KENNETH WRIGHT is numbed by the incessant dialogue in Beatty's
gangster flick.
EVERY so often a clinker of a film comes along that compensates the
reviewer for the sheer hell of having to watch it by writing its own
review in a line or two of script, thereby saving Couch Potato the
trouble of having to make up his own wisecracks. We remember with quite
disproportionate affection lines like ''Murdered -- and someone's
responsible!'' (Plan 9 From Outer Space) and ''An intellectual carrot --
the mind boggles!'' (The Thing), and one day we will perhaps think
kindly even of Bugsy (rental, cert. 18) for providing the fatal line
''Dialogue's cheap in Hollywood''.
Cheap? Director Barry Levinson must have got it wholesale. Nobody
(which usually means Warren Beatty) in this pole-axeingly dull floral
tribute on the cortege of the gangster thriller ever stops talking:
talking slow, talking fast, talking smart, talking dumb, but most of all
talking long (131 minutes long) while not much happens.
The pity is that the story of forties mobster Bugsy Siegel, mainstay
of Murder Inc., Hollywood groupie, and creator of Las Vegas, has so much
potential to make a good film. Bugsy sticks fairly closely to the facts
-- the obsessive affair with B-movie starlet Virginia Hill (Annette
Bening), the prissily psychopathic personality, the skewed commercial
genius that picked the middle of the Nevada Desert as the right place to
build the world's biggest gambling hell -- but its snail's-pace
narrative and editing, stopping the film every five minutes for Warren
Beatty to do some fancy acting, destroys the sense of menace and
unpredictabil-
ity so essential to a good gangster flick. All in all, it's an offer
Couch Potato found terribly easy to refuse.
Scotland may be short of heroes these days, but as long as Sean
Connery has strength to swing a broadsword this reviewer's heart will
always give a wee skirl at the sight of his name on a delicious slice of
escapist tosh like Highlander II: The Quickening (retail, Entertainment
in Video, cert. 15, #10.99). Although his entrance is too long delayed
and his exit comes too soon, he dominates this charming action fairytale
as the perfect tongue-in-cheek foil to Christopher Lambert's rent-a-hunk
heroic lead.
The storyline, set in 2024 and beefed up with a fashionable en-
vironmentalist subplot about the ozone layer, concerns the efforts of
the witty and eminently hissable baddie Katana (Michael Ironside),
dictator of the planet Zeist, to make sure that the freedom-fighters'
leader Connor McLeod (Lambert) never returns from his exile on earth to
rally the slaves again. McLeod is quite an old and disillusioned gent by
now, but he has two things on his side: a) when attacked by baddies from
Zeist, he becomes young and immortal again; and b) his pawky old
sidekick Ramirez (Connery), although dead, is able and willing to
unsheath his fine old Spanish steel in McLeod's aid at a moment's
notice. Ah, if only more films espoused that kind of gritty realism . .
.
Zestfully (or Zeistfully) directed action sequences -- lots of them --
zip along with gratifying speed and surprise in futurist-Gothic urban
wasteland settings, neatly balanced with delightful comedy sequences,
like the bit where Connery gets kitted out at a Highland tailor's and
comes out looking like a cross between a Christmas tree and Nicholas
Fairbairn on St Andrew's Night.
''Do you think we'll ever meet again?'' asks Lambert as Connery
prepares to take his leave. ''Who knows? Who knows?'' Connery twinkles
back. What do you think, readers?
Most idiosyncratic video of the year so far, and just possibly one of
the best, is Wim Wenders's frequently bewildering and consistently
fascinating genre gallimaufry Until The End Of The World (rental, cert.
15). It begins as a loosely-plotted highbrow detective yarn, with four
characters (mystery man William Hurt, wild child Solveig Dommartin,
boyfriend Sam Neill, and private eye Rudiger Vogler) chasing each other
around the world in connection with a McGuffin that may be either
bank-robbery loot or stolen jewels; then in fast order it develops into
an amour fou romance, a road movie, a Mad Scientist B-feature, and a
nuclear-accident nightmare before concluding as a benignly mystical and
optimistic reflection on life, the universe, and everything.
Easier to enjoy than to describe, its subjects include love, dreams,
death, blindness, and saving the planet; it also boasts the best rock
soundtrack we've ever heard, featuring inter alia Talking Heads, Neneh
Cherry, Lou Reed, REM, Nick Cave, and Peter Gabriel. Take it home and
leave your preconceptions in the video store.
Courtesy of the decent souls at Entertainment in Video, three copies
each of Until The End of the World and Highlander II feature in this
week's . . . Competition Corner! To win Wim Wenders's dreamy little rock
'n' roll apocalypse, answer this question: what was the name of his
1980s film in which angels took a hand in the lives of some unhappy
citizens of Berlin? For Highlander II: in which Indiana Jones film did
Sean Connery play the intrepid explorer's dad?
Answers, as ever, to: Couch Potato (Armageddon Out Of Here Prize/
Hoots Mon Prize), The Herald, 195 Albion Street, Glasgow G1 1QP.
* This week's column was compiled with the assistance of the Azad
chain of video libraries and of Ibis Books And Music, Gibson Street,
Hillhead, Glasgow.
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