1996 - FIRE, a pioneering film about women in India

An extremely controversial film set in India in the 1990's.  This film's notoriety comes from being one of the first films to feature a lesbian relationship in an Indian film.  Apparently the male dominated society was not pleased with this film to put it mildly.  About the last thing Indian conservatives wanted was to have a discussion about gender and gay rights.

I do think protestors kind of missed the point of this film.  While the lesbian relationship is certainly present, it's actually handled fairly discretely.  The theme of Fire is really about the very repressive role of women in Indian society at the time this was filmed.  Of course you could probably make a good argument that women's rights in lots of countries aren't really what could be called on an equal footing with men.

The story, two women who have married into a family aren't exactly thriving on a personal or emotional level.  Sita, is married to a man named Jatin who is involved in an intense affair with a Chinese women who he is really in love with.  Jatin only married Sita as part of an arranged marriage.  The other sister in law Rhada, married to Jatin's brother Ashok can't have children.  This has caused Ashok to embrace the teaching of a religious leader who advocates the complete suppression of any kind of sexual desire.  Sita and Rhada while married are basically indentured servants to these two brothers.

The film was directed by a woman Deepa Mehta who was born and raised in India and eventually ended up living in Canada.  In fact Fire was partially financed with Canadian money.  The film has a nice feel for Indian culture.  The performances of the entire cast are at a high level and for a rather low budget film it's very well made and looks very good.  Fire is one of the more accessible dramas I have seen come out of India.

Deepa Mehta wrote the screenplau, the running time is  

1996 - JINGLE ALL THE WAY, mediocre Christmas comedy at best

Jingle All The Way is a very good example of a very mediocre comedy being pulled across the finish line by the actors since the director and scriptwriter couldn't get the job done.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is a too busy dad who forgets to buy his son a popular toy action figure before Christmas.  The movie is basically about Arnold racing all over town trying to get his hands on one.  Cue one fairly lame comedic situation after another.

The film is loaded with actors who are trying their best to get some laughs out of this thin premise.  Jim Belushi is a crooked Santa Claus, Phil Hartman is Arnold's lech of a neighbor who is hitting on Arnold's wife played by Rita Wilson. Robert Conrad is a motorcycle cop who Arnold continually runs into and the comedian Sinbad is a deranged postal worker who is also trying to get the action figure for his son.

 

Jingle All The Way is part of the inevitable downward slide of Arnold's film career which probably peaked with True Lies, You can't stay on the top of the heap forever.  Arnold had made a few comedies but in this film he was either directed or decided to play it very broad and slap sticky.  You could probably also say that about the rest of the cast,  just not a whole lot of clever comedic acting going on.  The exception is Phil Hartman as the sleazy neighbor, he steals the show from just about everybody.

 

If the movie has any interest at all it's that it was filmed in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St Paul), my old hometown.  The geography of the film has the actors starting one scene in Minneapolis and ending it in St. Paul, the film hops all over the place without any sense of location.  However the final Christmas parade set piece was obviously shot in Hollywood.   This location stuff is funny to me but probably won't mean much to any other viewer outside of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The film was written by Randy Kornfield, the running time is 89 minutes. 

1996 - THE GOD OF COOKERY - a funny Stephen Chow film.

Stephen Chow should have been a bigger deal in the West.  Already a big star in Asia he never really received the recognition that Jackie Chan was finally able to achieve.  Chow made a bunch of popular and highly profitable films in Hong Kong.  The God of Cookery was one of Chow's biggest hits.

In this film Chow spoofs celebrity chefs and those celebrity chef cooking shows.  Chow plays a character named "Stephen Chow."  After humiliating just about everyone who he perceives to be standing in his way.  He gets his comeuppance by losing his show and all of his sponsorships.  This leads to Chow ending up in an area of Hong Kong where they cook and sell street food. There he befriends a facially scarred woman played by the performer Karen Mok who makes something called "pissing beef balls" It's a dumpling that ultimately squirts fluid all over your face as you eat it.  Chow knows a potentially popular food when he sees it so he sets out to market it with a line of canned pissing beef ball delicacies.

 

The humor is an incredible mix of martial arts, Chinese word play (which I suspect will go over the heads of most Western viewers) and lots of jokes about a Shaolin Monastery where he is trained to be a humble master chef.

 

Chow mixes so many comedic styles and genres that at times it's jarring to see him go from pathos to outright goofy "Jerry Lewis" comedy.  The actor Karen Mok is a good sport wearing disfiguring facial makeup and the climatic cook off even drags in some heavenly intervention in the form of some Asian gods.  Overall mighty funny stuff. 

The film was written by  Stephen Chow Edmond Lo and Tsang Kan-cheong, the running time is 92 minutes.

1996 - SPACE TRUCKERS, the return of the B-movie science fiction film

With his tongue and everything else firmly in cheek, the director Stuart Gordon films a B-movie space adventure film on a rather low but decent budget. However Gordon was a smart enough guy to add some humor to this funny and frequently dumb story.

Dennis Hopper is an independent space ship truck driver.  After dropping off a load of square pigs, (you read that right), he gets involved with a plot to take over the planet Earth with killer robots.  Along the way Hopper picks up some passengers, space station waitress Debbie Mazer and co-pilot Stephen Dorff.  A measure of the silliness of this film is that Hopper, Mazer and Dorff play a lot of scenes in their underwear for no real reason.  Hopper and his companions take on space pirates, killer robots and the evil C.E.O. of a company with plans to take over the world.

 

Well to put it mildly the critics did not get the jokes in this film or Gordon's clearly affectionate send up of old space movies like The Day The Sky Exploded,  Rocketship X-M, Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere, Lost Planet Airmen and Phantom from Space, to name a few.

 

Truth be told the film does kind of run out of gas towards the end but the good humor of the cast which is in on the joke does keep things amusing at the end.

The film was written by Ted Mann, the running time is 95 minutes.

1996 - ESCAPE FROM L.A. - the sequel to Escape from New York

This film was a big payday for the star Kurt Russell and the director John Carpenter.  Paramount paid out the big bucks for Russell to repeat his Snake Plissken character and for Carpenter to basically revisit his previous film.  The results were rather unspectacular.

 

This time Plissken is dropped into Los Angeles which is now a penal colony controlled by a fascist police force and a crazed president played by Cliff Robinson.  Plissken has to recover a device that will shut down the entire infrastructure of the world.  Escape from L.A. is basically a rehash of Escape from New York without some of the the cleverness and creative invention of the first film.  Russell and Carpenter take a lot of the trends and fads that Los Angeles is known for and attempt to satirize them with limited success.

 

For example Peter Fonda is a hot shot surfer cruising over the sunken ruins of parts of Los Angles, Bruce Campbell is an out of control plastic surgeon, there's a bike gang and a basketball game where the players have to win or they are killed.

Most of the entertainment value is in the supporting cast that was hired for the film, Peter Fonda, Stacey Keach, Michelle Forbes, Paul Bartel and Pam Grier to name a few.  All of these actors are associated with "B" or cult films.

 

The action in the film is okay, the film is basically a time killer without the social satire that the filmmakers were apparently aiming for.

Written by Kurt Russel, John Carpenter and Debra Hill.  The running time is 100 minutes.

1996 - LONE STAR, excellent drama about a Texas town

 The director and writer John Sayles is a master storyteller skilled at interweaving several stories into one compelling narrative.  Lone Star highlights his strengths as a writer with strong characterizations and an interesting story line.

The film's hook is a mystery story.  What happened to Charlie Wade the corrupt sheriff who vanished years ago in the town of Frontera, Texas?  This plot line is just a hook to look at the interactions between the White and Hispanic residents of Frontera.  Sayles does this with a lot of insight and fairness to the issues raised moving back and forth in time with a series of flashbacks.

The large cast is excellent and the film is told in a straightforward way without any of the usual fancy camera tricks directors seem to want to indulge in.  A very good film.

Running time, 135 minutes.

1996 - FREEWAY, a good black comedy

Freeway was known as a white trash remake of "Little Red Riding Hood."  For the first half hour I had some serious doubts about finishing this film.  But this film really has something going for it, Reese Witherspoon.

This is a don't screw with me version of Red Riding Hood. Kiefer Sutherland is the sex pervert serial killer (The Big Bad Wolf) who tangles with her and doesn't come out in the best shape to put it mildly.

Looking for something different, this is it.

102 minutes written by the director Matthew Bright.

1996 - MOTHER, another Albert Brooks observational comedy.

This quiet laid back comedy from satirist Albert Brooks is probably a little too laid back for its own good.  The story involves a writer who is attempting to come to grips with his relationship with his mother.  His decision is to move back home and live with his mother while he gets his head on straight.

Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are good as the son and the mother and the rest of what cast there is does their best to wring some laughs out of the situation.

The film is somewhat of a change of pace for Albert Brooks who usually has the knives out with his usual con artist character.  Here he tries for something a little more normal with his character.

A not bad picture it has some quiet laughs.

123 minutes. Written by Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson.

1996 - DAYLIGHT, Stallone to the rescue

Jewel thieves have blown up some tunnel in New York City leaving people trapped as the water from the river or ocean or somewhere starts to rise.  Lucky for them taxi driver Sylvester Stallone who used to be a firefighter/rescue guy has been trained in saving people from underground tunnels.  Yes, it's The Poseidon Adventure in a tunnel.

This film has a good cast, Amy Brenneman, Claire Bloom, Barry Newman, Viggo Mortensen and Dan Hedaya.  The tunnel set is actually very impressive, I think I read somewhere that they actually built it full scale on some Italian soundstage at Cinecitta Studios, apparently the production team could flood it, that's pretty cool.

Otherwise, seen it all before.

114 minutes.

1996 - THE FRIGHTENERS, a cult director goes mainstream

5 years before Peter Jackson started releasing The Lord of the Rings films, he made a jump into big time Hollywood studio film making with this film The Frighteners.  At this point in his career Jackson was a cult horror film director who had gained some respectability with Heavenly Creatures. Robert Zemeckis and Universal Studios decided to go ahead with one of his original screenplays about a psychic detective and his ghost associates who confront a serial killer ghost.

The Frighteners was intended as a mix of very black comedy and horror.  There is a heavy influence of Ghostbusters in this film.  But the comedy horror mix was not as well executed as that film.  Jackson's low budget horror roots are evident throughout the film. 

What the film has going for it is a decent cast particularly Michael J. Fox as the sort of bogus psychic detective.  Fox was always a very sharp performer particularly when it came to comedy and in The Frighteners he needs all the good will he can generate because this film has some extremely nasty stuff in it.

The Frighteners marks the beginning of Peter Jackson's very heavy reliance on computer generated visual effects which was to reach it's nadir in The Lord of the Rings series.  Today it seems that Jackson can't make a film unless he smothers it with lots of special effects.

110 minutes, written by Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson.

1996 - HARD EIGHT, a good study of some low life characters

This a decent little drama about gamblers getting by in Reno.  The director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson has made a film that is essentially about four characters and their interactions with each other.

Philip Baker Hall is the old guy who's been around a while and knows all the tricks.  John C. Reilly is his pretty dense protegee.  Samuel L. Jackson is some sleeze ball who knows Reilly.  Finally, Gwyneth Paltrow is the cocktail waitress/hooker who Reilly falls for.  All of the cast is very good and it was kind of nice to see Paltrow play a character who wears too much makeup and isn't very smart. 

I have to give the director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson credit, he could have fallen for the colored light eye candy of the casino setting but he manages to control himself and focus on the actors.

It's nice to watch a film where the story moves along because of the characters instead of being held hostage by elaborate action pieces for a change.

102 minutes.