The Caged Roams the Mean Streets of New York in Bringing Out the Dead.
Melanie Griffith is a movie mad murderess in Crazy in Alabama.
And Dilla McDermott, Nev Campbell and Matthew Perry do the mating dance in Three to Tango.
Male debris, approximately 30, west end in 72nd.
10-4-1, I'm coming baby!
Big Dan is walking to the top of it!
Nicholas Cage and Bing Rames are paramedics in a little too much of a hurry in that scene
from Martin Scorsese's new film, Bringing Out the Dead.
It's one of five new movies we'll review this week.
And I'm Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times.
And I'm David Poland, the Daily Columnist from www.roughcut.com.
Thanks for having me back in Chicago, Roger.
Yeah, I wanted to have you here in person.
You've been attacking my review of Fight Club every day on the web, so.
Well, I love that movie and you did not.
A lot of people do.
Okay, our first movie is Bringing Out the Dead and it's a great film.
Filled with fire and passion that reunites the team of director Martin Scorsese and
writer Paul Schrader, the same two men who made Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last
Temptation of Christ.
Like Taxi Driver, Bringing Out the Dead is about a man on the edge of madness who cruises
the night streets of New York trying to bring help to people who don't always want help.
His name is Frank and he's played by Nicholas Cage and a lot of his work is emergency on-the-job
improvisation.
Larry, call for backup!
6-3 Zebra, 10-85, 4th with, 44 and 8.
Call the police!
Paul, you didn't let me finish.
We have rules against killing people on the street, okay?
It looks bad.
There's a special room at the hospital for terminating.
It's a nice, quiet room with a big bed.
Move, stupid!
You mean that?
Yeah.
That's Mark Anthony, he's a deranged man who's a regular client.
They know him by name.
Frank has a different co-pilot every night.
One of them is played by John Goodman who distracts himself from the job with thoughts
of his next meal.
Oh no!
What?
Just remember, I'm so stupid, I had beef lo mein last night.
I can't eat the same thing two nights in a row.
Frank is way past being burned out and he keeps trying to quit.
The captain threatens to fire him but never does.
I'll fire you tomorrow!
Even better than that.
What was I thinking about?
I could forward you some sick time.
How about a week?
A week's not gonna do it.
A week's not gonna do it.
You're saying no.
It's gonna do it.
That's Arthur Nascaral reminding me a little of the dispatcher in Taxi Driver.
Patricia Arquette co-stars and is touching as the daughter of a dying man that Frank
has brought back to life.
This city, it'll kill you if you aren't strong enough.
The city doesn't discriminate.
Gets everybody.
Bringing out the dead doesn't give Frank the relief of being in a story with a beginning
and an end.
His life is a loop of endless emergencies.
Nicolas Cage is right for this role and Scorsese throws other characters at him to create a
disjointed rhythm of the paramedic's endless job.
Cliff Curtis is especially effective as the owner of a drug house.
Although I've admired Scorsese's recent efforts to break out of his city streets mode in good
films like The Age of Innocence and Kundan, bringing out the dead shows him at the top
of his form in a powerful film about a man who tries to do the right thing but never
seems to get anywhere.
Even though Paramount is selling this as kind of a very Scorsese movie with a lot of fast
moving images a la Cape Fear, it's really a lot more like Last Temptation of Christ.
It's very passionate, very Catholic.
The story of this man trying to find redemption or looking for it because he doesn't believe
he really can do his job anymore.
Exactly.
So after finishing this Scorsese he went back and got Paul Schrader to write this screenplay
because the two of them I think are on the same wavelength when it comes to this kind
of material as they were in Last Temptation, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.
Here is a guy who suffers because of his inability to really do anything good.
He wants to help and he can't and he's out there every night just being driven crazy
by the weight of suffering that comes down on him.
I think he's decided he's got it.
I think that's a lot of this movie is that he's decided he's got it and he doesn't have
the touch and by the end of the movie he realizes perhaps he's not God and he should give himself
some absolution.
But this is not an easy movie.
I mean a lot of people are going to have a hard time with a story because really Cage's
character goes as you said earlier in your thing really from A to B. This is not a long
story, this is not your typical Nicolas Cage experience but it is a wonderful powerful
movie in its subtlety.
And what life Scorsese brings to it.
His movies are alive, they vibrate with these characters, these locations, the kinetic energy,
the camera work.
He's got the three unwise men in the movie.
Exactly.
And the hero and being crazy, all three of them.
You look at one of his movies and you just wake up and you say other people are kind
of sleepwalking compared to him.
It's amazing.
Okay, on to the next movie.
We have to.
It's called Body Shots and I want to start by telling you what you won't be seeing here.
That is any clip that even remotely hints at what the film is really about.
That's date rape.
New Line hasn't sent us those clips because they know that you won't be paying any good
money to go see a 90 minute after school special.
Even one with bare breasts and dirty words.
This clip sets up the first part of the film.
So how many are you going to be there?
Three, maybe four.
Good looking, these chicks.
What do you think?
Did I match Sean?
Um, I don't think so.
He, uh, he's the one that introduced me to Rick though.
They work together.
What's the name of this lawyer?
This one that you're after?
Jane.
It was Jane.
The heart of the movie is four male friends meeting four female friends and wow, what a
coincidence they end up in four pairs.
Two of the couples will regret having coupled by morning.
Here at the nightclub, one pair Jerry O'Connell's maybe rapist and Tara Reid's maybe victim
make first contact.
Hey man, I want that salad chicken.
She's taking bro, all right?
Going who?
The child next to you?
Please.
A third member of the girl group uses bondage to empower herself.
That is to empower herself to have kinky sex with the most self-indulgent jerk you'd ever
want to meet.
Here they are with friends the morning after.
He was there.
Oh.
And he said he was stranded.
I thought you slept in the gutter.
No, no, no, no.
Before that.
You made love to Whitney.
Yeah.
And then of course, there's the one redeeming woman and the one redeeming man.
They don't get to have sex at all.
Last night, I mean, we, did we?
No.
Good.
Why good?
Because I'd like to think that I was here from Everett.
I wish I could tell you that these clips do justice to just how unpleasant this movie
was for me to sit through.
I like all eight of these actors and I wish them well, but the film spends half of its
running time trying to make the characters attractive and alluring and then spends the
second half judging them by Reagan-era standards for exhibiting exactly the characteristics
that the film wants you to find attractive.
Not of course that the film has anything truly insightful to say about any of it anyway.
I should take back my crack about this being like an after school special because that's
way too unkind to after school specials.
Friends won't let friends see body shots.
You know, one of the things that's interesting about this movie is it sets itself up as a
serious examination of date rape seen through her eyes and through his eyes and that gives
the movie an opportunity to show her brassiere being taken off gently and being ripped off
and her throwing down on the bed and throwing him down on the bed so we get to see the whole
thing twice.
And meanwhile, I'm thinking they've got the wrong issue here.
This movie is not really about date rape.
It's about alcoholism because neither person can remember what really happened.
You know, if you wake up in the morning and you think you might have had sex but you're
not sure who with or how or for that matter if you really had it then maybe you ought
to call AA before you call the cops.
Yeah, everybody's drunk.
This is like, you know, this is what kids are like today.
They're all out there drinking and being stupid because nobody enjoys the sex they have.
I mean that's ultimately the problem.
The one person who enjoys it is the dominatrix because, you know, one girl is having sex
against the wall and she, you know, with somebody she doesn't really want to be.
It's an insane world and I'm a little older than these people but not so much that I can't
remember that this is not the way it is.
Remember when we used to go to movies where people really liked to have sex and they enjoyed
and afterwards they were relieved and happy?
And I, you know, and I still like to have sex.
I must admit so.
I'll be happy to do it again.
Okay.
Not in this movie though.
Thank you very much for that insight, David.
We appreciate it.
Later in the show, Neve Campbell is at the center of a romantic triangle in Three to
Tango.
Have you ever kissed a woman before?
Not the right one.
And coming up next, Melanie Griffith is a ditzy dame on the lam in Crazy in Alabama.
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My name is Carolyn Clay and I need a hat.
I mean I need a hat box.
I need a, I mean I need a hat.
She doesn't need that hat box to carry a hat but a head.
That's Melanie Griffith as a crazy Alabama woman named Lucille who has decapitated her
husband and is now heading to Hollywood hoping to be discovered by the movies.
Her adventure is one of three stories in crazy Alabama which is at least one story to many.
The other story is seen through the eyes of Peejo her nephew who is witness to the death
of a black teenager during a civil rights demonstration at the local swimming pool.
Lucas Black is the kid and Meat Loaf a day is the sheriff.
You killed Taylor Jackson.
You pulled him off that fence.
And you meant to do it.
Who else you tell that to?
In Hollywood amazingly Aunt Lucille is successful in finding a job in show business but she's
still carrying that hat box.
Got your lines down?
I stayed up half the night practicing.
Well just relax and have fun.
Listen would you introduce her to everyone Amanda?
Okay people let's go.
Can I put my husband here?
Eventually somebody looks in the hat box and she's charged with murder and brought back
to Alabama to stand trial before a judge played by Rod Steiger who has a goofy courtroom style.
You might take it and you're going to continue with this plea and in spite of your legal
advisors and my kind of opinion about it is that true?
You're going to stick with it?
I mentioned that the boy tells two stories one about the ditzy aunt and the other one
about the black teenager.
The studio Columbia Pictures supplied no dialogue scenes representing the other half of the
movie which is about the civil rights struggle going on in town in 1965.
Those shots of the sheriff and the kid being pulled down from the fence were lifted by
us from the movie's trailer.
Sometimes marketing decisions can be very cynical.
So let me say that the black teenager who dies is played and well played by Lewis Miller
that he and Lucas Black share some powerful scenes that I would have liked to show and
that his character's death will result in another trial in Steiger's courtroom although
we never see that trial.
I dislike crazy in Alabama for various reasons but what really got to me was the decision
to use a civil rights murder as flavoring in a comedy about a ditzy nutcase.
Yeah, this film is the first film from Antonio de Banderas as a director and I think he was
completely sincere.
I think it's one of the nice things about the movie is there's a real sense of being
warm to everything and the story about the civil rights movement is much better but I
do think that the combination of the two just didn't quite work.
No.
It never happened.
Yeah, the narrator sees these two stories through his point of view and one is the aunt
and the other one is the civil rights struggle and the two stories each would be okay by
themselves but they don't fit together.
Each one makes the other one curdle.
It's just inappropriate to have a comedy and then have this serious stuff and cut back
and forth between it.
Yeah, well the thing is I think that the story of the aunt would have been a little less
comedic had they hired an actress who was 32 years old.
There's nothing wrong with Melanie Griffith being 40 something years old and playing this
role.
However, it's really not as poignant.
Somehow the numbers don't add up and somehow a woman who is already kind of established
leaving her kids to go pursue a dream is not really tragic when I think it was meant to
be in this movie.
Well, she leaves her kids because she's nuts.
That's why she cuts off her husband's head too because she's nuts so you can forgive
her anything because she's crazy in Alabama.
She is crazy in Alabama and so is Rod Steiger in this picture who just gives a wacky improvised
performance and you know he's a great actor still but he sometimes just kind of phones
it in and I think he did here.
Okay, coming up next Matthew Perry is an architect with designs on Neve Campbell in Three to
Tango.
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Champagne, music, Amy and a kimono.
I swear if you weren't gay, Oscar, I'd have to kill you.
Gay?
I'm not gay.
I didn't gay.
And that is the central joke of Three to Tango.
A young architect played by Matthew Perry from Friends gets a life-changing commission
from Dylan McDermott from the practice whose millionaire industrialist character thinks
that Perry's character is gay and therefore can be trusted to watch his mistress whose
kimono is filled by Neve Campbell, a party of five.
So Three to Tango is obviously a wacky romantic farce, right?
Or maybe it's just a big screen version of Friends.
I'm gonna go.
Actually, I had a lesbian experience once.
Really?
Mm-hmm.
You did.
Or perhaps it's a live-action cartoon.
What happened to you?
What the hell happened to your head?
Notice the fabulous hairstyling comedy that first-time director Damon Santo Stefano foist
upon one of the best comic actors of his generation, Oliver Platt, who plays Perry's
best friend and business partner.
As soon as we left the gallery, our cab caught on fire.
Then she elbowed me in the face.
Sorry.
We both threw up.
Or perhaps Three to Tango means to be a Billy Wilder-type dramatic comedy, All of the Apartment.
Here Neve Campbell's character Amy mistakenly ends up face-to-face with her boyfriend's
wife.
Your design is superb.
We were just discussing it.
Oh, I'm sorry.
This is my girlfriend Amy.
And Amy, this is my boss Charles.
I'm sorry.
Aren't you gay?
Getting the drift?
Three to Tango does not know what the hell it's supposed to be.
Matthew Perry's playing it at sitcom speed.
Neve Campbell's playing farce.
And she does it nicely, but she's the only person in the movie doing it.
Oliver Platt plays this subtle sophisticate, and then all of a sudden he turns into a raging
queen in the second act.
Good comedy requires a rhythm, and it needs to stick with that rhythm.
But even more importantly, one has to wonder whether somebody mistaking somebody else for
gay is actually funny in 1999.
Not because it's politically incorrect, but because I thought we were a little bit more
sophisticated these days.
Of course, sophistication is something you'll never have to worry about if you go see Three
to Tango.
Yes, that's my thumb in my pants, and no, it wasn't happy to see this movie.
You know, as I looked at this film, I realized once again how tired I am of the idiot plot.
And the idiot plot has been defined as the plot that will be over in a second if anybody
said the obvious thing to somebody else.
And you have Nev Campbell and Matthew Perry engaging in this excruciatingly complicated
dialogue to avoid it coming out that he's not gay.
And it's so frustrating.
Now, she is wonderful in this movie, and I just watched her all the way through it because
I couldn't stand to watch her listen to anything else except that Oliver Platt is sometimes
okay.
Yeah, there's idiocy from beginning to end.
The movie opens with hair jokes, and then somebody has their bed in their office, and
it just does, it's all over the place.
And it can't decide what speed it's going, it can't decide what it wants to say.
It's like the guys who were acting really gay turn out to be gay.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Okay, next movie.
And after the frivolities we've been talking about on this show, I think it comes as a
real breath of fresh air.
To clear away the fog, this movie is called The City, and it consists of four stories
about Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants in New York, and its honesty and directness
is heartbreaking.
The first story involves day laborers who are promised $50 a day but hear a different
story when they get to the job.
And the hairy brick that you cleaned, we will pay you 15 cents.
What?
The second story, a seamstress in a sweatshop who wants to send money home for her sick
daughter.
She hasn't been paid in weeks.
The third story, a homeless puppeteer who wants to enroll his daughter in school, but
because they live in a car they have no fixed address.
Well, you should stay in the city shelters.
That's what they're there for.
Everybody's sick in the shelter.
I got sick in the shelter.
I'll never take my daughter to the shelter.
And there is a little hope in the fourth story about two shy young people who meet and start
to fall in love.
The City, which is known in Spanish as La Ciudad, is a corrective for all those superficial
Latino movie images about drugs and cars and music.
It's about hardworking people who were respected at home and now find they've become invisible
in America.
The movie was directed by a documentary filmmaker named David Riker who mostly used immigrants
themselves as his actors.
It reminded me of the Bicycle Thief and other classics of neorealism and its playing in
art theaters around the country.
It's worth looking for.
Yeah, and that's really the Bicycle Thief's inappropriate analogy.
Riker makes a movie that is really, in some ways, a silent movie and really old fashioned.
It's nice that it's in black and white because it fits so beautifully.
His images are almost more impressive than any of the dialogue or any of the conversations
that go on.
You feel everything without anybody saying a word.
Absolutely.
You know, apart from its social message or its political meaning, which are not really
the reasons I think that people will go to this movie, the joy that I got from it was
the joy of a silent film about very simple people and very simple, very dramatic, very
moving stories.
It kind of gets you on an emotional level.
And you really feel their pain.
You really feel the agony they go through and how hard they work.
It's a powerful movie.
Yes, it is.
When we come back, if you liked The Sixth Sense, you might also like my video pick this
week.
And thanks again for watching.
Together we've celebrated birthdays and opening days.
Good efforts and little losses.
Moments that live once and forever.
But what we really celebrated is time.
Together.
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My video pick this week is a ghost story that came out in 1988 and has just been re-released
on tape and DVD in a director's cut with some extra features.
And now that audiences have spent a quarter of a billion dollars on the six cents, they
might be interested in another good film about a small boy who sees dead people.
The film is named Lady in White and it stars Lucas Haas as a kid who was locked overnight
in a school cloakroom as a joke.
As the moon rises and he realizes he has been forgotten, he sees a ghost.
Where is it?
Where's my present?
Where did you hide it this time?
Who is this young girl and who is the masked man who appears not long after?
Is the man a ghost or is he real?
What about the local eccentric played here by Catherine Hellman?
Is she the Lady in White?
Like all the best movie ghost stories, this one is firmly anchored in reality and does
a good job of setting its supernatural story in a convincing small town setting.
The writer and director is Frank Lelogia who for this director's cut has added two additional
scenes and some other bells and whistles.
Lady in White is in stores right now on tape and disc and it's my video pick of the week.
They don't know me.
I get these catalogs for kids clothes and I don't have kids.
I get discounts for car repair.
I take the subway.
I get offers for aluminum siding.
I live in an apartment.
Hey, hey, you behind the glass.
You're the one with the computers and databases.
You don't know me.
You don't know them.
You want to know who we are.
I think they got sandwiches in there.
My shoes.
So they are all the sand on the beach.
Goodbye ants.
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Now let's take another look at the movies we reviewed this week.
Two very enthusiastic thumbs up for bringing out to dead another great film from Martin
Scorsese with a haunting Nicolas Cage performance.
Two thumbs down though for body shots which would be more useful if it knew why its alcoholic
characters are so confused.
Two more thumbs down for crazy in Alabama with stripes that fit a civil rights murder
and a ditzy husband killer into a movie that's only big enough for one of them.
And two more thumbs down for the inane and belabored sitcom Three to Tango which has
nothing to recommend but the undeniably cute Nev Campbell.
Two thumbs up however for the city and its four heartbreaking stories of immigrants.
I think it's almost as important this week that people go see Les Ude and bringing out
the dead as they avoid body shots in Three to Tango.
They should stay away from those theaters and go see a good movie.
Go see bringing out the dead.
It'll be in theaters this week.
If they follow our advice they'll be much happier moviegoers.
Absolutely.
Okay thanks a lot for being here.
Thanks for having me back.
Okay.
Remember you can hear our reviews both David's and mine on the web at ebert-movies.com part
of Go Network.
Next week more new movies including Being John Malkovich with John Cusack magically
entering the Malkovich brain.
Next week and until then the balcony is closed.