This week, Siskel and Ebert review New York cop Michael Douglas up against the Japanese
underworld in black reigning.
In Country stars Bruce Willis as a Vietnam vet struggling with his past.
And Donald Sutherland enlists lawyer Marlon Brando to battle apartheid in a dry white
season.
All coming up next on Siskel and Ebert.
Michael Douglas is a New York cop trying to find an escaped prisoner in Japan in black
reign.
It's one of five new movies we'll be reviewing this week on Siskel and Ebert.
I'm Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times.
And I'm Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune.
Our first film is the highly touted Black Reign by Ridley Scott, the maker of Alien
and Blade Runner.
Like those pictures, Black Reign is good looking, but there's not much else to recommend it.
Michael Douglas plays a tough New York City detective.
How tough?
He drag races a punk on a motorcycle as the movie begins.
The rest of the film is about a sophisticated.
The next thing that happens is that Douglas and his partner witness a Japanese mobster
threaten a rival doing business with an American mafioso.
That's Andy Garcia as Douglas' partner.
They wind up tracking that killer named Sato in his native Japan, and they're forced to
work with a Japanese detective partner whom Douglas doesn't respect at first.
You're a foreigner.
This isn't New York.
We have rules here.
You have rules here, huh?
Hey, look, I see Sato's work, okay?
He ain't following your program.
Black Reign pays only lip service to the Japanese culture in the most obvious stereotypical
ways, as Douglas on the case gets a lesson in how to use chopsticks.
The last act of the film is the predictable extended chase in colorful Japanese urban
settings.
Black Reign has a good villain, but I think the script makes a fundamental mistake.
The Michael Douglas character is presented as very much in control most of the time he's
in Japan.
The whole picture would have been so much better if he had been totally at sea, constantly
being fooled along with us in the audience.
Why should he understand how... He's a run-of-the-mill New York detective.
He's not the big all-star, okay?
Why would he know how detective work is done in Japan?
How would he know how Japanese criminals work, especially on their own turf?
It doesn't make any sense.
Instead, he is played as the traditional macho hero, and that kind of cultural imperialism,
I think, really undoes the movie.
I was also very disappointed in this movie.
One of the things I kept thinking of as I looked at it was Blade Runner, the earlier
movie by Ridley Scott, which used enormously effective settings in urban Los Angeles of
the future, making that into a very depressing, kind of overwhelming city, kind of the Gotham
City of Los Angeles, if you will.
They're doing the same thing here, but to no purpose.
What happens is the city, Osaka, the sets for the city, overwhelm the action.
There was so much visually going on that has nothing to do with the story that you're almost
distracted, and then in the middle of it, this really dumb, simple story.
I mean, it's not a very good book, and you didn't mention Kate Capshaw, who was the bartender
in the Mob Hangout.
Because she isn't important.
Now, this could have been a cliché of one story, where they have the geisha who falls
in love with the American cop and gives him all the secrets.
Instead, it's an American girl who's been there eight years and presumably knows every
single secret of the Japanese mafia, which she doles out to Michael Douglas one at a
time.
I somehow doubt if an American girl could find out everything about the Japanese yakuza,
they call themselves, even in eight years, even as a bartender.
Well, if she knew it all, why would she give it to him?
The whole thing is, this movie is made like an American film, and they just, I think it's
almost insulting.
The portrayal of the Japanese in the film, which could have been exciting and fresh to
us, is just standard stuff updated from Stereotypes of the Forties.
Terrifically good-looking productions to cover up a very, very, very, very thin script.
Okay, next movie.
And our next movie is called Heavy Petting.
This is quite a change of subject to my other things.
It's a compilation of old and new footage on the subject of teenage sex, especially
in the 1950s and early 1960s, when, according to the testimony in this movie, teenagers
knew a lot about sex and almost everything they knew was wrong.
The movie brings together several different kinds of material.
First, there are old educational films, in which lecturers solemnly discuss the ins and
outs of human sexuality.
Well, I may be old-fashioned, but I've always been taught that sex relations should be
safe for marriage.
If I did give him the key, I don't think he'd ever respect me again.
Then there are the interviews with a lot of survivors of teenage sex, people now in their
thirties and forties who remember the old days.
A lot of these witnesses are performers, like actress Anne Magnusson, who talks about how
people never talked about sex.
Every time she said penis, we'd break up into squeals of laughter, and she got really
mad at us, because we would never pay attention.
We were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, let's go watch Bowinkle, you know.
The movie includes historical documentary gems like this rediscovered footage of the
dramatic search for a VD carrier.
Starting with a known hangout, the ballpark.
With only a vague description of a girl, the field representative tries to find one of
the known contacts of an infected person.
And here, as with all other cases in Oakdale, he is successful in locating a potential source
of syphilis, the tall aggressive blonde.
A sequence like that contains an amazement all its own as the camera zooms in on that
suspicious looking blonde.
But heavy petty has a couple of problems, I think.
One is that the structure of the movie quickly gets really routine.
First we get old footage, then we get new footage, then we get a clip from a Hollywood
teenager movie, then the process begins all over again with some more witnesses telling
about their adolescents.
The second problem in this movie is that none of the so-called experts in the film really
seem to have fought it out in the trenches of teenage sexuality.
A lot of them seem to have grown up in big cities, for example, where they missed the
whole car culture.
This movie really totally misses the boat on the whole culture of parking and lovers
lanes and things.
I kept having the feeling that any randomly selected group of my friends would have more
interesting memories about adolescents and the people in this film.
They were losers in the teenage romantic sweepstakes, but then again, who wasn't?
The problem is they can't even make good stories out of their defeats.
I thought this was a very weak film, given the potential for being funny or insightful.
And why not be insightful?
The easiest thing to do is to look at old BD films or army training films and just run
that material.
So I don't give them any credit for that.
It's not a fresh insight to look at that stuff as campy, but then they have interviews with
people and they pick a lot of fringe show business people, sort of cult figures who
are sort of standard order whenever you want to be sort of a little bit avant-garde, but
now they're really not their mainstream because they're used so often in the same way.
I thought it was completely uninspired.
I think they blew it.
I wasn't laughing at the stuff and actually I would have preferred to have seen one uninterrupted
army training film or something like that rather than what they put together for editing.
You know, one of the things I couldn't help thinking about as I watch this movie is that
several people talk about that legendary girl in the senior class, you know.
Every time that anybody talks about teenage sex in the 50s, they always say, and three
or four people in this movie say, I think everyone in our senior class was a virgin
when we graduated.
We never had any sex except for this one girl who was said to, you know, go all the way.
I would like it if they would find that girl.
Exactly.
You know, I would really like to find the legendary girl from the 50s who went all the
way.
I don't know if she exists.
I mean, there was supposed to be one in our senior class, but the identity kept changing
and by the time our 10th anniversary came around, we figured that that was just a bad
one.
What you're talking about is something of substance.
Yeah.
We're dealing, obviously, with an important subject.
Let's get some confessions.
Uh-huh.
Not people doing a showbiz act or standard camp material.
Coming up next, Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd star in In Country as a teenage girl tries
to learn from her uncle about the Vietnam War.
Well, I want to know about it.
I got the right.
Sounds strange to me.
Me too.
Us both.
Why are people leery of propaganda twister?
It violates the order of nature.
Propaganda twister, deliciously tempting flavor combinations mother nature never imagined.
The imagination is a dangerous thing.
Captivating flavors like orange passion fruit.
Passion fruit?
Propaganda twister, flavors mother nature never intended, but should've.
It's more excitement than decent people need.
Hmm, this is the new stuff, huh?
That's buttered coffee.
We made it just for you.
The thing about it is it's not too sweet, not sugary, just right.
You could eat this all day.
Well, you can keep telling me about it while I eat.
Well, taking advantage of me here.
I'll do all the talking and you do all the eating.
I just can't handle a plain hot potato.
But a meal in a potato?
Weight Watchers baked potato entrees, broccoli and cheese sauce, or chicken divine, Weight
Watchers.
This is living.
Do it yourself.
Do it for less.
Do it yourself.
Do it for less.
When it's finally time to get your home back together again, it's easy to do it yourself
with Home Club's help.
Everyone saves at Home Club, but members save even more.
Oh, you know that we can do it.
There's really nothing to it.
We'll have to see you do it.
The home of the family.
Do it yourself.
Denver.
The new four by four with the power to run circles around Toyota.
Introducing the 1990 Mitsubishi Mighty Max four by four.
It has a standard V6 engine to give it more power than the Toyota Deluxe.
More standard features than Toyota too, like auto locking hubs and side window defoggers.
The new Mitsubishi Mighty Max four by four with the power to run circles around Toyota.
And now factory dealer incentives could mean great deals, but only at your Denver area
Mitsubishi Motors dealer.
Our next film is yet another Vietnam war drama, but it is rendered special because of the
intimacy of its story and because of one extraordinary performance.
In Country is the name of the film.
It's a story of a 17 year old Southern girl whose father was killed in Vietnam combat
before she was born.
Now she wants to learn about him and the war.
Her uncle, her mother's brother, is a Vietnam vet played by Bruce Willis.
He's closed mouthed and bitter about the war and doesn't want to answer his niece's persistent
questions.
That's Emily Lloyd, a British actress so convincing as the Southern girl.
When she reads her father's diary, she starts forming opinions about him that infuriate
Bruce Willis.
Oh, he talked about them gooks and that killing, I hated it, I don't like him anymore.
You don't like him anymore?
Who the hell are you to judge him?
The film concludes with a quietly powerful family visit to the Vietnam War Memorial in
Washington D.C.
Plane E. Hughes.
That visit to the memorial runs on for about 15 screen minutes and it has almost an hallucinogenic
quality taking us into a trance-like reverie about the war and its effects on families.
It's remarkable, that monument, and particularly the way it's shot by Norman Jewish in which
you see the reflection of the people looking at the wall on the names and the reverberation
back and forth.
It's very, very special.
What I like about In Country is not that it has any fresh insights but that it is so matter
of fact about the slices of life it presents.
We meet some people, we see how the war has touched them, and life goes on.
Emily Lloyd is superb.
Bruce Willis is thoroughly credible in a serious role and that marvelous Vietnam War Memorial
deserves some kind of award as a supporting actor in this picture.
You know, I felt almost exactly the same way you did about the movie.
This movie doesn't have a plot in a conventional sense.
It doesn't set up a lot of conflict between the people and who's going to win and who's
going to lose.
Will the Vietnam vet blow up and kill everybody?
Or will he go berserk with his machine gun or something, none of that.
This is a movie about ordinary people in an ordinary small town going about their ordinary
lives and asking questions that anyone would ask.
This daughter has never known her father.
And the most heartbreaking line in the movie is when her mother says, honey, I only married
him a month before he went to Vietnam and then I never saw him again.
I hardly even remember your dad, but she remembers him.
And with her uncle, they go back and they make their peace at the memorial with this
war.
And the last scene of the movie, the movie is constructed like a short story, episode
and dialogue leading up to a big moment of truth at the end rather than a more conventional
plot.
It's very effective.
I thought it was extremely effective.
This Emily Lloyd, first of all, I didn't recognize her at first.
This is the girl from Wish You Were Here.
And then she played a mafia daughter in a couple of weeks ago.
And you see her and you're a fresh, exciting person.
Then you realize who it is.
I mean, it's a tremendous achievement.
She's a great bit of casting, I think, to think of her for this role.
Bruce Willis was just fine.
And the end of the movie is a real emotional power.
Absolutely.
It really is.
Coming up next, the dry white season with Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando.
First time on the screen in nine years in the story of a white South African who rebels
against the system.
How justice in South Africa is misapplied when it comes to the question of race.
It was a nightmare.
I opened the fridge.
Purate strawberries, gelatin, sour cream, bread, everywhere.