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I’ve raved over Bill Paxton before, and I’m gonna do it again now. Paxton is one of American film’s finest and most underappreciated actors — a fact obscured by his own supremely subtle talent. A Simple Plan, an outstanding film and an instant classic, should finally bring him the recognition he deserves.
Cheery and light-hearted if a bit thin in the plot, The Borrowers will enchant kids and those who grew up with Norton’s books. Bored Borrower teen Arrietty Clock (Flora Newbigin), against her father Pod’s (Jim Broadbent) wishes, goes exploring in the Bean house one day and inadvertently breaks the First Rule of Borrowing: “A Borrower must never, ever be seen.”
Tom Stoppard, I’ll grant you, is infinitely more clever and more talented than your run-of-the-mill fan-fiction writer. But he’s doing exactly the same thing as those hordes of writers who have continued and expanded upon the adventures of the crew of the Enterprise, the owner of the TARDIS, those two FBI agents down in the basement, and the fictional denizens of a zillion other cultish TV shows.
‘What do women want?’ Freud wanted to know. Why doesn’t anyone ask, What do men want? Men can be just as bizarre and contradictory as women can be, as is superbly depicted in the funny and sexy Dangerous Beauty.
Written by Rick Berman and Michael Piller — the two major creative forces behind recent incarnations of the 60’s series — and directed by Jonathan Frakes (aka Cmdr. Riker), Insurrection, like all good Trek and all good science fiction, isn’t about warp drives or phasers or other cool technology but about people: How do we keep track of what’s really important in our fast-paced, modern world?
The first thing you notice in the USA Networks movie Moby Dick is that little Elliott from E.T. has grown up really nicely, and gee, he’s kinda cute. Henry Thomas does a nice accent as Ismael, the 19th-century Nantucket schoolteacher with a ‘burning desire’ for the sea. The next thing you notice are the bad omens.
Maybe in 50 years, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho will be the classic that needs protection from upstart filmmakers. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Not that Pyscho is a bad movie in and of itself — in fact, I think if Hitchcock’s film were not around for comparison, Van Sant’s film would be much more warmly received. But Van Sant’s insistence on not merely remaking but re-creating, on a shot-by-shot basis, Hitchcock’s film is ultimately its downfall.
I was not looking forward to watching Paulie, expecting the usual sitcomish antics that seem to pass for family viewing these days, so I was delighted to find an old-fashioned — in the best way — kind of movie. Disney used to make movies like this: uncynical but with a bit of an edge, wholesome without making you want to gag, sweet without sending you into a diabetic coma. Before Disney’s live action movies sunk to the level of a UPN sitcom, you could count on family films like Paulie (a Dreamworks release) to allow the bad guy (here, the lab director played by Bruce Davison) to be redeemed simply by witnessing an unselfish act, and to let you bawl your eyes out without feeling silly as only sentiment animal stories can.
Babe: Pig in the City has got to be the darkest G-rated movie I’ve ever seen. From a floozy poodle and a drowning pit bull to a junkyard kitten’s heartbreaking mews of hunger and her terrier friend’s story of how his humans cruelly abandoned him, Pig in the City may be enough to give little kids nightmares, or at least prompt them to ask awkward questions of their parents.
When Valjean and Javert face off, it’s like the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. Neeson and Rush are electric together. Neeson, a head taller and much heftier than Rush, could easily threaten to overwhelm Rush with his onscreen presence, but that never happens. Their characters and their performances are so perfectly balanced that you can almost see them feeding off each other’s energy in an endless feedback loop, making both of them stronger than they’d have been alone.
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