The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 43

The Ottawa Citizen, Friday, July 3, 1992 E3 Movies -si I vis Reviews by movie writer Noel Taylor 4 -r IS rsrj nn ri i ri FVJ ii 'i tm4 ili-nl Irlinn 1 I iil1 I Roots theme pursued with mystical fervor a 2 Daughters of the Dust ByTowne aughters of the Dust is a film about roots that is like no other. I For voune New York film-maker Julie Dash it's a very personal od- a yssey, back to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and her memory of childhood stories about Africa. In a way, it's a very universal theme, especially in a country whose immigrant people have cut their own family ties, but have chosen never to forget their roots. The daughters are the women of the Gullah families who cling to their "scraps of memories," bits of memorabilia they have kept to remind them of the slaves who were their ancestors and of those who "walked on water" to get back to Africa. They are all blacks.

To the outsider their lifestyle seems idyllic, a place of sand and sea, close-knit families, private rituals and picnics on the beach. That thev would want to escape seems incomprehensible, and beyond Momentum: Giant icebreaker comes crunching towards audience suggesting that the young always have it in them to seek a new life else- whrrp in this case. "North" where in this case, Big screen needed to do justice to big country crunching towards its audience. It looks huge, and grows ft Momentum Museum of Civilization's Cineplus theatre 4i i I IE2 Dash does not pursue this compulsion. What she's more concerned with is the past, their African roots, and she pursues this theme with a mystical fervor that is compelling to the observer, whose own roots are not so far removed.

It takes place one day on the beach, where members of the Peazant family have gathered for a sort of last supper before they migrate North. A few, the older ones, are staying, especially the 88-year-old matriarch, played with great dignity and perhaps a little more youthful spirit than her years might allow by Cora Lee Day. The year, 1902, is quite specific, although D'ash does not use the timing to give the film more context. About the only reminders of the time are the graceful gingham dresses that all the young women wear, even on the beach. Dash insists that her film is about women at a pivotal moment in their lives, and indeed it is, though the men in it are not exactly on the fringe.

There is Eli, for instance, the tortured husband of Eula who is carrying the child of a MP J- if 'fetM if bigger and more threatening with each second. The momentum will surely carry it into the theatre. The opening scene of Momentum, the first Imax film in high-definition, is an eye-filler. And something of an eye-opener. It hits the viewer with a clarity unrivalled on a screen so vast.

High-definition filming is a new process that involves shooting and projecting images at twice the normal speed 48 frames per second instead of the usual 24. It is something one is aware of early on with the icebreaker, but soon forgets about. Imax directors Colin Iw and Tony Ianzelo covered 35,000 km over 14 months to shoot Momentum at a total cost of $4.4 million. Canada has never looked better, said Culture and Communications Minister Perrin Beatty at a preview before the official premiere of Momentum at the Museum of Civilization's Cineplus theatre on Canada Day. Joan Pennefather, chairman of the National Film Board which produced the film, was more specific.

She called the 20-minute movie "a spectacular ode to Canada," which precisely captures its sense of awe. Momentum, which has already become the hit of Expo '92 in Spain, where crowds have been lining up five hours to see it, is a handsome 125th birthday gift to the nation it celebrates. And indeed Canada hasn't looked better. Twenty minutes is only long enough for fleeting images, rather like flipping through a Canada calendar with all the refinement of color and clarity that implies. This cross-country tour east to west, with stops in the north isn't in the business of revelation.

Nor- of surprising. One gasps at the sheer size of it all without being stunned by its sense of discovery. Thankfully, there is no voice commentary. Monientum is filled almost as much with the sounds of Canada rushing water, the chipping of an Inuit carver, the roar of the Skydome as with the sights. It's a decision to be applauded.

Besides, the swelling score of composer Eldon Rathburn is homage enough. What the camera celebrates is the country's variety. It's a cliche one can't avoid. Some subjects like the Prairies or the Maritime coast are naturals. But the Rockies are the star, especially the scene of a trickle of melting snow that becomes a stream, then a spewing gusher, then a tumbling waterfall, and below in the distance a churning, winding river.

It's not something easily captured except from the air in a format as splendid as Imax I I D. For Ottawans, there's a bonus some aerial glimpses of Ottawa that include the oranges of autumn in the Gatineau and the Museum of Civilization from above, looking like a nest of worms in the rooftop tracery that outlines curvilinear buildings as never before. There are people too, doing Canadian things, like skating and skiing (with an Imax camera at ski-boot level), rescuing injured climbers, or flying the model plane with flapping wings that becomes a metaphor for Canadian ingenuity. And wildlife everything from a grumpy grizzly to Prairie horses to a couple of hummingbirds as though to reinforce, for the outsider, that image of Canada that depends more on nature than man. The camerawork in Momentum is bold, deftly composed and technically faultless.

A major problem was filming wildlife with an Imax II-D camera, which has a noise level of 88 decibels, enough to scare most animals away. To overcome this, the film-makers recorded the camera noise on cassettes, which they then played in the wildlife area three days before the arrival of the film crew. Cineplus had to be specially adapted for the new high-definition process, and is the first, large-format theatre in the world capable of projecting films at 24 and 48 frames per second in both Imax and Omnimax format Admission is $3.50 for adults and $3 for seniors, youths and children. Momentum will be screened daily at 9:30 a.m.; 1, 1:30, 5 and 5:30 p.m. The parting: Cora Lee Day (Nana), left, with Gullah women landowner rapist, a young man whose own awareness of the past haunts his present torment.

Only Nana, the matriarch, can work out his spiritual rescue. And there's the outsider with a camera, engrossed in capturing on film the last rites of the family before it is torn apart by migration. They pose for him good-naturedly and Dash uses his enthusiasm to reflect her own. But she's right, it is the women of these islands who are the focus of her visually striking film. They are torn between loyalty to Nana, and the blandishments of Haagar, who is the voice of progress and the promise of the American dream.

In 1902 it was a very distant reality indeed and Dash makes it clear where her own preferences lie. Though it's a small quibble it's a niggling one the voices of a strangely accented English are sometimes a strain to follow, if not actually to comprehend. In French there are subtitles, but in English, one is left to persevere alone. But Dash's film is as much a visual experience as an aural one. She is a film-maker whose passion for her subject permeates very frame.

Boomerang should not have come back Movie ratings from critics and reviewers across Canada Boomerang Capitol Square, Britannia, Gloucester, Promenades fri patching Eddie Murphy mellow out is like watching popcorn grow soggy, or a spritzer lose its fizz. It's not an event to stir the juices. Like most clowns, Murphy wants to be something, or some iV 4.V. I I I iW Mf. 2 5 2 3 A A ATA A ST A JS A I 0 A A A A MA 9 b.

I fif A I A I A A A A A A AA A A a js I rdj A 0 A I A I I a A A A A AM 0 I gj gf A a Wi MA A A A I A A A A A A A A A A A Excellent A Good Average Poor Awful Alien 3 Batman Returns Class Act Deep Cover Encino Man Far and Away Housesitter Howard's End Lethal Weapon 3 Patriot Games The Player Scorchers SisterAct Turtle Beach Unlawful Entry Voyager The Waterdance Angels Fear to Tread one, else. He doesn't need to play Hamlet but, he's admitted, Cary Grant's pretty cool. Which leads him, primping and purring, into Boomerang. It's billed as a romantic comedy. In reality it's an orgy devised around the notion that Murphy is irresistible to women.

Since he also wrote the original story, one senses that Murphy's own conception of himself hasn't changed much. He's still the greatest. Only the language is less; the four-letter vocabulary has lost some of its monotony but none of its tone. Boomerang is Murphy's make-or-break movie after a career that exploded from the top with Saturday Nigtti Live and a couple of motor-mouthed movies, 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop, but has been fizzling ever since. He deserves a plus for ambition and a D-minus for execution.

One is tempted to suggest it may break him except that he's already signed a $12 million a movie deal with Paramount, which may be wondering about its investment. In Boomerang, Murphy envisions himself as the ultimate man about town. Nothing, sexually speaking, is impossible. He's so cool women melt just looking at him. He plays Marcus Graham, a marketing executive who wears black a lot and sells perfume.

In the board room and the bedroom he's an ace whose function in life is seduction, until he meets the one woman in his life he wants but can't quite have. Any similarity between Cary Grant and the kind of sophisticated comedy he once indulged in ends right here. Boomerang is directed by Reginald Hudlin, who brought you the surprise hit, House Party, and is written by the same team, Barry Bluestein and David Sheffield, who hustled Murphy's career from SSL to Coming To America. It's obvious they're in it for the gags. Urbanity is not their thing.

Nor is it Murphy's. His idea of suave is to lower his voice a notch and show his teeth less. And not to say the word that made him famous. Since most of his fans have come to hear it, Marcus Graham is sometliing of a letdown. Cool: Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry in playful mood Jacqueline, the woman in his life, is Robin Givens.

She's his new boss who insists that she never dates a man she works with. As if we believed her. They both work for Eartha Kitt, whose appearance as a 60-ish vamp in a bedroom scene wearing fright wig and tights is one of the movie's major embarrassments. Someone does her, and Murphy, a kindness and turns out the lights at the crucial moment No such luck for Grace Jones as the snarly Parisian, Strange, who offers to eat Murphy raw for a late-night snack. For anyone else it would be a cameo role; for the ferocious Jones, it's a rock.

Boomerang is about blacks in New York, but not the ones the screen usually makes space for. These blacks are so cool, in suites the size of barns and offices like showrooms, they might as well be white. There's a scene outside a theatre advertising a benefit for black film-makers which promotes Murphy's latest cause, and incidentally apKases fellow film-maker Spike Lee who has eluded him for not heiping blacks more in Ijet's hope they weren't showing Boomerang. It's enough to make the brothers wince. si Souiham News Giapns.