Coldblooded

A blank, baby-faced hunk (Jason Priestley) who works as a bookie is reluctantly promoted by a new gang boss (Robert Loggia) to become a hit man, and then has some trouble adjusting to the fact that he’s so good at it. I suppose the point of this black comedy is how willing all of us are nowadays to accommodate ourselves to murder. It’s the material for Swiftian satire, but writer-director M. Wallace Wolodarsky, a TV veteran, isn’t up to the job. In order for this to have a pointed moral position, one has to believe in the characters on some level, and only Peter Riegert, as the hero’s mentor, and Janeane Garofalo, in a small part as a hooker, come close to earning belief. Most of the performances and much of the mise en scene are stiff, and the laugh cues in the horribly banal and TV-like music score discouraged me even from smiling. One more indication of what Tarantino’s pervasive influence has wrought: this seems to tip its hat to him in a gag about blood on a new car’s leather upholstery. Maybe you’ll bust a gut, but I doubt it. With Kimberly Williams and Jay Kogen. Michael J. Fox, one of the producers, has a cameo. Read more

Persuasion

I’ve never read Jane Austen’s last novel (1818), and I’m not generally attracted to film adaptations of classic English literaturemost of which, even at their best, seem like Cliffs Notes versions. But Roger Michell’s first feature (1995), scripted by Nick Dear, is a lot fresher and more engaging than the usual department-store windows of Merchant-Ivory: it makes us care about the characters rather than the sets and costumes. Set in 1814, with the British navy just back from the Napoleonic wars, it concerns the gradual reunion of Captain Frederick Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds) and Anne Elliot (Amanda Root), who’d been engaged seven years before. The secondary castincluding Simon Russell Beale, Sophie Thompson, Corin Redgrave, Susan Fleetwood, and Fiona Shawis especially effective. (JR) Read more