This week, Siskel and Ebert review George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino on the run from
Dusk Till Dawn.
Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt match wits in a race through time in 12 Monkeys.
Vigilante Sally Field targets murderer Kiefer Sutherland in Eye for an Eye.
George Clooney from TV's ER and Quentin Tarantino play a couple of murderous thieves who are
in for the fight of their lives down Mexico Way and from Dusk Till Dawn on a five new
movies we'll be reviewing this week on Siskel and Ebert along with the box office sensation
12 Monkeys starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt plus new films with Sandra Bullock and
Sally Field.
I'm Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune.
And I'm Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Our first movie is from Dusk Till Dawn although maybe I should call it our first two movies
because it starts out as a road picture about two escaping bank robbers who take hostages
and then halfway through it shifts gears and turns into a vampire movie.
That's typical of the style of Quentin Tarantino who wrote this film and likes to hop between
genres.
The high energy in the film is typical of its director I think Robert Rodriguez who
broke into the movies a few years ago with a low budget hit named El Mariachi.
As this new movie opens two criminal brothers have just held up a highway liquor store and
killed a Texas Ranger.
Now the clerk has opened fire on them.
The brothers are played by ER's George Clooney who is relatively sane and Quentin Tarantino
who is a mad dog killer.
Trying to escape across the Mexican border they take hostages.
A former preacher played by Harvey Keitel and his children played by Juliette Lewis
and Ernest Luke.
What I'm going to record right now is saying that this is a very bad idea.
Do we know it?
No, shut up.
How many with you?
They're going to switch the band.
As long as you're next.
No, we're going to be just fine.
They end up in a scummy bar where almost everyone is actually secretly a vampire and there's
a lot of gory action.
But Tarantino likes to work theological discussions into his portraits of violent low lives.
So here the killer played by Clooney gets serious with the former minister.
Because I know that whatever is out there trying to get in is pure evil straight from
hell.
If there is a hell and those sons of are from it then there has got to be a heaven, Jacob.
There's got to be.
So which are you?
Are you a faithless preacher?
Are you a mean servant of God?
The movie borrows from everywhere including George Romero's ghoul movies where all it
takes is one bite and you're a monster too.
Keitel knows his time is limited before he becomes a vampire.
Now since you need me, I think you better swear, Kate, do you swear to God that when
I become one of the undead, you'll kill me?
You know there are a few things in this movie that are really excellent and one of them
is the pre-title sequence involving a Texas Ranger played by Michael Parks.
His dialogue is so well written, so well acted and so funny that as he describes his backwater
community we can almost picture it, in fact I almost wanted the movie to be about what
he was talking about.
Me too.
And there are other moments like that in the movie, Tarantino can write dialogue and Rodriguez
can make films that move fast and take no hostages.
The last half hour is essentially one long violent fight scene punctuated by dialogue
and the special effects are well done.
From dusk till dawn delivers and it entertains so I'm giving it a thumbs up but I know these
guys have better pictures than this one in them.
And I'm giving it a thumbs down and I saw essentially the same picture as two different
films and I like the first one better.
To take these interesting characters, the brothers, the Ranger, and he's the most interesting
and then Keitel who I couldn't even spot in the beginning under his make, I mean I thought
he was sensational, to take all these people and then to run them through a vampire trash
picture and it really, Roger there's nothing really original there.
No I didn't say there was.
Not at all.
The originality takes place before they get to the bar.
So I mean I'm just so, I'm sitting there and saying alright I'm invested in, I'm laughing
at some of this stuff as violent as it is and it is hyper violent.
I just felt that you know they didn't try in the second half of the picture and it really
is half, not just a half an hour, I'm giving it a thumbs down.
It was a basic structural error, I'm giving it a marginal thumbs up because I think it
does deliver as I said but you're right, they had a good picture going and they lost it.
Really lost it.
Next movie and here's a real let down, Eye for an Eye with Sally Field in sort of a female
death wish.
Remember in that one how an architect played by Charles Bronson went on a rampage after
his daughter was raped and murdered in the opening scenes, well this time it's media
expert Sally Field whose daughter is raped and murdered at the beginning of Eye for an
Eye and she's really freaked out when the killer Kiefer Sutherland is caught but gets
off on a technicality.
What are we going to do now?
How could you let this happen?
It's the beginning.
You're just going to let him walk right out of here?
Sorry.
Let's go.
Mr. McCann.
Police.
Her husband is played by Ed Harris and here's proof that this movie is more interested in
scenes showing Sally with a gun than with the issue of crime and punishment.
Here's the extent of their discussion about the death penalty.
Do you believe in the death penalty?
As far as that guy's concerned I do.
Why?
Because it's just how you want revenge.
I don't know.
It's just the way I feel.
I don't know what I think.
Yep that's it and then on to the next scene which has Field seeking out the help of two
guys who facilitate frontier justice by training people to do their own vengeful killing.
I can't rest.
I'll never ever rest again until he pays for what he did to her.
This whole movie is just about Sally wanting to kill and about us watching her get the
chance.
But what I want to say most to people who are considering seeing Eye for an Eye is see
another much much better movie about the death penalty instead.
It just opened.
It's called Dead Man Walking and it stars Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn and offers far
better criticism of Eye for an Eye than I ever could.
Boy I'm with you all the way on this one.
I mean you know if I were teaching a high school class and trying to help young students learn
to be able to evaluate movies on their own I would show those two movies and ask them
to compare them because Eye for an Eye is shameful in its manipulation.
It made me feel unclean in the way that it was basically insulting my intelligence by
leading me to this conclusion where I'm supposed to cheer Sally Field's action and then at
the end of the film they cop out.
She doesn't really do what she's set up to do during the entire movie.
There's a little plot twist so she doesn't really have to take the full responsibility
so that's dishonest too.
Oh of course.
And on the other hand Dead Man Walking is right down the line in terms of really trying
to be intelligent and fair about this issue.
Just as a note on Eye for an Eye there's another person involved in the project John Schlesinger
who made the great Midnight Cowboy in Sunday Bloody Sunday and he's fallen I'm afraid
with this picture.
Okay when we come back the time travel saga Twelve Monkeys starring Bruce Willis and
Brad Pitt I'm not crazy.
Of course not.
You want to escape right?
That's very sane.
Coming up on HBO.
Uh oh.
Oh might be the best part.
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Channel 7 and the Rotary Club of Denver invite you to the Branch Rickey Award Banquet on
January 24th honoring San Diego Padres star outfielder Tony Nguyen.
The evening benefits Denver Kids Incorporated.
For tickets call 764-3353.
We've taken a full 5% off of our guaranteed lowest everyday price.
During our grand opening sale this bath accent table is $8.99 and this green brass baker's
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We appreciate your volunteering.
You're a very good observer Carl.
Thank you.
We have a very advanced program for something very different.
An opportunity to reduce your sentence considerably.
And possibly play an important role in returning the human race to the surface of the earth.
Bruce Willis plays a prisoner in a future world where human life has almost been wiped out
by a plague and he is urged, in fact almost ordered to volunteer for a journey in time
to discover the origins of the deadly virus.
That's the setup for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys which is a complex and challenging science
fiction fantasy with some good acting and some unexpectedly poignant elements.
Traveling back to 1990 the confused and disoriented Willis tries to tell people he's from the
future but all that does is get him hooked up with a psychiatrist played by Madeline
Stowe.
He meets her again on a trip to 1996.
12 Monkeys.
Wait.
Here.
Do you see it?
Do you see?
I see some red paint.
Some marks.
Marks.
You think they're.
Oh this is.
Hey.
Don't.
Don't you.
Do anything crazy.
In several trips to the past Willis runs into a weird mental patient played by Brad Pitt
who seems to have important things to say if only he could say them.
There's teeny tiny invisible bad things called germs that get into your body and make you
sick.
He's trying to get doctors to wash their hands.
What is this guy?
Crazy?
Teeny tiny invisible.
What do you call it?
Germs?
Huh?
What?
The key to the Willis character is his own disorientation as he's jerked around in time.
Finally in an ironic development he doesn't believe he's a time traveler but the psychiatrist
does.
You had a bullet from World War I in your leg James how did it get there?
I don't know.
Look you said.
You said that I had delusions that I created this world.
You said you could explain it.
I can't.
I.
But.
I'm trying to.
Anyone who has seen Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil will recognize some of the elements
of 12 Monkeys especially the totalitarian future bureaucracy and the enormous sets which
all seem rusty and shabby and leaking.
The future in his movies always needs a coat of paint but while Brazil often played like
sensational scenes in search of a plot 12 Monkeys is really about something about the
search for the origins of the deadly virus yes but also about the Willis character's
search for himself.
He's every man in a world that toys with him.
It's a good movie and a rich one so rich I had to see it twice to feel I was really
beginning to understand it.
Now this is very interesting because you know what happened to me?
I saw it twice just two nights ago I liked it more too the second time around.
I was pretty rough maybe you were too the first time around because of the thematic
similarity that you described with Brazil and I thought oh not this again not the depressing
future again.
Why in futuristic movies is it always a depressing future?
And so I just sort of shut down on the picture and I shut down on the actors and then the
second time I love the ending the first time I will admit that this time I saw that the
ending was justified and the last scene and the great line of dialogue in the last scene
is really earned very well and it is you call the poignant moments that's true.
We're ultimately touched by these people our guides and we want them and us to survive.
Okay coming up next Sandra Bullock and Dennis Leary are inept art thieves in the romantic
comedy Two If I See.
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