Salon.com > the Salon arts staff

It was a very strange year

Mon, 31 Dec 2001 20:34:00 +0000

Although we can all find something to complain about, by its final weeks 2001 turned out to be a reasonably enjoyable year for movies. It was a year in which moviegoers rejected the most heavily hyped pictures, like "Pearl Harbor," and instead fixed their focus on movies that came out of left field: One of the year's most pleasingly creepy pictures, Alejandro Amenabar's marvelously quiet "The Others," became a surprise hit, without any flashy effects or gore. It held audiences with the simplest means available: old-fashioned suspense. And "Memento," a psychological thriller with its story told back-to-front, certainly got moviegoers talking. Even those who didn't care for it probably found themselves drawn into vigorous dinner-table discussions about its pros and cons, and no matter what the movie in question is, vigorous discussion is always a comforting reassurance that movies can still enrapture and engage people.

“Survivor”

Fri, 16 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

CBS's twisted reality show "Survivor" shipwrecks 16 carefully selected stereotypes onto the remote Pulau Tiga island near Borneo in the South China Sea. One half "Real World," one half "American Gladiators," each weekly episode features a bizarre physical challenge that first pit two teams -- the Tagi and Pagong -- against one another, and then every player against everyone else. Every three days, the castaways must oust one person at the weirdly ritualized "Tribal Council." At the end of the summer season, only one member will remain -- and walk out with a $1 million prize.

"Survivor" works not because it's real, but because it's so beautifully manipulated. The natural environment provides water snakes and abundant rats -- which the contestants have roasted and tell us taste something like chicken, naturally. Both are icky enough to titillate and gross out armchair survivalists. And the characters, surely chosen for conflict potential, are even more transfixing. Two older islanders bit it in the first two rounds. A lawyer from San Francisco got dumped on the third episode, a whining biochemist in the fourth. Tagi's secret, ad hoc voting alliance took down two victims on the fifth and seventh: the Bible-thumping virgin and an impressive schoolteacher and team-leader. In between, the women of Pagong ditched a mildly sexist beefcake. In the eighth, a silly ivy league student -- another threat to the alliance -- was tossed by the alliance. The alliance broke in the ninth, but the three who were left managed to take out a single mom. Remaining are a crotchety Navy SEAL, a tough truck driver, a devious gay motivational speaker, a doctor with a pierced nipple, a cute young student and a guy who won't work and can't swim.

“Disney, we have a problem”

Fri, 10 Mar 2000 18:36:00 +0000

"In space, no one can hear you snore." That was the conclusion of the New York Times' Elvis Mitchell, leading off an across-the-boards critical fanny-whacking for Brian De Palma's $100 million "Mission to Mars."

The film, released through Disney's Touchstone Pictures, follows Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise and Don Cheadle through a space trip to the Red Planet, a disaster, and then a rescue mission that finds evidence of the origins of life on earth. The critics were unanimous in hooting at the film's ketchup-bottle pace, mind-numbing script and wooden performances. They also dismissed its New Age sentimentality and undifferentiated thematic amalgamation of, among other things, "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The Abyss," "Contact" and "The Mummy."

Mitchell's review is among the nicest, actually. "After a couple of hours spinning around listening to this drivel," writes the Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan, "I felt like I was going to barf."

Big-budget Hollywood actioners have been kicked around the solar system by critics before, of course -- take "Armageddon." But "Armageddon" made hundreds of millions of dollars for Disney. "Mission to Mars" lacks big stars (Robbins, Sinise and Cheadle, respected though they are, don't exactly make the multiplexes go cha-ching), and thus far audience reactions have been mixed as well.