Screen Scene

Friday, October 11, 1996

"Long Kiss Goodnight"

Written by Shane Black and directed by Renny Harlin. Starring
Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson

One hundred pieces of paper for $4 million dollars? A few years
ago, at the screenplay sale heard round the world, New Line bought
Shane Black’s "Long Kiss Goodnight" for exactly that amount. And
whatever its critical deficits, the tale of an amnesiac assassin
back bent on revenge looked worth the cash.

The script, and the film, detail a suburban Norman Rockwell
existence, where an elementary school teacher named Samantha Caine,
her husband and her daughter live in tranquility until she’s in a
pre-Christmas car crash that jars her long-term memory. Pieces of
her violent past start coming back, and homicidal villains start
knocking on her door. The low-rent private eye she’s been hiring to
do research gets a lead, and soon she’s on the road turning into
her former self: world-champion assassin for the government, Charly
Baltimore. Now she battles evil supervillian Timothy and his
henchmen to save the world as we know it.

The bloated two hour film loses a lot of the script’s economy
and precision in its transfer to the screen. Black’s words are
hardly lyrical, but action-meister director Renny Harlin ("Die Hard
2," "Cliffhanger") is responsible for this picture’s low-brow
mentality. He rarely succeeds in successfully capturing any scene
without gunplay, and even this film’s action is surprisingly blunt
and unstylized. That’s not to mention a few of the worst sequences
in the film; the dream sequences are straight out of "Nightmare on
Elm Street" (and Harlin directed the fourth installment of that
saga).

But a lot of the fun of the script could have been won back in
casting and performance. Action films have been able to use their
action status as an excuse for poor story and character before;
"Long Kiss Goodnight" just raises its own expectations when it’s
released for $70 million in production costs into the middle of
October in the midst of massive competition. They’d like to think
their target audience isn’t just young white males.

First off, Geena Davis is lacking, and not in the way you’d
initially suppose. She actually pulls off the physical stuff, and
her assassin better half looks downright wicked. But out of
nowhere, Davis left her comedy chops somewhere in the South Seas.
She literally cannot force a laugh out of the audience for the
length of the film, and that’s painful, because she’s cracking
jokes full-time and hardly off screen.

Thus, Sam Jackson becomes vital, and once again delivers. His
quips of disbelief keep most of the story’s absurdity at bay, and
his more realistic approach to action anchors the audience.

The true disappointment is this flick’s villain, who is written
to be one of cinema’s more stunning psychotic bad guys, and could
have been a hell of a lot more fun. Craig Bierko, from somewhere in
TV-land, looks like he’s auditioning to replace Andrew Shue on
"Melrose Place." Monotoned to a fault, flat and unamusing, he
changes "Long Kiss Goodnight’"s supervillian into a smirking Young
Republican who refuses to die. A few bad casting calls later, and
some rewrites that only dilute the power of the original piece,
this film will let down everyone but action die-hards.

Michael Horowitz

Grade: B-

"The Ghost and the Darkness"

Written by William Goldmand and directed by Stephen Hopkins.
Starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer

It takes a lot of work to screw up a story this promising. Just
the facts alone are staggering and deeply cinematic. Just knowing
that around the turn of the century, two psychotic lions ran around
a British colony in Africa, eating over a hundred human beings for
the thrill of the kill is chilling. How could "The Ghost and the
Darkness" be anything but an insane thrillride?

It also takes an incredible stroke of idiocy to mismanage the
talents of Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. Neither are the
strongest performers of their day, but each contributes impressive
star power and palpable charisma. How could "The Ghost and the
Darkness" be anything but a well-oiled star vehicle?

If Hollywood’s discovered anything, it’s that nothing is a sure
thing. There’s one wrench you can throw into the cogs of any
cranking celluloid machine, and his name is Stephen Hopkins.

Helmsman Hopkins has made a career out of hacking promising
projects to death, and his latest turn is no exception. Time and
time again, he resurfaces after yet another horrible failure,
defying all cinematic codes critical and commercial. Hopkins is
responsible for "Predator 2," the bad "Alien" redux without Arnold.
He’s behind "Judgment Night," the movie that brought Stephen Dorff
and Emilio Estevez together onscreen. And he’s the fool who made
"Blown Away" and almost destroyed the combined careers of the
entire Bridges family. Hopkins is a one man bomb squad, and
unbelievably, he wound up behind the camera of "Ghost and the
Darkness."

The only excuse his proponents could possibly offer is his
visual style. For all the inanity of "Judgment Night," the
camerawork is at least innovative. And the overhead shot of the
police van exploding in "Blown Away" lingers almost as long as that
film’s nightmarish hot tub scene. But credit for this look belongs
with his old cinematographer Peter Levy, busy helping shoot hit
movies elsewhere, and Hopkins is working with the acclaimed Vilmos
Zsigmond("The Deer Hunter, "Deliverance") in "Ghost." This might
seem like a step up initially, but Zsigmond’s visuals look plain
and artificial until the action footage, and then it appears that
the film crew had a 10 minute brainstorming session on how to film
lions without filming much of lions. Then they used any idea thrown
out. When we switch to "lion-cam" an hour and a half in any hopes
of originality are abandoned.

Speaking of late inning shifts, Michael Douglas walks on at
minute 50, after the film has been slowly started, built to
something resembling excitement, and then starts to get boring.
Anyone hoping this is a Douglas movie will be sorely
disappointed.

As will just about everyone else. There are some thrills, and
watching the seamless special effect lions bring down natives in
the background has its aesthetic charms, but there’s far too many
scenes of unintentional laughter and some huge continuity gaffes.
Hopeless Hopkins makes another kill.

Michael Horowitz

Grade: C+

"The Proprietor"

Starring Jean Moreau and Sean Young

Senior citizens just might start taking advantage of those movie
theater discounts. They probably won’t inundate Westwood in
film-hungry droves but their attendance to theaters is destined to
increase with movies like "The Proprietor" attempting to engage a
more mature crowd.

Starring the well-aged French actress Jean Moreau and Sean Young
this simple film is not intense in its dramatic plot or bare-bones
filming style, but it has a certain appeal to it in terms of its
portrayal of people, particularly elderly people.

Moreau’s character, Adrienne Marks, is well into her 60s, yet
nowhere in the film are ungrateful grandchildren nor desolate rest
homes. Marks continues to develop her career as a successful French
author living in America and her past as a Jewish child who
narrowly escaped the Nazi occupation of her homeland. The effect of
these continual forces on her character, plus her friendships and
relationship with her ex-husband, help to make this older woman a
convincing person, not just a stock character.

The plot is as off-beat as the main character herself. The
wealthy writer decides to buy the apartment she grew up in before
her family fled the Nazis. With her return to her native soil,
creative and admirably subtle comparisons between fascists of the
’40s and racists of the ’90s poignantly remind the viewer that
human nature has not changed much in the last 50 years.

During this part of the movie Marks’s dead mother begins to
appear to her, and in artistic but out-of-place sequences, Marks
waltzes with her mother’s apparition.

Many other aspects of the story are equally unnecessary and
unlikely though they are probably interesting and attractive to an
older crowd. The film’s characters are unrealistically devoted to
elderly people and go way beyond the call of dutiful fans and
industrious maids. A Marks admirer flying out to France to find his
nemesis is already difficult to believe, but the romantic come-on
he attempts with a woman nearly 40 years his senior inspires groans
of disgust from a reality-based audience.

Marks’ maid, played by Nell Carter (television star of "Gimmie a
Break"), is equally unsatisfactory, but for entirely different
reasons. Her purpose is comic relief in a basically dry film, but
her role is embarrassingly obsequious. As a black house servant,
she bleeds of negative racial connotations and stereotypes.

On the same note, the characters from the U.S. are given
typically insulting American attitudes. They are loud, pushy,
disrespectful of tradition and devoid of class.

Although "The Proprietor" has broken out of the mold in terms of
its portrayal of elderly people, it has not gotten past certain
racial and national stigmas. And although it is refreshing to see
senior citizens treated as people and not dried-up, useless
has-beens, it is difficult to get enthused over characters treated
with such over bearing niceness. The conflicts Marks encounters are
completely internal because the whole world, with the exception of
a few white supremacy lunatics, bends over backwards to cater to
her.

The film, however unflashy, is nevertheless a gutsy attempt at
giving the elderly a voice in cinema.

By Emily Forster

Grade: B-

"Tell the Truth and Run"

Directed by Rick Goldsmith. Narrated by Susan Sarandon and Ed
Asner

With "Tell the Truth and Run," documentarian Rick Goldsmith has
vividly captured every aspect of muckraker George Seldes’ life in
wonderful detail. The film’s close following of the famed
journalist, livened by a significant presence on the part of Seldes
himself, leaves nothing out.

Seldes’ tenure in the field of journalism has made him one of
the greatest legends in the fight of free press against more
corporate, monolithic news organizations. His work as a war
correspondent, field reporter for the Chicago Tribune and editor
for the long-running media watchdog newsletter "In Fact" is nothing
short of magnificent in its scope.

Goldsmith has captured this white knight of the yellow press era
with great tact and tremendous descriptive ability. Seldes’ ties to
historical landmarks and personalities like Franco, Mussolini, J
Edgar Hoover and William Randolph Hearst are brought to life with
both narration by Susan Sarandon and voice-overs of Seldes’ works
by Ed Asner.

In addition, Goldsmith has made excellent use of Media and
Democracy experts of our time in interviews that link the personal
renderings Seldes gives us of his time and the journalistic
environments of the era. Interviews with Ralph Nader, Daniel
Ellsberg and Ben Bagdikian are well done and serve the film’s
purpose delightfully.

While heady and even preachy at times, Goldsmith’s telling of
this legend’s life and times is beyond reproach, and is compelling
to the credits.

Damon Seeley

Grade: A