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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 October 1999 Issue No. 450 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 October 1999 Issue No. 450
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Recycling movies By Mohamed El-Assiouty
Connery and Zeta-Jones in Entrapment and Woods in The General's Daughter
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The way commercial cinema functions is not unlike a slaughterhouse: the lean meat is separated, the less palatable bits and pieces being processed into sausages and burgers while the bones are piled high to be used as fodder, fertiliser or pet food. In Hollywood, in much the same manner, one idea is repeatedly exploited: sometimes to cater to the taste of a middle-aged, middle-brow audience after a little nouvelle cuisine, sometimes for that of young people while they munch on popcorn and sometimes for the mentally dilapidated who can only handle the idea in as minced and sloppy a form as possible.
Looking through the recent crop of Hollywood productions in the local movie theatres it is obvious that while Entrapment attempted to belong to the first category -- and failed gracelessly -- The Faculty and Tarzan easily managed to win their place in the second and, with a heavy-pounding sound, The General's Daughter landed in the third.
Entrapment's typical heist formula revolves around the relationship between two art cat-thieves: the expert Robert McDougal (aka Mac), played by Sean Connery, and the skillful upstart Virginia Baker (aka Gin), played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who devoutly seeks to become his disciple and partner to carry out the ultimate heist: transferring an $8 billion sum from the World Clearance Bank's mainframe computers in Kuala Lumpur into her personal account. But is she really that ambitious or is she really seeking to trap the veteran art thief red-handed, as the insurance company she works for wants? The old romancer, naturally, manages to play it carefully and check her advances, based on the principle that pleasure and business should not mix.
The screenplay by Ron Boss and William Broyles leaves many gaps in its characterisation for both stars to charmingly fill, which, predictably, does not always succeed. In fact, there is nothing special about Entrapment, unless you (like many others) believe Zeta-Jones to be one of the most charming leading ladies in Hollywood and that no role could suit her better than that of cat thief. The fact that Sean Connery himself is Entrapment's co-producer is not necessarily objectionable, if not particularly attractive to the old-fashioned who nurture their prejudices against the 007 school of thought.
In The Faculty, after the bodies of a high school's faculty staff are mysteriously inhabited by aliens, the entire school is gradually overtaken by the alien invasion. Director Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi and Desperado) exerts a fair effort in this film by containing the events inside the school.
The teenage protagonists who, as yet uninfected, become increasingly paranoid, begin to wonder if directors Cameron, Spielberg, Emmerich and Sonnenfeld did not make movies about aliens as part of a conspiracy to discredit anyone who actually discovers the presence of aliens, dismissing the discovery as exaggerated exposure to such films. Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson, who exercised self-referential flair in the Scream series -- an exponential hall of mirrors of previous slasher films -- does the same in The Faculty with the Body Snatchers sub-genre.
Directors William Cameron Menzies, Don Siegel, Philip Kaufman, Tobe Hooper and Abel Ferrara have all taken turns in fueling this most paranoid of horror sub-genres, but now with Rodriguez and Williamson's happy end the door for sequels is left unshut. While Williamson has scripted three of the Scream films so far, he abandoned the I Know What You Did Last Summer series after the first film. Will the fact that the original Body Snatchers had no sequels tempt him to undertake an original venture for a change?
Talking of repetition, Walt Disney's Tarzan by Kevin Lima and Chris Buck is probably the most colourful adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough ever to hit the big screen. The reason is simple -- with Deep Canvas animation the three-dimensional effect of the picture is heightened, emphasising an impression that the animated world on screen is no less real than the spectators', if more beautiful. Tony Goldwyn's voice as Tarzan, Minnie Driver's as Jane, Glenn Close's as Kala (Tarzan's gorilla mother) and Nigel Hawthorne's as Jane's father, combined with the soundtrack by Phil Collins, bring the animated world even closer to life. In fact the only problem with Tarzan is that it lasts only an hour and a half.
The film being released this week in movie theatres is The General's Daughter. Captain Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) is mock-raped and strangled with her own underwear in the middle of the MacCallum military fort while her father, General Joe Campbell (James Cromwell), is running for the Senate. With such an opening, a predictable plot leaves little for the army's Criminal Investigation Division officers, ex-couple Paul Brenner (John Travolta) and Sarah Sunhill (Madeleine Stone) to unravel.
What scriptwriters Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman were aiming at by adapting the events of Nelson DeMilles' seventh novel for the screen is a more challenging and attractive task than actually seeing the film. Brenner's licence to arrest any officer regardless of rank turns a him into a superman figure seeking to find the rat in the house.
Con Air's director Simon West proves that he is a master craftsman of the MTV computer game action style, but in his second film he seems to be the only one mystified by the search for the actual murderer.
The "devil is inside" formula that Hitchcock and Preminger mastered has never been so abused as in this military corruption movie, compared to which Bob Reiner's A Few Good Men and Edward Zwick's Courage Underfire are masterpieces. Fortunately, in the same way that Jack Nicholson's performance saves the former, so James Woods's exemplary acting as the victim's commanding officer and mentor saves The General's Daughter. As for Woods' confrontations with Travolta, they serve as embarrassing tests for the latter. It is not only the plot of The General's Daughter that is flat, the characters are so one-dimensional that Tarzan and Jane suddenly appear not just deep, but fully rounded in comparison.
