Vampire’s Kiss

A Manhattan literary agent (Nicolas Cage) who has problems with women imagines that he’s turning into a vampire. This is the first script by Joseph Minion to be produced since After Hours, and it reflects some of the same obsession with predatory and/or defenseless females and New York perceived as an expressionist landscape; the variable but generally competent direction is by British newcomer Robert Bierman. Practically nothing happens other than the gradual deterioration of any distinction between reality and fantasy, and the theme is closer in some ways to Jekyll and Hyde (with the emphasis almost entirely on Hyde) than to Dracula or Nosferatu. What really makes this worth seeing is Cage’s outrageously unbridled performance, which recalls such extravagant actorly exercises as Jean-Louis Barrault in Jean Renoir’s The Testament of Dr. Cordelier and Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor. Even for viewers like myself who have never been especially impressed with Cage, his over-the-top effusions of rampant, demented asociality are really something to see, and they give this quirky, somewhat out-of-control black comedy whatever form and energy it has. With Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley, and Kasi Lemmons. (McClurg Court) Read more

Pink Cadillac

Clint Eastwood plays a “skip-tracer” cop with a taste for impersonations who is assigned to track down a woman (Bernadette Peters) on the lam with her eight-month-old baby. The wife of an ex-con (Timothy Carhart) who is linked to a group of white supremacists (a band of misfits and speed freaks that the movie has great fun ridiculing), she jumps bail after being arrested for passing counterfeit money; Eastwood follows her to Reno and then finds himself gradually shifting his loyalties. Buddy Van Horn (The Dead Pool) directed from a John Eskow script, but in fact this is very much an Eastwood movie, full of his cranky personality and quirky intelligence, and brimming with ideas. Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this has the kind of grit and feeling that few recent action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout. With John Dennis Johnston and Michael Des Barres. (Ford City, Harlem-Cermak, Deerbrook, Biograph, Bolingbrook, Burnham Plaza, Chicago Ridge, Chestnut Station, Woodfield, Orland Square, Plaza. Evanston, Hyde Park, Bricktown Square, Oakbrook Center, Golf Mill) Read more