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Movie Reviews
The ten-year birthday
tradition of all-day movies, broken in 1998, is revisited in 1999....
The Omega Code v
Three Kings v Bats
Bringing Out the Dead v The Blair Witch Project
The Omega
Code
My God, Casper Van Dien has an exquisite face! My God, he’s a miserable
excuse for an actor! Having received extensive training in the Baywatch/Melrose
Place Academy of Thespians, Van Dien exhibits an expressive range in The
Omega Code that runs the gamut from A to B. He can act with his forehead muscles
(clench to indicate intense emotion), his teeth (clench to indicate anger),
and, one gathers, his butthole (clench, etc.), since I promise you it wasn’t
his dramatic gift that got him a movie career. Actually, Van Dien spends most
of Omega Code looking as though he finds the prospect of actual acting
to be utterly humiliating, and certainly much too uncool for someone with
those cheekbones. I missed his gig in Tarzan and the Lost City, but
I’m sure he rocked, since the whole point of Tarzan is that he’s an ape.
(According to the pub shots, by the way, Van Dien shaved his chest for TLC
— a real shame because it’s a museum-quality chest.) But I did catch him in Shark
Attack, in which he played a Valley Boy with a snorkel; and Modern
Vampires, in which he played a Valley Boy with fangs. The fangs evidently
didn’t fit right because they made him lisp every time he said the word
“vapid.”
Oh yeah, the plot: The Torah contains a heretofore-undiscovered mathematical
cipher that predicts and/or controls the future. The bad guy (Michael York)
scans the whole thing into a computer, which begins spewing out terrifying
prophecies via the laser printer. (It was at this point that I began to
suspect that The Omega Code was actually a clever allegory about Bill
Gates.)
Although these messages are approximately as vague and inscrutable as the
ones that come in fortune cookies, two mysterious Prophets have no trouble
understanding that the jig is up for humanity, and they start trying to
convince everyone that the End Is Near. You can imagine how well that works.
Van Dien stops York before he turns into Satan or Kenneth Starr or something.
I forget how.
Three
Kings
Okay, so the Gulf War is, like, over and everything, but these three soldiers
decide they can’t go back to the States until they steal a bunker full of
gold bricks from Saddam Hussein who stole it from Kuwait (who stole it from
you and me, baby). It was never clear to me how they were planning to get
thousands of pounds of gold bars out of the country in their duffel bags,
but, in the end, I worried for nothing because things don’t really work out
as expected anyway. The moral of Three Kings is this: American
soldiers — even when they’re trying to be bad and are going around looting
the country they’ve just bombed into a several - hundred - square - mile oil
fire and are Uzi-ing the bejeezus out of anyone who looks at them funny —
well, they’re really decent, good-hearted, and honest if you just scratch the
surface. Though you might have to use a rake.
I saw this film mostly to get my annual Mark (“Don’t Call Me Marky”) Wahlberg
fix, though you see a lot less off him in this film than in 1997’s Boogie
Nights . On the other hand, I suppose you could argue that what you do
get to see is real and not molded out of epoxy. Anyway, there is a promising
scene in which he’s dragged off in his underwear to be ruthlessly
interrogated by the Evil Arabs, but of course he isn’t really hurt when they
hook him up to the electric generator and force him to drink motor oil (how’s
that for a metaphor), and, when he later reappears, he is inexplicably
wearing someone’s discarded pinstripe suit coat. I’m sure it was supposed to
be a commentary on the corporate-industrial elite and capitalism and stuff.
George Clooney acts like his lines are painted on the inside of his eyelids;
Ice Cube acts like he’s slightly offended that his Fly Girls have run off
somewhere without him; and Mark(y) — well, he’s better at this than he was at
singing.
Bats
I’m sure the producers of this pathetic little outing were hoping that Bats
would do for Chiropterids what Jaws did for sharks, Arachnophobia
did for spiders, and Willard did for rats. As a long-time fan of
horror movies, however, I have seen The World As We Know It all but destroyed
by alligators, rattlesnakes, cobras, anacondas, dinosaurs, piranhas, bees,
flies, roaches, cats, killer whales, wild dogs, blobs, wolves, Gojira, insane
gorillas, insane [continue]
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baboons,
mosquitoes, rabbits, llamas (!), shrews, birds, your basic virus / bacterium
/ microbe (not infrequently transported from outer space), giant squid, tomatoes, Venus Fly Traps, Creepozoids, Critters, and Triffids,
and I found myself muttering in the dark, You people got nothing to show
me!
Because let’s face it. Who is ALWAYS to blame in these movies? The mad
scientist, that’s who, and Bats is no exception. This summer I read
Jeff Rovin’s Vespers, the book from which Bats was ripped — bleeding
and still beating — and wanted to see what Hollywood would do with an
interesting story that combined a fair amount of science with your basic
attack-of-the-killer-animals plot. For some reason, which I can only imagine
has something to do with the fact that he has an ounce of self-respect, Rovin
doesn’t get a credit in Bats. I amuse myself by imagining that he
stomped out of a production meeting early in the project, emitting high-pitched
squeaks whose hidden signals summoned the hideous, razor-toothed bat-things
to carry out their mutant orgy of carnage and revenge.
But he probably just threatened to sue.
Bringing
Out The Dead
If you loved Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, you’ll adore him in Bringing
Out The Dead. Actually, BOTD is kind of a prequel to LLV,
because you can easily imagine that Las Vegas is where Cage’s BOTD
character winds up after his pathetic little life as a pill-popping,
burned-out paramedic takes a real nose dive.
Okay, here’s what you need to know: Driving an ambulance in the bowels of New
York City on the graveyard shift is a no good, very bad job. And yes,
Virginia, Martin Scorsese is at it again, remaking Taxi Driver without
all the extraneous elements that plagued that film: a script, some people who
could act, a plot. Unfortunately, Frank Pierce is no Travis Bickle, and
Patricia Arquette is no Jodie Foster. This profound filmic meditation on the
effects of sleep deprivation was shot entirely with a 60-watt bulb (and the
lighting wasn’t too bright either). I mean really. If Cage’s acting in this
film were just slightly less animated, he’d be Mount Rushmore.
In BOTD, Scorsese also shows, yet again, that he has not the slightest
idea what to do with black characters: We’re treated to a Holy Roller
ambulance driver whose compulsive, skanky flirting with the dispatcher (along
the lines of “Who’s yo' daddy?”) plumbs new depths of been-there /done-that;
a SuperFly pimp / gigolo / drug pusher à la Velvet Jones (only Eddie Murphy
made him funny); and an immense, bad-ass cop who guards the ER doors at the
hospital in Hell’s Kitchen (Oooh! Get it? Hell’s Kitchen!) and whose
one line is, “Don’t make me take off my sunglasses!”
But you always learn something at the movies, don’t you find it? I learned,
for instance, some new words to add to Wendell’s List of Poison Movie
Descriptions. From now on, in addition to avoiding like the plague any movie
tagged as “thoughtful,” “inspirational,” a “romantic (and/or screwball)
comedy,” “feel good,” “coming of age,” “epic,” a “celebration of life,” or a
“sleeper,” I can now also save my pennies whenever I see the words “surreal
nightmare” and “gritty realism.”
The Blair
Witch Project
For the last five years I have, with monklike discipline, avoided the hype,
elevating my nose at the must-see movies over which Joe SixPack and Connie
Casserole were salivating. They inundated prime-time TV with their obsequious
promos; they infiltrated my favorite magazines with their fawning, full-color
spreads. But I stood fast in my refusal to see their schlock. No, I said, a
thousand times NO!
In 1994 it was Forrest Gump. In 1995 it was Babe. In 1996 it
was The English Patient. In 1997 it was Titanic. In 1998 it was
Saving Private Ryan (although I must admit that I was entertained by a
low-budget remake I happened to see in a remarkably sticky theatre somewhere
in West Texas: Shaving Ryan’s Privates).
In any case, I resisted. All was well. Right up until 1999. Oh, how the
mighty are laid low.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last twelve months, here’s
how Blair Witch unfolds: Three film students backpack into the woods
of Darkest Maryland in order to make a documentary about a witch who may or
may not live there and who may or may not occasionally supplement her diet
with local children. (And for this she’s called evil! Go figure.) The
trio disappears; their footage is subsequently discovered and “edited” into
two hours of yack-inducing VibraCam for the honor of viewing which you still
have to fork over $7.75.
Right out of the gate, of course, I found the plot implausible. I mean, does
anyone really care what happens to film students? And then there’s the
filmmakers’ “mysterious” fate. Hello? What mystery? If I’d been lost
in the woods for three days with Heather, I’d have murdered the little bitch
myself.
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