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- CINEMA, Page 75Rushes
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- COME SEE THE PARADISE
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- Two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, TIME ran a
- story called "How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs," which
- itemized physical and personality traits of the Japanese and
- Chinese. The Japanese "laugh loudly at the wrong time," the
- piece revealed. "The Chinese expression is likely to be more
- placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic,
- arrogant."
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- Racism was codified in wartime America; around 110,000
- Japanese Americans were stripped of their property and shipped
- to camps, where they were held until late 1945. "It's like
- burning down Chicago to get rid of the gangsters," notes one
- character in this drama about Lily, a young Japanese woman
- (Tamlyn Tomita), and her family, interned for years though
- they are guilty of nothing, not even laughing loudly.
-
- Alan Parker, a political cartoonist among writer-directors,
- draws every noble sentiment with broad strokes; his style is an
- anvil hitting an easel. He also introduces an irrelevant
- American, Lily's husband (Dennis Quaid), who becomes a kind of
- noble victim by marriage. But the movie is a splendid showcase
- for Japanese-American actors, and it provides a history lesson
- that is no less valuable for being obvious.
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- MERMAIDS
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- Mrs. Flax (Cher) is instantly recognizable as a lovable
- eccentric, movie-style. If her wardrobe (hand-me-down Stella
- Dallas) didn't give her away, the fact that no one, including
- her children, ever calls her anything but "Mrs. Flax" would. The
- kids are cut from the same Day-Glo emotional fabric. The younger
- (an adorable Christina Ricci) regularly tries to break the
- world's record for holding one's breath under water. The older
- (a luminous Winona Ryder) reveres nuns and earnestly studies the
- lives of the saints, a curious passion for a '60s adolescent,
- all the more so in her case because she's Jewish.
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- As a character seeking redemption for purely imaginary
- sins, Ryder comes close to redeeming this agreeably feckless
- movie by director Richard Benjamin and screenwriter June
- Roberts. She is in touch with some hormonal reality, some
- temporary teenage insanity (sad, funny, scary, all at once) that
- the rest of the film, caught up in the desire to make us say
- "aww" instead of making us go "argh," cannot approach. The movie
- must drive the Flaxes sane, and once its instrument for doing
- so, a sensible shoe-store owner named Lou Landsky (Bob Hoskins),
- begins to court the missus, Mermaids abandons the tumultuous
- seas Ryder wants to ply and starts flopping its way to a shallow
- pond of easy sentiment.
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