Yet another comedy about a boy occupying a man’s body, this one produced by James L. Brooks and Robert Greenhut, written by Anne Spielberg (sister of Steven) and Gary Ross, and directed by Penny Marshall (1988). A teenager attends a carnival, makes a wish about growing up to a fortune-telling machine, and promptly turns into Tom Hanks. While this is marginally better and more serious than most of the other movies in the cycle, the psychological ramifications of the change still aren’t very convincing. The hero in this case becomes an ace executive at a toy company and wins the heart of Elizabeth Perkins (acquitting herself rather well here), but ultimately decides to become a Norman Rockwell teenager again. Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero’s sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre’s popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie pornarguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism. In keeping with the overall Spielbergian metaphysics, even skid row has a scrubbed look here; but as far as the movie’s message is consideredif only grown-ups could be more like kidsJerry Lewis did an infinitely better job of plugging it in the 50s. Read more
In the belated sequel to Steve Gordon’s yuppie fairy tale of 1981, the love of alcoholic multimillionaire Arthur (Dudley Moore) for his working-class wife (Liza Minnelli) is put to the test when the father of his former fiancee assumes corporate control of his family’s holdings, forcing the obnoxious playboy into a state of poverty until he agrees to divorce his wife and marry the jilted Susan (Cynthia Sikes). Whatever limited possibilities there might have been in the second-degree Capra-corn of Andy Breckman’s script (which traffics in such matters as Arthur and his wife’s hopes to adopt a baby and a cameo visit from the ghost of John Gielgud’s Hobson) are immediately killed by the sluggish and convictionless direction of old-time hack Bud Yorkin; there’s nary a laugh in sight. With Geraldine Fitzgerald. (JR) Read more
The idea must have seemed like a natural to producer Don Boyd: invite ten filmmakers to select an operatic aria and make a short film interpreting the music independent of the opera’s original story line. The results are decidedly mixed, but the best segments are worth waiting for. To take them in ascending order of preference: Bill Bryden provides an uninteresting wraparound using Leoncavallo that links the various segments; Nicolas Roeg’s use of Verdi in depicting a plot to assassinate King Zog of Albania in Vienna in 1931 (with Theresa Russell as Zog) is disappointingly pointless, and Bruce Beresford’s matching of a love duet and Korngold seems equally thin. Robert Altman’s view of the audience at the opening night of Paris’s Ranelagh Theater in 1734 (where a Rameau opera was premiering) is ambitious but sluggish, and Franc Roddam’s version of a young couple’s suicide pact in Las Vegas to the strains of Wagner is thoughtful but corny. More experimental sections by Charles Sturridge (lyrical black-and-white shots of children playing hooky, used with Verdi) and Derek Jarman (an elderly opera singer on stage in 35-millimeter recalls her romantic childhood in Super-8, all to a Charpentier aria) are arresting but rather unsatisfying. Ken Russell’s surreal depiction of a car-crash victim’s fantasies of her wounds becoming jewels in a lush ritual done to Puccini seems to benefit from Russell’s previous experience in matching music to action. Read more
Kon Ichikawa’s odd and magisterial docudrama of 1963 (also known as My Enemy, the Sea), beautifully filmed in ‘Scope and color, follows the true adventures of a young Japanese who sailed a 19-foot yacht from Osaka to San Francisco over 94 days in 1962. Alternating between scenes of this journey and flashbacks showing the hero’s various preparations and his overall estrangement from his family, Ichikawa makes this story a fascinating study of obsession, often comic, and a striking portrait of a solitary consciousness, full of Ichikawa’s graphic and compositional brilliance. 97 min. (JR) Read more
