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All you have to do is call 1-800-336-TRUE.
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Oh, please, Ms. Samuel.
Give an eligible guy a break. It's no big deal.
Yeah, but you see, the thing is, Archie...
I really want to spend my time here as un-socially as I can.
Sure.
Cheryl Lee from Twin Peaks plays the star of a TV series in that scene from the new movie Homage.
And the young man, played by Frank Whaley, who often plays characters just like that in the movies, very amusingly,
is a mathematician who has taken a summer job as the handyman at a ranch owned by the TV star's mother.
When the star comes home for the summer, Whaley is overwhelmed with emotions that are completely inappropriate and out of scale.
He adores her, but he's also an obnoxious pest who assumes that because they're in the middle of nowhere together,
she's gonna want to star in the movie he's written or maybe even become his lover.
One of your quasi-intellectual, intergalactic, sadomasochistic tales where I'd have to spend a great deal of time as a naked hostage.
What?
Not exactly the image I'm supposed to maintain for my show.
Oh, I see.
So the fact that in your first movie you took your clothes off, that is not in conflict with the image that you have to maintain for your show?
Oh, I see. We're a cinema history buff along with our other interests.
That was a long time ago, Archie.
The mother is played by Blythe Danner.
She considers her daughter an alcoholic and drug addict who is basically throwing her life away,
and although she's happy at first to see her daughter, they start fighting.
Let's have one of those fabulous, cathartic conversations that parents and children always have right before the final commercial message.
When you're sober, Lucille, maybe we can take a whack at it.
One of the key supporting roles is played by Bruce Davison as a public defender who gets Whaley's case after there's violence at the ranch.
No shrink tomorrow, Arch.
Mix them up good.
Smitty, why don't you just tell me what kind of diagnosis you want these nitwits to come in with?
I want you to be more complicated than their combined abilities to define you.
Homage is like Heavy, the earlier film, in a way, in that they're both about lonely and desperate alcoholics and the people who love them or don't love them.
But homage isn't as simple and straightforward, and I think that's a handicap.
It begins by telling us the outcome of the story and that everything is told in flashback,
and the surprise ending comes because of a melodramatic twist.
The movie was adapted by Mark Medoff from his stage play.
That's the same man who wrote Children of a Lesser God, and I think there are too many stage mannerisms and structural gimmicks in the film.
I prefer the more direct and cinematic approach of Heavy, which depends on the people instead of the technique to tell the story.
This is what was a problem for me.
I felt that I was I could have handled it in a more straightforward manner.
At the same time, this subject of obsession fascinates me.
There have been many great films written about it.
If you want to talk about fans, let's take a look at Scorsese's King of Comedy, which does even a great director knows enough to proceed in a more linear fashion.
There was no need for throwing it all up in the air and recombining this structure.
No, it didn't need to be shuffled, right.
At the same time, what I like about this guy is that he anchors the characters in very specific professions, and so they do play real.
And I think a mathematician, teacher, you know, actress, that kind of thing makes this intelligent.
But again, too complicated for its own good.
OK, coming up next, a feuding brother and sister are drawn together as their mother becomes ill in My Favorite Season with Catherine Deneuve.
Well, we're here with Wanda and Babs, who feel that their zipper bag is fine and will not switch to Gladlock zipper bags.
That's right. Ditto.
Now, Babo, let's say you hold some of your famous chicken gravy upside down over Wanda's head, sealed in either your bag or the Gladlock bag with the yellow and blue make green seal so you know the bag is closed.
Your bag doesn't have a green seal.
Why say let's go for it with our bag?
Why switch?
Because it's my head.
We'll switch to Gladlock.
Good call, Wanda. When it really counts, get Gladlock.
Our next film from France is about as far removed as it can be from the big Hollywood action pictures we reviewed earlier in the show.
It's André Tachanet's Mes Saisons préférés, My Favorite Season, about an adult brother and sister who have feuded, indeed not communicated, for years until their mother suffers a stroke and subtly they're brought together.
That's the great Catherine Deneuve and Daniel O'Toy as her brother and when they're together with their mother and Deneuve's husband, all kinds of age-old resentments are inflamed.
This movie is very much an investigation about how layer upon layer of anger can be built between relatives and how difficult and rare it is to even attempt to strip that away.
Here Deneuve realizes that with her own husband.
Well, at least she recognizes that in time to do something about it. My Favorite Season is a lot of talk, but the director André Tachanet also has total control of the pauses in the film, the pauses between the words, the silences of realization and discomfort.
He'll start the camera, for example, on Deneuve's face and pan away to a pond and we know exactly what she's thinking and we have the time to think it along with her.
I very much like being under the control of André Tachanet in Mace's own Pre-Ferre, My Favorite Season.
You know, one of the things that intrigued me about the movie is there's a whole subplot involving Deneuve's daughter and her adopted son and the son's girlfriend.
And indeed there's even a very strange scene where the daughter and the son go to the bedroom with the girlfriend and talk her into stripping and while she's stripping, the father walks in, sees it, has something else on his mind and leaves.
And I was wondering what this subplot had to do until I realized that it all goes back to the parents who have never really confronted their own emotions and never really felt anything.
And they have raised children who don't really feel anything either and they don't really feel anything about their children.
And that's why the casting of Catherine Deneuve was a master stroke because here is the classic French beauty. Exterior, a terrific actress, and here we get to see it, but to use her and to see her break the brittle facade is perfect.
And that's why it's an interesting film. It really is. It gets right underneath and deals with things.
Okay, when we come back, our video pick of the week starring the man who gave Swatchbuckling its name.
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Shisco and Ebert's video pick of the week, brought to you by Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn, the best part of the movies.
For 20 years, from around 1915 to 1935, the biggest action star in the movies was Douglas Fairbanks.
He was Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all rolled into one, and because he was a gifted athlete and stuntman and could play comedy as well as drama, his movies always showcased his versatility.
Now, 12 of his classics, restored in sparkling fresh prints, have been released as a collection of 10 video cassettes called Douglas Fairbanks, King of Hollywood.
Here he is in The Mark of Zorro, the 1920 film that defined him as an action hero after five years of lighter films.
He was one of the first of the screen Robin Hoods in a 1922 film that boasted some of the most sensational sets ever constructed for the movies before or since.
And here he is in The Thief of Baghdad, a 1924 fantasy adventure where Fairbanks did incredible stunt work.
Our video pick of the week, Douglas Fairbanks, King of Hollywood from Kino Video.
Now let's take another look at the movies we reviewed on this show.
A split vote on The Rock, I enjoyed his technical skill and rousing adventure as well as the performances.
Gene was worn out by the action and only really admired Nicolas Cage's performance.
Two thumbs up for Heavy, the touching story of loneliness and repression in a small town diner.
Congratulations to writer-director James Mangold.
We split on The Phantom with Billy Zane as the first of the comic superheroes.
I was swept up in his visual production, but Gene admired only Treat Williams' performance and some of the action sequences.
Two thumbs down on Homage, we both thought the technique got in the way of the emotion.
And finally, two thumbs up for my favorite season, Massez en préféré, with Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Latoy as a brother and sister who easily jostled for position in a competition that began in their childhood.
And so for me, you missed the boat on two fabulous adventure pictures, The Great Looking Phantom and the very exciting The Rock.
And Roger, you're the captain of that boat because I think that the more interesting pictures are the small ones this week, Massez en préféré and Heavy.
I think that these are the ones that take the chances.
Oh, well, I'm recommending those, too, but I think that you really should have been a little more open in particular.
Not lenient, no, no, no, open to the wonderful look of The Phantom.
Roger, I gave two mixed reviews. By definition, if they're mixed reviews, I had to be open to positive things.
Was the thumb up or was the thumb down?
The theme was down. Roger, support the notion of a mixed review. You, above all, should be smart enough to do that.
That's it for this week. Next week, we'll be back with reviews of more new movies, including Jim Carrey as the Cable Guy
and Mal Flanders starring Robin Wright as an 18th century adventurist and Morgan Freeman as her protector and friend.
That's next week, and until then, the balcony is closed.