The Province du lieu suivant : Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 76

B4 IVovIiH-e Irlu Friday, January 21, 1993 1 1 oferssistiii Gusts mmi 1 What's a girl gotta do to get a little action around here? In Intersection, Richard Gere is hung up at an emotional crossroads. He's stalled, unable to carry on with a passionless marriage (to Sharon Stone) or commit to a new relationship (to Lolita Davidovich). He can't see the big picture that is, until Just moments before he rolls his wMyi -m; .1 mil Mercedes and has slices of it pass before his eyes in a complex layer-cake of flashbacks. Nothing like getting airborne in your 450 SL to jumpstart the examined life. Unfortunately, this 5 LEE BACCHUS At the Movies Sharon Stone plays the bored wife to Richard Gere's dissatisfied architect in the Vancouver-made film Intersection.

surprisingly low-key movie filmed in Vancouver and (hey!) set in Vancouver is stalled as well. Director Mark Rydell (INTERVIEW, Page B7) doesn't seem to know how to kickstart this intriguing yet ultimately boring drama into overdrive. It looks good but doesn't have any spark. It coasts on some solid, subtle and mature work from Gere and company but spins its wheels in its own bland bog of inertia. The car crash an elegant slow-motion symphony of impending doom provides the opening frames of Intersection but stops short of actual impact.

So does the movie. FLASHBACKS SPUTTER Gere's flashbacks rewind in a proverbial life-before-your-eyes epiphany and the film sputters along with it slowly and without much spark. We learn he's Vincent Eastman, a wealthy, high-profile architect (it seems he designed the Museum of Anthropology at the University of B.C.) whose once-. waffling between Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich while he cruises the Sea to Sky Highway in his Mercedes?) and a rather dreary and deflating conclusion eventually test your patience. "What's a girl gotta do to get a little action around here?" quips Davidovich in one scene, and the same could be said for the film.

Intersection is all revved up with nowhere to go. the precipice of commitment. Hmmmm. Does he build that fabulous new seaside house and move in with Olivia as planned? Or hmmm does he remain neck-deep in his middle-age funk, unable to cut loose from his family ties? It may sound like a finger-snapping easy choice to you but Gere spends the entire movie sifting through flashback after flashback (all presumably while turning somersaults in his sports car), replaying those poignant lifescenes that led to his takes the high road, building this "relationships" drama around his actors. It's mature and restrained to a fault and none of the performers is strong enough to carry Intersection over its numerous slow-to-a-crawl zones.

REAL PROMISE Stone and Gere prove no mere bimbo and himbo, and Davidovich is the movie's real promise (along with the wonderfully moody supporting role by the Lower Mainland), but a pedestrian story (are we really supposed to feel compassion for a millionaire architect who's promising blueprint for life Also opening today are: Jamon, Jamon A rural Almodovar, Spanish director Bigas Luna emphasizes country matters in this story of a would-be decisive moment. Even his has begun to blur. His marriage to Stone also his business partner has bullfighter and the already-pregnant beauty that he is hired to seduce. In Spanish with English (Ridge) Man Bites Dog Done as a mock documentary, director Remy Belvaux's shock satire follows the adventures of a Belgian film crew as they become involved with their subject, a chatty serial killer. In French with English subtitles (R18 plus) (Caprice) Rock Hudson's Home Movies To create a biographical documentary with a difference, director Mark Rappaport uses footage from Hudson's many feature films to examine the hidden homosexuality of the late actor.

(M) (Starlight) The Snapper Director Stephen (Dangerous Liaisons) Frears adapts author Roddy (The Commitments) Doyle's second Barrytown novel. Actor Colm Meaney revisits Dublin to play a Barrytown dad attempting to deal with an unmarried daughter's pregnancy. (14 Years) (Vancouver Centre) REVIEW, Page B6 The town's sexiest young man, Raul (Javier Bardem) is hired by a wealthy woman to seduce her son's pregnant girlfriend, Silvia (Penelope Cruz), and break up the romance in Jamon Jamon. flashbacks have flashbacks. None of which is punctuated by the red-hot eruptions of sex or violence you come to expect in a Sharon Stone movie.

The "Intersection" here is not the one she revealed in Basic Instinct. Director Rydell (Cinderella Intersection Our rating The censor says Mature with the warning "occasional nudity, suggestive scenes and very coarse language" Playing at Capitol, Esplanade, Richmond Centre, Station Square, Eagle Ridge and Guildford cinemas soured (she doesn't return his profound love in kind) and ended in separation from wife and teenaged daughter (Jenny Morrison). "We weren't a family," he says. "We were a corporation with a kid." An affair with Olivia (Davidovich), an entertainment reporter bubbling with quirky joie de vivre, has led him to xyt mil 1b Liberty, On Golden Pond).