Foxfire
With Hedy Burress, Angelina Jolie, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Shimizu, Sarah Rosenberg, and Peter Facinelli.
With Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, George Corraface, and Cliff Robertson.
With Kevin Costner, Rene Russo, Cheech Marin, and Don Johnson.
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I can think of only one bit of Tin Cup that’s beautiful, imaginative, and different, and it lasts for only a few seconds: a speech delivered by Russo, before her character is transformed into the standard-issue cheerleader, is broken into fragments by jump cuts. The character’s hesitations and confusions–or are they those of the actress?–are formalized by the cuts into a kind of patchwork quilt, conveying a fresh authenticity. On the other hand, breaking down the golf trajectories into separate shots during the sports climax comes across as an expedient form of cheating–the very opposite of authenticity. This is where the movie seemingly hits box-office pay dirt. But if the glory and continuity of what Costner is supposedly achieving can only be conveyed by a measly film trick, how meaningful is it in the first place? Just glorious and continuous enough to kill a couple of hours.
By contrast Foxfire and Escape From L.A. honor their genres and feed their blurb writers only out of duty, and the effort shows. Foxfire assumes that a commercial movie about rebellious teenagers requires a certain amount of abrasive behavior and language, even if the teenagers are girls and the real interest of the filmmakers–Annette Haywood-Carter directing her first feature, Elizabeth White adapting a Joyce Carol Oates novel, five interesting but basically unknown actresses, and art director Alan Locke–appears to be elsewhere. John Carpenter’s Escape From L.A. harks back to its 1981 prequel, Escape From New York, updated by the commercial gospel according to Schwarzenegger: assuming that pithy, bubblegum one-liners are what audiences expect to hear from macho desperado Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), this film furnishes one or two per action sequence, honoring the contract even though Russell often makes the lines sound flat and obligatory.
The montage sequence behind the opening credits, deceptive stylistically in its frenetic pacing, is nevertheless appropriate thematically. A fully clothed Maddy (Hedy Burress), who turns out to be the narrator and central character, is snapping photographs of her bare-assed boyfriend Ethan (Peter Facinelli) in the woods. This simple inversion of the usual movie objectification of women carries over into a marginalizing, two-dimensional treatment of men throughout the movie: a teacher who paws the girls in his class, an intolerant principal, an uncomprehending father, and cops and security guards are all depicted in the foreshortened, stereotyped manner usually accorded females in movies about rebellious boys. In other words they’re stock figures rather than characters; even Ethan, who’s relatively sensitive, could be fairly described as a sensitive piece of meat.
