A few gems manage to shine among blockbusters

A few gems manage to shine among blockbusters

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): This, we are told, is an age of dwindling
certainties. Gone is the Cold War chill to polarize global
politics (Mission: Impossible, GoldenEye).

Once secure national borders and personal boundaries can now
be crossed with a click of the mouse (Copycat, The Net, Fair
Game). Gone missing too is the template for an uncomplicated
masculinity (Up Close and Personal, The Truth About Cats and
Dogs, The Crossing Guard).

Leadership is in the hands of woolly liberals (The American
President, Shadow Conspiracy, Independence Day). To aspire for
success can be dangerous (To Die For) and heroism cannot be
assumed (Courage Under Fire). The mainstream movies tell us this?
Sure they do, at their best and at their most banal.

The year 1996 (which officially celebrates 101 years of
cinema) brought with it films that in themselves are a
celebration of the cinema. Popcorn movies like Martin Campbell's
GoldenEye and Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible were classy
action spectaculars that just wouldn't translate into any other
medium. Why did we still need those 1960s heroes?

Secret weapons technology had fallen into the wrong hands
(still assorted Russians), and certain American intelligence
agents had lost a raison d'etre and deceived their own
countrymen. But who really cared?

We were happy to be entertained on slight pretext. It was,
after all, an opportunity to watch James Bond in a spectacular
swallow-diving bungee jump and manning a tank in a chase through
the St. Petersburg streets. It was a chance to see Ethan Hunt
dangling spider-like and within a drop of sweat of being
detected, while downloading disks inside a CIA vault.

GoldenEye -- glamorously and wittily staged, grand scale yet
finely tuned -- brought a welcome return by an urbane James Bond
in Pierce Brosnan, every bit as effective as Sean Connery. This
007 film for the 1990s (made by the director of the chilling
television nuclear thriller Edge of Darkness ) could have lost
its sense of self in this age of uncertainty. But no, it
restored a cheerfully masculine Bond, only barely reconstructed,
who gets ticked off for his sexism by his female colleagues.

Formulas

Mission: Impossible didn't bother with ticklish gender issues.
It had a darker, labyrinthine and more traditional espionage
quality, and was punctuated with the evergreen pounding theme
music. You couldn't ask for more for your rupiah.

No smooth sophisticate, that other action hero Arnold
Schwarzenegger returned in 1996 in his latest, Eraser.
It had the expected cheerfully blustering violent set pieces,
witty stunts and one-liners, and though some expressed
disappointment with it, the action produced a familiar sense of
exhilaration.

We had been eagerly looking forward to the first American
studio product from distinguished Hong Kong director John Woo,
but Broken Arrow didn't measure up. A few outstanding action
set-pieces like the helicopter sequence were not enough to offset
a shallow narrative and characterization, including the callow
John Travolta villain. We have come to expect much more of John
Woo.

A return to Tarantino territory in From Dusk Till Dawn
(written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez)
wasn't worth the ticket or the time. A shoddy Z-grade vampire-
western that Tarantino is supposed to have penned while still
working at the video store. The brilliant promise of Tarantino's
Reservoir Dogs of several years ago has receded to a low-water
mark in gross juvenilia.

Robert Rodriguez's other film this year was Desperado. His
first film was El Mariachi, a Mexican western on a guitar-string
on which this year's film was based. It was witty, cineliterate
and individual, but with Desperado Rodriguez has shown us nothing
new. A bigger budget added nothing but more graphic violence.

Danny De Vito tried out the Tarantino formula in the
mainstream, with the result of a pretty weightless Get Shorty.
Why didn't we get to see Kevin Spacey et al in The Usual Suspects
here on the big screen instead? It won the 1996 Oscar for Best
Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay.

Box office

At the box office this year in Indonesia, four out of the five
top movies were action films. The action genre (distinct from
action-adventures like Raiders of the Lost Ark) came to the fore
internationally in the 1980s with the colossal figures of
Stallone. Schwarzenegger and Willis astride them, center frame.
Typically, the action protagonist has to uphold justice and truth
while the institutions or individuals who are usually invested
with that particular responsibility are corrupt.

An impossible scenario presents itself, in which the
protagonist has to pit himself against an implacable foe. This
exaggerated scenario allows him to take his wild stand, and in a
film such as McTiernan's 1988 Die Hard, the results can actually
be breathtaking.

But this year in Jakarta audiences saw a humdrum list of
indistinguishably titled and undistinguished action films such as
Shadow Conspiracy, Critical Decision, Sudden Death. There were
more titles about tough bastards and public enemies, dangerous
prey and fair game, and about warriors in mortal combat dead on
impact. It's pleasing, at least, to know that the action movie
producers are running out of words, even if they haven't yet run
out of steam.

However, there was Heat with nothing in its title to
distinguish it from the run-of-the mill, except a hint perhaps,
for those who recognized it, in the directorial signature of
Michael Mann who made the elegiac The Last of the Mohicans
(1993). Heat brought together Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on
screen and in frame together for the first time.

Heat, at nearly 180 minutes running time, is long, and it is
high, wide and epic like Mohicans. Yes, yet another film with
significant violence, but this time it isn't celebratory.
Instead, it takes the trouble to point out the impact this way of
life has on significant others, i.e. the women involved with the
three key male characters: Val Kilmer, Pacino and De Niro. They
give very different voice to a very different perspective.

It is "against their better selves" that these men maintain
their attachments. With a nice line in anomie, the De Niro
character advises his younger partner Kilmer to "allow nothing in
your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you
spot the heat around the corner." These sorts of life choices
are questioned, and the losses they involve exposed.

Elegantly and meticulously made, with every framing in itself
intrinsically meaningful in narrative terms, it showed Casino up
for its one-dimensionality, and offered director Martin Scorsese
an object lesson in what his film could have been. Heat stood
out as a fine modernist benchmark in a welter of postmodernist
trivia.

Outstanding

The other outstanding film at the multiplex in Jakarta in 1996
was Gus Van Sant's To Die For, which did a star turn for Nicole
Kidman in the role of a vapid and voraciously careerist weather
girl who would stop at nothing to succeed on television ("What
was the use of doing anything if no one was watching?") This
precisely timed satire was a delicious pleasure, with Kidman in
wickedly good form as the heartless, hungry Suzanne Stone.

With a strong script, creative editing and fine buttoned-down
performances all round, To Die For is a fine example of the well-
managed black comedy -- would-be satirist Oliver Stone please
take note! Gus Van Sant has let his hand rest firmly on the fine
tuning all the while with this one and the results are, in their
idiosyncratic fashion, caustic and cannily clever.

A debut from director Gary Fleder, with his Things to Do In
Denver When You're Dead looked like it was going to be an
independent that would deliver something different from the
formulaic. It began well but stopped developing when the set-up
turned into just another excuse to dispatch with as many bodies
as possible.

Terry Gilliam's morose time-traveling Twelve Monkeys with
Bruce Willis was strong, but not as good an indication of how
clever this director can be -- in a delirious sort of way -- with
difficult material. The extravagant fantasy film Brazil, that
Gilliam made in 1985, screened briefly at the British Council
this year. It still stands as the best brilliant example of
Gilliam's ability to dazzle and surprise.

This year's remakes of classics Sabrina and Diabolique were
unable to reprise the originals made by director Billy Wilder
with Bogart and Audrey Hepburn (in Sabrina) and by Henri-Georges
Clouzot with Simone Signoret (in Diabolique) in the 1950s. Some
things are better left alone.

However, a return to old-fashioned romantic comedy in Rob
Reiner's The American President worked the formula very well,
managing at the same time to introduce a little contemporary
relevance. Courage Under Fire (directed by Edward Zwick) was
another reason to visit the multiplex this year. But when will
they learn that they don't have to tack on a big finale,
reasserting the state of the nation, at the end of any film that
exposes a few problems?

It won't come as a surprise to know that the biggest box
office success of the year in Indonesia was Roland Emmerich's
Independence Day. It was diverting and it did deliver, but the
success of Independence Day was a tribute to the marketing
machine that turned a solid B-grade movie about how America
single-handedly saves the world into the year's big blockbuster.

Twister made a similar pitch, and came in fifth at the box
office here in Indonesia. Jan de Bont (director of Speed) has
made little more than a big cloud of dust out of this one, with
its fragment of a narrative and unengaging lead characters. At
least the low body was low.

The demonic underworld of Seven infected us with a paranoia
that evil is everywhere, without and within. Agoraphobia in
Copycat had us share the realization that we can be got at via
the PC, or simply erased, as in The Net.

But you, the collective audience, went once again for the
action film, preferring these films in this order - Independence
Day, Mission: Impossible, Jumanji, Fair Game and Twister. These
were your choice, the top five films at the box-office in Jakarta
in 1996.

But there weren't nearly enough reasons to go to the cinema in
Jakarta in 1996. Available choices were frequently of low or
indifferent quality. At home I would be wanting to go to the
cinema twice a week, but distribution here in Indonesia just
doesn't bring enough of the good movies in. Why not?

Why didn't we get quality cinema this year when the rest of
the world saw Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, Richard
Loncraine's Richard III, Joel Cohen's Fargo, Scott Hick's Shine,
Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas, Josiane Balasko's French Twist,
Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, Wayne Wang's Smoke, Emir
Kusturica's Underground, or Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies?

Are they too expensive to buy for this market? Aren't the
foreign distributors keen to sell poor performers outside their
home markets to recoup their losses? Someone must be able to
tell us.