CINEMA

Rip It Up, Issue 147, 1 October 1989, Page 38

CINEMA

MAURI

Director: Merata Mita It's taken over a yearto get Merata Mita’s extraordinary film alocal release. To describe Mauri as powerful is a gross understatement: it s a vision of the tangata whenua so stirring that it could well make pakehas feel like intruders in their own country. Mauriis about real issues — something only too apparentwhen it screened aftera handful of Hollywood trailers — returning to one’s roots, being at one with the environment and the land, lessons that many of us have yetto learn from the Maori people. ZacWallace playsßewi,a guilt-ridden young man who returnsto the country to find some peace of mind, and restore some spiritual coreto his life. His performance has the passion and raw energy of a young Brando. Mita has commented that the three | women represent the heart of the film, astheir power, like that of nature, isa circular one. Susan Paulis ! embarrassingly weak as Ramari, crucially so in the many scenes with Wallace,but Evaßickard, asthe - - grandmother, has a canny mix of the spiritual and worldly (when her grand-daughter, the delightful Rangimeere Delamare, asks her whata tar baby is, she quickly replies “opposite of a white maggot”. :

Merata Mita has more of expressionistic bent than Barry Barclay showed in Ngatia few years ago: the striking scenes of the crazy old white

bigot (played with relish and rotten teeth by Geoff Murphy) asa scarecrow, the scene in which Wallace revisits his mother's house and the photographs mysteriously change in their frames. There are exciting, almost flashy pieces of “cinema” inthe . opening sequence or the murder of Willie, but these are contrasted with the relaxed scenes of the couple’s wedding, with those wonderful wahine dancing so un-self-consciously around the table. : When Jonathan Dennis, of the New Zealand Film Archive, took Maurito ltaly, the ltalians described it as “belissima.” Mauriis an intensely beautiful film, as Graeme Cowley's -camera catches the changing - seascapes around Te Kaha on the East Coast. Mita and Cowley can even find beauty in unexpected places such as the grandmother’s house, with its walls lined with pages from the old Weekly News. The film ends with a spectacular aerial shot as the young girl races up the hill to bid her last farewell fo her grandmother’s spirit. Goethe once wrote, “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have béen hidden from us forever.” If her were a visionary, the 18th century German poet could well have been writing about Mauri. WILLIAM DART THEY LIVE | Director: John Carpenter Like fellow writer/ director Dan O’Bannon, with whom he collaborated on Dark Star, John Carpenter likes taking the science fiction “what if2” premise and driving it to a brick wall

dead end. This end-game structure echoes nuclear paranoia and is the spine of the best science fiction: Kiss Me Deadly, Last Day of Summeror Dr Strangelove. When the curtain fell in both Escape From New Yorkand The Thing, strong men were left staring inhorror at what they had become, and the world they had made. No matter that one of the strong men was Kurt Russell, still haunted by The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes— this was high speed story felling, as exciting and as satisfying as a slam dunkiin the last two seconds of the game. They Live proposes that the morass in which we now reside is not of our making. The first third of the film documents the plight of modern America with the heavy-lidded pathos of Philip K Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth -and later, like the book, subverts the smooth reality with the simplest device: whatifthe aliens are already amongst us, butyou can only see them if you wear cheap sunglasses? Thisis virtuoso schlock SF, sharing the premise and the spirit of the watershed B-grades like Don Siegel’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and William Menzies' Invaders From Mars. Meg Foster reprises the woman’s Bodysnatchersrole of the film noir deciever with only a hint of emancipation— she totes a gun, has crooked lipstick, and swings a mean bottle of vin rouge. Roddy Piper, fresh fromthe WWF, isno actor, butthen again neither was Kevin McCarthy. They Liveis the freshest film of 1989 since Lair Of The White Worm. It does not star Robert De Niro, itwas not

directed by Mike Nichols, it does not feature any Motown classics, it does not have a “message” and it will not bring the world closer to peace. Itis as good as a Philip K Dick novel, paced like a Stainless Steel Rat, and as brisk as a Delacorta. The people in the row behind me threw jaffas. | mean, it's that good. 3 : CHADTAYLOR DEARAMERICA Director: Bill Couturie Once again we're reliving the nightmare of Vietnam, this time around without Robin Williams as a flip DJ. Dear Americais a docu-drama consisting of contemporary news footage culled from 926 hours of NBC reports. This is the whole, and occasionally grainy truth— or so we are led to believe. | would suggest, however, that when you re-edit, add the occasional bit of slow motion and superimposed images, hone in on the occasional detail or two, add songs and a reading of letters from the men themselves; thenyouhavea - highly manipulated and manipulative piece of filming. Thisis notto deny the sheer gut power of Dear America, although now and then one questions the ethics of invading the privacy of these soldiers’ agonies. The film is very selective in its horrors, though: we see something of the terror of a search and destroy mission, but nothing as terrible as the black and white images that NZ photographer Terence White brought back from Cambodiain 1976 —all the more terrible because shots of maimed Cambodians were interspersed with photographs of life going on around

them, as it were. We see very little of the Vietnamese people in Dear America, apart from afew exofic go-gogirlsin a Saigon brothel. - Shots of Gls goofing around are touching, as we imagine the sentence of death hanging over them. So, inits sheertackiness, is a clip from Bob Hope'stouring show, which reminded me of two lines from Phil Och’s song ‘White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land’ — “The comic and the beauty queen are dancing on the stage /Raw recruits are lining up like coffinsin a cage.” Och’s songs would have provided some sharp commentary in Dear America, but the producers have opted for a more commercial mix (after all, Tour Of Duty has now spawned three compilation albums). This is notto say, mind you, that there isn’t a certain poignance in watching weapons on the assembly line while Sonny & Cher sing ‘The Beat Goes On’, orthe soldiers returning home to the Stones’‘No Expectations’. Some of this irony carries through to the various letters — read by everyone from Robert De Niro to Kathleen Turner— when one soldier comments thata medal will help you getajobbackhome.Theironyno doubt hithome to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission whichwas behind this film. WILLIAMDART WIRED , Director: Larry Peerce John Belushi was a comedian of the terminally frantic school, associated in his time with some of the crudest comedies of the 70s — Animal House

and Spielberg'’s 1 941, to name just two. Most are familiar with The Blues Brothers,the bestofthe Belushi-Ackroyd movies, and now - something of a cult. After the actor’s death from a heroin overdose in 1982, author Bob All The President’s Men Woodward wrote Belushi's life up as a cautionary and sensationalistic tale called Wired. Now Wiredis at your local cinema, with Michael Chiklis doing his schtick as the hyper-active Belushi, recreating for cognescenti the classic routines (including a truly tedious samurai sketch). If you're sympathetic enough to Belushi’s unpleasant character to stay the 110 minutes, | defy you notto be irritated by the silly trickiness of the movie. The screen Belushi escapes from the morgue with a hip guardian angel (amarvellous performance by Ray Sharkey) to have a guided tour of his life. All this is intercut with Woodward's interviews as he researches the book, culminated in a scene where Woodward confronts the dying Belushi ina Hollywood motel. Addto this Larry Peerce in the director’s chair, a man who has never fulfilled the promise of his 1968 film The Incident, and some of Wired's failure is - explained. | have not seen such unsympathetic editing since Bruce Beresford was letloose on Crimes Of The Heart. The production reeks of pretension. At one point, Belushi's manager says to Woodward, “It's not just Belushi, it's a story about America.” Ifthe film-makers had been a little less ambitious, this might have come off.

WILLIAM DART