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A baseball strand about nine boys, the dusty lot they fidget with on and a mysterious monster that wolfs down their roaming baseballs, "Sandlot" may not be one for the ages. It's story as far as something all ages — at least anyone who remembers spending summers smacking baseballs, shimmying fences or trading such insults as "buffalo-butt breath."

Young Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) has just moved into a middle-class California neighborhood with his remarried mother (Karen Allen). The year is 1962. He desperately wants to join the local pickup baseball team, led by ace player Benny Rodriguez (Mike Vitar).

These guys, including bespectacled Squints (Chauncey Leopardi) and a redheaded chubster called Ham (Patrick Renna), are the coolest on earth. They play all day and every day. They're so dedicated, they don't even keep score. To join this throng would make Scotty's summer.

Unfortunately, Scotty's form needs a little work. In a motion that can only be described as an un-motion, he cocks his arm to throw, only to see the ball dribble embarrassingly to the ground. When a fly ball comes his way, he holds up his mitt and closes his eyes. Sometimes instead of throwing the ball, he'll just walk it to its destination. Even worse, he doesn't even know who Babe Ruth is. But Scotty has two things in his favor. Rodriguez is destined to be his guardian angel, and the team needs a ninth warm body.

New player Scotty learns, slowly, that putting your glove up to meet the ball often results in a catch. He even learns to throw the thing. He also learns about the monster, a snarling, doglike presence that rumbles and growls behind the fence. According to Squints, this shaggy Minotaur eats people and any ball that flies into its yard.

The big trouble comes when Scotty borrows his stepfather's prized baseball (signed by none other than Babe Ruth) for recreational use. His triumphant first homer is also the worst catastrophe of his young life, as the autographed ball sails into the dog-beast's lair. Unless that ball is recovered intact, Scotty's life is not worth living.

Kids will understand this stuff. If you can remember your younger, goofier roots, so will you. "Sandlot" isn't well made but it's alive with dopey, summertime spirit. In one episode, Squints pretends to drown so a busty lifeguard will give him the kiss of life — not to mention the kiss of his life. In another, the sandlot dudes take one of the more violent rides at a fairground, while chawing on tough-guy tobacco. The icky result is a guaranteed audience pleaser.

"Sandlot" has its annoying qualities. Its constant narration — intoned drearily by a grown-up Scotty — is completely superfluous. The young performers provide all the movie's necessary exuberance. They need no pseudo-poetic recollection. Writer/director David Mickey Evans, who wrote "Radio Flyer," hits you repeatedly over the head with counterfeit, Cracker Jack romanticism. At least three times, narrator Scotty tells us how — as a child — he was about to get his friends into the "biggest pickle" they'd ever seen. He likes that word — pickle. It's also hard to believe these kids are really living in the year 1962, adoring the Great Bambino, the Colossus of Clout — Babe Ruth. They just seem like, well, the kids down today's street. Which is actually the best thing about the movie.

The imaginary world depicts the comatose hero's dreams, using live action,
stop motion and computer graphics. Director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare
Before Christmas") knows animation and is in complete command. The effects are
so seamless that it's only later that one realizes what had to go into them.
In the moment, it all just flows.

For some viewers, the visuals will be enough. Brendan Fraser, as a
cartoonist lost in his own nightmare, inhabits an unusual landscape. It looks
like an amusement park at night, only here the stuffed animals talk, monsters
lurk around every corner and new constellations have a way of lighting up the
sky.

WHERE'S THE SCRIPT?

But the script — oh, that script. And the story — oh, that story. Lacking
a decent story, "Monkeybone" must hold audiences, moment by moment, with
whatever eye candy it can manage to throw. That works for about 10 minutes,
maybe 20, at most 30. Then the film becomes a flailing mess.

Fraser plays Stu, a shy cartoonist who has created Monkeybone, an animated
character that expresses his own wild side. In Freudian terms, Monkeybone
embodies pure id; he's totally selfish, totally libidinous. According to the
movie, Monkeybone is like a walking, thinking penis, turned loose on the world.

No, this is not a children's movie.

Stu is about to become famous for Monkeybone when disaster strikes. He and
his girlfriend (Bridget Fonda), a dream researcher, are in a car accident. She
walks away with a few scratches, but he's out for the count — in a coma and
dreaming. And poor Stu does not have a mind one would want to be trapped
inside.

'NIGHTMARE JUICE'

But trapped he is, and trapped we are, for much of what follows. Relief
comes in the form of live-action scenes, with Fonda trying to figure out ways
to wake Stu up. She gives him "nightmare juice" to scare him awake; and then
it's back inside Stu's head again, as he tries to trick Death (Whoopi
Goldberg) into letting him out.

Fraser, an actor with a lot of surprises in him, shows yet another side in
this film. As Stu, he is withdrawn and diffident. Later, when Monkeybone takes
over his body, he is completely abandoned, physically and facially — dancing,
mugging, clowning. Fraser's capacity to let go and follow his impulses marks
him as a genuine and generous talent.

Stu has to get his body back, and his girlfriend wants her boyfriend back,
not this maniac inhabited by Monkeybone. But it's hard for the viewer to care,
or even be all that amused, as the picture — reflecting, perhaps, the
filmmakers' desperation to maintain interest at all costs — gets more and
more grotesque.

The movie hits bottom in a scene in which a corpse (Chris Kattan), in the
process of having its organs removed for transplant, suddenly reanimates and
runs out of the operating room. As he runs,
various organs fall out of his body, and the doctors pick them up and put them in an ice
chest. Like "Monkey-bone" in general, this is too grotesque for children and just too silly for their parents.

This film contains graphic
violence and sexual situations.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

Short Takes

VICTORY OVER VHS OBLIVION! After 26 weeks among CineSchlock-O-Rama's Most Wanted, the unyielding vigilance of all CineSchlockers has been rewarded with another capture.

At the pinnacle of his Bond-dom, Roger Moore spread his thespian wings by growing an unsightly beard, swilling Scotch straight from the bottle and scowling at women as counterterrorism expert Rufus Excalibur ffolkes. Roger's anti-007 is called upon when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his deadly dandies strap explosives to some high-dollar oil platforms in hopes of securing a hansom ransom. James Mason mumbles incredulously as an aging admiral who doesn't cotton to ffolkes' methods — or his eccentricities. Such as the fact he's a rabid misogynist, but in a slice of crass irony, LOVES pussycats! While bereft of the cowboy heroics now expected of the genre, the flick's chock full of British decorum and precision, heck, ffolkes even takes time for a titter-worthy "let's synchronize our watches" scene before the final assault. CineSchlockers will spot genre great Michael Parks as Perkins' bespectacled partner in crime (and whatever else). More recently, Michael stole every frame of the tragically underappreciated From Dusk Til Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter. No breasts. Eight corpses. Tea slurping. Bucket o' grenades. Puking. Gratuitous shower scene. Ol' piping hot coffee to the face gag. Will writing. Norwegian impersonating. Parks reassures Perkins: "If any one of 'em even farts in the wrong key, he'll end up with his brains all over the floor!" (1980, 100 mins, 1.85:1 anam, DD mono, No trailer, No printed insert.)

Check out CineSchlock-O-Rama
for additional reviews and bonus features.
G. Noel Gross is a Dallas graphic designer and avowed Drive-In Mutant who specializes in scribbling B-movie reviews. Noel is inspired by Joe Bob Briggs and his gospel of blood, breasts and beasts.

Georgy Piece:
 Lynn Redgrave is the frumpy but free-spirited Georgy whose journey into adulthood is documented in this insubstantial but amusing comedy of manners set in a swinging London. Her cunning flatmate Meredith (Rampling) gets herself knocked up by Jos (Bates) and turns to dependable Georgy for help. Georgy Girl is a giddy-hearted 'youth' picture, couched in the 'hey groovy' language of the time…

NOTE: Read Cinema Gotham's interview with 'R Xmas director Abel Ferrara

UPDATE: A flaw in the audio of this disc was recently brought to my attention. See the "audio" section below for more information…

THE STRAIGHT DOPE:
Abel Ferrara's films don't really get a fair shake. He's often lumped in with
directors whose ambitions don't extend beyond splattering some violence and
villainy on the screen in the name of cheap thrills. But films like The King of New York, The
Funeral and Bad Lieutenant have deep emotional cores that far exceed
their intense genre leanings. His latest film, 'R Xmas is perhaps his
leanest film yet. At only 83 minutes it sketches out the thinnest of plots and
leaves some of the characters' biggest decisions up in the air. But Ferrara
turns these into strengths rather than weaknesses as he crafts a film with extraordinarily
instinctual character development and behavior.

The film is set at Christmas, 1992. New York still has a few months left before
Rudy Guiliani (you know, America's Mayor) takes over and drives the drug trade
underground. During this wilder time the law operates in more mysterious ways.
A husband and wife heroin team played by Lillo Brancato, Jr. and Drea De Matteo
try to provide the perfect holiday for their daughter while also stepping up
the drug supply for the season's increased demand.

While trying to score a black-market version of Party Girl, a sort-of slutted-out
Tickle-Me-Elmo, the wife (the characters are never named) is separated from
her husband. A mysterious man (also unnamed, played by Ice-T) informs her that
her husband has been kidnapped and that she has twenty minutes to bring him
money… and lots of it. Trying not to panic, she scramble to collect what she
can but everybody's gone out of town for the holidays. Over the course of the
night, shuttling between the kidnapper and home, she has time to rethink her
life.

That's basically it. (the details need to be discovered through watching the
film.) And while the It's a Wonderful Life plotting isn't necessarily
a new thing, the incredible performances are. De Matteo (of The Sopranos)
and Brancato (formerly of the same show) create specific human beings with minimal
strokes. Ferrara's is a film obsessed with behavior. We don't learn about these
people through stilted soliloquies and exclamations but rather through watching
them do their daily lives. How they shop for Christmas presents, how the change
clothes, how they act under pressure. We're given little details but they add
up. They aren't typical drug dealers. They have their own, almost decent code.
They aren't surrounded by junkies and the effect of their business on the addicts
it feeds doesn't really enter their middleman world. They're primarily interested
in providing a nice life for their kid (impressively portrayed by young Lisa
Valens) and for themselves, not with a power trip.

Brancato delivers a quiet, deep performance. His Dominican accent may be laid
on a bit thick at times but he's doesn't overdo the characterization. He plays
his character as decent but still a bit macho, just at the start of a little
self-examining. De Matteo, however, is the revelation here. The packaging may
try to capitalize on Ice-T's presence (he's solid, as usual) but it's De Matteo's
film. Her intensity is luminous. She plays her role as intelligent and fierce
but still vulnerable and a bit scared. She builds walls around herself (dark
sunglasses, leather, tinted windows) but she's fully aware of what's at stake.
When Ice-T confronts here as to why she stays with her husband (who he doesn't
think very highly of and repeatedly calls a "Domincan piece of shit")
she exasperatedly states that she loves him. She doesn't have more words for
it but she knows it's true. De Matteo has the makings of a real actress, not
just the mob moll that she brilliantly plays on The Sopranos. It'll be
a real test of the filmmaking community whether or not she gets the chance.

'R Xmas may be Abel Ferrara's most intimate film (although it's a toss
up with the primal Bad Lieutenant) and his attention to the little moments
is commendable. I have to love any film where the characters take time out from
a kidnapping plot to hit a bodega for a pack of smokes. The opening and closing
scenes provide a frame of surprising sweetness but the film is far from a closed
book. Nothing is neatly tied up and with his "to be cont…" closing
Ferrara thankfully leaves the door open to spend more time with these fascinating
characters.

Fifteen-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) embodies the idea of seminary eagerness stressed in high coach. His time is spent inaugurating countless new clubs and after-inculcate activities. They list the Beekeepers Club, Calligraphy Club, Fencing Club, and his own imaginative original plays. These productions group an suiting of Serpico and the explosive Heaven and Bottomless pit, which covers the Vietnam Joust with. Morosely, Max fails to harness similar enthusiasm for his studies, and he's flunking obsolete of school.

In Rushmore, the outstanding new film from Wes Anderson (Bottle Shoot up), Max's life is changed forever through his interactions with two adults, brace tycoon Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and skilful teacher Miss Cross (Olivia Williams). Mr. Blume catches Max's discernment during a surprisingly unreserved chapel speech that tells the students to place their "crosshairs" on the resources kids. They soon appropriate for friends, but everything becomes complicated when they both fall for the purpose Miss Cross. Thus begins a battle between the two stubborn foes that alienates both of them from her. She describes them both accurately as "little children."

Anderson has once again joined with co-writer Owen Wilson to create a wonderfully quirky story. They inception collaborated on Mettle Rocket, a silly but genuine heist videotape that generated a small cult following. It featured a standout performance from Wilson, whose Dignan inhabited a within reach of-visionary coterie of his own making. Rushmore contains a similar fairy-exaggeration mark, as Max believes he can do anything, and basically succeeds in the unceasingly. The leadership evokes a in number atmosphere of caring for the characters, who may perform dark deeds, but remain likable in the end.

Rushmore's good originates from an array of wonderful acting performances. Bill Murray gives Mr. Blume a calm distinction that shows the pain lurking inside. In a specific scene, he floats through his pool in a dreamy state, and we apply an intimate view of a fascinating shackle who can't believe the street his dash has turned unserviceable. In his first film role, Jason Schwartzman brings a perfect combination of avidity and young angst to Max. When he fails to gain the affections of Mademoiselle Huffy, he whines and schemes cast a 15-year practised boy. Olivia Williams brings a surprising tenderness to Skip Cross, who still mourns terminated her husband a long time after his death. The cast also includes numerous colorful characters, including Mr. Little Jeans, played by Kumar Pallana, who also appeared in Grit Rocket.

The soundtrack features British Invasion favorites that mesh line for line with the style of the blur. One highlight is the montage concatenation inappropriate in the coating that displays all of Max's school activities. Creation's Making Time blares over quick shots of each of his numerous clubs, and it hurriedly and cleverly introduces us to this eccentric character. Anderson does an excellent job throughout the motion picture of using music and pictures instead of dialogue to tell the black lie. This works especially well during the battles between Max and Mr. Blume.

Rushmore differs from the expected cookie-cutter Hollywood comedy by making its main characters more complex and at times unlikable. Anderson and Wilson's humor utilizes intelligent wit and numerous references to other films that might not draw in everyone. Extent, the script's cleverness and intricacies judge it one of the best comedies in recent years.

(2000)


It would be difficult to make up of a movie regarding a hyperactive main character that is as slow-paced as Disney's mid-season oblation,

The Tigger Movie

. From the first languid glimpse into the watercolor beauty of the Hundred Acre Wood, home of kids' lit favorite Winnie the Pooh, right through the all-too-brief finale,

The Tigger Movie

The first big screen Winnie the Pooh outing since 1977's lackluster

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

,

The Tigger Movie

explores the surprisingly tortured soul of the "trouncy, flouncy" character who has been bouncing into the hearts of children of all ages since 1928. Though only a minor character in creator A. A. Milne's original Pooh tales, Tigger's profile has risen enough that he contends with Elmo for the title of most hyperactive creature in the kiddieverse. In this film, Tigger steps into the spotlight for the first time, allowing his young fans an extended glimpse into his over-stimulated soul.

Winter is approaching in the Hundred Acre Wood, and everyone is busying themselves with preparations. Finding himself short on bouncing playmates besides the ever-loyal Roo, the lonely Tigger springs off in search of his family, undertaking a meandering journey that predictably leads him right back to Pooh, Piglet, and the rest of the Milne-agerie.

The frenetically affable Tigger will certainly delight the wee ones with his bounce-fired acrobatics and his simple-as-Cottlestone-Pie inquiries into the nature of identity. Unfortunately, even at a mere 70 minutes the road he takes to get to his warm-'n'-fuzzy revelation feels long and winding, making grumpy Eeyores out of parental chaperones. The one

Tigger-bleaux vivant

sequence that even attempts to wink at adult viewers seems out of place with the rest of the film. While the younger Roos in the preview audience seemed to enjoy most of the film, there were signs of restlessness, and the abudant low-level slapstick humor (Piglet falls in mud, etc.) and treacly story offer little appeal for older Kanga-types.

This is not to say that

The Tigger Movie

is a washout. Writer/director Jun Falkenstein has made a warm-hearted, gentle film with a positive moral core that reaffirms the importance of family and friendship. It offers a handful of cute (though instantly forgettable) songs penned by the fraternal team of Richard and Robert Sherman, whose previous collaborations include

Mary Poppins

,

The Jungle Book

, and other vintage Disney productions. And while the animation is typical of Disney's "B" studio work for TV (the film was produced by Walt Disney Television Animation), the backgrounds are delightful; they are the closest the film comes to Ernest Shepard's original ink illustrations.

Essentially,

Tigger

is a glorified straight-to-video release, and probably will feel more at home on the small screen; anyone expecting to see "Grade A" Disney animation of the

Tarzan

variety will be sorely disappointed. When compared to other recent preschool-targeted cinematic offerings like

Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland

that were equally fun for child and parent,

Tigger

's bounce is almost flat. Can you imaginate that?

? JEFFREY WACHS

The Caveman's
Valentine

look over by

, 9 March
2001

Ferocious


The
Caveman's Valentine



opens with a series of practical-to-present images, as if the darkness on
screen has be brought up alive, filled with fluttering wings and pounding
heartbeats. As the image finally comes into focus, you come up with yourself
being stared at hard by the ever-intimidating face of Samuel L.
Jackson: "Don't you keep a sharp lookout for me!" he roars. And for an
twinkling of an eye, you muscle think better of what you're about to do.

Jackson's
character, the paranoid schizophrenic Romulus Ledbetter, is known
for everyone Inexperienced York Metropolis streets as the Caveman, because he lives in a
cave in a estate. At that daunting before you can say 'Jack Robinson' when you first see him, Rom
is in point of fact not yelling at you, but at a timid public worker, whom
he distrusts on principle. But throughout the film, Rom is trying to
beat fail the demons that populate his own skull. As ferocious as he
seems to you, he's haunted by demons far more ferocious, besiege by
nightmares he can't identify. Nowadays dreadlocked, glowering, and
looming — and when Jackson looms, you separate he's looming — he was
once a piano intellectual and teacher at Julliard. But it's been years
since his wife Sheila (Tamara Tunie) kicked him inoperative of the house,
and though he understands his plight, he can't go cast off, no matter
how much he misses his former life.
Rom
isn't exactly a reliable narrator, but the film makes this
unreliability its focus, entrancing you inside his skull, so you can see
what he sees. He keeps a television in his cavity, on which he sees
projected a series of "messages" directed at him by evil
(corporate) forces. Romulus's collective name for these forces is
"Stuyvesant," and he imagines they scion telling,
puke-green z-rays at him from the Chrysler Edifice. One morning,
Rom wakes to find a frozen remains in a tree just outward his cave.
Believing that this way kid, Scotty (Sean MacMahon), has been
murdered by "Stuyvesant" as yet another message to him,
Rom heads off to the payphone down the street to call Lulu (Aunjanue
Ellis), who happens to be a cop. She answers wearily, roused from
sleep — they've been through something like this forward of — but soon
after, she arrives on the scene with a skeptical white detective in
trawl. As Rom spits his theory of the crime, she's so frustrated and
saddened by his ravings that she tries to squirrel away the fact that they're
even joint.
Intriguingly,

The Caveman's Valentine

asks you to sympathize with a
difficult character, and simultaneously to understand, from Lulu's
perspective, what makes him, frankly, aloof. But as the pellicle
turns more complicated and less coherent, it has trouble balancing
its electrifying plunges into Romulus's skull (where you see the
muscular black masculine angels that so unhinge him but also charge him
up) and its efforts to show you how other characters touched by to his
lurching encircling. The fluctuating character here is Sheila — she stands
outdoor his skull, but she is wholly a figment of his need and
desire, appearing to him sporadically, to offer advice and
encouragement. But while he's talking to her, the entirety and
each else has to a halt, and this makes for some sensitive pacing.
In
element, the movie's restless structure has to do with Rom's own
problems with keeping things honest. His skewed perspective comes
across in Rom's scenes with his reluctant patron, a lustrous,
self-dauntless bankruptcy member of the bar named Bob (Anthony Michael Hall).
When Rom asks the guy for a suit of clothes, Bob tests his musical
skills, then says okay, up appealing him into his super-nice
apartment to muster the wife, Betty (Kate McNeil) and enjoy a lime
rickey (and when you look at the neon color of these drinks, you potency
wonder merely whose perspective is skewed here). Rom and Bob fulfil a
big-hearted of comedy routine rhythm, as each
eaks
days of old and around the other, then behaves, out of politeness, as if
everything's scarcely peachy. Rom's own frustrations with the niceties
of social interactions are almost palpable here. But the most thrilling
image in the Bob and Betty world involves Betty, who warms up to her
unusual houseguest, ration him pare his beard and shampoo his
alarming dreads.
As
such cross-cultural change-ups suggest, the film — written by
George Dawes Green, based on his 1994 Edgar Award-winning detective
best-seller, and tweaked by Lemmons — is only superficially a rub out
mystery. And on that level, it lacks description and logistical sense:
Rom implausibly moves between locations apparently many miles apart,
without visible, or staid imaginable, means of transportation, while
tracking down the world at large-venerable avant-garde photographer David Leppenraub
(Colm Feore), whom he suspects of torture, murder, and general
sexual nastiness. Artful his way into Leppenraub's Long Archipelago
home (by unconvincingly pretending he's sane sufficiently to have written
a piano connect in the photographer's honor), Rom meets Moira
Leppenraub (Ann Magnuson), David's sister and an artist herself. She
and Romulus share a predestined disregard for commercial interests
(though she is clearly wealthy and hand-me-down to privilege), as far as a
taste for life on the fringe. Momentarily, their liaison helps Rom to
recognize himself again.
But
the father-daughter relationship — at sometimes connected and
separate — is the film's most insignificant, crucial, and potentially
terrifying, much as it was in Lemmons' at the outset feature,

Eve's Bayou

(where Jackson also played an all-powerful and all-fallible father).
When the grab some shut-eye — the kill novel, the questions about art and
obscenity, the by-statement of meaning untrustworthy domain methodology — starts to be aware
distracting, the movie flounders. Elegantly shot by cinematographer
Amelia Vincent and effectively scored by Terence Blanchard,

The
Caveman's Valentine

has much to sell, even aside from Jackson's
lauded powerhouse engagement. Despite and every so often because of its
unevenness, the flick conveys the delusions of constantly essence with
intense poetry.
Click here to read Cynthia Fuchs'

interview

.

Directed by:

Kasi Lemmons

Starring:

Samuel L. Jackson

Ann Magnuson

Aunjanue Ellis

Tamara Tunie

Colm Feore

Anthony Michael Hall

Rodney Eastman

Written
by:

George Dawes Green

Rated:
R - Restricted

Perpetual Time:

98 minutes

Threaten, Comedy, Kind

Elisabeth Shue stars as Chris Parker, an attractive high-school senior. When her boyfriend Mike (Bradley Whitford) cancels their big date, she finds herself with her evening free. So she agrees to babysit for pubescent teen Brad Anderson (Keith Coogan) and his younger Thor-obsessed sister Sara (Maia Brewton). No sooner is she settling in for a silent evening than Chris gets a phone call from her short-sighted cocker Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), who has lam out of somewhere away from bailiwick and is now marooned at a since bus station in the city. Under compulsion, Chris agrees to help and her two charges insist on joining her inasmuch as the trip. In advance they can leave, Brad's equally sex-mad man Daryl (Anthony Rapp) blackmails Chris into engaging him too.

The three children and the babysitter set off through despite the city, a trip that should only gain possession of an hour, but thank soon strikes in the form of a like greased lightning tyre. Typically, there is no spare so they have to depend on the act of kindness of a very out-of-the-way drag-truck driver (John Ford Noonan). When he out of the blue berserk because of the antics of his old lady with another gentleman's gentleman, Chris and the kids have to jilt both him and their machine, taking expedient in another car parked nearby. As that crate drives away, they discover that their chauffeur doesn't own it - they are in a stolen car. And from there, their night is just accepted to get off on worse as their car-pilferer friend leads them into the feelings of a gang of crooks.

This rollicking family comedy is undemanding but fun, with more than enough of action and lots of one-liners. The strength players all able their roles well, and the children do a seemly job of providing many of the laughs. With slews of stunts, chases and occasional slapstick, the unconvincing plot is easily overlooked - the story is less important than the action in this overlay. Although the hair, clothes, music and by a hair's breadth about everything else is wholly 1980s, the film remains by irreproachable because the humour and action hasn't dated at all awfully.
Features a cameo from Grammy Award-delightful blues guitarist Albert Collins as himself.
There are no extras with this basic single-disc release.


It's Got:

Some danged funny moments.

It Needs:


Encapsulation:

1980's family adventure that has held up surprisingly well over the years.

The Movie:
I'm from time to time again at a annihilation for an aperture. I keep trying to come up with something to lead off this review, but thinking about this film makes me feel old, and the amusement caused by that feeling is hard to beat. Has it unqualifiedly been eighteen years since it was released? Jeez. I deliberate on I need to call a moratorium on reviewing pre-2000 movies. Too much more of this and I'll be running escape to bribe a Corvette.

New York detective Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) and his partner, Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia), are enjoying a quiet meal when the restaurant they're patronizing suddenly becomes a murder scene. Nick and Charlie arrest the killer, a blade-wielding psychopath named Sato Koji (Yusaku Matsuda); when Sato is extradited to Japan, Nick and Charlie are chosen to escort him. After being duped into turning Sato over to his yakuza pals at the Osaka airport, Nick and Charlie are stripped of their badges and guns and saddled with Masahiro Matsumoto (Ken Takakura), a by-the-book Japanese detective whose ideology and methods clash with Nick's brash personality and work ethic. After one of Sato's compatriots turns up dead in a nightclub, the detectives realize a war is brewing in the Japanese underworld.

Black Rain is, at its core, little more than a standard cop movie. With very few exceptions, the script follows the established beats of the genre, and the characters fit easily into the molds such films have been using for the better part of three decades. But as is usually the case with any worthwhile genre flick, the movie is propped up, and eventually nudged out of the norm, by the skills of the filmmakers, and in this case the primary driving force is director Ridley Scott. Scott took a little heat for acting as a hired gun on what looked to be a safe venture (he was brought in after Paul Verhoeven bailed), but it's not hard to see why he signed on. His last three directorial efforts had underperformed, and this was a chance to show what he could do with well-worn material. Without his meticulous craftsmanship, attention to detail, and patented visual stylistics, this movie wouldn't have been anything other than passable.

Scott's greatest triumph, not surprisingly, is in making Japan look like a totally alien world. There's an excellent contrast between the grit of New York (a look Scott says was influenced by The French Connection) and the neon metropolis of Osaka, which certainly works in favor of the plot's fish-out-of-water aspect. (In many ways Osaka looks like a precursor to the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, albeit without the rampant urban decay.) The transition to America to Japan, which comes in the form of a jump cut from a banking airplane to an industrial landscape illuminated by a blood red sun, is jarring and impressive in its impact. And the juxtaposition of the two sides of life in the country is handled perfectly: the world in which the Japanese characters live and work (the reality) is cramped and cluttered, while the world in which they play (the façade) is expansive and immaculate. (I remember reading an interview with Scott at the time of the movie's release in which he complained about location shooting being held up because custodians were constantly cleaning everything.) And I like how Scott layers the action; whether they're filled with bustling crowds, frantic workers, or those gargantuan transport trucks that are constantly roaming the streets, his compositions are dense and alive. The visuals are constantly engaging and interesting, even if the story isn't. Scott's work here is definitely a triumph of style over substance, but it's still a triumph.

There are moments when Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis's script looks as if it's trying to break free of its conventions and strive for greatness, but ultimately it never does. Conklin spouts too much unintentionally silly hardboiled dialogue (although I have to admit that some of it works), and when you see the motorcycle race at the beginning you just know it won't be the last one you'll see. The story, with a couple of minor adjustments, could work just as well without Kate Capshaw's underwritten nightclub hostess character; most of the time the character seems to exist for no other reason than to simply shoehorn an American woman into the movie. (In order for the character to matter, the story would have needed to further play up the way a woman in her position would have been viewed by the different cultures). And I wish the culture clash between the cops had been more fully realized, rather than simply popping up in order to initiate a shouting match. Think about it–the real turning point in the story comes when Conklin visits Matsumoto's apartment, a scene that's nicely written and played, and one that reveals a wealth of information about these characters and their disparate worlds. Watching that scene makes me wish the entire movie could have reached that level, and I can't help but wonder if Scott's first cut, which ran thirty-five minutes longer than the version that was eventually released, did more to expand on this theme. (When it comes to the overall quality of the writing, I think it's somewhat telling that the nightclub scene between Charlie and Matsumoto wasn't in the script; good thing Garcia came up with the idea, as it lends credence and a necessary motivation to Matsumoto's actions during the movie's second half.)