Cinema
Releases - April 20, 2001
The
Hole
***
Certificate 15. 102 minutes. Directed by Nick
Hamm. Written by Ben Cort, Caroline Ip; from the novel "After the Hole" by
Gary Burt. Starring Thora Birch, Daniel Brocklebank, Desmond Harrington,
Laurence Fox, Keira Knightley, Embeth Davidtz.
One Night at
McCool's
***
Certificate 15. 93 minutes. Directed by Harald
Zwart. Written by Stan Seidel. Starring Liv Tyler, Matt Dillon, Paul Reiser,
John Goodman, Michael Douglas.
Hollywood produces a lot of crap, and Hollywood
is male-dominated. So it's a nice surprise that all five movies opening this
week are worth seeing, and all revolve around strong female
characters.
"One Night at McCool's" intercuts
three men recalling their experiences of the beautiful Jewel (Liv Tyler).
The movie opens with Randy (Matt Dillon) telling a hitman (Michael Douglas)
a desperate tale of how Jewel conned him into killing her boyfriend, then
moved into his house and used her sexuality to bankrupt him and get him in
a whole lot of trouble. A widower cop (John Goodman) investigating the
boyfriend's murder tells a priest of how he became besotted with the woman.
And Randy's brother Carl (Paul Reiser) is convinced that Jewel was into him
from the first time they met, and tells a psychiatrist how he cheated on
his wife to play leather-bound sex games with the busty
seductress.
The film has a goofy, lighthearted feel to it,
and on the surface is a dig at the way women use their charms to drive men
round the bend. But if all Jewel offers is a pussy trap, these guys go out
of their way to dive in; the real joke is on them, not her. One of the biggest
running gags is the way each man sees things differently -- when we see Randy's
thoughts, for example, he appears as a responsible bartender who keeps the
crowd excited… but the same scene in Carl's head pictures Randy as a
loud, drunken oaf. Randy has mundane dialogue with Jewel that appears as
abusive goading in the cop's version of events. Carl thinks Jewel was forever
eyeing him up, although no one else mentions any such thing. And so on and
so forth.
It all ends with Randy on the run from the law,
the cop acting as a knight in shining armour for a woman who loves him only
in his own imagination, and Carl tied up in leather in the middle of a shootout,
while Jewel stands outside, chatting up the hitman. This is good physical
comedy, at the end of a movie that has cleverly extracted humour out of a
concept -- men see what they want to see. The dopes. Hey, wait a
minute…
.
Another movie based around perception is
"The Hole", which has a similar premise to "Blair Witch 2:
Book of Shadows", but also has better acting and a plot that makes sense.
The film opens with a wounded Thora Birch emerging from a hole in the ground
and staggering to safety. We soon learn that she and three other students
from her London boarding school have been locked in a WWII bomb shelter for
a fortnight, and she is the sole survivor.
Birch gives her version of events to a police
psychiatrist (Embeth Davitz); she claims that the quartet went into the shelter
to avoid going on a school trip, and were supposed to be released by a classmate
(Daniel Brocklebank) after three days. Brocklebank, being interviewed by
detectives on suspicion of kidnapping and manslaughter, has a different story,
but he's a bit of a dark horse on campus, and is treated with scepticism
at every turn.
There are predictable twists involving Birch's
character, but as her layers are stripped away, she plays her character
convincingly and effectively, and the flashbacks to the hole have the right
look and feel of murkiness and creepiness, as seclusion turns ugly, darkness
turns scary and madness sets in. "The Hole" is a well-made shock story --
if British cinema is so intent on imitating Hollywood, this is a good example
of how to do it properly.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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