14 THE PLAIN FRIDAY, JUNE 30. 1995 Nightmare of 'Crumby' life of iconoclast documented By JOANNA CONNORS PLAIN DEALER FILM CRITIC When you first hear Robert Crumb speak in "Crumb," the new documentary that reveals perhaps more than he'd prefer about his life and family, he sounds eerily familiar. You know. you've heard that reedy monotone before, but where? After a few minutes, it hits you: It's Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man." The similarity in voices is perfect, in a way, since Crumb himself turns out to be not unlike Hoffman's Raymond excruciatingly uncomfortable in company, single-minded, prickly, remorseless, and brilliant. Crumb, who participated in the birth of underground comics in the '60s and went on to establish himself as an artist whom Time magazine critic Robert Hughes compares to Breughel, is, at heart, a celebrity autistic.
He cringes at the touch of fame. "That's what makes me such an exciting subject for a movie," Crumb says, his whine accented with an ever-present ironic note. He doesn't mean it, but he's right: In the publicity- and marketing-soaked American culture that Crumb so disdains, it's quite exhilarating to encounter an artist who is in it for something other than a lifestyle of the rich and famous. With a subject who literally turns away from the glare of the camera's lights, "Crumb" could be subtitled, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Iconoclast." Like Joyce's novel, "Crumb" looks for the artist in his troubled family and his past. So director Terry Zwigoff, a longtime friend of Crumb's, tags along with him as he visits old girlfriends and wives, and goes home to his mother and older brother, Charles, in Philadelphia, and to SILVER LION 1994 VENICE FILM FESTIVAL "BRILLIANT! A MAGNIFICENT Lynn Samuels, WABC RADIO roth furlong kelly redgrave schell LITTLE ODESSA R.
0 1 PHI NOW CLEVELAND CINEMAS CEDAR LEE EXCLUSIVELY (2163 Lee Rd 321-8232, FILM CLIPS Capsule reviews and summaries by Plain Dealer Film Critic Joanna Connors (JC), Plain Dealer Reporter Karen Sandstrom (KS), New York Times (NYT), Los Angeles Times (LAT) and Newsday. Amateur The movie equivalent of a Roy Lichtenstein comic-strip canvas. Film festival favorite Hal Hartley's "amateur" action thriller is crammed to the gills with corporate assassins and people on the run, but everything comes with quotation marks around it and a droll wink to the audience. The deadpan characters include Thomas (Martin Donovan, a Hartley regular), an amnesiac; Isabelle (Isabelle Hupert), a former nun; current p*rnographer and virgin nymphomaniac; Sofia, a former p*rnography star; and Edward, an accountant. The plot, which revolves around an unseen arms dealer named (of course) Mr.
Jacques and winds up with a shoot -out at a convent. would have Arnold himself confused. Like the original Pop artists, Hartley approaches his subject with great affection as well as the requisite irony; amateur, after all, means both devoted admirer and incompetent practitioner. Rated for language and violence. 105 minutes.
(JC) Bad Boys Here is a prime example of commercial movie making at its most basic and revolting. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer have taken the "Lethal Weapon" buddy-cop formula, added two semi-hot sitcom stars, Will Smith of "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and Martin Lawrence of "Martin," hooked them up with a young director who has made only TV commercials and music videos, and handed them all a script by two TV writers. Lawrence and Smith play mismatched partners on the Miami police force trying to track down a heroin deal. They're likable, but the movie's idea of a top-notch comedy routine is for them to swear at each other really fast and loud at the same time for several minutes. Rated for violence, language, some sexual innuendo.
126 minutes. (JC) Batman Forever It's the all-new Batman Lite! The third installment in the Warner Bros. franchise is funnier, lighter, and will probably even lower your cholesterol while you watch. But, like fat-free cream cheese, you know the instant you taste "Batman Forever" that it is not the real thing. Directed by Joel Schumacher, a competent journeyman who took over from the mad-genius Tim Burton, this movie is considerably archer than its two predecessors.
The jaunty script borrows a smidgen of camp attitude from the '60s TV series, and the plot is nothing if not antic: The Riddler (Jim Carrey) and Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) team up to take over Gotham with a brainwave contraption, and, oh yes, kill Batman (Val Kilmer) who has a new partner, the young hipster Robin (Chris O'Donnell). Schumacher has replaced Burton's atmosphere of dark, glamorous corruption with a neon-glowing, plastic-fantastic Gotham for the MTV generation. Parents whose children are begging to see it will be pleased with the changes. Though the PG-13-rated movie is a tad long for kids and jam-packed with fights and explosions, almost to the exclusion of anything else, they're more Zap! Pow! Ker-pow! than Blood! Gross! Nightmares! Rated PG-13 for stylized violence. 121 minutes.
(JC) Braveheart "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" doomed the medieval adventure movie; after they had at the legends of knights and kings, you couldn't watch a serious attempt without snickering just a little. So it goes with Mel Gibson's Scottish epic, an indeed brave-hearted effort to bring the Middle Ages back to the screen in glory. For the most part, Gibson has made an exciting, often stirring account of Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace (Gibson), who singlehandedly mounted a rebellion against the ruthless King Edward I of England in the CASPER A PG I I UNIVERSAL 41 14 CHAGRIN CINEMAS NOW SHOWING ERIE COMMONS GENERAL CINEMA 1200 E. Washington NO PASSES ACCEPTED 8057 Plaza Blvd-974-8383 AFGAL CINFMAS GENERAL CINEMA GREAT NORTHERN LAKESHORE NORTHFIELD PARMATOWN Brookpark Lorain-777-4600 E.226th, Lakeshore 731-1700 Northlield Shop. CIT.
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His three-hour epic is fullblooded and fully bloody, with plenty of close attention paid to the realities of battle in an age of arrows and swords. Compared to Kevin Costner's "Robin Hood" and the recent "Rob Roy," it is by far the most respectable effort at a period battle epic in recent times. But at a certain point, the luridly detailed gore begins to seem slightly absurd and it is then, perhaps when the severed head sails through the air, perhaps not until a man is eviscerated alive, that the silly spectre of the Pythonites begins to haunt this exhausting and exhilarating movie. With Patrick McGoohan as the ruthless English king and Catherine McCormack as Wallace's wife. Rated for much violence, brief nudity and some sexuality.
178 minutes. (JC) The Bridges of Madison County If bad novels really do make great movies, as Hollywood once believed, then Clint Eastwood must have felt secure about his task of turning Robert James Waller's syrupy romantic ballad into something he could show with pride, and without handing out airsick bags at the door. Eastwood's task was to satisfy those who loved this story of a great, oncein-a-lifetime love, while mollifying those who hated it, and for the most part, he's succeeded. He had two great advantages: the lovely script by Richard LaGravenese, who hacked away huge chunks of Waller's cloyting sentimentality, and Meryl Streep, who plays Francesca, the Italian farm wife in lowa who awakens to erotic love for the first time when she's in her 40s, and then gives it up for her children and husband. Streep glows: She owns the picture.
Rated PG-13 for very brief nudity, adult situations. 135 minutes. (JC) Robert Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'" '60s. MOVIE REVIEW 'Crumb' Opening today at the Cedar Lee Theatre, Cleveland Heights. A documentary directed by Terry Zwigoff, produced by Lynn O'Don-' nell and Zwigoff, featuring Robert Crumb.
his younger brother, Maxon, in San Francisco. These family visits are fascinating and depressing in a way that only documentaries can be: They cut close, reveal as much pain as art. We learn that the brothers (there are also two sisters who declined to be part of the film) grew up sleeping three to a bed. They spent their days playing fantasy "Treasure Island" games and experimenting on drawings and comic books, their evenings avoiding their abusive father and enduring the mood swings of their amphetamine -addicted mother. It was a rich, if not happy, artistic beginning: Both Charles and Maxon still share Robert's artistic talent and his bleak wit but not, sadly, his success.
ACADEMY AWARD WINNER BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM "EXQUISITE, LYRICAL, TOUGH-MINDED Miss Mikhalkov is priceless!" -Caryn James, THE NEW YORK TIMES BURNT BY THE SUN A FILM BY NIKITA MIKHALKOY IRS Friday: 4.20, 7:00, Centrum Sal 7:00, 9:40 Tues: (1.40) 4:20, 932-5956 1 al Discount 1 47 brought him success in the Charles, the oldest and leader of the three, describes himself and their addled mother as "two recluses living in the same house," and then goes on to blithely reveal such intimate details as his bowel habits and sexual dysfunctions. He laughs mockingly during the interview, showing the blank space where his upper teeth should be. Dirty, disheveled and overweight, he sits on his bed like a punjab, ing books he's already read once and tending to countless cats. Maxon, the youngest of the Crumb children, lives in a San Francisco SRO, where he sits on a bed of nails for a couple of hours a day, meditating. He begs on the street and has started working in oils dark, flat, angry paintings.
Their shared genes and pain has produced a lot of art. The art you think of as you watch these stark episodes isn't Crumb's, however, but Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Robert Crumb just happened to find that his scream was heard by a lot of people "my people," he says, smiling sardonically, as he sits on a bench on Haight Street in San Francisco, drawing dreams that have turned into nightmares. Rated for sexually explicit drawings and photos, language. Running time: 119 minutes. Burnt by the Sun A dacha outside cow, high summer, 1936.
A big country house party is in progress, headed by Col. Kotov (Nikita Mikhalkov), an aging hero of the Revolution, his pretty young wife, and his enchanting daughter (Nadia Mikhalkov). Family and friends fill the sun-lit house with games, music, dancing, drinking. The spell of Renoir wafts like a summer breeze over Mikhalkov's ravishing film, the winner of the Oscar for foreign film this year. Chekhov is in evidence, too, lending his air of absurd Slavic melancholy to the summer day.
We know from experience that the idyll cannot last, and as a mysterious visitor (Oleg Menchikov) arrives and the inevitable disllusionment settles in, Mikhalkov proves himself a splendid apprentice to the two masters. It is, after all, 1936, and in that harrowing climate of purges and betrayal, everyone, as Renoir said, has his reasons. Not rated; contains some violence and one suggestive sex scene. In Russian with English subtitles. 134 minutes.
(JC) Casper In a genre commonly known as "fun-house ride" movies, the first family movie of the summer takes the term literally. Directed by Brad Silberling and produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, this is a 96-minute theme-park ride just waiting to be built. Ghosts, the latest in Industrial Light and Magic's computergenerated imagery, cavort through a haunted mansion. Objects fly through the air. Characters levitate.
There's even a userfriendly contraption all ready to carry the crowds when "Casper: The Ride" comes to Universal Studios. This makes it perfect for kids in the elementary years, never mind that they're too young to have met "Casper" as the friendliest ghost on TV. The story will quickly fill them in on everything they need to know, from Casper's unsuccessful attempts to make friends with mortals, to his life in Whipstaff Manor with the formidible Ghostly Trio. With Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman, Cathy Moriarty and Eric Idle. PG (may spook younger children).
96 minutes. (JC) Circle of Friends Pat O'Connor directed: based on the novel by Maeve Binchy. Minnie Driver, Geraldine O'Rawe and Saffron Burrows portray three young girls in 1950s Ireland who discover boys, love, sex and guilt. Beyond eliciting warm, animated performances from his actors, director Pat O'Connor gives the film a visual style that's suitably quaint, accentuating the natural colors of the Irish setting. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations.
112 minutes. (NYT) Congo It's no "Jurassic Park." As adapted by screenwriter John Patrick Shanley and directed by Frank Marshall, Michael Crichton's 1980 novel comes out an overproduced, under-imagined throwback to the jungle movies of the '30s, featuring, as its special-effects corollary to "Jurassic's" dinosaurs, a cheesy animatronic gorilla who sounds like Chatty Cathy and looks only a step or two up the evolutionary ladder from the original King Kong. In true Crichton fashion, "Congo" is full of it. Plot, that is. So much goes on in this movie the discovery of a mythical city cluttered with diamonds, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, attacks by guerrillas, and gorillas, the.
