The Rock
stars Sean Connery (left) as a top-secret federal prisoner and
Nicolas Cage as an F.B.I. chemical/biological weapons expert trying
to break into Alcatraz.
DRAGONHEART
(A-2, PG-13): The dragons were due after the movie wizards made
them possible in Jurassic Park, and one turns up here as
a nice guy, sounding a lot like Sean Connery. Not only does Draco
the Dragon talk, but he flies, blows fire and generally makes
a nuisance of himself.
Directed by Rob Cohen, this $57-
million epic is a genuine Arthurian adventure, so far one of the
more inspirational and child-friendly of the summer flicks. The
switch is that, in the mythical England of a thousand years ago,
Draco and the heroic knight-dragonslayer Sir Bowen (Dennis Quaid)
join forces to defeat the wicked young King Einon (David Thewlis).
Einon is the good knight's former pupil, but he never caught on
to the virtues and idealism of chivalry.
Draco, who takes on some of the nobility
Connery has acquired in his recent screen persona, is not the
sort of bad dragon we're used to. He's of a more Eastern dragon
tradition in which the mythic beasts had godlike powers and were
protectors and counselors of humans. In this story, he's undoubtedly
the star (consuming most of the budget!), an intensely moral creature
who worries about saving his soul.
Dragonheart
packs a large share of religious symbolism (baptism, self-sacrifice,
redemption, immortality) in its plot. Dina Meyer has a key role
as the beautiful peasant girl who persuades her people to take
up their pitchforks, and Pete Postlethwaite is likable as a monk-poet
who composes odes to Bowen's valor and ultimately stars significantly
in the revolution. Good-natured spectacle adventure; genre
violence; satisfactory for mature youth and adults.
LAMERICA
(A-2, no MPAA rating): The best real film circulating is Lamerica,
the latest by Italian writer-director Gianni Amelio (The Stolen
Children), the logical heir to the tradition of Fellini and
DeSica. The focus is immigration, which may be the most pressing
social problem of this fading, tormented century.
The story is set in Albania, Europe's
poorest country, just across the Adriatic from Italy, and in chaos
after being recently cut free from 45 years of Communist repression.
There is no work and little of anything else, and the young men,
lured by glitzy Italian TV, pile onto ships for Italy. The military
finally has to stop them by force.
Gino (played by sad-eyed Enrico Lo
Verso, the compassionate cop-hero of Stolen Children) is
an Italian scam artist who comes to Albania to set up a phony
shoe factory. Spiro, an Italian POW from World War II who is not
entirely in touch with reality, is cleaned up to serve as a local
"company chairman."
Gino, the privileged and envied foreigner,
is slowly stripped of his possessions and arrogance, and reduced
to his own simple humanity. (Italy to Albanians is like America
for most of the Third World: an impossible dream). He and Spiro
join the crush of refugees heading for their homeland.
When the mysterious, generous, almost
Christlike Spiro begins to fantasize their ship is on the way
to America, his character becomes a poignant symbol of all the
displaced, brutalized, lied to--those who never stop hoping for
freedom and a better life.
Shot on location, Lamerica exposes
us to the wretched dog-eat-dog poverty and struggle to survive.
The film's joy and wonder is 80-year-old Carmelo Di Mazzarelli,
a nonactor and ex-fisherman, who makes Spiro an unforgettable
figure of human endurance and hope. In Italian with English
subtitles; highly recommended for mature audiences.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
(A-3, PG-13) is more spectacular than the original 1960's TV series,
but that's like saying a mountain is bigger than a molehill. This
Tom Cruise action flick desperately substitutes special effects
for character and human feeling, but the big wind, big fire, big
noise get boring fast.
The movie pays homage to memorable
ingredients from the TV series--Lalo Schifrin's energetic score,
which rattles the theater floor in digital sound, and the self-destructing,
taped mission assignment. The spectacle is aimed at junior-high
tastes, with "impossible" capers like breaking into
the C.I.A.'s most secret room in Langley, and a helicopter pursuing
a high-speed train in the Chunnel between Britain and France.
The genre violence is largely indirect--what
we actually see is before and after the actual crunch, plus a
lot of things like slo-mo explosions. It's not Graham Greene or
John le Carré, but audiences presumably know what they're
getting. Not generally recommended.
THE ROCK
(O, R): Consider Alcatraz. Consider also a platoon of Marines
headed by a former war-hero general (Ed Harris) taking it (and
81 hostages) over and threatening to fire poison-gas rockets at
San Francisco unless a $100-million ransom is paid. To stop all
this nonsense, the F.B.I. sends Navy SEALS, an ex-Brit spy (ex-007
Sean Connery) and a soft-hearted chemistry nerd (Oscar winner
Nicolas Cage) to break into the escape-proof prison in
the bay.
Alcatraz still has its perverse charm
as a movie set. This film is very violent but a cut above the
rest because it has some characters (including Connery and especially
Cage) who actually stand for some values we might admire. Macho
action flick with piled-on violence, somewhat softened by humor
and character; O.K. for adults.
TV IS CHANGING:
The shocker last season, historically speaking, was the sharp
prime-time decline of the three major networks. As a group, they
had only 53 percent of the audience, a drop of eight points from
1994-95, with ABC and CBS each tumbling more than 10 percent to
all-time murky depths.
In the 1970's, before cable, these
conglomerates had 90 percent of the market every year. They were
television. Even in the last decade, the Big Three had never fallen
below a combined 61 percent.
Obviously, the key factor remains basic
cable. (Its prime-time audience was up 15 percent.) Older viewers
drifted away because of the majors' ad-driven passion for younger
demographics. They gradually discovered terrific programs on AMC,
the Discovery and History channels, and Arts & Entertainment.
Families with kids found that in the earlier evening hours cable
offers many more wholesome choices.
AND NOW THE INTERNET:
Another cause of the overall drop in TV numbers is the surge in
use of personal computers. The coming convergence of TV and Internet
communication and entertainment may make distinctions between
these media irrelevant. But for now, even if TV is morphing,
it's still recognizable as the medium of Milton Berle, Ed Murrow,
M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore. The computer world, momentarily,
is something quite different.
For one thing, it's oriented more to
"info" than "tainment." Consider its friendly
impact on reading and writing. No doubt the phenomenon of electronic
mail (by improving on the telephone--cheaper, more flexible) has
pushed us into a time when writing skills are once again widely
useful. People are writing more e-mail "letters" than
a generation ago and finding it fun, even addictive.
They're making more human contacts
in the spooky sphere of cyberspace. Interaction involves some
risk--lawless cyberspace is like the Wild West, but it's a virtual
Wild West (you only get virtually shot). It looks better than
couch potato-dom, but the downsides have not been fully counted.
In the Internet world we also have
to read more and faster. You're getting "downloaded"
constantly. Books may be hard to read or expensive to print, but
magazines have found a new lease on life--not only those already
alive in print but others, new creations, that exist only online.
It's sort of like an infinite mall where you browse around looking
for stuff and clipping out only what you want to save, perhaps
print, and read (now or later).
As Marshall McLuhan famously noted
a generation ago, the way we communicate affects every aspect
of our lives. Look for some intriguing changes. Meanwhile, old-medium
TV shuffles along. About Books, on C-SPAN2, spends five
hours every weekend talking and listening to authors and publishers,
discussing book-related events, even touring famous libraries
and bookstores.
DILEMMAS:
If we have a little V-chip, a guy inside the machine who zaps
everything with violence in it, then, theoretically, he could
be instructed to chisel out sex scenes or certain words or certain
subjects.
Does the magic wand now exist that
can turn TV from a raging monster into a G-rated puppy dog where
the good guys always win, and nobody ever sins or suffers? Most
of us doubtless prefer something in between, the value and quality
depending on something you can't select ahead of time, can't program
with a chip. Chips may be great, but I'd rather do the editing
myself.
RELIGION REPLACES THEOLOGY:
That's the way Rabbi Harold Kushner (author of When Bad Things
Happen to Good People) describes it when people undergo hard
times and know God, not just in the abstract, but through experience:
"The only way I can handle all the pain and all the fear
in this world...I feel that God is with me."
Kushner's quote is from the Searching
for God in America series (PBS), in which religious leaders
of varied faiths discuss their own beliefs. The
Rev. Roberta Hestenes, past chairwoman of World Vision, speaks
about Third World suffering she's seen: "Some say that faith
exempts you from participation in suffering, that it's some easy
trip you make, that if you just accept Jesus, you'll be wealthy
or successful.... That's not what faith is about....Faith means
union with God in reality. That includes the brokenness, the struggle,
the evil that is out there....
"It also includes the beauty and
the love....I've seen caring by people, where on the human level
there was nothing in it for them. They gave themselves just because
it was right and love was at the heart of the universe."
TONY AWARDS FIASCO:
The CBS show honoring the best on Broadway last season squeezed
everything into the scheduled two hours. The hosts and honorees
babbled like chipmunks, and the excerpts looked like fragments
of a hyperactive imagination. Not so good, folks.
It was Tony's 50th anniversary, to
boot. So let's not complain about the length of the Oscars, which
are indulged because they draw 75 million viewers, compared to
seven million for the Tonys. That's show biz.
ON VIDEO
(new or reissued) are films of Catholic interest: Smoke
(grace comes to varied characters in a Brooklyn tobacco shop);
The Boys of St. Vincent (deep study of abuse at a Catholic
orphanage in Canada); Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini's
unique masterpiece, which made the Vatican's list of best films
of the century); Frankie Starlight (neglected 1995 Irish
film about the effect of a mother's love on a boy's life).
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Dragonheart
