't want to lose Verna. And his hesitation brings the city's whole criminal framework crashing down in blood and violence.

But I think about the room. What a wonderful room. All steeped in dark shadows, with expensive antique oak furniture and leather chairs and brass fittings and vast spaces of flooring between the yellow pools of light. I would like to work in this room. A man could get something done in this room. And yet the room is a key to why "Miller's Crossing" is not quite as successful as it should be - why it seems like a movie that is constantly aware of itself, instead of a movie that gets on with business.

I do not really think that Leo would have such an office. I believe it is the kind of office that would be created by a good interior designer with contacts in England, and supplied to a rich lawyer. I am not sure a rackets boss in a big American city in 1929 would occupy such a space, even though it does set him off as a sinister presence among the shadows.

I am also not sure that the other characters in this movie would inhabit quite the same clothing, accents, haircuts and dwellings as we see them in. This doesn't look like a gangster movie, it looks like a commercial intended to look like a gangster movie. Everything is too designed. That goes for the plot and the dialogue, too. The dialogue is well-written, but it is indeed written. We admire the prose rather than the message. People make threats, and we think about how elegantly the threats are worded.

"Miller's Crossing" comes from two traditions that sometimes overlap, the gangster movie of the 1930s and the film noir of the 1940s. It finds its characters in the first and its visual style in the second, but the visuals lack a certain stylish tackiness that film noir sometimes had. They're in good taste. The plot is as simple as an old gangster movie, but it takes us a long time to figure that out, because the first half hour of the film involves the characters in complicated dialogue where they talk about a lot of people we haven't met, and refer to a lot of possibilities we don't understand. It's the kind of movie you have to figure out in hindsight.

Don't get me wrong. There is a lot here to admire. Albert Finney is especially good as Leo, the crime boss, and Jon Polito is wonderful as Johnny Caspar, his rival, who keeps talking about "business ethics." One of the most interesting characters in the movie is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a two-timing bookie who pleads for his life in a monologue that he somehow keeps afloat long past any plausible dramatic length.
The pleasures of the film are largely technical. It is likely to be most appreciated by movie lovers who will enjoy its resonance with films of the past. What it doesn't have is a narrative magnet to pull us through - a story line that makes us really care what happens, aside from the elegant but mechanical manipulations of the plot. The one human moment comes when Leo finds out Verna really can't be trusted. Even then, I was thinking about "Farewell, My Lovely," where a big mug named Moose finds out the same thing about a dame named Velma.

Miller’s Crossing (2)

By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
October 05, 1990

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are children of movie technique. In their first two movies, "Blood Simple" and "Raising Arizona," they executed stylistic leaps and somersaults like young circus tumblers, with nary a thought for falling flat on their faces. There was a childlike, cine-kid exhilaration to it. Now, in "Miller's Crossing," producer/writer Ethan and director/writer Joel have come of inevitable age. Their routine's become more than just twists and turns. They've taken their show on the road and made a production out of it, with an intricately organized sideshow of themes, exposition, characters and fast talking. Things are getting involved and you'd be well advised to pin your ears back. The movie starts without warning and at expositional speed. Greasy crook John Polito and henchman J. E. Freeman have come to the lair of crime boss Albert Finney and his lieutenant Gabriel Byrne to make a request. Polito wants to bump off weaselly John Turturro, who's messing with Polito's boxing-fight scams. It's a matter, Polito insists, of "ethics." However, Turturro happens to be the brother of Marcia Gay Harden, who's fiercely protective of her sibling and with whom Finney happens to be in love. So Finney refuses the request. There's more: Byrne is having a secret affair with Harden, unbeknownst to his boss Finney. With me so far? One more time: Harden loves brother Turturro, Finney's got to protect Turturro, Byrne loves Harden, Finney doesn't know about Byrne . . . Aah, skip it. Suffice it to say, Polito and Freeman (both of them truly memorable hoods) aren't going to like this; the lovers' rivalry between Finney and Byrne will heat up; and Harden will be torn between them. We're talking gang war, machine-gunning, clandestine bedroom meetings, bloody executions and funny one liners. "So you want to kill him?" Finney asks Polito and Freeman in that opening scene. "For starters," answers Freeman. Whatever the plot details, they're grist for the brothers' stylistic mill, the Coen signature. In one scene, a character faces almost certain gangster execution in the woods. He begs pathetically, his face wet with tears, imploring the gunman, "Look into your heart." As the gunman deliberates over his fate, the camera stays with this scene, with an excruciating originality. In another scene of cartoonish hyperbole, Finney, evading an assassination attempt, scurries out of his bedroom window, then riddles a hood with gunfire. The hood, in a final dance of death, riddles the chandelier and ceiling above him. The shooting seems to last forever. And meanwhile, "Danny Boy" blares sweetly from Finney's Victrola. "Crossing" is the kind of movie that benefits from a second sitting, to get a complete grip on the plot. There's a great deal going on, although you can certainly skim along on the action at hand, and enjoy the handsome look created by director Joel Coen, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld and production designer Dennis Gassner. The Coens remain good with situation. They know how to make something happen all the time. "Crossing" should be watched not because it's their finest achievement (that's still to come), but because the brothers are keeping things refreshingly different and building a career, their minds still very much fixed on originality.

POINT OF NO RETURN (The Assassin)

By Roger Ebert

       `Point of No Return" is a "Pygmalion" for our angry age. In both
  stories, an older teacher picks a girl out of the gutter and teaches
  her new skills. Professor Higgins taught Eliza to act like a lady,
  and now Bob teaches Maggie to be a lady and a cold-blooded assassin.
  Both women get a lot of lessons on how to hold their forks.
           The movie stars Bridget Fonda as Maggie, a girl of the
  streets, who is high on drugs when she kills a cop during a drugstore
  robbery that goes wrong. She is sentenced to death, and to keep the
  story rolling along, the movie shows the sentence being carried out
  almost immediately (not likely in California).
           But, in fact, she is not killed; the execution is a cover,
  and she awakens inside a secret government school for killers, where
  Bob (Gabriel Byrne) tells her she has two choices: Go along with the
  program, or end up underneath the tombstone that already carries her
  name. Maggie is put through a quick course in weapons, explosives,
  martial arts and good manners. The last is taught by Anne Bancroft,
  as an older woman who gives her a beauty makeover. She comes to the
  center looking like a wolf girl; she leaves as a well-groomed beauty.
           Bob gives her a new identity and sends her to live in
  Venice, Calif., where she soon falls in love with the photographer
  who lives downstairs (Dermot Mulroney). But soon she is assigned to
  murder a man in a restaurant, and eventually it becomes clear that
  Bob's bosses consider her expendable. Bob, of course, has fallen
  quietly in love with her, a feeling that business keeps him from
  acting on.
           If this story sounds familiar, you have seen "La Femme
  Nikita," a 1991 French thriller by Luc Besson, which was bought by
  Warner Bros. to be remade into this American version by John Badham
  ("WarGames," "Stakeout"). The notion of pouring European films into
  Hollywood molds didn't work out recently with "The Vanishing," but
  "Point of No Return" is actually a fairly effective and faithful
  adaptation, and Bridget Fonda manages the wild identity-swings of her
  role with intensity and conviction, although not the same almost
  poetic sadness that Anne Parillaud brought to the original movie.
           If I didn't feel the same degree of involvement with "Point
  of No Return" that I did with "La Femme Nikita," it may be because
  the two movies are so similar in plot, look and feel. I had deja vu
  all through the movie. There are a few changes, mostly not for the
  better. By making the heroine's boyfriend a photographer this time,
  instead of a check-out clerk, the movie loses the poignancy of their
  relationship; Nikita liked her clerk precisely because he was
  completely lacking in aggression.
           The movie does, at least, end on the correct note of
  suitably bleak melancholia. Hollywood sometimes feels it necessary to
  squeeze all films into happy endings (in the case of a violent
  thriller, that means the right people get killed). That would be all
  wrong with this story  of a woman coming to grips with her violent
  nature.

Polish Wedding (1)

Polish Wedding (2)

Is this Detroit or Tuscany? That's the question I found myself asking while watching Polish Wedding, a picturesque but oblique romantic family comedy. To debut director Theresa Connelly's credit, the film revels in hothouse movie eroticism, and it looks great. All the characters run around lusty and barefoot through the summertime fields and back alleys in the lush Polish enclave of Hamtramck. Yet despite a game, scantily clad cast, the film is frustratingly flaccid. Its romantic spirit is hampered by Connelly's self-consciously literary script, which is full of hammy monologues and seduction scenes, but lacks any dramatic cohesion. These feisty, sexy urbanites kiss, bicker, and chase each other without any real motivation. The film is being labeled a Slavic Moonstruck, but it has none of that film's farcical wit and only a fraction of its swoon charm, which is thanks mostly to Lena Olin's spirited lead performance. The Pzoniaks are a proud, sprawling working-class family that practically breed dysfunctional romantic entanglements. Headstrong matriarch Jadzia (Olin) is devoted to her brood but distant to her mild-mannered baker husband, Bolek (Gabriel Byrne). After slaving away as an office janitor during the day, Jadzia beds her swarthy, bearded employer (Rade Serbedzija) and leaves her husband waiting. Jadzia's alibi is that she's attending local women's auxiliary meetings; and she's so caught up in her own lie that she wears a WAC-like uniform to her illicit late-night rendezvous. Though she has control over her four growing sons, including the arrogant Ziggy (Muriel's Wedding's hunky swimmer Daniel Lapaine), Jadzia is losing grip on Hala (Claire Danes), her wild high school dropout daughter. Hala is finding splendor in the grass with a studly local cop (Adam Trese), even though she's supposed to play the virgin in the annual church procession. Passions run high, secrets are divulged, and everybody eats a lot of pierogies. Polish Wedding is reminiscent of Nancy Savoca's infinitely more funny and beguiling slices of Italian-American life (True Love, Household Saints), but it lacks her clarity of vision. Olin's sultry mother hen is full of stilted movie pronouncements like "Children ravaged my body," and "Marrying my husband was no mistake. I had my reason, only I can't remember what it is." But Olin transcends the clichéd role with the fiery abandon that made her a star in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Enemies: A Love Story. As a woman prowling protectively over her willful family, she outclasses a mediocre movie. Gabriel Byrne, a talented actor with an unfortunate knack for picking projects that must have looked good on paper (Cool World, Smilla's Sense of Snow), is fine as her suitably laconic match. Unfortunately, the sensitive, introspective Claire Danes is wildly miscast as a bad girl with a worse hairdo. (Who stuck her with those ridiculous blonde ringlets?) It's especially odd that Hala is the least plausible character in the film, considering that she's clearly meant to mirror the director's own Polish-American coming-of-age. For a more satisfying Polish experience, try a good smoked kielbasa. --Kevin Maynard

Prince of Jutland (Royal Deceit)

Quest for Camelot, the Magic Sword

Kaylee wants to become a knight, just like her father, Sir Lionel. King Arthur insists in a meeting with all the Knights of the Round Table, including Sir Ruber (Gary Old man's voice). He is really a Baddie and kills, after a fight, Sir Lionel. Excalibur, the magic sword of the King, gets stolen by a big, ugly creation-bird of Ruber, but he drops it in the "Forbidden Forest". So, Kaylee is without father now, but her mother Juliana is still there for her. 10 Years later Ruber pays them a visit and wants Kay lee's mother, to stay with him, which she refuses of course. Kaylee escapes this mad man and his beastie helpers. She ends up in the "Forbidden  Forest", where she meets Garret, a blind, but good-looking young man. He is not eager in helping her, but he is her "man" in all senses of the word. A two-headed dinosaur Devon and Cornwall is accompanying them (with all their jokes and fun). Ruber and "friends" show up again. The end is romantic: Kaylee finds the sword (after some trouble with Ruber again and again) and she returns it to King Arthur. Ruber, who wanted Excalibur so badly and had it for a while, loses the sword and his life. Garret and Kaylee fall in love and both become knight (Just Knighted).

SIESTA (1)

By Roger Ebert

"Siesta" begins with a woman daredevil preparing to jump out of an airplane into a net above an artificial volcano, and it ends with fundamental questions about whether anything at all in the movie really happened. In between, there is a flight from California to Spain, a glimpse into the incestuous world of the woman's new and former lovers, and more than a touch of perversity. There is also a great deal of symbolism, hinting at deeper meanings lurking just out of focus.

The film is finally overwhelmed by its own ambition, not to mention one too many gimmicks in its plot, but it goes down swinging. It's the kind of bad film that remains quite watch able until fairly late in the game, when you realize that you've made more of an effort to figure it out than the director has. One of the pleasures of a film like this is that if you ever happen to see it again, it seems fresh because you can't remember how it turned out.

The movie stars Ellen Barkin, fresh from her triumph in "The Big Easy," as a tortured daredevil with a past. As the story opens, she is holed up in some kind of a temporary command post in the desert, where Martin Sheen, a special events promoter, wants to turn her into a new version of Evil Knievel. His exact plans are fairly obscure; a model of the fake volcano is produced, along with some talk about the safety net that will stretch above the flames, but exactly how Barkin is going to drop from the plane is in some doubt.

I left the movie assuming that she would parachute, but friends at the same screening assured me she was going to do a free fall into the net. I argued that such a stunt would certainly kill her. My friends said that was exactly the point.

It is certain, in any event, that the Barkin character has premonitions of her death, and the action in the movie is intercut with quick flashes of fantasy (or memory, or anticipation) in which she falls helplessly through the air. Therefore it is perhaps not surprising that, given three days before the deadline for the big jump, she flies to Spain to say goodbye to the great love of her life (Gabriel Byrne). And once there, she re-enters her lover's perverse and haunting world of erotic entanglements, which feeds off the ennui of an exile community including Isabella Rossellini, Jodie Foster and Grace Jones.

Up until this point the movie is actually quite good, probably because it seems to know what it is doing. Then confusion sets in. Sinister figures appear. A taxi driver seems to know more than he should. The flash forwards (or flashbacks, or fantasies) grow more ominous. And then there is one of those endings that reveals a final lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers, a gimmick in place of a resolution.
Barkin emerges relatively unharmed, however. She is an actress who is clearly drawn toward interesting scripts and is willing to take chances. "Siesta," whatever it is, is not another sausage from the Hollywood assembly line, and to intrigue us for an hour is a worthy achievement for any movie, even if it baffles us for the next 30 minutes then finally abandons us altogether.

 

Siesta (2)

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 28, 1987

"Siesta," the first feature directed by Mary Lambert, is so preposterously, aggressively half-baked that it practically dares you to march out of the theater. Starring Ellen Barkin, who appears in nearly every frame, the movie is about the final few days in the life of a world-famous sky-diving daredevil named Claire. Told in scrambled flashbacks after Claire's death, it takes place in a kind of timeless purgatory in which the character, wearing a scanty, bright red dress, must run around in a panic, trying to figure out what's happened to her. Ultimately, what's happened to her is of very little consequence, and comes as much more of a surprise to her than it does to us. Lambert has said that the film is about the "necessity for accepting change," and, yeah, since the main character is dead, I'd say she had some adjusting to do. The movie was adapted by Patricia Louisianna Knop, who wrote the screenplay for "9 1/2 Weeks," from a novel by Patrice Chaplin. The result might be dismissed as an art bauble if we weren't forced to endure the pain of watching an actress as gifted as Barkin flail around in the middle of it. And she's not alone either. The movie is like some Tony theme party with actors from all over -- Jodie Foster, Isabella Rossellini, Julian Sands, Martin Sheen, Grace Jones, Gabriel Byrne -- dropping by to play dress-up. (It's a toss-up as to who gets the worst of it, though Sands and Byrne probably have the most atrocious lines.) Lambert has done some fairly high-profile work in rock video -- she's perhaps best known for the "Material Girl" video she directed for Madonna -- but she gives no indication here that she's ever even seen a movie, much less knows how to direct one. The only thing she gets points for is ambition: No other movie this year has wanted so to take on the big issues of love and death and sex and art -- and failed as spectacularly. Yet you can't even applaud the aspirations here, as you might with another self-consciously stylized project.  Lambert hasn't even chosen interesting ways to fail.

SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE (1)

By Roger Ebert

       `A Simple Twist of Fate" is the kind of title you might find on
  a Victorian novel about dark secrets, incredible coincidences, love
  versus jealousy, and the sins of the father being visited upon the
  daughter. In other words, just the kind of novel I like to read.
  Modern novels don't work up the same energy, because their characters
  don't take sin and guilt seriously enough. Today's fictional heroes
  do in a paragraph what the Victorians spend 500 pages living down.
          The point is, though, that they are Victorians, living in the
  last century among fears and mores we no longer possess. When you
  take a Victorian story and plop it down in the 20th century, as "A
  Simple Twist of Fate" does, you get a strange interruption of the
  rhythm - as if the characters are dancing to unheard music. They do
  things that are inexplicable unless you realize they're living
  according to the codes and clichés of the last century.
           Steve Martin's screenplay for "A Simple Twist of Fate" is
  based on Silas Marner, George Eliot's 1861 novel about a poor weaver
  whose life is destroyed by a false accusation. He becomes a reclusive
  miser, hoarding coins. Then his treasure is stolen, and he is
  inconsolable, until a little golden-haired girl wanders into his
  life. He takes the girl as heaven's repayment for his lost gold, and
  adopts her. Years later, it is revealed . . . well, let's not get
  into that, as it will come as a surprise to anyone who hasn't read
  the novel.
         Victorian melodrama has a strange appeal for me, probably
  because I'm attracted to the tension between the repressed characters
  and the wild swoops of plot. (The Anne Rice novels duplicate this
  tension by giving us vampires living according to the strict
  practices of an earlier age.) In the modern world, alas, we're
  playing without nets, so it's hard to believe a Silas Marner could
  exist today.
           In the movie, Martin plays Michael McCann, a high school
  choral teacher whose wife cheats on him, a development George Eliot
  might not have anticipated. He moves to a rural area and sets up as a
  cabinetmaker, investing all of his earnings in gold coins which he
  buys from the local antique dealer (Catherine O'Hara). His evenings
  are spent alone with his hoard.
       Meanwhile, a local blueblood named Newland (Gabriel Byrne) wants
  to run for office. His life is complicated by his ne'er-do-well
  brother, a drunk and philanderer, who after a tragic car wreck breaks
  into McCann's house, steals the coins, and lurches out into the
  night. Meanwhile, a local woman, the victim of drug addiction,
  staggers out into a raging blizzard with her small daughter. She
  passes out in the cold, and the little girl wanders into Steve
  Martin's cottage. When the mother is found, frozen and unidentified,
  Martin determines to adopt the girl, and . . .
      You see how it goes with Victorian fiction. One thing after
  another. The heart of the movie, and a warm and funny one it is,
  involves the relationship between Martin and the little girl, who he
  names Mathilda. Played at various times by six actresses, including
  two sets of twins, she develops into a smart and engaging young lady
  who is the delight of the neighborhood, and especially of the
  childless Newlands. Then, when she is about 12, a dark secret from
  the past emerges . . .
           There I go again. There is a lot to like about "A Simple
  Twist of Fate," including the process by which the hopeless miser is
  made human again by the love of the young girl. Martin adds quirky
  touches, showing his own love of melodrama in a scene where the girl
  teeters on the brink of a rock quarry and he saves her by swooping
  overhead in a harness attached to a weather balloon.
       That's an update, I guess, of the old Victorian standby in which
  the girl is rescued from the runaway carriage. (I liked everything in
  this movie having to do with how you can take giant strides while
  tethered to a weather balloon and, by the way, I suspect Martin may
  have invented the successor to bungee-jumping.)
           The film ends in  a courtroom scene, in one of those trials
  where the good guys say all the wrong things and the bad guys say all
  the right ones, and then there is a sensational last-minute
  discovery, and . . .
       Try as I might, I just couldn't accept this Victorian story in
  modern dress. The motivations seemed wrong (would 20th century people
  behave this way?), the plotting seemed contrived (as indeed it was),
  and the plot's habit of springing big surprises on us was too
  manipulative. This is not at all a bad movie, mind you, but a good
  movie gone wrong, through a simple twist of miscalculation.

Simple Twist of Fate (2)

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 02, 1994

When clowns write sad stories for themselves, the results are almost always disastrous. For "A Simple Twist of Fate," Steve Martin not only wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of George Eliot's "Silas Marner," but also executive-produced the project, creating for himself a character that is about as different from his typical roles as can be imagined. And if the exercise isn't precisely disastrous, it comes very close to it. Directed by Gillies MacKinnon, this somber, depressing moral tale gives Martin the opportunity to play a dour recluse whose life is transformed when he agrees to raise a little orphan girl. His character is Michael McCann, a furniture maker in rural Virginia who runs off to the country after his wife reveals that the baby she is carrying is not his. Unable to shake off his disappointment, McCann becomes a humorless miser who skulks around town friendless and with nothing to live for. Then one snowy night, McCann discovers a beautiful blond child sitting in his cabin. When he goes outside to determine whom she belongs to, he finds the girl's mother dead in the snow. To prevent the little girl from being sent to a foster home, McCann offers to take her in. McCann names her Mathilda, and his transformation into a loving daddy begins. The effects of the child on McCann are just short of miraculous. Before you know it, this bland, featureless creature is warming up formula and pushing a pram down Main Street, happy as a lark. As Mathilda grows older, McCann experiences a kind of fulfillment that he had never dreamed possible. But there is a hitch to the proceedings. Mathilda's real father, John Newland (Gabriel Byrne), is a wealthy senator who lives just up the road. When the girl's mother was found, Newland was just beginning his political career, and out of fear that his name might be linked to the dead woman's, he kept his mouth shut. Now that 10 years have passed, Newland takes a renewed interest in Mathilda. As a dad, McCann is so loving that he can just barely bring himself to discipline his child. But he is also poor, and when the Newlands start bribing the horse-crazy Mathilda (Alana Austin) with a mount of her own, McCann can't compete. Eventually, the story comes down to a court battle over the girl, who is forced to choose between her love for her surrogate father and her chance of being rich and living in a fancy house. "A Simple Twist of Fate" may have a classical provenance, but it plays like a tawdry weepy from the '40s. Of all the actors in Hollywood, Martin would seem to be the least likely to turn himself into Stella Dallas. But, then, movie stars have all sorts of unrealized fantasies. Perhaps it's a stretch for a performer with such remarkable charisma to play someone who is without it. With his hair thinned and dyed a shade of lifeless brown, Martin does a skillful job of nullifying himself, and he does present a side of himself that has been glimpsed only briefly. But what a joyless accomplishment it is. As a comic, Martin soars, but here he has clipped his own wings.

Smilla's Sense of Snow (1)

Smilla's Sense of Snow is more than a climatologically instinct. It is the projection of a wintry soul over which a long, cold arctic night settled long ago. When we meet her in director Bille August's intricate and compelling realization of Peter Hoeg's best-selling novel, Smilla Jaspersen has given her professional life over to the frozen music of mathematics, her private life over to bone-chilling isolation. The set of Smilla's face, the carriage of her body, as Julia Ormond plays her, says, "Don't ask, don't touch." She relents--angry at the show of weakness--for just one person. That is a lonely little boy named Isaiah, who lives in her apartment building. Her identification with the child is more than that of one solitary with another. He was born in Greenland, as she was. Both of his parents are Inuits, natives of the region, as her mother was. Both have lost parents at an early age. And now, like Smilla before him, the boy finds himself trying to make a new life in Copenhagen, which to them is hardly the Danny Kaye song's "friendly old girl of a town." August makes us see it as dark and claustrophobic, stressing its contrast to the bright and limitless horizons of the land, essentially untouched by modern civilization, where they were born. One day Smilla comes home from work and finds Isaiah dead, the victim of a fall from their building's rooftop. An accident, the police insist. A murder, her intuition tells her. This suspicion is confirmed by the increasingly hostile behavior of the authorities as she begins to investigate the case. It will come as no surprise to devotees of the paranoid thriller--is there any other kind nowadays?--that the victim is accidentally privy to information that threatens the secret plans of a powerful mining corporation to exploit and sully Greenland's purity. It will come as no surprise to them either that as the conspiracy surrounding Smilla begins to take form, the movie loses some of its superbly shadowed sense of menace. What will surprise everyone is the dry iciness, the burning coldness of Ormond's Smilla. Up to now she has trafficked largely in vulnerability--melting in Legends of the Fall, perhaps a shade too winsome in Sabrina. Here, she is all contained fury, except for the flashes of anger and contempt that burst without warning from the darkness within. It's not exactly diva acting such as we used to get from the great ladies of the movies' classic era. She achieves her effects with less obvious calculation. But like a Barbara Stanwyck or a Bette Davis, she takes us into that country where strength shades into neurosis, and we fear that she can never be reclaimed for the more orderly pleasures of ordinary life. It is Gabriel Byrne's duty as an enigmatically watchful neighbor-lover-ally patiently to offer her that option, and he does it with his customary brooding grace. It's the duty of a lot of good character actors to keep driving her in the opposite direction, toward the end of her very taut tether. It is the very great pleasure of this movie (well written by Ann Biderman) that its truly haunting suspense derives not from Smilla's conflict with her external enemies but from her own demons.

Smilla's Sense of Snow (2)

Starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne.
Written by Ann Biderman from the book by Peter Hoeg.
Directed by Bille August. (AA)

Smilla's Sense Of Snow opens with a totemic Arctic figure: while sled dogs curl up against the chill, an Inuit spearman stands poised over a hole in the ice. Cut to beneath the ice, where fat seals tease toward the breathing hole. Back to the hunter. The shot holds and holds, driving home the image: silent, strong, as impassive as a glacier. But then the dogs start to yelp and the hunter turns to see what we can already discern: a giant burning object streaking toward the horizon to explode like an ice-pack Hiroshima. The hunter makes a frenzied dash for safety only to be swallowed by the sweeping storm. That director Bille August travels from this terrific big-bang opening to the fizzle that is the ending is typical of adaptations. You don't have to read the source material -- in this case, the best-selling Peter Hoeg novel -- to know the screenwriter has tried to encapsulate the whole: you can see the text straining through the dialogue and mise en scene. And working against time -- that lengthy opening sequence costs him dearly -- director August hurries like hell to tell it. He's like the hunter in the opening: doomed to failure. You see him pick up the pace with each passing sequence. When a young boy falls from a roof in Copenhagen, the police say it was an accident but his neighbor Smilla (Julia Ormond) suspects foul play. There's something funny about the footprints in the rooftop snow. No ordinary observation this. And yet there isn't the time to inspect it, to background it, to give us a glimpse into a person who can make such an observation. Instead it carries on in an action vein, as a defiant Smilla searches for the truth. Blame that meditative opening -- the time would have been better spent on Smilla.  Ormond more than pulls her weight: her severe bangs and brooding gaze make a compelling package even if she doesn't seem quite up to the strenuous detective work. But you can't help feeling gypped. Smilla is supposed to be more than just an expert on snow -- as the title suggests, it's supposed to be in her veins -- but you get no insight into the root of her obsession. In supporting roles, Gabriel Byrne has the uncomfortable task of being in the right place at the right time thrice too often -- he looks a bit sheepish as he makes his fourth appearance -- while Richard Harris is a villain at a distance, more an eminence than a person. Still, he provides a nice visual parallel: red on white on an ice floe, he echoes the bleeding seals of TV news. By the conclusion, August has resorted to videotape to make his plot points. With no time to lose, Smilla pops the right tape into a machine and, without a fast-forward, shows us the precise moment of incrimination. This kind of shorthand may get the job done but it denies dramatic satisfaction.

DENIS SEGUIN

Smilla's Sense of Snow (3)

By Mary Weems

Your reaction to "Smilla's Sense of Snow", based on the best selling Danish novel by Peter Hoeg, depends partly on whether you've read it. Movies love to deliver what the camera loves, and instead of the short, wiry, half-Eskimo Smilla of the book, we get lovely, regal Julia Ormond as Smilla, looking only slightly exotic in her sheepskin coat. Smilla is from Greenland, but was unwillingly spirited away to Copenhagen by her father, a Danish doctor, when her mother, an Inuit Indian, dies in a hunting accident. Gabriel Byrnes plays the mechanic who becomes Smilla's lover, and, even though he has the look and feel of the character, don't expect quite the same complexity of character that the novel offered. The beautiful opening scene on the blue white snow of Greenland, is a flashback to the 19th. century when a mysterious explosion from the sky creates a tidal wave, setting up a mystery that ripples right up to the present. It's somehow connected to the supposedly accidental death of an Inuit boy also living in Copenhagen, who Smilla has grown to love. She knows he couldn't have slipped on the snow and fallen from the top of their apartment building -- the sense of snow that has made her a respected authority on snow and ice tells her that he was chased off the roof. Determined to avenge his death, Smilla becomes a thirty-eight year old girl sleuth. Somehow the mechanic, who also loved the boy, fits into the puzzle, and Smilla's father comes to her aid, despite the antagonism of his bratty young girlfriend. Finally, Smilla's search takes her aboard a ship making a mysterious voyage to Greenland. Here her physical mettle and sheer nerve turn her into a sort of female James Bond, and a dazzlingly evil Richard Harris is the perfect arch enemy. "Smilla's Sense of Snow" is visually beautiful in its brooding way, filmed with both restraint and a rich vein of hijinks, and even if the commercially sound casting of Julia Ormond provides eye appeal at the expense of verisimilitude, she's still an intelligent and feisty Smilla.

This Is The Sea

Director: Mary McGuckian
Starring: Samantha Morton, Richard Harris, Ross McDade, John Lynch, Gabriel Byrne
Details: 1 hr. 50 mins. Cert. 15 Ireland
Released: November 28 '98 (selected cinemas)UK

If nothing else this ambitious and engaging drama can claim the dubious honour of being the first feature to have been filmed in Belfast since the partial resurgence of the troubles. With such a city as its backdrop, serious issues are inevitably tackled but This Is The Sea is not just a political platform - religion, love and betrayal are all given an equal airing. Hazel Stokes (Morton) leads a sheltered life living at home with her parents in rural Northern Ireland. As members of the fiercely Protestant Plymouth Brethren, the only social gatherings they attend are weekly prayer meetings. But that all changes when a long- time friend of the family, Old Man Jacobs (Harris), persuades her protective parents to allow her to accompany him to an agricultural show in Belfast. There she meets the cool (and very Catholic) Malachy (McDade) and his brother Padhar (John Lynch). Soon Hazel is enjoying secret rendezvous with Malachy and living it up in a swinging Belfast nightclub. As their love attempts to bloom under the weight of the Brethren, Padhar has troubles of his own with IRA unit- leader Rohan (Gabriel   Byrne).  Writer/director McGuckian has tried to address everyone's point of view but with any film set in a place where religion and politics are such emotive issues, it is almost impossible to appear unbiased. It is also apparent from the full-to-the-brim melting pot of subjects that there is just too much going on for just one film and so every thread suffers because of it. On the plus side, however, Irish culture is so affectionately embraced - in the cinematography and the soundtrack - that if you look hard enough you can ignore the soapboxes and enjoy the love story.

Jessica Mellor

Trial by Jury (1)

Trial by Jury is somewhat implausible, especially the ending part, but I think it sets a great example of how things should be. Valerie Alston is a juror on a case that is against an organized crime boss; the prosecuting DA in this case wants to put the boss away for eternity for the murder of 11 people. However, the crime boss holds the life Alston's son over her head, forcing her to hang the jury (which is a nice thought, come to think of it---more on this later). This ploy works, but the mob boss, realizing he cannot have any witnesses, decides to kill Valerie and her son anyway. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Alston does the best thing she can do: she follows her instincts in a very laudable, but as I said before, dubious ending. Those of you who thought True Lies was misogynistic might end up with the same viewpoint here, but I think Hollywood perpetuates both myths, neither of which I am comfortable with: that girls are meant to do whatever is told at any cost, thus objectifying them, and that boys are always "bad", needlessly putting the girls through pain.

Quote:

"It's not a matter of who dies, Valerie; it's a matter of who dies first."

Which brings me again to our system of justice: the jury system is, I believe, completely orthogonal to justice. First of all, jurors do not decide whether the evidence is enough to convict a person, but decide, yes, subjectively decide, if the person is guilty of the crimes accused. Secondly, jurors are ignorant of the law---I bet most of them (I'm assuming here, since I've never been on jury duty and never will (have to) be) could not differentiate between circumstantial evidence and "hard" evidence, which is really important because an excellent case could be built completely out of circumstantial evidence. But this is just an example, perhaps false. The fact is that the language of the law is very convoluted making it hard for the average person to understand what exactly is happening and making it harder to evaluate truth hood. Finally, the media compromises the integrity of the jurors---do we really believe/know that the jurors in the O.J. Simpson case haven't already formed their opinions about the case after all the garbage the media has written about it? All this doesn't place responsibility on jurors alone: that the language of the law is so convoluted is to be blamed on society as a whole. Oh sure, the law-makers will say "it needs to be that way in order to be unambiguous", but surely the ambiguity is still there---it is just carefully couched in superfluous words. In the end, however, the fact is that humans, who are removed from the situation, cannot pass judgments on others. So John asked me "what is a better way?" And this is a difficult question. Just because we might not have better philosophies at this current point doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find them: the only persons who can pass judgments are the ones who are involved and this movie brings this existential point into perspective.

Trial by Jury (2)

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 10, 1994

"Trial by Jury" is hardly an exciting title for a film, but it is at least accurate. Writer-director Heywood Gould seems intent on exposing the common manipulations of both defenders and prosecutors through the story of a capital murder case involving a ruthless mobster named Rusty Pirone (Armand Assante). Gould also explores the dilemmas created by the jury system, but somewhere along the way he opts for a very weird denouement melding sexual obsession and vigilante empowerment.

The focus of all this energy is Valerie Alston (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), a single mom called to jury duty in the case of Pirone, who is personally responsible for 11 murders but has proved to be, until now, a Teflon don.

The movie starts with a scene in which a snitch and four police guards are ruthlessly gunned down. In court, both prosecutors and defenders envision Alston, who is simply intent on doing her civic "duty," as an asset to their side. The bad guys ensure their view by threatening the life of her 7-year old son (Bryan Shilowich). The threats are delivered, frequently, by tarnished copper Tommy Vesey (William Hurt), but from the start he seems discomfortingly ambivalent and somehow pulled to Alston, as if she represents his lost honor.

For a while, "Trial by Jury" moves along like a standard television trial film, with a greater ambition evident in both casting and production values. But Gould and co-writer Jordan Katz go down another path entirely by making Alston a magnet, albeit an unwitting one, for all the men who are most dangerous to her. That includes the feral Pirone (who rapes her in a personal midnight warning), Vesey, and even DA Daniel Graham (Gabriel Byrne). Graham and Pirone share Brooklyn roots, and they both seek to use Alston to their benefit, no matter the consequences to her. Ultimately, things spin out of control, though not believably nor with any sense of logic.

Though the film rotates around her character, Whalley-Kilmer seldom brings Alston to life, which makes her unbattled compromises, and more crucially her shift from victim to self-assured revenger, hard to fathom. Byrne isn't given much to work with, and doesn't, but the sensitive Hurt plays hurt as the compromised but redeemable Vesey. Par for his discourse, powder-keg Assante is disturbingly charismatic as Pirone.

Despite solid technical credits -- cinematographer Frederick Elmes wisely brightens the film's noir aspirations -- "Trial by Jury" will likely enjoy only a short detention in local theaters.

Usual Suspects (1)

The two-fer concept suggests a strong film carrying a weaker one, but if "Mulholland Falls" was coolly received on its 1996 debut, the film can handle the proximity to the sensational "The Usual Suspects". "Mulholland Falls" has what it takes: a classic premise - a head-on clash between the cops and the army, which both  mould the law to suit their own ends - and a twisting plot. This involves a murdered woman whose favours were granted to, among others, LAPD detective Max Hoover (Nolte) and army general Timms (Malkovich), who also heads the newfound Atomic Energy Commission. When tapes of steamy afternoon sessions come light and Hoover crosses the line between business and personal, trouble is inevitable. Though more straightforward and less masterfully layered, the film doesn't fall too far short of "LA Confidential", its spiritual cousin. Well worth a posthumous reappraisal. Of course, "The Usual Suspects" needs no such thing. Heaped with superlatives in 1995, this labyrinthine yarn involves five master criminals, robberies gone right and wrong, enough switchbacks to confuse Elmore Leonard, an extraordinary sting in the tail and the most imposing underworld figure of the late 20th century in Keyser Soze. Even better, it's a film that was actually designed to be seen again and again as the multiple deceptions gradually reveal themselves. (Martin Aston). Director: Bryan Singer, Stars: Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Kevin Spacey, Pete Postlethwaite, Stephen Baldwin.

From beginning to end, the story is overwhelmed by style. This is a time to forget the plot for once and concentrate on enjoying an actors' field day with a good script.

 

USUAL SUSPECTS  (2)

A Nebbadoon review by Joan Ellis.

"The Usual Suspects" is confusing, implausible, and very successful. If that's convoluted, so is the movie. It shows that a cast with self-confidence and style can take a plot full of holes and wrap it in panache. It doesn't matter a whit that nothing in the movie makes sense. Just watching the chaos unfold in the hands of these actors is reward enough. The film opens with a rare moment of clarity as five very literate felons appear in a police lineup. Tossed into a communal jail cell, McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), Hockney (Kevin Pollak), Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), and Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) wonder why the cream of their criminal crop would be rounded up and impounded together, but proceed anyway to plan an operation so undefined that is impossible to describe, much less understand. There is a lot of dying in this movie, but it's fairly impersonal because the trigger man usually lurks in the shadows, of which there are many. Twenty-seven bodies are laid out on a pier in the opening scene, and the movie works its way backward from there, trying to figure out who they are and how they got there. What we do know is that the dazzling finale is the illogical outcome of the jail cell plotting session. Over the whole intricate web hangs the specter of Keyser Soze, an infamous villain who assumed mythical qualities in the criminal world after committing some unimaginable symbolic gesture. The unseen Soze sends Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), a chillingly cruel emissary, to our quintet of bandits. It is Kobayashi who inspires terror the old-fashioned way: with cold eyes and words far more powerful than guns. Postlethwaite freezes us in our seats with his performance. Chazz Palminteri puts his personal stamp on a good cop determined to untangle the yarn, and the gifted Suzy Amis is on hand as the lawyer who inspires in Keaton dreams of going straight, but hers is virtually a non-speaking part. This is a movie about bad guys doing bad things with eccentricity and style. How long has it been since you sat frozen, watching a hatch lever turning in the belly of a ship, knowing that the devil himself is on the other side? Director Bryan Singer has created the feel of a sophisticated 30s mystery; Christopher McQuarrie delivers the dialogue in a great mix of standard four-letter stuff and cerebral criminal thinking; each actor in this first-rate cast makes his character memorable. It's a hat trick. From beginning to end, the story is overwhelmed by style. This is a time to forget the plot for once and concentrate on enjoying an actors' field day with a good script. Newton Thomas Sigel's photography is wildly sophisticated and works with John Ottman's ominous score as a real suspense builder. You may well find delicious pleasure in being thoroughly caught up in a movie you don't understand. Remember, nothing's perfect.

Usual Suspects (3)

Starring: Kevin Spacey (Verbal), Gabriel Byrne (Keaton), Stephen Baldwin (McManus), Chazz Palmintari (Customs Special Agent Dave Kujon), produced by Bryan Singer, Michael McDonnell, written by Christopher McQuarrie, directed by Bryan Singer.

If O. Henry was alive today, "The Usual Suspects" might be the type of story he would write. This film is jam-packed with details, detective work, conspiracies, action, adventure, and most of all mystery. It's interesting to watch because of the way that the story is told, but what holds it back is the fact it's too much of a confusing Hollywood mystery to take seriously. The story is a generic crime/mystery story. We work our way up to "now" through a series of flashbacks. We meet our main character, Verbal (Spacey), a small time hood who is about to post bail in L.A., but Customs Special Agent Dave Kujon (Palmintari) thinks there's more to the story than he's telling them. He interviews Verbal about the history leading up to the incident that is the climax and most important part of the story. Basically, the story surrounds five different hoods who are arrested because they are, as the title states, the usual suspects. Gabriel Byrne is fine as Keaton, the so-called leader, while Stephen Baldwin goes a bit overboard as the wannabe psycho McManus. But considering the casting of such characters, the film's first major flaw is evident (Kevin Pollack as a dangerous, wanted felon?). In fact, the characters themselves seem very out of place. Eventually the story gets past this and starts to tell its complicated story of international crime and conspiracies. The gang is confronted by a European businessman who works for Keyser Soze, supposedly the most ruthless gangster on the Earth (although no one has heard of him). The man leaves behind evidence that could convict them all without a shadow of doubt. It turns out each of them had all stolen from Soze, but didn't know it at the time. In order to make restitution, they must destroy a Hungarian ship supposedly carrying $91 million in cocaine from one of Soze's rivals. This is could be considered a typical gangster movie plot device, but it's not told in a typical manner. The element of the mythological, devil-like Soze is creative, but it doesn't have as much effect on the mood as it wants to. It's almost as if the film is trying to take some of the things that made "The Crow" excellent and apply it to a more realistic setting. Most of the film is a serious of crimes and other events between the gang and associates of Soze. There's a lot of action, but it's not always exciting because it's so difficult to tell what's happening and why. The ending is a real shocker though, it almost makes you want to watch the whole thing over again. "The Usual Suspects" is a well-made picture, but it just tries too hard... period.