Video Replay
by Bob Angilly
Three interesting films by lesser known directors
. . . and one by John Houston
Mario Van Peebles
jazzed up the cop movie genre with New Jack City. In Posse he updates
the classic American western. Van Peebles is the reluctant leader of a
band of ex-soldiers, on the run from the Spanish-American war and a psychotic
colonel. He returns to his home town, seeking revenge for the death of
his father, and trying to save the settlers from the KKK a racist sheriff,
and the railroad interests who want to take over the town. Peebles has
great fun mining traditional western clichés, from Once Upon a Time
to Blazing Saddles. There's a high-energy sound track, a historically relevant
story and an imaginative cast including Tone Loc, Tiny Lister, Woody Stroud,
Paul Bartel, Nipsy Russell and Issac Hayes.
Steven
Soderbergh's Kafka has fun with the notion that highly imaginative
writers often lead very mundane lives. Franz Kafka is a timid insurance
clerk in Prague, who writes strange stories in his spare time, and quite
unaware of the bizarre conspiracies going on around him. When he tries
to locate a missing friend, he gets involved with anarchists, mysterious
government experiments, and a strange rodent like man who is trying to
kill him. The trail leads him through the black & white streets of
Prague, to a castle overlooking the city, where upon opening a door everything
is revealed in glorious color. Jeremy Irons heads a mostly British cast
including Alec Guiness, Ian Holm, and Joel Grey as a tyrannical middle
manager.
If El Mariachi is an indicator of the post-NAFTA future
of the Mexican film industry, Hollywood should be worried. Director Robert
Rodriguez (also photographer, writer, editor and co-producer) created this
minor gem for a mere $7,000--about three zeros less than ever the most
modest Hollywood action picture. Carlos Gallardo is a singing guitarist
mistaken for an escaped hit man. When a mob boss tries to hit the hit man
before he hits him, the Mariachi gets caught in the middle, and soon everyone
is trying to kill him. Rodriguez avoids farce, (there are too many similar
comedies already), he also avoids to obvious cliché of having his
star play both the Mariachi and the hit man. Instead we have a nice guy
suddenly forced into a very violent world, fighting to survive, and not
knowing what he did to annoy so many people.
Finally,
if three World Cup games a day weren't enough for you, check out a great
soccer movie. Pelé heads a cast of over a dozen top European and
South American players (doing their first acting outside the penalty area)
along with lesser players Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, and Max von
Sidow in John Houston's Victory. Allied prisoners of war are forced
to play a propaganda game with German all stars. There's an escape plan
(you guessed it--somebody digs a tunnel under the locker room) and one
heck of a football game, with Pelé choreographing all the plays
and teaching Stallone to play goal. Sure it's silly, but so was The Dirty
Dozen.