Battle weary
Saving Private Ryan (MA)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Bugs out of five: Three
Saw Spielberg’s war opus and up popped the
question: what’s all the hoopla about?
Scores: Technical virtuosity and verisimilitude: 4½ (out of 5)
Drama: 2 – The message: “war is hell” (but futile sacrifice
is still noble; and the military is still valorous; and the young pacificist
intellectual character inevitably ‘matures’ by finding the courage
to finally kill a Nazi ...)
Of course, I will no doubt be the lone voice of dissent again on this. Clearly
I’m some sort of pinko nutcase. It’s bound to be a five star film
with every living critic on the planet; and we all better brace ourselves
for the Oscars.
Still, the three hours passed easily so Spielberg must have done something
right.
- Drew Perry
Romancing the Stone
Antz (G)
Director: Does it matter but Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson
Bugs out of five: Three
Gosh, now let me see. Who can we get to play
the part of a little nerdy New York ant who's unhappy with his lot in life?
A loner who doesn't fit in and wants to date someone society thinks
he shouldn't. The unhappy middle child in a family of five million who needs
therapy all the time. Mmmmm.
No. Not Woody Allen? He wouldn't be available, surely? Well, yeah, no harm
in giving him a call.
Not only was Woody home but he crawled at the chance to play worker ant
Z-4195, an ant in a zillion whose ambition in life is to get into the pants
of the beautiful Princess Bala (Sharon Stone), if she wore pants, that is.
Helping Z along in his quest is a soldier ant, Weaver, who looks and sounds
a lot like Sylvester Stallone but acts better. Throw in an ensemble cast
of well-known voices and some brilliant computer animation and you have
Antz. There have been much worse ways to spend a few hours in the
dark this year.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Shopping at the hype-a-market
The Truman Show (M)
Director: Peter Weir
Bugs out of five: Three
The Truman Show provides a wicked insight into
just how powerfully the modern media manipulates our mindless lives.
It shocks with the revelation that television, once the shape of things
to come, now shapes our lives in ways we can't even begin to comprehend.
That inside the box in the corner of the lounge room lurks an evil power.
Truman also reminds us that TV's older sibling, the printed word,
still has a role to play in shaping our thought processes and our actions
to the wills of rapacious, single-minded multinationals hellbent on pushing
their products on an increasingly materialistic world.
The Truman Show does all this brilliantly by being only half the
movie the media hype promised us.
With the movie's unfolding comes the sickening realisation that if the title
character Truman's been had, then so have we.
Before this film's release, the mainstream media reviewers almost without
exception covered The Truman Show in more stars than an outback sky
at night.
By the time we walked into the cinema we not so much expected five star
service but demanded it.
This was the show, after all, that was going to catapult Jim Carrey from
buffoon vet to the bewildered victim of an uncaring, media-driven society.
This was the show that was going to push Aussie director Peter Weir a step
closer to directoral martyrdom - perhaps the greatest living in Hollywood
even.
But most importantly, this was the movie that would make us sit up and take
notice of media manipulation in our lives; the definitive expose on how
the gullible masses can be sucked in to believe what the Gods of commercialism
decree we should believe in.
Central to all the hype was the claim that the viewer would find it quite
easy to suspend disbelief about this movie's harebrained and totally unbelievable
concept to listen to the bigger message about the dangers of television
in our lives.
And we probably would if there was any real message there to tell us.
In the absence of any real attempt to highlight such manipulation, we are
free to return to the crap premise surrounding the movie.
We are asked to suspend disbelief that not too far in the future, a giant
corporation could afford to build the world's largest sound stage, a dome
large enough to fit an island community and the ocean that surrounds it.
And people it with enough actors good enough and, props aplenty enough,
so that a man could get to 30 before starting to suspect there's something
artificial about his world.
Suspend disbelief that such a fake society would cost the combined annual
budget of NASA and most small countries and we're in for a show that tells
us we should be really, really scared the next time we see a video camera
in a hotel lift. That was the promise.
A dome big enough even, mind, to allow for a sizable bit of mainland to
accommodate the remote possibility that Truman might one day realise that
no man is an island, overcome his implanted fear of water and do a Teddy
Kennedy by driving over a bridge that will change his life forever.
Is that what Weir and writer are really trying to tell us here?
That television in the not too distant future is going to be so bloody boring
that we'll tune in in our millions for hours on end to watch a man's life
unfold in a short 80 years.
Is that the real message of The Truman Show? TV's power, not to daze,
but doze.
Believe this movie's basic premise and you have a world's TV audience spell-bound
by the decisions Truman makes every day of his life – will he have
the Special K or the Weetbix for breakfast; will he fart before entering
the shower or after? Will he sell more insurance policies than normal today?
Yes, like the sands through an hour glass, these are the daze of poor Truman's
lives.
The Truman Show must have been an absolute ratings winner in the
years up to his potty training.
"Come quick Marsha! Baby Truman's coming out of his seven hour sleep."
Product makers must have been fighting themselves to a standstill to pay
for airtime during those defining phases in Truman's life.
Are Weir and co. also warning us that we are fast approaching a world society
so cruel that millions of us will accept the endless hours of tedium to
gain a buzz out of the rare moments of bitterness and happiness that comes
our hero's way.
Because folks, this is not just soap. It's real soap; real expensive soap.
The audience knows Truman was adopted by the TV corporation at birth. They
know the stringpullers have staged his love affairs, his father's death,
everything about his sad and sorry life.
The other irritating, and almost universal hype spread about Truman, was
of course, the reported transformation from Jerry Lewis lookalike to Oscar
contender.
Weir lets us know early in the piece that Carrey is still a lair. There
he is at his doorstep in the morning, hamming it up with the fake neighbours,
Carreying on as usual: Have a nice day. "And if I don't see you tonight,
good evening, goodbye and amen."
A little later, Carrey is on his hands and knees in the garden and Weir's
got his camera right up his date, daring Carrey to say something funning
with his arse. The comedian's cloaca stays silent; further proof that the
transition from rubbery-face to serious actor and Oscar contender is well
under way.
So what happens to Truman? Is everyone's rooting for Truman to finally move
out of Dome sweet Dome and reunite with his one true love, an actress cut
from the three-decade saga early for falling for our hapless hero.
By movie's end, it's obvious that zookeeper Christo (Ed Harris? I was dozing
off to much to notice) is starting to feel pangs of remorse, even though
he's just tried to kill his money-making ward in a fake hurricane.
For a bloke who can make the sun appear on cue and cyclonic winds buffer
our hero to the point of drowning by numbers on a control console at the
flick of a switch, Christo doesn't even bother to blow our reluctant hero
back home where he belongs.
He lets Truman sail on to discover his world is flat all along.
Why? We can only assume that Christo must have just been handed the latest
TV ratings. That, or the dome's electricity bill.
- Don Gordon-Brown
More front with Myers
54 (M)
Director/writer: Mark Christopher
Bugs out of five: Two and a half.
Just think of 54 as Boogie Nights without the porn.
Dumb beefcake (Ryan Phillippe) starts work at the famous New York club;
succumbs to soft women and hard drugs, gets too big for his boots and comes
a cropper.
In the process, he mixes with all the beautiful spaced-out people like love
interest Julie Black (Neve Campbell) above and narrowly avoids a career-boosting
chocolate cha-cha with the club's legendary owner Steve Rubell (Mike Myers),
supposedly in his first serious role but who could tell.
Never having been part of the 60s and 70s drug scene - the closest we came
at Gatton agricultural college was a mixture of coke (the drink) and aspirin
which never worked for me, perhaps because I inserted them in the wrong
order - I can't report if 54 is a true depiction of those crazy,
rip-snortin' times in this legendary Manhattan nightclub. The film's a bit
too affectionate for mine, because I imagine the mixture of high spirits,
hard spirits, harder drugs and willing flesh might have gotten a little
bit nasty and messy from time to time. But the disco music I do remember,
and it is sprinkled throughout 54 in a clever way that doesn't drown
out the rather skeletal storyline.
Your reviewer must be getting soft in his old age. I went along not expecting
any great shakes from 54, got exactly that and it passed all rather
harmlessly and quickly.
- Don Gordon-Brown
