Month: October 1999

Poor Chad Lowe. He hadn’t been doing too badly for himself — he won an Emmy for the series Life Goes On and recently did a nice guest turn on ER. But if the new Showtime Original movie The Apartment Complex is any kind of indication, he’s about to join his brother Rob down in the bowels of the entertainment industry: cheesy made-for-TV movies. Put The Apartment Complex back-to-back with Rob’s last TV flick, Atomic Train, and you’d have the makings one of those little variety packs of cheese balls. You know, the kind that come rolled in nuts.

I don’t mean to belittle Kamal’s death but rather the sheer apathy that has resulted in his story being untold until now. Punitive Damage tells his powerful, disturbing tale, which needs to be seen by anyone concerned about justice in a world seemingly increasingly hostile to the concept.

I won’t be surprised to soon hear female moviegoers professing to be madly in love with Tim Roth. 1900 — yes, that’s a name — is the kind of movie character with whom women fall madly in love, and infatuation like that invariably spills over onto the actor portraying him. Not bad for a guy whose career has mostly been spent playing hoodlums and heavies.

‘Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a paramedic.’ If you’re expecting director Martin Scorsese to give the GoodFellas treatment to ambulance jockeys in Bringing Out the Dead, you’ll be disappointed. Instead of a my-world-and-welcome-to-it approach, Scorsese offers us a dizzying stream-of-consciousness meditation on death and dying via an EMS tech who calls himself a ‘grief mop.’

It’s always a bit of a thrill to discover a gem of a film at the video store — it’s like finding buried treasure. Monument Avenue, a slow-burn drama, is exactly the kind of small, character-driven movie that gets ignored at the box office. Fortunately, these movies also play well on video, which allows them to finally get the audience they deserve.

Is there a manlier man than Harrison Ford in Hollywood today? I doubt it. Onscreen, he plays cops and adventurers; offscreen he practices carpentry on his ranch in Big Sky country. He’s the Marlboro Man without lung cancer. He’s the perfect object of where-have-all-the-cowboys-gone? lust. Which makes him the perfect leading man for a piece of relationship porn like Random Hearts.

Personally, I’da thought Death himself would be more interesting than a doe-eyed Brad Pitt doing his best Forrest Gump imitation. I mean, he’s got a pretty cool job that takes him all over the world. He meets people from literally all walks of life. He’s been around, you know? But director Martin Brest and his four (count ’em) screenwriters would have us believe that Death is so busy with his grim reaping that he hasn’t had time to develop any semblance of a personality.

Whaddaya know? I went to a hockey movie, and a story broke out. Yeah, Mystery, Alaska is a rather standard piece of David E. Kelley calculated quirkiness (Kelley cowrote with Sean O’Byrne), but except for one detour into melodrama and a one-liner that is appallingly awful in every possible way, this gently funny and surprisingly touching film manages to transcend its many cliches.