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Certain scenes will blow you away.
Certain characters (Leo Decapitated)
will not. (Alps)
The Truman Show (PG) Director
Peter Weir’s conceptually ambitious
drama about a man who unknowingly
lives in a lake studio world for the
benefit of millions of sicko TV fanat
ics Jim Carrey proves he can handle
such serious drama but stil' hams it
up obnoxiously. Go see it. With Laura
Linney, Noan Emmerich, Ed Harris
and Natascha McElhone. (Mall
Outside, Commerce Drive-In)
The X Files (PG-13) Gillian
Andeison and David Duchovny take
their roles as FBI agents to the big
screen in this long-awaited film ver
sion of the TV show. Novices and
fans will enjoy this eerie conspiracy
drama about extra-terrestrial viruses,
global bogeymen, mysterious corn
fields and far-fetched situations in the
Arctic (many scenes in the intro and
conclusion look like Smilla's Sense
Of Snow mixed with Aliens).
Worthwhile. (Beechwood)
MOVIE PICK
END OF THE WORLD AGAIN
Armageddon (PG-13) if you can make it
through the first excruciating 10 minutes
of extreme violence (New York City gets
demolished — what a fresh idea!) and the
first half hour of character introductions
(there are at least 20 of them), you might
eventually give in and enjoy the ridiculous
bombast of this new disaster flick. At least
that’s what director Michael Bay {The
Rock) and co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer
(Con Air) hope happens with what they
must assume are mindless summer movie
audiences. It’s the kind of thing
Independence Day fans will love, Contact
fans will tolerate and film buffs will hate.
Armageddon bounds along with so
much loud machismo and pumped-up
patriotism that it forgets to pay any atten
tion to detail, believability or plot. It’s so
bad it’s funny — if you can figure out a
way to simply sit there, popcorn in hand,
and take it all in.
After a meteorite pummels New York
City, NASA realizes that something’s not
quite right in the skies. An enormous
asteroid is heading towards Earth at great
speed and there’s nothing they can do
about. It’s “the size of Texas” says NASA
director Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton)
and will “destroy all life on the planet no
matter where it hits.” Yikes.
Whereas Deep Impact allowed the gov
ernment a full year to devise a plan,
Armageddon gives the world only 18 days.
What to do? The big wigs decide to call in
their version of The Dirty Dozen — a pack
of gnarled deep-core oil drillers led by the
balding Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis).
Stamper is one hell of a red-blooded
American; when he’s not threatening his
daughter’s boyfriend A.J. (Good Will
Hunting's Ben Affleck) with a shotgun, he’s
strutting around his massive oH rig in the
Pacific, poking fun at those sissy environ
mentalists on the Greenpeace ship across
the way.
Bruce Willis is perfect for the role as
the lead tough guy. He holds the same
John Wayne-ish expression the entire time
and utters some of the best one liners (the
bulk of the script sounds like leftover Con
Air material). “La Grange” by ZZ Top
cranks up as soon as Willis appears on
screen. His crew is a crazy hodgepodge of
scrawny smart-asses and muscle-bound
brutes — all of whom take credit for help
ing to raise Harry’s daughter... and enjoy
a healthy dose of strip clubs and liquor on
the side.
The main story focuses on the crew’s
spur-of-the moment training sessions at
NASA and their trip up into space to drill
and blast the asteroid in half. Some of the
psychological exams In particular are
hilarious, almost resembling the prison
therapy sessions in Raising Arizona. Steve
Buscemi’s character usually rattles off the
best (though arguably most -exist) or.e-
liners.
Meanwhile, the love story between AJ.
(Affleck) and Harry’s daughter Grace (the
pouty Liv Tyler) rears its predictably silly
head from time to time. When she’s not
making love on the
oil rig or wrapping
her legs around AJ.
on tlie NASA load
ing docks (with
Aerosmith blaring in
the foreground),
she’s whining about
this and that
to either Truman
(Thornton) or Harry
It’s a shame that
Tyler, a talented up-
and-coming actress,
has to play such a
dumb character.
Tyler and Affleck
come across as
stoned rich brats, not two heroes in love.
The energy inevitably picks up as the
asteroid approaches Earth. With time run
ning out, the crew lands on the rocky sur
face and places a nuclear bomb 800 feet
below its surface. They pick up a Russian
astronaut (Stormare) along the way, acci
dentally destroy his space station, then
make fun of his nomeland. The count
down is somewhat suspenseful, despite
the whole set looking like something from
an old Flash Gordon flick.
With a weaker cast, Armageddon would
be heading down the same path as the
recent Godzilla or last year’s flops Batman
& Robin and Speed 2 — toward block
buster purgatory. As it stands, it holds up
as an amusing “bad movie" with enough
misplaced aggression, violence and gener
al idiocy to almost entertain the American
moviegoer. At one point, Thornton’s char
acter describes the approaching
onslaught as “basically the worst parts of
the Bible." Armageddon is basically the
worst parts of Hollywood’s mega-bucks
summer factory. At least it’s kind of funny.
Ballard Lesemann
3
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