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A r l i n g t o n R o a d

blown away

When someone's paranoid in a movie and no believes him or her, that paranoia will be justified. It's cliche. Similarly, when the neighbors are perfect, they aren't. In Arlington Road, Michael Faraday, (Jeff Bridges) teacher of an American-Terrorism course, suspects his neighbors just might be terrorists. And no one believe him. And this isn't the second installment of Blown Away. It does fade-in moments after an explosion, though, with one of the strongest opening sequences since se7en, which both sets the combustible tone for the rest of the movie and, in economical fashion, serves to introduce widower Faraday to his new neighbors, Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins)and stepford-wife Cheryl (Joan Cusack).
          Soon enough Faraday begins to uncover what we already know from the trailer: that the Langs aren't perfect. Which makes all the foreshadowing concerning them a little heavy-handed, but so be it. In writer Ehren Kruger's credit, however, Faraday's dawning suspicion is at least layered in with grief for his wife, which is effecting his current relationship with his girlfriend, whose presence is causing something of a rift between Faraday and his son, etc. And all this develops more or less simultaneously, to the point where it begins to seem this may all be one of those narratives where the emotionally-maimed protagonist (Faraday) is only able to achieve cathartic release via immersion in some high-tension storyline.
          But it's not.
          At it's most basic level it's closer to another narrative, most recently commercialized in Sleepers : the criminal initially getting away with the crime, then somewhere down the road encountering one of his victims wholly by chance, who metes out justice. But too, and in spite of its cast, Sleepers was a failure. Arlington Road isn't, again thanks to strong writing, to the fact that Oliver Lang isn't directly implicated in the death of Faraday's wife, but is instead simply identified as the type whose file gets flagged by the FBI. Faraday's wife died investigating such a flag. Constructing it this way you get the association without the causality, which--because not dependent upon serendipity--is even stronger. Meaning we wholly expect Faraday to mete out some long-overdue justice to Lang, which is right where Kruger wants us: these carefully cultured expectations allow Arlington Road to use less contrivance to turn everything upside down, which it does very effectively in the closing frames. And quietly.
          The thing is, in a movie about bombs, the plot's about subtlety. Not just the inevitable surprise we've come to anticipate, but a development which forces us to reconstruct the whole movie scene by scene. Which is rarely done well. Even rarer is that, in retrospect, (and disregarding the opening sequence) every prior event is open to dual interpretation. Perhaps it was Mark Pellington's unobtrusive camerawork that eased our suspicions; perhaps it was simply Tim Robbins and Jeff Bridges on-screen together, never a mistimed delivery or stray eyebrow between them. Either way, Arlington Road is far and away the best college-professor-just-trying-to-get-out-alive movie since D.O.A., though it is loyal to it all the same.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

B l a i rW i t c hP r o j e c t

war of the worlds

Lest we forget, Deliverance was 1972. Six years later The Hills Have Eyes. Two decades later they still do. And James Dickey's backwoods have always been there in the unconscious, waiting. What The Blair Witch Project does is take us back to those woods, and then leave us there with three film students--Josh(ua Leonard), Mic(hael Williams), and Heather (Donahue)--there to document the Blair Witch Legend, get in and get out. But, as the opening title card informs, they never make it out, meaning that during the next 80-odd minutes the issue isn't Will they die, but How will they die? Which is quite a gamble for independents Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, dramatically speaking. But they make it pay. Before the opening sequence is even over, narrative matters have ceased to intrude. This thanks to genre--not horror, but documentary: they idea that anything can happen, and did.
          But the documentary brings with it its own set of conventions, one of which is that the filmmaker is able to keep and objective distance from the subject. Which is to say the filmmaker doesn't believe. Which, conveniently enough, is the first mistake in any horror film. The second is to get suddenly curious. Here, Myrick and Sanchez provide that tragic curiosity via documentary interest, and then collapse any and all objective distance Josh and Mike and Heather might have had from the Blair Witch Legend by making them subject to it. Which is exactly the kind of sophisticated reversal so often absent from horror.
          All the same though, this is a horror movie. Josh Mike and Heather do make all the typical mistakes--splitting up, with-holding information, turning on each other, etc--and they do often choose, as Josh says, to stay and record instead of help, but still, it never quite becomes formulaic. And it's not just about cinematography, presentation, improvised lines, so-called method-filmmaking. It's about stumbling deeper and deeper into the darkness. The Blair Witch Project draws upon our most primal fear--the unseen presence. The strongest scenes in it aren't the ones with the leaves rushing by and the noises just beyond the frame, they're the ones where the screen is black, and all we have to gon on is audio whispers. The weakest points perhaps all occur in the first 15 minutes, where Myrick and Sanchez had to edit this raw footage together in a back and forth manner, so as to firmly establish that everything we're seeing is through the camera of a crewmember. A necessary evil, perhaps, in the absence of voice-overs or scores or potential soundtracks we're trained to cue into.
          Does The Blair Witch Project intend to retrain us, though? Perhaps. If we pay attention. First, however, it just disturbs us at a fundamental level, and then, by foregoing the Hollywood ending, it doesn't take that disturbance away. Suddenly, American cinema isn't so American anymore.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

D e e p B l u e S e a

ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny

The Jaws structure works because it's simple: oversized shark enters isolated community, begins feeding, has a few good kills and chase scenes, then is in turn chased and killed, largely because the whole meal-thing got a little too personal somewhere along the way. Man versus nature, intellect against instinct, all that. Deviate too far and you don't have a shark-movie anymore. Duncan Kennedy and Wayne Powers were aware of this during writing, and it shows. Deep Blue Sea is a shark movie, this time set out on a Waterworld-ish compound, complete even with another anti-social man from Atlantis, right down to the haircut, sleeveless wetsuit, and underwater acrobatics: Carter Blake (Thomas Jane) the soon-to-be-redeemed ex-con.
          And of course his chums, led by the overworked Samuel Jackson and rounded out by the beautiful-anywhere Saffron Burrows, playing a female Victor von, LL Cool J in the mix there somewhere, in another unreprised yet still entertaining role (see H20). The low point of the movie is everytime his alcoholic preacher character tries to get metaphysical. The high point is the sharks: Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Long Kiss Goodnight ) knows how to put an action sequence together in the computer, and has plenty of opportunity. Remember the floating cow in Twister? Deep Blue Sea has a similar moment with the floating leg/twitching foot of a recently-bitten-in-half crewman. But yes, the structure is Jaws all the way, what with the waterborne Aquatica compound, the isolating storm, the sharks fenced in so they can't leave.
          Yes, plural sharks. In keeping with Anaconda, Lake Placid, Ghost & the Darkness (Jaws 3), etc., there's not just one of them anymore. That would be too easy. And they're makos this time, which have a cooler color scheme anyway. Needless to say, these sharks are vatgrown, genetically-enhanced, smart. Pretty much Benchley's Creature without the bothersome legs. We get the gist of this via some particularly clunky exposition, where Jackson's Russel Franklin--the cashcow of Aquatica, there to pull the plug unless the good doctors can convince him otherwise--gets the grand tour.
          What perhaps saves Deep Blue Sea from being just another Jaws sequel is the awareness that this isn't 1975. Not just talking animatronics here, either, but pop knowledge: we know too much about sharks by now to listen to a Dreyfuss character wax poetic about feeding habits, rogue behavior, life cycles, etc. This can all be assumed, and is. In addition, there's enough environmental guilt circulating that if these sharks weren't essentially man-made (see: Godzilla) their eventual destruction would be pretty much unwarranted, (see: King Kong) in spite of the havoc they wreak. What perhaps doesn't save Deep Blue Sea from being just another Jaws sequel is when it tries really hard not to be, which is to say when it tries to supplant Spielberg's underwater POV's we know love and expect with overwater character history, motivations, revelation, all that small Sphere-type drama. At least there's no love sub-plot. Just a lot of people getting ripped apart, which is what we paid to see.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

D e t r o i t R o c k C i t y

four horsemen, one apocalypse

When we think stadium rock the kneejerk association is the decadent hairbands of the 80's. But there was a time when it was more pure. Or, less pure, but in a more original way. The time is 1978. The band is KISS. The place is director Adam Rifkin's Detroit Rock City, temporary mecca for MyStery, a KISS-tribute band made up of Jam (Sam Huntington), Hawk (Edward Furlong), Trip (James DeBello), and Lex (Giuseppe Andrews), skipping school and driving in from Cleveland on borrowed wheels and stolen time. Just four guys on what for them is a pilgrimage, with all the necessary pitfalls, pratfalls, obstacles, etc to make it interesting. To make it seem like they won't make it, that this will be 'that' kind of coming-of-age movie. Refreshingly, it's not that kind of movie.
          Instead, it's the kind of movie with a soundtrack, maybe the best since Robert Alt's Dazed and Confused. And yes, Detroit Rock City toys with some of the same torch-passing type of generational material as Dazed and Confused, but in a significantly less introspective manner than Alt. Which gives it the freedom to go overboard, to have an overweight Elvis security guard chase this KISS-tribute band into the future, a little retrospective allegory we can all appreciate via dramatic irony: we know how the music wars went. We know that KISS is in facepaint again and nobody has Saturday Night Fever anymore.
          All the same though, Detroit Rock City isn't just a movie for the faithful. Instead of writing it for the heavy metal equivalent of the snickering in-group Star Trek: Insurrection appealed to--and thus relying solely on the nostalgic appeal of a mythic KISS concert to propel things--writer Carl V. Dupre chose instead to make the concert's importance proportional with the obstacles MyStery has to deal with to get to that concert. And, as they're big issues, especially for Jam, having to deal with his MATMOK (Mothers Against The Music Of Kiss) mother, the concert is important, even pivotal. In case this isn't enough, though, Dupre also has a back-up structure: this is Jam's last night of freedom before two years of boarding school. Which is to say tonight they're going to let it all hang out, even dancing at a male strip club for ticket money.
          Which is where Shannon Tweed has her big cameo, playing Sylvia again from Hot Dog, coolly oblivious to the 15 years between then and now, but still in full possession of the camera. And then of course there's Paul and Gene and Ace and Peter, playing themselves on stage, still breathing fire and spitting blood. There's even a strange little shot of the audience from the POV of Gene Simmons' throat, down along his legendary cow-tongue, which is perhaps the one moment when the Detroit Rock City goes a little far. As for the rest of it, though, just be satisfied that it's not Phantom in the Park. It's 1999 now. Suddenly the devil's music is in DTS.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

T h e H a u n t i n g

peripherally envisioned

What gets you in a haunted house movie are the quiet moments, when you expect something to happen. A good haunted house movie incubates this, stacks up a few false positives, then knocks them down all at once in a crash of cymbals, only to start the whole process over. Think The Shining, Amityville, even Poltergeist. Jan de Bont's The Haunting, a liberal remake of the 1962 Haunting of Hill House, based on the Shirley Jackson novel, doesn't so much concern itself with this second stage--remounting the tension. Instead it jacks it up and keeps it there, until the baseline (the quiet moments) are the moments when only some of the faces on the wall are tracking a character's progress across a room, down a hall, through one of the countless thirty-foot tall doors of Hill House. This isn't to say there isn't escalation, though. More like overload. The place is an absolute amusement park of horror, the ideal setting for Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson) to stage an experiment on fear; he wants to know what use sweaty palms, rapid heartbeats, pupil dilation and all that have in today's world. His idea is that they're vestigial responses, of no use anymore. How observing a handful of insomniacs is supposed to answer his question is a bit murky, though, which is just as well, as the sweaty palms etc are never given a chance to redeem themselves. So it goes.
          Suffice it to say that the three subjects--homebody Eleanor (Lily Taylor), bisexual party gal Theo (Catherine-Zeta-Jones), and sardonic Owen (the intractable Luke Wilson)--walk the halls all night trying to get to the bottom of the many strange goings-on. Voices, cherubic faces in the curtains, interdimensional gongs, the whole gamut. And of course no two of them ever see the same phenomenon simultaneously, which isn't so much a trick of camerawork as an accepted convention. Where The Haunting departs from tradition, however, is in the noticeable absence of sexual tension. Nevermind that Catherine Zeta-Jones is splashed all over the trailer, still in supermodel shape from Zorro and Entrapment. She's evidently just window dressing. The one or two token innuendoes (invitations?) her Theo directs Eleanor's way hardly even register, perhaps because Eleanor--suddenly the central character--has other things to worry about. Like distinguishing the scary but good ghosts from the scary and bad ghosts, and how she may or may not fit into the history of Hill House.
          About this scary and bad ghost: aside from being a Scrooge lookalike, he seems more intent upon frightening Eleanor & Co. to death than upon actually killing them, which--judging by his insanity level and the power he wields--would be a short night's work. But then we wouldn't get startled, right? And The Haunting does startle, something of a feat in itself, taking into account a slightly jaded audience. It does this by not allowing us to anticipate the narrative, and it does that by more or less replacing the narrative with special effects. The same ones introduced with The Frighteners and abused in The Mummy, both of which fell similarly short on story but spent a lot of money doing so. Like them, The Haunting is best seen in the theater, where you can be wowed by sound and lights and not have time to consider what might be missing.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

R u n a w a y B r i d e

julia's mile

Romantic comedy is largely about oppositions, and the eventual collapse of those oppositions into a happy ending. Which suggests that those oppositions weren't oppositions after all. In Gary Marhsall's Runaway Bride, Maggie (Julia Roberts) and Ike (Richard Gere), are earmarked early on for such a happy ending by how opposite they seem to be: city boy and country girl; misogynist and man-eater; harried freelance journalist and sedentary 9-5 hardware store manager; etc. This is all established in about four minutes. Underneath those tags, however, are two people who are both defined by their manner when the clock's ticking down: Maggie walking down the aisle and Ike with 15 minutes left to write a story.
         Which is how Runaway Bride opens, with Maggie running and Ike getting a second-hand version of her running and then writing it into his column. Which is the initial complication that draws them together: Maggie disagrees with Ike's write-up of her vehemently enough that he's 'assigned' to cover her pending wedding. If she runs, he's vindicated; if she doesn't, he loses this country girl he's falling for. It all gets a little complicated, which is nice. What isn't so nice is that Ike's assignment feels a little contrived, a little too functional. This is a direct result of there being no sharp turning point into the country for him, but more of a gradual and inevitable curve, shaped not by dramatic events but by the necessity of reuniting Gere and Roberts on-screen for another Pretty Woman, a pressure Pretty Woman alumn Gary Marshall must have been acutely aware of. It shows.
         Since then and now though things have changed a bit, however. Most recently, there's been My Best Friend's Wedding and Forces of Nature, both offering non-traditional 'comedic' endings which skew our expectations a bit as concerns wedding-movies, both of them suggesting that the happiest ending isn't always the one we want to be the happy ending. Runaway Bride could have used this to its advantage, but it chooses not to. Instead it relies a bit desperately on Gere and Roberts to turn mediocre writing into magic. Granted, Joan Cusack is wonderful in her habitual sidekick role, adding humor and a little tenderness to the proceedings, but in the final analysis it's Gere and Roberts. There's simply no room for anyone else, not even Maggie's current betrothed, Coach Bob.
          And Coach Bob even seems aware of this in his military-athletic way, bowing gracefully out for Ike. And again, it's a little bit of a set-up, but at least this time it's supported by convention, by the need for comedic reversal: Maggie, habitually running away from men she's attracted to, will instinctively cling to the one she's repulsed by. She has to. The genre demands it. Similarly, Ike has to be the groom that no other groom was for Maggie, do what none of the others did: chase her, literally or figuratively. Like the boy who brought the king water in Fisher King. In Runaway Bride's favor, however, there is at least the suggestion of a larger narrative functioning, a little tension over whether Maggie will become part of Ike's story (another sacrifice to the dailies) or whether he'll become part of hers (another groom left with a lot of cake left to eat alone), which, in a Gere/Roberts movie not predicated on a Roy Orbison ditty, is finally all we have to cling to.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

T h e S i x t h S e n s e

shyamalan's way

In Speilberg's Always, the dead hang around for awhile, tying up the loose ends of their lives. In Jacob's Ladder, the dead hang around in a similar manner, having to make peace before they can move on. Ditto with Beetlejuice, High Plains Drifter, Ghost, etc. It's all about preparation. In that regard the The Sixth Sense is no different. There's even a brilliant little thematic moment where a red balloon is released in a staircase. It climbs, climbs, rising steadily away from the party, and then finally comes to rest against the ceiling, unable to go any higher. Yet. It's no accident either that director/writer M. Night Shyamalan has the young Cole (Haley Joel Osment) be the only one aware of this balloon. He can, after all, see the dead, who are similarly trapped.
          But of course he doesn't tell people this. Until child psychologist Malcolm (pay-attention-to-the-name) Crowe (Bruce Willis) enters his life. The deal with Crowe is that he feels he once failed to reach a similarly tortured patient, and his failure led to the tragedy which the movie opens with: that former patient breaking into Crowe's home for some impromptu therapy. The Sixth Sense is set a year after that tragic session, but Crowe is hardly over it. During that year of ostensible convalescence--both psychological and physical--his marriage has fallen quietly apart, to the point where he and his wife no longer talk. If he can only help this Cole, maybe everything will be all right again.
          So for Crowe, it's about redemption.
          For Cole, however, it's about making it down the hall to the bathroom at night, an acute terror we feel with him, although at that point there's yet to be anything supernatural on-screen. But when it comes, hold on. Remember about 45 minutes into Exorcist III, where an unannounced nun with some cadaver tool floats silently across the hall, in the background? One of the single scariest moments in moviedom, for the simple reason that, 45 minutes into it, the tension level is so high that the slightest thing can release it all at once. M. Night Shyamalan understands this thoroughly, and handles his 'manifestations' with a steady hand. He never crowds a room with them, but chooses instead to simply reflect them in a child's reaction shots. It's not so much that they're out of the frame, though, as with The Blair Witch Project. It's that they're locked into Cole's point-of-view, thus inaccessible, or, only accessible when dramatically effective, which drains a little off the illusion of reality any horror film depends upon. In Shyamalan's defense, though, perhaps he delayed putting Cole's 'sixth sense' on-screen simply because he wants us to know the viewer before the viewed. Otherwise Cole might get upstaged.
          All minor issues aside though, what stands out is how Shyamalan leads us to believe that the dramatic line is lifted directly from Good Will Hunting: the therapist and the patient both depending on each other for a cure. And in a sense this is the dramatic line, but in the final moments, in what's already looking like a typical Hollywood epilogue, it's recast in an unconventional light. One that makes you reconcieve the whole movie, much as Arlington Road did. Much as Jacob's Ladder did. The real surprise, though, is that The Sixth Sense owes more to Always than to Jacob's Ladder. The dual-epiphanies Cole and Crowe eventually achieve--tying together subplots which seemed incidental but were in fact pivotal--make you appreciate the darkened theater. People can't see your eyes without lights. But then they're misty too: The Sixth Sense is a horror movie with an unexpected love story embedded in it. Prepare.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

E n t r a p m e n t

vertigo among thieves

In the summers that aren't Bond-summers, we get the Bond-movies without Bond. Which is to say gadget movies, all the high-tech toys and death-defying leaps that'll fit into 2 hrs. Entrapment is all of this and more: it even has the original Bond--Sean Connery--playing high-stakes cat thief Mac. More or less the same veteran criminal-type role he had for The Rock, except this time he's starring opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones, insurance agent (Gin Baker), high-altitude acrobat, sharp dresser. The Bond-girl has to be all of this and more.
          Gin Baker is, and then some. But too, she has a day job, or, more specifically, an assignment: to gain Mac's confidence via assuming the role of fellow-thief, then turn him in. In a nutshell, this is Entrapment (and Donnie Brasco, and countless more). Granted, the technical difficulty-level of the robberies Mac and Gin attempt together does escalate, which is satisfying, and their relationship does flirt with intimacy, which is necessary, but, as the title suggests, that's not really what it's all going to be about. What it is all about is entrapment, defined in the trailer as what the law does to the unlawful. And whether honor among thieves applies or not. And who's entrapping whom in the first place. Ving Rhames is even in there somewhere, waltzing through his Mission Impossible role again. To director Jon Amiel's credit, though, he does keep us guessing until the final frames (via occlusion, which isn't quite fair, but so it goes), when everyone takes their double-agent masks off and bears their collective souls. Which is to say he never quite lets Entrapment get lost in its own gadgetry.
          Instead, he does another version of the same sleight-of-hand Raiders of the Lost Ark pulled off once and for all: he not only legitimizes the thief, he glorifies the thief. The thing is, if we don't have sympathy for the main character, if we don't want Indiana Jones to get away with the golden idol (and thus 'preserve' it), then the rest of the movie tends to fall apart. And there's many ways of legitimizing the theif. Absolute Power does it by essentially cleansing the (similarly) aging criminal's crime, making it petty in comparison to the crime he witnesses. Which creates a hierarchy of criminal acts, which succeeds in making the thief less a thief. Entrapment goes about it differently. What Mac steals is largely modern art, which the 'modern' world doesn't assign that much value in the first place. So, suddenly, petty larceny's the name of the game; nobody's starving as a result of Mac's crime habit. Add to this the fact that he's not stealing it to resell, but to ornament his Highlander- esque castle, and he's either a lonely gentleman addicted to the thrill of the game or a particularly debonair bachelor in need of interior decoration, either of which are forgivable.
          Where Entrapment breaks away from tradition--at least the Bond-type tradition--is that the narrative finally isn't hinged upon one final stunt that outdoes all previous stunts, but upon a man and a woman alone in a train station. This isn't The Jackal or The Saint, with little epilogues tacked on as an afterthought. Here, the epilogue is the final stunt. While that may not quite satisfy those who actually expect such developments in a movie, it does set Entrapment slightly above the usual Bond-replacement, which, in a Bond-less summer, might just be enough.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

E y e s W i d e S h u t

high infidelity

The structure of Stanley Kubrick's swan song Eyes Wide Shut is older than cinema itself, but hardly new to it: an everyman type encounters boundary situation X, which draws him into some analogue of the unconscious, where he journeys, learns, etc, and then that man is reborn. It's the Odysseus monomyth. Most recently featured in Lynch's Lost Highway, which is at least as sexually charged as Eyes Wide Shut. The difference being that whereas Lynch represents the unconscious journey overtly, by marking it with the illogical, Kubrick chooses instead to dramatically incorporate it. Which gives Eyes Wide Shut more the surface texture of, say, (talking Lynch) a Blue Velvet: some naïf stumbling deeper and deeper into the mystery.
          In this case, however, that naïf is Tom Cruise. Playing 'Bill Hartford' to Nicole Kidman's 'Alice Hartford,' but still--perhaps as Kubrick intended--it's Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on-screen, husband and wife. That's part of the mystique. The other part is the overhyped sexual material, which, as this is Kubrick, is significantly more subdued (see: stylized) than the trailer would suggest. This isn't 9½ Weeks revisited. Not that kind of classic.
          But it does have its moments, when there's no dialogue, when Bill holds his index finger to his lips, trusting that that slight motion will be enough to shush the prostitute he's with long enough for him to talk on the phone with Alice. Moments when Kubrick allows his characters to interact at such a basic, human level that words aren't even remotely necessary, would in fact be, in the middle of all this social indecency, indecent themselves. Another such moment is the liturgical orgy, where Kubrick baldly presents the theme of the movie with the mask everyone's wearing, which makes all this sex impersonal, purely physical, which is just the quick-fix Bill is looking for in the wake of Alice's revelation that left him reeling: that she's betrayed him emotionally. That he has to reinterpret their relationship in the light of that betrayal.
          Which is a common enough premise, but then Kubrick, pushing the monomyth to its extremes, takes Eyes Wide Shut a little too far into fairy-tale land for credibility. Meaning Bill's 'sexual education' is a little too convenient for modern audiences to stomach. A medieval audience would have had no problem, but then they were tuned into the morality play, were used to the main character being essentially a spectator in the underworld, continually warned away from real danger, etc. Perhaps this 'convenience' is simply a result of Kubrick dramatically incorporating the unconscious trip into the storyline, though. Give him that. However, Cronenberg was able to dramatically incorporate the unconscious trip into Crash, and it never quite got unpalatable. So.
          What the modern audience can cue into, however, are the occasionally heavy-handed psychoanalytic references. Say, Bill being led into the sexual underworld by his 'pianist' friend. Or the foreshadowing, at the Christmas party Eyes Wide Shut opens with: while Bill repeatedly touches his 'pianist' friend, Alice essentially swaps bodily fluids with some stranger, via a glass of wine. All of which suggests that their marriage might not stand on as solid ground as it could be, which--trained on Annie Hall as we are--we get as soon as Nicole casually smokes pot in bed.
          It's difficult to imagine that Kubrick was thinking Woody Allen when he conceived Eyes Wide Shut, though. In Boogie Nights, porn magnate Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) dreams of making an adult film so compelling that the raincoated gentlemen evenly spaced throughout the theater will stay in their seats for the full feature, instead of ducking out early. Word is that Stanley Kubrick had a similar vision. Perhaps Eyes Wide Shut is the result. If so, then it is compelling enough to sit through once, just a little transparent for the second time around.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

L a k e P l a c i d

unexpendable crewmen

In Lake Placid staying alive is easier than you'd think, with a 35 ft. crocodile prowling the waters. All you have to do is talk: none of the characters with significant dialogue are killed, though they sorely need to be. Viewers sometimes bemoan the conventions of the horror- movie--all the little faux pas you can make that get you dispatched: investigating noises, having sex, refusing to see the 'truth,' separating yourself from the group, etc. Just as distressing, though, is when there's no justice at all, when those genre-taboos are breached and the transgressor doesn't get his or her desserts. This is Lake Placid, set in King-country, where the ecosystem's been seriously thrown out of whack by a crocodile big enough to take a grizzly bear out in one bite. What's a grizzly doing in Maine? It doesn't matter. There's crocodiles too. The lake isn't even called Lake Placid.
          It all starts with the embittered sheriff (Brendan Gleeson) trading quips with a scuba-geared ecologist, setting the bickering tone for the rest of the movie. Yes this ecologist dies and dies ugly. Yes, a tooth is recovered from his corpse which effortlessly attracts another game warden-type (Bill Pullman), a museum curator running away from a broken relationship in the city (Bridget Fonda), and one Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), croc specialist extrordinaire. The sheriff is already there, grumbling in place, acting as reluctant guide. Not a bad opening sequence, all in all, and the group dynamic Steve Miner (everything from Wonder Years to H20) kickstarts is distracting enough that when the crocodile finally begins snatching the supporting cast away, it initially catches us off guard. However, this group dynamic is also what pulls the movie down for the death roll: all the one-liners incessantly traded back and forth about the city, the country, the bugs, men women and love, etc, finally just get in the way, or, only succeed in establishing the movie firmly enough on land that the crocodile, for all it's technical splendor and appetite for expendable crewmen, is upstaged.
          In addition to these four core characters there's a little old lady who lives on the lake, makes cooing sounds to herself, and has a soft spot for the crocodile and a little dab of profanity for everyone else. Typically, she'd be the token comic foil for the movie, rounding it out, but in Lake Placid, slapstick is already part of camp life. Brendan Gleeson's sheriff falls into every crocodile trap Hector Cyr sets. Which isn't their only point of contention: while the sheriff wants to kill the beast, Cyr wants to swim with it. It's a mystical thing with him. Soon enough everyone has to take sides, switch sides, sit on the fence, all that.
          Which is to say we're not in the water. Which is to say we never get the sense that these characters are in any real danger. Who would deliver their lines if they were dead?
          On the plus side, there is an animatronic cow suspended from a helicopter, as well as a surprise at the big kill scene. Think Anaconda, but don't accidentally compare the two. In Anaconda people die, suggesting that the monster might actually win this time. Lake Placid doesn't even flirt with that. We root for the croc not because of the amount of meat it can grind per frame, but because, when pitted against the seeming invulnerability of a good-natured crew in the vital process of bonding, it's the underdog.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

A u s t i n P o w e r s I I

in the absence of shag

In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, set in the 90s, Austin's arch-nemesis Dr. Evil is laughably stuck in the 60s, demanding a million dollars to ransom the world, etc. Now it's the second installment, though, and, to keep it interesting, Mike Myers has turned it all around: back in his own time--the 60s--Dr. Evil is now laughably stuck in the 90s. Meaning he now wants to ransom the world for a billion or so dollars, which is just as preposterous as his 90s ransom demand. Which is precisely what Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is all about: temporal dislocation. It's why we love (or hate) Austin--via some fantastic cryogenics, he's managed to preserve a 60's mindset wholly unsullied by the 70s and 80s. But, to return to the little binary set that propels both movies (Dr. Evil/Austin Powers), while this childlike quality is light-hearted and attractive in Austin, in Dr. Evil it's a character flaw. Granted, a lighthearted, entertaining one, but still, more or less the reason Austin defeats him in International Man of Mystery.
          The Spy Who Shagged Me isn't quite so balanced. This time the binary set of Austin/Evil falls apart a bit, with Dr. Evil more or less taking the lead role, leaving Austin and Agent Shagwell (Heather Graham) to their series of hijinks etc. Perhaps this is a result of the introduction of Fat Bastard (Mike Myers again), Dr. Evil's lackey, or perhaps Evil's Mini-Me skewed everything somehow. Whatever the case, with Austin and Evil no longer counterbalancing each other narratively, the mojo that propelled us through the first installment is somewhat diluted, and all we have to pull us through then is the slapstick, the self-conscious intertextuality, the in-jokes.
          But there is plenty of all three.
          Maybe even too much. Granted, Dr. Evils' Puff-Daddy intermezzo is one of the highlights of the movie, something we can cue into, and there's Austin mistaking a stool-sample for coffee, even Agent Shagwell pulling an Austin from International Man of Mystery (sleeping with the enemy), but it doesn't all cohere. Instead of going constantly forward as a 'fantastic' comedy absolutely needs to, The Spy Who Shagged Me sidesteps again and again into un-plot-related SNL-ish sketches. Dr. Evil's Puff-Daddy intermezzo is a case in point. But , again, these sketches are entertaining (especially Will Ferrel's Monty Python take-off), they just make The Spy Who Shagged Me a fundamentally different type of movie than International Man of Mystery, which used the sketches as plot devices.
          In spite of these narrative difficulties, however, The Spy Who Shagged Me does redeem itself, both with the frame it sets itself in (Jerry Springer episodes) and with a wonderful little device it uses never to say 'penis' when 'penis' really needs to be said. Just as in the closing scene of International Man of Mystery the naked Austin and Vanessa Kensington's (Elizabeth Hurley) R-rated parts are always hidden at the last possible moment, so in The Spy Who Shagged Me--via wordplay, editing, and cameos (Woody, Willie, etc)--'penis' is never said in the proper context, though it's what everyone's talking about. This is Austin Powers, after all, and, while we may not expect narrative rigor, we can can count on extended joke-sequences such as these, handled with that signature Mike Myers touch.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

A s t r o n a u t's W i f e

not a space odyssey

The X-Files taught us that alien colonization won't be loud like Independence Day, but insipient, like Body Snatchers, Puppet Masters, all that. More They Live than War of the the Worlds. The trailer establishes all this with minimal effort, too, as it's already conventional knowledge. And we are hungry for it, or something like it. It's been two summers now since Contact made the aliens benevolent, paternal, essentially erasing the (ir-)rational fear of the Alien series. Which is to say it's high time to give those aliens fangs again. The Astronaut's Wife does just that.
          Or, to be more specific, it gives NASA pilot Spencer Armacost ('Texan' Johnny Depp, a long way from 21 Jumpstreet, bit closer to Elm) fangs, via a low-orbit close encounter. And of course no one can see those fangs for most of the movie. His wife Jillian (Charlize Thiron) has her suspicions, but, luckily for Spencer, Jillian is an ex-mental patient, so is thus easy to convince that it's all hallucination and paranoia brought on by her pregnancy. And there's even the suggestion that it might all just be paranoia. But then there wouldn't be any special effects. To writer/director Rand Ravich's credit, however, he is able to milk a lot of tension from an otherwise subdued movie by keeping the range of Spencer's suprahuman abilities more or less under wraps until the closing frames, a bit of dramatically-effective concealment.
          But Spencer's not the title-character here. Jillian is. Along with their marriage, which is so ideal for the first few minutes that it has to be doomed ('unmade in heaven'). This is something of a non-traditional approach, though, putting the wife--the ostensible victim here--in the leading role. Typically, it's the alien's pursuer who gets the screentime, which gives the movie license to use all the cop/criminal conventions in space etc, but The Astronaut's Wife isn't Predator, is a bit more low-key than that. Which is to say it has to rely on a whole nother set of conventions. Specifically, those Polanski hammered out once and for all with Rosemary's Baby. Chereze Thiron even has a schoolboy Mia Farrow haircut and a husband who spends his days at the office. And everyone who shares her suspicions is summarily removed. It's all about isolation. The only difference is that instead of giving birth to the supernatural, Jillian may be giving birth to the extraterrestrial. Not the 2001 kind of extraterrestrial, though, but something less the benign-infant, more our replacement. Again, it's how aliens get a terrestrial foothold: hybridization. And don't think Starman here. Think Species.
          Jillian does. But too, she has a little more of that final-girl resolve than Rosemary did. Very Jamie Lee Curtis, except instead of intense action and longindying screams we get intense dialogue and longindying stares. Which is a bit of a change. The stand-off as opposed to the shoot-em-up. This is a drama, after all, nevermind the alien overtones. It's about trust in marriage, what the breakover point is. What will convince Jillian she's not losing it, that Spencer is in fact listening to the coded-static radio transmissions we know from Contact, Arrival. And it's all fairly strong up until then, until her convincing. And then, inside of two minutes, it simply falls apart, uses the same cheap trick Fallen used to 'surprise' us in the closing frames. And the thing is, there was such a better ending within reach. In all The Thing incarnations there's always the distinct possibility early on that these people have just been cooped up too long. Instead of expanding on that, using it for the ending, The Astronaut's Wife takes the easy way out, the grand way out, the Hollywood way out. Shoots for the disturbing Twilight Zone ending and doesn't quite make escape velocity, has to settle for the typical, when it had the potential to be so much more.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

1 3 t h W a r r i o r

antonio the arabian viking

A work (novel, movie, whatever) only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it's been part of conventional knowledge for so long that the audience gets all the little in-jokes, can appreciate the asides, the irony, etc. To look at it another way, a work only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it's been overdeveloped in so many other directions that burrowing into the myth of its own origins is about all that's left. This is what Shakespeare in Love does for Romeo and Juliet, what Love and War tries to do for Farewell to Arms. This is also what the 13th Warrior tries to do for Beowulf--to tell it from the POV of a minor/forgotten participant in the 'actual' event, of which Beowulf is a loose retelling. The thing is, however, Shakespeare in Love had the advantage of coming right on the heels of 199x's Romeo + Juliet, meaning the play was still fresh in our minds, we were already piqued for a little more iambic pentameter, please. The 13th Warrior doesn't have such an advantage: disregarding the recent sci-fiBeowulf (not released in America),there's been nothing to leave us hungry for Old English, mead, all that.
         Writer/director Michael Crichton (along with Diehard's John McTiernan) was likely aware of this poor timing, too, so, for the big screen, this adaptation of his historical novel Eaters of the Dead draws more on, say, the enthematic swordplay of Braveheart, the 'good fight' against-all-odds feel of Starship Troopers, and, further back, all the Dungeons & Dragons-type movies (Flesh and Blood(1985), Excaliber, etc.) which also manage to assemble a rag-tag group into some honorable world-saving campaign.
         In The 13th Warrior, that rag-tag group is composed of twelve Viking volunteers, plus the initially-reluctant exiled Arabian poet Ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas). The world this group has to save is a village in Scandinavia. What they have to save the village from are creatures of legend--eaters of the dead. Which is to say transgressors of one of our most fundamental taboos: cannibalism. And, when fighting cannibals, you're automatically the good guy, which is how Crichton manages to erase any raping and pillaging Eric the Viking-type associations, making the campaigners honorable. In addition, though--or, to really establish the bad guys' inhumanity--the bad guys are never really personified, which makes Ibn Fadlen and Co.'s series of skirmishes with them impersonal, as it would be with a mass of animals. And this isn't necessarily a weakness, but more of an identification trick: the bad guys are as dark and mysterious to us as they are to Ibn Fadlan and Co. It does have a flipside, though: when the battle gets pared down to the individual level, it doesn't have that same finality you get with, say, Conan and Thulsa-Doom. Meaning we're not sure it's over when it is, in fact, over.
         If that was the only flaw, The 13th Warrior could possibly be a great movie. But there's more. There's the castle-intrigue in the opening sequence, which establishes so little that it's never mentioned again. There's Ibn Fadlan's love interest in the village they're saving, which feels tacked on. There's Antonio Banderas playing a devout Muslim. There's some unwisely foregrounded translation difficulty (Old English to Latin, then Latin to Arabian, which is cinematically rendered in English, etc) which slows things down considerably. On the plus side, though, there is a lot of flashy AD&D-type sword and horseplay, there's an ancient woman who talks with Yoda-syntax ('Seek you me?'), and there's even something of a transformation in Ibn Fadlan, which allows him to put pen to paper again, write that epic. More than all that, though, what The 13th Warrior leaves you with is a distinct nostalgia, not for a period in history that's lost, but for a period in history that never really was, at least as it's presented on-screen. Which is to say it does get us to buy its illusion, if only for a while.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

M y s t e r y M e n

a league of their own

The trailer didn't lie: Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) has captured Captain Amazing (wholesome Greg Kinnear), leaving a superhero-sized void in the skies of Champion City. Enter Mr Furious, the Bowler, the Shoveler, Blue Raja & Co. (Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafalo, William H. Macy, and Hank Azaria) to fill that void and save the city. All slapstick aside, this is Kinka Usher's Mystery Men, a send-up of all the Supermans and Batmans and Spawns and Phantoms which have been taking themselves too seriously for too long now. Granted, The Mask dealt with the whole superhero shtick in a similarly tongue-in-cheek manner, but it didn't go nearly as far as Mystery Men. Or, it was comic, but its comedy was confined to the scenic level; the backbone of the superhero movie was left intact (i.e., the target audience--children--was conservatively not overshot).
          Not so with Mystery Men.
          Mystery Men does to the superhero movie what Rustler's Rhapsody did to the western: reduces it to the level of ridiculousness while still retaining that same mass appeal. Yes, it does still have all the flash and gadgetry of the Batman series, but--and this is important--the standby notions of good and evil have been called into question. And in a particularly clever manner: the hero no longer fights evil just because s/he's good, but because it's good publicity to fight evil. And good publicity translates immediately into corporate sponsorship, endorsement opportunities, star treatment. But it's not easy being a superhero, either. You have to worry about staying in character, sticking to a theme, matching your gloves with your boots, getting the right publicist, and--as in Captain Amazing's case which sets things in motion--you have to worry especially about having an arch-nemesis left to fight. Batman had The Joker, Superman had Lex Luthor, etc. As Mystery Men opens, though, Champion City is pretty much free of arch-villains; Captain Amazing has been a little too amazing for his own good, evidently.
          This is remedied soon enough, by him, even, which, once it all turns around on him, leaves room for the wannabees to fumble around and save the day. And this wannabee contingent is the one brilliant aspect of the movie, simply because it's so logical: in a world where superheroes wear Pepsi armbands, there will of course be hero-types a few rungs down, longing to wear that armband as well, longing to save the city so as to get a little airtime. But not every wannabee is a hero, either. Some are just grown men wearing tutus. And some, like Mr Invisible, can only be invisible when no one's looking at them.
          And the villains are nearly as fantastic (disco gangs etc.), if a tad more traditional: they seem to still want to take over the city just because that's what villains do. Which is something of a weakness, in that their motivations are no longer the inverse of the heroes' (commercially-oriented) motivations, which is to say that the good guys and the bad guys no longer counterbalance each other. Even in Rustler's Rhapsody there is at least that balance. It lends a wholeness to the proceedings, a wholeness missing from Mystery Men. It goes deeper, though. While the sub-arch-nemeses are equally as theme-loyal etc as the heroes here, the arch-arch nemesis--Casanova Frankenstein--is, aside from his wonderful name, wholly typical.
          To return to Rustler's Rhapsody again, in it the villain achieves balance with the hero by being equally eccentric-by hiring a good-guy gunman to be his bad guy. Which is a fitting turnaround. Mystery Men has no such built-in turnaround, but instead relies on the individual comic ability of its cast, which, while significant, doesn't quite make up for careless writing. Too, and not dealt with, at the end of the movie these Mystery Men are in the same predicament Captain Amazing opened with: though they have airtime now, they don't have anything to do with that airtime, as they've defeated the one bad guy around. Not for long is the idea, though, right? Which, in spite of itself, brings Mystery Men full circle, transforms it into yet another comic-book superhero movie, albeit with more laughs than usual.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

B o w f i n g e r

uncanned

Steve Martin is at his best when his character is trying to sell something not really worth buying. See his silver-tongued evangelist in Leap of Faith, a character both reprehensible and sympathetic, the endearing used car salesman. Eddie Murphy's at his best when allowed to do variations on his always-one-step-ahead -of-you-and talking-twice-as-fast Axel Foley. In Bowfinger--written by Steve Martin--both of these actors get to be at their best: Steve Martin as the title-character--Hollywood outsider/ occasional filmmaker Bowfinger--and Eddie Murphy as Kit Ramsey, eccentric action star. And, importantly, they get to be at their best in their own scenes. As with Dinero and Pacino in Heat, Bowfinger and Kit Ramsey are hardly ever on-screen together, meaning heavyweights Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy don't get in each other's way, which gives each whatever creative room they might need.
          Too, though, there's Eddie Murphy's other character, Jiff, the lookalike stand-in Bowfinger recruits when Kit Ramsey refuses to star in Bowfinger's picture "Chubby Rain." Jiff isn't a variation on Axel Foley. More a variation on the Jerry Lewis-type character Eddie Murphy's been playing of late. Because Jiff isn't Eddie Murphy at his best with Jiff, he and Steve Martin's Bowfinger can be on-screen together. There's even room for Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, Jamie Kennedy, Terrence Stamp (not in his The Hunger persona) some walk-throughs by Robert Downey Jr, etc.
          Holding them all together too is a near-brilliant writing job: the premise of Bowfinger is that if Kit Ramsey won't be in Chubby Rain willingly, then he'll be in it unwillingly--or, unwittingly, via Bowfinger's cast approaching him on the street and running lines, all of this surreptitiously caught on film. If left at this, Bowfinger would be merely clever, but then Steve Martin takes it one step further, makes Kit Ramsey's 'alien' paranoia dramatically dovetail with the script for Chubby Rain, which in turn makes kit Ramsey more and more dependent upon his 'therapist' at MindHead (a thinly veiled Scientology), which is exactly the kind of domino-action a comedy needs.
          And then there's Frank Oz directing, doing everything right, working in probably 80% of the exposition without dialogue, as in the Rockford Files opening, where, by the time the camera gets to Bowfinger, we already know him and his type: that, because he's existed at the fringe, never succeeded, he thus deserves to succeed. Bowfinger is, after all, a Cinderella-story, a structure familiar enough to us that Steve Martin can get a little fantastic with it and not lose us altogether.
          However familiar, though, the structure and the writing can't quite hide the occasionally inconsistent humor, the absurdist moments when someone made the decision to go for the compulsive laugh when this isn't a movie about the compulsive laugh. It's more akin to Rushmoore, or, talking Steve Martin, LA Story. Also painfully apparent is how unnecessary Jiff is to the development of Bowfinger. Yes, a clown character was needed there, but there's no reason for Eddie Murphy to play two roles for it. Granted, it looked good in the trailer, it worked in the first Austin Powers and it was what Dead Ringers was all about, but more often than not, one actor with two roles is either a glitzy hindrance or overcorrection for a weak story. And Steve Martin didn't write a weak story here, meaning Jiff just slows things down, or, provides the plausible excuse for the plot to lurch forward when it really had enough momentum that it was going to lurch regardless. Other than that, though, Bowfinger is about as close to flawless as it gets, right down to the spoof-ending (every martial arts movie), which, while eerily reminiscent of a similar scene in Half-Baked, is, like everything else in Bowfinger, somehow just a little better.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

T h e M u s e

cameo parade

Through Get Shorty we learned that to make it in Hollywood, you have to be not of Hollywood. That way all your 'foreign' methods of doing things will be just new enough to work. The west coast was a cakewalk for Chili Palmer and his in your face, loan-shark approach. It's similarly easy for Sarah Little (Sharon Stone), the muse of Albert Brooks' The Muse, not to be confused with Mighty Aphrodite, though the reflective brand of humor in both targets more or less the same audience and both are organized around the continual dilemmas of a neurotic/sardonic male lead and his associations with a mysterious women. Unlike Mighty Aphrodite, however, this is LA, meaning that Lorenzo Lamas is in the diner, Rob Reiner's at the aquarium, James Cameron is at the doorstep, Martin Scorcese's desperately seeking Starbuck's. As in The Player, too, this long string of cameos is just part of the behind-the-scenes- of-Hollywood Hollywood movie, pulling back the curtain on the machinery which makes the magic.
          What The Muse does to that machine, though, is make it magic as well. Sarah Little claims to be the daughter of Zeus, you see. Which makes her significantly more foreign than Chili Palmer (Olympia vs. Florida). And more than claims: she has all the big-name producers and directors at her beck and call, everyone dependent upon her for inspiration. Enter 'past-his-prime' screenwriter Steven Phillips, (Albert Brooks, same character as always, different name) just let go by a major studio because he's supposedly lost his edge. Edge or no, though, he has a family to support, meaning soon enough he's just desperate enough to believe in earthly deities, divine manifestations, whatever it takes to get his 'edge' back, make him a commodity again.
          The thing is, though--as he finds out--muses are high-maintenance, requiring ideal conditions to sleep, midnight salads, spontaneous daytrips, limousines etc, all of which harry Steven to the point of exhaustion, strain his marriage in the usual, comical ways, all that. Which is satisfying. To add to the mix he even has an advisor, Jack (Jeff Bridges, not playing Jeff Bridges, which, in a cameo-heavy show, is initially confusing), who's also dependent on Sarah for inspiration. In a movie founded in myth, though, of course the main character will have an advisor. And of course Jeff Bridges pulls it off with grace; his tennis-serving scene is one of the two high-points of it all.
          The second high point has to be at a cocktail party, when Brooks really lets go with his signature ability to spool dialogue line on top of line, and somehow keep it all at least peripherally pertinent. Every time you think the back and forth is over, it's not, which is definitely his strength. It's why everyone quotes Broadcast News. But The Muse isn't just about underbreath conversation (though it does start slow and hushed, until Sarah gets on-screen). As expected, it's a touch intellectual as well, even going so far as to toy with the foundational myth-structure, or, to foreground what's usually repressed in these divine-intervention mythic cycles: the host/parasite dynamic. The way Sarah is at least as dependent upon Steven as Steven is dependent upon her, which is something of a wry comment upon religion, perhaps, or at least upon a culture always looking over its shoulder to Greece. But quiet enough not to get in the way, too.
          This is, after all, a movie about the moviemakers, or, the realization of a screenplay about a screenwriter. It has to hold itself to a higher, more self-conscious standard. Is it Skin Deep or Barton Fink, though, right? Well, it has elements of both--even a surprise Coen-ish ending, minus the John Goodman serial killer--but the laugh-a-minute pacing pushes it perhaps a little more in John Ritter's direction, which isn't at all a bad thing.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

S t i g m a t a

critical mass

Stigmata was marketed as horror, when it's not. It's a religious thriller. There is a difference. Whereas (good) horror startles and disturbs you, the religious thriller unseats you, unsettles you. Doesn't make you leave the light on. Think Omen, Exorcist, not Prophecy. All the same though, Stigmata is a bit more upbeat than Omen or Exorcist, which translates into less unsettling (more reassuring). But the dramatics are all there.
          It opens with Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne), the Vatican's miracle-debunker, doing his job in Brazil. And of course he stumbles onto the real thing. And of course no one believes him. Cut to Philadelphia, where a certain Brazilian artifact has found Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette), who, as the trailer's already told us, starts manifesting stigmata. Kiernan comes to investigate, which involves the mandatory initial doubting session followed soon enough by eventual conversion. All of this is typical, right down to Kiernan, the scientist who's a preacher who's a scientist who's Damian Karras, Doubting Thomas etc.
          What isn't typical, though, is legion. First, there's the Romeo + Juliet-ish camera/editing work, which lends an MTV quality to everything-fast-paced, high-decibel, undeniable. Second, there's something like a social indictment/imperative buried in all the techno-distraction: that the church has become more important than religion. Third, there's no choir-singing whatsoever, which is odd in a movie so consciously derivative that it hides secrets in photographs (qua Omen), pancakes make-up on its Linda Blair character, has doves exploding into the sky left and right, all that.
          It does work, though, for about three-quarters of its runtime (before Rome comes to Philadelphia, with no brotherly love). Especially effective are the lengths writer Tom Lazarus goes to to establish that Frankie is definitely not worthy of the stigmata, so something else must be going on. Something is, as Kiernan--the ex-communicated detective of Stigmata--slowly finds out. And it's more or less the same story as The Name of the Rose, or, more recently, pi: there exists somewhere out there a lost book (in pi, number) which can change the world. Meaning the people who are happy with the world as it is don't want that book being discovered.
          Effective also is the structuring of Stigmata. Like Se7en, which is structured around the seven deadly sins, Stigmata is structured around the five wounds of Jesus Christ during crucifixion, only here each wound ups the ante via pushing Frankie that much closer to death, meaning she's a victim in need of saving. Not quite as effective is Kiernan's occasional ignorance, when he asks obvious questions for us about the gospels and such, which is supposed to function as narrative exposition but instead makes his character a little less believable each time. Too--and even though a token explanation is offered--there seems to be no reason for Frankie to talk in demon-voices, tell you lies, fake flames, etc. Or, the only viable explanation isn't within the story but in what we expect: the creepy dissonance of Patricia Arquette talking with a male voice. It is unsettling, it just doesn't quite fit in a movie that tries to be so loyal to the academic side of things.
          Twice as unsettling as the demon-voices, though, is an early shot of a woman and baby and a lot of traffic, which is where Stigmata is strongest: in director Rupert Wainwright's meticulously composed audio-visual moment, when he's got all the religious iconography standing small yet important against a modern backdrop. It doesn't quite make us want to go to church as Omen did, or leave us feeling dirty as Exorcist did, but all the same, Stigmata does leave us with questions, which at least feel a lot like doubts, which is what the religious thriller uses to unsettle us. Even the religious thrillers with MTV appeal.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

S t i r o f E c h o e s

the 6½th sense

Take Chinatown as the archetypical detective movie. In it a private investigator has to reconstruct some crime bit by bit. And the crime of course happened before the movie started. And everyone tries to steer him off the case. And it all gets real personal real fast, to the point where the detective's need to know is held in balance against his need to live. These conventional developments we expect from a hard-boiled detective movie. What we don't expect them from so much, though, is horror, which is part of the appeal of director David Koepp's Stir of Echoes (based on Richard Matheson's book)--that, although it has dead people walking the halls, is nevertheless structured after the traditional detective movie, even down to the opening, where Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon)--private-investigator-like--is minding his own business, just trying to scratch out a decent living, when a 'strange woman' enters and turns his world inside-out.
          Or, specifically, via an overextended Big Lebowski-ish hypnosis session, she accidentally flips a switch in his psyche, which transforms him into a 'receiver,' which translates into the ability to see dead people walking around, to catch glimpses of the past, the future, all that. But of course Witzky never quite sees it all in detail (qua Blink), which is tantalizing enough to compel him to reconstruct bit by bit whatever 'crime' occurred before the movie opened. Think Poltergeist; it's the same story with a tighter cast and better music (or, it's 1996's Spectre with good direction). And his 'investigation' unfolds conventionally, with all the appropriate setbacks, distractions, isolations, etc. He even gets some help from his son (Zachary David Cope), who's a 'natural' receiver, not unlike Haley Joel Osment from Sixth Sense, though Zachary David Cope is no Haley Joel Osment.
          Where Stir of Echoes breaks from the traditional detective movie set-up is that the 'detective' here actually has a home life--nominally pregnant wife and prescient son--which serves to heighten what's at stake for him here. And it is effective in that regard, though at times the rounds of marital conflict and reconciliation seem a bit forced, more dramatically necessary than developmentally. This home-life, however, does give Witzky room to complain that his life is too 'ordinary,' which, in a horror-movie, is another way of asking for it. Soon enough everything's all but ordinary, and Witzky only wants to close the Doors of Perception which Jim Morrison wanted open so badly in The Doors.
          And it's easy to understand why he wants them closed: the undead he can see now are easily the summer's scariest, even moreso than Sixth Sense's, this due largely to how Koepp renders undead movement--both fast and contained, as in Jakob's Ladder, which is for some reason primally disturbing. Which is of course exactly what we pay for--to be scared. In that sense, Stir of Echoes satisfies, and then some. However. For a while, when the external pressure Witzky's facing is at low ebb, Stir of Echoes tries to maintain the tension via the undead doing all the typical haunting things--turning out lights, standing around every corner, etc, which doesn't fit with how the undead in the reality of Stir of Echoes are 'supposed' to act. But oh well. It happens in Romero too, whom Koepp unsubtly references. Aside from that, and in spite of an ill-advised (see: non-catchy) title, Stir of Echoes is high-caliber horror, the kind that stays with you a little longer than you really want it to.

(c)Stephen G. Jones

L o v e o f t h e G a m e

mr baseball

The trick in a movie with a title like Love of the Game is to, by the end of the movie, redefine 'game' so that it refers not so much to sports but to the main character's life situation. Thus winning or losing the game means a little more. It's a common enough trick, from Rocky to Happy Gilmore to Varsity Blues. Or, talking Kevin Costner, Tin Cup. Which is to say Love of the Game is, as the title also suggests, a love story, or, more specifically, a love triangle--aging superstar Billy Chapel (Costner), freelance writer Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston), and America's favorite already-romanticized (Field of Dreams) past-time.
          None of this is unexpected. What is something of a surprise, though--for those who didn't read Michael Shaara's novel--is how Love of the Game isn't structured over the length of a season, as with Bull Durham, but instead uses the last game of Billy Chapel's season as a springboard into everything that's gone before. Meaning yes, the bulk of the movie happens in the movie's past. It's all flashbacks, occasioned by pained expressions from the dugout, reached through soft dissolves, all that, which has the effect of gradually making this 'last' game more and more important. Or, of making us realize how important it is. Which is all good and fine.
          The problem with non-linear approaches like this, however, is that--unless every flashback is both a surprise and absolutely necessary narrative exposition, qua Tarrantino--it can get old real fast. As in repetitive. As in every scar and every comment has an explanation. In Love of the Game, they're all explained, which is a little bit of overkill. And you can tell when the explanations are coming, too, which doesn't help any, and doesn't do anything to subtract from the occasionally nauseous levels of nostalgia already circulating. But then it a movie about baseball. And it is Kevin Costner.
          And it is--in spite of all this 'ghosts of Christmas past' feel--a dramatically sound movie: the 'story of them' (Billy Chapel and Jane Aubrey) is a strong little story, with no real bad guys, lots of bad luck, all the things we've liked since When Harry Met Sally, Forget Paris, all those. And this 'story of them' does catch up with the present-story very nicely (see: without intruding), in a way that gives us no real choice but to care, to--as with any date-movie--beg for the happy ending. However, unlike most date movies, Love of the Game doesn't wholly give itself away until the closing frames.
          But of course Billy and Jane aren't the only two characters here in search of restoration. Everyone in the movie wants to be redeemed, and, like dominos, they more or less are, which is a little too picture-perfect for comfort. Which isn't to say you're not happy for the minor characters when they get 'redeemed,' it just feels a little cheap immediately afterwards. Perhaps it's meant to be all about the moment, though, in which case it's a success.
          The thing is, though, there are so many moments, better than two hours of them. Which would be fine is Love of the Game were epic in scope, like, say, Dances with Wolves, Waterworld, orThe Postman, but it's not. Or, it tries hard to be more sweeping than it is. Meaning it's a little inflated. And this simply because every picture in it has a story. But so be it. It is satisfying in other ways. There is a definite Unforgiven-feel, of the aging hero proving himself in high style, which America so loves. And there is a seriously magical moment when director Sam Raimi cues Bob Seger when Bob Seger is exactly what's needed, which manages to keep us from dismissing the rest of the movie, on the off-chance that there might be another magical moment like that, more chances to cry. Love of the Game is full of them.

(c)Stephen G. Jones