Film

Rip It Up, Issue 244, 1 December 1997, Page 38

Film

Reviews BY

William Dart

Gl JANE Director: Ridley Scott Ridley Scott’s latest is certainly a film with muscle, and it’s not all on the rippling torsos of the male cast members. Even Demi Moore has impressive thighs and biceps as she works out in this post-feminist saga. Moore plays Lt Jordan Neil who, after being underestimated and overlooked for too long at her desk in Naval ■ Intelligence, takes up the challenge of a training stint in the exclusive. SEALS unit. This is a group in which-men are men and any woman who wants to be part of it needs to beat the guys at their own gender games.

Against a hip soundtrack (Randy Newman’s ‘Mama Told Me Not to Come’ is wickedly apt early on in the training, and Puccini’s JO/Mio, Bambino Caro’ is a nicely ironic accompaniment at another point), the initiation begins. The turning point — and for some, no doubt, a stomach-churning point — comes when our Demi takes on the Master Chief (Viggo Mortensen) in fist-to-jaw and foot-; to-crutch combat. Mind . you, Mortensen, who looks like a Marlboro Man with all the 70s sensitivity pumped out of him, is not such a brute that he can’t quote a D.H. Lawrence poem when the moment is appropriate. . i The final test for the SEALS wannabes ,is a search and rescue mission on the Libyan coast — an

escapade so far-fetched that it makes Airforce One look like a docudrama. But no matter, it’s a 10 minute disposable slice out of a film that's a pretty punchy package. Demi Moore is a trouper. In a role destined to make her. Dyke icon for decades to come, she doesn’t hold back for a second, whether booting Viggo in the pego or resolutely giving herself a number one in the barber’s chair. Watch out too for Anne -Bancroft as the ruthless Senator who is exploiting Demi’s venture for her own political career. I suspect Bancroft must have been buddies with the scriptwriters — she certainly has the most trenchant oneliners, delivered in an accent halfway between Alabama and ■ the East Village.

The Peacemaker

Director- Mimi Leder

Kidman works.her butt off in The Peacemaker. She . spends more than her share of time in the line of fire, swims, runs, makes scientific pronouncements and even' dashes off some Russian at one point — all this in chic Calvin Klein clobber. She is a woman with a mission. As Dr Julia Kelly, Kidman gets entangled With Peacemaker Colonel Thomas Devoe (the suave ‘n’ sexy George Clooney sans Batcape) and together they save the Western world (or at least new York) from nuclear annihilation, f

The plot, which bounces all the way from the Ural Mountains via Iran to trie Big Apple, could have done with some trimming, although Mimi Leder neatly orchestrates her big moments (the final showdown in New York is edge-of-the-seat stuff). L. ■, . .. For. all its noise, and it is a belligerently noisy film, The ■ Peacemaker is immensely watchable, and not' without some subtleties. The take-over of the Russian Train by masked terrorists is a chilling moment worthy ■of Franju,. and The ‘villain’ of ' the piece, movingly played by the distinguished Romanian actor, Marcel lures, is even allowed to register as a human being. , ------

Austin POWERS

Director: Jay Roach

Spy spoofs were the rage in the late 60s and they were usually, with the notable exception of the deadly Casino Royale, brisky and breezy affairs. In the wake of 007 himself came Matt Helm (a likeably lecherous Dean Martin) or Our Man Flint (James Cobum, unruffled and terminally cool) and those small-screen re-runs don’t allow us to forget the immortal Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 (played by Don Adams and Barbara Feldon). Now Mike Myers, trying to atone for the truly dreadful So I Married

An Axe Murderer, is reviving the genre, taking on the dual roles of , Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (with chest wig and catchphrases like ‘Shagadelic’), and the bad, bad Dr Evil (very much based on Donald Pleasance’s villain in You Only Live Twice) _ The script is one unrelenting nudge, but a sexpot villainess with the name of Alotta Fagina is no substitute for the original Pussy Galore,, as played by Honor Blackman. And generally, the cast do not seem at ease. Elizabeth Hurley is certainly glacial enough**; to ~ set Alfred Hitchcock’s heart afire, and Robert Wagner, so urbane and witty in Hart -to Hart, just seems awkward. The undisputed star is Myers himself, with an acting style that reminds me of Norman Wisdom and Ronnie Corbett in equal parts. He’s the - eternal clown and, when in one of Dr Evil’s speeches, the script gives him some lines to relish, he shows , his skill and timing. But : much of - the : comedy ,is resolutely physical, hilariously so when Myers demolishes a team of deadly blonde automatons who lip-sync a mean ‘These Boots are Made for Walking’ and shoot from the bra. .

i Amongst the passing treats: Burt Bacharach crooning ‘What the World Needs Now’ on top of a dou-ble-decker bus, and two tricky pieces of camera manipulation in which various objects tactfully shield Myers’ family jewels and then Hurley’s breasts from the viewer's libidinous gaze.

Breakdown Director: Jonathan Mostow it :' Jeff and Amy (Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan) are emigrating by car from East to West Coast. They get stranded in the. Utah desert, , and a helpful trucker is not as helpful as he seems... ■ '’Breakdown is the latest entry in a genre that American cinema thrives on — backwoods rednecks wreaking revenge on city slickers (or, in the words of one villain, ‘two rich assholes looking for trouble’).

As a film, it takes a wee bit of time to warm up, although Mostow has some fun creating images of rustic sleaze: in Belle's Diner. Trie climax, with Russell's ute ■ flanked by an 18-wheeler and two other cars, is classic chase stuff — although I can’t imagine that this film does much for Utah’s tourist industry.

Basquiat

Director.- Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel, a wunderkind of the artworld himself, tries to capture the essence of the late JeanMichel Basquiat, a controversial young artist who made the trip from street graffiti to the SOHO art scene. And, when Schnabel is working with art, the film is at its most effective, from the opening scene in which the young Jean-Michel and mother stand entranced before a Picasso.

; There are other many other moments in which images proves themselves mightier than the word, whether it be psychedelic surfers soaring against a New York skyline, or the insouciant body rhythms of Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat. The personalities around Basquiat are less convincing, apart from David Bowie, with his nervous, jittery performance as Andy Warhol. Actors like Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper and an excruciatingly loud Tatum O’Neal just seem ill-at-ease.

The real stars perhaps are to be found on the soundtrack, which catches Schnabel’s conception of an artist who ‘became what he longed to be, and fulfilled what his audience waited for him to become’. It’s a night of a thousand gravelly voices, with John Cale intoning Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, Tom Waits, Shane MacGowan and, best of all, Keith Richards in an extraordinarily rough take on Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘The Nearness of You’.