The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 205

ryrirrfrir'ia i AT THE MOVIES SATURDAY NOVEMBER 4 1995 fif) THE MIAMI HERALD INTERNATIONAL EDITION JO nxwjfw urni'imi'iu'Lil Holidays is relatively entertaining By RENE RODRIGUEZ herald Movie Critic Near the end of her three-day visit to her Baltimore home for Thanksgiving dinner Claudia Larson wonders you go home do you ever sit there and wonder are these people? here the hell did I come Anyone who endures the holiday tradition of gathering with far-flung relatives will chuckle at that line in Home for the Holidays a bittersweet comedy about familial obligations The trouble is Claudia (Holly Hunter) is even worse off than usual this year Shortly before her flight from Chicago to Baltimore she's fired from her job And at the airport her 1 5-year-old daughter (Claire Danes) who is staying behind announces she plans to lose her virginity while Claudia is gone Upon arriving stress level gets kicked up a few more notches Her chain-smoking Mom (Anne Bancroft) and bird-brained Dad (Charles Durning) are their usual overbearing selves Her brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr) who is gay hasn't yet told the family he's married his lover Her sister Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson) who bears a deep resentment toward her siblings for moving away and not imitating her domestic lifestyle isn't feeling particularly merry And Aunt Gladys (Geraldine Chaplin) who speaks from her heart at the most inopportune moments is in a talkative mood Home for the Holidays is ripe with promise for fr jF 4 it I MOVIE REVIEW FEAST OF JUL Embeth Davidtz and Ben Chaplin fall in love FEAST OF JULY (R) An elegant tearjerker from Merchant Ivory Feast of July the latest production from the Merchant Ivory team is a melancholy tale possessed of an icy sadness: Even when its characters are walking around in sunny daylight their hearts are shivering Based on the novel by HE Bates the story is set in late 19th Century England and centers on Bella (Embeth Davidtz) still pining for her lover Arch Wilson (Greg Wise) who abandoned her and left her pregnant pregnancy results in a miscarriage after she sets out on foot during a vicious winter to find Arch and nursed back to health by the Wainwright family who take her in as one of their own The three Wainwright sons are all captivated by beauty and each begins to court her in his individual manner creating tension in the previously peaceful household One of the three will eventually win her hand but just as things seem to be getting better tragedy strikes again Feast of July is an elegant radiantly performed weeper that moves the viewer much more deeply than your average downbeat romance Davidtz (Schindler's List) is affecting as the heartbroken Bella even when laughing her eyes betray her inner sadness and director Christopher Menaul paces the movie confidently letting the characters grow on you before setting off the various machinations of fate that lead to an ineffably sad finale Cast: Embeth Davidtz Ben Chaplin Tom Bell Gdmma Jones James Purefoy Greg Wise Director: Christopher Menaul Producers: Henry Herbert Christopher Neame Screenwriter: Christopher Neame Based on the novel by HE Bates A Touchstone Pictures release Running time: 115 minutes Violence adult themes FAMILY NO PICNIC: Charles Durning Anne Bancroft wrestle over the holiday turkey while Holly Hunter looks on HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (PG-13) Cast: Holly Hunter Robert Downey Jr Anne Bancroft Charles Durning Dylan McDermott Cynthia Stevenson Geraldine Chaplin Steve Guttenberg Claire Danes David Strathairn Austin Pendleton Director: Jodie Foster Producers: Peggy Raiski Jodie Foster Screenwriter: WD Richter Based on a short story by Chris Radant Cinematographer Lajos Koltai Music: Mark Isham A Paramount Pictures release Running time: 103 min-utes Vulgar language adult themes hilarious satire but director Jodie Foster quite make the elements gel Even in its best scene the catastrophic Thanksgiving dinner the movie always feels muted with laughs never as big or sharp as they should be Part of the problem is that it becomes increasingly harder to laugh at the viciousness toward each other Unlike The Ref which took a similar premise and spiked it with cutthroat unapologetically dark humor Home Jor the Holidays wants to be a movie too Foster content with skewering Norman Rockwell she wants you to leave the theater with a lump in your throat too Accordingly the actors play relatively straight making the movie work better as drama than comedy The immensely likable Hunter provides a sympathetic alter ego for the viewer Durning and Bancroft make a convincing aging couple and Stevenson is surprisingly poignant as the embittered sister (her final scene with Hunter is leavened with so much pain it seems to belong in another movie) Downey plays Tommy abrasively at first but he settles down and unearths the dignity Only Dylan McDermott as visiting friend uho falls for Claudia fares badly: He does what he can with the role but the character feds nothing more than the requisite love interest Home Jor the Holidays' script build on itself: simply a scries of episodes separated by title cards Foster does show a knack for funny touches: On the interminable drive home from the airport with her babbling parents Claudia looks out the window and briefly bonds with an exasperated soul enduring a similar scenario The scene is funny because most people can relate to it and typical of much of Home for the Holidays not on screen hilarious what it reminds you of RENE RODRIGUEZ Herald Movie Critic that awful smell? It just may be Fair Game Test audiences that laughed wrong LES MISERABLES (R)AAVi i tr frrt -s- Film intertwines classic modern tales Claude Les Miserables opens and close with dizzying dance scenes The first is set at night in a lush golden palace site of a New Eve ball on the threshold of a new century the other 40-odd years later happens outdoors in a small-town wedding under the afternoon sun In both the camera holds to its subjects precariously as it turns around and around faster and faster blurrying shapes and faces giving happiness an uneasy feel One scene leads to tragedy The other is open-ended and while no reason to suspect this we sense it might end in tragedy too After all as the hero Henri Fortin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) reminds us are only two or three stories in the world and we must live them over and In this ambitious adaptation of the novel by Victor Hugo Fortin and his son Henri represent variations of hero Jean Valjean At every retelling each has to deal with his own Thenardiers innkeepers who take advantage of other misfortunes and find peace In world echoing we do have a chance for redemption even joy even if now and then we give in to our petty ambitions our miserly side It is a hopeful view tempered by experience Lelouch who throughout the movie intertwines the classic tale and his own modern-day version is not exempt The escape from occupied Paris of the Jewish family evokes own family story and as if to further blur the issue his own daughter Salome plays a role of the same name But then there is more than a whiff of self-importance in the ponderous pace the earnest tone the nearly (soap) operatic gestures and he docs give in to happy ending instincts At the end it is his underlying belief in simple decency and a smart dignified performance by Jean Paul Belmondo that redeems him It is only fitting Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo Michel Boujenah Alessandra Martmes Annie Girardot Clementine Celaire and Philipe Leotard Writerdirector: Claude Lelouch Producer: Claude Lelouch A Warner Bros release Running time: 174 minutes Violence adult themes In French with English subtitles FERNANDO GONZALEZ Herald Arts Writer By RENE RODRIGUEZ Herald Movie Critic In Fair Game supermodel Cindy Crawford plays Kate McQuean a gorgeous Miami civil lawyer who wears dangerously short miniskirts to work (you can imagine her standing up in court saying honor an As the movie opens Kate has been marked for murder not for her fashion sense which is impeccable but for a repossession case involving a boat being used for mysterious purposes by some ex-KGB The Russians first take a shot at Kate as jogging along Ocean Drive: They miss Then they blow up her Miami Shores waterfront apartment but the only casualty is a cat the blast sends Kate off her balcony and into the water from which she emerges soaked and frazzled but miraculously unhurt (maybe her mousse was fireproof) This makes the bad guys really mad Armed with high-tech surveillance gizmos and tracking devices they storm the Anchor Hotel on Collins Avenue where detective Max Kirkpatrick (William Baldwin) has taken the dazed and confused Kate to hide out The killers easily dispatch the cops standing guard in the lobby but when they take aim at Kate the assassins turn into the gang that shoot straight Their bullets do find the water pipes in the hotel walls poor Kate ends up drenched (again!) and she must run around in a wet T-shirt for a while without a bra natch Kate and Max get away and call the FBI for help but the agents who come to the rescue turn out to be impersonators (those sneaky Russians!) A gratuitously violent shootout ensues and Max and Kate again manage to slip away leaving Max to marvel at the ingenious trick did everything I was supposed he says thoroughly puzzled checked his IDr') The two check into another hotel and Kate takes her second shower of the night (she likes water that one) Before she can get any rest the killers come calling again so Max decides be safer for them to just drive around in his Jeep while they try to figure out why Kate is so darned unpopular Until the plot proved us wrong we just figured the bad guys were members of the Acting Police Fair Game has been delayed for months primarily because test audiences reportedly laughed at performance and were confused by the story Some clumsy nips and tucks later Fair Game still make sense and left of performance still cracks you up Considering the star Crawford gets scant dialogue here: Only a couple of times is she even allowed to recite three sentences in a row Chunks of the film seem to be missing too: The scene containing the infamous line is Miami we only shoot the from Fair Game's trailer is gone and the action sometimes shifts unexpectedly from one locale to the next without explanation (watch how the background changes suddenly after Baldwin handcuffs himself to Crawford) It help that what dialogue Crawford docs have consists of lines like going the hell is the dumbest thing ever seen!" was hoping to demo your and our personal favorite that which Kate asks Max as parked next to a tractor-trailer full of oinking rooting pigs worse Crawford has no concept of inflection or tone She speaks her lines in bored monotone from beginning to end as if she were reciting from the phone book Screenwriter Charlie Fletcher stingy with the awful lines giving the villains equally tasty bon mots can have the boat a bad guy tells a captured Kate it will be in little pieces with YOURSELF IN Total Eclipse a dark story grimly told By RENE RODRIGUEZ Herald Movie Critic Total Eclipse is about the struggle of the tortured artist the time-honored battle to find meaning in a mundane world the innate drive to shake up the bourgeoisie a movie filled with angst and longing and it leaves you eager to label yourself an ordinary Joe This film turns genius into a four-letter word Based on the destructive real-life relationship between the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine the movie is like a pompous would-be artiste who always dresses in black spouts gloom-and-doom philosophies and smiles only when sneering at his fellow man Total Eclipse burrows so deeply into its depiction of young cruelty it ultimately feels as disdainful as its protagonists Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Rimbaud who at 17 established a friendship with the 25-year-old Verlaine (David Thewlis) in 1871 Paris Verlaine marveled at the talent and beauty of joie de vivre poetry and he soon takes part in defiance of established literary circles and stuffy etiquette joining the teen on drunken tears and youthful shenanigans that shocked peers wife Mathilde (Romaine Bohringcr) pregnant with their first child is worried about her volatile behavior his drinking and his inordinately strong bond with Rimbaud but when she expresses her concern Verlaine responds with physical violence As his relationship with Rimbaud intensifies their passion for each other turns sexual and eventually Verlaine abandons his family to travel across Europe with the reckless Rimbaud cheering his arrogance and youthful abandon at every step Total Eclipse wants to show how unbridled artistic fervor can consume a creative mind but the movie focuses too much on the ugliness of its story and too little on the spiritual zeal that drew Rimbaud and Verlaine together DiCaprio plays Rimbaud as a mean-spirited unruly fiat boy one so obnoxiously smug and self-obsessed that impossible to correlate him with the great writer supposed to be Near the end when the movie flashes forward to Rimbaud as an adult the scenes carry no weight: learned so little about him all you can see is DiCaprio sporting an unconvincing moustache IF LOOKS COULD KILL: William Baldwin with Cindy Crawford whose career as a supermodel should emerge unscathed Director Andrew Sipes has a nice flair for MTV-style action the movie looks as slick as a fashion magazine but like other recent made-in-Miami action flicks (Bad Hoys The Specialist) no amount of eye candy can overcome a creatively bankrupt script Fair Game hurt modeling career she looks stunning in every shot but safe to say Meryl Streep has nothing to worry about MOVIE REVIEW FAIR GAME (R) -A Cast: William Baldwin Cindy Crawford Steven Berkoff Christopher McDonald Salma Hayek Director: Andrew Sipes Producer: Joel Silver Screenwriter: Charlie Fletcher Cinematographer: Richard Bowen Music: Mark Mancina A Warner Bros release Running time: 90 minutes Vulgar language considerable violence gore brief nudity sexual situations adult themes less-than-mighty Aphrodite still has its funny moments most of one-liners And always Allen himself once again playing the usual nebbish worrywart only had an heel got an a persona we get enough of Mighty Aphrodite might be minor Woody but it has some mighty funnv moments MOVIE REVIEW is initially amusing but would have been a better fit with wacky early comedies (Bananas Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex) By the time the chorus resorts to singing Cole Porter tunes it becomes obvious the gag worked a lot better on paper than it docs on film marriage to his gallery-owner wife (Helena Bonham Carter) is on the rocks but their scenes together are so bland you care less if they split up Carter so good in Merchant-Ivory films feels miscast everywhere else: She register here sabotaging an important plot line But Sorvino who is a marvel and as Allen tries to fix her up with an equally slow-witted boxer named Kevin (Michael Rapaport) the movie reaches giddy comic heights: Rapaport had 16 fights and I won all of them except and Sorvino know how to make the As played by the wonderful Mira Sorvino (Barcelona Quiz Show) Linda is an irresistibly endearing creation a little girl trapped in the body of a ditzy call girl and even if seen this character before Sorvino gives her enough new curves to make her feel unique the best thing in Mighty Aphrodite the 26th film directed by Woody Allen a light often silly comedy sharply funny in spots middling and unwieldy in others As the title implies Allen is flirting with mythic Greek undertones in this tale of an adoptive father (played by Allen) who is so impressed by his intelligence that he sets out to find the natural mother who turns out to be a hooker a lot in Mighty Aphrodite that work A running gag involving a Greek chorus that comments on the action and offers advice to the characters By RENE RODRIGUEZ Herald Movie Critic Mighty Aphrodite features one of the all-time great dumb blonds: Linda Ash a prostitute and sometime porn actress who speaks in a nasal squeak hilariously at odds with her low-rent vulgarity and whose Manhattan apartment is done in what would best be described as phallic decor Linda has a 24-karat heart and is possessed with a mystifying logic: When a potential john asks her you afraid a guy is going to tie you up and kill Linda replies no I always get paid in MOVIE REVIEW TOTAL ECLIPSE (R) -A Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio David Thewlis Romane Bohringer Dominique Blanc Director: Agnieszka Holland Producer: Jean-Pierre Ramsay Levi Screenwriter Christopher Hampton Cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis Music: Jan AP Kaczmarek A Fine Line release Running time: 1 10 minutes Vulgar language nudity sexual situations violence adult themes MIGHTY APHRODITE (R)-W Cast: Woody Allen Mira Sorvino Helena Bonham Carter Michael Rapaport Murray Abraham Olympia Dukakis Peter Weller David Ogden Stiers Jack Warden Director: Woody Allen Producer: Robert Greenhut Screenwriter Woody Allen Cinematographer: Carlo DiPalma A Miramax Films release Running time: 95 minutes Vulgar language sexual situations adult themes.