reviews

Supernova is just like Alien, only not good. Following the standard issue SF plot No. 42, a bunch of people (1) out in the middle of nowhere on a spaceship (2) get picked off one by one by Something Evil (3). Here (1) is some sex-crazed paramedics, (2) is the hospital ship Nightingale, and (3) is a phallic-looking alien thingamajig.

Please, somebody keep David E. Kelley away from the big screen. His Mystery, Alaska was saved — barely — by a cast that refused to let their screenwriter get away with sappy melodrama. I don’t know what the cast of Lake Placid was thinking — they probably just kept their minds on their paychecks. In Lake Placid, Kelley’s attempt at horror comedy that is neither scary nor funny, what passes for lighthearted banter is downright disgraceful, and the miserable-looking cast seems powerless to do anything about it.

The script may be a mess, but to be fair to Pullman, it is nicely directed. It’s probably hard to shoot an ugly movie in gorgeous Big Sky country (Alberta stands in for Wyoming here), but vast locations like this can be greatly diminished on television. Pullman, though, eschews static shots of beautiful scenery and keeps his camera moving over his boundless outdoors settings.

Snow Falling on Cedars, then, is the story of Ishmael’s reluctant journey to become a man of compassion and fairness, as he finds himself having to decide whether the bitterness he feels over Hatsue’s rejection of him will stand in the way of correcting an injustice he is in a position to affect. It’s a very interior story, and probably not one that anyone could easily adapt for the screen.

Tobey Maguire is rapidly becoming one of my favorite young actors. His remarkably expressive face has done him great service so far with his characters, who’ve tended to be naive boys who get their eyes abruptly and unpleasantly opened, as in Ride with the Devil and Pleasantville. It remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to make the transition to more adult characters, but I’d lay odds that he’ll do just fine: The Cider House Rules is a step in that direction for him.

Why do otherwise rational people believe in the weirdest of things, in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary? This is the question lurking in the background of Errol Morris’s new documentary, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Powerful and disturbing, this is a startling portrait of man so blinkered by vanity that he lives in a fantasy world of his own making, rationality be damned.

And sure enough, with The Hurricane, Washington does finally join the rank of actors capable of delivering a performance that packs an emotional wallop. All it took was a role that is at least as physical as it is cerebral.