UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, August 18, 1997
15D
Gritty 187 commands attention
Story of inner-city school teaches valuable lesson
The Associated Press
Trevor Garfield works in a war zone — a school so torn by violence and hate that the building shakes with hostility.
But Trevor loves teaching. Better still, he loves teaching science. Talking about amoebas puts a spring in his stride, and demonstrating physics makes him rhapsodize. And then a kid he flunks stabs him in the back and leaves him for dead.
A lot more than Trevor's health slips away with that assault in the hallway of a Brooklyn high school — he also loses his spirit and his enthusiasm for his profession.
Warner Bros.' 187, directed by Kevin Reynolds, makes an important and impassioned statement with a breathtaking performance by Samuel L. Jackson as the embattled Trevor Garfield. It also is a frightening look at
public education today.
Trevor survives the vicious attack and leaves his job. A year later, emotionally shaken but still committed to teaching, he becomes a substitute science teacher in Los Angeles. And he steps into a despairingly familiar scene: a school ruled by fear and violence, a place where kids would rather
Samuel Jackson
fight than learn and will sue any teacher who acts in self-defense against their attacks.
Trevor meets teachers who equate working in the inner-city high school with crawling through the jungles of Vietnam or dodging bullets in the Persian Gulf. His classroom is one of a series of bungalows off the main building — small, dirty, hot concrete boxes with ratty furniture and bad lighting.
But more has changed in Trevor than his spirit. There's a darkening of his soul, as though a light has gone out and been replaced
by a neon glare that washes out all color, all joy. Even his lab experiments now have a hardened edge — to demonstrate the effects of drugs, he shoots up a lab mouse with morphine.
And there's a far more insidious, calculating twist to Trevor, as he takes the codes of Hammurabi to glorious new heights. The title alone should give you a clue: 187 is the police radio code in Los Angeles for homicide.
With its almost formula characters — gang thugs, burned-out teachers, etc. — 187 easily could have slipped into the typical violent-urban-classroom drama of such movies as The Substitute or The Principal and emerge as just another B-movie. But what sets it apart is a bone-chilling curveball tossed by screenwriter Scott Yagemann, himself a former teacher, and Reynolds' tough direction.
You won't easily forget the final scenes of 187. Nor will you forget Jackson's stunning performance, a performance worthy of an Academy Award nomination.
187 was produced by Bruce Davey and Stephen McEveety and is rated R for graphic violence and strong language.
Outdoor enthusiast turns PBS spotlight to nature
Anyplace Wild showcases thrills of adventure spots
Associated Press Writer
CAMDEN, Maine — People often tell outdoor enthusiast John Viehman that his life must be a perpetual vacation, and he is seldom inclined to disagree.
"My only response is 'Yes, I kind of planned it that way,' " Viehman said with a
planned it that way twinkle in his eye. His formula: Find out what you truly love to do and then come up with a way to make a living doing it.
John Vlehman
For Viehman, executive editor of Backpacker magazine, that means hiking, canoeing, ice climbing or other self-propelled outdoors pursuits that
he shares with viewers of his new Public Broadcasting Service series, Anyplace Wild.
The job takes Viehman and co-host Annie Getchell on outings of a week or more in wilderness locations ranging from the Boundary Waters of Minnesota to the High Sierra of California and the steamy jungles of Belize.
Their adventures stretch the notion of vacation: a grueling 8 1/2-mile canoe portage, an attack by killer bees and a backwoods meal of live grubworms — maggots, in Viehman's parlance — are among the memories likely to linger the longest.
In choosing Camden, Viehman put himself on familiar turf. The Minnesota native lived here for five years in the early 1980s while he served as editor and publisher of Canoe magazine, the publication he went to work for straight out of college.
Even when they return to the office, Viehman, Getchell and their production crew remain in a vacation setting. Anyplace Wild, the first national series presented by Maine Public Television, is based in this picturesque tourist town along Penobscot Bay.
Wisconsin-born Getchell, who worked with Viehman at Canoe, lives in Camden with her husband Dave, the series editor for Amplace Wild.
The program made its debut in June with a one-hour special on canoeing the Boundary Waters that traced the story of the French Canadian fur traders, or Voyageurs, who traversed Lake Superior during the 1800s. The series continues through the summer with 13 half-hour episodes.
Vleihman, host of PBS' popular Trailside series through three seasons, said Anyplace Wild redefined the genre for outdoor programs. Whereas Trailside took a basic how-to approach to activities such as backpacking or kayaking, the new series weaves in an array of elements that would likely pull in a broader range of viewers.
"We're taking trips, but we're not just going out and looking for adrenaline," he said. "What we're trying to do is embrace what I call the texture of the outdoor experience."
That means incorporating material about
"We're taking trips, but we're not just going out and looking for adrenaline. What we're trying to do is embrace what I call the texture of the outdoor experience."
John Viehman host, Anyplace Wild
natural history and wildlife, guides and experts, weather considerations, specialized equipment, and local history and culture to tell the story in a lively and entertaining way.
After kayaking Utah's Green River, for example, Viehman was joined on a river raft by a string quartet from the Los Angeles Philharmonic that performs the music of Dvorak in a canyon amphitheater.
"We're mixing a lot of things up," Viehman said. "Each week, we're going someplace where we're not quite sure what's going to happen. And so, there's an element of risk, or surprise."
One of the biggest surprises came when a swarm of killer bees ambushed the crew during the filming of the two-segment adventure in Belize. Fortunately, no one developed serious reactions to the stings.
Pain also was part of the 81/2-mile grand portage in which Viehman, accompanied during the Boundary Waters trip by his brother Tom, hefted a canoe and gear over muddy trails, retracing the steps of Canada's piloneers.
Dining on live grubworms was one of the skills Viehm and Getchell mastered during their week under the tutelage of a master survivalist in California's Golden Trout Wilderness.
How did the grubworms taste?
"Unseasoned tofu with a shrimp-like shell" Viehman assessed.
"I consider myself as sort of the designated AHB — your Average Human Being," he said. "I'm not like any super-fit testosterone-charged guy, and Annie's certainly not."
Viehman, boyish at 43 despite his gray hair, tries to make his adventures accessible to his audience and doesn't see himself possessed of outdoor skills beyond the reach of most.
The crew has begun filming its second season, which will include a trip to Scotland that has Viehman sea kayaking along the coast and Getchell trekking along the moors and highlands.
Viehman said Anplace Wild distilled its first 13 episodes from an initial field of 300 to 400 possibilities, and he said he didn't ever foresee the program being drained of ideas.
"Anywhere you can go anyplace wild," he said, " there's a story and there a trip."
Scream makes noise among film producers Movie industry capitalizes on revival of horror genre
With a reported $100 million theatrical gross and the No. 1 spot on the video rental charts, Scream has resuscitated the horror genre, nearly moribund a decade ago.
And it has further established Miramax's exploitation film label, Dimension Films, as among Hollywood's biggest surprise stories.
"In terms of putting Dimension on the map, Scream did it," says the film's co-producer, Cary Woods.
Once a purveyor of crummy B-movies such as Children of the Corn 2 and Hellraiser III, Mirramax's violent sister label now is turning out relatively sophisticated scary movies worthy of critical attention, including the rampaging mutant cockroach movie Mimic, opening Aug. 22.
Dimension's Scream 2, a highly anticipated sequel, should be in theaters by Dec.12,and upcoming titles include Nightwatch and Phantoms.
LOS ANGELES — One Miramax movie is among the most beloved romantic epics in years and swept the Academy Awards.
The other Miramax title is a bloody low-budget slasher film whose biggest prize was an MTV Movie Award.
Miramax, a part of the Walt Disney Co., has no plans to get out of the art film business. But the returns for so-called genre films have changed Dimension's profile from an interesting hobby to powerful industry force. Once content to buy finished films and snap up rights to horror franchises, Dimension now is producing up to 90 percent of its own product — a mix of horror and action, science-fiction and urban films.
Dimension is concurrently attracting some unusual talent.
Steven Soderbergh, the maker of the groundbreaking art film sex, lies and videotape, wrote the script for Nightwatch. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote and directed Pulp Fiction, is planning several Dimension productions, and Chasing Amy filmmaker Kevin Smith has told Dimension he has quite a few thriller ideas.
By all accounts, The English Patient should have clobbered Scream, and yet the grisly thriller is proving far more popular in domestic theaters and video stores.
"They're extremely open-minded about talent," says Robert Newman, an agent at International Creative Management who has several clients making Dimension films. Adds Woods: "A lot of talented filmmakers who might not have contemplated making a film in the genre now might."
The Associated Press
In fact, Scream is more profitable than almost any 1996 movie outside of Independence Day, if you look at cost vs. return.
Wes Craven, the veteran horror director who made Scream, says audiences grew tired of scary movies because the films were shallow, repetitive. "It's a genre that can be so lucrative and such a machine money (that) it falls into the hands of people who are more interested in the money than the movie," Craven said from the set of the Scream sequel.
"There hasn't been anything new in a long time," Dimension chairman Bob Weinstein said when explaining the sudden interest from filmmakers and audiences alike. "But films like Scream and Mimic are not films cut out of a cookie cutter. They're made by real filmmakers."
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