Short Takes
By Scott Snyder
Perhaps the joke's on us ... Paul Newman's 135th-floor glory ... When you hear those chopper blades whir ... Hollywood gets Webbed feet

Most of the people I've talked to agree: Species is one of the worst movies to come swaggering out to theaters in quite a while. Its characters are underdeveloped and choppy. It uses every Alien, 2001 trick in the book. It sacrifices the considerable acting talents of its cast at the altar of T & A and cheap thrills. And it's not even scary. It was so bad, in fact, that the person I saw it with leaned over halfway through and said, "This has got to be a spoof."

And I couldn't help thinking that he could be right. Maybe the film's real joke -- it's only funny one -- is at its own expense, and at Hollywood's. The technothriller is the up-and-coming genre; if the Internet isn't out menacing the innocents, some test-tube Frankenstein is. The plot lines are thinning, and it makes perfect sense that Species would mock the science-fair-project-from-hell genre even as it exploits it.

How else do you explain the presence of Ben Kingsley and Forrest Whitaker? Both are hot properties among directors who make films of substance -- particularly Kingsley, a favorite in the Most Grievously Wronged by the Academy category for his role in Schindler's List. What could have possessed them to take such roles, unless they got the joke? And what else could explain the movie's cheesily cliffhung ending?

I imagine the spoof theory is far more charitable than Species warrants. But I can't bring myself to rule it out. Maybe Ishtar deserves another look.


If you stayed up late one Wednesday in July, watching The Towering Inferno on AMC and wondering if you had any company -- you did. If you looked suspiciously at your watch after two and a quarter hours of commercial-free Inferno, only to learn, upon consulting the TV guide, that you had another hour to go -- you weren't alone. And if you stayed up anyway and watched the end -- even though you were far too tired to be able to explain why you were staying up -- I was right there with you.

I guess there's something about '70s movies that calls out to the insomniac in me. O.J. Simpson made his acting debut in The Towering Inferno; he lends the film an air of what passes in 1995 for poignancy. It's hard to see the O.J. Simpson we know today in Jernigan, the Inferno security guard, or Nordberg, Simpson's Naked Gun character. Farewell Nordberg. You've pratfallen your last, and we'll miss you.


Robert "Bobby Z" Zajonc gets only a few acting credits for the movies he's in, but keep an eye out for him in the technical credits. Any time a director wants something tricky done with a helicopter, Bobby Z gets the call. Since I've been looking for him, I haven't seen any helicopter movies made without him. I wonder whether antitrust regulations apply.

Moviemakers have been getting their 'Net legs, it seems. Many of the major releases have had their own Websites, many of them quite complicated and among the vanguard in using new coding options. Most of the sites I've seen are more fun than the movies they promote; they are good advertising, though. After I've spent an hour or so goofing around in a Website, I'm a lot more likely to give a movie a fair chance -- if only because I don't want to admit having been suckered in.

Here are links to some of the better ones:

http://batmanforever.com/ -- one of the first Websites to be at all successful in using Netscape 1.1N's simulated real-time animation. It's rudimentary, but it's sort of cool, too.
http://www.mca.com/universal_pictures/casper/ -- a little slow, but it has cool backgrounds.
http://www.mca.com/universal_pictures/apollo13/-- The site itself isn't wildly innovative, but it's well put-together, and if the subject of the movie interests you, the site should too.
http://www.mgmua.com/tank_girl/ -- I'm not sure why the site's still up, since the movie's long gone. It almost made me want to go out and rent the video, though, in spite of all I've heard about the film.
http://www.paramount.com/Congo.html -- another site that's better than the movie. There are a lot of those.


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