Screen

...The shooting schedule was fourteen days and the production cost $14,000...

...Reitman's task was to get his viewers to self-lobotomize...

...It may be suggested that here, too, lies the source of the giant fanaticisms which in our day have convulsed the world...

...He served as his own editor and good thing, too...

...When the heroine ik)rces the mariachi to prove his identity by singing a ballad while she has a knife at his groin (he's sitting in a bath), the flurry of struggling limbs and the horrified expression on his face are intercut with the progress of a fallen shampoo bottle rolling along the floor...

...Angels is a serious play which is also a grotesque comedy that brings us back to the angel who crashes through the roof at the end of the play...

...Norman Cohn writes: A boundless, millennial promise made with boundless, prophet-like conviction to a number" of rootless and desperate men in the midst of a society where traditional norms and relationships are disintegrating--here, it would seem, lay the source of that peculiar subterranean fanaticism which subsisted as a perpetual menace to the structure of medieval society...

...Then Rodriguez patched everything together in the cutting room...

...In/'act, he's been approached to remake El Mariachi itself with a bigger budget and more leisurely shooting schedule...

...Work cheap, stay rough, stay funny...

...That sum might keep half the wardrobe crew of Dave in hot lunches for a couple of days...

...This is quite quickly accomplished once our hero calls upon an old friend who is good with figures to deal with the budget...

...He may be preternaturally ignorant of our country's political operations, but Dave is instinctually media-savvy...

...For Cohn, life is the getting and wielding of power, which is why he denies his homosexuality, renames his AIDS to the straighter cancer because gays and AIDS victims are powerless...

...The transgressions Roy has in mind are political, legal, professional, but Joe has stifled transgressions of his own...

...In both films, as in Anthony Hope's romance, an innocent is forced to substitute for a figure of power and/or notoriety and, through pluck and common sense, the sub outdoes the subbed...

...If you have trouble getting your next independent project started, I'll break open my two-year-old's piggy bank...

...Dave might very well be mistaken as satire, for it does sport with some satirical notions in its first half...

...Cubism for kids...

...that those who do...

...Aside from probably hiring only saints, suckers, and concerned relatives as collaborators, Rodriguez pulled offthis stunt apparently by shooting very expeditiously with one camera and allowing himself as few retakes as possible: no pans, no eyepopping special effects, no lengthy scenes of dialogue, no fussy lighting, no shots held for more than eight seconds (thus cutting down on retakes...

...After one all-night session, shelters and daycare centers are saved...

...He has made a son of sorts of Joe Pitt, a slightly bent straight arrow, a conservative Mormon lawyer, whom he wants to redesign in his own image, to teach him to "transgress a little, Joseph...

...Is the angel announcing the end of something or the beginning...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN E.B...

...de Vito Roles Rewritten This time, the replay recalls their brief, outdistanced time together, finds Lucifer recast--as is-and not in any way at all the angel he was before the fall...

...Who else could put this jigsaw puzzle together...

...This description hardly indicates the texture of the play because the scenes are often very funny, sometimes sentimental, more often simply ruthless...

...Dave may be a flirt of a movie but El Mariachi is an honest whore...

...Any attempt at summary could only ruin your fun and lower my I.Q...

...Instead, he gives them time to think...

...either should El Mariachi, but who has time to think while watching it...

...Downhill...

...Dave has a good joke or two, and Kevin Kline is skillful and charming in the lead...

...You'll end up making something as well upholstered as Dave...

...and he, not m some shining spot is tucked in his allotted slot Santayana said those who do nol remember the past are condemned to relive it...

...And when something violent is going on, Rodriguez has a knack of putting human lives on a par with the nearest inanimate object...

...RICHARD ALLEVA Commonweal 16 July 1993:21...

...Is the angel simply a stage device, perhaps a comic one, looking toward something better than the human losses and failures embedded in the gay fantasia, the national themes...

...The machinations of the villainous chief of staff (enjoyably hammed by Frank Langella of the magisterially sepulchral voice) are sketched instead of being menacingly unfolded, and Dave's counterattack is utterly predictable...

...rewrite it, till it is a view of a brighter, more enhancing hue...

...The net result isn't arty, though, just.jangling and kind of fun...

...Suffice it to say that nobody in this film can so much as dive into a pool or flop down on a bed without Rodriguez showing the simplest action from a zillion different camera angles...

...No, I'm afraid El Mariachi is not a masterpiece in the great humanistic tradition of Western civilization, but Noel Coward wasn't being too perverse when he noted how potent cheap music can be...

...This time, a script completely new denies what she seemed committed toz the role of puppet, pawn or toy-MISTAKEN IDENTITIES 'DAVE' & 'EL MARIACHI' he prisoner of Zenda is at large again, courtesy of two recent, well received movies: Dave and El Mariachi...

...Dave, in particular, evokes the glamour of Ruritania even though it takes place in contemporary America...

...The movie loses its teeth once Dave starts taking his office seriously and decides to put the country' s economy and moral priorities in order...

...There's this guitar-player, see, and because he's carrying his instrument in its case, everyone mistakes him for this gangster who's carrrying an arsenal in an identical case, so when our hero...oh, the hell with it...

...The unremitting nmsic on the soundtrack keeps inviting us to glide through flower-bedecked fields with flower-power smiles on our faces...

...A good literary or cinematic romance (Zenda, The Third Man, Lola Montez) dazzles us with atmosphere, verbal or visual lyricism, adroitness of storytelling, jokes, sex...

...Its actors are flesh-andblood, yet this is really a cartoon, or, better still, a comic book, one of those ultraviolent, quasisurrealistic jobs that are called graphic novels and appeal more to adults than kids...

...As the derelict and perhaps psychotic woman in act 3 says, "In the new century I think we will all be insane...

...This time, no virtual halo rests at rakish angle on his head...

...The leads--Carlos Callardo (also executive producer, wouldn't you know) as the gallant troubadour-turned-gunman, and Consuelo Gomez as the gutsy heroine--both have the sort of open, intelligent faces that give Rodriguez the excuse he needs to put a lot of very cheap, overlit close-ups on screen...

...He did not add, as he might have done...

...In any event, El Mariachi triumphs in its own grungy way...

...But the budding romance with First Lady Sigourney Weaver lacks tingle...

...The glimpses of the real president on life-support are too realistically grim for the light-hearted tone of the rest of the movie...

...Of course 1 have caught on to the idea that we are a democracy and that all presidents (even when they're not Harry Truman) are common men, but, in so far as Dave works at all, it does so as Zenda-esque romance: a commoner walks among aristocrats and proves himself a natural aristocrat...

...Louis, whose path has crossed Joe's often in the play, has guilt of his Own, having deserted Prior, whom he loves, because he does not have the courage to watch AIDS destroy Prior...

...I'm going to hell for doing this," says Joe, the good Mormon, when he finally accepts that he is homosexual and goes off with Louis, a damnation that is certainly more positive than our last sight of Harper, settling into the comfort of an imaginary Antarctica...

...For instance, the hero is so ignorant of even the rudiments of government that he has to be taught about the three branches, yet when his handlers place him at the presidential podium to coach him for his 20:16 July 1993 Commonwealnext address, Dave immediately knows where the teleprompter should be...

...Do we have to wait for part 2? Should I quit asking questions and simply accept that Angels in America is a play almost as impressive as the hoopla surrounding it...

...The character of the president's mistress isn't utilized after the president's stroke but is left hovering in the background, thus calling attention to the fact that the scriptwriter doesn't know what to do with her...

...Don't do it, amigo...

...instead the transformation is done with a jerk...

...And, after Dave gives a press conference in which he delivers the same we-must-all-sacrifice message that lost Jimmy Carter his post (only in language far slurpier than Carter's), the press corps leaps to its feet in enthusiasm, led by...Helen Thomas...

...So Dave goes...

...But this particular movie, if it's to be enjoyed at all, mustn't be pondered...

...Because of the editing, we watch the career of the plastic container with the same degree of interest we feel for the imperiled crooner...

...Because of his film's surprisingly good reception, Rodriguez has had offers from moneymen to make more expensive thrillers...

...I would guess that whoever was available for any given shot was simply shoved in front of the camera and warned not to goof it up...

...For when Dave, a Joe Average impersonating a stroke-disabled president at the behest of a power-mad chief of staff, first tours the White House, we are meant to catch our breaths just as he does at the sight of so much plush carpeted, crystal chandeliered splendor, to ooh and ah at the idea of a commoner having free access to the trappings of royalty...

...The movie does have some old-fashioned human warmth, however...

...The success of the film derives in part from the way its creator, twenty-four-year old Robert Rodriguez, was forced to make it...

...E1Mariachi's plot is trim, taut, action-packed, and submoronic...

...Thus, Dave flirts with the possibilities of satire...

...But flirts seldom keep their promises...

...Worst of all, director Ivan Reitman stages his material reverentially, as if every plot development and line of dialogue were to be savored by the audience...

...Where does that leave the AIDS victim as prophet...

...The way you work, that should pay for at least three days of production...

...He has evidently studied Harold Lloyd to good effect...

...And, in an age of photo opportunities and soundbites, mustn't such savvy pass as true wisdom...

...The conversion of the president's press secretary fi'om covillain to good guy needed to be revealed by degrees...

...As long as there are a fair number of males (but not necessarily young males) in the audience, group self-lobotomization is assured...

...He has spent his life smothering his homosexual longings and, in the process, has helped turn his wife Harper into an hysteric, a woman obsessed by a man threatening her (Joe, of course) whose only escape is dream journeys...

...Taken strictly as Ruritanian romance rather than satire, Dave would pass as a decent movie except for one unfortunate fact: it lumbers...