Cinema

Rip It Up, Issue 136, 1 November 1988, Page 38

Cinema

BIRD - Director: Clint Eastwood Miles Davis, at 62, has just guested on Scritti Politti's new album. If Charlie Parker had been alive today he would be 68, and it's tempting to speculate as to what he might have been doing. ' Judging by a scene in Clint Eastwood's biopic, in which he pours scorn on a * . former colleague who has descended to playing R&B, he might not have been the most adaptable of musicians. Parker's is an elusive personality, and it's not totally caught in this film, in spite of a running time of almost three hours . and Forest Whitaker's towering „ performance (matched in intensity by Diane Venora's, as his wife). Basing his movie on the last three months of Parker's life, and filling in the rest with very selective flashbacks, has created some problems. Certainly, the lower depths of his career and his life seem rather glossed over; and Eastwood, ‘- . well known for his anti-crack commercials, can't resist moralising. It's ~ there in the opening quote from F.Scott Fitzgerald ("There are no second acts in American lives") and slammed home in the final credits, where Red Rodney is described as going on to pursue "musical excellence and a drug-free life". Dizzy Gillespie's character has been reduced to a mere moralist,'■ coming out with chestnuts like "If they killed me it would only be because I helped them." , » \

Sometimes Eastwood is a little too heavy in his emphasis, as in the recurring punctuation device of a thrown cymbal in slow motion (recalling one of Parker's early humiliations) and the flashbacks to the morgue sequence to imbue Parker's career with a certain fatalism. Balancing this, though, are some beautifully realised scenes — Parker's sly bop undermining of a wedding song during a Jewish wedding party and a touching scene in which he visits Stravinksy in Los Angeles, standing at the gate, while the Russian composer and his wife look out from the doorway. Although the film doesn't quite catch the musical personality of a man who could throw a line ortwo of Prokofiev into his version of'Fine And Dandy' or turn 'How High The Moon' inside out to become 'Ornithology', the classic bop number, the music is well presented.

Bird uses a mixture of miming to original records and recreations by present-day players (including the original Red Rodney on some tracks)»«» The music itself, which ranges from a soupy supper-club 'Laura' complete with harp and strings to a sparse quartet recording of 'Lover Man' and a frenetic reading of'Night In Tunisia'show the complexity and contradictions of Parker's personality much more effectively th an the soul-searching dialogue and pregnant pauses of the script. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 Director: Tobe Hooper Fourteen years after the first bloodbath, the buzz is back, as the poster gleefully tells us. Hooper, who made the original TCSM sets the sequel off in grand style, with a couple of young Texan yahoos provoking Leatherface and getting carved up at 90mph.

Fourteen years later we have also come to feel less comfortable with the theme of the "woman terrorised," but Caroline Williams' Stretch, a Texas DJ in denim hotpants looking fora chance 'to stop playing head-banging music and do something real,' is a little more wily than Marilyn Burns was in the original. She does not simply escape from the projected 'Last Supper' (closely echoed from the first film) but emerges a victorious warrior, wielding a whirring saw above her head. Dennis Hopper, as the obsessed Lieutenant Lefty Enright, is the closest thing the film has to a hero, assuming a Messianic role as he goes forth to "bury the devil," singing Harvest hymns as he saws his way into the crazy family's lair. There is more local colour this time round, and Hooper has a field day with gross Texan caricatures, from the Chilli Cook Off which introduces Drayton Sawyerto the radio station manager calmly constructing a ranch house out of his French fries before he devours them. Apart from the confrontation in the radio station, with more than a few jabs at the icons of American culture, the ma jor conflict occurs at the deserted Texas Battleground. Not only does this bring about some virtuoso filming but it recalls Hooper's earlier . film Fun House and makes one see TCSM in the context of recent post-Vietnam films. The villains are irresistable. The crazed brother with his hippie buttons and Sonny Bono wig, requesting Iron Butterfly's 'ln-a-gadda-da-vida' and Leatherface even showing, like the

zombies in Romero's Day Of The Dead, an unexpected "human" side (incidentally, Romero's makeup man, Tom Savini, has devised brilliant masks for both). Jim Siedlow's oldest brother, Drayton Sawyer, is a total delight, maniacally rambling on about taxes, Puritanism ("Sex or the saw," he cackles at one point) and his individual brand of cuisine. On one level, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a grand guignol to relish (if that is quite the word) but I suspect that Hooper may also be telling us something about the American psyche. BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY Director: James Bridges Jay Mclnerney's novel Bright Lights Big City was a wry and compulsively witty account of chasing "the Great American Novel." James Bridges'film, scripted by Mclnerney himself, doesn't really make the same impact on screen. Michael J Fox dominates the movie, trying for "Serious Actor" credibility so earnestly, even to the point of several lengthy monologues — so much so that actors like Dianne Wiest, Jason Robards and the inimitable Swoosie Kurtz, still looking fot a suitable follow-up to her stunning debut in True Stories, struggle to make an impact. The film's rapid descent into sentimentality is swift, while the various club scenes make one suspect that someone there, in the backroom of United Artists, was thinking of the soundtrack market. All in all, an opportunity missed. WILLIAM DART