BY COLLEEN RUSH
EVERYBODY'S SO ANGRY THESE days. People are casting spells, getting revenge, stalking celebrities and stripping for a lousy buck. What's wrong with kids today? Where did we go wrong? Can't we all just get along? You know... smile on your brother? Try to love one another right now?
The Rock
Hollywood Pictures
Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) is pissed. And it's not because he has a funny name. He's a military hero, and he wants revenge for the men who died in a covert operation under his command. So he's taken control of Alcatraz, grabbed a few hostages and is threatening to bomb San Francisco with poisonous gas. Pop quiz, wise guys. Whaddya do? Call in Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, of course.
Independence Day
20th Century Fox
Plan on more than fireworks this Fourth of July. Plan on total annihilation. We're talking
mass destruction and mayhem. When weird, preapocalyptic stuff starts happening, an unlikely group — Will Smith (TV'S The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), Bill Pullman (While You Were Sleeping) and Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park) — unites to fight the freaky forces that are destroying the world.
Mission:
Impossible
Paramount Pictures
Spies and international secrets. Babes and corrupt agents. It sounds like a job for 007, but hold your
secret holster. This rescue mission calls for someone with a little less finesse and more muscle. Enter Tom Cruise and his impossible mission: recover a
list with the names of top undercover agents in the world, nail a former Russian spy selling secret info, get the babe and, oh yeah, save the world.
The Craft
TriStar Pictures
Sarah (Robin Tunney, Empire Records) is pissed. She's the new kid in town, and she's got the usual problems: ACTs, prom traumas, a pimple — oh, and her best friends are in a witches' coven and want her to join them on the
dark side. Which is, like, fine if you use your powers to give someone bad hair. But, like, it's a total downer when revenge goes the fatal route.
Multiplicity
Columbia Pictures
Doug Kinney (Michael Keaton) is pissed. He's being pulled in every direction family, work, social,
personal — so he clones himself. Now he's twice the man with twice the trouble. Andie McDowell plays the lucky wife. So, is it cheating if she sleeps with one, then...?
Phenomenon
Touchstone Pictures
George Malley (John Travolta) isn't pissed, but his neighbors are. He went and got himself all smarted up when he done got struck by a white light on his birfday. Now Mr. Smarty Pants is a world-renowned genius, but the locals don't take kindly to his newfound brain, and they turn their backs on him. Buncha meanies.
Striptease Castle Rock
Just chalk this one up as another one of those mom-loSES-daughter-to-lunatic-ex-husband-and-decides-to-strip-for-cashto-get-her-back movies. Erin Grant (Demi Moore) will do whatever it takes to get custody of her child — even if it means stripping in front
of drooling old men at a seedy little Miami dive aptly named the Eager Beaver. If you missed her shimmy on Letterman, see it again on the big screen.
Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) is having a bad inning in life. His super-fave baseball celebrity, Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), has taken a nose dive in the popularity charts, and Gil will have none of that. The obsessed fan will stop at nothing — including (gasp) murder — to reshine the star's reputation. De Niro a crazed lsnatic stalking his idol? C'mon Who'll believe that?
The Fan
TriStar Pictures
High School High
TriStar Pictures
bring you this spoof on the teacher-who-cares genre. Richard C. Clark (Jon Lovitz) is the teacher-who-cares who braves the tough inner-city school. How tough is it? Man, this school is so tough, it's got its own cemetery.
Only the creators of the Naked Gun series could
Last Man Standing
New Line Cinema
John Smith wants to clean house. He's not happy with what the mob has done with
Chicago's decor, and he wants to take 'em out. The renegade gun for hire (Bruce Willis) sells his services to two families of Irish mobsters in a daring attempt to restore the 'hood back to its original splendor. Can you say double-cross à la Pulp Fiction?
Kingpin MGM
Roy Munson's bowling career is in the gutter thanks to the sleazy bowling huckster Ernie McCracken
(Bill Murray). But a strike is around the corner when he latches on to Ishmael (Randy Quaid), a bowling prodigy from the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Munson (Woody Harrelson) thinks he's got his ticket back to the bowling lane, and the two con their way to Nevada for the big bowling tournament.
Last Dance Touchstone Pictures
Stop me if you've heard this one. The cocky young lawyer (Rob Morrow, TV's Northern Exposure) tries to save the drop-dead-gorgeous death row
inmate? Um, maybe not. Sharon Stone plays Cindy Liggett, the woman on death row. They fall in love (shocker) and wait for the clemency board to decide their fate.
Psss! Have you heard? U.'s web site now has movie news and gossip: http://www.umagazine.com
Screen Saver
Dead Man
If someone described a movie as an eerie, black-and-white, psychedelic "western" about a guy traveling west who's dying because he's got a bullet in his heart, what would you say?
Um, cool?
Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as William Blake, the doomed traveler who hooks up with an unlikely companion along the way — an outcast Native American who mistakes Blake for the late, great English poet.
The someone is Jim Jarmusch, writer and director of movies like Night On Earth and Down By Law, and he doesn't sound enthused about answering questions about his new movie, Dead Man. So we stick to the basics.
Part tragic, part comic, the movie follows Blake and Nobody, the Blake (the poet)-quoting companion, through circumstances that transform their relationship with themselves, their surroundings and their world.
The Reel Deal
A Very Brady Sequel
But for those of us used to seeing Depp in cheese mode (Don Juan DeMarco) and nut mode (Edward Scissorhands), the cross-over to pensive youth gone awry might sound like a stretch. On second thought, could it be art imitating life?
It's a dog-eat-dog world, and this mutt must be wearing milkbone drawers. Tiger, that lovable mop, has been dropped from not one, but all two of the Brady Bunch movies. Oh the doghouse will also on the AstonTurf
sure, the dog house still sits on the AstroTurf
lawn — right next to the almost world-famous teeter totter — but there's that not-so-subtle canine absence feel to the set.
Never mind that members of the cast jokes about Tiger being in Alice's next meatloaf. What's not missing from A Very Brady Sequel is the retro-funk, tacky-ass polyester get-ups that have made the Brady era one of the most visually offensive.
"I don't like the fabric or the Buck Rogers tightness," says Christopher Daniel Barnes, the less bushy version of Greg in his open shirt/bare chest days.
It's hard not to feel a little strange sitting in a Paramount Studios restaurant with the kids from the upcoming sequel. They're still in costume, and after awhile, it's difficult — if not impossible — to remember what the original Bradys looked like. Spooky.
Anyway, this Brady sequel finally answers the question we've all been asking ourselves: How does Carol get her hair to flip like that? Oh, and who fathered the three lovely girls? The sudden reappearance of the girls' (gasp) real father, Carol's long-lost husband (Tim Matheson, Animal House), is at the center of this story about a family named Brady.
But, like the first movie, the story has that same '70s-freak-family-stuck-in-the' 90s spin on the original TV series. You can count on the movie cramming at least 10 different episodes into the main story line.
But we still wanna know... where the hell is Tiger?
May 1996 * U. Magazine
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