Category: 1998

The Parent Trap (1998, Nancy Meyers)

Where to start with The Parent Trap. There’s the structure–Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer split their script into three distinct parts. Well, maybe even three and a half. There’s the opening where Lindsay Lohan goes to summer camp and meets her twin. Then there’s the part where the twins meet the opposite parents–I’m not explaining The Parent Trap, you should know these things–and then there’s the third part, where everyone gets together.

Only, towards the end, the movie all of a sudden becomes a romance between Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson (as the parents). Meyers deftly shifts from the kids–sorry, Lohan–being the protagonist–protagonists–to turning Quaid into the lead. Richardson has a lot more to do on her own for a bit, which seems to be part of how Meyers pulls it off. She introduces the idea of a floating protagonist label so it’s easier to assign it to Quaid.

But there’s also the technical marvel part of the film. The effects with Lohan are outstanding. The Parent Trap is a special effects extravaganza; Dean Cundey lights it all perfectly, Meyers directs it perfectly.

Of course, the film only works because of Lohan and her ability to create two entirely different characters who not only look alike, but also sound alike for much of the film. Meyers’s direction of Lohan is phenomenal.

The excellent supporting performances from Lisa Ann Walter, Simon Kunz and Elaine Hendrix are essential.

The Parent Trap is a fantastic film.

3.5/4★★★½

CREDITS

Directed by Nancy Meyers; screenplay by David Swift, Meyers and Charles Shyer, based on a novel by Erich Kästner; director of photography, Dean Cundey; edited by Stephen A. Rotter; music by Alan Silvestri; production designer, Dean Tavoularis; produced by Shyer; released by Walt Disney Pictures.

Starring Lindsay Lohan (Hallie Parker / Annie James), Dennis Quaid (Nick Parker), Natasha Richardson (Elizabeth James), Elaine Hendrix (Meredith Blake), Lisa Ann Walter (Chessy), Simon Kunz (Martin), Polly Holliday (Marva Kulp Sr.), Maggie Wheeler (Marva Kulp Jr.), Ronnie Stevens (Grandfather James) and Joanna Barnes (Vicki Blake).

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Godzilla (1998, Roland Emmerich)

Godzilla is tolerably bad for about the first half, then it takes a turn for the far worse as the characters start having longer conversations. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s dialogue would be hilariously bad if it were in small parts, but they string together these scenes. There’s no action, just a lot of bad dialogue and bad acting. Only Hank Azaria seems immune; giving Godzilla‘s best performance isn’t a difficult achievement however.

Worst performance is a little more difficult to ascertain. Doug Savant’s an easy target, but it isn’t his fault Devlin and Emmerich wrote his character to have stuttering as comic relief (really, they did). Harry Shearer, Michael Lerner and Arabella Field are easier targets, but none are in the picture for very long. Maria Pitillo’s worst of the primary cast, but Matthew Broderick doesn’t trail too far behind.

As for Jean Reno… he’s okay.

Besides the crappy script and the awful CG, Godzilla‘s biggest problem is Emmerich. For the first half hour (only twenty percent of the runtime), Emmerich concentrates on ripping off Spielberg. Close Encounters, Raiders, Jurassic Park, Jaws. Emmerich’s unoriginality is at least distracting. Once he just directs the picture straight… it’s so much worse. He can’t figure out how to shoot a giant monster running through New York. It shouldn’t be hard. An establishing shot or two.

But maybe the CG composites just looked too weak.

The only competent thing in Godzilla is David Arnold’s score. Or half of it. The other half’s lousy.

Body Count (1998, Robert Patton-Spruill)

Body Count is unexceptionally bad. Theodore Witcher’s script is poorly plotted and stagy; Patton-Spruill’s direction is simply lame. He’s got no personality; it’s a heist gone wrong picture and it’s clear Witcher’s seen Reservoir Dogs, but Patton-Spruill’s apparently incapable of directing scenes with any tension whatsoever. Oddly Curt Sobel’s musical score reminds of seventies American New Wave so… maybe someone else made that decision? With an eighty-five minute run time and no theatrical release, Body Count obviously had its post-production issues.

Still, the acting’s good. Donnie Wahlberg’s probably the best, followed by David Caruso, then John Leguizamo. Body Count has the added problem of having no redeemable characters whatsoever–Ving Rhames is revealed as a religious man late in the picture as a way to endear him. Without a sympathetic lead and with Patton-Spruill’s vapid direction, Count‘s often tedious to watch. But then Witcher will come up with a great line or two (usually for Caruso) and it engages a little again.

Rhames is all right as the de facto lead. There’s not enough to his character (the religion thing is inane) and his arc is unbelievable, but he’s solid.

The film’s about a bunch of robbers on a lousy road trip, with Linda Fiorentino as a hitchhiker who tags along. She’s surprisingly mediocre. It’s not her fault, of course. Witcher’s script frequently reviles in its misogyny.

Good photography from Charles Mills. It could be a lot worse. Like if it were eighty-six minutes.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Robert Patton-Spruill; written by Theodore Witcher; director of photography, Charles Mills; edited by Joseph Gutowski and Richard Nord; music by Curt Sobel; production designer, Tim Eckel; produced by Mark Burg, George Jackson and Doug McHenry; released by Polygram Filmed Entertainment.

Starring Ving Rhames (Pike), David Caruso (Hobbs), John Leguizamo (Chino), Linda Fiorentino (Natalie), Donnie Wahlberg (Booker) and Forest Whitaker (Crane).

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Debutante (1998, Mollie Jones)

Debutante isn’t perfect. There’s some awesome sound design, but director (and editor) Jones pushes it a little to carry over into other scenes. It works a little bit, but not always.

So it isn’t perfect.

Otherwise, it’s probably perfect.

Selma Blair plays the protagonist, who probably has the least lines in the short. She’s got a bad set of parents and runs off to a party. Maybe. The narrative’s a little fractured. One actually has to go on costume design to determine the chain of events.

The exact chronology doesn’t matter as much as Blair’s performance. She’s amazing, even when silent, and Jones’s direction. Debutante is a beautifully made little film. Jones turns up the volume and still manages to be subtly profound. I think it’s a student film, which is even more impressive.

Great photography from Byron Shah, nice supporting turns from Theresa Tilly and Josh Hartnett.

It’s fantastic.

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998, John Landis)

I found something good to say about Blues Brothers 2000. The end credits are seven minutes. The only good thing about this movie is it ending any sooner.

2000 is truly one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, particularly because it’s not even amusing in its badness. If it was amusingly bad, it would have something going for it. But Dan Aykroyd, who starts the movie with what seems to be a Russian accent before going into his terrible version of a Chicago one, takes it all very seriously. Watching John Goodman play second fiddle to Aykroyd is depressing, but probably not as depressing as watching Joe Morton inexplicably playing Cab Calloway’s character from the first one’s son. Because they needed a Black costar this time?

As for Landis, his direction is atrocious. It’s clear from the opening whatever technical proficiency Landis had for the first one is gone for this one. If it were anyone but he and Aykroyd, one might think of 2000‘s scenes similar to the original as paltry knock-offs instead of informed homages. Ever single thing in the movie flops though. It’s incredible. The only good performance is probably Shann Johnson.

Landis can’t even direct a fun James Brown performance in this one. It’s constantly getting worse and even more boring. There aren’t any comedy gags in it.

While the cast is terrible overall (especially little Blues J. Evan Bonifant), Erykah Badu and Paul Shaffer give the worst performances.

2000‘s indescribably abysmal.

Halloween H20 (1998, Steve Miner)

Halloween H20 is a mishmash. It’s a sequel to a seventies slasher movie, it’s a post-modern slasher movie of the Scream variety, it’s a thoughtful sequel, it’s a somewhat successful rumination on redemption and the cost of such redemption.

Director Miner’s composition is, appropriately, more John Carpenter homage than mimicry. He and cinematographer Daryn Okada hold the picture together; while pieces occasionally spill out, they keep it pretty well solid throughout.

Without Jamie Lee Curtis, of course, H20 wouldn’t work. The plot could work without her, but not the scenes. Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg’s script has these great scenes–particularly Curtis’s relationship with son Josh Hartnett and beau Adam Arkin. Those are the “real world” things. The writers also produce a striking horror sequence involving a child in distress.

For the teenagers being in danger, the script doesn’t do as well. Some of it is just bad acting. Jodi Lyn O’Keefe is bad, Michelle Williams is mediocre–though Adam Hann-Byrd is good. O’Keefe butchers her witty dialogue.

H20 isn’t a scary movie in the traditional sense. It toys with the whole idea of inevitability as it relates to the genre, whether in the opening “scare” or the boogeyman’s arrival.

Curtis is utterly fantastic. Hartnett and Arkin are both good, though in some ways neither get enough story time. Janet Leigh has a nice little part and LL Cool J is amusing.

The Marco Beltrami (with some John Ottman) score is usually effective.

It’s an unexpectedly excellent film.

Soldier (1998, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Someone must have realized Soldier had a lot of problems because there’s a terribly edited montage showing how Kurt Russell’s socially engineered future soldier is crushing on Connie Nielsen while her husband Sean Pertwee looks on in concern.

It gives Soldier a Shane feel, something the rest of the film doesn’t have. Like I said, it’s an awful montage–mixing footage from previous scenes and future ones with no sense of time–but all of Martin Hunter’s editing for Soldier is awful so it’s not a surprise.

Soldier‘s about Russell being replaced by genetically engineered future soldiers, who are “better”, and protecting a bunch of colonists whose spaceship crashed on the way to paradise. It’s a garbage planet too, which means it’s not really a Western in space… it’s a Western on a space garbage planet.

Anderson’s direction is occasionally mediocre, but mostly bad. He can’t figure out how to direct a fight scene, which is bad for the big finale between Russell and muscle-bound grotesque Jason Scott Lee. He also can’t direct his actors, so Gary Busey just embarrasses himself and Jason Isaacs is more cartoonish than Elmer Fudd.

There’s also a lot of slow motion and bad zooms and godawful music from Joel McNeely. Worse, the slow motion and worst music coincide; Anderson doesn’t trust his viewer to pick up on anything.

Russell’s not bad, though he can’t compete with the idiotic production. Sean Pertwee’s pretty good as Van Heflin, though his highlights are inexplicable.

Soldier‘s ghastly.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson; written by David Webb Peoples; director of photography, David Tattersall; edited by Martin Hunter; music by Joel McNeely; production designer, David L. Snyder; produced by Jerry Weintraub; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Kurt Russell (Todd 3465), Jason Scott Lee (Caine 607), Jason Isaacs (Colonel Mekum), Connie Nielsen (Sandra), Sean Pertwee (Mace), Jared Thorne & Taylor Thorne (Nathan), Mark Bringelsorn (Rubrick), Gary Busey (Church), K.K. Dodds (Sloan), James Black (Riley), Mark De Alessandro (Goines), Vladimir Orlov (Romero), Carsten Norgaard (Green), Duffy Gaver (Chelsey), Brenda Wehle (Hawkins), Michael Chiklis (Jimmy Pig), Elizabeth Dennehy (Mrs. Pig) and Paul Dillon (Slade).

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Lost in Space (1998, Stephen Hopkins)

For maybe forty minutes–from twenty minutes in to the hour mark–Lost in Space is actually rather engaging. It’s not any good as a narrative, but Hopkins’s direction of the space sequences is phenomenal. The film opens with something familiar, a dogfight out of Star Wars, but the later sequences are not. They aren’t original, but they’re the first time such a budget had been expended on them.

Overall, Hopkins does an excellent job with the film. The last hour, featuring an alien planet and time travel, falls apart because Akiva Goldsman’s script collapses under its own idiocy. The first hour, when Goldsman is still setting up the plot, only has awful dialogue and can survive.

The CG is sometimes excellent, sometimes not. Lost in Space tries a lot with the technology. Hopkins is able to get good performances opposite the CG–especially from Lacey Chabert and Heather Graham.

Chabert is good throughout (she’s inexplicably underused, having nothing to do) while Graham occasionally runs into some problems. Her flirting scenes with Matt LeBlanc are terrible, but she’s otherwise good. LeBlanc’s terrible the whole time. Often laughably so.

William Hurt is excellent (though one wonders why he said yes to Lost in Space and not Jurassic Park). Gary Oldman is hammy, but the character’s terribly underwritten. Mimi Rogers, Jack Johnson and Jared Harris are all awful. Watching Rogers act opposite Hurt is painful.

The film’s bad, but there are some amazing sequences in it. Nice score from Bruce Broughton too.

Small Soldiers (1998, Joe Dante)

I remember liking Small Soldiers the first time I saw it. I was wrong.

This time watching it, all I could think about was how Dante and DreamWorks studio chief Steven Spielberg ignored they had a terrible script.

Of course, Dante still does a good job. He has a fantastic Bride of Frankenstein homage, which brings up the target audience–along with the action figures being effectively voiced by the Spinal Tap and Dirty Dozen casts.

The casting has some problems. Kevin Dunn plays Gregory Smith’s father (prepping for Transformers in the distant future no doubt) and he’s really bad. Dunn’s usually good, but his character is just too terribly written for him to work with it. All of the characters are terribly written–except maybe David Cross and Jay Mohr’s characters, who are disposable and funny.

Smith is supposed to be playing a problem teenager–it’s never explained why, but presumably has something to with Dunn’s bad parenting. Smith and Kirsten Dunst are supposed to be fifteen–too young to drive–and they show the real problem. Small Soldiers is a kid’s movie made by people who don’t know how to dumb it down enough.

Dunst’s actually okay. Denis Leary does his schtick. Phil Hartmann’s great. Wendy Schaal is wasted. Dick Miller’s got a good part. Ann Magnuson has some excellent scenes.

It works best as a showcase for outstanding practical and CG effects. Thinking about the movie just hurts one’s head, especially when they get into the science.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Joe Dante; written by Gavin Scott, Adam Rifkin, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio; director of photography, Jamie Anderson; edited by Marshall Harvey and Michael Thau; music by Jerry Goldsmith; production designer, William Sandell; produced by Michael Finnell and Colin Wilson; released by DreamWorks Pictures.

Starring Gregory Smith (Alan Abernathy), Kirsten Dunst (Christy Fimple), Phil Hartman (Phil Fimple), Kevin Dunn (Stuart Abernathy), Ann Magnuson (Irene Abernathy), Wendy Schaal (Marion Fimple), David Cross (Irwin Wayfair), Jay Mohr (Larry Benson), Dick Miller (Joe) and Denis Leary (Gil Mars).

Starring Frank Langella (Archer), Tommy Lee Jones (Chip Hazard), Ernest Borgnine (Kip Killagin), Jim Brown (Butch Meathook), Bruce Dern (Link Static), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Gwendy Doll), Christopher Guest (Slamfist / Scratch-It), George Kennedy (Brick Bazooka), Michael McKean (Insaniac / Freakenstein), Christina Ricci (Gwendy Doll), Harry Shearer (Punch-It) and Clint Walker (Nick Nitro).

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Safe Men (1998, John Hamburg)

For a stupid comedy, Safe Men is pretty good.

Hamburg’s well-aware of what he’s doing and the film is stupid in a funny way. It’s about, basically, eight men and they’re all pretty dumb to a certain degree. Of the two smartest, one is a kid and the other is Steve Zahn, who’s character is in the film only to make the plot work in the third act.

Zahn and Sam Rockwell are a singing duo who model their dress after barbershop quartets (though there’s only two of them) and do inept low-key covers. The music angle isn’t important other than they’re bad (Hamburg even forgets he was going to bring it back at the end). They end up mistaken for safe crackers, which brings Paul Giamatti and Michael Lerner into the film.

Giamatti, who’s hilarious, plays Lerner’s well-meaning, if idiotic lackey. Lerner’s funny but mostly because of Hamburg’s dialogue (it’s well-written dumb content).

However, in smaller roles as the real safe crackers, Mark Ruffalo (in one of his exception performances) and Josh Pais (good, but no Ruffalo), are in the film as well.

Hamburg structures it around conversations, mostly between the men, usually in pairs (though sometimes Michael Schmidt and Harvey Fierstein show up). Rockwell’s got a love interest—Christina Kirk—and she’s good… only she’s a real person among these moronic, genial men.

Rockwell does a decent job in a difficult part.

Safe Men’s short. It could’ve gone longer, but it would’ve lost something.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Written and directed by John Hamburg; director of photography, Michael Barrett; edited by Suzanne Pillsbury and M. Scott Smith; music by Theodore Shapiro; production designer, Anthony Gasparro; produced by Ellen Bronfman, Jeffrey Clifford, Jonathan Cohen and Andrew Hauptman; released by October Films.

Starring Sam Rockwell (Sam), Steve Zahn (Eddie), Michael Lerner (Big Fat Bernie Gayle), Paul Giamatti (Veal Chop), Michael Schmidt (Bernie Jr.), Christina Kirk (Hannah), Mark Ruffalo (Frank), Josh Pais (Mitchell), Harvey Fierstein (Leo) and Michael Showalter (Larry).

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