LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 70

IFILM FILM CALENDAR CALENDAR mm mmmm FILM PICK OF THE WEEK CO cc UJ UJ CO cc CO CD 3 i ji i but the Batiste family educated, prosperous thrives on a psychological island of its own The snake in the garden here isn't civil rights but sex, and secrecy Samuel L. Jackson is Eve's father, a charming, brilliant physician, Debbi Morgan is her aunt and confidante who, like Eve, has "the sight." As plot mechanisms go, incest is an engine made in Detroit these days every family story now seems to have one purring under the hood. Lemmons revs hers hard, partly to goose the suspense but also out of a first timer's nervous urge to tie up loose ends Despite this awkwardness, her approach to the complexities of attraction between relatives is one of respect for the mysteries locked inside people, isolated even when they make lives together. (Citywide) FX Feeney) MAD CITY Costa Gavras' new movie, with a script from Tom Matthews, is an earnest attempt to say something meaningful about the corruption of the media Since the bad guys are network types (Dustin Hoffman as a for-mer hotshot reporter banished to the sticks, Alan Alda as a preening star anchor), its the electronic media that takes the biggest drubbing, though print types are part of the equation as well Essentially, Mad City is Ace in the Hole minus writer director Billy Wilder's lethal savvy, with John Travolta as a recently fired, sweet sap museum guard who tries to get his job back from his waspish employer (Blythe Danner), only to take her and a dozen schoolchildren hostage Hoffman's reporter latches onto the crisis hard, seeing it as the means to his professional resurrection. The two leads are fine Travolta is good at playing stupid, and Hoffman excels at feral opportunists; and they improve as the story wears on Too bad the movie gets worse The great, and given Costa-Gavras' previous inevitable irony of continued on page 74 BEAN Even fans of physical comedy are likely to find that Bean falls pitifully short of Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean television series, not to mention his achingly funny turn as the inept trainee vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral There is a whisper of a story Bean, a humble British museum guard masquerading as an art expert, shows up at an A.

art museum to make a speech about a new portrait of Whistler's mother, and lays waste to the home and life of his straight man host (Peter MacNicol, holding up nicely under the circumstances). There's wit in the museum's look a cross between MOCA and the new Getty and Sandra Oh is wickedly funny as its garish publicist The rest, ploddingly directed by British comedian Mel Smith (who also made The Tall Guy is nothing but padding, a feeble frame within which Atkinson makes the usual faces (his writhing red lips had the under-IOs around me rolling in the aisles), gets into arguments with major household appliances and works of art, and drinks large quantities of prominently displayed product placement This is not comedy it's mugging And there's no excuse for making Bean cuddly; he only works with an evil edge (CitywideH Ella Taylor) EVES BAYOU The village called Eves Bayou takes its name from a slave who had "the sight" and charmed a French general into marrying her Her descendant (wonderful newcomer Jurnee Smollett), is also named Eve and warns us, "I killed my father" That's a world, a person and a threat in less than a scene, writer director Kasi Lemmons works fast, and the world she conjures is powerfully realized The era appears to be the early 1960s, Li SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SOPEBMASOCHIST Kirby Dick's sympathetic portrait of the late performance artist Bob Flanagan is most remarkable for the way it manages to locate the human being nearly obscured by breathing tubes, accouterments and his own will to self-spectacle. A self-ordained supermasochist, Flanagan was bom with cystic fibrosis, a hereditary disease that caused him unimaginable suffering. The child endured his pain, which he learned to ease or, more accurately, rage against with other, competing physical hurts, in time, the boy who was once lashed to his crib so he wouldn't harm himself, became the man who had turned his own body into a landscape of outrage, a stage on which he could ritualistically act out all manner of abuse. Flanagan's body became, quite literally, his own body of work.

In 1980, he took on what could only be called a co-author of that body when he signed on as the lifelong slave of artist (and supersadist) Sheree Rose. Together with Rose, Flanagan launched a vocation in performance art, bringing him notoriety, institutional support and something of a following. Kirby Dick befriended Flanagan after seeing him perform in the early '80s, and shot his documentary with Flanagan and Rose's active support over the course of several years. The collaborative nature of the film accounts for its startling, occasionally devastating emotional nakedness, but it also helps to clarify its principal flaw. In the tradition of cinema-v6rit6 great Jean Rouch, Dick wants to question the gap between the interviewer and interviewee, and to challenge the very notion of documentary objectivity.

He succeeds, but only at the expense of any view that might either confirm or question Flanagan's world-view, much less his claim to art: Sick is nothing if not subjective. The upshot is a film that is unexpectedly engaging, intimate and moving, but not half as intellectually rigorous as either its subject merits or its director likely hoped. (Nuart, Nov. 7-20) Manohla Dargis We also recommend: Beaumarchais the Scoundrel; Boogie Nights; Critical Care; The Devil's Advocate; The Edge; Eve's Bayou Excess Baggage; Fairytale: A True Story; Fast, Cheap Out of Control; 4 Little Girls; The Full Monty; George of the Jungle; Gummo; Habit Happy Together; The Ice Storm; I Know What You Did Last Summer; I Love You, I Love You Not In Out LA Confidential; Lilies; The Long Way Home; Men in Black; Red Comer; Soul Food; Switchback; Telling Lies in America; U-Turn Waco: The Rules of Engagement; Washington Square; Year of the Horse. (Selected theaters) (MD) AMAZON The best way to enjoy Oscar winner Kieth Merrill's latest IMAX film about the efforts of Western medical scientists to tap the healing powers of Amazon plant life with the help of local shamans is to ogle the gorgeous images and ignore the creaky dramatic structure holding them together Sure, Amazons save the rain-forest message and Merrill's respectful rapport with tribes like the Zoe earn high political marks, but the film's double-quester storyline featuring Dr Mark Plotkm, a renowned American ethnobotamst on the hunt for ancient elixirs, and Mamam, a Bolivian Callawaya shaman portrayed by one actor and voiced by another comes off as a hokey contrivance ill suited to the documentary format What does play well here is Merrill's fearless camera work, which glides over treetops, plunges into the river and zooms in on all sorts of creatures to capture some truly amazing shots The results, set off by actress Linda Hunts narration and Alan Williams powerful score, are relentlessly spectacular (Museum of Science and Industry IMAX Theater) AS) BEAUMARCHAIS THE SCOUNDREL Son of a clockmaker, playwright of such wit that his Marriage of Figaro is credited with triggering the French Revolution, Pierre de Beaumarchais is a natural hero for an upbeat bio Directorco writer Edouard Mo mar brings him dazzlingly to life Beaumarchais -causes a satiric stir with his first play, The Barber of Seville but, true to what Voltaire, said of him, prefers a life of action He serves as a judge He sword fights while court is in session a jealous aristocrat steamed over the stealing of a mistress He becomes a spy, champions the American Revolution, finds-love (Sandrine Kiberlain) and somehow, somehow gets the incendiary Figaro written Will he get it past the censors7 Can the revolution begin without him7 History books have been giving away the ending for two centuries, but even so, this movie's bright vitality keeps you guessing (Goldwyn Pavilion, Town Center 5.

State (Pasadena)) (FXF) BOOGIE NIGHTS Set in the San Fernando Valley porn industry, Paul Thomas Andersons Boogie Nights stretches from the halcyon years of the late 70s through the crash and bum of the early '80s, tracking the industry through the meta- -continued on page 74 Reviews by Donnell Alexander, Greg Burk, Nicole Campos, Manohla Dargis, Hazel-Dawn Dumped, F.X. Feeney, Ernest Hardy, Paul Malcolm, Marina Rosenfeld, Andrew Sargent and Ella Taylor. AIR FORCE ONE The first 20 minutes of Wolfgang Petersen's new action adventure. Air Force One, are so thrillingly choreographed (and so very, very loud), it's all the more disappointing that the balance of the movie tends to move less like a Stealth bomber and more like a jalopy jerking fitfully from plot hole to plot hole, only occasionally finding momentum Written by Andrew Marlowe, the film has a setup that's pure gold The president of the United States, his family and a few dozen aides are taken hostage aboard the First Airplane by Kazakhstan terrorists Yes, its The Desperate Hours, with Airport and some Steven Seagal movies tossed in for good and bad measure, only most of the time it's a kick, even with those five phony endings Add to that the fact that Harrison Ford makes for a more appealing president than Bill Clinton He not only looks good, he can kill a man with his bare hands 70 LA WEEKLY NOVEMBER 7 -13, 1997.