ON SCREEN:

CAST AWAY: Unlike most of the rest of the world, I am not really a big fan of Forrest Gump, the first collaboration between director Bob Zemeckis and actor Tom Hanks.  To my great surprise, I actually liked this movie (their latest work) a lot better.  Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a hotshot young efficiency expert for Fed Ex who travels to foreign country offices and gives pep talks to faltering employees about the importance of time.  He is called up unexpectedly to Malaysia just as he is planning to propose to his longtime girlfriend Jan (Helen Hunt) and ends up the only survivor of a horrific crash in the Pacific Ocean, which lands him on a small island somewhere in the Pacific... where he begins to experience time (and the rest of life) in a very different way.   The message being delivered here, like most Hollywood messages, isn't especially subtle, but it is delivered much more artfully than the norm, making this film a great pleasure.  The terrifying plane crash, and Hanks' subsequent struggle to become used to island life, are related with a sober realism and without lots of heavy-handed music to guide the viewer's every emotion. With a few exceptions, even the computer graphics look like what they're meant to look like.  While many viewers might find the island-life scenes boring, I actually found them to be the exact opposite–I was riveted to the screen, because I desperately wanted Chuck to survive and get back home someday.  (This interest in the main character is exactly what was absent from Forrest Gump, at least for me.)  The later developments in the plot (which I dare not describe in detail) I actually found less interesting.  This was a minor gripe, however, as was my ambivalence about Helen Hunt's performance (she never quite nails down her Southern accent, and sometimes seems less-than-involved with her role).  As a side note, much has been said about the product-placement in the movie, particularly the omnipresence of FedEx packages, making the movie seem a bit like one long commercial.  While I would agree that this is one of the cheesier aspects of the movie, I also liked the realism of featuring an actual company, instead of a fake one that we would all know was just a stand-in for the real FedEx.  (To some extent, this is a pet peeve of mine; I have never seen a movie with a fake company name that didn't sound like exactly what it was, a movie-fake-company-name.)  See this.  RATING: 8.

ON TAPE:

SMOKE: In the first scene of Smoke, a tired freelance writer (William Hurt) walks into the unpretentious Brooklyn tobacco shop of Augie Wren (Harvey Keitel) and tells the strangers there the story of Sir Walter Raleigh's method for weighing smoke.  We thus learn the essence of Wayne Wang's film in its first few minutes: Since most of the important people in our lives start out as strangers, how do all these strangers get to know each other?  How is it different when the "stranger" is a family member or friend one hasn't seen in years?  How do we weigh immaterial things like the relationships we have with other people, and what do we owe strangers?  Wang uses an episodic structure to explore these notions, with sections devoted to the writer, Augie, a young black man who offhandedly saves the writer from a car crash (Harold Perrineau Jr.), and Augie's long-forgotten ex-girlfriend, in town for a favor (Stockard Channing).  The potential sentimentality of all this is restrained by Wang and writer Paul Auster's common touch and gentle, dignified humor, traits that the director showed as far back as his first feature, Dim Sum (which I reviewed many issues ago).  In the acting department, I was particularly impressed by Hurt, who evokes a great world-weariness, light-years away from his roles in Children of a Lesser God and Broadcast News.  Keitel is at least as good, and is also cast against type--as a sympathetic character!  (Ashley Judd provides the only sour acting note, overdoing it a bit as Channing's estranged daughter; on the other hand, Forrest Whitaker, as the young man's estranged father, is perfectly cast.)  The ending is fantastic.  RATING: 9.

DUEL: An unassuming, stressed-out salesman from LA (intended to be an Everyman, he is unsubtly named David Mann) begins a rather uneventful morning driving through the California desert for a high-pressure sales meeting in another town.  Soon, he gets into an aggressive-driver contest with the anonymous driver of a gasoline truck, who then attempts to run him off the road... several times.  There's a lot of intriguing history behind this film--it was directed by a young up-and-comer named Steven Spielberg (who had already absorbed everything he would learn from Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut), and another young up-and-comer, Dennis Weaver, was perfectly cast as Mann.  History, however, isn't its only interest--Duel has lost none of the clout it had thirty years ago.  There are a lot of reasons for this--the almost unbearable tension, the eerie anonymity of the other driver (whose truck has the ominous "FLAMMABLE" pasted on the back), the nearly-perfect resolution.  My favorite part, however, is the bathroom scene after Mann's first encounter with the truck, in which he realizes that he must now re- evaluate basic ideas about his safety and his society.  This, and the primal fear of nature and the unknown explored in The Blair Witch Project (which I reviewed a few issues ago), are perhaps the scariest things humans can imagine, and they give these two films their timeless immediacy.   RATING: 9.

NOTES: For those of you in the DC area, I would recommend seeing the South African painter and filmmaker William Kentridge's exhibit now at the Hirschhorn Museum (for more information, you can check out their webpage, which is hirshhorn.si.edu/) before it closes on May 13th.  Kentridge's animation depends on drawing and re-drawing his subjects with a charcoal pencil, and limiting themes and characters to a few symbolic types.  The results are a bit bleak (which was Jill's admittedly justified criticism of his work), but they are also some of the eeriest and most spellbinding animation being made today, at least in my opinion.  On a lighter note, Jill and I just saw a movie (Traffic, which I hope to review in the next newsletter) at Florida-based Muvico's new Egyptian theater in Arundel Mills Mall near our home.  As the name implies, this place is a takeoff on various Egyptian motifs and a revival of the Egyptian Revival architectural style, which was big in the 1920's.  The results, as you might guess, are both grand and tacky in a sort of Las-Vegas-meets-Luxor way, giving us a theater with a lot more character than most suburban-multiplexes (and much more than the cheesy mall attached to it).  It's not often that a movie theater is as entertaining as the movie!

Thanks for reading...  As always, feel free to send any comments, suggestions, and personal criticism my way.....
 

TONY  %)