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This year, we're paying for the success of "Three Men and a Baby" with two lumbering remakes of French originals: "Three Fugitives" and "Cousins." Francis Veber has nobody but himself to blame for the fact that Martin Short and Nick Nolte aren't as funny as the team he usually works with: Pierre Richard and Gerard Depardieu. Instead of elan, we get heavy machinery. And the delicacy, tenderness and worldliness that made "Cousin, Cousine" an art-house hit in 1976, are absent in the "Cousins" remake except when Isabella Rossellini is on screen. "Cousins," to judge by its crudely stereotyped ethnic families, behaves as if it were motivated by Paramount's desire to have its own "Moonstruck." Both, robbed of context, exist in an unfunny anxious vacuum. ("Cousins," in fact, takes place in Vancouver, which doesn't quite convince as an American city, underlining the film's sense of dislocation.)
Look for a lot of movies based on comic-strip or cartoon characters, starting with "Batman," toplining Michael Keaton, fighting Jack Nicholson as The Joker. In addition to the batpic, there'll be "Dick Tracy," "Spiderman," "Brenda Starr," "The Jetsons" and "Boris and Natasha" (of "Bullwinkle and Rocky" TV fame). Despite the low batting average of crime fighters at the movies so far in 1989, there's hope for better with Michael Douglas ("Black Rain"), Al Pacino ("Sea of Love"), Clint Eastwood ("Pink Cadillac"), Gene Hackman ("The Package"), Jamie Lee Curtis ("Blue Steel"), Timothy Dalton ("License to Kill"), Fred Ward ("Miami Blues"), Patrick Swayze ("Next of Kin") and Don Johnson ("Dead Bang").
Also: "Cookie," Susan Seidelman's mob comedy with Peter Falk, Emily Lloyd and Ricky Lake; "New York Stories," three short films by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese; "Slaves of New York," the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Tama Janowitz's New York artworld sendup; "Dead Poet's Society," starring Robin Williams as an English teacher; "Family Business," [Sean Connery], Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick as a crime clan; "The Old Gringo," Jane Fonda's film of Carlos Fuentes' novel pushing off from the Pancho Villa insurrection. New movies, too, from Ron Howard, Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Kevin Costner and Woody Allen (a comedy -- he'll appear). All that, and the return of "Gone with the Wind" and "Lawrence of Arabia."
ARTS ETC. / MOVIES
What did Richard III know about winters of discontent? Did he have to sit through "Her Alibi"? "The Fly II"? "Cousins"? "The 'burbs"? Here's how bad it's been so far in 1989: "The January Man," starring Kevin Kline as a fey cop chasing a serial killer when he isn't busy sleeping with the mayor's daughter and refusing to rekindle an affair with his brother's wife, began the year with a thud. Then a week later, "Physical Evidence" opened. Set in Boston, this one began life by being rejected as a "Jagged Edge" sequel. It had Burt Reynolds as a hungover cop framed for murder and Theresa Russell as the defense attorney trying to get him off. It was worse.
That is, until we saw "Her Alibi." That's the one with Tom Selleck posing uneasily as a writer of mystery novels, falling for Paulina Porizkova, providing her with a murder alibi, then wondering why she does things like run him over with his truck and shoot arrows into his posterior. Hopeless, lifeless, witless. But while we critics are slow, we do learn. We held off describing it as the worst movie of 1989, secure in the knowledge that, bad as it is, there's always the possibility of worse. Such as? Maybe such as a pair of upcoming cop movies -- "Turner and Hooch" and "K-9" -- in which Tom Hanks and Jim Belushi play cops with canine partners. Got your dog jokes ready?
Everybody knows that January and February are post-Christmas dump months for the studios, when they open the movies that weren't strong enough for Christmas and aren't strong enough for Easter. To judge by the release pattern of recent years, Hollywood doesn't see America's couch potatoes stirring much before Easter, when, presumably, they take their cue from the season and arise in a collective spasm of social resurrection. Until then, those who go to the movies are seemingly regarded as happy enough to be out of the cold so that they don't much care what they get.
What's depressing is not that Hollywood's executives can't get a handful of simple genre films right -- nothing new there -- but that they seem to have lost the knack for making them bad in ways that are amusing. Over the years, the ripest source of funny bad movies has been sci-fi. But "Deepstar Six" gets the year off to a glum start. We're kept waiting a long time to see what kind of trouble a bunch of scientists in an undersea lab are going to get into. When the monster finally does arrive, it's just a big, peevish mollusk, nothing worse than we've all encountered in seafood restaurants.
It's shaping up as a wet year for sci-fi. The "Alien" team of John Carpenter and Gale Hurd will return later this year with "The Abyss," another deep-sea outing. So is "Leviathan," with Peter Weller and Amanda Paye. And "Lords of the Deep." Let's hope they will be more than "Alien" under water. As for "The Fly II," don't ask. It will be remembered as the movie in which Daphne Zuniga is required to plant a big wet kiss on the cheek of what's left of Eric Stoltz, who plays the title role. Can the plagues to come in "Cyborg," "The Terror Within," "River of Death," "Death House" and "Empire of Ash" be any worse?
In fact, the only movies worth seeing so far in 1989 -- all three of them -- opened elsewhere in 1988: "The Accidental Tourist," "Hotel Terminus" and "Pelle the Conqueror." To be fair, most of the good movies in the first two months of the record-breaking year of 1988 opened in 1987 before Boston got them: "The Dead," "Au revior, les enfants," "Good Morning, Vietnam," "Moonstruck," "Repentance." Only "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was new. And if 1989 dropped "Who's Harry Crumb?" on us, 1988 will be remembered as the year of "Julia and Julia."
But this year, we're paying for the success of "Three Men and a Baby" with two lumbering remakes of French originals: "Three Fugitives" and "Cousins." Francis Veber has nobody but himself to blame for the fact that Martin Short and Nick Nolte aren't as funny as the team he usually works with: Pierre Richard and Gerard Depardieu. Instead of elan, we get heavy machinery. And the delicacy, tenderness and worldliness that made "Cousin, Cousine" an art-house hit in 1976, are absent in the "Cousins" remake except when Isabella Rossellini is on screen. "Cousins," to judge by its crudely stereotyped ethnic families, behaves as if it were motivated by Paramount's desire to have its own "Moonstruck." Both, robbed of context, exist in an unfunny anxious vacuum. ("Cousins," in fact, takes place in Vancouver, which doesn't quite convince as an American city, underlining the film's sense of dislocation.)
In a sense, Joe Dante's "The 'burbs" seems a woebegone refugee from Remake Hell, too, fueled by Hollywood's wrong-headed assumption that movies are more or less interchangeable. It doesn't directly parallel David Lynch's matchless "Blue Velvet," but Dante did seem to want, in a more mainstream way, to ply the same turf as Lynch did by exposing suburban irrationality. Not even Tom Hanks can save "The 'burbs," however. Like "Three Fugitives," it's always a couple of steps behind the audience. Finally, it caves in to a copout ending and a lot of overdone physical comedy that can never conceal the yawning hole where a script should be. With 10 months to go, 1989's movies are in a nowhere-to-go-but-up mode.
SIDEBAR COMING ATTRACTIONS
To paraphrase the chorus of streetwalkers in "Sweet Charity," there's gotta be something better than the movies we've seen so far in 1989. Maybe the drought will end with "Jackknife," a Vietnam-theme movie starring Ed Harris and Robert De Niro as one-time buddies who purge old grievances. It's one of a slate of Vietnam movies scheduled for 1989. Among the others: "Casualties of War," with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox; "In Country," with Bruce Willis as a vet with problems; "Born on the 4th of July," with Tom Cruise as Viet vet Ron Kovic, who returned a paraplegic. Also: "The Iron Triangle," in which the communist point of view is aired, and "84 Charlie Mopic," about a combat photographer.
Look for a lot of movies based on comic-strip or cartoon characters, starting with "Batman," toplining Michael Keaton, fighting Jack Nicholson as The Joker. In addition to the batpic, there'll be "Dick Tracy," "Spiderman," "Brenda Starr," "The Jetsons" and "Boris and Natasha" (of "Bullwinkle and Rocky" TV fame). Despite the low batting average of crime fighters at the movies so far in 1989, there's hope for better with Michael Douglas ("Black Rain"), Al Pacino ("Sea of Love"), Clint Eastwood ("Pink Cadillac"), Gene Hackman ("The Package"), Jamie Lee Curtis ("Blue Steel"), Timothy Dalton ("License to Kill"), Fred Ward ("Miami Blues"), Patrick Swayze ("Next of Kin") and Don Johnson ("Dead Bang").
Biopics, too. Jerry Lee Lewis (Dennis Quaid in "Great Balls of Fire"), John Belushi (Michael Chiklis in "Wired"), Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman in "Lean on Me"), Adolf Eichmann (Robert Duvall in "The White Crow") and Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley in "Scandal") will be among the personages drawn from so-called real life. Sequels, too, of course, starting with "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," in which we'll see Indy's father (Sean Connery). Then look for "The Karate Kid III," "Star Trek V," "Ghostbusters II," "Lethal Weapon II" and "The Stepfather II."
Also: "Cookie," Susan Seidelman's mob comedy with Peter Falk, Emily Lloyd and Ricky Lake; "New York Stories," three short films by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese; "Slaves of New York," the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Tama Janowitz's New York artworld sendup; "Dead Poet's Society," starring Robin Williams as an English teacher; "Family Business," Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick as a crime clan; "The Old Gringo," Jane Fonda's film of Carlos Fuentes' novel pushing off from the Pancho Villa insurrection. New movies, too, from Ron Howard, Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Kevin Costner and Woody Allen (a comedy -- he'll appear). All that, and the return of "Gone with the Wind" and "Lawrence of Arabia."
| JCARR ;02/14 NIGRO ;02/21,11:27 BADMOVI1 |
| Caption: PHOTO |
Martin Short (top photo) plays a bumbling bank robber in "Three Fugitives." Tom Selleck and Paulina Porizkova star in "Her Alibi."
PHOTO
Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper Feb 19, 1989