A social worker (Jennifer Anniston) finds herself falling in love with her gay roommate and best friend (Paul Rudd), an elementary-school teacher, as she becomes pregnant by her lawyer boyfriend (John Pankow), decides to have the baby, and concludes that she can’t live with the father. Adapted by Wendy Wasserstein from Stephen McCauley’s novel and directed by Nicholas Hytner (The Crucible), this entertaining comedy-drama often plays like ideologically upgraded Neil Simon, and though I was grateful for many things in itI especially love the fine shading of an English drama professor played by Nigel HawthorneI never could shake off the impression that the whole thing was propaganda, even if I agreed with everything the propaganda was saying. The mixture of sincerity and sitcom phoniness is bewildering at times, but on some level, I guess, the film works. With Alan Alda, Allison Janney, and Tim Daly. (JR) Read more
The release of Fireworks, Takeshi Kitano’s seventh feature, belatedly goaded Quentin Tarantino and Miramax into releasing the writer-director-actor’s fourth (1994, 94 min.) after they’d sat on it for years, thereby making it possible to view this bizarre mannerist artist’s work in an even purer state, without the distractions of sentimentality or lousy paintings. Another gangster tale, this one features Beat Takeshi (as he’s affectionately known in Japan) as an underboss ordered to settle a dispute between two warring gangs in Okinawa. After losing several of his regulars and then finding out that his services weren’t even necessary, he and his surviving stooges hide out and goof off on a remote beach. Like Fireworks, this basically becomes a movie about waiting. Even if you’re like me and find Kitano’s films relatively empty apart from his self-parodic macho stoicism and quizzical style, these qualities alone provide quite an eyeful and earful; preternatural quiet and stillness alternate with flurries of loud violence in a manner that is singularly his, and the colors and compositions are riveting. The deadpan humor is somewhere east of Harry Langdon and north of Jacques Tati, though far from humanist. Attitude is everything, and if you get into his moodsI do about half the timethat’s plenty. Read more
