Movie scene 1999: A Year of experiments and scare fare

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Moviegoing in Jakarta is essentially about two things: good movie weeks and bad movie weeks.

When you are lucky, you can go from one critically acclaimed film to the next, watching one award-winning picture after another. But at other times, all that is offered is either a schlocky horror show, an awful slapstick piece or a mind-numbing action flick that is high in body count but low in cinematic nutrition.

That could not have been more true in 1999, when our local movie theaters showed symptoms of such severe moodswings. At certain times they could really grab you with Oscar-winning films and other high-profile material.

But soon after, they let you go, leaving no choice but an Adam Sandler lowbrow comedy or an obscure action movie from obscure action guy Mark Dacascos.

The good news is that the Studio 21 chain, the company that distributes and screens movies in most Indonesian cinemas, seems to be learning something.

It is obviously beginning to recognize the developing tastes of the Jakarta moviegoing public. The evidence: a fewer number of bad movie weeks this year.

Sure, we still have to deal with low-grade action flicks such as Dacascos's The Base, the vigilantism propaganda of The Substitute 2 or Steve Guttenberg's Airborne.

Some horror trashfests like Warlock III and Phantasm IV: Oblivion also enjoyed a good amount of screentime here.

However, we have seen more and more internationally acclaimed films reaching our screens too, especially from March through April, when the city enjoyed an Oscar-fever aftermath.

This was the right time to show Affliction (starring Oscar winner James Coburn), the Oscar-nominated The Truman Show and The Thin Red Line, and the big Oscar champion Shakespeare in Love. The obvious absentee in this group is the World War II saga Saving Private Ryan, which was shown late last year.

Who would have thought that a film about a 16th century British playwright suffering from writer's block would be a hit in Jakarta?

Well, it happened, with the marketing-savvy Studio 21 opening Shakespeare in Love a week before the Academy Awards ceremony, letting the Oscars do the rest.

The result: people would not stop going to the cinema to see what the year's Oscar winner for Best Picture was like.

And Studio 21 itself could not stop. In July, it screened Afterglow, whose leading lady, Julie Christie, was nominated for an Oscar last year.

This offbeat comedy-drama about two married couples who inadvertently swap partners did not seem like a sure-fire box- office winner here. But the gamble paid off and the film reaped considerable success.

And so, "better late than never" became the apparent motto that prompted the December opening of Good Will Hunting and The Wings of the Dove, two films that also won Oscar accolades last year.

Good Will Hunting, a drama about a math genius who opts for a blue-collar life will benefit from the star power of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Robin Williams, who all won Oscars for their work in this film.

Meanwhile, Wings, slated to open late this year, will be a testing ground to see whether a period costume drama will or will not scare away an audience too accustomed to films with contemporary settings.

Of course, the theater chain was not only busy experimenting all year. Most of the time it stuck to an age-old formula: bring in movies with established, household names, like Nicolas Cage, John Travolta, Sharon Stone, Adam Sandler, Will Smith, Jean- Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The funny thing is, only Travolta's detective story The General's Daughter and Schwarzenegger's doomsday tale End of Days earned anything meaningful among these star-led films (since Studio 21 never publishes box-office results, we can only guess at the success of a film from its lifespan at the theaters).

None of Van Damme's three films lasted long, and Stone's sensual pose on the posters for Gloria was apparently not magnetic enough to lure audiences into the theaters (a pity, since it is actually a pretty decent film).

This year's main course at the movies was comedy, and we got a wide variety of it: from slapstick (Wrongfully Accused, Bowfinger) to action-comedy (Rush Hour, Blue Streak) to offbeat (Office Space, Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me).

Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal made an effective comedy duo in Analyze This. And there were even those movies from beyond Hollywood -- Virtual Sexuality and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels from the United Kingdom and Witch Way Love from France.

And we have not even mentioned romantic comedies, two of which featured Hollywood's most-loved couples of today: Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (You've Got Mail) and Julia Roberts and Richard Gere (Runaway Bride) in reunion movies that became bigger than the films themselves.

While romance was in the air, we were also offered Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair, two films about romantic thieves whose plots are so similar one wonders if they stole story pitches from each other. Thomas Crown star Pierce Brosnan returned later this year with The World is Not Enough, a film that sounds like a United Nation's family planning campaign but turns out to be the newest James Bond spectacle.

Yes, our theaters this year were quite a colorful spectrum: there was the high-energy sci-fi action extravaganza The Matrix; there was the shot-by-shot remake of the Hitchcock classic Psycho; and there were even selections for the thinking crowd: the character-driven comedy Pushing Tin and the classy thriller Arlington Road. Fans of Indian song-and-dance flicks continued to go to Senayan 21, where such films are regularly screened.

There was also space for the "Annual Indonesian Movie". Again, there was only one, Marselli Sumarno's directorial debut, Sri, which has become the country's official entry for the upcoming Academy Awards. Actually, there were a number of other Indonesian films, but they were the usual soft-porn types which were shown at smaller theaters outside the 21 system.

Still, something was missing, and it was the most highly anticipated movie of 1999, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Now why would such an obvious cash cow not be shown here? Studio 21 spokespeople would not speak, but sources said the film came with a burdensome merchandising deal that local distributors found unaffordable.

Filmgoers waiting for Notting Hill were also dismayed. Logically, if they showed Stepmom and Runaway Bride, they would screen a third Julia Roberts film, right? Wrong.

Explanation? None.

There is something else that should have been seen at local cinemas: more movies for kids, in quantity and quality. Sure, Tarzan was all right, but then we got other films about heroes in loincloths -- Mowgli's First Adventure, Jungle Boy -- that were not that great. And those lame adaptations of old TV series -- My Favorite Martian, Inspector Gadget -- did not cut it either.

Solution: bring in more stuff like The Borrowers and Toy Story 2.

Following Hollywood's recent trend of scare fare, the theaters gave us an array of man vs. menacing species films to choose from. We could take our pick: snakes (King Cobra), crocodiles (Lake Placid), sharks (Deep Blue Sea), aliens (The Faculty) or devil-possessed human organs (Idle Hands).

And a venture into the supernatural realm was made possible by The Haunting, The Mummy and The Sixth Sense.

The latter two, incidentally, were this year's winners, both staying at major theaters for over six weeks, longer than any other film in 1999. The Sixth Sense has just received Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (for its spectacular young star, Haley Joel Osment), making it a probable contender for the upcoming Academy Awards. Now that is something for the Studio 21 people to get busy about come March.