Wild Wild West (12) General release
With Hollywood plundering TV junk culture from the Sixties and Seventies for all its ideas these days, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to revive that staple of the era, the comedy Western, although this first example suggests there's not much gold in them thar hills. Barry Sonnenfeld's movie loosely draws its inspiration from an obscure TV series of the period, but is more concerned with grafting the elements of a modern, effects-driven blockbuster on to the horse opera genre - a deeply unsuccessful surgical operation.
The whole thing starts off amiably enough, with a chase, a bar-room brawl and a shoot-out in the best Western tradition, introducing our heroes, Will Smith and Kevin Kline. Smith and Kline are federal marshalls with different modus vivendi: Smith is the all-guns-blazing type; Kline prides himself on his more refined approach as a master of disguise and technology. Called to Washington by the president, they're sent on a mission to find out who's behind the kidnapping of the nation's best scientists. Along the way, they pick up Salma Hayek, and the trail soon leads to the lair of mad genius Kenneth Branagh, a former Confederate general, crippled in the Civil War, who dreams of wreaking his revenge on the United States with a range of deadly new inventions. You can see why Sonnenfeld, with a track record of sci-fi and comic horror behind him, would have thought that this blend of action, comedy and special effects might be a winning mix. In fact, on paper, Wild Wild West probably looked like perfect material, with its echoes of The Addams Family in Branagh's over-the-top performance and Men in Black in the SmithKline relationship.
Which just goes to show that paper isn't a very good material for making movies. Everything in Wild Wild West is just too calculated: the Heath Robinson-ish inventions are never quite inventive enough; Smith and Kline's banter is heavy-handed at best; and the movie collapses in its final quarter, when the less-than-impressive effects take over completely.
Another Day in Paradise (Club IFC, Dublin)
Larry Clark's debut feature, Kids, stirred up some controversy a couple of years ago, with its depiction of the aimless, amoral lifestyle of New York youngsters receiving outraged comment in some quarters. Another Day in Paradise, Clark's second film, hasn't received the same kind of attention, even though the violent, drug-soaked world it depicts isn't a million miles away from that of Kids.
That may be partly because we've seen it all before. Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy traversed very similar terrain in its depiction of young drug addicts robbing their way across America. In Van Sant's film, the setting was the Pacific north-west, but he explicitly acknowledged the influence of Clark's 1971 photo-essay, Tulsa, about young hustlers in Oklahoma. Now Clark has returned to that milieu for his sometimes interesting but surprisingly straightforward low-life drama.
Like Van Sant's film, Another Day in Paradise centres on an unconventional "family", headed by a charismatic father-figure - in this case played by James Woods. Woods is Mel, a longtime junkie and experienced criminal who, together with his girlfriend, Sid (Melanie Griffith) takes two young drifters (Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Warner) under his wing. The four set off on a spree of robberies and drug deals across Oklahoma, which soon go wrong in a shoot-out with a white-supremacist biker gang. From then on, things go from bad to worse, as events spiral downwards into further violence and death, with Woods and his gang getting increasingly out of their depth.
Shot in an economical, unflashy style, Clark's film (based on a book by Eddie Little) is constructed largely as a vehicle for Woods, an actor who has never quite lived up to the early promise he showed in films like Salvador. Here, he's excellent as the loquacious, charming, violent Mel, while Griffith is a revelation as his sidekick. But there's a disappointing lack of ambition about the whole enterprise, and even a sense of laziness - Clark has assembled a soundtrack of Stax soul classics, which serve to heighten the action at first, but lose their impact through over-use as the film wears on. Another Day in Paradise isn't a bad film by any means - it just leaves you with the feeling that it could have been a better one.
Venus Beauty (Club IFC, Dublin)
Tonie Marshall's drily humorous drama dissects the myths of romance through the eyes of the women who work in a Parisian beauty salon, an oasis of perfumed pink in a drab urban landcsape. Chief among them is middle-aged Nathalie Baye, deeply cynical about love or happiness and resigned to anonymous one-night stands. When rumpled, passionate sculptor Samuel LeBihan appears and declares his undying love for Baye, her world is thrown into unwelcome turmoil, to her dismay. Meanwhile, the other women are coping in their own different ways with their lives, while a constant stream of customers comes through the door in search of a little cosmetic happiness.
Marshall's film, with its lack of pretension and its slightly surreal sense of humour, makes a refreshing change from the usual po-faced French bourgeois romantic dramas. As the various protagonists circle the salon (the Babychamsweet tinkle of its doorbell becomes a recurring musical motif for their desperation), their weaknesses, self-deceptions and disappointments are handled with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality and a sure sense of light comedy, with a string of telling cameos from an excellent supporting cast.
A limited number of tickets for the readers' screening of Mickey Blue Eyes, starring Hugh Grant, are available today on a first-come, first-served basis at The Irish Times, 10-16 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2. The screening is at 11 a.m. next Sunday in the Savoy, Dublin.
