Financial Times (London,England)

July 28, 1994, Thursday

Eyes on the teen market

By STEPHEN AMIDON

NORTH (PG) Rob Reiner
THE SANDLOT KIDS (PG) David Mickey Evans
PARIS, FRANCE (18) Gerard Ciccoritti
BOILING POINT (18) Takeshi Kitano
NECRONOMICON (18) Brian Yuzna, Christophe Gans, Shu Kaneko
WOODSTOCK (18) Michael Wadleigh
The concept behind North is one of the more promising to inform a screen comedy this year. In it, a 13-year-old boy with the unlikely first name of North decides that his parents do not love him enough, especially since he regularly cleans his room and always gets perfect grades at school. So he does what any red-blooded American would do – he hires a lawyer, who starts divorce proceedings against the folks. North wins the case and is given three months to find a new family who will love him for his true worth. If he fails, he must go back home or, worse, to an orphanage.

It is not hard to imagine what Frank Capra would have done with this material, a notion enhanced by the presence of a Frank Capra III as the first assistant director. But the direction of the usually reliable Rob Reiner fails to take advantage of the film’s satirical possibilities, playing instead for the broadest possible laughs and most sugary emotions. North’s parental suitors are little more than daft caricatures of mega-rich Texans, tourism-crazed Hawaiians and creepily holistic Eskimos. As North, Elijah Wood is resolutely bland, while usually hilarious performers like Jason Alexander and Jon Lovitz labour beneath a script that never takes its eyes off the teen market. Bruce Willis’s lugubrious presence as North’s mentor only shows that the film’s makers had more money than sense.
The Sandlot Kids is another willowy hymn to American boyhood. In it, Tom Guiry plays a 12-year-old who passes the summer of 1962 playing baseball with his friends. Their idyll is menaced only by the existence of the world’s baddest dog beyond the sandlot’s fence. When a prized ball falls into the hound’s clutches, Guiry and company are forced to try to get it back, making for one of the more bizarre rites-of-passage movies to come along in quite a while.
David Mickey Evans’s film is a largely amiable affair, coming unglued only at the end with a prolonged chase sequence. There is a genuinely funny moment where the boys try chewing tobacco for the first time, though the movie loses its claim to be an accurate slice of Americana when it has an ageing black baseballer (James Earl Jones) reminiscing about his days playing with Babe Ruth. The viciously racist colour line that kept blacks out of the big leagues was not broken until several years after Ruth’s death.
Paris, France bills itself as erotically charged, though nowhere is there any mention of the fact that its abundant energy is all negative. Its central character, Lucy (Leslie Hope), is a Canadian fiction writer who suffers a serious block as she tries to write about an affair she had in Paris with a now-dead poet. Her creative occlusion is finally purged when her publisher husband introduces her to Sloan (Peter Outerbridge), a hunky boxer-turned-writer. They immediately embark on a torrid affair that includes sodomy, straight razors, leather chaps and, worst of all, lots of bad prose. The film ends with Lucy, her husband and Sloan together in bed, all three being chastised over the phone by Sloan’s gay lover.
If this strenuous bedsmanship were cast as a black comedy it might have worked, but wit and laughter is rare in a film which takes itself as seriously as a heart attack. Director Gerard Ciccoritti seems to have intended a sort of ‘Last Tango in Toronto’ in which tortured sex mirrors tortured souls. Unfortunately, the film is unable to transform the lustful into the lyrical, making for a nasty and jarringly pretentious affair. Despite the lurid couplings and ribald language, there is a strange puritanism lurking at the film’s heart, a sense that sex can be either nasty or liberating – but never a joy in itself.
Despite being the most popular filmmaker in Japan, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano has yet to make a big impact in the English-speaking market. With his latest effort, Boiling Point, it is easy to see why. To put it mildly, his sensibility takes considerable getting used to. This story of a wimp-turned-avenging angel is a curious blend of surrealism, black comedy and sudden violence. The best thing about it is Takeshi’s ability to keep the audience off balance, though many viewers will find his uneven pacing and unresolved misogyny as hard to swallow as week-old sushi.
Another film that has cult written all over it is Necronomicon. Based on three short stories by the horror writer HP Lovecraft, it bypasses the normal conventions of plot and character to go comprehensively over the top at every possible occasion. Slime-spewing orifices, flesh-chomping zombies and globules of dripping flesh litter the film, punctuated by dialogue of the ‘I have a strong feeling we won’t be seeing him anymore’ variety. Fans of Re-Animator and The Evil Dead might find something of value here, though the squeamish would be advised to steer well clear.
Hippy-bashing has long been a popular sport, though watching the expanded cut of Michael Wadleigh’s seminal Woodstock makes you wonder if the flower children might not have been on to something, after all. Sure, the Aquarian speeches of the likes of John Sebastian and Joan Baez sound like self-parody to modern ears. The public address announcements, meanwhile, are inadvertently hilarious, particularly the continuous updates on the quality of the LSD circulating through the audience.
But there is no denying the spirit of peaceful adventure at the heart of the whole mad undertaking; a lack of malevolence, angst and irony that seems positively Edenic a quarter century on. The music, remixed and cleaned up, sounds great, particularly the rousing festival opener by Richie Havens, the crooning melodies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the lyrical acid rock of Jimi Hendrix. Viewers should be warned that the expanded director’s cut is now nearly four hours long, but those ready to take the plunge should thoroughly enjoy this grandaddy of rock documentaries.