Trailers

Our ever-hopeful filmgoer suggests what might turn us on this fall and winter, and what might make politicians mad. They could be the same things.

By David Thomson

Sep 22, 2000 | It's the custom every fall for movie people to pick winners and losers in the season ahead. But since my beat at Salon is movies (or anything) in which there is the hope of sexual excitement, this fall I may be walking into the jaws of Lynne Cheney, Al Gore and anyone else eager to take advantage of the notion that sex and violence in American movies are too American for us to see.

As it happens, I do make distinctions between sex and violence: It's my opinion that we don't know enough about sex, don't talk about it as much as we might and have lost the habit of seeing most movie imagery as a metaphor for sex. I worry more about violence -- not that there is definitive evidence one way or the other about the connections between violence seen and violence enacted. It's rather more that I grow afraid of people addicted to mythic violence. This is only a hunch, but that preoccupation with violence could be related to our ignorance of sex. I share Jack Nicholson's confusion over a society that will show breasts being slashed but turns coy if they are stroked.

The recent outpouring over the movies we see misses the point -- as always. The single most sickening point that the moviegoer must face is, quite simply, that the movies are so awful. I don't have many large hopes for "The Legend of Bagger Vance" (coming in November). It's about a golfer (Matt Damon) who finds his magic swing, and it's altogether a mix of sport and things mystical rather like the baseball picture "The Natural," which was a dud. What's more, "Bagger Vance" is directed by the star of "The Natural," Robert Redford. This is enough to conjure up the prospect of endless, exquisite scenes of high, pure, straight drives disappearing into the sunset at magic hour.

It may come to that, and no more than that. At the same time, it is Damon with Charlize Theron as his girlfriend. I've seen one still of them together in the film, and I smell chemistry. Is that sort of instinct reliable? No, and I don't think Redford has ever filmed or been involved in really sensual material on-screen. But sometimes two players can have an eye for each other that ignores omissions in a script and blind spots in a director.

Similarly, Taylor Hackford's "Proof of Life" (December) has me intrigued. An American engineer is taken hostage by Colombian guerrillas. Russell Crowe arrives to negotiate his release, but he falls in love with the engineer's wife (Meg Ryan). Hackford does have a feeling for sex. Remember Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward in "Against All Odds"? And don't forget that Hackford himself has for years been the companion of Helen Mirren, one of the most desirable of grown-up women. But we have more still to go on here. For as the unit labored in the jungle so word leaked out that Ryan's husband, Dennis Quaid, was seeking a divorce because of the way she was feeling in her scenes with Crowe. Location romances are very common, of course, and most of them evaporate after filming. But sometimes there's some charge felt in life that the camera eats up greedily -- like Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw in Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway." Plus, Ryan is a far better actress than McGraw.

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