The Talkies /Running Time

...I only wish that my confidence in the good sense of America's children were robust enough for me to believe it will be as hated as it deserves...

...And, as this is a film about excess, Woo gilds the poison lily by making the chief bad guy's chief henchman a sadistic South African given to heavy-handed irony about his tender feelings and called, like the late prime minister of his homeland, Pik (Arnold Vosloo...

...But children could do a lot worse than take this film—or either of the two others—as almost as good an introduction to serious thinking about adult problems as the old TV Fugitive...

...Where the rich are not scheming to murder doctors' wives or hunting down homeless people, they are as bloodless and feckless and pathetic as the effete Lord Craven (John Lynch) in The Secret Garden...

...He is ostensibly a federal marshal, but we haven't seen one like him since Wyatt Earp...

...Here was Kafka for Americans...

...The climactic scene comes when Josh's mother (Joan Allen) and father argue about how important they've all allowed chess to become to them...

...The .1 Man Without a Face is yet another example of good acting and story-telling that leads up to a muddled finish...

...Steven Zaillian' s Searching for Bobby Fischer is terrific until the climax, when it wimps out of making a resolution for the terrible problem it has set itself...

...King of the Hill is the most accomplished bit of film-making among the three...

...Most of the stories up until the rather pat ending are told with exemplary dispassion and the whole is both tough-minded and life-affirming...

...It's not that I'm against children taking an interest in nature and planting things, mind you, but I do resent the crass manipulation of feelings involved in accompanying their horticultural pursuits with lush music and photography...

...Richard K. was a man wrongly accused of a crime who found himself not caught up in some Central European nightmare of military-judicial bureaucracy but turned loose in the great anonymous open spaces of America, where men have always gone to start their lives over again, to reinvent themselves...

...But all three have found excellent child actors for the lead roles, manage to tell a good story interestingly, and, in the course of doing so, arouse some genuine emotions...

...sell its political worldview—according to which any villainy not originating with the CIA mustbe the work of big corporate interests...

...For every Little Eva there is a Simon Legree, for every Little Nell a Daniel Qui1p...

...And add fifty bonus points if it is Japanese...

...It is too hastily introduced and confusingly resolved...

...He had been liberated by the threat of capture.from those normal ties that hold most people to one life only...

...arises from a diabolical sort of cleverness on the part of the Japanese, and encompassing within it a much more elemental prejudice against little yellow men with buck teeth and thick glasses...

...None of the three is in itself perhaps quite of the standard we normally expect of the Movie of the Month...

...The point of his character is the hero he becomes to the child...

...So, for this one time only, .I proclaim them all three Movies of the Month...

...How odd, then, that the new film of The Fugitive cuts out all that interesting stuff and leaves in only the lurid murder mystery and the shadowy one-armed man...

...Making him too realistic a person would only interfere with this...

...In a nice touch we are allowed to see howinsufferable and pushy are most chess parents—easily as bad as stage parents—along with Mantegna, who has to work out as he goes along how to run interference for his son without trying to run his life...

...How many ballplayers grow up being afraid to lose their father's love every time they come up to the plate...

...There is no real plot but instead a series of well-observed vignettes ranging from Aaron's telling his little brother the etiquette of stealing food at school lunch ("Only steal from fat boys and never steal anyone's dessert") to the suicide of a marvelously raffish hotel neighbor (played by Spalding Gray...

...As the two parents recognize for just a moment, if winning is more important than anything else, then you live one kind of life...

...The bad guys must be motivated, and Hollywood cannot pass up a chance to...

...and Mel Gibson's Man Without a Face bogs down in a false accusation of child abuse...

...Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill, based on A.E...

...You'd think that any self-respecting wicked pharmaceutical company could find a more direct and efficient way of silencing a whistle-blower than getting a one-armed man to murder his wife and then getting him sent to the chair for murder, but there it is...

...W ell, there is a great bus-train wreck that proves an appropriately drastic means of springing Harrison Ford (as the new version of Kimble) from incarceration...

...It gives us something of the true flavor of the Depression as seen through the eyes of a child, Aaron Kurlander (Jesse Bradford...

...He would have been a man torn between wanting to do better in his new life and bound by justice to answer for the sins of his old one...

...In fact, if it wouldn't have been scandalously inappropriate in the televisual world of the 1960s, I'd have liked it better if he had been guilty of his wife's murder...

...Mel Gibson plays the eponymous man without a face (actually he has one but it is hideously disfigured), who is overdrawn and lacking in subtlety, but this hardly matters...

...how very much odder that it has had such success at the box office...

...ndings are the problem with F all three of these films...

...He harbored, like any Byronic hero, a guilty secret, but there was no time for self-pity...

...There's also the performance of Tommy Lee Jones as the pursuing Lt...

...But thereafter the film takes the easy way out by pretending that no hard choices are involved after all...

...Gerard who, when Barry Morse played him on TV, was rather a dull dog...

...Kimble, played by the late David Janssen, did that every week...

...In fact, the only thing better (i.e., worse) than a large corporation is a large foreign corporation...

...The film is beneath criticism for taking the superstition that the Japanese trade surplus with the U.S...

...He's not afraid of losing," says mom, "he's afraid 'of losing your love...

...There is something in all of us that wants the pursued to escape the pursuer, and that could have been exploited without making the pursued into a cliché of wrongly convicted innocence...

...She lacked, I feel sure, Miss Maberly's charming self-possession...

...Children will see R-rated films—if only because they are proscribed—and will know when they do that they have a mystique, that the "adult" material is not for casual watching...

...He lived by his wits from week to week, moving on from one new life to another...

...Hotchner's memoir of growing up in St...

...We could have cut out all that silly stuff about the one-armed man and there would have been more subtlety, more ambiguity about our fondness for him...

...In fact, I'm not sure he's not the director of the FBI...

...It has some beautifully observed moments drawn from the family life of its young hero, Chuck Norstadt (Nick Stahl), including his fierce rivalry with his two half-sisters, longing for his dead father and resentment of his mother's penchant, for marrying and divorcing new husbands...

...Mantegna replies, simply but forcefully, "All of them...

...But give Hollywood a rich—or a military/CIA—man and the wellsprings of human evil need be plumbed no deeper...

...I only wish that the film-makers could have been half so focused on Kimble instead of introducing a tedious conspiracy by a wicked, multinational pharmaceutical company to suppress information about the side-effects of one of its drugs...

...Up until that point, however, Zaillian does a good job of setting out the hard choices of life...

...uckily, it just so happens L this month that there are not one, not two, but three new s that do a much better job of presenting adult situations to children...

...But don't get me going on Rising Sun...

...But there are other reasons to hate The Secret Garden—most of them little and cuddly and unbearably cute...

...if it is not, you live another...

...But even without such subtlety, Janssen's TV fugitive was an attractive, lonely figure...

...Louis during the Depression, is just a little too suffused with nostalgia's golden glow...

...What the children who watch this stuff take in is, in my view, at least as toxic to their psychic health as all the sex 'n' violence celebrated in the moralists' strictures...

...No further explanation is needed...

...Here he is the sort of cop who, if there were any justice in the world, would be immediately elevated to the directorship of the FBI...

...There was something particularly attractive and flattering to my boyish worldly wisdom about the idea not of the innocent convict but of the wanderer, the outsider, and the actor...

...I don't remember the book being so sick-making, and I'm quite sure that Mary Lennox, the young heroine played here by the much too pretty Kate Maberly, was more awkward and difficult...

...Suffice it to say that it takes a strong stomach to sit through all the soft-focus shots not only of gardens but also of baby lambs and baby birds...

...I would have thought that even a child looking at the problems of the adult world for the first time would want something more substantial...

...But this great moment is not followed up...

...Even with a story set in England and a Polish woman director, this film stinks of Hollywood money and sentiment...

...What in this generic thriller is there to get excited about...

...John Woo's spectacularly choreographed but dramatically negligible Hard Target, for example, introduces a gang of rich villains with seemingly unlimited numbers of henchmen (as Roland smote the Saracens, so Jean-Claude Van Damme smites the capitalists), who make their money by providing homeless Vietnam veterans as human quarry for amateurish but even richer white hunters...

...With his mother in a sanitarium, his brother sent to live with relatives to save money, and his father on the road looking for work or trying to sell watches, Aaron is left alone in their hotel room somehow to stave off eviction, feed himself, finish elementary school, and hold his head up among his school friends from more prosperous families by never letting them know of his own family's poverty...

...Such sentimentalism is really the other side of the coin to villain stereotyping...

...In Searching for Bobby Fischer another cute kid, Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) is a chess prodigy whose father (Joe Mantegna) is determined to give him the chance to exploit his gift in the cutthroat world of children's chess competition...

...Josh goes on winning without having to sacrifice anything else to his desire...

...For all the imminent peril the law's pursuit was supposed to put him in, he was the freest man ontelevision to me...

...His being so completely focused on apprehending his man is dramatically very powerful...

...Unfortunately, for similar reasons the baseless charge of child abuse against him is also a distraction...

...But who will do children the favor of similarly marking out sentimentalism—something dangerous not to their present innocence but to their prospective maturity...