Reviews

What a disappointment. A movie about the difficulty of writing a screenplay. Who cares?!

What's worse, a fine book (The Orchid Thief) is cheapened and discredited by being shown as a tale of adultery.

The actors (except Cage, who's in yet another whiny role) are good - pray they get a better script next time out. Or even a real script.

Rated 6/10. In The Pelican Brief, supemely talented New Orleans law student Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts, in full pout and doe eyes) solves the mystery of who assasinated two Supreme Court justices after a few all-nighters in the law-school library. She shares this info with her lover and professor, Thomas Callahan (Sam Shepherd, looking good!), who shares it with a friend at the FBI. Soon everyone who knows about The Pelican Brief (Darby's novel title for her thesis; whatever happened to titles like Doe. v. State of Texas?) dies suddenly and violently.

Darby does a Deep Throat and seeks out journalist Gray Grant (Denzel Washington, also lookin' mighty fine). He checks out her story and soon they are both are on the run, relying on all the tools of spycraft they picked up from previous John Grisham novels, no doubt.

If the pace of the movie had been faster, the viewer might not have had time to think of all the implausibilities of the plot. But it clocks in at 2:15, when it has enough material for a tight 1:30. However, the photography and scenery are nice but those late '80s women's clothes suck!

I didn't care for Apocalypse Now (1979) when I first saw it. Too anti-American and simple-minded concerning the Vietnamese War, I thought. Something compelled me to see the re-edited and lengthened version, Apocalypse Now/Redux (2001), however, and I'm very glad I did.

Apocaplyse Now is the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who we first meet as a tightly wound Army intelligence agent awaiting a new assignment in Saigon in 1968. He is sent on a mission to find and assassinate a Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who is holed up in a compound upriver just over the Vietnamese border in Cambodia, waging his own war. It is assumed that Kurtz has gone insane.

Willard takes a small but interesting crew along: Chief (Sam Bottoms), Chef (Frederic Forrest), Lance (a famous California surfer dude), and Clean (Laurence Fishburn). Battles and boredom beset them, and as they travel the outposts of civilization become less and less civilized, as do they. Kurtz's domain is the paradoxical archetype of this anarchic hell.

The major plot differences from the original movie include a salacious visit with some Playboy bunnies sent to entertain the troops and a visit to a French plantation, stubbornly holding on to the colonial ways.

The new movie is stunning from a visual and sound aspect. Small segments have been added to bring out the characters more fully. Scenes like the famous helicopter assault on a small village, led by a testosterone fueled Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), still have power but seem more balanced in the overall content of the film.

Despite it's 3-1/2-hour length, I was mesmerized throughout. This, finally, is the film Francis Ford Coppola meant to make.

Apocalyse Now/Redux (2001) - 10/10

If I had wasted another 1-1/2 hours of my life, I'm pretty sure I would have rated Pandaemonium (2001) a 1/5. It's that bad.

The movie purports to tell the stories of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, considered the fathers of the English Romantic literature movement. This happens to be an area I studied as my major in college. Pandaemonium bore so little resemblance to the actual stories that it might as well have been a film noir.

Inept acting and stupefying camera tricks add to the general mess.

Whoever is responsible for this piece of junk decided to represent STC and WW as extreme late 18th-century hippies, which insults their memories as well as that of hippies. Unlike some of their later colleagues, such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, STC and WW were conventional men with superb literary gifts. The movie further cultivates the myth of STC as a drug addict, a facade he maintained to add mystery to his reputation.

Unlike some bad movies, though, Pandemonium's not even fun to watch.

Run, do not walk, away.

Every now and then you see a movie which presents an impeccable group of talents but which manages to fail on just about every front. Mad Dog & Glory is one of those movies. I rated it a 5 only because I did watch the whole thing, often as if I was watching a horrible train wreck. Plus I probably could watch De Niro read the proverbial phone book.

Master detective Wayne (Robert De Niro) is bored and frustrated in his work, but we also see that he is am excellent cop, in what starts out as a clever if somewhat familiar Cop Movie. He interrupts a burglary and meets Name-Already-Forgotten (Bill Murray), a gangster of unknown but definite power who decides to befriend him by inviting him to see his stand-up comedy act. So are we now in Wacky Gangster Movie territory?

Wacky Gangster decides to give Wayne a woman, Glory (Uma Thurman), for a week. She is apparently his slave, paying off a family debt. Wayne and Glory fall in love for no apparent reason (but the sex does look hot) and Wayne decides not to return Glory. Now we enter Tough Gangster Movie time.

All the switches and turns simply bore you, as the characters are given little to work with so it's hard to like them for anything other than their already established off-screen personas. They do try hard, though.

If you want De Niro as a troubled cop, rent 15 Seconds. If you want him as a funny gangster, get Analyze This! But skip this movie, and help hide any existing copies.

The time: Ye Olde West. A gang of robbers is fleeing from a posse when they get lost in the fog and find themselves in a mysterious, quiet town. They are taken in and kindly treated, but they soon realize that the inhabitants don't permit themselves the same luxuries. SOme of these inhabitants have names like Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid.

TYo say more is to spoil the plot of this challenging movie that uses US Western mythology to examine beliefs about life and death. A strong cast led by Sam Shepard make it a must-see. Even my mother liked it!

This earnest coming-of-age movie is unique only in that it is set amidst the poverty and tragedy of contemporary native American life.

Two boys search for their fathers and themselves. Old news.

Good performances, a few clever moments, but not worth two hours of my life. Rated 5.

Other than Cabaret, which Bob Fosse altered significantly in his adaptation for film, I can't recall a better film version of a Broadway musical. The singers are a bit weak at times but the acting and cinematography are excellent.

Pun intended. This is a comedy about trying to make a movie in Hollywood. There's a screenwriter (Wuhl), desparate to see his long-forgotten masterpiece brought to the screen, a producer (Landau) who hasn't had a hit in 15 years and three wanna-be producers (De Niro, Aiello and Wallach), of varying competence. All of the producers have girlfriends who want to be in the movie. Everyone has complicated lives.

The theme is compromise, and who can and who can't. Some parts of the film are mesmerizing, earning it a seven from me, and others sag. A splendid birthday party serves as the climax of the film but I had no idea of why the birthday boy was being feted.

See it if you like the lead male actors - they're terrific (even if it does remind you that women of the the same age can't find roles as juicy). Otherwise, it's another "ain't Holywood awful" movies.