Well-made treacle (1989), adapted by writer-director Phil Alden Robinson from W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe. A fledgling farmer (Kevin Costner) hears a voice in an Iowa cornfield and has a vision that convinces him that if he builds a baseball diamond in his field, Shoeless Joe Jackson, of the notorious 1919 White Sox, will turn up to play there. Other messages and signs follow, leading the hero to meet a former novelist in hiding (James Earl Jones) and a deceased ballplayer who ended his life as a doctor (Burt Lancaster). The strange mixture of nostalgia, poetry, pop mysticism, and innocence suggests both Ray Bradbury and Steven Spielberg, at their best as well as their worst; the conception is sentimental, but the storytelling remains assured and effective. With Amy Madigan as the hero’s sympathetic wife, Gaby Hoffmann as their daughter, and Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe. PG, 106 min. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most interesting element of John Fowles’s novel is its alternation between two narrators — the shy and eccentric butterfly collector who kidnaps a young woman to add to his collection, and the woman herself. By jettisoning this structure, this 1965 film has precious little to hold one’s interest, apart from Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar as the leads; Stanley Mann and John Kohn’s script adaptation is relatively flat-footed, and William Wyler’s direction is as academic as ever. 119 min. (JR) Read more
Clint Eastwood plays a skip-tracer cop with a taste for impersonations who’s 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’s 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 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout. With John Dennis Johnston and Michael Des Barres. 122 min. (JR) Read more
