FILM REVIEW FILM
I Bitter Moon On board a luxury ocean liner, a wheelchair-bound American captivates a straight-laced Brit with his tale of love and lust turned sour. Roman Polanski‘s very black comedy peeks through the keyhole at the
i darker side of desire, but
has split critics right down
the middle: is it a well-constructed tease or
isit an embarrassing
i mess? Only the taste level 3 of the individual can
decide. See feature (AM)
I Juice Acclaimed cinematographer Ernest Dickerson makes a fine directorial debut with this rough-and-ready look at life in Harlem. A group of friends struggle to free
I Just Like A Woman An American businessman is kicked out of his London home by his wife for ,having an affair when she finds piles of women’s underwear littering the bedroom. Only when he has struck up a friendship with his new landlady (Julie Walters) does he admit that he is a transvestite. No doubt we are meant to adjust our attitudes along with her,
: themselves from ghetto ‘ life,butfind themselves F getting dragged further and further into a crime. ' Worth catching forthe
hardline rap soundtrack. See preview. (AM)
_ cm OFJOY
C Joy: ‘a ieelgo epic from a situation oi almost lncalculabie sullering and degradation'
Having trekked to India to get his head together, troubled surgeon Max Lowe (Patrick Swayze) winds up in Calcutta’s poorest area, the so-calied City oi Joy,
3 where irish nurse Joan Bethel (Pauline
K , Collins) persuades him to help out in j , f the school and medical dispensary she
but more likely we’ll be twisting in our seats with embarrassment. Caught
; somewherebetween 5 well-intentioned
’ education and distracting farce, the faults of Just
Like A Woman show all the more when compared to the engagingly camp style of the BBC‘s recent (and in many ways
_; similar)Screenplay f production,A Little BitOf Lippy.(AM)
I Caiiiomla Man Les Mayfield’s feature debut is the latest teen comedy following the well-worn Bill & Ted/Wayne & Garth path of synchronised screaming and exclamations of ‘No way!‘ Dave, an average college loser, has little better to do than dig a pool in his backyard, anticipating wild parties and happiness. His best friend Stoney, an outrageously mellow hippy, is visiting when an earth tremor reveals a prehistoric caveman embedded in ice. Rather than contribute this well-preserved specimen to science, they thaw him out, aware the discovery could be the key to winning babes.
What follows is a mindless series of
predictable gags, as the defrosted ape invades their home. Christening him Link, they pass him off to the family as an Estonian exchange
student and enrol him at college. What makes this
worth seeing is not the typical fish-out-of—water scenario, but the interaction of the off-beat performances by the leads. Sean Astin, last seen in Toy Soldiers, plays it straight, allowing MTV DJ Pauly Shore to steal the film as his spaced-out but dependable buddy, while relative newcomer Brendan Fraser has enough physical dexterity and charismatic madness to vindicate the childish slapstick paces he endures as the caveman. (Dylan Matthew)
has set up. Peasant villager Hasari Pal
‘ (0m Purl) is another new arrival in - town, providing lor his iamin by
pulling a rickshaw through the crowded streets. The lives oi these very diilerent men are to intersect when they both come up against the callous son (Art Malik) oi the godiather who virtually runs the neighbourhood. This brutal heir-apparent wants to take Hasari’s
livelihood away and intimidate Joan and Max‘s clinic out oi existence, leaving the battle lines set between gangsters on one side and honest
the other.
Having climaxed The Killing Fields' chronicle ol Pol Pot’s regime with an absurdly sentimental burst at John Lennon’s ‘lmagine’, Roland Jolie's latest oiierlng is another attempt to create a ieeigood epic lrom a situation of almost lncalculabie suilering and
voices an understandable unwillingness to get involved, his cynicism is soon worn down by Collins’s dogged commitment. Meanwhile. the twin narrative threads ioliowing Hasarl's various tribulations and the despicable villainry oi the small-time crooks seek to draw our sympathy iurther into the proceedings. it’s well-made and well-acted, to be sure, but somehow the didacticism oi
to respond. As it winds down to an exaggeratedly positive ending, the iilm's unashamed manipulativeness will surely prove counterproductive il audiences share this particular viewer's resistence to its emotional assaulttactics. Not, lthink, the eliect that Jolie was alter. (Trevor Johnston)
City oi Joy (15) (Roland Jolie, UK/France, 1992) Patrick Swayze, Pauline Collins, 0m Purl. 135 mins. From Fri 2. Cannons: Sauchiehall
5 Street, Edinburgh, Falkirk. Glasgow: . MGM Parkhead. All UCls.
PATRIOT GAMES
Having helped bring the Cold Warto an end in The Hunt For Red October, ex-CIA analyst Jack Ryan tries his hand at the Northern Ireland situation. 0n holiday with his wile and kid in London (we know it is, because he’s staying in the same hotel room overlooking Big Ben that seems to appear in all American movies), Ryan (Harrison Ford) thwarts an assassination attempt on a minor member oi the Royal Family, killing a couple oi terrorists and winning a knighthood in the process. The brother oi one oi the corpses decides to push The Cause to the side until he hunts down and destroys the Ryan iamily, and so the movie turns into a tense tete-a-tete between two men driven by opposing deiinitlons oi loyalty.
On this side oi the Atlantic, you can’t help but ieel a bit uncomiortable with some aspects oi Patriot Games. The iilm is quick to stress a distance between this renegade group oi brutal terrorists and the IRA itself, with the paramilitarles represented on screen only in the shape oi Slnn Feln tundraiser Richard Harris, whose Cause is swathed in misty-eyed iolk songs and Clannad soundtracks. As the plot develops, it’s hard not to find some sort oi sympathy ior Sean Bean as the renegade's renegade: cold-blooded he may be, but his obsessive drive is no more one-sided than Ford's ‘maintaln
. :_)->‘\ t .1 V»; .‘9‘
the lamily unit’ motivation.
Philip (Dead Calm) Noyce certainly pulls all some eiiectlve set pieces and the lesser characters are nicely played by a company ranging irom James Earl Jones to Alex Norton and young Thora Birch (proving again, after Paradise, that she's probably the best child actor around). Ultimately, however, the lirst oi a projected trilogy oi iilms starring Ford as novelist Tom Clancy’s hero is undermined by its gimmicky use oi irish politics. You can't play games with this level at patriotism. (Alan Morrison)
Patriot Games (15) (Philip Noyce, US, 1992) Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Sean Bean. 121 mins. From Fri 25.
citizens struggling to eke out a living on 1
degradation. Although Swayze initially
its good intentions smothers our ability
CARRY on ; cowmsus
‘ Ca 0n olumbus:
‘strangely hollow'
The fourteen years that have passed since the last Carry On film (the flogging-a-dead-horse Carry On Emmanuelle) have seen the team outlive their reputation as the crassest end of British cinema and, via a weighty article or two, elevated to the status of some cultural significance. Whatever bright spark thought that it would be a shame to deny the 905 their own version was sadly misguided. With Jim Dale as the only significant member of the team still in action, the panoply of lame gags, silly costumes and slapstick manoeuvres seems strangely hollow when deprived of the effortlessly zany presences of Sid James, Kenneth Williams and the rest of the posse. Roping in a new
generation of comicsonly
emphasises the remoteness ofthc originals. What resultsis pretty substandard fare: Chris C (Dale), map shop proprietor. hustlcs his way to an expedition command and takes off across the
‘ A . Atlantic, hotly pursued by
a grubby Alexei Sayle as Ahmed the Turkish Spy. That‘s all you need to know, except the oh-so-lovely Julian Clary pops up in some even lovelier frocks, the girl from the Philadelphia ad
, (Sara Crowe) does some
a deeply awful
belly-dancing and Rik Mayall proves that being in a Carry Or: can be a bad career move for some. The script virtually writes
; itself, with only Larry
E Miller's sassy Inca
; providing any worthwhile
material. Could more be
expected? Some laughs
for a start, and a film that
isn’t totally forgettable
five minutes after leaving
the cinema. (Andrew
Pulvcr)
Cannons: Muirend, Sauchiehall Street, ; Carry On Columbus (PG)
: Edinburgh, Faikirk, Kirkcaldy,
; Kllmamock. Odeons: Ayr. Hamilton.
i All UCis. Glasgow: MGM Parkhead,
f Salon. Edinburgh: Dominion. Central: Allanpark. File: New Picture House. Strathclyde: Kelbume.
(Gerald Thomas, UK, ’ 1992)Jim Dalc,Alexei Sayle, Maureen Lipman. 91 mins. Odeons: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr. Glasgow: MGM Parkhead. All UCIs.
14 The List 25 September — 8 October 1992