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reviews in brief.
Out of Time
PG-13, 114 minutes, South Wind 12
As a three-year veteran of Miami, I keep waiting for a movie to faithfully bring my crazy former college town to the screen. The recent 2 Fast 2 Furious and Bad Boys II carefully airbrushed out the city's surly underbelly, and so does Carl Franklin's Out of Time.
Set peripherally around Miami, Franklin's bite-sized South Florida thriller is pedestrian and skin-deep, and that's a major disappointment considering his last work in this genre was the masterful Devil in,a Blue Dress.
Denzel Washington plays Matt Whitlock, the chief of police in a balmy little town named Banyan Key. Separated from his ambitious wife, a recently promoted homicide detective named Alex (Eva Mendes), Matt has begun sleeping with Ann (Sanaa Lathan), the sultry wife of Chris Harrison (Dean Cain). Chris is a hot-tempered ex-football player who beats up Ann and makes thinly veiled threats to kill Matt. Soon, the Harrisons are found burnt to a crisp inside their home, leaving the chief as the main suspect.
Out of Time's sole claim to ingenuity is that while Matt is innocent of murder, he's not entirely innocent as a policeman. He has swindled the DEA out of a sizable sum of cash, so he must scheme his way through Alex's murder investigation to get away with it.
The problem is that little of this is
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Denzel Washington, as Matt, and Eva Mendes, as Alex, discuss the case they're investigating over lunch in Out of Time.
believable, logistically or characteristically, given Matt's by-the-book personality. The film also turns silly when Cain tries to act ferocious. He was much better as the West Hollywood slut Cole in The Broken Hearts Club.
—Stephen Shupe
Grade: C
Franklin's worldview has lost much of its cynicism since Blue Dress. His latest thriller could have used a Miami-style shot of seediness.
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John Cusack and Amanda Peet star in the murder mystery Identity.
Identity
—Cal Creek
Grade: Care. In fact, we're so excited we thought we'd include a preview synopsis of Kill Bill in addition to reviews of Tarantino's previous directorial feature-length works: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie
R. 90 minutes, Woodruff Auditorium, Kansas Union
While the movie relies on stereotyped characterizations and bland dialogue to further the plot, director James Mangold does create a creepy looking film. The dark motel and torrential downpour creates an ominous feeling of foreboding that makes for the only saving grace of the picture.
Identity tricks audiences into thinking it's going to be a clever mystery but instead delivers a handful of predictable clichés that would be more appropriate in a teen-slasher pic.
The ambiguous, not mysterious, plot has 10 strangers caught in a storm, forcing them to stay in the same hotel. The strangers have a lot in common, and then people start to die one by one. Ed (John Cusack), a limo driver, and Rhodes (Ray Liotta), a cop, try to protect their fellow strangers from the mysterious killer. All is not what it seems ... appearances can be deceiving. Long story short: the filmmakers try to trick the audience into reaching one conclusion and fail.
TARANTINO SHOWCASE
Tomorrow Quentin Tarantino's sixyear directorial hiatus ends with the release of Kill Bill Vol. I. Excited? We
Tarantino
Brown. Still need more Tarantino? Don't forget Four Rooms, which he co-wrote and co-directed; True Romance and From Dusk Till Dawn, both of which he wrote; and Natural Born Killers, which he co-wrote.
Kill Bill Vol. I
R. 110 minutes, South Wind 12
Kill Bill Vol.1 appears to be director Quentin Tarantino's most ambitious project to date.
The film tells the story of "The Bride" (Uma Thurman), an assassin shot by her boss, Bill, on her wedding day. The Bride wakes up from a five-year coma vowing to extract her vengeance on Bill.
Tarantino presents the film in a chapter-by-chapter format to deliver his usual
uber-violent, rapid-fire dialogue style.
This movie will cement Tarantino's reputation as a film director. If it's good — if it delivers the flashy-pulp style that put Tarantino on the map in the '90s — then he will be regarded as one of the most inventive and respected filmmakers of his generation. If it fails — if it is a ridiculous farce of Tarantino's previous work — then he will be regarded as a flash in the pan trend that did little more than save John Travolta's career.
—Preview by Cal Creek
Reservoir Dogs (1992) R. 100 minutes, VHS and DVD
Six career criminals who don't know each other are assembled to pull off a jewelry heist. They're assigned names off a color chart and told to meet up at an abandoned warehouse after the job's done. Everyone dies in a bloodbath. The end.
If it were that simple, Tarantino's timehopping, blood-spurting debut would never have won the cult following that it did. Just to illustrate Reservoir Dogs' place among film geeks, I'll go ahead and mention that I've seen this movie more than 20 times.
What Tarantino brought to the cinema is the idea that the characters in a genre film could talk about more than just the plot. Here was a filmmaker so talented as to let us eavesdrop on his characters'
Uma Thurman is an assassin with a heart set on revenge in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.
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22 jayplay
thursday, October 9. 2003