Film

Rip It Up, Issue 243, 1 November 1997, Page 38

Fil m

Reviews by

William Dart

Event horizon Director: Paul Anderson The year is 2046, a rescue crew slope off to deserted space station and there’s a strange life force on board.. . sound familiar? Event Horizon, slickly put together by Pau Anderson, who cut his teeth on Mortal Kombat, i yet another entrant in the Aliens genre (I'd sa' ‘Aliens 4’ if there wasn't one already on the way' And it hangs together pretty well, if you managi to survive Michael Kamen’s barrage on th< eardrums over the opening credits. . Although there is some tasty grand guigno (the piece de resistance is a disembowellec corpse hooked up and suspended over a coffin) Event Horizon does give one the rare pleasure o the seeing the usually sober Sam Neil disintegrate both physically and mentally. But th star is Joseph Bennett’s brilliant set for the spaceship’s core — Metropolis meets heavy meta meets medieval dungeon — pity the actors wh( have to compete with it. Manny & LO Director: Lisa Krueger Manny & Lo is an offbeat charmer that keeps cuteness mercifully at arm’s length. It’s a roac movie, about two orphaned youngsters — Mann} (Scarlett Johansson) and Lo (Aleksam Palladino — on the run, and eventually having to cope witl a third, Lo’s baby. Completing the mix is Elaine (Mary Kay Place), a warm-hearted mysterious woman they kidnap from a maternity shop. . ‘Did you ever dream about someone before yot saw them in real life,’ is asked early on in the film and it’s this nowhere land between dreams delusions and a fragile reality that Lisa Kruege: explores with remarkable, freshness and a tota lack of affectation. Certainly one of the best films to come my way this year. AIRFORCE ONE Director: Wolfgang Petersen This preposterous piece of hokum gives Harrisoi Ford yet another opportunity to save the world Predictably, he does just that, taking on a clutch o crazed terrorists virtually single-handed. This time around, Ford is the President of the USA and in the course of the movie, spends most of the filn prowling around the corridors of Airforce One, th presidential jet. The political theme echoes Petersen’s 199: Clint Eastwood vehicle, In the Line of Fire, but th

setting recalls the German feature that made Petersen’s name in 1981 — Das Boot. Just as, 16 years ago, the compressed quarters of a submarine proved the perfect arena for surging, relentless action, so too does a jet plane, with a seemingly inexhaustible array of nooks and crannies, often decorated with corpses of passengers fated not to make the trip. Humour is wherever you want to find it. It's most obvious when Ford discovers that the battery on the cellphone is flat just when he needs it... more cynical souls may smile as they watch Madam Vice-President Glenn Close dispensing the purest of distilled corn through quivering lips, and Gary Oldman lapping up every guttural syllable as the terrorist leader.

Paradise Road Director: Bruce Beresford It’s 1942 and we're at Raffles' Hotel in Singapore on the night of the Japanese attack. The jaded Europeans are listening to a singer working her wiles on Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’. Glenn Close's table is a-buzz with deliciously bitchy conversation. Several bomb blasts and a shipwreck later (all of which is accounted for in a few short minutes of screen time) most of the European women and children find themselves in a Japanese prison camp on Sumatra. Glenn Close proves to be as musical as she is plucky. A fellow prisoner catches her humming a theme from the Elgar Cello Concerto, and soon there’s chatter about the Royal Academy. Next thing Our Glenn is organising a vocal orchestra, and the woman are chirruping their way through such classics as Dvorak's Goin Home and Ravel’s Bolero (without the crucial shift of harmony, the musician in me notes). Music, understandably enough, takes over their lives. In one priceless line, Close remonstrates with another inmate who is thinking of becoming a good-time girl in the Japanese officer’s quarters by saying, ‘What about the vocal orchestra? I’ll be an alto short’. There are serious issues here (although a similar film, Playing For Time, with Vanessa Redgrave, presented them more unflinchingly). Paradise Road is eminently watchable in an H.E. Bates sort of way, thanks i to a first-class cast. Close, only recently seen sweeping around London hunting for dalmations, manages to keep her cool while she's kicked around by Japanese guards, watches the odd atrocity or conducts Bolero. A special note too for Frances McDormand, who offers a crisp homage to Lotte Lenya as the worldly-wise . and cynical camp doctor. Grosse Pointe blank Director: George Armitage George Armitage’s film career ambles back to the late 60s, when he wrote the screenplay for Roger Corman’s Gasss-ss. Over the last decade, he has directed a handful of his own movies, the most successful being the brutal and brilliant Miami Blues. Watching Grosse Pointe Blank, it was Corman’s film that came to mind — a self indulgent movie that should have been much funnier and sharper than it was. Some of the problem lay with feeble, unfocused performances, but ultimately, the fault lay with the loose, freewheeling satire of the sprint

And so it is with Grosse Pointe Blank, except that the performances, from players like John Cusack, Dan Ackroyd, Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin are spot on. After an initial rush of adrenalin, in which it seems that this power struggle between two hit men (Cusack and Ackroyd) will become a nifty satire on (a)moral responsibility, the film slips out of focus. Joan Cusack lights up the screen doing her Eve Arden schtick, and Arkin has some of the best lines as the hero's shrink, but eventually the question of ‘what is happening?’ receives its inevitable answer: ‘Who cares?’. The well Director: Samantha Lang ■ ■'' ■ ■ ' ■ ’ ■ . • ■' ■■ There’s something nasty in the well at the Harper farm... or is there? This is the premise of this weird little Gothic tale, set in a hot summer on the treeless planes of Monaro. Miranda Otto plays Katherine, who is taken on as a housekeeper by the strange, repressed Hester (the inspirational Pamela Rabe who can also be seen as a sourpuss in Paradise Road}. It’s a pretty wacky household anyway, with Frank Wilson as the last word in gross old Dads, feeding his dog from the table with his own fork and shoving his gnarled out toes at the camera for a • ■■ :■ .. ■ : f .. ■ ■ - -• • nail-clipping. It gets wackier. Hester alternately twitches and stares, and proved to be a devotee .of Gustav Mahler’s Riickert-Lieder. Katherine is street-smart trash and easily won over by a pair of thigh-high vinyl boots (one of the funniest scenes has her squealing ‘l’m in love with these boots, Miss Harper’ as Hester: pounds away on her trusty upright). To my mind, The Well doesn’t quite follow through on the sheer delirium of the first four or so minutes of the film. The ending is ironic, but predictably so. And Mandy Walker’s cool and dispassionate filming of the Australian landscape, always central to the film, takes over from an ailing script. The game Director: David Fincher David Fincher set some ripples off a few years back when he directed Seven, one of the nastiest and most meretricious films that it has been my fate to experience. The Game is relatively mild in the kinks department, but it’s, a lame allegory about the filthy rich and successful getting their due comeuppance. Michael Douglas,. having survived Kathleen Turner’s flying furniture, Glenn Close’s kitchen knife, and Sharon Stone’s icepick, is given a birthday present with a difference: a package enabling this particularly anal control freak, to relinquish control of his life for a wee while. And this happens, although it’s hardly the ‘2lst century roller coast ride’ that Douglas describes in the press handouts... not at a grinding 2 hours and 20 minutes. I suspect that it could have been a stunning short, let’s say 30 minutes max.