Screen
O'Brien, Tom
of their rooms. (I agreed with Orwell that one must get inside range for a mock assassination of one of its Mafia informers. the whale. There one has some control over what...
...I began to consider the value of such The second half of the film is sustained by Brian Dennehy, public ceremonies to the individual protesters themselves one of the best supporting actors in film today...
...The film is also stylishly written, acted, and directed...
...macho appear in this movie: sleek Tom Cruise plays the hero...
...South African embassy...
...Watching this film, you sometimes feel you ican's brashness, but the suspense is too skimpy to make this need to be at least medium cool to deserve its air-conditioning...
...Reinhold of faith set forth in the review had char- rootage in fact, but there is, nevertheless, Niebuhr: A Biography (Pantheon, acterized Niebuhr and the Christian a question to be faced...
...Marines in Vietnam, was born to play characters like McCarI was wrong not to join the protesters outside the South thy...
...The dialogue is in English and Mandarin, flight instructor is beyond credibility...
...Despite some obscurities, improbwill, one should, if possible, enter those same streets to dem- abilities, and predictable elements (chase scenes, blow-ups onstrate opposition...
...And it was uses Venora's scenes to provide suspenseful alternation bethe pursuit of this vision, not his death, that made it difficult for tween a quiet, almost pastoral mood and the bloody mayhem me to sustain the objections I had to the protests outside the when the fake assassination goes askew...
...He previously played in Dim Sum, a very successful films, echoing the first's jingoism and the second's already Chinese American film set in San Francisco that similarly familiar passage of young male hero through love and the exploited the mystery genre...
...When eyes makes for a large part of the campy fear and fun that FIX others are already out in the street, tyrannically imposing their is contrived to produce...
...apartheid, justifying my participation in the protest, as well as The way that Dennehy uses his girth and his alert, shrewd discovering something I had not known about myself...
...Nor can there be ROBERT G. MIDDLETON is a minister of the long-suffering women in his life" really any dissent from the proposition that the American Baptist Church now living in Ocean felt about their relation to Niebuhr, nor contemporary theological scene is dePark, Maine...
...do I know how McCann arrives at his void of superstars, perhaps even of any 20 June 1986: 375...
...It No doubt Wang provided these scenes to get the film made lacks the former's wild sincerity and the latter's raw treatment by associating it with some recognizable genres now on the of genuine emotional needs...
...One sequence depicts Chinese musical storytelling, a centuries-old BLOODY MAYHEM art whose antique grace has outlasted dynasties, civil wars, 'F/X,' 'GREAT WALL,' & 'TOP GUN' Red Guards, and now even Pepsi...
...Mandel's directing expertly of the condition of the world that was unerasable...
...Nor, I Niebuhr's life...
...The wall is not just star attraction but central metaphor, an expresROBERT MANDEL'S FIX is not a summer release but a sion of the divide between a native Chinese and a Chinesesleeper hit left over from the spring...
...tisements on "A Prairie Home Companion," is meant for The film will succeed, and corrupt, precisely because it so folks so special that you have to apply to eat it...
...The last dominates much of the plot: Wang's mood, taken seriously, dominates Top Gun, a film about the son, a brash Californian headed for Stanford (Kelvin Han Yee) "right stuff ' Navy pilots who cavalierly compare hi-tech F-14 takes a strong liking to his native cousin, provoking both dogfights to "sex in a car wreck...
...Wang has tried to provide some drama, mostly with the Anthony Edwards and Kelley McGillis play his friends...
...FIX yields more American family that has taken advantage of detente to revisit action, adventure, thrills, and suspense than all the new its mainland relatives...
...What he does with the figure of this likable rogue (close in African embassy...
...move in a circle of people before a closed gate with my head raised, slowly breathing again fresh air...
...dismissed the protesters outside the South African embassy...
...Sadly, the cinematic and aerial skills involved at the end T OP GUN is like Raw Bits, Garrison Keillor's hypothetical serve some bad politics: combat between Navy fighters and tough-guy breakfast cereal, which, according to adver- Soviet MIGs, breezily passed over as an event of little note...
...and the reviews it has community of his day, there would have whether, granting all this, the Christian occasioned serve a helpful purpose, re- been no biography by Richard Fox to be community is the richer for the witness of minding those influenced by Niebuhr of reviewed by Dennis McCann...
...These assertions may have ular and religious press...
...But A Great Wall lacks power...
...Fortunately, the film provides more than a scenic tour...
...But I FIX steadily works on one's nerves to engender creepy misgivbegan to reconsider my misgivings about public protests...
...Now I conclusions, etc...
...The casting of sultry McGillis as a compelling way...
...The way to tell the story of the adults, his main interest, in a macho strutting is absurd...
...FIX provides an entertaining, inventive am resolved to move outside that belly of the whale, if only to revision of the mystery genre...
...To think otherwise was preposterous, fan- Succubus, Return of the Vermin, and ! Dismember Mama...
...Similarly, four men hanging sationalist moviemaking: Brownwas sought by the FBI beoutside a building could not seriously refine the consciousness cause of his success in such (supposed) hits as Song of the of their audience...
...Top Gun melds Rambo and An Officer and a Gentleman...
...I may not have accomplished anything for kind to his roles in Never Cry Wolf, Foul Play, and the the oppressed people of South Africa, but I might have helped soon-to-be-released Legal Eagles), is to individualize it, to to project an unerasable impression of the wickedness of animate the cliche with some personal, playful mischief...
...Even their names seem to have tography, and neatly climaxes the conflict posed by the Amer- gone on a diet...
...The first half-hour is nerve-racking...
...TOM o'BRIEN REINHOLD NIEBUHR & HIS CRITICS The need for superstars ROBERT G. MI DDLETON important elements in Niebuhr's own feeling that a man who had an extraordithought...
...But some powerful with English subtitles, which gives some idea of its authentic opening and closing action sequences catapult the viewer into texture...
...resolve his cultural clash...
...Nevertheless, involved the central characters and here Wang has found no it has a kind of style, in part laughable and in part visceral...
...Tony Scott directed...
...There one is at home...
...Den- Dennis McCann may well be right in ages have been those in which some pernis McCann's review in these pages contending that such "superstars" sons, out of whatever tangled motiva("The Last Superstar," Commonweal, exacted a heavy price from those around tions, have been willing to pay the price...
...Only the young, lean, and parental anxiety and hostility from her native boyfriend...
...all they care about is So I believed once...
...It also has the defects of both market...
...cares about making movies about people...
...In Reinhold Niebuhr's case, McCann's designation of Reinhold I do not know enough to say what "the Niebuhr as a superstar...
...Augustine indi- pected ally in untangling the mess the FBI agents have created...
...nary capacity for self-evaluation could THE BIOGRAPHY of Reinhold Irony is clearly discernible in have used his activities so that they Niebuhr by Richard Fox has had McCann's review, for if the relation be- "masked an unholy temptation to selfmany excellent reviews in the sec- tween an individual and the community evasion...
...cated, in every act of knowledge we are creating ourselves...
...I had ings...
...The also stars as the American father, enriches his screenplay with strange title is movie argot for "special effects," and the plot notes on different definitions of privacy (there's no word for it concerns one master of the trade (played by Bryan Brown) who in Chinese), attitudes to grief (displayed in the best scene in the is contacted by the FBI's Witness Protection Program to ar- film, a visit to his father's grave), and attitudes toward adolesCommonweal: 374 cent sexuality...
...The They could march day after day but, they alone could not screenplay abounds in wit aimed at the absurdities of senmodify the policies in Pretoria...
...Leo McCarthy of the NYPD, Brown's unexthat such acts define their participants...
...As ning the very illusions that contribute to the danger and confu- his actress girlfriend (Diane Venora) comments, "Nobody sion of the world...
...Val teenage soap opera and with a device from sport movies to Kilmer and Whip Hubley play his rivals...
...As he is invited, then hired and instructed in how to do the job, There it is secure and soothing...
...If it is indeed true that the debt owed to this important figure and suspect, would we have been enriched by insight into spiritual reality always serving, it is hoped, as an incentive for a the insights of many of the other great comes with a cost attached, it is also the new generation to explore the thought of figures in the past...
...case that great and creative theological a significant American theologian...
...A GREAT WALL is the first American-made film to be shot almost entirely in the People's Republic of China, including a scene on the great wall north of Beijing...
...It thus has the Screen advantage of a magnificent, inexpensive set design, and some faces and scenes photographed far more beautifully and sensitively than by visiting journalists filming documentaries...
...Writer and director Peter Wang, who season's kiddie films will probably provide combined...
...The same delightfully makes one an airhead...
...We You might think Dennehy, who grew up Irish Catholic in are defined by our actions, not our silences...
...To take a stand Brooklyn, played guard for Columbia, and served in the anywhere is an act of personal definition...
...Instead, I had remained inside the whale, between the police bureaucrats and Dennehy, several false registering my protest in silence, as passive as Jonah...
...He, for one, energy into her performance - especially in one humorous, had not done something that was merely fashionable and sensual exit from Brown's bed for an audition - that you convenient, but had risked his life to convey a personal vision know she is a marked woman...
...roots" story memorable...
...Tracy "Too Cool" Skeels...
...This makes for some fine pho- Lt...
...As St...
...I decided the maverick Lt...
...flight (and a kind of exhilarated vertigo) like nothing before...
...There one has some control over what happens...
...The question is $19.95, 340 pp...
...Here he plays rather than the achievement of a particular purpose...
...March 14, 1986) certainly manifests them and paid a heavy price in their own There can be no argument with Dennis qualities of paradox and irony that were experience...
...and technihave to joust out their rivalry over a ping pong table for the cal assistance was provided by the Navy and fighter pilots like Beijing youth championship...
...The tragic death of the Japanese per- special effects...
...But in Dim Sum the mystery death of a friend to greater emotional maturity...
...A veteran of the New York Shakespeare former made me appreciate the significance that certain ac- Festival (indeed, once its female Hamlet), Venora put so much tions may have apart from their stated objectives...
...The two competing teenage males Walter Skaaren, Jack Cash, and John Epps wrote...
Vol. 113 • June 1986 • No. 12
