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Reviews
Oleanna (1994)
Undermined.
David Mamet is a good writer. "House of Games" was non pareille. But this isn't. It's an interesting question (rape vs. claims of innocence) undermined by a style that removes us too far from the issue.
It's not the fault of the actors or the director. The performers do a good job and the director moves the bodies about efficiently.
It's the script that's the problem. "You think I'm an abandoned, lonely, frightened young thing, don't you?" "Yes, I do."
"I came here to tell you something. Will you listen? I came here to tell you something. It's the self-same process of selection. . . You're right, education is just hazing. My charges are not trivial. You say they are meaningless. I understand. It is not for you to say." "I take your point."
It goes on and disappointingly on. "I don't want revenge, I want understanding."
Nobody uses contractions much. It sounds like a play written by a grammarian and read out loud.
When I was teaching in a mostly black school in the South, I showed a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers about teenage pregnancies and their consequences. Most (not all) of the cases were drawn from black populations. One young woman in class accused me of being a racist because I had shown Moyers' rather antiquated humanitarianism.
I said, Okay, I can see your point. I told her that she should write up all the objections she could think of and the next time the class met we would discuss them. Instead she wrote a letter to the president of the college and the governor of the state, condemning me for a bigot.
Since then I've been wary of accusations with little objective support. I feel sorry for people like Michael Jackson, a rich and confused man who is walking around with a great big bulls eye on his back, like a game animal on a preserve.
Mamet deals with some resonant questions and then screws it all up with self indulgence. What's called for is a realistic appraisal of the issue. What we get is an exercise in style.
Did the professor "do it"? We never find out.
Fair Game (1995)
Good-natured dumb action flick.
Is Cindy Crawford really supposed to be staggeringly beautiful? I mean, she's okay, with her pointy chin and beauty spot, but is she any more attractive than, say, Madeleine Stowe, Sean Young, or Jennifer Connolly? Crawford is taller than the others, true. She could be on an all-girl's Olympic basketball team. But it would be hard to rank order the beauty parade that's been on screen lately. When you get so close to the top it becomes a matter of stylistic choice, almost arbitrary.
There's another woman in this movie, a homely middle-aged KGB agent who demolishes men with a single kick to the head. It could be argued that a woman with such a talent for meting out punishment might be a more exciting date than some marshmallow ex-model.
Anyway, Crawford, the ex-model at hand, isn't bad. She has legs the length of a giraffe's and she takes two showers at the beginning of the movie and changes her T shirt in front of the camera once. I don't mean to be too critical of her appearance.
It's no wonder that her bare midriff prompts the goggle-eyed Baldwin to put a cigar in his mouth and try to light it. I take this to be symbolism although, to be sure, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." But then she cozzens some computer nerd so much that he winds up "fiddling with my joystick." Can a joystick sometimes just be a joystick too? Of course she can't act but we can't count that as a demerit because nobody else in the movie can act either, so the absence of skill on her part is hardly noticeable. Her performance though does put on display at least one of her attractive features, in addition to the other two, and that is an endearing lisp. "Pizza" comes out "PEET-tha." Kind of nice. Gives her a vulnerable quality, you know? Speaking of her vulnerability brings up the question of the plot, alas. See -- these ex-KGB agents try to murder her in every way possible -- shooting, blowing up her house, shooting yet again, and again. Then, towards the end, they decide she can't be killed but rather she must be interrogated. End of discussion of plot.
I found myself wishing the heavies weren't all ex-Russian KGB agents because the movie was shot, after all, in 1994, five years after the collapse of the USSR, which either makes the villains out of date or the screenwriters unimaginative in their search for heavies. Maybe both.
It doesn't matter really, except that there are some people of an impressionable age who might be tempted to take this cartoon as a serious reflection of reality. Their minds might be warped enough by exposure to these stereotypes that they grow up imagining all Russians have faces with the general contours and texture of potatoes. The heavies all scowl and sneer and speak with one or another foreign accent. Was it Oliver Cromwell who said, "Take me for what I am, warts and all"? Makeup has given the chief heavy a prominent wart right in the middle of his forehead, like a third eye, I suppose so we don't mix him up with the others.
These ex-Soviet Seals are something special. They are "experts in electronics," the film tells us, but that doesn't do them justice. Their equipment has positively supernatural attributes. For instance, they use an infra-red heat sensor that can not only penetrate walls but can detect that the leading lady is wearing high heels as well. And their radio direction finder can "triangulate" a transmitter's position all by itself.
Essentially the whole movie is one long chase. None of it makes too much sense. After Baldwin saves Crawford's life a dozen times over she suddenly turns on him angrily then runs away. Shortly afterward, aboard a freight train, they have a physical fight and then she immediately falls into his arms and they make love. Unfortunately it's one of those love-making scenes in which such arty effects as dappled spots of blue light move across patches of undifferentiated limbs, and it's interrupted by one of the agents who has a laser-sight-equipped weapon that plants a red circle on Baldwin's butt. At least Crawford notices this. I can understand why Baldwin might not have.
There are some gags and would-be jokes and sassy lines sprinkled through this melange of explosions and shootings and slow-motion fireballs. It doesn't add up to much but it's so slam bang that I found it kind of fun. I really do wish we had some generic villain for these types of movies though. Those impressionable minds -- the ones that can't remember the difference between Russia and the Soviet Union -- worry me at times.
Ship of Fools (1965)
Reflections on the title.
PS: A little further research reveals that I was all wrong about Katherine Anne Porter's having gotten her title from Bosch's painting. She claims she ripped it off in the early 30s from a long poem by Sebastian Brandt, "Das Narrschiff" ("Ship of Fools" or "Foolish Ship"), written about the same time as Bosch was painting his picture with a similar title.
It's not the first time I've been wrong. It's the second. I was only wrong once before -- when I thought I was wrong and it turned out I'd been right all along. What I want to know is how come both a painting and a poem with the same title were produced in the same country (Germany) at the same time? Hmmm? Bosch's work wasn't an illustration for Brandt's poem. There WERE illustrations but they were woodcuts done by somebody else, maybe Durer.
Moreover, it seems that both these works -- the painting and the poem -- were followed by a string of works in various media dealing with a collection of nuts traveling somewhere, for all I know winding up with "Candide". Or even passing through Voltaire and STILL going on, as relevant now as it was in 1490 -- maybe more so.
Something fishy going on if you ask me.