Coming Attractions (1999)

What it says in the title (plus mini-reviews). But feel free to explore the 1998 page if you absolutely demand some kind of introductory spiel.

Films are listed in reverse order seen.

• THE APPLE (V) (57)
• PAYBACK (56)

• A WALK ON THE MOON (V) (48) [Sensitively done, at least till it drafts a sick child as a getting-back-together device - but wouldn't it have been more interesting if frustrated wife Diane Lane, looking for a change (any change) in her life, had fallen in with some dangerous jerk instead of terminally nice Viggo Mortensen? The Jewish holiday camp - Julie Kavner's voice advertising the day's events, including "slides of Reuben's bar mitzvah" - is caricature, and the well-meaning husband's awkward attempt to 'get down' at the end, suggesting glimmers of a brighter future (whaddayaknow, he's not such a square after all), is a little silly. What Anna Paquin can do with a dorky role, though! Every second of that performance seethes with inner life.]

• THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (55) [This just about says it all, I think. You'll have to scroll down a little, though ...]

• INSTINCT (V) (18) [Wow! It is so mind-blowing watching a film where the lead character is named Theo : I felt I should be shouting out replies, or at least nodding along to show I was listening (I don't know how the Joes and Frankies of the world do it, really I don't). The film itself is a bizarre non-event, in which an hour of portentous build-up leads only to baby gorillas making goo-goo eyes, "World Of Wildlife"-style, plus the shattering revelation that getting close to Nature is in fact a good thing. For non-Theos, a more or less complete waste of time ; namesakes looking for vicarious thrills should check it out, however.]

• GO (V) (65) (second viewing: 61) [Goes all right - question is, where? Gently downhill is where, finishing up as smart, zingy fun - not a bad place to be, though it looked for a while like it might be more, might have something to say about the inner lives of the Whatever Generation : it's the difference between Sarah Polley's wary, complicated presence and Katie Holmes' intensely likeable shininess. Smug hipness quotient (BREAKFAST CLUB references, a montage to the "Macarena") balanced by careful plotting and terrific jokes - though even the best of them (William Fichtner's dinner-table proposal) turns out to be a shaggy-dog story. Significant?] [Second viewing, 16 years later: same reaction, but the scattershot second and third stories bugged me more this time (also, CRASH-like interlocking-story structure has come and gone in the intervening decade-and-a-half). Polley, Diggs, Olyphant the obvious standouts; shame they don't get more to do.]

• OFFICE SPACE (V) (53) [About twenty minutes of genuine satire, tailing off into juvenile boob-jokes, rap music and tired-of-being-pushed-around frustrations ("B & B" may be over for Mike Judge, but the teenage mind-set remains). Not quite worth the price of a cinema ticket, but endlessly cherishable for Gary Cole's poisonous blandness, Stephen Root's shamefully hilarious grotesque, "Michael Bolton" 's interview and Jennifer Aniston's "pieces of flair". Why does it feel so much like an 80s movie, though?]

• B. MONKEY (47) [Entertaining first half, featuring Jared Harris' decent, "funny-looking" schoolteacher (kin to William Hurt in SECOND BEST) - lovely detail, like the deliberate way he takes off his glasses before sex ("You're a funny lover, but you'd make a brilliant big sister," says our heroine). Story's cardboard, however, casting him as the tranquil yin in her life, versus the turbulent yang of her criminal past ; Radford tries to keep it edgy - interrupting a kiss on the street with someone walking across the frame, stuff like that - but inserting "fuck"s in Monkey's every sentence does not a wild child make. Rupert Everett camps it up hilariously, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers preens and glowers. Nice try, people.]

• PUSHING TIN (47) [How could something go so wrong so fast? The early scenes are great, Hawksian group dynamics done with comic flair, and even later, when the rest of the group melts away to make way for the mano a mano, I could watch John Cusack's nervous urban energy bounce off Billy Bob Thornton's saturnine good ole boy more or less forever ; so why was I begging for the film to end a good half-hour before it actually did? Mixed-up tone doubtless has a lot to do with it - Newell's trying for testosterone satire a la DONNIE BRASCO, but the writers are busy sticking cute one-liners even in the climax (the gag about "going down in flames") and misguidedly pushing a straight-faced message about having "to lose control in order to gain control". The most interesting strand - the suggestion that the best air-traffic controllers are in effect dehumanised, treating the winking dots on their screen as a kind of video-game - gets lost in the muddle.]

• WILD WILD WEST (30) [Some mild felicities in the first half (if you like bad puns), but it quickly strays - and pretty much stays - in was-that-supposed-to-be-funny? territory. Was it supposed to be funny that the central duo's banter is laced with coy homoerotic undertones (neither gets the girl at the end, but "you still have each other," she consoles them ; cut to desert landscape with phallic shaft of rock)? Was it supposed to be funny that Smith almost gets lynched for touching a white woman's breasts, then escapes by blaming the bongo-drumming habits of his African ancestors? What about Branagh's deep-fried Southern accent? What about when liquefied ear-wax dribbles out of a man's ear-trumpet? That's some weird shit goin' on here...]

• HIDEOUS KINKY (63) [HOUSEKEEPING without the ethereal overtones : a remarkably sensible, down-to-earth film in fact, unconcerned with applauding or condemning the heroine's quest for spiritual enlightenment, only with evoking a world of "passing pleasures" ("The world," as somebody puts it, "is simply the world"). It's a world of Sufis and snake-charmers, "hippies, freaks, Moroccans", boys on donkeys beating little drums, deftly sketched by MacKinnon (who started his career as a cartoonist), given heft by Winslet's luminous (but unshowy) performance. Easy to dismiss as a travelogue - it does dwell on the more exotic aspects of its setting - but it's able to float (as per the title) between opposite perspectives, giving equal weight to both. Neat, agile and beguiling, if a little overlong.]

• THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN (V) (53) [Careful, unadorned telling of a tale equal parts powerful and preposterous, its general dynamic rather similar to the late-80s TV movie "I Know My First Name is Steven" : effectively nightmarish in the first half, increasingly sappy in the second, fairly, well, TV movie-ish throughout. Grosbard's good with actors (even Whoopi Goldberg's tolerable here), and the film studded with perceptive detail, but it gets increasingly hokey as the psychobabble creeps in (do 12-year-old boys talk of "being punished" unless they mean, you know, punished?), especially since the heroine's self-sacrifice is patently hollow - there's no reason why the two families can't share the boy till he gets used to the situation. Oh and, just for the record, I've been trying to learn the 'hasapiko' for at least a decade now and still get the steps wrong ; guess I just don't have an aptitude for it the way Ms. Pfeiffer does...]

• CRUEL INTENTIONS (44) [The journey from Placebo (singing "Every You Every Me" over the opening credits) to Counting Crows (wailing some goatee-tugging nonsense over a dismayingly earnest true-love montage) is the journey of this film's disintegration, from amusingly tawdry trash - the kind that loves its hero as much for his heartless nihilism as for his snazzy black Jaguar convertible - to heavy-handed, moralistic wholesomeness. Fans of the original may be startled by lines like "I don't fuck losers", but in fact the theme of hypocrisy is as relevant to 90s teens as it was to 18th-century French aristocrats - even if the film reduces it to smiling angelically while listening to some boring older person then rolling your eyes the moment they turn away. Perfect for rebellious-but-basically-right-thinking teens, junk-culture junkies, and those rather fey people who make delighted cat-sharpening- its-claws gestures every time they hear something provocative. The magnificent Reese Witherspoon will someday look back on unworthy vehicles like this - and FEAR, and even FREEWAY - clasp her perfectly-formed hand to her brow and howl, "What was I thinking?".]

• 8 MM. (39) [Schumacher does SE7EN - and won't let you forget it, doing dark and creepy even where dark and creepy isn't really appropriate (as in the early domestic scenes, which are supposed to be a counterpoint). Not a lot of fun in this puritanical, Devil-made- me-do-it view of sleaze - sweaty guys in dim, single-lightbulb rooms, Oriental music wailing on the soundtrack (you almost start to wonder what the attraction is) - but the film does exert a certain sensationalist pull, at least till it turns campy in the second act and weirdly DEATH WISH-y in the third. Generally unpleasant, with a silly banality-of-Evil message at the end - though not half as silly as the BASIC INSTINCT-patented use of smoking as a symbol of transgression and/or hidden desires. Can we put this tired old indicator to bed now?]