Reviews

There are still moments of greatness in "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break", but, by this time, they are few and far between. Fields is great in an early sequence arguing with a fat diner waitress, and his jumping out the airplane window is priceless. But I think even Fields must have known he'd had it by this point, and the most telling sign is the inclusion (at Fields' insistence) of the dreadful Gloria Jean. When heavy hitters like Fields insist on being portrayed on-screen as 'lovable', the game's over. If I never hear her insipid Bavarian yodeling again, it'll be too soon. Some people will love the utter insanity of the movie script that Fields tries to pitch to Hollywood hotshot Franklin Pangborn; I thought it dragged on a bit. A sometimes funny, but kind of sad epitaph to one of the world's greatest comedians. R.I.P. Uncle Bill!

In 1965, a movie called "The Loved One" claimed to have "something in it guaranteed to offend everyone". Since then, numerous movies have tried to claim that honor, pushing the envelope further and further into offensive territory. "Pretty Persuasion" appears to be the latest entrant for the title.

The movie is centered around the activities of three high-school girls, mostly Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood), who try to entrap a hated teacher of theirs into an imagined sex scandal. But to talk about this movie in terms of plot is a joke; the squeaky contraption is merely a device for the filmmakers to use sexual perversion, ethnic insults and the like as their ticket to making the greatest "something in it guaranteed to offend everyone" movie of all time. But what's offensive here is not the slurs and the insults, but the incompetence of the filmmakers. The only character here that's fully fleshed out is Wood's. She plays her angel-bitch role for all it's worth, and she is tremendous in it. But the other characters have no real identity and feel like accessories to the so-called plot, which is crudely slapped together. The only driving force here is Wood, who dominates the screen in nearly every scene she's in. Only James Woods, playing her loudmouth racist father, can even get close to the performance she gives. He's insanely funny, with little more than a slew of vulgarities and ethnic stereotype wisecracks passing for dialogue.

But the story, ultimately, is negligible and poorly executed, complete with a series of neo-Tarantinian flashbacks and flash-forwards (which seems all the rage these days). The three girls are set up in a dynamic that's meant, I guess, to mimic the dynamic of the girls in "Clueless". Elizabeth Harnois as Wood's best friend is a neutral presence on screen, at best, with a wordless girl from India (Adi Schnall) cast as the outsider. This is the most peculiar character of all- she trails Wood around for most of the movie, but it's not clear what kind of person she is or how she feels about anything, except a humble gratitude at being allowed to hang with the popular girls. When she testifies in court - falsely - that the teacher "touched her boobs", it rings false, since we have no idea of her motivation, or, for that matter, the way she's dressed in the movie (traditional Indian garb), if she even has boobs. When, disgraced, she blows her brains out off-camera, leaving only a pithy message on a blackboard, it's laughingly bad. One minute the movie is toiling in depravity, the next it's straining for depth? What's up with that?

"Pretty Persuasion" tries to leave us with a message, but it hasn't earned the right to preach to anyone, because it hasn't earned the right to satire. This isn't satire; it's just gross-out humor for the masses. This movie is Clueless, all right, but in this case, the adjective more accurately describes the filmmakers.

I don't think Atom Egoyan's "Where the Truth Lies" is a very likable movie. It's admirable, and it looks good, and a lot of the budget went into details and style that are about right, but the story just leaves me cold.

Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth star as (its unclear to me) either Martin and Lewis or a chintzy answer to Martin and Lewis (the same way Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall would be a chintzy answer to Nichols and May). The distinction is important, because why would Alison Lohman's character idolize these two bums unless they were considered big time. This is a flaw in the screenplay - I don't think Egoyan does a very good job of writing the stage material for Morris and Collins. It's a cheap club act, and I guess that's the idea, but it feels out of whack with the pedestal Egoyan puts them on in relation to the story. (After all, who ever idolized Charlie and Mitzi?)

The story, about a crusading young female biographer trying to get the true story of what happened the night a deal girl was found in their hotel room bathtub, has a lot of labyrinthine twists and turns, not all of which can be followed by the average viewer. You can't even go back in your head later and put it together in your mind, the way you can with other confusing thrillers. The performances are fine - Kevin Bacon stands out as the Jerry Lewis-ish rotten human being, which I believe, is an accurate depiction - but the characters are not well drawn and it's difficult to tell what they're meant to be. We see Alison Lohman's character taking a hard line with her bosses at the publishing house on editorial control, but then she allows herself to be placed in sexual situations with both Morris and Collins in ways that are totally implausible to anything a reputable journalist would ever get involved in. Some plot threads don't make sense: why is the publishing house so worried about Lanny Morris' competing book, when it's clear he has no intention of discussing the mystery of the dead girl? - the central event associated with Morris and Collins (and it must have been the central event - their act was so crummy).

The film does have a distinctive, evocative look. Egoyan does a good job of capturing the time and mood - from the hokey naiveté of the 1960's to the run-down glamour of the disillusioned seventies. The colors are bright in the Morris and Collins heyday - and in the sequences with the dead girl's mother, then muted into autumnal shades for the later years, maroons and walnut browns. But all this backstage whiplash is really wearing - it's orgy after orgy and orgy, loyalties are discarded as easily as clothing. Where The Truth Lies certainly isn't a bad movie, but it may well be the death of show-biz yet.

I jest, of course. I guess I didn't dislike Quintet as much as most people did, although it is quite an ordeal to sit through. The interesting thing about it is that, unusual as it is, I felt like I'd seen it a thousand times before. In various ways, it strongly suggests Rollerball, Soylent Green, Walking Tall, and even Satyricon, another movie I didn't like. It's Fellini on ice, you might say. It's amazingly trite for an Altman picture - a distant world when everyone's nuts except the hero. And the mano-a-mano stuff between Paul Newman and Vittorio Gassman at the end is right out of Saturday afternoon matinée. The plot points aren't clear in any way until the end when Paul Newman sort of sums them up, but then Fernando Rey tosses it all out by replacing the logic with a philosophical explanation of life, similar to the one John Houseman gave in Rollerball. The music and sets both fall into the category of lavish condemnation. Well, at least I was indoors when I watched it.

This movie got a lot of undeserved juice from Roger Ebert's four-star review, and it's just awful. I've liked some of Toback's other work, particularly "Fingers", but this thing feels like a really boring home movie on autopilot. It's purportedly about the non-adventures of this bratty little rich girl (Neve Campbell) and her no-account boyfriend (Fred Weller) and, ultimately, their scheme to seduce a rich Italian count (Dominic Chianese) out of some major money. But it takes some time to get to this plot point, and up till then, the movie just meanders in a cinema-verite sort of way that makes it seem like Toback can use it as an excuse for the picture being a dud. It's like he's saying, "Well, whatever we shot, we shot. I can't be held responsible for the randomness of events."

The movie goes from Neve Campbell meeting one person on the street to another in what I'm sure Toback would insist was "character development", but it's done in such a way that it all rings false. It's scripted without being scripted. In another words, it's contrived. When Neve's college professor (played by Toback) explains what he thinks is going on with Neve and her head games, you can almost hear the gears locking in the background. It might be the most mechanical ad-libbed sequence in history.

Toback's use of celebrity here is also peculiar. The Mike Tyson cameo is pretty funny; he actually gives the movie a momentary spark. But when Toback has Neve recognizing a bit actress like Lori Singer on the street like she's Jane Fonda, I wonder what world he's living in. This whole "expository" part feels like padding, like Toback didn't have enough legit material to go around. Then, when the action shifts to the "scheme" in the final twenty minutes, it's good - it's the best part of the film. But the effect is a little jarring. Toback goes from a lazy, dawdling atmosphere to a sequence that's scripted tighter than Abbott & Costello's Who's on First, and it just doesn't work. The two forms don't really mesh, and you get the feeling Toback only had twenty good minutes in him to begin with - the rest is like a warm-up, like running in place to get the circulation going. And I hate to sound like an old prude (which I'm far from being), but the nude shower scene is an absolute cheap shot; Neve Campbell is just being exploited here. It has nothing to do with her character or anything else; it's completely gratuitous. But I guess anything goes when you have no material. Minus credits, this thing is barely over an hour and fifteen minutes. It hardly seems worth being made.

I admit to liking a lot of the so-called "frat-pack" movies. No matter how bad they are, I can find something to like about Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson or Vince Vaughn or Will Ferrell or Jack Black. But "Envy" just left me about as cold as the white horse that Ben disposed of. This time, it's Ben and Jack Black as a couple of nutty neighbors, one of whom (Black) discovers a aerosol spray to make animal poop disappear and becomes incredibly wealthy while the other (Stiller) writhes in envy. That's supposedly the plot, but then it veers off in other directions that don't really make much sense.

I guess the 'Vapoorize' thing is sort of amusing at first. The problem is, they try to sustain the gag for the whole picture (Black has a license plate that reads 'Caca King') and it gets fairly tiresome. But even Ben and Jack are used poorly; the energy level for both of their performances seems significantly dialed down. The two best performances by far are Rachel Weisz and Chris Walken. Walken's neo-hippie-dippie guy is so offbeat and so well-modulated a performance that it really never suggests any of Walken's other familiar nutcase characters. It's completely unique, yet comes across as unmistakably Walken. And Weisz is about the best actress in the business that nobody knows about. Even with limited screen time, she still dominates every scene she's in.

The whole crux of the so-called drama is that Ben, in a jealous drunken stupor, accidentally shoots Jack's prize white stallion, and then goes to ridiculous lengths to cover it up, fearing his best friend will find out and cut him dead. But the plot twist isn't believable because there's nothing about Jack's character to indicate that he would do such a thing. He plays such a sweet guy that it renders the whole excruciating horse chase null and void. You discount it completely. It's all filler. And what's the point of the out-of-control merry-go-round, except that Barry Levinson wants us to know that he's seen "Strangers on a Train"? The screenplay is painfully bad and the acting of the two leads poorly directed. Someone with Levinson's track record should know better. Maybe someone will invent something to make this film disappear. Oh, wait, they already have.

I can't believe that any grown adult could take any enjoyment out of watching "Duplex". Kids might laugh at it, but they haven't seen these jokes a thousand times like I have. Ben and Drew are good; they make a very charming, believable couple despite the garbage they're given to work with. This is really nothing more than sitcom humor extended to ninety minutes. You knew they were never going to tell the old lady to buzz off, which just led to more disaster, you knew Ben was going to get it in the face when he stuck his head under that kitchen drain, you knew they were going to hire the hit man that Ben was introduced to at the cocktail party, you knew the Powerbook was going to get trashed and so on, and so on. And, of course, when Ben accidentally gets shot, it had to be in the balls, right? Of course it did! Because anything to do with boys and girls private parts is really funny! Why is the old lady supposed to be cute and charming, when she's just selfish and annoying? Because she has an Irish brogue? It's just pathetic. And Ben and Drew are asked to play such stupid idiots; they just asked for the torture half the time. The final "surprise" ending is meant to be edgy and clever, but it's just a cliché. I liked Harvey Fierstein, too, doing his usual fagbag routine, but the whole movie is so stupid and dismal, I can't say one nice thing about it. Danny DeVito may think he's on the edge of something, but it's probably just my nerve endings.

It might be impossible to capture every aspect of a man's life in a two-hour film (A & E Biography frequently fails at this in the one-hour format with the bigger stars) while giving everything its proper weight. Peter Sellers' life is of such extraordinary dimensions that "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" even fails at being a scrapbook. This is not necessarily the film's fault; the movie is mostly well-cast (only John Lithgow as Blake Edwards didn't seem quite right) and beautiful to look at, from the opening credits on.

The movie serves mostly as a sampler of Sellers' oddball behavior. Incidents are selected from his life (or slightly fabricated) to stand for the whole; one slap across Britt Ekland's face is meant to represent a lifetime of spousal abuse, but those unfamiliar with Sellers personal life will assume that he was merely temperamental off-camera. In fact, it doesn't even come close to the truth: Anne Sellers reported that Peter once fought her for 14 hours straight (she took a nap in between) and Britt says Peter pointed a loaded gun at her in Rome, only capitulating after she told him 'if you shoot me, you'll ruin your own career'. His mistreatment of his family is grossly underweighted compared to such trivial items as Sellers not quite getting the Texas accent required for the bomber role in Dr. Strangelove, then faking a broken leg to Kubrick so he wouldn't be able to climb the ladder to the elevated cockpit on the movie set and avoid having to admit his failure with the voice. Other things are not clearly explained; for instance, that the "clairvoyant" Maurice Woodruff was in the employ of the movie studios to get Sellers to do the pictures they wanted him to do, or the fantasy sequence after his seven consecutive heart attacks in LA, which relates to Sellers insisting that he had an out-of-body experience during he time his heart stopped. The asides to the camera by the Kubrick and Bill Sellers characters, and Sellers (in funny voices) indicate the director straining for depth; perhaps a documentary on Sellers' life would have been better.

On the plus side, Geoffrey Rush is nothing short of superb as Sellers. Everything about Sellers seems exactly right, including the voice, which is no small feat, since I don't think Sellers is all that doable. The voice certainly wouldn't be recognized as Sellers if done out of context, say, as a stage impersonation, yet it works, even though I can't really recall what Sellers' actual voice did sound like. (It was this lack of personality that made him such a great instrument for creating characters) Charlize Theron is also a dead ringer for Britt, though she's not given much to do.

This movie is mostly for Peter Sellers enthusiasts, like myself, who can pick out the obscure trivia (like the Texas accent sequence), explain it to other people and feel superior. The movie isn't bad, really; its extremely well-acted and well-crafted, but it fails miserably at explaining the man. Why was he the way he was? How does one reconcile his genius with his brutality and selfishness. Sellers is of such depth and magnitude that a two-hour movie just doesn't cut it. For a true picture of the man, I would recommend the Roger Lewis book on which the movie is "based", Ed Sikov's more sympathetic biography on Sellers, and Michael Sellers' memoir "P.S. I Love You". Sellers once described himself as being an "empty vessel", a body through which one of his great characters came to life. I feel the same way about this movie.

Experiment in Terror is an OK movie, but it really doesn't rise much above the level of your basic TV movie-of-the-week. I guess I could nitpick on all the plot details that I just didn't get. Why would Lee Remick's first impulse be to call the FBI as opposed to the local police? It is San Francisco, after all, not some jerkwater small town operation. Why was she sneaking the $100,000 into her purse if the whole thing had been set up previously with Glenn Ford and her boss to take the money anyway? Why does Glenn Ford say, "Well, it's too bad about Popcorn" after Ford shoots that middleman who comes to answer the phone which is clearly not Popcorn (as the camera moves away, we see Popcorn, looking solemnly at the dead body with his bag of popcorn in hand)? At Candlestick Park, why doesn't Ross Martin have two seats together for himself and Remick, so he can just take the money and leave? Instead, he grabs her violently in the middle of an exiting crowd of about 50,000. Why does Martin gesture like he wants to rape Stefanie Powers, then, after she whimpers a little, he gives something like an 'Aw, shucks' reaction and just forgets the whole thing? What a sweetheart! And that story Martin tells Powers to get her to come running to him in the first place was just about the cheesiest ever.

The biggest problem with the movie is that, at no time in the picture did I think Lee Remick was in any kind of danger. Ford's G-man is on the case within the first 10 minutes of the film. The subplot involving the Asian woman and her son added nothing to the story. It's a complete throwaway. On the positive side, Ford, Remick, Martin, Ned Glass, and the guy who played Ford's sidekick are all very very good. Henry Mancini's score is terrific, as it nearly always is. The location shots in and around San Francisco of Fisherman's Wharf, Candlestick Park, etc. are gorgeous, and the opening tracking shot of Lee Remick driving over the Bay Bridge at night is absolutely spectacular. One more thing- toward the end, in the Candlestick Park sequence, the Giants are playing the Dodgers, and Vin Scully's voice is heard on the soundtrack briefly giving the Dodger radio call of the game. Those thirty seconds almost redeem the entire film.

Die, Mommie, Die! is either camp, or satire, or a satire of camp, it's difficult to tell. And there lies the problem with the movie. It's a takeoff of the sort of Joan Crawford/Bette Davis movies from both their 1940's heyday and the hagbag pictures of the 60's. The range seems to cover the whole lifespan of their careers. It's about a washed-up singer/actress played by a man, Charles Busch, in female regalia, named Angela Arden (The character is aptly named. Busch, in drag, strongly resembles Eve Arden. If only he had her comic timing and delivery, the performance would have been a tour-de-force instead of just a good female impersonation), whose affair with a young gigolo (Jason Priestley) is interrupted by the arrival of her producer-husband (Philip Baker-Hall), from a Madrid vacation, who proceeds to take firm control of his home and marriage, driving Angela to contemplate murder.

From there, the plot twists into a series of murders, potential murders, sexual crises, and identity crises. It's funny in places, and has some truly unique comic turns (Angela trying to dispose of her husband with a poisoned suppository is gleefully tasteless, and a secret language spoken by Angela and her son that her husband and daughter can't tap into is a beauty - replete with subtitles, no less). But it tends to lose its place in its own chronology; eras are confused, and we can't make sense of things - the humor doesn't match the genre it's lampooning. The story is supposed to take place in the psychedelic 60's, but at the beginning, we can't place it. When Angela's son tells her he left school because a student demonstration shut the school down, it seems an anachronistic joke. There's nothing to indicate a 60's dressing-down by the kids - they just dress like spoiled Hollywood rich kids. Natasha Lyonne, as Angela's daughter, is clothed like the TV Patty Duke. And while Angela and her husband seem locked in 1940's wardrobe time warp (we suspect that's part of the joke; these people are washed-up in Hollywood because they can't get out of 1949), Angela's slick young gigolo is also dressed in 40's garb, a la Bing Crosby.

Busch is really the center of the movie, though. Oddly enough, he manages to be believable in character without being believable as a woman (he gives himself away when he speaks, his tones in the lower register are clearly that of a man, not a deep-chested woman). He gives Angela a flighty, tawdry charm; we sympathize with him/her when Baker-Hall lays down the law and ends all her fun. Angela is made promiscuous without being trashy; she has style, and one can understand how she must have been appealing in her halcyon days of performing. In the musical number performed by Angela, "Why Not Me?", Busch gives Angela her glory, she looks like a star, radiant and engagingly naughty, Busch suggests Bette Midler in the routine. The dubbed-in vocal doesn't quite work, though, it's too tepid; it should have been more ebullient, boisterous, rousing. Baker-Hall is great playing the synthesis of all the Sam Spiegels and Dore Scharies, he's a robust outcast, a wash-up who still has the imagined clout to throw his weight around at home. The only performance that feels wrong is Priestley's; he's too broad, his line readings too self-conscious. The others are playing camp, he's satirizing it, like an actor employed by Mad Magazine. He gave a more creditable performance as the teen heartthrob in Love and Death on Long Island, maybe that's all he'll ever be. He doesn't have the sophistication to play a gigolo, he lacks a richness and a physical imposition. He's too boy-next-door, even with bags under his eyes that are making him look like Fred Allen.

Die, Mommie, Die! does have some good laughs in it, and the performances, especially Busch's and Baker-Hall's, are really a kick. It doesn't quite capture the Crawford/Davis oeuvre too well, though. That province still belongs to the real stars.

"Garden State" is another of these "indie"-type pictures that supposedly skimp on production values for the sake of giving the audience some real true-to-life human drama. Oddly enough, the production is very good, so are the performances (by some fairly big-name actors as well). Where the picture is lacking is in Zach Braff's script, which seems mostly culled from situations taken from other movies.

When you're as young as Braff is, you haven't really lived enough to use the experience as film fodder. Braff's experience looks to be from watching movies, then repeating the same trite clichés in his own movie. In Garden State, he plays Andrew Largeman, a semi-successful Hollywood actor who returns to his hometown in New Jersey to bury his mother, who took her own life after suffering in a wheelchair for many years. He appears to have no feeling about any of this; he has no relationship with his father, who blames him for causing his mother's paralysis in a freak accident as a six-year-old, and has no particular despondency over losing his mother (in fact, he attends a party right after the burial to which he was invited by a friend of his, who works as a cemetery grave-digger). It all smacks heavily of "Beautiful Girls", also about a guy who returns to his hometown to "find himself" and hang with his old friends, with a little "Ordinary People" thrown in on the side.

It's really a miracle Braff could accomplish anything at all in his life, given his father and his useless friends (I'm surprised he didn't kill himself), who are still living their "lives" as though they're still in high school, partying with dumb bimbos, drinking and drugging, etc. None of them even recognize him from his TV role as the "retarded quarterback" (Natalie Portman's character, the most aware person in the movie, does), and say things, like "Hey, I remember you from Junior year". These guys are such losers, for them, watching television would be a cultural leap forward. Even one friend, who made millions inventing a silent Velcro, has no real reason to live, because his whole frame of reference is high school and partying. And you don't need big money to party like a high school sophomore.

Braff, it is revealed, is heavily medicated, which keeps from "feeling" and dealing with anything, really, like an adult would. Then he meets Sam (Natalie Portman) a sort-of lost girl, who gives pet funerals and lives with her mother like a 10-year-old in a bedroom that looks like a pink doll house blown up to life size. Anyway, they fall in love, and Braff learns to "feel" again. The clichés come fast and furious. Braff has a long delayed heart-to-heart talk with his cold, distancing father and tells him What It Is and The Name Of The Game. In one scene, Braff and Portman are in the millionaire kid's house, playing touchy-feely is front of a giant fireplace, and the bit is so routine, so standard movie-schtick, I swear, I half-expected somebody to walk up and throw a sled into the fire. In another, Braff visits a doctor (Ron Liebman) to get his junk refilled, and Liebman tells him (in easily the worst line in the movie) "The body can play tricks on you. I once found my ex-best-friend's cufflinks in my wife's purse, and I didn't have an erection for a year and a half." Obviously, no licensed physician would ever say that, but it's dirtbag poetry, a nod from Braff to, I guess, his loser friends to let them know he's still thinking of them, just as the "37" joke in "Clerks", was Kevin Smith's nod to his dirtbag buddies.

Anyway, Braff finds true happiness and gets off the dope; the story plays itself out predictably. But if you're going to have a movie that's wall-to-wall clichés, at least give it some charming performances to breathe some life into it. And Braff does. He has the right sort of vacancy, of casual acceptance to make his role as the zonked-out Andrew both real and poignant, and Natalie Portman (also of Beautiful Girls) gives the movie a big lift. With her tiny features and flickering expressions of mood, she just about steals the picture as his traveling companion. Jean Smart is surprisingly good as Portman's mother, and Peter Saarsgard (though much better in "Shattered Glass") is notable as the gravedigger friend. I would recommend "Garden State" if you can't get enough storybook romance out of movies, but when people start hailing it as a masterpiece, they're just clueless. Braff thinks you can take the same old tired plot, write in a few "f**ks" and "awesomes" and slap on an acoustic rock soundtrack and that contemporizes the material. It doesn't.

"Consenting Adults" simply proves what a Hollywood screenwriter can do when given a big budget, big stars and no imagination. Kevin Kline and Kevin Spacey play suburban neighbors who become unlikely friends then slowly descend into episodes of criminal mischief and debauchery.

The picture starts off well enough. We're introduced to Kline and his wife (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and their musically gifted daughter. He's a composer of commercial jingles who appears to be placid and content in his boring, upper-middle-class ways. Then Spacey and his stunning wife (Rebecca Miller) move in next door, and Kline's character is suddenly awakened: Spacey is a real schmoozer, a "financial adviser" with a sharp mind and an engaging personality; Miss Miller is a bombshell, and one can sense that Kline wants a piece of her. The tension and complications build until Spacey suggests to Kline a one-night stand of wipe-swapping, each man accosting the other's wife, half-asleep in bed, so they are unaware of the identity of the lover (in theory, anyway). Kline refuses, but Spacey and the idea keep gnawing at him, and eventually, craving a scrap of excitement in his dull life, he gives in. The final consummation between Kline and Miller is a lovely shot; his bare body caught in shadows in front of a glittering window-dressing, partially lit by street lamps. Unfortunately, that's where the movie ends.

A few hours later, Miss Miller turns up dead, bashed with a baseball bat, and Kline, having had sex with her is cast as the murderer. From this point, nothing in the story appears to make much sense; its as though the screenplay was flowcharted by a computer programmer. This happens, then this, then this. Human emotions are never considered, and the movie becomes an acted-out cartoon, each actor assuming a caricature of something that fits a framework; any chance for texture in the performances is completely destroyed.

The plot is full of holes, and sometimes, in a truly suspenseful picture, the audience is willing to overlook it. Not this time. It's all so by-the-numbers, you can virtually guess what will happen next even though you don't understand why. If the dead girl wasn't Spacey's wife, then who was she? Why didn't Kline recognize her as a different girl when he rushed into the bedroom? (Do all vapid blondes look that much alike?) Why does Mastantonio immediately discount her husband's plea of innocence? (so much for 14 years of marriage) If she's so much happier with Spacey, why does she agree to play the tape? I considered that she might toss it in the lake they were standing by, but I knew she wouldn't. Then the computer program wouldn't run.

There's not much to like about the performances in this thing. Kevin Kline, it's been my long-held opinion, is only good when he's acting up a storm. When he plays a regular person, he's just boring, he radiates very little presence to the audience. He's not a convincing Everyman, as Jimmy Stewart was, he's just dismal and you don't really care whether he clears his name or not. The boringness is not so evident in the first part of the film (in fact, it fits), but once his life is on the line and he has reach to down deep for some reserve of passion, it isn't there. He's not compelling enough to be The Man Caught in the Web (he'd be lost in a Hitchcock picture). Kevin Spacey is superb in the early scenes as the sleazo Eddie, and he gives the picture its only zing; he has the right admixture of charm and smarm to draw you in and make you wary at the same time. But by the end, he's just another psychotic killer and his eyes gleam freakishly like Nicholson's in "The Shining". If there's such a thing as a cardboard cutout of a deviant, this is it. Audiences may like Forest Whitaker's subdued performance as a polite southern gentleman sniffing out the scam (he's like the Lovie Smith of insurance investigators), but it belongs in another movie.

A good movie could have been made from this material. From the crucial point of the wipe swap, it could have been a character study on how lives are destroyed by this kind of self-indulgent behavior, or at least a better thriller, with Spacey leading Kline into deeper and more diabolical adventures. But "Consenting Adults" is straight from the textbook, and a cursory-level high school textbook at that.

In the opening sequence of "Where's Poppa?", George Segal rises from his bed one morning, shaves, showers, puts on a gorilla suit and goes into his mother's bedroom, we realize later, to give her a massive heart attack that will kill her and get her out of his life forever. This is about the level of humor one can expect from most of this picture: insanity, blended with what might be taken as morbid daring.

Segal plays a New York attorney who lives with his supposedly senile mother (Ruth Gordon), whose life is further complicated when, while hiring a nurse to care for the old bag, meets the girl of his dreams, the pleasantly prim Trish Van Devere, decked out like Florence Nightingale. His dilemma: how to integrate the lovely nurse into his and his pesky mother's life.

Segal's performance is about the only thing holding the picture together. His frustrations, his reactions, his comic timing is almost peerless (whatever happened to that guy?); where the film fails is in other areas. Ruth Gordon's characterization is dreadful as the mother. At the beginning, you can't figure out if her character is senile or just being deliberately vague to keep her son from moving out. By the end, it's clear she's just nuts. When Segal brings Van Devere home to meet her, Gordon's eyebrows furrow and she gets a mean, sinister look. She wants the intruder in her son's life removed; she's calculating. This is not the mode of a senile person. You're not getting a consistent performance throughout the picture, which is probably the director's (Carl Reiner) fault as much as Gordon's. Ruth Gordon's old lady in "Rosemary Baby" is much more successful because with the kind of ingratiating, cloying person that Ruth Gordon generally plays, the audience responds to her as annoying. But when Mia Farrow is too timid to fight back, Gordon becomes more cloying, her fangs dig deeper and deeper and we're frightened for Farrow; this kind of imposition is genuinely terrifying. Here, we're being asked to laugh at what we'd normally find annoying, and if Gordon played it as helplessly nutty all the way, we might. But she's selfish and mean as well, and it dampens what little humor there is.

There are a few good laughs, though. A courtroom scene with Barnard Hughes as a military officer and Rob Reiner as a counterculture punk is fairly hilarious, and Vincent Gardenia does a nice turn as a Lombardiesque football coach. There's also an inspired bit where Segal's brother (Ron Liebman), having been stripped naked by muggers on his way to Segal's place, asks him for something for to wear home- and he gives him the gorilla suit.

But of a lot of the script is poorly conceived and simply doesn't make sense. Why is a New York lawyer with his own practice even living at home in the first place? Why does Segal, if his mother is senile, try to reason with her logically: "If you spoil this for me, I'll punch your f---ing heart out." Why does Liebman keep cutting through the park if he knows he's going to get mugged? Why does he take a taxi after leaving Segal's with gorilla suit? Why wasn't he taking taxis all along? A funnier bit would have been Liebman, as the gorilla, terrorizing the muggers. Why does Van Devere keep coming back- after her first husband was a kook, why does she want to get involved with this bunch? I suppose if I put this to Carl Reiner, he'd say, 'These are crazy people, they don't have to make sense.' Which is a convenient way to excuse a lousy script that's full of holes. The characters' moment-to-moment behavior may not have to make sense, but their motivations do, and that's where "Where's Poppa?" falls apart; the situations are created just to have the gag, and the gags are mostly one-shots, they don't build to anything.

Carl Reiner is the most guilty in this whole fiasco. How he has acquired this vaunted reputation as a pillar of comedy puzzles me; basically, his career has been to hold a microphone in front of Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks while they talk in funny voices. His son Rob has ten times the skill and intelligence as a director. In show-biz terms, Reiner pushes buttons; a monkey could do his job. And that is most apparent in his framing of the action. Why is all of New York shot in tight and in close-ups, but the scenes in the country are all distant and panoramic? That's the mentality of Carl Reiner's direction, claustrophobic for the city, spatial for the country. In the final lunatic scene at the old folks home, the camera is so far off, you can't even make out what's going on. The abrupt ending suggests a resolution that Segal could have easily arrived at ninety minutes ago; it also suggests Reiner couldn't figure out how to end the picture. So he just cut it, as another example of "craziness". Reiner seems to think dumbness equals craziness, and craziness without logic is always funny. It isn't, and the creators of "Where's Poppa" are as demented as Ruth Gordon putting Pepsi in her Fruit Loops.

"The Shout" is one of the funniest film comedies in cinema history. It just doesn't know it. That this material could be played for anything but laughs is astounding to me, but the actors carry it off with the traditional British stiff upper lip. I often wonder what the actors are thinking in a picture like this. Do they realize it's junk and the only way to save it is to play it totally straight and hope it passes for camp? The movie is about this nutty wanderer (Alan Bates) who drifts into the life of an unsuspecting couple (John Hurt and Susannah York) regaling them with tales of his Aboriginal exploits and his "shout", the ferocity of which is so extreme- he claims- it could kill a man. This so-called terror shout hangs over the movie like an unwanted guest at a dinner party you know is going to show up. There's an element of dread; not of suspense, but of disappointment. You figure it's got to be stupid.

So, while we're waiting for the big shout, Bates manages to slowly devour the household by getting Miss York to fall in love with him, and tearing at Hurt's confidence. Hurt plays an aspiring musician with a makeshift recording studio in his home- but he's going for sound, not music. He records himself moaning and captures the drone of a buzzing fly trapped inside a jam jar; he's like a low-grade Yoko Ono, it's training-wheel avant-gardism. When Bates tells him (accurately), "I've heard your music- it's empty" , it's uproariously funny because of the tone. Bates talks like a doctor informing you you have six weeks to live. Susannah York has a sexy, big body, but her manner is so without charm or nuance that she is little more than a plot function- she mediates the tension between Bates and Hurt and that's about it. Then, finally the moment of truth arrives and Bates demonstrates his death call (pretty impressive, actually) in an open dune. When the sheep start keeling over in a nearby pasture, and Hurt rolls down the hill in a neo-Peckinpah slo-mo shot, it's almost too much to keep a straight face. It is the single best piece of camp since the spike-through-the-head in "Berserk". There's one more great bit- when Bates, sitting snugly with York, tells Hurt, "We're going to make love, so you'd better make yourself scarce", and Hurt stands there with this pained little boy look. When he objects, Bates counters with, "Get out, or I'll shout the hell out of you." You simply can't place a value on this kind of dialogue. It couldn't possibly have been written, it seems ordained somehow, a gift from the gods.

The one truly weak bit of business in the movie is the cross-cutting from the domestic drama to a mental institution where staff and patients are engaged in a cricket match. It probably fails because it tries to be amusing; we're supposed to laugh when one loony during an outbreak of rain goes into hysterics. But the beauty of camp is that it's unintentionally hilarious; you can't set out to create it- it just materializes. It's a vacuous form of artistic achievement, like hitting the Pick-Six. There's no way I can defend "The Shout" as a good movie or even a good thriller; it is truly in a class by itself. And any remaining prints of it belong in a room by itself.

Dick Lester really owes his career to the Beatles. I can't think of a single thing he's done without them that has any lasting entertainment value; The Knack is another enterprise in that vein. Lester, a one-time director of TV commercials, uses about the same technique in his features, a lot of trick camera work, blitzkrieg editing, curt, rapid-fire "dialogue" which is just a lot of clipped phrases passed off as conversation. The net effect is the same in both cases, Lester is trying to sell us the images- the plot, characters, etc. are all subservient to the next image or phrase Lester wants to run up the flagpole, ultimately each shot, each composition, each gesture, each catchphrase, has a sly life unto itself, and, when slapped together, really doesn't add up to much.

The alleged plot of this sorry thing is an awkward schoolteacher/landlord (Michael Crawford) trying to learn how to score with women from his worldly tenant (Ray Brooks). This plot never gets off the ground in any way, it just degenerates into a lot of funky, dyspeptic action and unfunny (and often unintelligible) dialogue. There is not one bit of business in the movie that could be construed as funny, nor a single line of dialogue. And it didn't surprise me to note that the screenplay was written by Charles Wood, who was responsible for the pathetic screenplay for The Beatles "Help!" Wood seems eternally to be marketing his work for The Beatles. It's certainly no accident that Rita Tushingham is cast in the picture as a dead ringer for Ringo Starr. When one sees Crawford, Brooks, Tushingham, and Donal Donnelly in the same shot, we are watching a Beatles' sketch, and it doesn't say much for the material when one suspects that it would play far better for them than it does for these professionally trained actors. The performances are negligible at best, hysteria-ridden and squeamish at worst.

People who compare this movie with "A Hard Day's Night" simply don't have a clue. HDN was intelligently written, with great characterization, and some memorable lines. Lester's so-called style was incidental to the proceedings. There is no joy in The Knack. No mirth, no verve. It is all technique. Dick Lester wants to bombard us with technique, miles and miles of it, until we are knocked flat by his sheer brilliance and wizardry. Unfortunately, clever technique does not a motion picture make. This movie plays like a ketchup commercial that won't end. It's not even silliness, it's an advertisement for silliness. That's how far removed Lester is to giving the audience anything resembling content. Complete and worthless garbage. 1/2 * out of 4

"Band Of Outsiders" covers about the same ground as "Breathless", but I think with less depth and less humor. Godard sticks more to plot here and less to his wonderful scenes of empty talk that are like good jazz riffs. People may respond more to this one than Breathless precisely for that reason- it more fits the conception of an American B-movie: The plot is conceived, designed and carried out with a few twists and turns in the process.

This movie is the most self-referential of Godard's B-ish movies in that Godard is a director who lives in a world of the junk crime movies he grew up with making a movie about characters who live their lives like a bad crime movie. When Anna Karina jokes that Stolz probably made his loot from cheating on his taxes, then repeats it again in the final scene- this time as stated fact, it shows you how deeply these characters are entrenched in the fiction of it all, how the wisecracking becomes a way of living. What was disappointing to me is that there was less of the memorable nonsense that makes Godard's films unique- although there is some. Godard's overwrought, sickly poetic narration is obviously a gag, as is Arthur's hilariously overacted death scene; the minute of silence at the soda shop where Godard cuts the soundtrack completely is great, and the synchronized (well, almost) dancing is just precious, and I loved it. But it's the almostness of Godard's films that makes it special; if it were too perfect, it would be mechanized and dull. Instead of dancing, it would be choreography, an applied science.

Band Of Outsiders is definitely worth seeing if you like Godard's way of filmmaking; to me, it falls a little short of greatness, but it does have its moments. Beware of croc-Odiles! 3*** out of 4

It's always fascinating to watch Godard operate outside of his beloved gangster/noir thing, just to see if he can he do it- or how he'll do it. "A Woman Is A Woman" not only proves he has a flair for romantic comedy, but that he has made quite an extraordinary one. This movie is so charming and funny that it puts the assembly-line Hollywood romantic comedies to shame.

I've never thought Anna Karina was a great actress, but she is a good one, plus has the added benefit of a natural beauty and presence on-camera that really makes a star a star. She is a one-of-a-kind performer, and her lilting, flitting style fits remarkably well with Godard's roving camera in this light-headed, light-hearted story about a young girl working as a stripper who desperately wants to have a baby with her boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy).

But the thing that sets the film apart from others in this mostly trite genre is Godard's unique style: the use of on-screen graphics to give insights into the character's motives, the all-too-sly speaking directly to the camera, the stop-start of the film's scoring, the accentuation of moments and dialogue by music which is extremely well-done. I loved the scene where Karina and Brialy, "not speaking", speak to each other with book notes, concluding in "all women to the firing squad". His conception of the Zodiac club is hilarious; it might be the tamest strip club in world history (it looks like a little Italian restaurant). And Godard is an absolute genius at writing small talk that sounds interesting and funny. It is a rare gift, and he doesn't get enough credit for it. In a genre like romantic comedy, where the subject matter is so trivial, to be able to sustain an entire motion picture just on small talk is no small accomplishment.

I highly recommend this picture for fans of good romantic comedy-it might be the best ever of this type. "A Woman Is A Woman" may be lightweight as Godard's films go, but it's exceptional as well. 3 *** out of 4

"Look Back In Anger" is a mostly good reproduction of John Osborne's stage play about a college-educated Englishman trapped in a dank working class existence and lashing out at everyone around him. The performances are excellent all around; Mary Ure's I found the most moving as the fragile upper-class wife. My only complaint is the elements of staginess that were not expelled from the original incarnation: what Richard Burton does in this movie works better on the stage than it does on film. The screen is already larger than life, he doesn't need to expand the performance the way he does. As I was watching it, I found myself easily picturing Robin Williams performing the same material as a parody of gross overacting. For this, I blame the director Tony Richardson for not restraining him somewhat. I've actually liked Burton better in more modulated performances in lousy movies (the VIPs, The Comedians). Burton is a great talent, but he sometimes has the effect of a baseball pitcher with "great stuff"; he attacks the batters with pure heat and no finesse. There are also bits of business that should have been excised, like Burton and Gary Raymond's occasional breaks into Music Hall skits. That is exclusively a stage bit; it doesn't develop the characters and stops the dramatic flow.

Richardson, otherwise, shows good understanding of the film medium. The look of it is about right- the characters are the right distance from the camera to deliver their lines for maximum impact (in other words, the shots aren't cramped with close-ups in an already cramped apartment). And some scenes are shot exceptionally well: the last scene in the fog and mist with Burton and Mary Ure silhouetted is superb, as is the shot in the small doorway where Miss Ure must decide whether to join her husband or go to church with Claire Bloom's character, while Miss Bloom holds open the tiny door that exposes a flurry of street activity.

"Look Back In Anger" is a well-done film, although I think Richard Burton's assault of the audience as well as the other characters keeps it from true greatness. 3 *** out of 4

The Millionairess reminds me of why people will sit through generally stale movies sometimes instead of just packing it in, the odd glitter or chemistry between two major movie stars who one does not often get to see together. This is a flat uncompelling piece of work about a newly minted heiress (Sophia Loren) who can't find the right man to marry and a devoted Indian physician (Peter Sellers) who has no interest in money- or women.

Sellers performance is about the only thing that takes this picture above banality; he has so much integrity as an actor that he raises the level of the mostly shoddy material. He has some truly wonderful, charming moments as the doctor who resists the stunning Loren at every turn (the same could not be said off-camera; Sellers wrecked his first marriage over the obsession). Loren, is a good, but not great actress; her appeal lies heavily in her charm and good humor. Here, those qualities are muted by the character she plays: a self-obsessed bombshell who has no real love to give- only money- and doesn't understand why a man of true integrity won't respond to that. But what's wrong with the screenplay is fairly obvious. In the typical Hate At First Sight movie romance, the characters learn and grow to see the virtue of the each other's worth, then fall in love. Here, they don't. Sellers character gives no indication of wearing down, Loren's never stops being exasperating (in one scene, she fakes an illness at 4:30 AM so Sellers will come over to examine her). When they hook up at the end, it's totally implausible and not very satisfying (she fakes committing suicide to draw him to her).

That said, the movie is not quite boring, the audience may be drawn to the radiance of the stars in spite of itself, but it has no real spark and no drive. The look of it is quite nice, it's expensive without being gaudy. But it doesn't serve the actors very well; even the great Alastair Sim isn't well-used. I suspect watching The Millionairess is something like being super-rich, one gets the feeling of having too much time to kill. 2** out of 4

The Monkees "Head" is one of those peculiar phenomenons I've noticed- that when something doesn't make sense, people will try to read things into it and give it great deep meanings, which its creator never intended. Such is the case here.

The movie is a stream-of-consciousness spectacle of The Monkees floating in and out of various sketches, blackouts, set pieces, etc. similar to the ones on their TV show. But while the TV show was played for laughs, this doesn't seem to be played for anything except a sort of deep, trippy, pseudo-intellectual state that this brand of psychedelia imposes. All in all, it's The Monkees doing the same schtick, but now it's "consciousness-raising" because the laugh track is removed. There is not a stitch of humor or meaning to the whole thing; it just drones on with colored lights.

The music in "Head" should prove to anyone, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Monkees had not a scrap of songwriting ability. The tunes are mostly garbage; the only one that's even listenable is "Porpoise Song", which opens and closes the film. But the thing is, that was a Gerry Goffin-Carole King song, and, while it's above-average for the Monkees, it's below-average by Goffin and King standards. It's like hearing one of the old Peter And Gordon songs that Paul McCartney wrote for them: you might think it's a pretty good song, but then you find out who composed it, and you realize it's a throwaway. Mike Nesmith's song is maybe passable, the rest is worthless. Davy Jones has, I guess, what the filmmakers imagined to be "the big number" in the picture, since it's the only song presented As Show Biz and not cut into a film montage or dream sequence, but it falls flat, too, just because the song isn't any good.

I have to admit I always liked the Monkees, so the movie is a real disappointment. Sure, they were cheesy, but they were so cheerful about it.

They knew they were cheesy and they were cool with it. But then they got ambitious. In "Head", they actually joke about being a manufactured pop product, but the truth is, they wanted something more. They wanted to be Great Musicians and taken seriously as artists. Maybe not like the Beatles, but something approaching that. "Head" proves that they failed on all counts. 1* out of 4

The biggest problem with movies that run in a series (the Pink Panthers, the Lethal Weapons, etc.) is that the longer they go on, the more insane they get; they almost lose touch with the characterizations and subtleties that made them great and rely heavily on big boffo gags and fraudulent action. Die Hard 3 is the sorriest example of this malaise.

The people who made Die Hard 3 don't understand the difference between "over the top" and "stupid". Over the top entertainment may be extreme, but it's within a realm of possibility, and the audience needs only to suspend disbelief to accept it. Stupid is stupid and it's an insult to the audiences' intelligence, except, I guess, for the action-picture dummies who don't care and can't tell. Explain me this: Why does Sam Jackson, who is playing a black racist, offer Bruce Willis shelter in his shop so he won't get beat up by the homies after he turns up wearing a sandwich board that says "I Hate Niggers"? Or why does the NYPD, which can't even respond to a legit threatening phone call because it wades through so many fakers, spring into action when some guy doing a Peter O'Toole imitation intones "Simple Simon met a pieman...."

The movie will suck in the Die Hard die-hards, but without the goodwill of the first two pictures to support it, it fails on so many levels. Jackson's character, which is only there because the filmmakers So Obviously want to create a Lethal Weapon-esque buddy-buddy thing, is just an annoying complainer. It's written poorly and acted poorly. Jackson's racist isn't aggrieved, he's miffed. And in the whole movie, there is not one quotable line of dialogue (a la "hasta la vista, baby"), which everyone knows the filmmakers want; they have the right actor in Willis to deliver a wisecrack, and they still can't come up with anything. Even the action isn't great: one bit that has potential for greatness is when a subway train is blown right out of its hole and jumps up on the platform. The scene is edited so badly, one second we see debris flying and people running scared, the next, it's all over and we don't see the consequences, except for Bruce Willis emerging with a wrenched back and a bloody nose. But isn't that the whole point of the film- that civilians are in danger from this psychotic madman? If the film cuts that, then why not just cut the whole thing?

There is nothing particularly memorable about Die Hard 3, it's just one long cliché (oh, and don't forget the old tin snip to break out of handcuffs). The only thing I liked was a scene where Bruce Willis steals some little kid's bike in the name of official police business, a great cliché-buster if ever there was one. But the Die Hards are not in the same class with the Lethal Weapons, action-wise or dialogue-wise. They're very dreary and menacing and generally only good for killing time, about the only thing that does die hard. It's a tough sit. 1 1/2 * out of 4

Hoffman is another of the lonely middle-aged man pictures that Peter Sellers made during this period (1967-70), mostly, I think to prop up his fragile ego by co-starring him with young beautiful women after his marriage to Britt Ekland crashed. This one may contain the best Sellers performance of those movies (The Bobo-with Ekland-, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, and There's A Girl In My Soup being the others), although it ultimately flops and leaves one with a feeling of dissatisfaction at the end.

Sellers plays a business executive who blackmails his beautiful secretary into spending a week with him (he's got the goods on her and her fiance). The standout quality of the film is Sellers' brilliantly underplayed brooding madman, a man with a buried charm beneath a front of psycho-erotic fantasies. Even though the movie has moments of light comedy, one never fails to see the singularly terrifying quality of Sellers' obsession with the girl, either sexual or homicidal. He is marvelously ambiguous in the performance; when he massages the secretary's (Sinead Cusack) neck to work out a cramp, one is not quite sure if he won't crush her to death right there. Unfortunately, the movie follows the all-too-familiar plotline of these Peter Sellers movies. He is the unwanted one, the oddball, who frightens his female prey, until she sees his good side and warms up to him. It is nearly an inverse of The Bobo, where Ekland played the evil one and Sellers the innocent. The Bobo sets the audience up for a happy ending, then ends in a distasteful, unfunny joke. The only way to end Hoffman appropriately is for him to kill Miss Cusack. When the bedroom door closes behind them in the final shot, somehow we don't sense a 25th anniversary in store for this couple. It just isn't believable; why would she go back to this kook? Yet on some level it works, as symbolic of the limited choices for happiness among working class people. The problem is, in a movie, it doesn't work, because the audience is conditioned to responding to motives that are understandable, and everyone knows a beautiful young woman is always in the drivers' seat.

The best thing about Hoffman is the supremely conditioned performance by Sellers, one of the world's greatest actors. I don't know if Miss Cusack can act; mostly she walks through the whole picture with that terrified little girl look on her face, but she is adorable. But like The Bobo, the ending undercuts the whole picture; after the script has set us up for strangulation, we get hearts and flowers, and its not a relief; it's a con and a disappointment. 2 1/2 ** out of 4