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Cinema
Releases - March 23, 2001
15
Minutes
**
Certificate 18. 120 minutes. Written and directed
by John Herzfeld. Starring Robert DeNiro, Edward Burns, Melina Kanakaredes,
Karel Roden, Kelser Grammer, Avery Brooks.
Miss
Congeniality
***
Certificate 12. 109 minutes. Directed by Donald
Petrie. Written by Katie Ford, Marc Lawrence, Caryn Lucas. Starring Sandra
Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, William Shatner, Ernie Hudson, Candice
Bergen.
For a movie about television, "15
Minutes" spends a lot of time on the wrong channel. The plot involves
two Eastern Europeans who go on a killing spree across New York City with
a video camera; they're spellbound by the American newsmedia's fascination
with violence and the way talk shows are so forgiving to the whiny and stupid,
and figure they could cash in on their footage, and get out of trouble by
pleading insanity in court, and then, once sentenced, proving to doctors
that they're sane, to get released. The story of these guys is involving,
and yet the film spends more time with the cops chasing them, whose scenes
are nothing but the boring procedural details of an investigation -- useless
in any movie, more so when we've witnessed the crimes, and already know
everything the cops are trying to find out.
The murder scenes are graphic and brutal, and
made more disturbing by the fact that the driving force behind them is the
foreigners' conviction that, hey, we can do this, it's America. The idea
that you can make a living in the USA by waiting for people to exploit your
sins and plaster them all over the TV is horrific enough when we see the
TV, worse when we see the sins.
But what's with all the scenes of Robert De Niro
and Edward Burns trying to find the crooks? My estimation is that this stuff
takes up more than half the movie, and yet it has the flavour of a goofy
subplot. De Niro plays a loser of an ageing cop who plods around with the
body language of a bad stand-up comedian, puts whisky in his coffee and makes
extra money by letting a tabloid TV producer (Kelsey Grammer) film his arrests.
Burns is a far too idealistic young kid who keeps shouting hopeful suggestions
De Niro responds to with 'wise' advice that goes beyond mature and shows
him to be a cynical sell-out.
These two make such a useless team that the cop
story seems to be about the inefficiency of the police; and yet in the latter
part of the picture, we see them presented as heroes who the criminals are
able to evade only because of their cunningly evil ways. It all builds to
a gun-wielding climax on a pier that's not only ludicrous, but so disgustingly
macho and right-wing that it puts "Dirty Harry" to shame.
Indeed, as "15 Minutes" progresses it seems less
about America's mass media sending the country down a slippery slope than
about pandering to right-wing prejudices -- we see them damn defence lawyers
gettin' off crooks, them damn foreigners pollutin' the streets, them damn
liberals not knowin' what's what. Like, whatever.
.
"Miss Congeniality", on the other
hand, is a movie that seems to have no potential at all and still works
remarkably well. It covers familiar territory, being a big-budget
fish-out-of-water undercover-agent comedy, and stars Sandra Bullock, who
has been in nothing but irritating movies for the last five years. And yet
it moves along nicely, avoiding a lot of the stupid, obvious jokes I expected
it to go for -- even though it's set around a beauty pageant, for example,
with FBI agent Bullock having to enrol as a contestant to infiltrate the
arena and locate a killer, when it takes to satirising the girls on display
the jokes are affectionate and believable, rather than easy pot shots making
them out to be anorexic airheads. Bullock is charming, too; the clumsiness
with which she reacts to hardcore glamour training is well-timed and endearing,
and, as in the great "Speed" (1994), she delivers bitter one-liners like
they're really just rolling off her tongue. She's cute, she's attractive,
she doesn't come across as dumb, and because she works, so does the
picture.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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