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FT 27 AUG 92 / Arts: Four dudes search for a plot - Cinema
By NIGEL ANDREWS
JUICE (15) MGMs West End, Electric
BFI NEW DIRECTORS Metro
THE CUTTING EDGE (PG) MGM Haymarket
BODY HEAT (18) Barbican
HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY ICA from next week
TAKING the rap used to be something people did for a crime they had or had
not committed. Now it is what filmgoers do (with or without criminal record)
when pinned to their seats by black movies whose plot sense is as minimal as
their musical variety.
Ernest Dickerson's Juice is a Harlem-set rap-scored melodrama about four
young blacks who fall out with the law after a robbery with murder. Since it
marks the writing-directing debut of Spike Lee's longtime camera-person, the
film has gained encomia from those publications that worship at the altar of
Political Correctness.
'Energetic, entertaining and engagaging, and without the feeling of
difficult truths being forgotten' says Time Out. And right-on ideologues
will no doubt applaud the film's 90 percent non-white cast, the dialogue
rich in local argot ('I'm gonna beat your ass', 'You gonna beat my ass?'
'Yes, I gonna ..' etc.) and the screenplay that weaves and feints through
half an hour of tired street comedy before standing stiffly to attention to
give us a 'plot'.
This concerns aspiring disc jockey 'Q' (Omar Epps) and his two friends Steel
and Rahim who are appalled when a fourth friend Bishop goes gun-crazy during
a shop hold-up. Why he does so is unclear; but perhaps an earlier glimpse of
Cagney on TV in White Heat has wired him up for mayhem.
Either way, the film soon turns into a throwback Warners melodrama, with
Bishop gunning for his former friends, and the early sub-Spike Lee street
comedy is forgotten in a hail of B-movie cliches. We especially note the
tilted angles and harsh-lit close-ups of the police interrogation sequence:
these look as if they were kidnapped, feebly protesting, from Public Enemy
or The Roaring Twenties.
With its two-dimensional characters and trite moralising, this film would
have been laughed off the screen if presented by white film-makers with
white actors in white roles. But we cannot laugh around - or we are not
supposed to - with the cinema of Spike Lee and his acolytes. Although some
of those film-makers, like Lee himself, are talented social satirists, most
like Mr Dickerson are bargain-basement disciples empowered and encouraged
only by the mighty karma of PC
How mighty that karma is is evident in the 1992 New Directors programme of
shorts sponsored by the British Film Institute with Channel 4. This is the
fifth year's fruit from the annual scheme whereby six aspiring film-makers
receive Pounds 30,000 apiece to make calling-card movies.
The quality is so low this year that we need not detain you with an autopsy
on each film. But I wonder if the reason for the cinematic poverty is not
that ethnic tokenism is being exercised in the choice of directors. Three
are white (one male, two female), one is black, one is Asian and one is
Dutch-Trinidadian. For good measure, lesbianism, the environment and
cultural colonialism are among the Important Themes treated.
This would be fine if the films were any good. But they are so banal that
one wonders what the 990-odd submissions apparently rejected by the BFI were
like. Were they bad? Were they banal? Or were they just Politically
Incorrect? Better luck, and much better selection, in 1993.
It is not a good week - it is not a good summer - and Hollywod fails to come
to the rescue. 'I wanna see your ass in the air' shouts the trainer to the
figure skater in The Cutting Edge; much around the time that that part of
the filmgoer's anatomy has slid deep into the upholstery in response to this
dotty tale of love and ambition on the ice rink.
Tony Gilroy wrote the script, Paul M. Glaser (TV's Starsky) directed, and DB
Sweeney and Moira Kelly play the ice partners for whom initial antagonism is
a prelude to - yes] - passion. The wiser characters realise this early on.
'Foreplay]' they chuckle avuncularly as Sweeney slings Kelly
life-endangeringly on to the ice or she screams at him down a hotel corridor
after a drunken dinner date.
Never mind. We can always turn to more peaceable matters like the reception
accorded our hero's career-change - he used to be an ice-hockey player - by
his redneck bar-owning father ('Are they gonna make you shave you legs?').
Or for tragicomic relief there is Roy Dotrice as the duo's trainer,
struggling with his Russian accent much as Laocoon struggled with his
consignment of snakes.
Hokum so wholehearted earns affection if not admiration. It skates over
every known emotion in the pop-melodramatic rink, while never pausing to
make an original incision on any.
Revival corner this week features Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 directing debut
Body Heat, launching a Barbican season in honour of actor William Hurt.
Adultery and murder; Hurt and Kathleen Turner; and a shameless set of
plunderings from the fatal-woman thrillers of yesteryear. Double Indemnity,
The Woman In The Window, Out Of The Past: bring on the Venetian blinds,
paint the dialogue in wisecracking monochrome.
But if Body Heat is plagiarism posturing as art, it is still more enjoyable
than anything director Kasdan has made since. Main reason: a script is
served up with a salty crackle by Hurt and Turner, aided by Mickey Rourke's
debut cameo as a soft-spoken bomb-maker.
Jostling an 11-year-old American film is a 15-year-old European one.
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film From Germany, revived at the ICA, is
a monstrous 7-hour cabaret from the man who brought us Ludwig: Requiem For A
Virgin King and Parsifal the movie. On soundstages thick with smoke,
puppetry, slide projections and other theatrical-pedagogic devices oft
called 'Brechtian', modern German history is recounted for us as if by a mad
schoolteacher with a runaway props budget.
The good news is that Syberberg both absorbs and contextualises the kitsch
associations that grew around Hitler in 1970s culture, when in such musicals
as Cabaret and such films as Visconti's The Damned Herr Fuhrer became a
superstar. The bad news is - well, actually there is no bad news. Against
expectation, Syberberg's seminar is horribly compulsive.
Even at its most hectoring - a toga'd Adolf rearing from a grave marked 'RW'
(Richard Wagner), Goering or Goebbels puppets cavorting against Leni
Riefenstahl back-projections - Hitler has a passionate wit about the fatal
windings of politics and an absurdist ferocity that puts the hiss back into
history.
How disturbing, though, that the summer has brought us so few new films from
Europe and so many old ones reminding us of her former glory. The European
Film Award nominations, just announced, pour salt on the continent's wounded
self-esteem. The awards are nicknamed 'Felixes' in reference to Neil Simon's
odd couple. They were Felix and Oscar, you recall, of whom Oscar was the
flamboyant shambolic one while Felix was the fastidious introvert.
Oh what wisdom from careless sobriquets] While Oscar wassails loudly and
untidily each April, Felix dons his dinner jacket each autumn graciously to
honour films that few people have heard of and fewer have seen.
The Financial Times
London Page 13