Friday, May 8, 1998
Screenscene
FILM
"Deep Impact"
Directed by Mimi Leder
Starring Morgan Freeman, Tea Leoni and Elijah Wood
"Deep Impact," as the first big Hollywood extravaganza of Summer
’98, brings with it a lot of hefty expectations. With a budget of
$80 million, an executive producer named Steven Spielberg, and a
cast which includes such major celebrities as Morgan Freeman,
Robert Duvall, Jon Favreau and Vanessa Redgrave (in supporting
roles!), one would think that "Deep Impact" would have the
potential to be the biggest film of the year. Unfortunately, the
film fails as a spectacle, and simply doesn’t work as a dramatic
film, leaving it a garbled 2-hour mix of special effects and sappy
melodrama.
"Deep Impact" is one of two summer films dealing with space
debris colliding with Earth. Its competition, "Armageddon," opens
in July and also deals with asteroids colliding with Earth. "Deep
Impact’s" space debris of choice takes the form of a comet hurtling
through space on a course directly for our planet. After the comet
is discovered by high school student Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood),
the world enters into a year-long period of terror.
The government’s plan is two-fold. First, a group of astronauts
(led by Duvall) will try to blow up the comet. Should they fail,
selected people will get to hide in big government tunnels for two
years until they can return to the surface.
If "Deep Impact" were a typical mindless action movie, none of
this would be open for scrutiny. These developments would merely be
set-up for some thrilling chase sequences and explosions. However,
because it takes on such a melodramatic and sensitive tone, the
audience is forced too often to suspend disbelief. Are we supposed
to believe that no one would try to leave the country (or at least
avoid areas known to be in the comet’s path), or that people
wouldn’t build their own underground tunnels without government
help? These and other questions plague the film, as with every new
plot development there seem to be about 10 different
implausabilities.
If moviegoers wanted to see teary-eyed families being ripped
apart, children sobbing about the imminent death of their parents
and babies in peril, they would go rent a dramatic film.
Director Mimi Leder is seriously misguided in providing this
sort of emotion in a summer action movie. But one must concede that
all is not lost in "Deep Impact," though. Some of the performances
are really wonderful, and belong in much better and more
interesting films. And the comet special effects are incredible and
extremely detailed — a testament to the large group of technical
advisors who worked with the special effects crew. If only some
advisors had aided the screenwriters, perhaps the final product
would have at least been more fun to watch.
Lonnie Harris
Grade: C-
"Shopping for Fangs"
Directed by Quentin Lee and Justin Lin
Starring Jeanne Chin, Radmar Jao and Clint Jung
After finishing its world-wide tour of the festival circuit and
even been selected for the highly prestigious Toronto competition,
UCLA’s own "Shopping for Fangs" finds itself back in Westwood, this
time around with a hometown-boy-makes-good swagger of theatrical
release.
For those who aren’t familiar with its homecoming, "Fangs" is
co-directed and written by UCLA film grads Quentin Lee and Justin
Lin. Their charmingly scrappy film squeezes its pulp of young Asian
Americans — ranging from model-minority yups to lickety-hip pups
— with the proverbial narrative handling of the ’90s: two
concurrent plots which move along with one or two degrees of
separation until the conclusion, where the plots meet and lives
connect.
One of them centers on a mysterious and deliriously sexy
waitress who wears sunglasses and a blond wig wherever she goes, a
character who’s actually a bit more interesting than her obvious
predecessor in "Chunking Express." At work she likes to flirt with
a frequent customer (Jung), but she tells him that she’s a lesbian
and is obsessed with a woman whom she’s only seen on a lost
driver’s license. He befriends the waitress and one day meets her
object of desire, a cheerless china doll (Chin) bored with both her
husband and her therapy sessions.
The second plot involves a typically impotent Asian male named
Phil (Jao) who believes he’s slowly turning into a werewolf. As his
hair grows uncontrollably, Phil becomes more sexually assertive,
better at sports, gets a hankering for raw red meat and stumbles
over a few dead bodies in his path – should the poor boy tie up his
id or put a silver bullet through it?
It’s a question that so many over-achieving Asian Americans do
ask themselves, and one of the biting strengths of "Fangs" is that
it is so immediately alert to the moments which confront the
contempo-young of Asian America. What’s more, it’s alert without
the standard f.o.b. sobs and sickly joy-luck epiphanies–the
freshness in "Fangs" has to do with its unruly giddiness and
disregard for ancestors.
But as much as one hopes that the filmmakers give its
"Gener-asian X" slogan a rest (nothing’s sillier than film trying
to create its own marketing vocabulary), one would have hoped that
the filmmakers had made two movies instead one: The slow drivel of
the werewolf plot, overly-serious and really crummy looking, simply
does not match up to the sleek and brilliantly mounted love story
of the waitress. But these days, you have to take what you can
get.
Tommy Nguyen
Grade: B
"Wilde"
Directed by Brian Gilbert
Starring Stephen Fry, Jude Law and Michael Sheen
One of the triumphs of "Wilde," and there are many to be sure,
is that we are consistently given an outstanding Stephen Fry in the
title role. The actor commands an imposing height and the smoothest
vocal delivery, perfect for the larger-than-life persona which
Oscar Wilde once enjoyed as a playwright, novelist, cultural
critic, lampooner and mentor.
And yet there’s a lowly coarseness to Fry’s facial personality,
a kind of bumpkin humbleness that isn’t as flamboyantly handsome as
the famous intellect he so well portrays. It’s a discontinuity
that’s sad to consider, since we know historically that Wilde would
in fact know himself lastly by this quiet, crestfallen face and not
by the language which made him immortal.
There’s a deliberate pace in which the film chronicles Wilde’s
fall from grace. Adapted from Richard Ellmann’s widely recognized
biography on the turn-of-the-century writer, the film begins by
exploring his repressed sexuality by introducing him to Robert Ross
( Michael Sheen), a family friend who seduces Wilde in his own home
(Wilde had a wife and two sons at the time).
Liberated by self-realization, Wilde becomes absorbed in a
torrid and brutal romance with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed
"Bosie" and portrayed with crackerjack gusto by Jude Law. Bosie’s
father is the hateful Marquess of Queensbury (Tom Wilkinson), an
opponent of Wilde’s licentious lifestyle and further enraged that
Wilde shares it with Bosie.
A calling card which Queensbury leaves with Wilde, one that
addresses him as a "posing Somdomite," prompts Wilde to sue him for
libel, even with the insult misspelled. Not only does Wilde lose
his case, but in the process exposes his own violations against the
crown (homosexuality was illegal in England at that time). Wilde is
then arrested and forced into exile.
It’s in this latter portion of the movie that a miscalculation
comes into play. The filmmakers are too strong-armed in showing
that it was Bosie who coerced Wilde into pursuing his libel suit,
leaving Wilde to look merely passive and defensive. Surely his
lover played a huge part, but the filmmakers should have left some
room for the hubris that was undoubtedly involved in Wilde’s
collapse; the fascinating thing about Wilde’s "The Picture of
Dorian Gray" is that it does work as biographical antecedent.
Instead, the filmmakers opt for victimization, which is always a
less complicated demand for the audience’s sympathy.
Tommy Nguyen
Grade: A-
"Glam"
Directed by Josh Evans
Starring William McNamara, Frank Whaley and Tony Danza
Unclean! Unclean! In all, beware of this meandering rigmarole of
pop existentialism about a mute young man cleverly named Sonny Daye
(McNamara) who goes to live with his cousin Franky (Whaley) in the
always seething underworld Los Angeles.
Yes, first-time director Evans, full of over-ripe visceral
charge, makes a crucial point that the city does seethe: strippers,
druggies, woman beaters, movie producers, agents, freaks and
ghouls, all of which offer some kind of mean commentary on the
industry which spawned this movie in the first place. (The movie
carries an NC-17 rating, which actually seems undeserved.) But it
takes a breath of light like Sonny Daye to dismantle the horror;
he’s identified as the second coming because of his godlike
scriptwriting- – make no mistake that there’s the most audacious
alter ego at work here.
For apparently appropriate reasons, "Glam" only plays at
midnight on Fridays and Saturdays at Laemmle’s Sunset Five. But for
all of its tiresome shock values, "Glam" does display a dashing
cinematic veneer: showy, but hardly ever a grimy moment. And
there’s one sequence that may be worth the price of a movie ticket:
a spooky tweaked-out queen (played big-time by Ricky Tramell) tries
to convince Sonny to go on a space odyssey with him, spewing out a
ferociously beautiful monologue in the attempt. There are few other
wonderfully creepy moments, but more often we find ourselves jilted
out of our daze, telling ourselves, exactly the way Franky does in
the movie, "Oh my god, you’re all so fucking evil!"
Tommy Nguyen
Grade: C
"Little Men"
Directed by Rodney Gibbons
Starring Michael Caloz, Ben Cook, Chris Sarandon and Mariel
Hemingway
Lying is bad. Fighting is bad. Growing hens for money and taming
wild stallions is good. Those are the lessons from Rodney Gibbons’
preachy new movie adaptation of "Little Men," the sequel to Louisa
May Alcott’s famed classic, "Little Women."
Although the film attempts to tug at the little heartstrings of
children everywhere, it instead drips with moral lessons, like not
only learning to be good, but "love being good" and sappy lines
like "love is the flower that grows in any soil, blessing both
those who give and those who receive."
With a script too fuzzy even for a peach, the story begins with
the adventures of two street boys, Nat (Michael Caloz) and Dan (Ben
Cook) and follows their inevitable formation into "fine, young
lads." Run by Jo March (Mariel Hemingway), the strong-spirited
"Little Woman," and her stern husband Fritz Bhaer (Chris Sarandon),
the Plumfield School for Boys is a proper place to live where the
only rules are to have an "honesty and a willingness to learn."
Aside from a few noteworthy scenes and charming scenery, the
only thing worth watching is the debut of young Cook, who makes Dan
a tough, suave street rat. He is the only one that convincingly
portrays his character as the loyal best friend, the rugrat with a
good heart, and the charismatic con artist.
In one memorable scene, he and another boy, Tommy Bangs ( Ricky
Mabe) engage in a game of stick knife in which each boy spreads his
legs apart and drops a knife in between, bringing their legs closer
together until one boy stabs his own foot. Cook manages to steal
the scene and keep the story somewhat interesting as the
14-year-old who manages to earn the respect of the other boys, get
in trouble with the Bhaers and protect his best friend, Nat, all in
one scene.
What "Little Men" attempts to do is honorable – create a warm
family movie that teaches kids to be honest and good. It has the
potential to do so with a clever book as its base, but it misses
the mark. Scenes meant to create a touching bond with the
characters tend to be overdone and maudlin.
Unlike other children’s films like "The Little Princess," which
leave viewers’ of all ages with the memory of how much fun it was
to be a child, this film just leaves the audience feeling like they
need to repent. Dripping with moral preaching, "Little Men" proves
to be no more than a little entertaining.
Diana Lee
Grade: C+
Astronauts Mikhail Tulchinsky (Alexander Baluev, left) and Gus
Partenza (Jon Favreau) plant a detonating device to alter the
course of the comet in "Deep Impact."