BANDITS Director Barry Levinson's latest tries hard to be a quirky
comedy (God, does it try), but the funniest moment in this criminally overlong
picture turns out to be a purely unintentional one. Kate Wheeler (Cate Blanchett),
a bored housewife who has hooked up with a pair of bank robbers known as "The
Sleepover Bandits," is stunned when she hears one of the crooks (Bruce Willis)
mouth the words of the chorus from Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
"You know that song!" she bleats, as if that omniscient smash single were some
obscure Gregorian chant and they were the only two people in the world familiar
with it. Grab your chuckles where you can, because Bandits is such a
complete mess, even the prospect of seeing Willis and Billy Bob Thornton mix
it up fails to stir anything in the audience besides contempt. Like a squeaky
axle that won't quiet down over the course of a 500-mile road trip, this grates
on the nerves almost from the start, when we realize that Thornton's hypochondriac
character is going to spend the entire 125-minute running time whining about
his various ailments. Blanchett fares no better as the bargain basement screwball
heroine in love with both men, and, for that matter, neither does Jane Fonda's
son Troy Garity as the gang's thick-witted driver. Amazingly, even though he's
cast opposite Thornton, Blanchett and a Fonda heir, it's Willis who comes out
on top: Playing it closer to the vest, he at least provides a respite from all
the mannered acting smothering the rest of the picture.
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MY FIRST MISTER Like Michael Caine in the 80s, teenaged Leelee Sobieski
has recently been appearing in movies left and right, following September's
The Glass House with Joy Ride and now this drama from actress
Christine Lahti (making her feature film directing debut). One of those heartfelt
efforts that means well but plays lamely, this stars Sobieski as 17-year-old
Jennifer, a sullen teen who dresses in black, pierces practically every part
of her body, and hates her divorced parents (Carol Kane and John Goodman). Seeking
employment, she ends up working at a mall clothing store under the watchful
eye of Randall (Albert Brooks), a fussy 49-year-old man with no friends but
plenty of insecurities. After a rough start centered solely around a teen protagonist
who's not terribly interesting (Jennifer's a far cry from Thora Birch's equally
wild child in Ghost World), My First Mister comes alive as it
explores the sometimes tense, sometimes tender, and always platonic relationship
that develops between these two loners. But rather than honestly explore how
such an unorthodox friendship might progress, screenwriter Jill Franklin cops
out by revealing that one of them has been diagnosed with a terminal illness
(but of course); this in turn leads to a climactic Hallmark moment that cracks
our suspension of disbelief wide open. Sobieski is too wholesome (at least on
screen) to be convincing as a miserable kid prone to self-mutilation, but Brooks
is excellent as the emotionally cloistered older man.
CURRENT RELEASES
DON'T SAY A WORD Gary Fleder directed the 1997 Morgan Freeman thriller
Kiss the Girls, but for whatever reason, he wasn't involved with last
spring's follow-up Along Came a Spider, about the search for a kidnapped
girl. Perhaps suffering from franchise envy, Fleder opted to put his name on
Don't Say a Word, which, oddly enough, also involves the kidnapping of
a little girl. In short, Fleder was screwed from either direction with this
particular plotline, making one wonder if he should have tried for a generic
Disney comedy instead. Word doesn't have quite as many plotholes as Spider,
but it also doesn't have Freeman's stabilizing presence. Instead, its marquee
draw is Michael Douglas, who seems utterly bored with this particular project.
He plays Dr. Nathan Conrad, a New York psychiatrist whose daughter is snatched
by crooks whose defining trait is that they don't have a single defining trait
between them. The good doctor learns that the only way he'll get his daughter
back is by extracting valuable information from the mind of one of his patients
(Brittany Murphy), a catatonic woman with a murky past. Murphy's disturbed character
is the most interesting one in the film, and this might have worked had it bothered
to treat her as more than just an occasional plot device. As it stands, this
boils down to routine police procedurals (stretch), cars speeding through city
streets (yawn), and Douglas trading climactic blows with the baddies (zzzzzz).
GHOST WORLD Terry Zwigoff, whose movie about cartoonist R. Crumb (Crumb)
stands as one of the best documentaries of modern times, makes his fictional
film debut with this adaptation of Daniel Clowes' underground comic book. Although
the picture is probably destined for cult status, its art-house encapsulation
may prevent it from achieving its proper due as a new generational touchstone
for disaffected teens and young adults everywhere. Certainly, the character
that Zwigoff and Clowes place at the center of this razor-sharp satire is a
familiar one to anyone who's ever set foot in a high school hallway. Enid (Thora
Birch), an outsider and damn proud of it, wears her disdain for the civilized
world on her sleeve, and she and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson)
spend most of their time not experiencing their own lives as much as wryly commenting
on everyone else's. Whether you love or loathe this type of person in real life
doesn't really matter, since it's Enid's universal vulnerability that ultimately
wins us to her cause. In many respects, she's no different than James Dean's
Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause or Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock
in The Graduate good kids who want to move forward but whose failure
to communicate perpetually keeps their lives in idle. Ghost World is
very funny but also very perceptive, and it offers Steve Buscemi one of the
defining roles of his career as a lonely guy whose very cluelessness makes him
cool in Enid's eyes.
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