ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, September 28, 1996 TAG: 9609300098
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: It Came From The Video Store
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO
"What can I say? I'm a bad man. Sometimes it's fun to be bad."
So 47-year-old Joseph Svenden (Dennis Hopper) explains his affair with 17-year-old Catherine Wheeler (Amy Locane), and he's not being flippant. That is what's going on in "Carried Away," Bruno Baretto's adaptation of Jim Harrison's novel "Farmer."
It's one of five dramas new to video.
The setting for "Carried Away" is a bleak, wintry Midwest where Joseph teaches at a two-room school. Rosalie (Amy Irving) teaches in the other room. She and Joseph have a comfortable "arrangement'' until Catherine arrives. Actually, everyone in Howardsville plays their expected roles - the doctor (Hal Holbrook), Joseph's dying mother (Julie Harris), even Catherine's father (Gary Busey).
Brazilian Barreto seems comfortable with this uniquely American - almost Faulknerian - material. In most of the important scenes he uses a strong horizontal light to emphasize the flat landscape. In telling the highly charged story, he emphasizes honesty over discretion, leaving himself open to charges of exploitation. But that's not his point. The film is sexy, well-acted and not without humor. Hopper proves again that he can be effective in an understated dramatic role.
Recommended.
The influence of Quentin Tarantino is slowly spreading throughout the film and video business. "Pure Danger" cheerfully recycles elements from "Pulp Fiction," "True Romance" and "Reservoir Dogs." It's a crime-comedy about ex-con Johnny Dean (director C. Thomas Howell) who finds himself on the run with waitress Becky (Teri Ann Linn) and a bag full of diamonds. Two gangs - one black (led by Leon), the other Italian - are after them. Johnny's hyperactive loudmouth friend Dice (Rick Shapiro) is little help.
The quickly paced action ranges from confrontations in diners, junkyards and topless bars to terrific car chases. (This is a PM Entertainment release, after all; if a vehicle doesn't crash and burn every seven minutes, something's wrong.)
Throughout, lots of guys in cheap black suits wave pistols in each others' faces and scream vile racial epithets.
If the source material is blatantly borrowed, the L.A. locations are well chosen and the humor is rough, earthy and original. That's where this one works best. It's a refreshingly unpredictable, tongue-in-cheek approach to the standard video shoot-'em-up. One warning: Those who thought the violence was excessive in "Pulp Fiction" won't be any happier with this one.
An enjoyable, almost-too-much star turn by Anthony LaPaglia is the main attraction in "Chameleon." He plays an undercover cop whose traumatic past may have driven him over the edge of sanity. Investigating a drug/money-laundering ring, he submerges himself so deeply in the roles he assumes that his boss, Kevin Pollak, becomes worried. The rest of the plot is standard movie thriller stuff - a little slow and, at the end, cliched - but LaPaglia's performance overcomes the flaws.
Some spectacular North Carolina mountain scenery easily upstages a wooden cast and a slowly paced story in "The Journey of August King." In 1815, the title character (Jason Patric) is a young widower who helps a runaway slave (Thandie Newton) elude her obsessed owner (Larry Drake). The pace is leaden and, while the accents and phrasings may be historically accurate, they're still off-putting. Australian director John Duigan seems emotionally distant from the material, and the performances are impenetrably self-absorbed.
Low-budget New York ensemble comedies have become a mini-staple of the video business in recent years. "The Search for One-Eye Jimmy" is a shaggy-dog story about a young filmmaker (Holt McCallany) who goes back to his Brooklyn neighborhood and gets caught up with his old buddies - Nicholas Turturro and Michael Badalucco - as they go looking for another missing pal. Anne Meara, Jennifer Beals, John Turturro and Samuel L. Jackson show up for colorful cameos.
Writer/director Sam Henry Kass captures that on-the-fly quality of a good independent production, but this one isn't as enjoyable as "My Life's In Turnaround," "Blue in the Face," or several others that were cut from the same celluloid.
Next week: Funky romance!
Got a question about home video or film? Contact your favorite video columnist at P.O. Box 2491; Roanoke, VA 24010-2491, or by e-mail at 75331.2603@compuserve.com.
New releases this week:
Twister: ***
Starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. Directed by Jan De Bont. Warner Home Video. 106 min. Rated PG-13 for weather violence, strong language.
The Weather Channel version of "Jurassic Park" does everything you could ask of a big-budget, plot-challenged special-effects blockbuster. It's a too-simple story about tornadoes and the scientists who chase them. The effects created by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic will lose a lot in translation from wide screen to small, but the film is still flashy cinematic escapism, and that's all it's meant to be.
- Mike Mayo
Fargo: ****
Starring Frances McDormand. Polygram. 100 minutes. Rated R for explicitly sexual situations, profanity and graphic violence, although the violence is exceedingly funny.
No one combines comedy and horror the way the Coen brothers do, somehow preserving the sanctity of both elements. In this latest of their killer comedies, the brothers lampoon our kind neighbors to the North while telling a compelling tale of a kidnapping gone wrong. Steve Buscemi is one of the slimeballs, and McDormand is the simple - but far from stupid - small-town police chief who tracks the toxins to their source.
- Katherine Reed
Cemetery Man: *** 1/2
Starring Rupert Everett. CBS/Fox. 100 minutes. Rated R for violence, sexual content.
If you like your horror movies with a bloody good sense of humor, you'll like this offering from Italy. Everett as Francesco Dellamorte is the caretaker of a cemetery that has a tendency to come alive at night. The walking dead have to be killed again in a particularly grisly way before they can be reburied. But there's still time for love for Francesco and his assistant, Gnaghi, and that's when things really get interesting.
- KR
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie: ***
MCA/Universal. 74 minutes. Rated PG-13 for profanity, adult humor.
OK, so there's not much plot. Who needs plot when you've got one human and three robot space castaways riffing endlessly on terrible science fiction features such as "This Island Earth"? The script for the movie is twice as funny as any of the Comedy Central episodes that you may (or may not) have seen. MST fans: Enjoy. Others: Experience.
- KR
The Essentials:
Carried Away *** New Line Home Video. 105 min. Rated R for subject matter, nudity, sexual content, language, some violence.
Pure Danger *** PM Entertainment. 96 min. Rated R for graphic violence, paint-blistering language, brief nudity, sexual content.
Chameleon ** 1/2 WarnerVision. 108 min. Rated R for violence, language.
The Journey of August King * 1/2 Miramax. 92 min. Rated PG-13 for violence, subject matter.
The Search for One-Eye Jimmy ** 1/2 Cabin Fever Entertainment. 86 min. Rated R for language.
LENGTH: Long : 139 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Tom Servo (left), Mike Nelson and Crow T. Robot watchby CNBthe awe-inspiring ``This Island Earth'' in ``Mystery Science Theater
3000: The Movie,'' on video shelves this week.