Dataset statistics
| Number of variables | 6 |
|---|---|
| Number of observations | 4004 |
| Missing cells | 0 |
| Missing cells (%) | 0.0% |
| Duplicate rows | 0 |
| Duplicate rows (%) | 0.0% |
| Total size in memory | 187.8 KiB |
| Average record size in memory | 48.0 B |
Variable types
| NUM | 3 |
|---|---|
| CAT | 3 |
Text has a high cardinality: 3978 distinct values | High cardinality |
Text is uniformly distributed | Uniform |
Id has unique values | Unique |
Reproduction
| Analysis started | 2020-12-13 01:25:06.751044 |
|---|---|
| Analysis finished | 2020-12-13 01:25:09.932302 |
| Duration | 3.18 seconds |
| Software version | pandas-profiling v2.9.0 |
| Download configuration | config.yaml |
| Distinct | 4004 |
|---|---|
| Distinct (%) | 100.0% |
| Missing | 0 |
| Missing (%) | 0.0% |
| Infinite | 0 |
| Infinite (%) | 0.0% |
| Mean | 13887.96503 |
|---|---|
| Minimum | 1858 |
| Maximum | 29866 |
| Zeros | 0 |
| Zeros (%) | 0.0% |
| Memory size | 31.3 KiB |
Quantile statistics
| Minimum | 1858 |
|---|---|
| 5-th percentile | 2435.6 |
| Q1 | 5404.25 |
| median | 11211 |
| Q3 | 23263.25 |
| 95-th percentile | 28764.85 |
| Maximum | 29866 |
| Range | 28008 |
| Interquartile range (IQR) | 17859 |
Descriptive statistics
| Standard deviation | 9332.642525 |
|---|---|
| Coefficient of variation (CV) | 0.6719949612 |
| Kurtosis | -1.44393748 |
| Mean | 13887.96503 |
| Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) | 7617 |
| Skewness | 0.314393375 |
| Sum | 55607412 |
| Variance | 87098216.49 |
| Monotocity | Not monotonic |
Histogram with fixed size bins (bins=50)
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 11917 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 21199 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 4839 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 7081 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 2788 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 7726 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 4831 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 17117 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 4827 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 10968 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| Other values (3994) | 3994 | 99.8% |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 1858 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 1859 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 1860 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 1864 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 1865 | 1 | < 0.1% |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 29866 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 29857 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 29855 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 29854 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 29853 | 1 | < 0.1% |
| Distinct | 3978 |
|---|---|
| Distinct (%) | 99.4% |
| Missing | 0 |
| Missing (%) | 0.0% |
| Memory size | 31.3 KiB |
| THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF) has all of the right ingredients for most hard core art house patrons. It stars a famous, gorgeous foreign actress (Juliette Binoche) who boldly appears quite unattractive. It is a well-meaning story about people living on society's margins. It features unhappy and unsympathetic characters whose actions dare you to like them, but whose circumstances are so dire that you feel guilty if you don't. Finally it has a director who figures that, if he doesn't proceed with excruciating slowness, you will not appreciate the gravity of the characters' situations and the importance of the material. In short, it's the high-minded type of film that will have those less dedicated filmgoers heading for the exits before the first 15 long minutes have elapsed. To be fair the actors try hard, perhaps too hard, and the images, especially those of the steel-gray Parisian twilight, are handsomely filmed. Writer and director Léos Carax does accomplish his mission, crafting a serious, albeit sometimes unbearable, view of two homeless lovers who live on a bridge. As the story opens, Alex (Denis Lavant) is lying in the road, scratching his forehead on the pavement. As blood begins to seep through his skin, a car runs over his leg. The police pick him up and take him to a combination hospital and shelter. Like most of the Parisian homeless in the story, he's mentally disturbed and a substance abuser. Once he's released, he returns to Paris's famous Pont-Neuf bridge. The bridge, which is closed for restoration, is currently the home for some homeless people. A gruff and angry Hans (Klaus-Michael Grüber) functions as the bridge's homeless landlord and drug distributor. Much to Hans's consternation, Michèle Stalens (Binoche) takes up residence on the bridge without his permission. With a patch over one eye, a cut and bruised lip and a splotchy complexion, Binoche's normally striking beauty is completely masked. Michèle and Alex strike up an almost instant friendship and like nothing better than swigging cheap wine from identical large bottles until they obtain the desired degree of inebriation. With realistic background sounds and little dialog, the movie has the feel of a documentary. When words are spoken, they are usually in whispers, and they rarely form anything approaching a complete sentence. The largely plotless story does include a small mystery about how the artistic Michèle came to leave her previous middle-class lifestyle. Eventually, when the two lovers develop a scheme to drug and rob outdoor cafe diners, the snail's pacing of the movie does pick up a bit. It's hard to criticize a picture like this with its lofty intentions, but it is even harder to sit through it all. This much can be said, the director does make living an indigent and alcoholic life look pretty unappealing. The problem is that in the process he makes watching the movie just as undesirable. Spending two hours in a dark theater with Alex, Michèle and Hans is fairly torturous. THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE runs a very long 2:05. The movie is in French with English subtitles. It is rated R for violence, language, sexuality/nudity and substance abuse and would be acceptable for teenagers only if they are older and mature. | 2 |
|---|---|
| CAUGHT is a powerful character study and devastating love triangle. Although the title of the picture is an obvious giveaway for the ending, it doesn't matter. This is no mystery; the revelations are of the spirit and not of some artificial turn of an overly clever suspense plot. Filmed in a tough area of Jersey City, CAUGHT is the cautionary tale of two people who invite a stranger into their lives and thereby transform their lives forever. Simple and hard working Joe (Edward James Olmos) is the owner of Joe's fish store. He brags that he was once known as "the fastest knife in the West" for his deboning skills. He is still so confident that he will give any customer who finds a bone in his fish, "their money back plus a quarter." His wife Betty (Maria Conchita Alonso), who answer's the phone as "Mrs. Joe," is proud of her husband. She says, "Fish are his life." But he puts it more succinctly, "Fish been very, very good to me." Although happy, she has aspirations, "I want to go places." In part put-down and part realism, he retorts, "You want to go places? Get up at 5:00AM, I'll take you to Fulton's Fish Market." Into their busy and unassuming life, comes a young man in his twenties named Nick (Arie Verveen). He is about the same age as their son Danny (Steve Schub) who has gone to Hollywood to seek his fortune as a standup comedian. When Nick arrives out of breath and starving at their shop, they invite him to stay at their house, and they soon give him a job as well. Yes, this is a show that strains credulity every now and then, but the emotions are real and the scenes so natural you will have no problem suspending disbelief. The unglamorous cinematography by Michael F. Barrow is as carefully constructed and important as the antonymic lush work of John Toll in LEGENDS OF THE FALL. Look how shiny the grease reflects off of Nick's chin at dinner making him look especially crude. Every line in Betty's naked body is highlighted when she makes love to remind us of her age. As Joe is cutting fish, his facials pours seem like they will erupt at any moment. These people look more like inhabitants of a documentary than a fictional romance. Barrow loves close-ups and editor Norman Buckley combines them into dizzyingly fast sequences that keeps the pacing and the energy high. Soon their small apartment is brimming with sexual tension. Betty wants more out of her life, but her husband is content with the challenges of running an inner city fish store. She looks sadly in the mirror at her aging body. Quiet Nick becomes Joe's second son, but Nick's hormones are raging, and he admires his young body which explodes with its sexuality. As the title suggests, Betty and Nick are soon doing it all the time and in every locale possible. Amazingly, in a tiny apartment with thin walls, they never seem to wake up Nick. The tension ratchets up even more when Danny, his wife Amy (Bitty Schram), and their young son Peter arrive home at a very inauspicious moment. Steve Schub is great as an obnoxious son who claims that stars are fighting to have him on their show, but right now, of course, he is a little hard pressed for cash. Schub has this evil look that makes his every statement seem to have deep hidden portent. All of the performances are quite good, but Maria Conchita Alonso owns every scene she is in. She gives a beautiful and insightful performance of a woman who loves her husband, but doesn't want to let go of her sexuality. Nick is so available and so handsome, that it is hard to do anything but make love to him. Yes, it is wrong, but like the bottle and the alcoholic, they are drawn to each other. The ending is much more impressive and complicated that the straightforward title suggestions. It is the best part of the film, and I liked it all except the way the conflict between Nick and Danny is resolved. Masterfully directed by Robert M. Young (DOMINICK AND EUGENE and TRIUMPH OF THE SPIRIT) and with a well developed screenplay by Edward Pomerantz (based on his book "Into It"), CAUGHT is an entrancing film with sympathetic characters that keeps you glued to the screen. The script saves the best for last without ever cheating the audience along the way. Sometimes devastating, periodically erotic, always smartly written and acted, and frequently tender, CAUGHT is a cornucopia of emotions. If you go, it will catch you in its spell. CAUGHT runs 1:59 but doesn't seem near that long. It is rated R for one dope smoking scene, lots of sex of many varieties, nudity, some violence, and bad language. It would be okay for mature teenagers only. For adults, I recommend it and give it ***. **** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable. REVIEW WRITTEN ON: September 30, 1996 Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's. | 2 |
| Heeeeeeeee's back! Woody Allen plays a vintage Woody Allen character resurrected from his films of old in SMALL TIME CROOKS, a movie which he also wrote and directed. It is the starring role in the type of silly comedies that first made him famous. This one isn't in the same league as the classic Woody comedies, which it mimics, but it is a pleasant little movie that's as easy to listen to as Woody's signature jazz scoring. His script proves better than its delivery perhaps because the actors seem a bit tired, like vaudevillians who've done the same routine so often that they've lost their edge. "What would you say if I told you that you were married to a very brilliant man?" Ray (Allen) asks his wife, Frenchy (Tracey Ullman). "I'd say, I'd have to be a bigamist!" she shoots back. Frenchy is an ex-exotic dancer, and Ray is an ex-con who currently makes a living as a dishwasher while he plans a big heist. Neither of them excels in brains or class. The movie's brief first act concerns the activities of Ray and his cronies as they plan to tunnel under an old pizza shop in order to rob the bank a couple of stores down. As a cover operation, Frenchy turns the pizza joint into a cookie shop. The crime goes bust, but Frenchy's cookies are such a big hit that she's vaulted into stardom as a "cookie mogul." Her empire is known as Sunset Farms, which she, Ray and his two-bit crooks run on autopilot. The rest of the movie revolves around her attempts to get class and Ray's attempts to shun it like the plague. With their newfound wealth they turn their lavish, new Manhattan apartment into a garish imitation of a bad bordello with more gold than Fort Knox. Their home, Frenchy brags, has a rug with fiber optics that light up in order to create just the right ambiance. And their outlandish outfits match the decor perfectly. Clearly they need help, so they turn to Wall-Street-broker-turned-art-dealer David (Hugh Grant). Giving him some hint as to her tastes, Frenchy says that she likes, "Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Picasso -- you know, the boys." David, somewhat reluctantly, agrees to conduct a cultural crash course for them. Ray hates the idea. "My idea of a good time is not opera and ruins," says Ray. "I get enough sleep at home." In a direct parallel with Woody himself, Ray has quite simple needs. He just wants people to laugh at his jokes. But when he tries them on his sophisticated new acquaintances ("Have you heard of the Polish car pool? Every day they meet at work."), they just stare at him without laughing or even blinking an eye. Eventually the movie ends as much because it just runs out of steam as because the plot has reached its predictable conclusion. Although it has a few nice laughs, the movie never rises above forgettable fluff. If you want to see the real thing, rather than this pale imitation, just rent some of Woody's early pictures and savor what he once was capable of creating. SMALL TIME CROOKS runs 1:35. It is rated PG for mild language and innuendo and would be acceptable for kids around 8 and up. | 2 |
| DIRTY BALLET DANCING, released under the pseudonym of CENTER STAGE, tries to make the hard and competitive world of ballet dancing as much fun as rock and roll. Not since Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze cut a rug in the Catskills has a movie so wanted to demonstrate the sensuous joy of moving one's body to a beat. Although CENTER STAGE doesn't really find its groove until the last act, its dance numbers are well worth the price of admission. Just try to forgive the amount of celluloid director Nicholas Hytner (THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION and THE CRUCIBLE) wastes on the story's hackneyed romances. Screenwriter Carol Heikkinen subscribes to the "one of" theory of script design, so the dozens of dancers include: one gay, one bulimic, one not skinny, one loud mouth, one black male and one Hispanic female. The rest are so interchangeable that you'll wish that they had numbers on them to make it easier to tell them apart. And since the writer doesn't want to make a choice, she tries to shoehorn in way too many stories, all at the expense of the dance sequences, which is the only reason to see the movie in the first place. The story starts off promisingly as it shows how hard it is to get into the best ballet school and how much harder still to make it into "the company." One of the film's most instructive and fascinating segments has the ballet dancers using everything from fire to water in order to get their toe shoes into just the right shape. And once their practice sessions begin, their feet turn into bloody imitations of the moonscape. The dancers endure incredible pain for the slim chance that they'll hit the big time, and the chorus -- in which you can tell your friends that you're the third one from the left -- is the most that even the better students can realistically hope for. After this ambitious start, the picture quickly bogs down into petty competition and light-weight love stories. One of the hardest parts of the story to believe is the excessive politeness with which dance instructors like Juliette (Donna Murphy) treat the students. Speaking almost in whispers, the instructors give their generally mild critiques. Light-years away from the drill instructor style that one would expect, they are so quiet that it's a miracle that the dancers can hear them. But the story's limitations become mere quibbles when the dancing starts. The best of the dancers, Ethan Stiefel as Cooper Nielsen, amazes us with his high flying, twirling bravado. When he engages another in a dazzling dancing duel, there's never any question as to who will emerge as the winner. Although not his equal in technical skill, Amanda Schull as Jody Sawyer, plays the dancer with the most heart. When they perform the long ending sequence together, the movie sizzles, and the choreography wows us with its inviting originality. See it first on the big screen, and later, when it goes to video, hit the fast-forward button every time the dancing stops. CENTER STAGE runs 1:53. It is rated PG-13 for language and some sensuality and would be fine for kids around 11 or 12 and up. | 2 |
| "When I grow up and get married, I'm going to live alone," Kevin McCallister decides after being alternately ignored and ridiculed by a household full of his siblings and cousins. Rebelliously, he wishes he'd never see his family again and that he'd be home alone. As the old adage goes, be careful what you wish for lest you get it and, by implication, loathe it. Kevin will soon be alone, very alone, but he will end up loving it. Even when disaster looms eminent, he will rise to the occasion, relishing the opportunity to utilize simple household items to defend his home. In 1990, MRS. DOUBTFIRE's director Chris Columbus, brought out the first in the extremely popular HOME ALONE series. Starring Macaulay Culkin in his first big role, the movie was a hit for its slapstick humor as well as the age-old theme of a kid who bests the grown-ups. (The problem with your kids' watching movie series is that it is not always easy to start them with the first episode. Although we were able to show our son, Jeffrey, the Bond and the STAR WARS series in order, he got out of sequence on HOME ALONE, seeing the first one last.) Two sets of McCallister families head to Paris for their big trip. In one of the movie's best scenes Kevin's parents, while aloft, figure that they forgot something, but can't determine what it could it be - perhaps they left the garage door open says the dad (John Heard). We've all had that experience but few have had the dilemma facing them, they forgot a child - Kevin (Culkin). It was a simple matter of a bad headcount on the airport shuttle and, what with the commotion of leaving, etc., they didn't notice Kevin's absence. Rather than panicking, as his parents do when they realize what has happened, Kevin decides he is in hog heaven. He starts doing all of those things that under normal circumstances he would be absolutely forbidden to do. Watching "rubbish" on TV while feasting on mountains of ice cream is but one of his many sinful pleasures. Culkin displays a wide range of acting emotions. One minute he's a hellion, and the next he's an angel. He is especially cute hamming it up in front of the mirror. Looking brave, wise, and yet vulnerable, Culkin is perfect for the role. Imaginative, Kevin turns on all the lights, cranks up the stereo, and moves cardboard cutouts on his electric train to make his house look chockfull of adults. Using relentlessly upbeat Christmas music by STAR WARS's John Williams, the movie contrasts the joyous holiday season with the less than ideal situation in which Kevin and his parents find themselves. In the midst of the comedy is a well-acted subplot of an old man who no longer talks to his grown son because they lost their tempers at each other years ago. A sagacious Kevin gives him advice in a touching scene in church. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, playing two bumbling burglars, set their sights on robbing the McCallister house. Although the two robbers are central to the storyline, the movie is at its best when they are nowhere to be seen. They cause the sweet, original movie to dissolve into cheap slapstick that you've seen many times before. Kevin defends his home from them with everything from blowtorches to carefully laid nails. Mainly the two robbers fall one minute and get knocked on the head the next, ad nauseam. A little of Stern and Pesci goes a long way, and HOME ALONE has them in almost every scene in the last half of the movie. Too bad Kevin's adversaries had to be so terminally stupid - the rest of the picture isn't. HOME ALONE runs 1:45. It is rated PG for comic violence and would be fine for most kids. My son Jeffrey, age 9, gave the movie ***. Of the three HOME ALONE episodes, he ranked them HOME ALONE 3, HOME ALONE and then HOME ALONE 2. | 2 |
| Other values (3973) |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF) has all of the right ingredients for most hard core art house patrons. It stars a famous, gorgeous foreign actress (Juliette Binoche) who boldly appears quite unattractive. It is a well-meaning story about people living on society's margins. It features unhappy and unsympathetic characters whose actions dare you to like them, but whose circumstances are so dire that you feel guilty if you don't. Finally it has a director who figures that, if he doesn't proceed with excruciating slowness, you will not appreciate the gravity of the characters' situations and the importance of the material. In short, it's the high-minded type of film that will have those less dedicated filmgoers heading for the exits before the first 15 long minutes have elapsed. To be fair the actors try hard, perhaps too hard, and the images, especially those of the steel-gray Parisian twilight, are handsomely filmed. Writer and director Léos Carax does accomplish his mission, crafting a serious, albeit sometimes unbearable, view of two homeless lovers who live on a bridge. As the story opens, Alex (Denis Lavant) is lying in the road, scratching his forehead on the pavement. As blood begins to seep through his skin, a car runs over his leg. The police pick him up and take him to a combination hospital and shelter. Like most of the Parisian homeless in the story, he's mentally disturbed and a substance abuser. Once he's released, he returns to Paris's famous Pont-Neuf bridge. The bridge, which is closed for restoration, is currently the home for some homeless people. A gruff and angry Hans (Klaus-Michael Grüber) functions as the bridge's homeless landlord and drug distributor. Much to Hans's consternation, Michèle Stalens (Binoche) takes up residence on the bridge without his permission. With a patch over one eye, a cut and bruised lip and a splotchy complexion, Binoche's normally striking beauty is completely masked. Michèle and Alex strike up an almost instant friendship and like nothing better than swigging cheap wine from identical large bottles until they obtain the desired degree of inebriation. With realistic background sounds and little dialog, the movie has the feel of a documentary. When words are spoken, they are usually in whispers, and they rarely form anything approaching a complete sentence. The largely plotless story does include a small mystery about how the artistic Michèle came to leave her previous middle-class lifestyle. Eventually, when the two lovers develop a scheme to drug and rob outdoor cafe diners, the snail's pacing of the movie does pick up a bit. It's hard to criticize a picture like this with its lofty intentions, but it is even harder to sit through it all. This much can be said, the director does make living an indigent and alcoholic life look pretty unappealing. The problem is that in the process he makes watching the movie just as undesirable. Spending two hours in a dark theater with Alex, Michèle and Hans is fairly torturous. THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE runs a very long 2:05. The movie is in French with English subtitles. It is rated R for violence, language, sexuality/nudity and substance abuse and would be acceptable for teenagers only if they are older and mature. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| CAUGHT is a powerful character study and devastating love triangle. Although the title of the picture is an obvious giveaway for the ending, it doesn't matter. This is no mystery; the revelations are of the spirit and not of some artificial turn of an overly clever suspense plot. Filmed in a tough area of Jersey City, CAUGHT is the cautionary tale of two people who invite a stranger into their lives and thereby transform their lives forever. Simple and hard working Joe (Edward James Olmos) is the owner of Joe's fish store. He brags that he was once known as "the fastest knife in the West" for his deboning skills. He is still so confident that he will give any customer who finds a bone in his fish, "their money back plus a quarter." His wife Betty (Maria Conchita Alonso), who answer's the phone as "Mrs. Joe," is proud of her husband. She says, "Fish are his life." But he puts it more succinctly, "Fish been very, very good to me." Although happy, she has aspirations, "I want to go places." In part put-down and part realism, he retorts, "You want to go places? Get up at 5:00AM, I'll take you to Fulton's Fish Market." Into their busy and unassuming life, comes a young man in his twenties named Nick (Arie Verveen). He is about the same age as their son Danny (Steve Schub) who has gone to Hollywood to seek his fortune as a standup comedian. When Nick arrives out of breath and starving at their shop, they invite him to stay at their house, and they soon give him a job as well. Yes, this is a show that strains credulity every now and then, but the emotions are real and the scenes so natural you will have no problem suspending disbelief. The unglamorous cinematography by Michael F. Barrow is as carefully constructed and important as the antonymic lush work of John Toll in LEGENDS OF THE FALL. Look how shiny the grease reflects off of Nick's chin at dinner making him look especially crude. Every line in Betty's naked body is highlighted when she makes love to remind us of her age. As Joe is cutting fish, his facials pours seem like they will erupt at any moment. These people look more like inhabitants of a documentary than a fictional romance. Barrow loves close-ups and editor Norman Buckley combines them into dizzyingly fast sequences that keeps the pacing and the energy high. Soon their small apartment is brimming with sexual tension. Betty wants more out of her life, but her husband is content with the challenges of running an inner city fish store. She looks sadly in the mirror at her aging body. Quiet Nick becomes Joe's second son, but Nick's hormones are raging, and he admires his young body which explodes with its sexuality. As the title suggests, Betty and Nick are soon doing it all the time and in every locale possible. Amazingly, in a tiny apartment with thin walls, they never seem to wake up Nick. The tension ratchets up even more when Danny, his wife Amy (Bitty Schram), and their young son Peter arrive home at a very inauspicious moment. Steve Schub is great as an obnoxious son who claims that stars are fighting to have him on their show, but right now, of course, he is a little hard pressed for cash. Schub has this evil look that makes his every statement seem to have deep hidden portent. All of the performances are quite good, but Maria Conchita Alonso owns every scene she is in. She gives a beautiful and insightful performance of a woman who loves her husband, but doesn't want to let go of her sexuality. Nick is so available and so handsome, that it is hard to do anything but make love to him. Yes, it is wrong, but like the bottle and the alcoholic, they are drawn to each other. The ending is much more impressive and complicated that the straightforward title suggestions. It is the best part of the film, and I liked it all except the way the conflict between Nick and Danny is resolved. Masterfully directed by Robert M. Young (DOMINICK AND EUGENE and TRIUMPH OF THE SPIRIT) and with a well developed screenplay by Edward Pomerantz (based on his book "Into It"), CAUGHT is an entrancing film with sympathetic characters that keeps you glued to the screen. The script saves the best for last without ever cheating the audience along the way. Sometimes devastating, periodically erotic, always smartly written and acted, and frequently tender, CAUGHT is a cornucopia of emotions. If you go, it will catch you in its spell. CAUGHT runs 1:59 but doesn't seem near that long. It is rated R for one dope smoking scene, lots of sex of many varieties, nudity, some violence, and bad language. It would be okay for mature teenagers only. For adults, I recommend it and give it ***. **** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable. REVIEW WRITTEN ON: September 30, 1996 Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| Heeeeeeeee's back! Woody Allen plays a vintage Woody Allen character resurrected from his films of old in SMALL TIME CROOKS, a movie which he also wrote and directed. It is the starring role in the type of silly comedies that first made him famous. This one isn't in the same league as the classic Woody comedies, which it mimics, but it is a pleasant little movie that's as easy to listen to as Woody's signature jazz scoring. His script proves better than its delivery perhaps because the actors seem a bit tired, like vaudevillians who've done the same routine so often that they've lost their edge. "What would you say if I told you that you were married to a very brilliant man?" Ray (Allen) asks his wife, Frenchy (Tracey Ullman). "I'd say, I'd have to be a bigamist!" she shoots back. Frenchy is an ex-exotic dancer, and Ray is an ex-con who currently makes a living as a dishwasher while he plans a big heist. Neither of them excels in brains or class. The movie's brief first act concerns the activities of Ray and his cronies as they plan to tunnel under an old pizza shop in order to rob the bank a couple of stores down. As a cover operation, Frenchy turns the pizza joint into a cookie shop. The crime goes bust, but Frenchy's cookies are such a big hit that she's vaulted into stardom as a "cookie mogul." Her empire is known as Sunset Farms, which she, Ray and his two-bit crooks run on autopilot. The rest of the movie revolves around her attempts to get class and Ray's attempts to shun it like the plague. With their newfound wealth they turn their lavish, new Manhattan apartment into a garish imitation of a bad bordello with more gold than Fort Knox. Their home, Frenchy brags, has a rug with fiber optics that light up in order to create just the right ambiance. And their outlandish outfits match the decor perfectly. Clearly they need help, so they turn to Wall-Street-broker-turned-art-dealer David (Hugh Grant). Giving him some hint as to her tastes, Frenchy says that she likes, "Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Picasso -- you know, the boys." David, somewhat reluctantly, agrees to conduct a cultural crash course for them. Ray hates the idea. "My idea of a good time is not opera and ruins," says Ray. "I get enough sleep at home." In a direct parallel with Woody himself, Ray has quite simple needs. He just wants people to laugh at his jokes. But when he tries them on his sophisticated new acquaintances ("Have you heard of the Polish car pool? Every day they meet at work."), they just stare at him without laughing or even blinking an eye. Eventually the movie ends as much because it just runs out of steam as because the plot has reached its predictable conclusion. Although it has a few nice laughs, the movie never rises above forgettable fluff. If you want to see the real thing, rather than this pale imitation, just rent some of Woody's early pictures and savor what he once was capable of creating. SMALL TIME CROOKS runs 1:35. It is rated PG for mild language and innuendo and would be acceptable for kids around 8 and up. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| DIRTY BALLET DANCING, released under the pseudonym of CENTER STAGE, tries to make the hard and competitive world of ballet dancing as much fun as rock and roll. Not since Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze cut a rug in the Catskills has a movie so wanted to demonstrate the sensuous joy of moving one's body to a beat. Although CENTER STAGE doesn't really find its groove until the last act, its dance numbers are well worth the price of admission. Just try to forgive the amount of celluloid director Nicholas Hytner (THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION and THE CRUCIBLE) wastes on the story's hackneyed romances. Screenwriter Carol Heikkinen subscribes to the "one of" theory of script design, so the dozens of dancers include: one gay, one bulimic, one not skinny, one loud mouth, one black male and one Hispanic female. The rest are so interchangeable that you'll wish that they had numbers on them to make it easier to tell them apart. And since the writer doesn't want to make a choice, she tries to shoehorn in way too many stories, all at the expense of the dance sequences, which is the only reason to see the movie in the first place. The story starts off promisingly as it shows how hard it is to get into the best ballet school and how much harder still to make it into "the company." One of the film's most instructive and fascinating segments has the ballet dancers using everything from fire to water in order to get their toe shoes into just the right shape. And once their practice sessions begin, their feet turn into bloody imitations of the moonscape. The dancers endure incredible pain for the slim chance that they'll hit the big time, and the chorus -- in which you can tell your friends that you're the third one from the left -- is the most that even the better students can realistically hope for. After this ambitious start, the picture quickly bogs down into petty competition and light-weight love stories. One of the hardest parts of the story to believe is the excessive politeness with which dance instructors like Juliette (Donna Murphy) treat the students. Speaking almost in whispers, the instructors give their generally mild critiques. Light-years away from the drill instructor style that one would expect, they are so quiet that it's a miracle that the dancers can hear them. But the story's limitations become mere quibbles when the dancing starts. The best of the dancers, Ethan Stiefel as Cooper Nielsen, amazes us with his high flying, twirling bravado. When he engages another in a dazzling dancing duel, there's never any question as to who will emerge as the winner. Although not his equal in technical skill, Amanda Schull as Jody Sawyer, plays the dancer with the most heart. When they perform the long ending sequence together, the movie sizzles, and the choreography wows us with its inviting originality. See it first on the big screen, and later, when it goes to video, hit the fast-forward button every time the dancing stops. CENTER STAGE runs 1:53. It is rated PG-13 for language and some sensuality and would be fine for kids around 11 or 12 and up. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| "When I grow up and get married, I'm going to live alone," Kevin McCallister decides after being alternately ignored and ridiculed by a household full of his siblings and cousins. Rebelliously, he wishes he'd never see his family again and that he'd be home alone. As the old adage goes, be careful what you wish for lest you get it and, by implication, loathe it. Kevin will soon be alone, very alone, but he will end up loving it. Even when disaster looms eminent, he will rise to the occasion, relishing the opportunity to utilize simple household items to defend his home. In 1990, MRS. DOUBTFIRE's director Chris Columbus, brought out the first in the extremely popular HOME ALONE series. Starring Macaulay Culkin in his first big role, the movie was a hit for its slapstick humor as well as the age-old theme of a kid who bests the grown-ups. (The problem with your kids' watching movie series is that it is not always easy to start them with the first episode. Although we were able to show our son, Jeffrey, the Bond and the STAR WARS series in order, he got out of sequence on HOME ALONE, seeing the first one last.) Two sets of McCallister families head to Paris for their big trip. In one of the movie's best scenes Kevin's parents, while aloft, figure that they forgot something, but can't determine what it could it be - perhaps they left the garage door open says the dad (John Heard). We've all had that experience but few have had the dilemma facing them, they forgot a child - Kevin (Culkin). It was a simple matter of a bad headcount on the airport shuttle and, what with the commotion of leaving, etc., they didn't notice Kevin's absence. Rather than panicking, as his parents do when they realize what has happened, Kevin decides he is in hog heaven. He starts doing all of those things that under normal circumstances he would be absolutely forbidden to do. Watching "rubbish" on TV while feasting on mountains of ice cream is but one of his many sinful pleasures. Culkin displays a wide range of acting emotions. One minute he's a hellion, and the next he's an angel. He is especially cute hamming it up in front of the mirror. Looking brave, wise, and yet vulnerable, Culkin is perfect for the role. Imaginative, Kevin turns on all the lights, cranks up the stereo, and moves cardboard cutouts on his electric train to make his house look chockfull of adults. Using relentlessly upbeat Christmas music by STAR WARS's John Williams, the movie contrasts the joyous holiday season with the less than ideal situation in which Kevin and his parents find themselves. In the midst of the comedy is a well-acted subplot of an old man who no longer talks to his grown son because they lost their tempers at each other years ago. A sagacious Kevin gives him advice in a touching scene in church. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, playing two bumbling burglars, set their sights on robbing the McCallister house. Although the two robbers are central to the storyline, the movie is at its best when they are nowhere to be seen. They cause the sweet, original movie to dissolve into cheap slapstick that you've seen many times before. Kevin defends his home from them with everything from blowtorches to carefully laid nails. Mainly the two robbers fall one minute and get knocked on the head the next, ad nauseam. A little of Stern and Pesci goes a long way, and HOME ALONE has them in almost every scene in the last half of the movie. Too bad Kevin's adversaries had to be so terminally stupid - the rest of the picture isn't. HOME ALONE runs 1:45. It is rated PG for comic violence and would be fine for most kids. My son Jeffrey, age 9, gave the movie ***. Of the three HOME ALONE episodes, he ranked them HOME ALONE 3, HOME ALONE and then HOME ALONE 2. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| AN AFFAIR OF LOVE (UNE LIAISON PORNOGRAPHIQUE) (Fine Line) Starring: Nathalie Baye, Sergi Lopez. Screenplay: Philippe Blasband. Producers: Patrick Quinet, Rolf Schmid, Claude Waringo. Director: Frederic Fonteyne. MPAA Rating: R (sexual situations, nudity, adult themes) Running Time: 77 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw. In the early scenes of AN AFFAIR OF LOVE, two characters appear in documentary-style interview vignettes. In separate one-on-one interviews, an off-camera voice prods an unnamed woman (Nathalie Baye) and man (Sergi Lopez) for information about a relationship that is now clearly some time in the past. As the interviews are cross-cut with scenes from their actual meetings, the two voices turn into something akin to a spoken-word version of "I Remember It Well." They met on-line, she says; they met through a personals ad in a magazine, he says. They exchanged photos, he says; not so, says she. Their first sexual encounter was satisfying, she claims with a smile; a bit disappointing, he recalls. Ah, yes they remember it well. The hazy recollections and unreliable perceptions could have been played as little more than an amusing conceit, but in AN AFFAIR OF LOVE, they form the backbone for one of the most stunningly rendered sort-of-love stories in recent years. A few things do become more-or-less clear as the story unfolds, despite the differing retrospective accounts. The man and woman initially come together to fulfill a mutual, somewhat unusual sexual fantasy, one that is never explicitly defined. Though the encounter is initially meant to be a one-time, purely physical event, they agree to meet again, and again, until they contemplate a more "normal" sexual encounter. Eventually, each begins to feel that the relationship has more potential, even though they do not know each other's name, or occupation, or anything that, as the woman describes, makes up "what we normally call our lives." It doesn't take a Francophone to recognize that the French title UNE LIAISON PORNOGRAPHIQUE doesn't exactly translate to AN AFFAIR OF LOVE. Indeed, Fine Line Films' American title proves not only to be an obvious bow to marketing concerns, but a patently absurd take on the development of the relationship. What begins as a pornographic liaison does mutate, but it does not mutate into a love affair. AN AFFAIR OF LOVE is a meditation on what happens to people when they find themselves in a relationship where they feel no pressure to do what they think they should do, because the rules have been discarded from the outset. The man and woman's growing affection builds to a climax that has been telegraphed by the framing structure -- we know they don't end up together -- yet packs a wallop because it's not about whether they will end up together. In fact, the scene is brilliant because it works on two levels: as a tragedy of a relationship that didn't have to end, and as evidence that neither one knew the other in any substantial way. By all rights, AN AFFAIR OF LOVE should never have worked as anything more than an intellectual exercise, with a little sex thrown in for spice. The characters are defined exclusively within the context of their arm's-length relationship, leaving huge chunks of their lives unexplored. Yet they still emerge as fascinating and complex people, thanks to a subtle script by Philippe Blasband and two remarkable performances. Baye and Lopez play off each other masterfully -- hinting at emotions beneath the surface, capturing awkward moments with a sensitivity that almost forces you to look away. Fonteyne pulls it all together with an unfailing visual sense, and a rhythm that pulls this 77-minute film together without an ounce of flab. The only time AN AFFAIR OF LOVE feels remotely strained in its presentation involves an episode where the lovers have an encounter with an estranged elderly couple. It's an unnecessarily obvious counterpoint to the fantasy world in which they live, one that spells out what any viewer should understand: that the relationship being explored has nothing to do with the reality of a life together. Fonteyne says more when he's saying less, as he does when he leaves his camera at a distance outside the hotel room door when the lovers are engaged in their mysterious fantasy activity. It is the one moment where the two characters come together in their story; they both respect the privacy and intimacy of the reason they came together in the first place. The irony of Fine Line's title is that it plays to the distorted memories of the characters who, over time, have turned their pornographic affair into an affair of love. Ah, yes they remember it well. On the Renshaw scale of 0 . Visit Scott Renshaw's Screening Room http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the Screening Room for details, or reply to this message with subject "Subscribe". | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| THREAT, THE (director: Felix E. Feist; screenwriter: Dick I. Hyland; cinematographer: Harry J. Wild; editor: Samuel E. Beetley; cast: Julie Bishop (Ann), Anthony Caruso (Nick Damon), Frank Conroy (D.A., Barker 'Mac' McDonald), Charles McGraw (Red Kluger), Virginia Grey (Carol), Michael O'Shea (Detective Ray Williams), Don McGuire (Joe Turner), Frank Richards (Lefty), Robert Shayne (Inspector Murphy); Runtime: 66; RKO; 1949) Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz A very satisfying B- action film about an escaped murderer from Folsom Prison, Red Kluger (Charles McGraw), who threatens after he was sentenced to the gas chamber to kill the D.A. who prosecuted him, the arresting detective, and the singer whom he believes squealed on him. Kluger kidnaps the singer Carol (Grey) with the help of his henchman Nick (Caruso), as she leaves her singing engagement. He then has his other henchman, Lefty (Richards), go with Nick and pretend to be painters on the floor of the D.A. office, where they mug the policeman guarding the office, as Kluger enters the D.A.'s office and kidnaps Mac (Conroy). They kidnap the detective Ray Williams (O'Shea) offscreen and also take his police car, this comes after we see the detective telling his wife at home that Kluger escaped and he is going after him. Before that his commanding officer, Inspector Murphy (Shayne), phoned and told him to stay at home. Ray and his wife Ann (Julie) were talking just before the inspector's call about what to name their expectant baby. She wants to name him Dexter after her rich uncle, but he says he will only be named Dexter if I have a gun to my back. This will be used by the detective to let her know he is kidnapped, as Kluger will force him to make calls over the police radio to mislead the police, but in one of the messages Ray will mention that they are naming the baby Dexter. The fast-paced film highlights how vicious and cunning a thug Kluger is, as he gets the detective to go on the police radio against his will by torturing the D.A. with pliers. Kluger is perceived as being tougher and smarter than the D.A. and the detective, and seems to be invincible. He calls a moving van company to take his furniture to Palm Springs. When Joe Turner (McGuire) shows up with the van, he also becomes a hostage, as they load the van with furniture and the police car. Kluger keeps the men hostages gagged and toys with Carol, trying to get her to admit she squealed. Carol was the girlfriend of Kluger's partner Tony, who is to meet them in their Mojave desert hideaway three days after the escape, as prearranged, and Tony will then fly him to Mexico. She blames Tony for ratting them out, but Kluger says Tony would never double-cross him, and spends the rest of the film scaring the nervous Carol out of her wits. With roadblocks on every highway, the moving van takes a side road and stops for gas. When a motorcycle cop becomes suspicious and asks to search the van, Kluger shoots him. Kluger takes the police car stored in the van to get to the desert shack and abandons the van in a deserted spot, as he waits there for Tony to show. He wonders about the $100,000 in the safe deposit box, which the detective says was empty, and tries to stay cool in the desert heat and from the dramatics of the intensive manhunt for him. The final shoot-out is well executed and though the story is as plain as vanilla, it still had plenty of tough action. When the detective jumps Kluger and catches him by surprise, he still can't win the fight, as the stronger Kluger pins him crucifixion style to the ground. It is only the sniveling Carol who picks up the criminal's dropped gun and without a conscience brings him down, as he begs for mercy. Felix E. Feist directed this tough B&W noir film in a gritty and pleasing style. REVIEWED ON 11/12/2000 Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews" © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| The Merchant Ivory film A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES is a richly textured series of sketches pasted into an inviting, cinematic picture book. Based on Kaylie Jones's novel of an expatriate family living in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, the story starts slowly as it introduces its characters, but it eventually weaves a strong spell on the audience. Kaylie Jones's inspiration for her book was her father, the writer and WW II veteran James Jones, who wrote "From Here to Eternity" and "The Thin Red Line", and their family's life abroad. As the movie opens, we meet Bill Willis, an American writer living in Paris with his wife, Marcella, and his 6-year-old daughter Channe. Bill, played by Kris Kristofferson in his first good role since LONE STAR, is a loving and lovable father, who acts a bit like an old cowboy. He voices controversial opinions that sometimes make sense and other times don't. ("The French don't celebrate Lincoln's Birthday, though they damn well should," he, quite illogically, tells his daughter, who has gotten into trouble. She forged his name on an excuse to get her out of gym class because of Lincoln's Birthday. Spelling gym as "jim" was her downfall.) Barbara Hershey, without much of a clue as to how to play Bill's wife, Marcella, makes her into an alcoholic enigma. Equally underdeveloped is the orphan boy they adopt. Called Benoit at first and later renamed to Billy, he is played by Samuel Gruen as a child and Jesse Bradford as a teenager. Except for these relatively weak characters, the movie is fully fleshed out. The central character, Channe, is played by Luisa Conlon as a young girl and Leelee Sobieski, the bride from DEEP IMPACT, as a teenager. Both actresses deliver wonderfully complex and winning performances. The movie, which possesses little narrative drive, collects together, for our enjoyment, an array of incidents from her childhood, especially the relationship with her father and with the various boys in her life. When Channe is about seven, an older boy of perhaps nine lures her into his tree house. In an interesting change of pace on the let's-play-doctor routine, he tries to get her to take her clothes off by arguing that she has to be naked to fully appreciate his pet snails on her skin. She wises up to his ploy before fully disrobing. The realistic portrayal of Channe's life and loves has incidents and characters just quirky enough to mimic real life without being too outlandish. The script by James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has the good sense to avoid the obvious scenes. When Bill tells one of Channe's teenage suitors that he doesn't want him to drive too fast, the lad agrees with big-smiling sincerity. Most filmmakers would then cut to the young couple speeding down the highway. Instead, the script leads us into a heart-warming Christmas tree trimming scene. The most original and intriguing character in the movie is the teenage Channe's best friend, Francis Fortescue. Francis, played by real-life operatic singer Anthony Roth Costanzo in his first acting role, isn't Channe's boyfriend per se, even if he'd like to be. His passion is opera, and his high-pitched voice is phenomenal. Their relationship together is filled with "sleepovers" but never sex. His tenderness in helping Channe through her first period is especially touching. Teenagers should all have such a wonderful friend as Francis. With the father's health deteriorating, he moves his family back "home" to America, where the kids have never lived. Having made us feel like part of the family, we become deeply but subtly moved by this last third of the picture. The kids, who are ridiculed as "frogs" by their fellow American students, feel alienated. Since they are viewed as weird, they act the part. Channe experiments with sleeping around, and Billy withdraws into endless watching of bad television. The father continues to take controversial positions. He shocks his daughter by asking her in front of her boyfriend if they are sleeping together. When she says yes, he tells her he doesn't want them doing it in some car, especially if it is his, so they should have sex in the family home instead. "None of us got no guarantee for tomorrow," her dad advises her toward the end. The story, which gets to you in ways that are hard to explain, reminds us of the fragility of life and of the need to take the time to be with our loved ones, while they're still with us. And it teaches us about the need for friendships, both romantic and platonic. A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES runs 2:04. The first part of the film is partially in French with English subtitles. It is rated R for a little profanity and for mature situations and would be fine for teenagers. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| Pecker, using a cheap camera from his mother's thrift shop, has become famous in the New York art world. The newspaper critic refers to his work as "delicious photography of his culturally-challenged family." (Trust a critic to use adjectives in ways that no normal person would.) The locals in Baltimore, where Pecker used to work at a sub shop, are much less impressed. As one of them points out, his photographs "aren't even in color." They are out of focus too, but this is attributed to the camera equipment rather than the operator. In writer and director John Waters's PECKER, the lead doesn't just take photographs, he obsesses over them with his shutter clicking faster than a cricket's chirp. From pictures of copulating rats to ones of his family and friends, he shoots everything he sees. The picture that launches him on his career is one of a woman's pubic hair shot so close-up that some can't even figure out what it depicts. Waters, who is fascinated by people on society's fringes, last gave us the marvelously funny SERIAL MOM, starring Kathleen Turner. His latest, PECKER, has his usual montage of quirky characters, but the script is more like an outline that he never quite got around to filling in. Some of the characters and situations are humorous, but the story has trouble ever gelling. The supporting cast is strong, with the exception of a formless performance by Brendan Sexton III as a thief who is Pecker's best buddy. As usual, Christina Ricci, as Pecker's girlfriend, steals the show with her sarcastic brand of humor. She plays an angry laundromat manager who keeps her nefarious customers on a tight leash. THE BIG CHILL's Mary Kay Place does a wonderful job as Pecker's overly generous mom. She literally gives the coat off her back to the homeless. "We know how to make a dollar holler," is her thrift shop motto. Martha Plimpton is Pecker's boisterous, bartender sister. She works at a gay bar featuring male strippers who specialize in "teabaggin'" -- don't ask. The biggest problem with the casting of the film is the weakness of the lead, Edward Furlong as Pecker. Furlong gives a vapid performance and never gives us a reason to care about Pecker. An enigma, Furlong is just the blank face on the other side of the camera lens. Some of Waters's jokes probably sounded funnier in the script that they came out in the celluloid. Typical of these is the long running joke of Pecker's ventriloquist grandmother, who throws her voice to a large statue of the Virgin Mary. Although John Waters's PECKER never really comes together, it is entertaining. The frustration is that, having spent 4 years since his last film, he didn't come up with a more fully developed one. PECKER runs just 1:27. It is rated R for nudity, profanity, sex and a brief drug usage scene and would be fine for most teenagers. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| THE MUMMY RETURNS, again directed by Stephen Sommers, is a film with a complex. It's a relentless movie that seems in constant fear that if it ever slows down for a minute the entire audience will walk out. Rarely pausing to smell the flowers or to provide the requisite motivation and background, the confusing story scurries around like the thousands of scorpions that take the place of Indiana Jones's snakes. And speaking of Indiana Jones, the movie wants badly to morph into an Indiana Jones-type franchise, a movie it mimics constantly. It also borrows liberally from the fight sequences of STAR WARS EPISODE I - THE PHANTOM MENACE and the creatures from GREMLINS. Gone is the campy charm from the previous MUMMY. Instead, we have lots of nifty computer generated effects and warriors and non-stop action. This is the perfect movie for 12-year-old boys, since most have grown too sophisticated for Saturday morning cartoon mayhem. The stars from last time are back. Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evie (Rachel Weisz) are now married and have an 8-year-old son, Alex (Freddie Boath). Alex is a chip off the old block, curious and adventuresome like his parents. This time Weisz gets many opportunities to flex her muscles, and she turns out to be a surprisingly credible action star. Arnold Vosloo again plays the mummy Im-Ho-Tep. Not content with a single villain, the sequel adds WWF's The Rock playing The Scorpion King, Im-Ho-Tep's competition. Rick will have to take them both out or the world will end. What seems to never end is the movie itself. I lost count of the number of "endings" that were merely preludes to other fight sequences. As a display of computer generated images, the movie does dazzle and impress. It can also be imaginative with a Jules Verne inspired boat/dirigible being the most memorable. "You know," Rick confesses, "a couple of years ago, this would have seemed really strange to me." That's the problem with the sequel. We've seen it all before. The only idea that the director had for the sequel was "more." More special effects and lots more fighting. Its target audience will undoubtedly love it. THE MUMMY RETURNS runs a long 2:01. It is rated PG-13 for adventure action and violence and would be acceptable for kids around 11 and up. Younger ones could be severely frightened. Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email? Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line. | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| Other values (3968) | 3984 | 99.5% |
Frequencies of value counts
Unique
| Unique | 3952 ? |
|---|---|
| Unique (%) | 98.7% |
Histogram of lengths of the category
Length
| Max length | 16259 |
|---|---|
| Median length | 4261 |
| Mean length | 4390.486763 |
| Min length | 83 |
Author
Categorical
| Distinct | 4 |
|---|---|
| Distinct (%) | 0.1% |
| Missing | 0 |
| Missing (%) | 0.0% |
| Memory size | 31.3 KiB |
| Rhodes | |
|---|---|
| Berardinelli | |
| Schwartz | |
| Renshaw |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| Rhodes | 1415 | 35.3% | |
| Berardinelli | 1056 | 26.4% | |
| Schwartz | 827 | 20.7% | |
| Renshaw | 706 | 17.6% |
Frequencies of value counts
Unique
| Unique | 0 ? |
|---|---|
| Unique (%) | 0.0% |
Histogram of lengths of the category
Length
| Max length | 12 |
|---|---|
| Median length | 7 |
| Mean length | 8.171828172 |
| Min length | 6 |
Rating
Real number (ℝ≥0)
| Distinct | 86 |
|---|---|
| Distinct (%) | 2.1% |
| Missing | 0 |
| Missing (%) | 0.0% |
| Infinite | 0 |
| Infinite (%) | 0.0% |
| Mean | 5.805644356 |
|---|---|
| Minimum | 0 |
| Maximum | 10 |
| Zeros | 3 |
| Zeros (%) | 0.1% |
| Memory size | 31.3 KiB |
Quantile statistics
| Minimum | 0 |
|---|---|
| 5-th percentile | 3 |
| Q1 | 4.5 |
| median | 6 |
| Q3 | 7 |
| 95-th percentile | 8.6 |
| Maximum | 10 |
| Range | 10 |
| Interquartile range (IQR) | 2.5 |
Descriptive statistics
| Standard deviation | 1.81505435 |
|---|---|
| Coefficient of variation (CV) | 0.3126361586 |
| Kurtosis | -0.4956142643 |
| Mean | 5.805644356 |
| Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) | 1 |
| Skewness | -0.2230589839 |
| Sum | 23245.8 |
| Variance | 3.294422293 |
| Monotocity | Not monotonic |
Histogram with fixed size bins (bins=50)
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 7 | 688 | 17.2% | |
| 5 | 640 | 16.0% | |
| 6 | 637 | 15.9% | |
| 4 | 484 | 12.1% | |
| 8 | 387 | 9.7% | |
| 3 | 300 | 7.5% | |
| 9 | 139 | 3.5% | |
| 2 | 90 | 2.2% | |
| 7.5 | 70 | 1.7% | |
| 6.5 | 40 | 1.0% | |
| Other values (76) | 529 | 13.2% |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 0 | 3 | 0.1% | |
| 0.5 | 4 | 0.1% | |
| 0.9 | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| 1 | 19 | 0.5% | |
| 1.1 | 1 | < 0.1% |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 10 | 18 | 0.4% | |
| 9.9 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 9.7 | 2 | < 0.1% | |
| 9.6 | 3 | 0.1% | |
| 9.5 | 6 | 0.1% |
n_words
Real number (ℝ≥0)
| Distinct | 1093 |
|---|---|
| Distinct (%) | 27.3% |
| Missing | 0 |
| Missing (%) | 0.0% |
| Infinite | 0 |
| Infinite (%) | 0.0% |
| Mean | 875.2582418 |
|---|---|
| Minimum | 16 |
| Maximum | 3362 |
| Zeros | 0 |
| Zeros (%) | 0.0% |
| Memory size | 31.3 KiB |
Quantile statistics
| Minimum | 16 |
|---|---|
| 5-th percentile | 497.15 |
| Q1 | 695.75 |
| median | 838 |
| Q3 | 987 |
| 95-th percentile | 1382 |
| Maximum | 3362 |
| Range | 3346 |
| Interquartile range (IQR) | 291.25 |
Descriptive statistics
| Standard deviation | 297.2358901 |
|---|---|
| Coefficient of variation (CV) | 0.3395979334 |
| Kurtosis | 8.408603274 |
| Mean | 875.2582418 |
| Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) | 145.5 |
| Skewness | 1.935528268 |
| Sum | 3504534 |
| Variance | 88349.17436 |
| Monotocity | Not monotonic |
Histogram with fixed size bins (bins=50)
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 833 | 17 | 0.4% | |
| 820 | 16 | 0.4% | |
| 750 | 15 | 0.4% | |
| 839 | 15 | 0.4% | |
| 915 | 15 | 0.4% | |
| 790 | 14 | 0.3% | |
| 854 | 14 | 0.3% | |
| 960 | 13 | 0.3% | |
| 830 | 13 | 0.3% | |
| 938 | 13 | 0.3% | |
| Other values (1083) | 3859 | 96.4% |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 16 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 191 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 246 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 251 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 262 | 2 | < 0.1% |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| 3362 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 3160 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 3034 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 3031 | 1 | < 0.1% | |
| 2940 | 1 | < 0.1% |
sentiment
Categorical
| Distinct | 2 |
|---|---|
| Distinct (%) | < 0.1% |
| Missing | 0 |
| Missing (%) | 0.0% |
| Memory size | 31.3 KiB |
| compound | |
|---|---|
| neu |
| Value | Count | Frequency (%) | |
| compound | 2631 | 65.7% | |
| neu | 1373 | 34.3% |
Frequencies of value counts
Unique
| Unique | 0 ? |
|---|---|
| Unique (%) | 0.0% |
Histogram of lengths of the category
Length
| Max length | 8 |
|---|---|
| Median length | 8 |
| Mean length | 6.285464535 |
| Min length | 3 |
Pearson's r
The Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) is a measure of linear correlation between two variables. It's value lies between -1 and +1, -1 indicating total negative linear correlation, 0 indicating no linear correlation and 1 indicating total positive linear correlation. Furthermore, r is invariant under separate changes in location and scale of the two variables, implying that for a linear function the angle to the x-axis does not affect r.To calculate r for two variables X and Y, one divides the covariance of X and Y by the product of their standard deviations.
Spearman's ρ
The Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (ρ) is a measure of monotonic correlation between two variables, and is therefore better in catching nonlinear monotonic correlations than Pearson's r. It's value lies between -1 and +1, -1 indicating total negative monotonic correlation, 0 indicating no monotonic correlation and 1 indicating total positive monotonic correlation.To calculate ρ for two variables X and Y, one divides the covariance of the rank variables of X and Y by the product of their standard deviations.
Kendall's τ
Similarly to Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, the Kendall rank correlation coefficient (τ) measures ordinal association between two variables. It's value lies between -1 and +1, -1 indicating total negative correlation, 0 indicating no correlation and 1 indicating total positive correlation.To calculate τ for two variables X and Y, one determines the number of concordant and discordant pairs of observations. τ is given by the number of concordant pairs minus the discordant pairs divided by the total number of pairs.
Phik (φk)
Phik (φk) is a new and practical correlation coefficient that works consistently between categorical, ordinal and interval variables, captures non-linear dependency and reverts to the Pearson correlation coefficient in case of a bivariate normal input distribution. There is extensive documentation available here.Cramér's V (φc)
Cramér's V is an association measure for nominal random variables. The coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating independence and 1 indicating perfect association. The empirical estimators used for Cramér's V have been proved to be biased, even for large samples. We use a bias-corrected measure that has been proposed by Bergsma in 2013 that can be found here.First rows
| Id | Text | Author | Rating | n_words | sentiment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 9794 | Bill Murray is a wonderful comic who has trouble picking decent scripts. At his best, as in GROUNDHOG DAY, his delicious brand of wry humor provides one delightful moment after another. But without the right material, as in LARGER THAN LIFE and many other recent pictures of his, he tries to ham it up too much in order to make up for the film's lack of natural humor. In these latter movies, the result is bad slapstick.\nTHE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE, which bears no relationship to THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, provides the perfect vehicle for Murray's talents. Clearly enjoying his part, Murray takes this one-joke movie and milks the joke for all it's worth. Although the hilarious GROUNDHOG DAY was a classic one-joke movie, comedies with a single idea are the hardest to sustain.\nWhen the story starts, Wallace Ritchie (Murray) has just arrived in London to visit his brother. Blockbuster Video clerk Wallace with a tartan hat and bad tourist clothes goes to visit his upscale brother James. Peter Gallagher plays James with all of the genuine horror of someone who has an uninvited guest arrive at an inopportune moment.\nJames is hosting a large dinner party of Germans to pitch them a big deal. Having his country-bumpkin brother on hand would be a disaster, so James attempts to solve the problem by signing Wallace up with a "Theater of Life" company. They stage pretend murders in real houses, and the participant gets to live a fantasy criminal life. Since the theater lasts until almost midnight, this seems the perfect mechanism for James to rid himself of his unwanted brother.\nThe one joke is that there is a real crime afoot, and Wallace, as a sunglassed, pretend secret agent, gets in the middle of it by mistake. Wallace never realizes that he is in any danger so he has great fun shooting and getting shot at. When he finds a dead body, he compliments the corpse on how real he looks. Nothing fazes Wallace including a real mugging.\nThe purposely overcomplicated plot involves stolen letters of a call girl named Lori, played by Joanne Whalley, who is blackmailing a high government official. The most dastardly deed comes from two groups of secret agents, one British and one Russian. As a job security program, they plan on bombing the delegates in town to sign a world-wide peace treaty. After the explosion, they figure that the heyday for the spooks, the cold war, will be back in full swing.\nWith any actor other than Murray, the audience would probably grow tired of the story within the first half hour. But his subtle and serious approach to the humor provides at least one big laugh every ten minutes and lots of little ones in-between. Murray makes Wallace so believable that it is easy to live his secret agent life for a night vicariously with him.\nWhalley, one of the most beautiful actresses working today, has talent that is rarely utilized effectively. Her performance in SCANDAL, a film about the real Christine Keeler and John Profumo scandal in the British government, shows what a tremendous actress she can be. Even in bad films, such as TRIAL BY JURY, she has managed to stand out. In THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE she complements Murray's part perfectly without ever trying to upstage him.\n"Do you think I look silly in this outfit?" Lori asks demurely when Wallace first sees her in a slightly revealing maid's outfit with a big heart on it. "I could take it off if you like." The occasional sexual innuendo never gets much stronger than this, allowing director Jon Amiel to bring in the picture with just a PG rating. Given that his last film was the excellent, but hard R picture, COPYCAT, Amiel shows more versatility than most directors.\nTHE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE is a film more to be savored in person than discussed after the fact. Wallace himself says it best when asked by a policemen what it is like to be a secret agent. "They pay all your expenses and your 'license to kill,'" explains Wallace. "But there's a downside. Torture." Well, actually not, but one must keep up one's image.\nTHE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE runs 1:33. It is rated PG for language, innuendo, and comic violence. Kids need to be ten to appreciate the humor but the film would be acceptable for those a bit younger as well.\n | Rhodes | 7.0 | 854 | compound |
| 1 | 6767 | (Universal) Starring: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin. Screenplay: John Cleese and Iain Johnstone. Producers: Michael Shamberg and John Cleese. Directors: Robert Young and Fred Schepisi. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (strong language, adult themes) Running Time: 95 mintues. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.\nIn case you were unclear on this point, FIERCE CREATURES is _not_ technically a sequel to A FISH CALLED WANDA...though for the life of me I can't figure out why that was the case. It isn't as though John Cleese had a radically different idea in mind for reuniting the four principal cast members. Cleese again plays a flustered authority figure; Kevin Kline again plays a libidinous boor; Jamie Lee Curtis again plays a tough bombshell who uses Kline and seduces Cleese; Michael Palin again plays an animal lover with a distinctive speech pattern. A great deal of effort went into reminding you why you might have enjoyed A FISH CALLED WANDA, and then FIERCE CREATURES only delivers halfway. Though buoyed by a couple of wildly farcical set pieces, FIERCE CREATURES often feels like a film in search of an identity.\nFIERCE CREATURES opens in Atlanta, where Octopus Inc., run by multi-billionaire communications tycoon Rod McCain (Kline), has just acquired a company which owns a small British zoo. Determined to make the zoo just as profitable as his other subsidiaries, McCain assigns former police chief Rollo Lee (Cleese) the job of whipping the place into shape. Rollo's plan is to weed out the tamest of the animals, leaving only the most vicious beasts to attract customers, a plan which outrages staff members like zookeeper Bugsy (Palin). The zoo does begin to make more money, but a couple of opportunistic Octopus employees hope for even bigger things. Marketing whiz Willa Weston (Curtis) hopes to create a zoo franchise which will make her career, while McCain's ne'er-do-well son Vince (also played by Kline) hopes to line his pockets with the zoo's profits while turning it into a giant billboard.\nI don't blame the makers of FIERCE CREATURES for making its main characters so similar to those in WANDA, because they were simply following a time-honored tradition for recurring comic teams. From Abbott and Costello through Spade and Farley, it has been understood that it is important for roles to be defined. Id is id and ego is ego and never the twain should meet; what would the audience make of it if Curly suddenly began to browbeat Moe? The problem with FIERCE CREATURES isn't that its characters are familiar, it is that they are just familiar enough to be disappointing. Cleese does the put-upon bit, but he's not put-upon _enough_; Kline does the dense bit, but he's not dense _enough_. The foursome found a dynamic in A FISH CALLED WANDA which worked to perfection, and there are at least a few references in FIERCE CREATURES intended to capitalize on that goodwill. The script simply leaves you waiting on several occasions, waiting for it to take an extra comedic step which doesn't come.\nWANDA also featured the delightful sub-text of the clash between British and American cultures, and FIERCE CREATURES chooses corporate avarice and gross commercialism as its satirical targets. Yet there too the script by Cleese and Iain Johnstone is disappointingly half-hearted with its jabs. The ruthless tycoon played by Kline is clearly modeled after Ruppert Murdoch, yet he escapes with no more interesting a character trait than occasional flatulence; the outrageous possibilities of a zoo with a ton of corporate sponsors yield some amusing results (particularly the zoo uniforms covered in more labels than a stock car), but there is no major payoff. It is surprising primarily because Cleese did a funnier and more concise job of skewering advertising in the Schwepps spot which accompanied the American video release of WANDA, a spot recalled by an advertisement Cleese wears on the back of his suit coat in CREATURES.\nFIERCE CREATURES does have its moments, most of them coming in the last half hour as the zoo employees (including a soft-hearted Cleese) try to save the zoo from closure. There are a pair of winning scenes in the classic farce tradition of slamming doors and near misses, one in a hotel room and the other involving the younger McCain's attempt to impersonate his father, yet that latter scene also reminds you of what is missing in much of the humor in FIERCE CREATURES. A FISH CALLED WANDA was infamous as the film which had the audacity to make fun of dogs being killed in unusual ways, to use stuttering as a comic device. Until the finale of FIERCE CREATURES, which includes a startling bit of black humor, the film feels terribly tame. The animals in this film aren't subjected to cruel fates; they are photographed in all their quirky cuteness for "awww" moments and used for sometimes amusing slapstick comedy. Too many things about FIERCE CREATURES feel just slightly askew, like the conflicted results of film-makers trying both to remind you of something and to make something completely different. Part of that may be the result of two directors (Robert Young and Fred Schepisi), but ultimately much of the responsibility comes back to Cleese. At times, his work sparks memories not just of WANDA's outrageousness, but of classic Monty Python as well; at other times, he seems to have softened with age. He is just one of several creatures in FIERCE CREATURES which isn't quite fierce enough.\nOn the Renshaw scale of 0 .\n | Renshaw | 5.0 | 1041 | compound |
| 2 | 5073 | Cast: Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Kevin Murphy, Jim Mallon Director: Jim Mallon Producer: Jim Mallon Screenplay: Michael J. Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Mary Jo Pehl, Paul Chaplin, Bridget Jones Cinematography: Jeff Stonehouse U.S. Distributor: Gramercy Pictures\nI guess there are some concepts that don't excel in the translation from the small screen to the big one, and MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 appears to be among these. The TV series, which started on a Minneapolis UHF channel in 1988 before moving to HBO's Comedy Channel in 1989, provides light, undemanding entertainment for those who enjoy lampooning (or, perhaps more appropriately, harpooning) bad movies. This new motion picture incarnation, which boasts larger sets but essentially the same format, is on par with one of the lesser episodes. As a TV diversion, MST3K is thoroughly enjoyable, but, in this new medium, it's something of a disappointment.\nFor those unfamiliar with the MST3K premise, it goes something like this: a dastardly mad scientist, Dr. Forrester (Trace Beaulieu), has decided to conquer the world by subjecting the entire population to bad movies. On an Earth-orbiting space station called the Satellite of Love, Forrester tries out his plan on a hapless human guinea pig, Mike Nelson, and two robots, Tom Servo (voice of Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (voice of Trace Beaulieu). Instead of being tortured into submission, however, these three actually seem to enjoy the experience. Episode-after-episode, they sit in the audience and mock whatever "cinematic suppository" Forrester exhibits. As viewers, we see a movie screen showing the picture of choice with a row of seats and three moving heads silhouetted against it.\nFor MST3K: THE MOVIE, the film-to-be-savaged is THIS ISLAND EARTH, a 1954 science fiction embarrassment that could hold its own against any other entries in the worst movie of all time competition. Featuring the obscure cast of Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, and Faith Domergue, the chaotic, idiotic plot involves a trip by two Earth scientists to the planet Metulana (which, in the words of one of the MST3K trio, looks like "THE JETSONS after Armageddon"). Once there, the Earth man and woman learn of an intended invasion of their homeworld, avoid becoming the victims of a giant mutant insectoid, and join a helpful Metulana native in escaping from the dying, bombed-out world.\nA significant problem with using a movie this deliciously bad is that the film generates enough unintentional humor on its own, so it doesn't really need the quips and barbs from Servo, Mike, and Crow. Although a number of their comments are very funny, THIS ISLAND EARTH would have had me doubled over with laughter had I seen it without the MST3K format. Unfortunately, during the course of this film, there are several contrived breaks that get the characters out of the darkened theater. During these sequences, without a cheesy flick to inspire them, their banter comes across as juvenile. Such unnecessary and pointless padding dilutes the movie's better aspects.\nDie-hard fans will undoubtedly be delighted, but it's more difficult to determine how casual viewers will react, especially if they realize that they're paying for something that's no better than what's available on TV. In fact, the theatrical environment may stifle MST3K, unless you happen to see it in a ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW setting. By its nature, MST3K demands audience participation -- something difficult to obtain in a typical movie-watching environment.\nIn general, it's easy to praise the ingenuity of the MST3K writers, although less for this script than for some of what they have previously accomplished. Motion pictures, no matter what they celebrate or deride, should be something of an event (after all, you have to travel to get to the theater, then dole out money once you arrive). In this case, however, MST3K: THE MOVIE is routine -- sporadically funny, occasionally clever, but routine nonetheless.\n | Berardinelli | 6.0 | 769 | compound |
| 3 | 28773 | Marzieh Meshkini's THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN (ROOZI KHE ZAN SHODAM) tells three short stories, the first touching, the second tragic and the third comedic, after which they are briefly brought together. These simple episodes are all admirable but rarely engaging. And, although the movie comes in at a mere 78 minutes, 10 would have sufficed. After about 3 minutes, each of the stories has made its rather straightforward point quite gracefully. The next 20 minutes of each adds little other than needless reinforcement.\nThe first story concerns a 9-year-old girl named Hava (Fatemeh Cherag Akhar) who is about to lose her freedom and her childhood. At that age, she is required to always be covered in a chador and not play with male friends anymore. Using a stick as a crude sundial to tell when the dreaded hour of noon arrives, which will signal the end of her youth, she tries her best to enjoy the time she has left.\nThe second story, which might be called "Pedal Ahoo Pedal," has Ahoo (Shabnam Toloui) in a bicycle race. As she burns up the road, her husband rides alongside her on horseback, divorcing her on the spot with the help of a mullah who rides along on another horse. The mullah, in the story's only memorable line, calls her bicycle, "the devil's mount." Toloui's acting is exquisite, showing her pain and determination with eye expressions alone.\nThe last story is about a senile grandmother (Azizeh Sedighi) who takes a large inheritance and goes on a big shopping spree. Everything from a refrigerator to a bed, all in crates, follows her wheelchair like a Werner Herzog designed caravan.\nIt's always hard understanding someone else's religion, but the images shown of Islam in this picture give one a feeling of sad repression. And it is the images alone that stay with you after this film is over.\nTHE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN runs a surprisingly long feeling 1:17. The film is in Farsi with English subtitles. It is not rated but would probably be a G since there isn't anything offensive.\nWant free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email? Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.\n | Rhodes | 6.0 | 437 | compound |
| 4 | 22863 | MAGNOLIA (director/writer: Paul Thomas Anderson; cinematographer: Robert Elswit; cast: Jeremy Blackman (Stanley Spector), Tom Cruise (Frank T. J. Mackey), Melinda Dillon (Rose Gator), April Grace (Gwenovier, reporter), Luis Guzman (Luis), Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Phil Parma), Ricky Jay (Burt Ramsey), Orlando Jones (Worm), William H. Macy (Donnie Smith, quiz kid), Alfred Molina (Solomon Solomon), Julianne Moore (Linda Partridge), John C. Reilly (Jim Kurring), Jason Robards (Earl Partridge), Melora Walters (Claudia Wilson Gator), Michael Bowen (Stanley's father), 1999)\nReviewed by Dennis Schwartz\nThis is a wonderfully chaotic work, meriting high praise for what it tried to do and not condemnation for what it failed to do. There's such a thing as something being spoiled because it has too many good things going for it. That is the case with this ensemble dramatic piece, whose most telling fault is that it eventually resembles an overblown soap opera, going on for far too long. Its three hours length and many subplots will attest to that, even though it is artfully woven together, but could in all honesty, have enough material for five other movies within it. Therefore it is not surprising that the ingenuously talented director, the 29-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights/Hard Eight), had to finally tie-up all the loose ends of the story into a nice knot, which resulted in an ending that won't please too many because it might seem absurd. But I found myself accepting of its biblical ending and was impressed by the overall stupendous effort of this exuberant film, that is pumped with self-confidence and a virtuoso style. A work that mirrors greatness even if it doesn't quite keep that greatness in proper focus.\nThe film does go on for too long, with the only thing that could save it from never ending is a biblical miracle, but it settles instead for a plague right out of Exodus in the Bible to make its farewell. That improbable ending was set up and apologized for in its prologue by the offscreen narrator, who explained three different bizarre chance happenings as unlikely but possible, giving cause for the improbable ending the film comes up with, and after all, how absurd could that ending be, if the Bible used the same material! In one of those prologue pieces, a London druggist, in 1911, named Greenberryhill, gets killed by three drifters named, Green, Berry, and Hill.\nThe reward the viewer gets for sitting through the long and highly structured but at times confusing film, that tries to picture life as being a matter of coincidences, is how brilliant the individual skits were and how fine the acting was. The cast, of Anderson regulars Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, and John C. Reilly, are larger than life figures. To see Jason Robards as a dying old crotchety TV mogul, with a tube up his nose, made for some effective dramatics. Even Tom Cruise, as his estranged son, playing an obnoxious hustling infomercials maker for the product he is selling to men, so that they can conquer women, was done with a blend of humor and pathos, making his role less obnoxious than it could have been. In a role that reminded me, of Jean-Pierre Leaud' outlandish performance in "Irma Vep." Here, Cruise goes for the jugular, as a boorish male predator, someone who is just plain unlikable and prone to going off on rants. What Cruise does, is parody himself and other box-office stars with big egos. Cruise is becoming a noticeably more polished actor ever since his Kubrick stint in "Eyes Wide Shut," and deserves much praise for this role.\nThis is a Los Angeles based film about the casualities of modernism, each one lost in their own shame and failure to be loved. Each life is depicted as being that of a victim, who has been affected by the mass culture of the TV and popular musical worlds, and crippled psychologically by such after-effects. They are all-tied together too neatly and the outcome of their sufferings is too predictable for my taste. But that can't begin to explain how penetrating a human drama this is and how acutely aware the young director is of the people's misery and heartaches he highlights. He is mostly guilty of being excessive, wanting to put too much of a good thing on the plate, in this Robert Altman's Short Cuts-Nashville like production. But Anderson offers more meat in his character's parts than did Altman and more finesse in telling his story, allowing his actors to expand their roles more.\nThe film involves the lives of these nine characters during one rainy day in Southern California. They are each connected for one of the following reasons: because something happened in their past that stunted their growth, by their family relationships, and by mere coincidence. And, even though all their lives don't intersect, they are all fighting the same battle to have a clean slate, whether they realize it or not. There is a sensitive but unappreciated cop, who wants to be of help to others, James (John C. Reilly), his coke-using junkie date, resentful of her abusive father, (Melora Walters), her kid game-show host, bastard of a father (Philip Baker Hall), who has learned that he has an incurable cancer and wants to make amends for his past sins, and his current whiz kid star, the unhappy genius, Stanley (Jeremy Blackman), who is bullied by his father, and there is the former whiz kid, now a pathetic grown man with problems over his homosexual love life and his failure to be financially successful, Donnie Smith (William H. Macy ). There's also the game show's wealthy producer, who lies in pain as he is dying, requesting only to speak to his son who won't talk to him now, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), and the gorgeous younger, unfaithful wife he married when he left his cancer striken first-wife, the now hysterical and remorseful Linda (Julianne Moore), and Earl's estranged son, who when he was 14-years-old nursed his abandoned mother suffering from cancer until she died, the TV pitchman, full of denial and hatred about his past, Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), and finally, the home care nurse, Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is sexually frustrated, given to read Hustler magazine, but who is dedicated to looking out for Mr. Partridge as best as he can.\nThe performances by all were superb, but Reilly's and Hoffman's were better than superb, in a film that didn't have a featured player, but allowed each performer to take his or her time telling their story, as Anderson was able to create a somewhat seamless work out of this separate skits, making use of different camera angles, using TV intercutting methods, fast-cut editing, and utilizing a provocative visual style. He also made the story seem fresh and moving in many different directions to catch all the personalities involved in the story. He also made use of a song, through the performance of Aimee Mann, who somewhere more than half-way through the film, sings the theme song of the film, and it is heard first by one character, then another, until all the film's troubled souls are brought together by a single refrain. "It's not ... going to stop," as each one sings, as if signaling the approach of some impending doom.\nWhatever fault one might find with the film, that fault is countered by how interesting and refreshing the film felt, and with the director's flair for taking risks. The unbelievable tale puts one into the mood of the magic happening onscreen, and the magic was not necessarily in what was extraordinary and not in the cleverly plotted coincidences, but in the telling tragedies of the lost souls and their injured psyches, casualities that are inevitable in America's modern world of consumerism. The cry for love can be heard on the lips of the two deathlike, philandering fathers, and on all the other lost souls, each searching for a place to fit in and for a way to love someone and be loved in return.\nIncidently, the title of the film comes from the name on the street sign.\nREVIEWED ON 1/28/2000\nDennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"\n© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ\n | Schwartz | 7.0 | 1642 | neu |
| 5 | 6748 | Writers are smacked around so often and with such impunity in Hollywood that it is perfectly understandable when a writer insists on directing his or her own material. It similarly makes sense, I suppose, for a playwright to want to direct the film adaptation of his own material, and Herb Gardner has been unusually protective of his plays. In 1986, he directed his own adaptation of THE GOODBYE PEOPLE; in 1996, he directed his own adaptation of I'M NOT RAPPAPORT. Clearly Gardner is attached to his creations. In fact, he is far too attached. Another director might have identified I'M NOT RAPPAPORT as a meandering play with one interesting idea, and given it the good tightening up it needed. Gardner clings to every line and situation, turning out a sluggish and repetitive meditation on aging.\nWalter Matthau stars as Nat, a senior citizen in New York City who spends his days creating identities for himself and causing trouble for those he believes guilty of exploiting people. He is also troublesome to Midge Carter (Ossie Davis), the old gentleman he pesters with his tall tales every day on a Central Park bench. The two become entangled when Midge's failing eyesight threatens his job as an apartment building superintendent, and Nat offers unsolicited assistance by posing as Midge's attorney. Nat's daughter Clara (Amy Irving) considers her father's behavior grounds for having herself declared his guardian, but Nat refuses to change his ways, even when an attempt to con a drug dealer (Craig T. Nelson) places both Nat and Midge in danger.\nI'M NOT RAPPAPORT is about a man's attempt to retain his dignity in spite of advancing years, and there are strong possibilities in the character of Nat. A committed Socialist and social agitator, Nat sees his deceptions in defense of the elderly as a natural extension of his life-long belief in the rights of the oppressed. The film's best scene is Nat's showdown with Danforth (Boyd Gaines), the representative from Midge's apartment building, as Nat browbeats the insincere yuppie into a realization that he is attempting to discard a human being who has out-lived his usefulness. Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis both give solid performances, obviously appreciating their own opportunities in rare leading roles, and there is an affecting sincerity to their comments about giving respect where it is due.\nThat scene between Nat, Midge and Danforth is noteworthy not just because it is the best one in I'M NOT RAPPAPORT, but also because it says everything Gardner has to say that is worth saying. The film basically consists of a series of conversations between characters, and virtually every one finds Nat trying to put something over on someone to prove he is still relevant or to save his skin. In one such scene, Nat challenges a young tough (Guillermo Diaz) who has been extorting protection money from seniors; in another, Nat tries to persuade his daughter that he does not need her supervision. The relationships are not compelling enough by themselves to carry those scenes, and the point that seniors are under-estimated and mis-treated is made and made and made again. As I'M NOT RAPPAPORT wanders through the last of its 133 minutes, you may begin to feel that you have been sitting in your seat as long as its main characters have been alive.\nGardner tries to make up for that repetitive structure by spicing up the third act with the drug dealer sub-plot, and what a strange encounter it is. In an attempt to protect a young woman (Martha Plimpton) who owes the dealer money, Nat plays the part of a stereotypical mob boss who warns the "Cowboy" dealer to leave her alone. What begins as broad comic relief soon turns nasty as the Cowboy (played with scary effectiveness by Nelson) proves smarter and more dangerous than Nat expected. Yet even this scene is a re-tread of the run-in with the young extortionist, as Nat pushes his act too far with someone unwilling to play along. Worse still, it leaves us with the depressing notion that the elderly should be seen and not heard. Gardner didn't need to take us through over two hours of hoops just so that we could end up right where we started. Well-intentioned and well-acted though it might be, I'M NOT RAPPAPORT is the product of a writer too married to every word, and a director too sparing with the knife.\nOn the Renshaw scale of 0 .\n | Renshaw | 4.0 | 837 | compound |
| 6 | 24862 | What could be funnier that the mere sight of a really obese woman? How about a guy in a few hundred pounds of latex impersonating one?\nWell, if this is your brand of humor -- as it was for exactly one very vocal member of our audience -- then BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE, starring Martin Lawrence (BLUE STREAK), may be just the film for you. This one-joke movie generated a paltry number of laughs from our audience, save the aforementioned one-person laugh track. My personal laugh count total was exactly zero. The movie's attempts at humor weren't even enough to get many small grins out of me. Only in the few episodes when Lawrence escapes his "funny" costume does the story ever possess any genuine charm.\nThe minimal plot concerns an FBI agent, Malcolm Turner (Martin Lawrence), who goes undercover to impersonate a 400-pound woman known to one and all as Big Momma. He hopes that Sherry, the girlfriend of escaped bank robber and murderer Lester Vesco (Terrence Howard), who barely appears in the movie, will spill the beans to her Big Momma as to Lester's whereabouts.\nSherry, played by the lovely Nia Long (BOILER ROOM), adds class to a movie that doesn't have much. An actress who brings intelligence and grace to her pictures, she has such well-scrubbed looks that she always seems as if she just finished shooting a commercial for beauty soap.\nDirector Raja Gosnell, working from a hopeless script by Darryl Quarles and Don Rhymer, gives Lawrence little apparent guidance, letting him wander around aimlessly in his outlandish outfit, searching for laughs. Typical of the film's humor is a basketball match in which Big Momma plays a mean game, surprising some teenagers with her agility. At it's worst, suffice it to say that you'll thank your lucky stars that Smell-o-Vision didn't catch-on.\nIs there anything good in the movie other than Nia Long? The music is not bad.\nBIG MOMMA'S HOUSE runs 1:35. It is rated PG-13 for crude humor, sexual innuendo, language, brief nudity and some violence and would be acceptable for kids around 10 and up.\nMy son Jeffrey, age 11, who loved Lawrence's last picture (BLUE STREAK), laughed very little at this one. Giving it just **, he liked Lawrence only during those rare moments when he wasn't wearing a ton of latex. His main criticism of the film was simply that it wasn't very funny.\n | Rhodes | 4.0 | 473 | compound |
| 7 | 23229 | McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (director/writer: Robert Altman; screenplay: Brian McKay; cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond;cast: Warren Beatty (John Q. McCabe), Julie Christie (Constance Miller), Rene Auberjonois (Sheehan), Hugh Millais (Butler), Shelley Duvall (Mrs. Ida Coyle), Bert Remsen (Bart Coyle), William Devane (Lawyer), John Schuck (Smalley), Corey Fischer (Mr. Elliot), Keith Carradine (Cowboy), Jackie Crossland (Lily), Elizabeth Murphy (Kate), Michael Murphy (Sears), Antony Holland (Hollander), Manfred Schulz (Kid), Jace Van Der Veen (Breed), Rodney Gage (Sumner Washington), Jeremy Newson (Jeremy Berg), 1971)\nReviewed by Dennis Schwartz\nJohn McCabe (Beatty) cuts a nifty businessman's pose, dressed in a derby and a suit, as he wanders through the rain on horseback into this half-built, muddy wasteland mining town, Presbyterian Church, in the mountainous hinterlands of Washington. In the background Leonard Cohen sings his prophetic ballad, with the poetical refrain, "It is hard to hold the hand of anyone who is just reaching for the sky to surrender." Cohen's song will pop up continuously throughout, giving the film an arty flavor to it, as it also adds to the explanation of the film's despondent theme of a small capitalist against the big capitalist.\nIt is the kind of town where it easy for everyone to think they know one another, as one of the patrons in Sheehan's saloon thinks McCabe is a gunfighter by the nickname of Pudgy, who once shot a man in a card game. It is a dark place that McCabe has entered, where it either rains or snows, there is very little sunlight in town. The stranger anxiously cases the saloon he enters, until he gets to feel at home in this rough atmosphere and goes out to his saddlebags and soon comes back and puts a tablecloth on the table and start a card game.\n"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is an antiwestern western, whose themes of love, gambling, alienation, suffering, death, and capitalism, are as haunting as the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond' beautifully colorful Pacific Northwest territory is, and as haunting as Leonard Cohen's ballad is, and as haunting as the moody atmosphere of this winter wonderland of desolation is.\nMcCabe, is a two-bit gambler, who thinks of himself as more important than what he really is, and who has the romantic notion to dream the American dream of financial success, and decides to open a saloon and a whorehouse here, after winning at cards. He thereby purchases three unrefined "chippies" to get his business started, figuring on the 100 or so horny men working in the area as likely customers.\nMrs. Miller (Julie), a drifter and a whore, soon comes to this town and offers McCabe a business proposal, that they become partners and she will become the madame, bringing in classier prostitutes from the big city and taking care of the girls, something she declares that she knows more about than him. She also tells him that this partnership will raise his profits.\nThe harshness of life, drives the crafty businesswoman, Mrs. Miller, to prefer her opium pipe fantasy world to anything else in town, and that includes McCabe, who is taken with her but doesn't know quite how to love this disconnected woman. Their sexual contact comes, when he pays for her services like any other customer. Though she soon recognizes he isn't operating on all cylinders and feels sorry for this lost soul, still it doesn't bring her any closer to him.\nFor Mrs. Miller, marriage is compared to prostitution, as a mail-order bride Ida (Duvall), married to a lame older man, finds herself a widow when her husband takes umbrage at a street ruffian who treats his wife as a whore, and the other fellow reacts violently to being reprimanded by cracking his head open. Upon his death, in order to get room and board, Ida becomes one of Mrs. Miller's working girls.\nThe drunken McCabe succeeds by luck: by being at the right spot, at the right time, and not by any skills he might possess. But his success catches the interest of the big mining company and they sent out representatives to buy him out. But he foolishly turns down their offer, thinking he could outsmart them. He suddenly realizes when they are not there the next morning to bargain with him, that it's all over for him, that they will send someone to kill him, as is their custom to do when dealing with small businessmen they want to gobble up.\nThe final scene, shot in a snow storm, of the three hired gunmen for the mining company tracking him down, is an emotionally sad scene played against the glacial beauty of the natural surroundings, as the hapless McCabe has gotten into a mess that is way over his head, not quite understanding the life and death struggle inherent in American capitalism.\nThe town has a church, but when he comes calling in the church for shelter, he is forced out of there by the reverend and is forced to face off with the hired guns looking for him. The point made, is that there is no help forthcoming from anywhere, from the law or from God, man is on his own here, struggling against nature, his own fears, and the coldness of the citizens around him.\nAltman's film is strikingly lyrical and perfect in mood; it is a dreamlike film that is hauntingly memorable, that is magical in scope and sadly touches McCabe's yearnings to find love and a place to put down roots. The result is a poetical Western without heroes, that is pathetically witty, where McCabe and Mrs. Miller's wishful dreams are seen as either foolish romantic notions or drug induced inspirations, ones that never had a chance of coming true.\nREVIEWED ON 1/26/2000\nDennis Schwartz: " Ozus' World Movie Reviews"\n© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ\n | Schwartz | 8.0 | 1158 | neu |
| 8 | 5786 | After the recent I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, the new movie BASQUIAT (also as BUILD A FORT, SET IT ON FIRE) begs the question of whether we need another movie about Andy Warhol's world. Ignoring the answer, artist Julian Schnabel wrote his first script and directed his first movie about Jean Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright) who was a black painter who died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose. Basquiat's paintings have been exhibited alongside both those of Warhol's and of Schnabel's, and Basquiat was a personal friend of Andy's and a full fledged member of his entourage.\nAs the show opens, 22 year old Basquiat is getting out of the cardboard box in which he lives. Although he grew up in a middle-class family, he spends his days spraying graffiti on the walls all over the city. He goes into a coffee shop and pours syrup all over the table and then begins to finger-paint in it before they throw him out. There are quotes from the narrator about van Gogh - how he was considered crazy in his day and managed to sell only one painting before he died. The show tries hard to convince us Basquiat could be the van Gogh of our time.\nAlthough Basquiat is considered important since he was one of the first African Americans to become a famous pop artist, I found his work on a par with a typical kindergarten class. In one scene in the movie, Warhol and Basquiat comment on a guy who is urinating on Warhol's painting to give it just the right look. If you can get beyond the drug culture aspects, they smoke dope and blow it up their nose in the show, and can ignore the quality of the "art", the acting is quite good.\nThe artists you meet in the film are a strange lot to say the least. Everyone is an artist. As Andy's electrician (Willem Dafoe) explains to Basquiat that he is an artist too, but "I'll be 40 in July, and I'm glad I never got recognition. It gives me time to develop."\nThe show is full of the people that swarm around Basquiat as soon as they realize that there is money to be made. Every agent wants to represent him, and every gallery owner wants to display his works. One of the earliest to write about him is Rene Ricard (Michael Wincott from DEAD MAN). As Rene explains it, "when I speak nobody believes me, but when I write it down everybody knows it to be true." Later Rene goes on to claim that, "We're no longer collecting art; we're buying people." One of his first agents, Gina Cardinale (Clair Forlani), glowing describes his art as, "This is the true voice of the gutter." Gosh, I'll guess take two then.\nUnlike Jared Harris's more remote characterization of Andy Warhol in I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, here David Bowie is great as the legendary pop artist. He throws himself into the role with gusto. Andy's friend and agent Bruno Bischofberger is played with amazing restraint by the frequently combustible Dennis Hopper.\nEven after he becomes famous, Basquiat still dresses like a homeless person. The costumes by John Dunn are dead on. Kind of shocking having an apparent bum going into a fancy department store, asking to taste the caviar and buying a three thousand dollar tin of the best in the store.\nOne of the more ironic lines in the film comes from his friend and fellow artist Albert Milo (Gary Oldman). Albert tells Basquiat that "good conversation is hard to find in this town." The irony is that Basquiat seems incapable of forming coherent sentences. Jeffrey Wright is brilliant in his interpretation of the artist. A nice piece of acting.\nThe music by John Cale and all of the songs chosen are one of the high points of the show. Frequently the camera (Ron Fortunato) will slowly pan a scene without dialog but with beautiful songs being song. I wish there had been even more of these scenes.\nRounding out the cast, we have Benicio Del Toro, Christopher Walken, Jean Claude Le Marre, Parker Posey, Elina Lowensohn, Paul Bartel, Courtney Love, and Tatum O'Neal among many others. It looks like half of Hollywood wanted a part. Although you may not care about the people they play, the acting, as I said earlier, is worth seeing.\nBASQUIAT is incorrectly listed in the press kit as running 1:26. I timed it at about 1:50. The shorter length would have been better, and we could have stood a few less stars and parts. The film is rated R for drug use and some bad language. There is no sex, nudity, and only one mildly violent scene. It is possible to misinterpret the show's message as graffiti is a way to great riches and drug usage is cool. As an adult, I can see beyond that, but teenagers might not. For that reason, I am recommending that teenagers not see the show. For adults, I give it a marginal thumbs up for the acting and the music. His paintings get a big thumbs down from me, but this is a movie review, not an art review. I award the film ** 1/2.\n**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.\nREVIEW WRITTEN ON: August 9, 1996\nOpinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.\n | Rhodes | 6.0 | 1099 | compound |
| 9 | 25999 | "Isn't it exciting?" the lithe and beautiful Alice (Natacha Régnier from THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS) asks her virginal boyfriend, Luc (Jérémie Renier). "Our adventure. You used to complain that nothing happened." Loading the body of a high school classmate, Saïd (Salim Kechiouche), whom they just murdered into the trunk of the car, the numb Luc isn't likely to be griping about the lack of excitement ever again.\nWriter/director François Ozon's CRIMINAL LOVERS (LES AMANTS CRIMINELS) is a dark, dark psychosexual fairy tale for adults as written by the Brothers Grimm, as in VERY grim. It is an erotically-charged morality tale with the message that actions have consequences and horrific actions have horrific consequences.\nAt first, we aren't sure why these two young lovers have killed Saïd. Is it just for sadomasochistic sexual gratification as it certainly seems? Using flashbacks, we learn from Alice the reason why she feels that she deserves to enact revenge on Saïd, but how credible is her version of the truth? And will we ever come to know the exact events that led her to take another's life with such premeditated viciousness?\nAfter asking the shocked Luc if he loves her and getting no response, Alice goes off with Luc to bury Saïd's body in the woods. Along the way they stick up a jewelry store, but Alice wishes they had held up the bakery instead since she's hungry. This is a girl with a very twisted sense of morality. She cries profusely for a rabbit that they run over but has no sense of remorse over slicing up a human being like a piece of meat. What is clear is that she gets her sexual kicks from perverse activities.\nFilmed beautifully and scored well musically, the picture alternately invites and repulses us. The most sickening scene turns out to be the skinning of a rabbit, as its flesh is ripped off its body. It is the type of movie that, the more you describe it, the more your readers want no part of it. But this is a fascinating film with chillingly believable acting. And with plenty of surprises along the way.\nThe second part of the story happens after our young lovers have buried Saïd's body. Lost in the woods, they happen upon the remote cabin of an ogre. They figure that they are quite invincible and can easily rob food from him.\nInstead, this man, listed in the credits only as the man in the forest (Miki Manojlovic), proves to be a one-man vigilante squad. He throws them down into a dark basement inhabited by rats and Saïd's decomposing body, which the man has unburied. The man says he has cannibalistic intents on them, liking his girls skinny and his boys fat. This means that Luc gets stuffed like a goose while Alice starves. Homosexual rape is just one of many terrors that he inflicts on his prisoners. Suffice it to say that they would have been much better off if the police had found them first.\nIf ever there was a movie that isn't for everyone, it's CRIMINAL LOVERS. But if you find really dark sexual thrillers intriguing, CRIMINAL LOVERS may be the picture for you since they don't get much darker or more erotic than this.\nCRIMINAL LOVERS runs 1:30. It is in French with English subtitles. The film is not rated but would probably be NC-17 for nudity, language and strong sexuality and violence, including rape. It is for adults only.\n | Rhodes | 7.0 | 668 | neu |
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| 3994 | 26654 | POSTMAN BLUES (Posutoman Burusu) (director/writer: Sabu; cinematographer: Shuji Kuriyama; editor: Shuichi Kakesu; cast: Shinichi Tsutsumi (Ryuichi Sawaki), Osugi Ren (Hit Man Joe), Keisuke Horibe (Noguchi), Toyama Kyoko (Kyoko), Susumu Terajima (Detective Maeda), Tomoro Taguchi (Profiler), Shimizu Hiroshi (Detective Domon); Runtime: 110; 1997-Japan)\nReviewed by Dennis Schwartz\nThis parody of other gangster films suffers from a bad case of mindless imitation and hapless comedy that might be funny to someone in Japan, but does not have a universal appeal. It is a parody of how the yakuza is portrayed in Kitano films. It also pays homage to many other gangster films from around the world, including France's "Diva." It tries to take dramatic situations that occurred in those films and apply them out of context here, by poking fun at the hit man's mystique.\nWhat the director Sabu is trying to do becomes apparent in one of the early scenes, where a postman Sawaki (Tsutsumi ) goes to deliver mail to his old high school friend Noguchi (Horibe), someone he hasn't seen for years. Noguchi has become a low-level yakuza with dreams of becoming infamous, expressing exhilaration for the work he has chosen to do, even if he couldn't possibly be overjoyed at the present since he just cut off his pinky to give to his yakuza boss for screwing up a drug deal. Sawaki when asked about his work, just feels his job is dull. Noguchi asks him, "Does your heart ever thump with excitement like it did when you were a kid?"\nThe police have Noguchi under surveillance and since the postman went into the yakuza's apartment, they assume he is working for the gangster as a messenger and thereby put a tail on him. The film will turn into an absurd action comedy of mistaken identity, as Sawaki is taken for a drug-runner, then when he delivers mail in a hospital and talks with a cancer victim, Hit Man Joe (Ren), the police think he is involved in an insurance scam, then they think he a terrorist bomber because he is always delivering packages, and finally, they bring in a criminal profiler, and Sawaki is classified as being a serial homicidal psychopath. By searching his apartment and finding a severed finger there, which Sawaki took by mistake from his friend's apartment, and then following him to meet Noguchi, who has to cut off another to please his boss -- the cops from this task force surveillance team become convinced that he is a serial killer connected with the Minato Gang. The cops are shown to be bumbling idiots, while the yakuzas are clichés of how they appear in films. The fun in the film is mainly for film buffs, who will spot a wide variety of gangster films being used as a source for the levity here.\nA conventional soap opera romance is thrown into the mix, as the kindly mailman not only meets Hit Man Joe at the hospital but a beautiful young lady called Kyoto, who has a terminal case of cancer. The two dream that they can find bliss together as lovers. While Hit Man Joe dreams that he can win a hit man Killer of Killers competition, but he is worried they will disqualify him for health reasons.\nThe film's conclusion is a mixture of madcap comedy and an attempt to give meaning to all the lives of the dreamers who befriended Sawaki. The postman is racing on his bike to meet Kyoto at the hospital, while the special task force under detective Domon's direction have high-tech computer graphics to follow the suspect and roadblocks in place to detain the mailman, and are poised to shoot Sawaki first and ask questions later. Hit Man Joe and Noguchi are shown to have more feeling than the police and go by bike to aid their unsuspecting friend from the danger he is in, trying to tell the police they got the wrong man. Sabu reveals his pessimistic opinion of society, by having the innocent postman put through such an ordeal over nothing.\nHumor is subjective, you can't convince anyone that something was funny when they aren't laughing. I didn't laugh at what I was seeing, though I found the film to be stylish, shot in an outpouring of mellow brown and blue-gray shades.\nREVIEWED ON 10/24/2000\nDennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"\n© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ\n | Schwartz | 3.0 | 845 | neu |
| 3995 | 20619 | DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS, THE (LA VIE REVEE DES ANGES) (director/writer: Erick Zonca; screenwriters: Roger Bohbot/Virginie Wagon; cinematographer: Agnes Godard; cast:Elodie Bouchez (Isa), Natacha Regnier (Marie), Gregoire Colin (Chriss), Jo Prestia (Fredo), Patrick Mercado (Charly), 1998-France)\nReviewed by Dennis Schwartz\nWho finds in life what they dream of? This emotionally moving film will look into that and will also examine the heart aches of two working class girls, doing it in a way only the French can do it justice.\nThe petite 21-year old Isa (for Isabelle), who is loaded down with a full backpack, wanders into the cold and grey industrial city of Lille. She hopes to stay with a male friend, but finds out he's in Belgium, and ends up remaining in Lille for the night. She hopes to pick up some cash by selling touristy postcards on the street, which leads to an encounter with a Yugoslavian who tells her about a sewing job in a clothing factory. Isa, being unskilled, gets fired after working there only one day, but not before meeting a fellow seamstress, Marie (Regnier), who is the same age.\nIsa is someone we think we know but really don't, as she is prone to be friendly and willing to make relationships, opening her dark saucer eyes wide and offering an engaging smile full of her milky white teeth to go along with her warm personality and trim look of close-cropped black hair; but, we are, also, distracted by a mysterious scar she has on her right eyebrow, which is never explained. There are many things about Isa that are unexplained and delightfully mysterious that we accept from her because she is so genuinely likable.\nMarie reluctantly puts her up in a beautiful apartment, one that she is minding for a mother and a daughter lying comatose in the hospital after a car crash.The mother will die, leaving the teenage girl with no visitors except for Isa who takes it upon herself to make contact with the girl in the hospital. These encounters brilliantly show what Isa is all-about, as she wants to will the girl back to life. For Isa, life holds so much promise and light and love in it, that misery alone cannot stop her thoroughly from the angelic path she is on. The journey becomes for her only a question if her dreamlife can become her real life, as she will seek the ideal and not be deterred by what roadblocks stand in her way, which is something the young can do more readily than the elderly. By the end of the film, we wonder what will become of her, as the camera pans the sad faces of the women who work all their lives in a factory, where Isa might have no choice but to end up working in and be exploited by the bosses, as it seems that is the pattern of life for a working girl here.\nHer relationship with Marie is not a very warm one, instead it is a workable one. Marie is not a trusting or caring person; in fact, she is most of the time a downer who expects the worst in life and when that happens she can't properly handle it without becoming crazy.\nThe tall and slender Marie is very attractive but she is also very mixed-up emotionally. Sex is the only thing that can bring her joy in this world. Her relationship with the more spiritually minded Isa is based more on convenience than on mutual admiration or anything else, since they are both impoverished and seem to be stuck because of their lack of education and inability to fit into society and their inability to meet a guy who they love or who can love them in return. They are working-class girls, seemingly trapped by their birth, unable to get what they want from life. Each one dreams of a way out; but Isa, as hard as it is to believe from her appearance, is the one more grounded in reality, the one better prepared to make a go of it in life, and she is the one who grows up right in front of us.\nTheir encounter with the opposite sex comes on their first night together, as they try to crash a rock concert without having a ticket, but two rough-looking bouncers keep them out while flirting with them. The girls are not attracted to the guys and tell them so in a nasty way, but the relationship changes to one of friendship after much banter back and forth. Marie ends up going out with the one she insultingly called fat, Charly (Mercado), and sleeps with him but tells him she doesn't like him enough to have sex with him (she will have sex with him twice, on later occasions); while the other bouncer, Fredo (Prestia), is smitten with the cute Isa, but to no avail, as she is not taken with him and does not encourage the relationship to go any further than friendship. The guys feel sorry for the penniless girls; also, they want to keep up a relationship with them, so they give them some money to help them out.\nThe supposed meal ticket and way out of the trap Marie is in comes about unexpectedly, as she gets caught shoplifting a leather jacket and meets again Chriss (Colin), she once randomly approached him in the street in a hostile manner when she was in a playful mood. He pays for the jacket, which she accepts with hostility. She is someone who is terribly concerned about appearances and being humiliated, constantly unhappy about her station in life. He will turn out to be a womanizer, and she will be one more girl in his series of conquests, but is too blinded by her own dreams to see this, though all the signs are there. His nightclub (his father bought it for him) happens to be the place where the girls' bouncer friends work.\nIsa, in need of money, tucks in her pride and takes on the temp job of dressing like a fool, putting on roller-skates and advertising sandwich-boards. Marie, however, will not. She can't handle the demeaning nature of the job.\nA steady rift grows between the women, as Marie thinks she's got what she wants with her relationship with Chriss and doesn't need Isa anymore, and acts hostile toward her. All Isa is trying to do is clue her friend into not falling for Chriss, telling her that he will only drop her when he wants to, these remarks only make Marie more insulting towards her. There is a classic look of disgust on the face of Isa, that seems to be saying, you are really sick, when she finally realizes that she has to move on from here.\nThe performances of the two actresses was bewitching, as the two women deservedly shared Best Actress honors last year at Cannes.\nThe poignancy and merits of the film, are in depicting accurately the reality of the girls' lives. It is a film without one false note of sympathy or sentimentality in it. This is not the type of a girl-buddy movie as seen in some Hollywood films of late, filled with glibness and glitter and canned experiences. Here, what happens has the ring of truth to it and is powerful in the sense that its simple telling of the tale, without trying to be cute or pedantic, turns out to be profound. It caught a certain inexpressible joy there is to life, the kind of joy where one can connect with someone else and feel satisfied in doing that because what you are doing is true, just like Isa did when she befriended the girl in the coma.\nThis debut film for the 42-year-old director, done with the austerity of a master, reminiscent of someone like a Robert Bresson, is a work of considerable merit. It is a film that not only depicted the shattering of a friendship and a realistic look at life for the working class, but it probed into the deep seated loneliness found within each of the girls, looking at it in a poetic way.\nREVIEWED ON 9/3/99\nDennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"\n© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ\n | Schwartz | 8.0 | 1565 | compound |
| 3996 | 3647 | FORGET PARIS is a Billy Crystal movie in the style of one of Woody Allen's New York Jewish comedies. Crystal is the lead actor, the producer, the director, and the lead writer (along with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel). He is even, briefly, the only singer in the movie. I can not find the cinematographer's name so for all I know, Billy was behind the camera as well.\nFORGET PARIS tells the story of a hard nosed NBA referee called Mickey (Billy Crystal). He refers to himself as a "vertically challenged" individual, but he is not afraid of the redwood tree sized athletes of the NBA. He looks right up to them and orders them around. In one classic scene, Mickey looses it, and throws every member and coach of both teams out on the game for technical fouls. If you like the NBA, I don't, you can see all your favorite stars in cameos roles through out the movie although the basketball scenes take up less ten percent of the show.\nNothing intimidates Mickey until he has to go to Paris to bury his father and the French airline looses his father's body in baggage handling. The French representatives of the airline do not care about his complaints. He lives in the airport for two days complaining to them. Finally, a middle manager at the airline, an American named Ellen (Debra Winger), takes over his case and awards him the honor of "passenger of the month" to make up for all of the troubles they have caused him. He asks her to show him Paris and the on again, off again romance begins from there.\nThe whole story of their romance is told in a series of flashbacks by their friends (Julie Kavner, Joe Mantegna, Richard Masur, Cathy Moriarty, John Spencer, etc.) having dinner in New York. The dinner party is actually quite interesting as well. It provided the most humorous single line. Joe Mantegna and his finance are telling how they met. It seems he FAXed her by accident since he punched one digit wrong. She then FAXed him back across the country and soon she said "we were FAXing each other's brains out".\nBy far the funniest sequence has to be all of the fertility clinic scenes. The dialog is uproarious. I had trouble controlling myself I was laughing so hard. I got to worrying that I might be offensive to the rest of the audience I was laughing so loud.\nAll of the above having been said, I am sad to report that the movie was extremely uneven in quality. Most of the time, it was like a flywheel that kept spinning but engaged only infrequently. Crystal directed the actors so that they were like detached free agents. Moreover, the script only allocated them funny material at sporadic intervals. When the scene's should have had strong male bonding, there was none. The chemistry between Mickey and Ellen was never there so you did not care about them. Since the movie tried to be both serious and comedic, having no believable relationships was a real problem. The comedy, when it was present, was excellent. The serious part was non-engaging, dull, and lifeless.\nFORGET PARIS runs a quick 1:40. It is rated PG-13 for the fertility clinic scene, but overall, it is a mild PG-13. There is no nudity or violence, albeit a lot of discussion of sex. FORGET PARIS, when it worked, made me laugh hard and long so I can easily recommend it to you. On the other hand, the vast majority of the film had no value other than filling in time before the next joke came along, so I am only awarding it only ** 1/2.\n______________________________________________________________________ **** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.\nREVIEWED WRITTEN ON: May 25, 1995\nOpinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.\n | Rhodes | 6.0 | 803 | compound |
| 3997 | 29477 | THE GLASS HOUSE is an entertaining thriller that almost works. Using a predictable script by Wesley Strick (THE SAINT), long-time television director Daniel Sackheim brings a strong sense of visual style and foreboding. The formulaic film is shot in the cool blue tones that are all the rage today in movie mysteries.\n"The simplest thing is the hardest to see," Mrs. Baker (Rita Wilson) advises her daughter Ruby (Leelee Sobieski). Although she is talking about Ruby's sketching, this advice obviously is meant for the audience. The problem with the script is that most of the plot "twists" are both simple and easy to spot. When the writer worries that things aren't completely obvious, he inserts the visual equivalent of exclamation points to make sure we understand. One character punctures all the tires on a car. Although it is clear who did it and why, the writer has to have her come out and stand by the car. And just in case we still don't get it, he has her drop a hidden knife on the ground with a loud crash.\nRuby is a mildly rebellious 16-year-old girl. She can barely tolerate her 11-year-old, video game playing brother, Rhett (Trevor Morgan). She claims that the only thing they share are "common genes."\nThe kids' world is quickly shattered when their parents die in a car accident. They go to live with their long-time friends and ex-neighbors, the Glass family, Terry and Erin (Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgård). The Glasses live in -- yes, you guessed it -- a big, glass house. Even the car dealership that Terry owns is made with the same modernistic glass-and-steel construction. When he gets angry, Terry likes to break glasses. Thankfully, the glass metaphor ends there. When the killers look for murder weapons, they don't go for slivers of glass.\nThe squabbling siblings are the most believable part of the picture. When their new guardians force the two kids to share the same bedroom in the Glass's monster-sized house, Ruby lays down the law to Rhett. If he dares even glance at her while she's changing, he's toast.\nRuby soon learns that the Glasses aren't the sweet couple they once were when the two families used to vacation together in Hawaii. Erin, a doctor in a hospital's pain management program, manages her own "pain" nightly with drug injections, turning herself into a zombie. Terry is heavily in debt, and some unsavory characters are looking to call in his loan. Did I mention yet that the kids come with a big inheritance? Doesn't matter. Even if I didn't, I'm sure you've already guessed it.\n"Hi, you guys need some help?" a friendly sheriff asks the kids. "Yes," Ruby replies with succinct understatement. The writer needed some help too, but he didn't get it. The director, however, does his best to keep your attention and generally succeeds.\nTHE GLASS HOUSE runs 1:45. It is rated PG-13 for "sinister thematic elements, violence, drug content and language," and would be acceptable for kids around 12 and up.\nThe film opens nationwide in the United States today, Friday, September 14, 2001. In the Silicon Valley, it is showing at the AMC and the Century theaters.\nWant free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email? Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.\n========== X-RAMR-ID: 29477 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 250171 X-RT-TitleID: 1109671 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271\n | Rhodes | 6.0 | 692 | neu |
| 3998 | 25580 | TEA WITH MUSSOLINI (director/writer: Franco Zeffirelli; screenwriter: John Mortimer/based on "The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli"; cinematographer: David Watkin; editor: Tariq Anwar; cast: Cher (Elsa), Judi Dench (Arabella), Joan Plowright (Mary), Maggie Smith (Lady Hester), Lily Tomlin (Georgie), Charlie Lucas (Luca as a child), Baird Wallace (Luca), Paolo Seganti (Vittorio), Paul Chequer (Wilfred), Tessa Pritchard (Connie); Runtime: 117; 1999-UK/Italy)\nReviewed by Dennis Schwartz\n"Tea With Mussolini" is based on the semiautobiography of the film's director and co-screenwriter Franco Zeffirelli. It tells of a boy named Luca (he is supposed to be the director), born out of wedlock to an English clothing designer living in Florence. His mother is dead and his married father doesn't want him, and the child can't stand being in an orphanage, so he runs away. The British secretary in his father's silk business, an elderly expatriate named Mary (Joan Plowright), takes a liking to the kid and decides to raise him on her own to be a perfect English gentleman, just as his father wishes.\nThe film opens in the Florence of 1935, at a memorial service for the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who died in Florence in the 19th century. A group of expatriates pay their annual respects to her. These English expatriates feel very comfortable to be in Italy, excited by the civilizing nature of all the art around them. For them, Il Duce is still the gentleman who makes the trains run on time and they desperately want to be loyal to Italy, quite taken with the richness of the art they are surrounded by. The old biddies are portrayed by a collection of actresses well-adapted to being hams. Maggie Smith is Lady Hester, the chief chewer of scenery, the de-facto leader of the group and number one snob. Because of her biting tongue, she is known as the I Scorpioni, a name that unfairly sticks to this gaggle of English ladies, since Lady Hester seems to be the only one with acid on her tongue. Lily Tomlin is the American in the group, a bold lesbian archeologist, in a role that is inconsequential, she doesn't even have any funny lines, but she's always smiling, dressed in pants, and sunburned (the reason for her being so happy, is that she is probably daydreaming about some of the better films she has been in). Cher is a wealthy and vulgar Jewish-American named Elsa, an ex-Broadway actress who keeps trading in old husbands who either die or she divorces. Either way her bank account grows and she uses that money to collect art, she is especially interested in collecting Picassos. Judi Dench is Arabella, a dizzy painter and lover of the arts, in a role that gives her no room to be anything but a stereotypical English old biddy, who has a corny zest for what is on the canvas and what hangs in a museum. She has the most embarrassing line in the film, as she explains to Luca why she remains in Italy, "I have warmed both hands before the fires of Michelangelo and Botticelli."\nThese old English ladies love to gather in Doney's Tea Room and at the Galleria Uffizi and to be served tea at exactly 4 P.M., enjoyably gossiping about one another and talking about their past. When Elsa enters the group, Lady Hester puts her nose in the air and mentions how much she detests her because of her sordid lifestyle. Lady Hester sets the tone and proper standards for how this snooty group behaves.\nThings abroad begin to get more tense due to Hitler's aggression and Mussolini's pact with him, and even Florence seems to be getting less friendly. Lady Hester has undying faith in Mussolini, and uses her political influence from when her late husband was the British ambassador to Italy, to secure a meeting with the head of the Brown Shirts. Mussolini assures her that he personally guarantees the safety of the English expatriates. The newspaper headline features a picture with Mussolini and her having tea.\nBut when England enters the war, all things change and the expatriates are rounded up and locked up in a barracks. The strangest scene in the movie, is when Lady Hester's grandson (Paul Chequer) dresses up as a woman so he can be with granny. He is finally so ashamed, he strips off his dress and goes yelling in the street "I'm a man." He then joins the resistance (Now what was that all about!). When Elsa hears of the English ladies being jailed, she has Luca secretly arrange for the ladies to be sent to an expensive hotel, where she generously pays the bill. Lady Hester thinks Mussolini realized his mistake of putting them in a barracks and is now responsible for taking care of them in such a grand manner.\nAmerica declares war and Elsa is trapped in Italy. She has foolishly fallen in love with her young chauffeur (Seganti), a weasel who sells her fake art, tricks her into signing over all her money to him, and then betrays her to the Fascists.\nThe film ends on a melodramatic note, and if this wasn't supposed to be a true story, it would be one that was hard to fathom. For instance, how could Cher playing a Jewess be so non-chalant about being a Jew in a Fascist country and even more absurdly, fall in love with a Fascist and trust him with all her money!\nThis was a ridiculous movie; it was an apathetic sudser with flat dialogue, stiff characterizations, and if it didn't take place in Florence, where art is a way of life, this film would be a feckless fiasco. It is hard to believe that Luca is Franco Zeffirelli, he seemed so out of it, the role seemed to have nothing to say, as if he wasn't there when he was there, and his heroics as a 17-year-old with the Resistance Movement seemed unconvincing. Also, the actor who played him, Baird Wallace, was very stiff and made his presence felt in a very awkward manner. Since the film is supposedly about the director blossoming to become a great artist, I saw no evidence of this. This is a fourth-rate production. It just had no spark to it, and the 10 years of history it spans from 1935-45, seemed as if it was made up by a bunch of snobs and dabblers in the arts who wouldn't know the difference between a Mussolini and a Churchill unless they were thrown in jail by one of them.\nREVIEWED ON 7/27/2000\nDennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"\n© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ\n | Schwartz | 3.0 | 1290 | compound |
| 3999 | 4149 | Cast: Patrick Swayze, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Joseph Mazzello, Seth Mumy, David Marshall Grant, Diane Venora, David O. Sanders, Michael O'Keefe Director: Martha Coolidge Producers: Clifford Green, Ellen Green, and Gary Lucchesi Screenplay: Elizabeth Anderson based on a story by Clifford and Ellen Green Cinematography: Johnny E. Jensen Music: Cynthia Miller U.S. Distributor: Savoy Pictures\nFrankly, I'm not entirely sure at what audience THREE WISHES is aimed. With its wholesome, politically-correct story, it seems focused at the under-15 crowd. Yet, considering the slow pace and relative dearth of action, adults might be the only ones with the patience to sit through these two hours. The result is a film that doesn't have a strong appeal for any age group. Some viewers will undoubtedly be charmed by this mystical, whimsical motion picture, but it's doubtful there will be enough fans to save it from a quick box office death.\nIn recent years, Patrick Swayze has been attempting to broaden his image, branching away from the hunky, action-oriented roles he gravitated towards in his early Hollywood days. (Has it really been that long since DIRTY DANCING?) After starting down this less-traveled road in 1992 with CITY OF JOY, Swayze has continued along the path with the likes of TOO WONG FOO and now THREE WISHES. Here, he plays a drifter without a penny to his name, and there's not a fist fight to be found. Hardly a traditional heroic image.\nAs the soundtrack, which includes such tunes as "Do You Believe in Magic?" and "Earth Angel", indicates, THREE WISHES is about dreams and magic. Its message, which is all-but-shouted from the rooftops (subtlety is not the film's strong suit), is that we should all stop yearning for what we can't have and "find happiness in whatever [we've] got." Just because there's a piece missing from the puzzle of the American Dream doesn't mean that life can't be wonderful. This is a very traditional theme, and one that's probably a little too obvious for a sophisticated movie-going audience.\nOf course, for those not impressed by the message, there's a heavy element of nostalgia to inhale. Set in 1955, THREE WISHES is full of pastel reminders of $13,500 dream houses, old TV shows like OZZIE AND HARRIET, and two-parent families where the mother tends home and the father provides. The story opens on Memorial Day at a cemetery for veterans of the Korean War, where Jeanne (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her two sons, Tom (Joseph Mazzello) and Gunther (Seth Mumy), have come to remember their father, whose plane was shot down several years ago. On the way home, an accident occurs which changes the direction of the fatherless family's life. A dog runs in front of Jeanne's car and, when she swerves to avoid running it over, she instead hits a man--a vagrant named Jack (Patrick Swayze) who is just passing through town. Feeling guilty about what has happened, Jeanne invites Jack to spend time at her house until his broken leg has healed. As it turns out, however, the man and his dog are more than they seem.\nAs relatively pleasant and undemanding as this film is, it runs a little too long, primarily because the setup takes the first half of the movie. THREE WISHES appears to have undergone some fairly heavy editing to get it below the two hour mark, however, since several minor subplots are left dangling. The film opens and closes with brief contemporary (1995) scenes that might have better underscored the primary theme had they been given a greater portion of the running time.\nCharacter development is also on the weak side. While the primary four (Jack, Jeanne, Tom, and Gunther) are likable, none of them possesses amazing depth. Basically, they're just well-acted stereotypes with a few interesting lines of dialogue. The supporting characters fare far worse--there isn't an interesting one in the whole lot. From uptight parents to bullying kids, everyone is lifted directly from stock, with little attempt made at fleshing them out.\nDarker than Capra, yet somewhat reminiscent of (albeit inferior to) classics like IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, THREE WISHES has a good heart, effective direction by Martha Coolidge (RAMBLING ROSE), and solid acting -- yet the occasional meandering of the script doesn't allow the movie to be as engaging or enchanting as it ought to be. THREE WISHES is all about the supernatural, and, considering the nearly impossible-to-market nature of the subject matter, it's going to take a major miracle for more than a handful of people to see this film in theaters before its quick transfer to video.\n | Berardinelli | 6.2 | 917 | compound |
| 4000 | 22385 | Since TUMBLEWEEDS opened right on the heels of the remarkably similar ANYWHERE BUT HERE, let's make it clear which is which. Both feature likeable mother/daughter buddies who are off to California to make a new life for themselves since the mother is relationship-challenged. Both even feature moms who shop for furniture in the closest trash.\nThe differences are in the casting and the budget. The more critically acclaimed and obviously lower-budget film is TUMBLEWEEDS. And, whereas everyone knows the stars of ANYWHERE BUT HERE (Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman), few people will have heard of Janet McTeer, known mainly for her stage work, and relative newcomer Kimberly Brown.\nMary Jo Walker (McTeer) feels obligated to leave the state whenever she changes husbands, she's had 4, or boyfriends. This means that she and her 12-year-old daughter, Ava (Brown), named after Ava Gardner, have lived in more states than they can count.\nOn their way to "sunny San Diego," they are aided by a large, good-looking truck driver, Jack Ranson, whom Mary Jo will eye as a possible number 5. Jack's played by Gavin O'Connor, who is also the producer, director and co-writer (along with Angela Shelton). Mary Jo has an unbounded energy for life. She's a good mother who likes her daughter as much as her men. In a life of constant flux, her daughter provides her only stability.\nThe slice of life story is remarkably uneventful and rarely compelling. Generally avoiding clichés, the movie's typical scene is Ava's first day at school. In the movies it is de rigueur for the other kids to ridicule any new kids in class. In contrast, Ava is welcomed without fanfare, and the only remark she hears is a kind one, as one girl whispers a compliment about her dress.\nMuch of the story is quite predictable. As soon as Ava mentions that she hasn't had her first period, you can bet that it will happen during the movie and at an awkward moment.\nQualifying as the picture's strangest episode is the incident at Mary Jo's new place of work in California. Soon after she meets her coworker, Laurie Pendleton (Laurel Holloman), Laurie suggest she join her later for a coffee enema. And she's not kidding. Laurie goes on to detail the joys that coffee enemas can bring.\nFinally, showing that it is a hip modern picture, Ava plays Romeo in the school play. Her boyfriend says that he wished he had known that she was trying out for the part. If he had, he would have tried out for the part of Juliet.\nTUMBLEWEEDS runs 1:44. It is rated PG-13 for language, sensuality and a scene of domestic discord and would be acceptable for teenagers.\n | Rhodes | 6.0 | 530 | compound |
| 4001 | 2547 | Consider this premise: a private investigator (Dana Carvey) who's a key witness in an upcoming trial has a memory problem. Not only can't he recall the crimes of the man he's supposed to testify against, but he can't remember things from day to day. Every time he goes to sleep, his amnesia asserts itself, wiping out events, places, and people. So, every night before he goes to bed, he uses a cassette recorder to tape instructions to himself - basic facts of life to get him through the day.\nAdd to this a beautiful woman who is supposed to be dead (Valeria Golno), a mobster with a British accent (Michael Gambon), and a doctor who seems to know things that no one else does (Michael Murphy), and the seeds are there for a decent thriller - or a hilarious comedy. Unfortunately, CLEAN SLATE is neither. For all its promise and possibilities, this film manages to be nothing more than forgettable.\nAs far as featherweight entertainment goes, this isn't bad. The script is peppered with funny moments, although probably less than half the jokes actually click. CLEAN SLATE works better when its humor isn't too outrageous - the climactic trial scene is more silly than enjoyable because it's so completely over-the-top (lawyers, bailiffs, and courtroom observers pile atop each other in the middle of a free-for-all melee).\nOne of the most disappointing things about this film is that it could have been so much better, either as a mystery or a comedy. Only on one or two occasions is the central plot device of amnesia used to its full potential. Whichever way the filmmaker chose to play CLEAN SLATE - for laughs or thrills - it would seem they had a winner. Yet, mysteriously, the result is a unsatisfying mix of a hard-to-swallow gumshoe tale and a pedestrian comedy.\nThe cast is solid. Although you occasionally expect him to start imitating George Bush, Dana Carvey brings a welcome likability to Maurice Pogue, the man with no memory. Valeria Golino, known best as Charlie Sheen's girlfriend from the two HOT SHOTS films, again functions as the token female love interest. James Earl Jones enjoys himself in this comic turn, while bringing a touch of class to CLEAN SLATE. Other performers include Kevin Pollak, Michael Gambon, and Olivia D'Abo.\nThe first act, where the audience is finding things out along with Pogue, is the most entertaining segment of the film. For the first forty-five minutes, the script cleverly forces the viewers to identify with the main character. It's almost - albeit not quite - a first-person motion picture. Certainly, Pogue is in every early scene. Then he goes to sleep and forgets everything, but the audience remembers, and the effect is ruined. Now Pogue's memory loss seems like what it is - a device to set up jokes and move the story along.\nThere are some worthwhile running gags, including the local blind man's "joke of the day", a painter's continuing attempts to render a Mona Lisa likeness on the side of a building, and the misadventures of a dog with depth perception problems. None of these, however, make up for what CLEAN SLATE is missing.\nThis film is likeable, if not especially worthwhile. Admittedly, Dana Carvey is a more engaging screen presence than his former SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE co-star Mike Myers, but there's little in the way of breakthrough comedy in his latest feature. With CLEAN SLATE, the lackluster results speak of a wasted opportunity.\n | Berardinelli | 5.1 | 680 | compound |
| 4002 | 14956 | What's left for peasants to do when the owner of the farm they worked all their lives has died? Quite a lot actually, in writer and director Stefan Ruzowitzky's morality tale, THE INHERITORS (DIE SIEBTELBAUERN), set in a 1930's Austria that looks like the 1730s. They've inherited the farm, and they've never worked so hard in their lives now that they are both employers and employees.\nTheir owner has died of mysterious circumstances, angering the local police, who like their murderers to be caught red-handed. The story isn't a murder mystery per se, the crime's investigation being shuttled off to a cinematic sidetrack.\nThe setup concerns the effect of the owner's will. Hating basically everyone in the town, he gives his farm to the peasants who have worked it. Not some noble gesture, his bequest is done as a kind of a lark, and he says in the will that he expects them to fight among themselves. Among the ten peasants, the two leaders are played by Sophie Rois as Emmy and Simon Schwarz as Lukas.\nThe formula film rigidly dichotomizes the local inhabitants into the good and the bad. The good are the free-spirited, lithe peasants dressed in cheerful, plaid clothes. The bad can be just as easily recognized. They are the farmers with their abundant girth and black, somber suits, hats and ties. The farmers get lines certain to draw our wrath. ("God wants things the way they are, and the way they have always been," the lead farmer argues as to why it isn't right for peasants to own their own farm.)\nThe characters lack much depth or complexity. Looking at their clothes is sufficient information to predict their behavior. Made in interchangeable parts, the peasants are downtrodden and hence worthy of our sympathy. The farmers, rich and vicious, are deserving of our indignation. It is all rather like vaudeville plays in which they hold up "applause" and "hiss" signs to instruct the audience on how they are supposed to feel when the various characters are on stage.\nAs a director, Stefan Ruzowitzky strives to set a whimsical tone, but his script doesn't provide much humorous material to back up his intentions. Sometimes, as in the gang rape sequence, he tries hard to manipulate our emotions. The problem with this and other similar scenes is that the characters are not genuine enough for us to care as we should.\nThe body of the movie has the farmers conniving to get the farm from the peasants while the peasants work hard to save it. Lacking much complexity, the movie exists on scenes like the recurring one around the large kitchen table. The peasants scarf down their soup while grimacing at each other. They always keep a place set for the dead owner. Why is never adequately explained, since they loathed him.\nUltimately it isn't what happens in THE INHERITORS that is the problem, but what doesn't. The story is so thin that it is barely there, and the formula film runs most of the time on autopilot.\nTHE INHERITORS runs 1:32. It is in German with English subtitles. The film isn't rated but would be an R for sex, nudity, violence, profanity and rape and would be acceptable for teenagers only if they are older and mature.\n | Rhodes | 4.0 | 636 | neu |
| 4003 | 4439 | LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS is a Henry Jaglom film. He is the director, the editor, and to the extent there is a script, he wrote it. As in most of his movies, he also plays a role, albeit a small role in this film. Jaglom is arguably the most independent of film makers in America today. He makes his movies for himself and allows the audience to view them much as your neighbor might invite you over for some home movies. He is frequently criticized for being self-indulgent, but to me that is his charm.\nAlthough Jaglom films can be pretentious one moment and totally off the wall the next, they always push the edge of the envelope. My favorite is ALWAYS (1985) which should not be confused with Spielberg's ALWAYS (1989) with Holly Hunter. Jaglom's ALWAYS is a pseudo-documentary about the signing of his divorce papers and has a subtitle of BUT NOT NECESSARILY FOREVER. In ALWAYS he has a weekend party and invites his soon to be ex over along with all of their friends. It was one of my top ten movies of the 80s.\nJaglom does not mind experimenting which means some of his movies are turkeys, but others are brilliant successes. I found LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS to be a minimally enjoyable movie, but one that, nevertheless, has a certain fascination. It starts with the strains of "Accentuate the Positive". This choice of this tune has a meaning you may want to ponder during the slow parts of the film. In typical Jaglom style the picture is shot (Hanania Baer) frequently with a single handheld camera and too many pans and zooms that leave the audience dizzy.\nIn LAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS, Helena Mora (Viveca Lindfors) the matriarch of an artistic family invites everyone back for the last summer they will have in the family home in the Hamptons before it is sold. Helena is a great star who owns the large sprawling home. Although retired from acting herself, she teaches it to others. Her family consists of her son-in-law, avant-garde director Ivan Axelrod (Andre Gregory), his daughter Trish (Melissa Leo) and his playwright son Jake (Jon Robin Baitz), Helena's son Eli Garield (Ron Rifkin) and his daughter Chlow (Martha Plimpton), and others. To the estate they have invited the currently famous actress Oona Hart (Victoria Foyt).\nThe family is one who prides themselves in taking forever to produce their artistic endeavors and not caring if they are financially successful. Jake however informs the audience that "the dirty little secret of the avant-garde is they are jealous of money." It is as if Jaglom is saying this himself. As if he is saying, I only make these art house pictures and although I claim not to care, I wish one would become a major hit that would make me filthy rich.\nWhen Jaglom shows up in the movie, he plays Oona's agent Max. Max wants her to play a sequel to the mindless but popular movie she just finished. He claims that if she does this, she could start commanding two to three million dollars per picture. She is angry because she feels her life is being wasted and tells him forcefully, "We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!"\nAlthough Oona is successful, she keeps trying to improve her craft. She does this by acting as a baby seal, a leopard, and a heron. She has long scenes where she converses with people acting and talking like these animals. A great but failed attempt by Jaglom at creativity. Poor Foyt really put herself out on a limb and tried hard, but ended up looking bizarre and totally ridiculous. When he has Andre Gregory (MY DINNER WITH ANDRE and VANYA ON 42ND STREET) act as a leopard wooing Foyt's leopard, you want to yell at the screen to get serious.\nThe best and only part of show that really works is the way it deals with Trish and her incestuous relationship with her gay brother Jake. None of the rest of the characters in this movie are the least bit believable, but Jake and especially Trish are. They have a serious problem to deal with and the movie handles the touchy subject of incest honestly and amazingly well. To further complicate things, Trish complains that Jake steals all of her boyfriends.\nLAST SUMMER IN THE HAMPTONS runs overly long at 1:45. It is rated R for some bad language and for the incest themes. It is a soft R and would be fine for teenagers. Although I can not recommend the movie, I'm glad I gave it a try. Mining Jagloms can sometimes turn up gold, but then again, sometimes not. For the risk taking and for the excellent acting by Melissa Leo and Jon Robin Baitz, I give it * 1/2.\n**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.\nREVIEW WRITTEN ON: December 14, 1995\nOpinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.\n | Rhodes | 4.0 | 1015 | compound |