VIDEOS

Rip It Up, Issue 236, 1 April 1997, Page 36

VIDEOS

HACKERS Director: lain Softley It could be due to the fact I had just watched Some Kind of Wonderful for what must have been the fiftieth time (and wondered how the youth of today get by without the dreams John Hughes cooked up for them) that I found this film so engaging, but I certainly didn’t expect the return of the hip-and-sexy teen flick to come from the world of cyber-geekdom. Still, I’ll bet a lot of you kids out there never thought the Beatles were sexy until lain Softley showed them to you in Back Beat.

Exihibit A in the small stack of reasons this film could well slay your head: Angelina Jolie, daughter of Jon ‘Midnight Cowboy’ Voight, possessor of the best lips arrr/eyes since Liv Tyler, and now wife of, Exhibit B: her co-star Johnny Lee ‘Sick Boy’ Millar. This prickly pair of computer whizzes compete for the chosen favours of one another (she: his slavery, he: her company), but are interrupted when a pair of double-dealing corporation types conspire to set them up. Along with an ‘excellent, dude’ cast of supports, they enlist the help of a veritable cyber-teen army to take on the system and “hack the planet!”. Exhibit C comes in the form of computer guts graphics which will have your eyes on stalks, and Exhibit D is a kickin' soundtrack. So, let’s see, sexual tension, weirdy bits, great sounds... yeah, it is kinda like music video, but a level more engaging. THE CROSSING GUARD Director: Sean Penn In which long-divorced Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson are reunited to play estranged parents of a young daughter killed by a drunk driver. A beefed-up David Morse plays the repentant driver, and the film starts with his release from prison. It’s a day Nicholson has long been counting down to, the day he plans to kill Morse. This is dark and gritty stuff. Nicholson lives in a world of extremes that is drawn so accurately you can almost smell the smoke, booze, and perfumeveiled sweat it exudes. It’s the polar opposite to the

world in which the remarried Huston exists, and neither of them know how (or even whether) the other is going about the day-to-day business of coping with their loss. Their chemistry, guided by Penn’s unflinching eye for the spaces between seconds, is what makes this sobering effort worth seeing.

Penn’s wife, Robin Wright (from whom he must have learned a thing or two about estrangement), is the forth polar opposite in this wonderfully cast set. Giving Morse a choice between life with her or death without, she ups the ante and gets Morse’s mouse on the run which could lead to a.sort of peace for all involved. LAST DANCE Director: Bruce Beresford Shazza Stone! Whoowoar, lick-lick, pant-pant... Woops, wrong generic Sharon Stone video review header. This is a film where she doesn’t take her clothes off — although she does manage to dispatch a couple of people with the old slice ’n’ dice routine. - . , Stone plays a killer on death row in Last Dance — a film echoing the themes of The Executioner’s Song and Dead Man Walking, but giving them a gender switch and adding a touch of romance (however bad its timing may be). Rob Morrow plays the new boy from the Clemency Board, who’s been given Stone’s case because it’s a dead duck — she is definitely guilty, and he is no match for the politicians who intend to make sure she pays with her life. Morrow, however, believes the extenuating circumstances of her crime should dictate only imprisonment, not death, and it is this belief and the development she has shown after maturing in prison that allow an understated affection to blossom. Stone and Morrow are a double act definitely capable of getting the tears 'rolling down your « cheeks, rather than the bile.rising in your throat. It’s just a pity the screenplay doesn’t fill in the , holes which could have made this more than a poor cousin Dead ‘Woman’ Walking. ' BRONWYN TRUDGEON