Closes its doors and off the menu, the last days of chasin'.
And a young woman masquerades as a soldier in Mulan.
Music
Music
Picking up where the series left off, FBI agents Mulder and Scully find themselves in trouble once again in the film version of The X-Files.
That's one of five new movies we'll review this week on Siskel and Ebert, plus a look at the American Film Institute's vote for the greatest American film.
I'm Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, and look who's across the aisle from me today.
My pleasure, Roger. And to Hollywood, I just want to say, just when you thought it was safe to make a bad movie, I'm back.
Let's go for it. I'm Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune.
Our first movie is The X-Files, the feature film treatment of the five-year hit TV show, which, just for the record, I have never seen and thus cannot offer any comparative analysis.
But maybe this is relevant. Based on the movie, I am now seriously tempted to watch the TV show.
I'm intrigued by the main characters, earnest FBI special agents Fox Mulder, David Duchovny, and Dana Scully, Jillian Anderson, who stare deeply into each other's eyes and call each other by their last names.
Their dynamic is that they are obviously made for each other, but need to straighten out their individual lives before they can relate to anyone else.
They make a good team because in a lesser screenplay, I think they would just constantly bicker. Here, they have something to do. They investigate a bomb threat.
And if we don't act in accordance with that data, if you ignore it as we have done, the chances are great that if there actually is a bomb, we might not find it.
Lives could be lost. Mulder. Mulder.
Who?
Jesus, Mulder.
Whatever happened to plan a hunch, Scully?
After the bombing, FBI boss Mitch Pileggi warns Mulder that someone will have to take the blame.
If they want somebody to blame, they can blame me. Agent Scully doesn't deserve this.
She's in there right now saying the same thing about you.
It turns out that Mulder and Scully have their work cut out for them, save mankind from a plot to destroy it through biological warfare prepared by an alien life form.
Martin Landau plays a doctor who claims to have known Mulder's father, and he warns him about the plot.
They've been working on this for 50 years. While the rest of the world have been fighting groups and committees, these men have been secretly negotiating a planned armageddon.
Negotiating with whom?
I think you know.
The story of the X-Files movie is challenging without depending on arbitrary plot twists, the staple of so much screenwriting these days.
Mulder and Scully are in jeopardy here, and we buy it.
Now I need someone to tell me when the TV show is on, because I plan to watch. Seriously.
I very, very casually watched the show over the years, maybe once, perhaps twice, so I'm not a fan.
What did you think?
I liked the movie. I enjoyed the movie, and one of the things I enjoyed about it was the fact that I was totally confused at the end.
As nearly as I can tell, mankind is at the same position at the end of this movie that it was at the beginning.
Everything has gone around in a circle, leaving everything set up for the fall series to continue.
And that was okay with me, because the movie was all form and spectacle and relationship and special effects and astonishing developments.
And it was just all kind of like an exercise in these materials without really explaining or settling much of anything.
But I thought it was a really layered story, and I got into it.
I mean, somebody had really worked on this. This was not a pro forma exercise.
There's terror out there, and we'll knock it down.
Oh, I agree. I agree with the fact that there are layers. What's interesting is that all the layers don't connect.
It's a lot of loose ends, which makes for another season of TV.
Let me get back to another word you used, which I praise this film for, the relationship.
Yeah. Uh-huh.
I mean, it's a good one, isn't it, between those two?
Yeah, well, it's kind of famous, and of course everybody wants to know if they're going to kiss or not.
We won't say whether they do or not, because everybody's been waiting for years on this show
for the two of them to break down, cave in, and fall in love.
Oh, I think it's obvious they care deeply for each other.
Oh, yeah.
Just as I said, they need to self-actualize before they can become interdependent.
And also they have to save the earth at the same time that way.
Yeah, that too, yeah.
Next movie. Our next movie is set in England during World War II, and it's titled The Land Girls.
It tells the story of city women who enlisted to work as farmers to help the war effort,
and particularly about three of them assigned to the same farm where they found love, friendship, and a lot of hard work.
The Land Girls come from quite different backgrounds.
Stella, played by Catherine McCormick, is upper class.
Agatha, played by Rachel Weiss, is a Cambridge graduate.
And Prue, played by Anna Friel, worked as a hairdresser.
She's the most frank about sexual matters.
Oh, oh, I'm in need of assistance, Joe.
I'm not actually, yeah.
Very used to first aid.
It's an emergency.
All of them are attracted to one degree or another to Joe, the son of the family that owns the farm.
He's played by Stephen McIntosh.
I say Joe.
Agatha, who is a virgin, decides forthrightly to enlist Joe in her own education.
I say Joe, could you just stop, please?
I'll come straight to the point. No reading about the bush.
I wondered, could you give me a go?
I'm doing a go.
Stella is engaged to a naval officer and feels it's her duty to marry him, even though her heart is in it, because she too is drawn to Joe.
Where's East Meadow?
Which way did you come?
That way.
You must have crossed it.
The Land Girls never really involved me in any of its characters.
In an odd way, the movie seemed more like an old World War II movie than a modern reconsideration of that era.
What I did like was the cinematography by Henry Braham, who goes for rich earth tones, browns and greens, and evokes the farm so successfully,
I could almost smell the thick dew on the grass during wet winter mornings.
The Land Girls is wonderful to look at and has some likable characters, but it never convinced me very much was really at stake.
I have the same exact reaction. Roger, if you're smelling the farm in this movie, it's in trouble.
Also, predictable.
Was there anything, if I had told you a quick synopsis, women substitute for men on the farm so they can go off and fight, was there a single scene that came as a surprise?
There was one, and that is because the old farmer is so protective of his meadow.
He loves it so much and the woman gets a tractor and says, I'm going to plow it for the war effort.
That's a nice scene and how it pays off is nice, but in general you're absolutely right.
This movie was more or less an exercise in unfocused nostalgia.
It didn't really seem to be really trying to say something definite.
And again, no jeopardy in that sense of on the edge, that life could end.
It's wartime. I just didn't feel the urgency of what they were doing.
Never a real energy in the film.
You got it. Later in the show, a memory of the last days of the famous Hollywood restaurant, Chasen's.
And coming up next, Mulan, the new Disney animated adventure.
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By order of the emperor, one man from every family must serve in the imperial army.
Father, you can't go.
Mulan.
Enemy troops swarm down on the Great Wall of China
and the call goes out for all able-bodied men to defend the kingdom in Mulan,
the new Disney animated feature.
But the teenage girl named Mulan doesn't want her old and ailing father to go to war,
so she plays a trick.
She cuts off her hair, disguises herself as a boy,
and goes off to volunteer in his place.
Sorry you had to see that, but you know how it is when you get those manly urges.
Of course, there's a comic sidekick, a little dragon with a voice by Eddie Murphy.
Who are you?
Who am I? Who am I?
I am the guardian of lost souls.
I am the powerful, the pleasurable, the indestructible.
Oh, pretty high, man.
Mulan is a fresh adaptation of a classic Chinese folk tale filled with color and excitement,
as the young girl brilliantly figures out a way to win a battle
that attracts the attention of Shan Yu, the leader of the Hun forces.
Mulan is one of the very best recent Disney animated adventures,
original, fresh, great to look at,
and with a story that reaches a little more and takes bigger chances than is usually the case.
It's the kind of family movie that adults can enjoy on their own.
Its only weakness is in its songs, which didn't seem especially memorable to me,
because this isn't a musical anyway, really.
It's a thrilling adventure, and some of the animated sequences,
like a wall of enemy horsemen racing down a snow-covered mountainside,
are as good as anything the studio has done.
Well, Roger, we simply differ here.
Comparing it to other recent Disney animated features featuring young women as the center of the film,
I think this really comes up short compared with Ariel in The Little Mermaid, her story,
Belle in Beauty and the Beast. I did not get behind this one at all.
Oh, and Anne Pocahontas, too. I think that the thing here is that she is free-standing.
She is the person who, out of her own will and her own imagination, controls her own destiny.
She's not just trying to go along with a team as they are in the other pictures.
I think she's the most independent Disney heroine I've seen.
Well, actually, I think all three of those young women in the other features were quite independent.
They were not going along. One didn't want to be a mermaid, if you recall.
She wanted to be human, basically. She wasn't going along.
Her masquerade, frankly, wasn't as good as Barbara Streisand in Yentl.
I didn't feel a sense of jeopardy. In Yentl, her whole life could collapse.
I never felt that in this film.
There's got to be some kind of a difference between an adult drama and a family animated cartoon,
don't you think, in terms of how serious it can be taken and how seriously we're supposed to take it?
It's a fantasy.
Are you saying we can't take this film seriously?
Well, I think that you take it seriously as an animated family cartoon.
You don't compare it to Yentl. They come out of different worlds.
I'm comparing one element. And here's another one. Maybe you'll object to this.
In terms of what she does, the notion of a young woman being strong in battle, G.I. Jane.
I thought the story, the saga, the endurance of Demi Moore was more impressive.
I'm just aghast. I don't understand. I mean, this is the kind of genre that it's in.
It just does a wonderful job.
And I compared it earlier to Beauty and the Beast and to The Little Mermaid. Same genre.
Well, I just think that basically my bottom line is...
And listen, you did the same thing. You knew where you did it when you said the songs weren't good,
because the songs in these other pictures were spectacular.
Well, that's what I said.
But that's what you're doing. You're comparing it.
I work here. The story, the characterization, the action, the originality, the drawing, it's wonderful.
On the subject of artwork, if you look in the background, you're gonna see a lot of blank walls. I was very surprised.
Not at all. What you see is... It reminded me of the great Japanese cartoon artist Hiroshige from two centuries ago.
Not in the way I saw the picture. Not at all.
Okay, when we come back, the story of the last days of Chasen's, the legendary Hollywood landmark.
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This is the place that has nurtured just about every creative person in the film industry,
every political entity, both on the way up, and those address Mr. President.
Sooner or later, everyone seemed to come to Chasen's, the famed Hollywood restaurant where deals were sealed,
gossip was wholesale, and romances began and ended.
Hollywood royalty rubbed shoulders with real royalty and presidents for a menu that appealed to carnivores,
chili, beef bones, and hobo steaks flamed at tableside.
And then the party ended in 1995 when Chasen's closed after being sold to a mall developer.
Off the menu, The Last Days of Chasen's is an evocative documentary that records the passing
not only of a restaurant, but of a Hollywood era.
The co-directors are Sherry Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini.
As soon as you announce that you're closing Chasen's, now you're busy every night.
I said, well, let me tell you, the only way I can put it to you is when you're sick, nobody call you,
but when you die, everybody come to the funeral.
The most unforgettable characters at Chasen's weren't the customers, but the veteran employees,
especially Raymond Bilbu, the feisty banquet manager who is an obsessive perfectionist.
His view is no matter what the call time is, say the call time is five,
his people working at his party should be there at 4.30 or 4.
That's right.
And that's if they're not, if they're on time, they're late.
Then there was waiter Tommy Gallagher who was intimidated by no one.
Not many people called Sinatra Frank to his face.
We could have gone someplace else and made more money.
I stayed, thank God.
You absorb some of the pride and tradition of the restaurant.
You realize that for a waiter like Tommy Gallagher, his job really was his life.
You meet his son who loved him, but only rarely saw him because Tommy was always at work.
You see in miniature how rituals and traditions are the cement of human society
and how even a restaurant can provide continuity and meaning.
By the end of the movie, you're amazed by how deeply you've been touched.
I thought this was a terrific job.
And again, think about the standard way of telling the story of the closing of a restaurant.
You show the restaurant, maybe some of the famous people who ate there,
and you have the scene where the mean money man explains why for financial reasons it must be closed.
And then the final dinner and the exterior shot lights out.
But these directors did something, as you've mentioned, totally different.
They found something fresh to go at the employees and tell their stories.
What a wonderful idea.
It humanizes this experience. It stands for all employment, all work.
They've made a universal story out of something that normally would have been just a little bit of showbiz.
They made the staff into the stars and the stars into the supporting cast.
If you're there every night, sure, Jimmy Stewart comes in, Frank Sinatra comes in, and then they go home.
But you're there again tomorrow night, and this is your turf.
And your pride is involved.
There was only one thing they left out that I thought a documentarian would have included, the recipe for the chili.
Well, I'll give you my chili recipe, and that's also very good.
When we come back, the Oscar nominee, Beyond Silence, about the hearing daughter of deaf parents.
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Our next film is Beyond Silence, which is an Oscar nominee this year for Best Foreign Film.
It's about a young girl named Lara who grows up loving her parents, who are both deaf.
All families have their problems, their resentments and unhappiness, and this one is no exception.
When it's time for the daughter to go out on her own, her possessive father finds that hard to accept.
And here's a scene from midway in the film as the young woman, who can hear,
discusses the sound of snow with her father.
[♪upbeat music playing -♪!]
As a younger girl, she is given a clarinet by her father's sister and that reopens an old wound.
Because when the aunt was a child, she was praised for her playing, and her little brother, of course, couldn't hear it.
Papa, was sollen das? Gib mir meine clarinette wieder.
Pass, die Musik lenkt mich vom Lernen ab. So ein Quatsch lernen is überhaupt nicht wichtiger.
Beyond Silence is remarkably touching in the way it deals with the feelings and issues of those who are deaf.
The movie isn't sentimental, but realistic, and its portrait of this girl and her parents
is an observant, moving treatment of family love and tension.
One interesting thing, everything in the movie is subtitled.
Not just the spoken dialogue and the sign language, but also the sounds and the musical lyrics.
Well, I wasn't really knocked out by the picture, as you seem to have been.
I think it's because the conflicts which occupy the bulk of the movie seem to be forced.
One of my daughters has a great line. She says, I knew they were going to fall in love, Dad,
because they were arguing so much at the beginning of the movie.
And here, it's just felt again, forced conflict between the father and the daughter.
Well, the father has been wounded. I mean, first his sister punishes him by playing the clarinet.
Then she gives a clarinet to his daughter. So it's like repeating this wound in a second generation of the family.
And that's very real. Also, just all the little details of how she translates for her parents,
how when she goes to that PTA conference, she doesn't really translate all the negative things
that the teacher is saying about her. I just loved every single way that the story was built up.
I guess what I'm asking for is a little more love, a little more happiness in this story.
It just seemed to me needlessly conflicted.
When we come back, our video pick of the week, a look at the film which was just named
the greatest American movie of all time by the American Film Institute.
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The beginning won't prepare you in watching you for the end.
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The American Film Institute, a very good organization that helps to preserve our American film heritage,
has been involved in a project to select the 100 greatest American films of all time.
They started with 400 finalists, then they asked the Blue Ribbon Panel to vote on them,
and last Tuesday they announced the winners.
And it was an upset, I guess.
But top of the list went to Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane.
Now, Kane has routinely voted the greatest of all films in polls of cinema insiders,
but I thought perhaps the larger pool of AFI voters might go for Gone with the Wind.
Not at all. They embraced Welles' story of a media tycoon named Charles Foster Kane,
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Girls, delightful in Cuba, stop!
Could send you prose poems about scenery, but don't feel right spending your money. Stop!
There is no war in Cuba, signed Wheeler. Any answer?
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The runner's up to Kane, where Casablanca, The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, and Lawrence of Arabia.
Video stories will be featuring many of the winning titles in the weeks to come,
and you can't go wrong in winning them. Were you surprised that Kane won?
Not at all, Roger. I mean, that is the official answer to the question.
It's become that over the years, you know, what's the greatest film of all time?
And I like the film being called the greatest American film.
Actually, the original title of the film was The American.
And Kane's life, I've always thought, and its potential, stood for America and the American experience,
which is he had everything. And what do you do with it? What do you do with power?
How does he rule his world? How do we rule the world? I mean, it's truly an American film.
It sure is. Now let's take another look at the movies we reviewed this week.
Two thumbs up for The X-Files. We both liked the characters as well as the look and mood of the movie.
Two thumbs down for The Land Girls, the wonderfully photographed but listless slice of British wartime life.
A split decision on Mulan. Gene thought it came up short compared to other comparable Disney films.
Two big thumbs up, though, for Off the Menu, the Last Days of Chasins, but a split decision on Beyond Silence.
I thought it was a perceptive and touching story of a child growing up with deaf parents,
but Gene thought the constant conflicts grew tiresome.
Remember, you can hear our reviews on the web at Cisco-Ebert.com.
Next week we'll be back with reviews of more new movies, including Dr. Doolittle, starring Eddie Murphy as the man who can talk to the animals.
Hey, honey! Who's this? I'll give you a hint. I'm cute, I'm spirit, and I make 500 babies a year.
And the romantic thriller Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.
That's next week, and until then, the balcony is closed. And it's great to be back.
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