Pick o' the Flicks

by Jesse Gerstein

What a summer for the movie industry! Well, they didn't make any believers in the well-thought out, well-written, well-portrayed categories. I spent the summer up in Maine, and one of my only connections with civilization was the ocasional movie at the Hoyts Eight. Imagine my dismay when I found that I could see only Armageddon, or Lethal Weapon 4, or any of the many lousy Hollywood productions of late. More recently, I saw the atrociously awful vampire-ninja flick entitled Blade. My faith in the movie industry, however small it had been, would have dwindled to zero had it not been for the fact that I did happen to see a few good films amidst the dregs that made up the largest part of this summer season. Saving Private Ryan is, as all other reviewers and moviegoers have said, spellbinding, spectacular, beautifully sad, and a true cinematic masterpiece. What more can be said? In addition to Saving Private Ryan, I also caught a couple indie films at this little artsy, rundown, hole-in-the-wall of a theater in the middle of Portland, where the tickets are only three bucks, and the seats are essentially like sitting on metal tree stumps with little metal protrusions digging into your back. Uncomfortable, yes, but they make a man out of you, I tell you what. I don't know if I agree with the ambience, but the movies are usually pretty good, as is the case with The Opposite of Sex. And High Art just kicks ass. So yeah, the Summer of '98 was a veritable cinematic skirmish, as both the horrible and decent waged a fruitless battle that ended in a toss-up.

Blade

I want it to be said that I am disgusted with the American movie-going public. Granted, I went to see this sham of a film, too, but I get to write it off as a business expense. This is the #1 movie in America, and it's also quite possibly the worst movie produced in America since Cool as Ice. This vampire-ninja flick with Wesley Snipes and Stephen Dorff sucks, pure and simple. It's cheesy, poorly written, laughable (although at the wrong times), and just plain bad. I mean, it's like the guys in the big offices were smoking a lot of crack and decided to make a movie that has a lot of martial arts, blood, special effects, Wesley Snipes, and nothing else. The dialogue was more or less non-existent, except for some really bad one-liners about blood and pure-blood and vampires and sunlight. Whatever. Basically the movie makes you follow Blade (Snipes) as he kicks the asses of all the vampires in "the City." They're bad, he's sorta good, but he's also a vampire, but without any of the weaknesses of the stereotypical ones, because he is a "daywalker." He's the chosen one or something like that, and he has to prevent Deacon Frost (Dorff) from bringing on the vampirical apocalypse. So guess what happens. I'm gonna make you see for yourself, although I wouldn't recommend it unless you happen to be sitting around with a bunch of friends on a Sunday afternoon, hung-over, bored, and wanting to laugh at stupidity incarnate.

Armageddon

This movie, although the review may be somewhat belated, is still as bad now as it was when I first saw it in early July. The second of the asteroid-type movies of the summer (the first being Deep Impact, which I did not have the opportunity to see), Armageddon really didn't do it for me. I don't know if it was the Aerosmith monopoly on the music, the potentially (but not quite) believable storyline, Bruce Willis with a Southern accent, Liv Tyler's horrible acting, or just the movie as a whole. So the Earth is going to be destroyed if this oil rig team doesn't drill 800 feet into this asteroid, plant a nuke, and blow it up. Oh, and they have twelve days to train and they're working against the "zero-barrier," which, if the asteroid passes and is still in one piece, well, look at the title. Ben Affleck delivers a somewhat decent performance as a Bruno wannabe, and Steve Buscemi's semi-insane, wonderfully comic lecher is quite possibly the only reason to see this movie. If you're one of those people who like to pick out little flaws in movies, however, this is a great one. In one scene where Affleck, a Russian cosmonaut, and another team-member jump over this huge canyon, on the big rock, in the middle of space, while in a really big Hummer-type vehicle, one of my favorite screw-ups of all time takes place. They get out of the machine and start cheering and walking around, on the asteroid mind you, and if you look at what they're walking around on you see that it's grass, and it's backlit! Somebody missed a little sump'n in the editing room. So anyway, Bruno and pals experience all sorts of tense foul-ups while trying to save the world and racing the clock. Then, at the end, this air force commander who also went on the mission with the drillers comes up to Liv Tyler (who plays Bruno's daughter), salutes, and tearfully says, "Ma'am, I just wanted to know if I could have the honor of shaking the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I have ever known." Ugh.

The Opposite of Sex

This was one of the better flicks of the summer, and it's actually coming soon to the Jefferson Theater downtown. Christina Ricci (a.k.a. Wednesday Addams, or the little girl from Mermaids, or the girl in a bunch of recent indie films and The Ice Storm) plays a somewhat delinquent, homewrecking sixteen-year-old from a broken home who goes to live with her much older, gay half-brother, played by Martin Donovan. She moves in, planning to destroy his life by taking advantage of every possible show of caring and kindness and being the end-all, be-all bad girl. To top it off, she steals her brother's boyfriend, money, and various other items and emotions, and flees, while pregnant, boozing, and smoking. Great life. So she goes to California, followed by her half-brother, Lisa Kudrow (playing a convincingly pitiful, neurotic, potential spinster who is also the sister of Donovan's character's former lover), and a very creepy Lyle Lovett as a cop friend who tails them in order to keep tabs on them. So everyone's worlds collide, unravel, spiral downwards and sidewards and backwards, and each character ends up discovering something about himself, although not in a condescendingly moralistic way. Director Don Roos does an excellent job at maintaining the story such that no real pity is felt for any of the characters, just as no real hatred is felt either. Put simply, you don't hate or love anyone in the film. No real hero, no real villain. Just characters who do interesting things. Go see it.

High Art

What do you get when you cross heroin, photography, lesbians, New York, love, lust, infatuation, a magazine, the art world, and a smashing soundtrack by Shudder To Think? Why, it's High Art, the "controversial" film starring the ex-brat packer Ally Sheedy and the beautiful and innocent and talented Radha Mitchell. Sheedy plays reclusive photographer Lucy Berliner, a shining star in the art world of the '80s who got fed up with its commercialism, discovered the draw of various powdered narcotics, and went into hiding. Mitchell plays Sid, the aspiring assistant editor at the photography magazine Frame, as well as downstairs neighbor of Lucy Berliner. A leaky pipe leads to a chance encounter between the two, and Sid soon realizes who Lucy really is. A love story of sorts evolves, inhibitions are tossed to the side, and a genuine appreciation of art, life, and individuality is displayed. Aside from some initial naive, first-year-art-history-survey-course dialogue on photography from Sid regarding Lucy's work, the script is wonderful.

It challenges the way we feel about people as individuals, stereotypes, artists as commodities, and thoughts of forbidden romance, love, and passion. In addition, the movie has some very appealing surface values and sentiments, and confronts the difficulties of everyday life in New York. It's beautifully shot, and the characters are portrayed in about as real a light as any I've seen. This is the one that you should see if you're going to see any movies in the near future, because there ain't a whole lot else out there that's worth seeing.

As summer draws to a close, we can only hope that these so-called blockbusters will end. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a well-written, interesting movie. Maybe indie films are where it's at. All I really know is that this summer's movies will soon be forgotten, and they'll soon start hyping those for the Summer of '99.