Remember key parties? Ang Lee’s latest, THE ICE STORM, takes us back to swinging 1973 in suburban Connecticut, when all those nice upper-middle-class parents tried to keep up with the sexual revolution. After a few joints and a lot of Scotch, hubby threw his car keys into a bowl, another man’s wife picked them out and the two were expected to head off to bed. Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood head an intergenerational cast in this drama of miniskirts and shaky marriages. James Schamus’s adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel copped the best-screenplay prize in Cannes.
FLUBBER bounces. It dances. It shape-shifts, it defies gravity, it can make anything and anyone fly. In one sequence, it apparently comes rocketing out of somebody’s backside. In this remake of ““The Absent-Minded Professor,’’ Robin Williams invents flying rubber, which somehow saves the day at his penniless college. Williams has been bouncing off the walls for years. Why should he be alone?
Last year, speaking from the set of STARSHIP TROOPERS, director Paul Verhoeven made his intentions clear: ““This is a movie about fighting giant bugs.’’ It seems Buenos Aires has been attacked by alien spiders, and Earthlings have mobilized an immense counterattack. Like Verhoeven’s ““RoboCop,’’ ““Troopers’’ promises to deliver sci-fi thrills without ever removing its tongue from its cheek. The real stars are the evil alien bugs, which were designed by Phil Tippett of ““Jurassic Park’’ fame. Rows of gigantic spiders swarm over the hills like the German army, slicing and dicing Earthlings in some very gruesome battle scenes.
It’s hard to steal a scene from Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, but Bart the Bear delivers an Oscar-worthy four-legged turn in THE EDGE, an action adventure written by David Mamet. Expanding his range from the benevolent hero of ““The Bear’’ to this man-eating mammal, Bart terrifies the two-legged survivors of a plane crash, who are stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with no supplies. Hopkins is an autodidactic billionaire who’s afraid not just of death by bear claw but death by Baldwin, a fashion photographer he suspects has designs on his beautiful wife (Elle Macpherson). Lee Tamahori directs.
SOUL FOOD is a grand, affirming homage to the black middle class. Vanessa L. Williams, Vivica A. Fox and Nia Long are sisters living in Chicago. Their mother’s taken ill and they’re trying to keep her most cherished family tradition alive: Sunday dinner. In the uproarious highlight of the film, uptight Teri (Williams) learns her cousin has been romping around with her husband–and goes after her with a knife. The sequence had one preview audience levitating with laughter.
Burt Reynolds may have found the role he was born to play. In BOOGIE NIGHTS, a riveting two-hour, 20-minute epic about the porn industry in the late ’70s, Burt plays skin-flick director Jack Horner, who discovers an extremely well-endowed dishwasher (Mark Wahlberg) and turns him into legendary porn star ““Dirk Diggler.’’ Burt, playing father figure to his dysfunctional family of porn actors and technicians, keeps his clothes on and his wits about him while everyone else is on a roller-coaster ride of coke-fueled, disco-era excess. This sure-to-be-controversial panorama by 27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson debuts at the New York Film Festival. Gasps may greet the climactic shot of Dirk’s equipment, a 13-inch prosthetic device that stretches the concept of special effect.
Everything was big in 1950s Hollywood: the cars, the blondes, the corruption. The hard-bitten film noir L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, based on a James Ellroy novel, is heavy on both period detail and double-crossing plot as two rival L.A. cops–played with impeccable American accents by Aussies Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce–follow a mass homicide to its bloody conclusion. Director Curtis Hanson studs his mazelike story with vintage cars and high-voltage performers: Kim Basinger as a call girl, Danny DeVito as a tabloid reporter, Kevin Spacey as a publicity-hungry detective.
No weird accents, drug binges or raccoon eyes from Jennifer Jason Leigh in WASHINGTON SQUARE. She’s playing Henry James’s beleaguered 19th-century heroine Catherine Sloper in Agnieszka Holland’s highly charged remake of ““The Heiress.’’ Leigh’s Catherine, the ultimate wallflower, gets a new lease on life when suitor Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin) comes calling, but her cold father (Albert Finney) smells a rat. Will Henry James be the Jane Austen of 1997? James’s ““The Wings of the Dove’’ also gets the screen treatment this season, but this is the pick of the literary litter.
No one’s talking about a John Travolta comeback anymore. Now you can’t get the guy to go away. This fall’s new Travolta movie is MAD CITY. It teams him with Dustin Hoffman in a hostage-crisis drama directed by Costa-Gavras. Travolta plays a sacked security guard who snaps and holds prisoners in a standoff with the cops. Hoffman is the cynical TV reporter who fans the flames to boost his ratings. The comeback kid here is Costa-Gavras (““Z,’’ ““Missing’’), who hasn’t made a movie in eight years.
SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET will be Brad Pitt’s longest leap as an actor–and don’t be surprised when he surprises you. Pitt plays the arrogant Heinrich Harrer, a real-life Austrian mountain climber who conned his way into Tibet during World War II and befriended the young Dalai Lama just before China invaded in 1950. Pitt gives a terrifically nuanced performance, and the young boy playing His Holiness (Jamyang Wangchuk) just glows. The real Dalai Lama’s sister, Jetsun Pema, plays his mother. Pema was 5 when Harrer arrived in Lhasa: ““I don’t recall his face, but I recall this golden-haired man, yes? I remember this blond man coming to visit our brother in our house in Lhasa. He was involved in planting some trees, and sometimes he’d put me on his shoulders and take me to see the trees, yes? And I would be playing with his blond hair because I was fascinated by it.''
GATTACA is a cool, stylized bit of future shock. In the 21st century, couples order designer children by flipping through a sort of gene catalog–and people born the old-fashioned way tumble into a despised underclass. Ethan Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, an undesirable trying to bluff his way into both the aerospace program and Uma Thurman’s heart. But expect all eyes to be on the young British actor Jude Law, who steals the show in his American film debut. Law plays Eugene, a perfect genetic specimen who’s been paralyzed in an accident and now helps Vincent in his subterfuge. Law grounds the chilly ““Gattaca’’ with a nicely human performance that careers from self-righteousness to self-pity. He’ll also turn up in ““Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’’ and ““Wilde.''
The suddenly ubiquitous Sean Penn (didn’t he once say he never wanted to act again?) plays the lead in Oliver Stone’s latest, U-TURN. But this is not your ordinary, politically charged Stone opus. This time he’s given us a straight genre movie, and the genre is film noir with a dark comic edge. Penn is a hard-luck case whose car breaks down in an Arizona town, where he’s seduced (by Jennifer Lopez), threatened (by Joaquin Phoenix), harassed (by Billy Bob Thornton’s mechanic from hell) and propositioned to commit murder (by Nick Nolte). With no controversial agenda, this stylish thriller will rise or fall on the sheer bravado of Stone’s filmmaking.
Al Pacino has played good guys and bad guys, but in DEVIL’S ADVOCATE he’s the Devil himself, taking the form of a powerful New York lawyer named John Milton. In this Taylor Hackford thriller, an idealistic lawyer played by Keanu Reeves comes to work for Pacino, who makes him a Faustian offer he can’t refuse. Things get very weird after that. New-babe-in-town Charlize Theron plays Keanu’s wife. The set was rife with rumors of conflict between the two stars, but so what? Some of the best movies were made when everybody was at each other’s throat.
