Epic Mice

...When General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) marches 10,000 troops into Brooklyn, occupies the borough, and moves its Arab population into internment camps, all credibility is lost...

...The movie features remarkably few speaking roles...

...In this sense, The Siege is a throwback to the paranoid thrillers of the '60s and '70s, which argued that the militant forces in our own government are the greatest threat to a free society...

...It is possible to imagine them becoming an extraordinary means for exploring the evils of slavery and the passions of an oppressed culture...

...While Meet Joe Black doesn't attempt the political seriousness of Beloved, it also overdoses on its own portentousness and runs for almost three hours...

...most of the extras stand around like waxworks during the chief players' frequent grandstanding...

...Though she succeeded only in ending the life of her twoyear-old daughter, her two sons abandoned her after the War and she lives now with her prodigal lover, Paul D (Danny Glover), and her teenage daughter, Denver (Kimberly Elise...

...Winfrey does quite well in a challenging role and has wisely surrounded herself with superb performers...

...What happens to the dying if Death is no longer available to perform his function?—Meet Joe Black is appallingly underdeveloped...

...Yet in the long run this work is not so independent of the novel that it escapes falling victim to its own lofty pretensions...

...That body, it turns out, is the real star of the movie and the camera's fascination with it is the only reason Meet Joe Black is at all entertaining...

...The film, however, like the novel, devolves into irrelevant, protracted sequences which sidestep the tragedy and pathos that should be at its core...

...In fact, he is so successful in translating Morrison's story that one wonders if Morrison needed to tell this tale in such difficult modernist prose in the firstplace...

...They wept through the closing credits...

...The real problem with Beloved, though, is that it overstays its welcome, stringing its characters along a wayward plot that finally just peters out...

...The gorgeous Forlani gets the obligatory opportunity to undrape, but it is Death who occupies most of director Martin Brest's leering attention...

...Without their enthusiasm and energy, I'm not sure I would have lasted to the end...

...nevertheless, it has so many continuity gaps that it clearly was badly edited from an even longer film...

...agent who, like Devereaux, mostly works against Hubbard...

...Watching it, you get the feeling that its creators devoted so much attention to its ornate design that they couldn't find the time to instill a jot of credibility into its plot or characters...

...Reviewers who attended screenings for critics were understandably bored, but if they had viewed it in a local theater surrounded by an audience composed mostly of teenage girls, as I did, they might have seen it in a somewhat different light...

...For reasons that are never adequately explained, Death (Brad Pitt), apparently no longer exhilarated by the chess games he once played with Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, decides he is due for a vacation and insists upon dwelling with the Parrish family...

...FBI agents Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) and Frank Haddad (Tony Shaloub), searching for the terrorists' leaders, find themselves more at odds with the U.S...

...Parrish is about to turn 65 and, we soon discover, is about to die...

...While it is true that Haddad is a Lebanese American who is justifiably outraged at Willis' orders, the criticism is not unreasonable...

...Despite its few references to the Oklahoma City bombing, The Siege promotes the idea that terrorists routinely run amok within the Arab community, making fools of the well-meaning leaders who ineffectually parade their people's love for the U.S...

...Many of the most intriguing recent pictures have fallen short of their promise, proving that a mix of good intentions, overextended ambition and a bloated running time can prove fatal...

...military and agents from other government organizations than with the bombers themselves...

...all of the family members, at one point or another, consider it a great personal triumph to confess their love for someone else, as if the simple admission instantly absolved them of all flaws...

...Fans of the novel were concerned that a film version could never mimic its elliptical structure—its delving into several streams of character consciousness, leaping around in time and employing opaque Faulknerian narrative devices...

...For the first two hours, the conversation of these characters holds a good deal of interest...

...Demme, who in the past has shown a penchant for flamboyant camera tricks, only occasionally indulges himself in the shock cutting, hazy lighting and other Roger Corman-like tactics that detracted from the performances in his Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs...

...His is a star turn...

...The plot revolves around members of an Arab terrorist group who execute a series of bombings that throw New York City into a panic...

...Set in the 1870s, Beloved is the story of Sethe (Winfrey), who in the years before the Civil War escaped with her children from bondage in Kentucky to an Ohio refuge...

...Based on the highly praised novel by Toni Morrison and directed by the Oscar-winning Jonathan Demme, this was a pet project of Oprah Winfrey, who nurtured it for years, co-produced the movie and took its starring role...

...Demme retains significant sections of the novel's dialogue and is careful to depict its most memorable digressions, such as the birth of Denver on Sethe's road to freedom and her awful act...

...Pitt is not expected to deliver a performance, however...

...Take the case of Beloved, released to immense expectations...

...Although The Siege runs just over two hours and boasts an intriguing premise, it nevertheless seems endless...

...But by this point the significance of Morrison's story has long been abandoned...

...Every Arab represented here is either innocent or evil...

...The movie is ostensibly a remake of Death Takes a Holiday, a beautifully romantic 1934 Fredric March vehicle...

...But like Beloved and Meet Joe Black, The Siege ignores its most interesting implications in favor of cheaper, easier and less satisfying sensationalism...

...As the film begins, Sethe's Ohio house is haunted by the ghost of her murdered child (Thandie Newton), a spirit who takes human form and, calling herself Beloved, enters into the lives of this broken family...

...It is difficult to believe that a few explosions in New York would raise a huge public cry for the enforcement of martial law...

...No one notices...

...Everyone is ridiculously beautiful and absurdly selfish...

...Every scene of this fluffy monster contains long pauses and pointless interchanges that could easily have been trimmed...

...The teenagers did jeer at the film's silliest parts, revealing that they thought it idiotic too, but they also tittered and cooed as Pitt paraded in fancy suits, flashed his boyish grin, and bared his shoulders and chest...

...So, apparently, were Demme and his scenarists, who wisely decided not to attempt this...

...Unfortunately, it does not follow the original beyond its initial premise...

...The third hour has some sensationalistic scenes, including the sight of a stark naked and visibly pregnant Beloved standing on the porch of Sethe's house and raging against a gaggle of "respectable" women who have gathered disapprovingly outside the gate...

...Much has been made of the film's hostile representation of Arabs...

...There is almost no consistency to his character, whom Parrish dubs Joe Black: He is alternately sinister, composed, ingratiating, foolish, intelligent, ignorant, and passionate...

...Beloved's cool critical reception and poor box office returns have led Hollywood moguls to decry films that are "downers" and to pull the plug on a number of "prestige" movies that were to feature AfricanAmerican protagonists...

...With the production designed by Dante Ferretti, who worked on the last films of Fellini and Pasolini, and with lush cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, Meet Joe Black lingers lovingly over the fabulously wealthy lifestyle of media tycoon William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins...

...Her characters, driven by bondage and the War to the brink of despair, desperately try to hold on to their love for one another despite the unconscionable acts they have committed...

...Instead, they wove the strands of the book's main plot together to create an admittedly less detailed but much more accessible movie...

...We are subjected to excessive tours of his ornate house, his lawns and his comfortable offices...

...When her former master's agents caught up with her, she attempted to kill her four children rather than return them to a life of oppression...

...Instead of posing the questions that made the older film so compelling—Can Death be loved for what he truly is...

...He gives Parrish more time to live, but only so long as the millionaire opens his home to him and keeps his identity a secret...

...Poor Susan, though hardly 100 yards away, does not hear the screeching of rubber or anyone's screams...

...none are permitted the inner complexities of Hubbard, Devereaux or Sharon Bridger (Annette Bening), a U.S...

...Because this grim, stupid film does not earn any of the alarmism it tries to foist on the viewer, it succeeds neither as an action picture nor as a drama...

...The funniest moment comes when a young man, after flirting in a coffee shop with Parrish's daughter Susan (Clair Forlani), parts ways with her on the streets of Manhattan and, while turning back for one more glance, is run over by two cars in quick succession...

...The movie discards this young man so summarily because it needs to introduce us to the body that Death's spirit will shortly inhabit when, coincidentally for Susan, he enters the Parrish household...

...And this film's fans—sisters, no doubt, of the Leonardo DiCaprio fanatics who made Titanic the most lucrative picture of all time—melted so completely every time the actor appeared on the screen that they fell victim to its artificial romanticism and feeble catharsis...

...By keeping the narrative primarily in the present tense, Demme discovers motivations and momentums absent from the novel...