1997: Year in Review

Kevin Smith's third feature is a step up from the crude but hilarious "Clerks" (1994) and the just plain crude "Mallrats" (1995). Ben Affleck stars as Holden McNeil, a New Jersey comic book artist who is the co-creator of "Bluntman and Chronic," a cult success based on the exploits of Jay and Silent Bob as superheroes. His partner is Banky (Jason Lee), who is his BFFL, and watches his back - perhaps more than either of them realize. One night, Holden and Banky are invited to a bar by the black militant (and homosexual) Hooper X (a hilarious Dwight Ewell, who dispenses some of the most sense in the film), a fellow comic book artist who is joined on the minority panel by Alyssa Jones (an effervescent Joey Lauren Adams). Holden is almost automatically smitten with Alyssa, unaware that his illusions will soon be shattered. When Hooper (on Alyssa's behalf) invites Holden to a club to hang out with Alyssa, he discovers what may keep them apart - she's a lesbian. Their friendship, despite this, grows along with the potential for romance, and jealousy of sorts from Banky. This powder keg of a situation boils down to a brilliant, intense scene where Holden must lay his cards out on the table and make his feelings known to both his best friend and his new gal-pal, and some heart-wrenching decisions must be made. Smith graduates here to a heretofor unimaginable level of maturity and thoughtfulness, while still maintaining the same "quality" of crassness that made his earlier works so oddly endearing. This film is sweet, smart and hilarious. Affleck was never more funny and charming than in this film, and Adams shoulda been a star on the basis of this performance. This is a gem.

Majid Majidi's winsome fable is a sweet, heartwarming, ultimately uplifting film from Iran that manages to be a perfect children's movie. Ali (Mir Farrokh Hashemian) goes to the cobbler to get new shoes for his sister Zahra (Bahare Seddiqi). On the way home, Ali accidentally loses them at the grocer's and a blind man accidentally picks them up. Ali goes home in shame, afraid of what will happen if his parents find out, so he and his sister concoct a plan: She will go to school in the morning wearing his own shoes, and run to a meeting place to give him his shoes back so he can attend school in the afternoon. What could go wrong, right? Ali must improvise a lot in order to keep his secret and stay out of trouble. Majidi's film is simple but not simplistic, intelligent but nowhere near condescending, and sweet without being cloying. The siblings love each other and the young actors portray them with solid and believable performances. The film unfolds with the gentle humor of everyday life, never pounding home the plot points, always with a good insight into human nature. The subtitles are generally easy enough to follow for any child of reading age. This is a fine film - for any age.

Woody Allen's wickedly funny masterpiece is as self-effacing - strike that; ego-obliterating - as they come. Allen stars as Harry Block, an aptly named and once moderately famous writer who now sits boozing in his Manhattan apartment, shifting the events and people of his life around under a microscope to see what "thinly-veiled" version of reality he can conjur up next for his "fiction;" a disgruntled ex refers to his "alchemy" and to him as "some f---in black magician." His problem is that he can't write. His life is a shambles: he has had multiple wives (including Kirstie Alley as a therapist who works out of their cramped apartment and Amy Irving as the cuckolded woman whose sister Harry woos into bed), a penchant for hookers, and far too many neuroses to mention. The plot, as it were, kicks in when Harry is told he's to be honored by his old alma-mater, who once expelled him, but his plans to attend are thwarted at every turn - he has nobody really to share the honor with, save for a young son (Eric Lloyd) who he kidnaps, an old friend who is poorly (Bob Balaban) and a kind, wisecracking black hooker named Cookie Williams (Hazelle Goodman). The road will be paved with many detours and visions, bittersweet memories and hilariously harsh confrontations; in this, Allen borrows somewhat from his idol Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" (1957), which also featured an intellectual on his way to be honored and reflecting on his life. Woody Allen, who also wrote and directed, has crafted a wildly profane (you've never heard this much cursing; not even in "Bullets Over Broadway" or "Mighty Aphrodite"), sometimes dizzyingly kaleidoscopic vision of a self-loathing, narcissistic, sexist, vile sewer of a human being; just about everyone has a doppelganger. The film's style is to intercut snippets of Harry's many ill-fated relationships - including the affair he had with Irving's sister (a fantastic Judy Davis), now a gun-toting victim of heartbreak, and the sweet young student (Elisabeth Shue in reality, Jennifer Garner in fiction) who in turn broke Harry's heart - with bits from his various short stories and novels, as well as some of the moments from "reality" which inspired him in the first place. His fictions include everything from an "auto-biographical" thing about himself when he was young, married, sex-obsessed (portrayed by Tobey Maguire) and has an encounter that can best be described as ill-fated, to an actor (Robin Williams) who is out of focus and forces the world around him (including wife Julie Kavner and his kids and co-workers) to adjust to his "disability," as well as a not-so-subtle portrait of the destruction of his marriage to a "devout Jewish" therapist (he is Stanley Tucci, she is Demi Moore), and a mean-spirited, enraging slice of his affair with his sister-in-law (in fiction, she's Julia Louis-Dreyfus and he's "Mermaids" director Richard Benjamin). Allen throws in the kitchen sink, and then the whole kitchen: he even finds time for a brutally honest (and hilarious) excursion to the home of his ultra-Jewish half-sister (Caroline Aaron) and her zealot husband (Eric Bogosian), a darkly hilarious jab at his parents that features a Star Wars-themed bar mitzvah, the tale of an axe murderer and cannibalism, and that's even before an astonishingly designed sojurn into Hell to ask the Devil (Billy Crystal, who is also Harry's successful former best friend Larry) to give him back his young girlfriend (Shue). Because, as he finds, he cannot function in life but only in art, it is the excerpts from his work that are smooth and film-like, while the moments of reality are often fragmented, jump-cutting and full of slightly off-framed shots. Occasionally, Allen will begin a sentence, cut to another angle in the middle of another thought, and then back again to join the previous thought already in further progress. Sometimes, the film begins a camera move only to double back and start over; this reflects the fragmented nature of Harry's thought process. The results are sometimes a bit confusing at first, ambitious and admirably full of candor, and always hilarious. One of Allen's very best films!

NOTE: That catchy song over the beginning and ending credits is "Twisted" by Annie Ross of "Short Cuts"-fame. The original screenplay was deservedly nominated for an Oscar.

Lee Tamahori's riveting, thoughtful, suspenseful thriller is about as well-made and involving as we could ever expect from the material - and then some. Charles Morse (Anthony Hopkins) is a billionaire who takes his private plane into the wilds of Alaska so that his beautiful young model wife Mickey (Elle Macpherson) can be photographed by a young hot-shot fashion photographer named Robert Green (Alec Baldwin). The differences between these two men couldn't be more obvious. Robert is a wise-cracking city slicker, a professional who is looking for the best shots money can buy. Charles is the well-to-do businessman (though it's never quite revealed what his business is) who has a thirst for knowledge, who absorbs everything he learns and reads, and who happens to be reading the book "Lost in the Woods," a sort of how-to manual for survival in the wilderness, before things get underway. Charles is also less oblivious than people perhaps take him for: he can see clearly what a kindly old lodge keep (L.Q. Jones) points out - his young wife is very attractive and so is Robert, they're both young and they are likely to have an affair at some point - if they aren't already. The plot kicks in when Robert wants to go get a picture of a distinguished looking Native American man who the lodgekeeper keeps a photo of in the front of his place. Robert is willing to go "off on an adventure" to find the old man, and invites Charles along. Charles, it turns out, is something of a dab-hand at surviving in the woods (thanks, no doubt, to his latest reading material), and so he becomes invaluable when the trek involves a 20 mile plane ride and the plane crashes (after a perfectly-timed line which will come back to haunt the plot, as it turns out), stranding Charles, Robert and Robert's assistant Stephen (Harold Perrineau) out in the middle of nowhere. Charles, Robert and Stephen get along fine for a while, until a clearly telegraphed bear attack, leaving our two intrepid heroes out there, alone. Soon, Charles and Robert get to talking, and seem to have developed a certain fondness and respect for one another - but nothing is what it seems; remember that line of dialogue I mentioned before. Lee Tamahori ("Once Were Warriors," "Mulholland Falls") directed from an original screenplay by playwright turned filmmaker David Mamet ("Glengarry Glen Ross," "House of Games"). The film is beautifully-made, from Donald M. McAlpine's majestic cinematography, to Neil Travis' luxuriously-paced editing, to the evocative music by Jerry Goldsmith. Though the setting of the Alaskan wilderness is a new one for Mamet, the basic underlying material is more of the same - two men getting down to brass tacks about what makes them tick, and the con-games people can play with one another. It is great fun to watch Baldwin and Hopkins, two old pro's if ever there were, creating the relationship between these men - which develops with a refreshing subtlety. And, above all, it's great to hear Mamet's trademark dialogue spouted back and forth between two well-developed characters, stuck in a somewhat cliched and hackneyed situation, winking all the time.

Andrew Niccol's intriguing, thought-provoking sci-fi/noir is about dreaming of a better life, and what one is willing to do in order to prove they are worthy of that life. In the "Near-Future," being born "the natural way" has fallen by the wayside in favor of being an "In Vitro." Unfortunately for him, Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) was born when being what has come to be called a "Faith Birth" was still fashionable. He was also born with a congenital heart condition. His parents (Elias Koteas and Jayne Brooke) decided to have another child, one "worthy of his father's name," and Vincent never quite measured up. Now, in a newfangled society that champions the genetically elite and discriminates illegally against those who are "imperfect," he has gone from being declared "Valid" to being "In-Valid." Determined to get to space by any means necessary, Vincent finds an unscrupulous salesman (Tony Shalhoub) to help purchase the identity of Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), a former British swimming star who was paralyzed in an auto-accident. Living with Jerome, Vincent has used his bodily fluids, his look and, yes, even his heartbeats to rise through the ranks of Gattaca, the Aerospace Corporation that has become the future's version of NASA. A plot creeps in when it seems someone has murdered the mission director and two Federal agents (Loren Dean and Alan Arkin) must search for the killer. Meanwhile, Vincent must dodge the suspicious looks of his mission supervisor (Gore Vidal), while wooing an attractive fellow flight coordinator named Irene (Uma Thurman). Will Vincent remain free, or will one of them find out his secret? The film has been written and directed by Andrew Niccol, and is an astonishing debut. He creates this world so fully and seems to know it inside-out. His film is full of profound ideas, plopped down in the middle of that old Hitchcock standby plot, The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused, yet the plot serves the ideas, not the other way around; it is deeply involving, and surprisingly hard to predict. The look of the film, achieved by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak ("Three Colors: Blue"), is often cold but beautiful, prone to a color palette of oddly cold amber colors, juxtaposed with glorious deep blues and sea-greens. The film is set to a lush, vibrant and insistent musical score by Michael Nyman, made of pianos and strings, melancholy and beautiful at once. In its tale of someone who is considered "less-than" overcoming many obstacles put in place by society, this film is profoundly moving; it's one of the year's best films.

NOTE: The film was nominated for an Oscar for Art Direction-Set Decoration.

Barry Levinson's ingenious satire was remarkably prescient when it was originally released during the time that President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in the news in late 1997/early 1998; its story is even more relevant today as satire and a frightening warning of the shape of things to come. Robert De Niro stars as Conrad Brean, a spin-doctor, "Mr. Fix-It" as Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) calls him, a one-man solution to any problem the White House needs handled. In this case, Ms. Ames calls Conrad in when the President, on the eve of his potential re-election, is reported to have had sex with a Firefly girl in "the office behind the Oval Office." Conrad's solution is to go to Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) and have him "produce" a fake war with Albania. Soon, the trio enlists help from a crazy country singer (Willie Nelson), the "Fad King" (Denis Leary) and a fashion consultant (Andrea Martin), and there's a theme song being produced, some grainy "news footage" being shot in a studio with a young Canadian actress (Kirsten Dunst) playing an "Albanian victim," and whatever other tricks Brean and Motss can finagle. The screenplay, based on the book "American Hero" by Larry Beinhart, was co-written by David Mamet, and it shows. The dialogue comes fast, furious, and just a hair too clever. The plot sommersaults its way through twist after twist, and if after a while the film feels a bit too self-satisfied, you're nevertheless nodding to yourself and thinking, "Of course," at whatever this comedy dream team has cooked up next. The most startlingly timeless political satire since Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1964).