ARTS Tuesday, April 16,_1991 The Michigan Daily More i Seagal, marked above the law, s Out For Justice dir. John Flynn by Mark Binelli A snippet of dialogue from ponytailed killing machine Steven Seagal's latest reac- tionary blood-fest, Out For Justice: HEAD NARCOTICS DET- ECTIVE: "Be careful, will you." He hands Seagal's character, the offensively-named renegade cop Gino Felino, an unmarked shotgun. GINO (deadpan): "Yeah. You know me." The plot: Gino's cop buddy gets blown away - in front of his wife and kids!! - by obese psychotic gang- ster Richie Madano (William Forsythe, last seen as Flattop in Dick Tracy), who walks the streets of New York City waving around his pistol and smoking crack and shooting women and people in wheelchairs and raising the legiti- mate question, "Why doesn't some- body waste this asshole?" Enter Steven Seagal. The police brutality: The film opens with Seagal's Gino provoking a pimp to violence and then smashing him through a car windshield. Then his buddy gets popped. Then he tails the bad guys to a butcher shop, where he tacks one guy's hand to the wall with a meat njustice for death and still hard to kill cleaver and stabs another guy with a butcher knife and breaks another guy's arm and hits another guy over the head with a salami. Seriously. Then he goes to a bar where Richie's brother works and calls Richie a "chicken shit, fuck, pussy asshole." Then he beats everybody up. Then there is a montage of Gino searching for Richie. Then a gangster says (about Richie), "He's killin' people like it was free." Then Gino finally finds Richie and beats him to a bloody pulp and, for the poetic coup de grace, he stabs him in the fore- head with a corkscrew. Moral issues raised by the film: At least in Clint Eastwood's films, the sergeantswouldalways say, "Harry, if you shoot one more kid for lookin' at you funny, you're gonna get suspended, ya hear me?" Seagal, on the other hand, is given an open license by his peers in blue to "take out the garbage." I'm sure that guy from the LAPD's Wackiest Home Videos would find that tagline really amusing. The sub-plot: Gino is driving down the street when this guy throws a sack out of his car. Gino slams on his brakes and picks it up and, morally affronted, finds a dog inside. He names it Courago and says, "Please God, let me run into this guy again." At the end of the film, Gino does meet up with the man again, who is middle- aged and overweight, but he chal- lenges Gino to a fight anyway. Gino Page 5 \S'S*Leiew. 'Greg! Where are my blueprints!' Part of the reason for the success of Love Letters throughout the United States is the strength of its script. A.R. Gurney's dialogue is perfect - the language speaks for itself, literally. It's not a play in the traditional style; there are only two characters: an actor (Andy Ladd) and an actress (Melissa Gardner) sitting side by side reading the letters that mark their relation- ship from the second grade until late middle age. The play deals specifically with the dying lifestyle of strict boarding schools and crusty East Coast WASP families. "How did it manage to produce both you and me?" asked Melissa. "A stalwart upright servant of the people, and a boozed-out, cynical, lascivious old next to Tammy Grimes and read his set of love notes to his childhood best friend and eventual lover, his character, his inflections and ,his voice in general was completely Andy. Only once, when Andy was mocking his father, was I reminded of the television character. But while Reed was completely Andy, Grimes was not completely Melissa. At times her character was right on target, especially when Melissa wrote Andy to tell him that if he did not stop sending stuffy form letters, she'd "moon the whole fucking family" at a formal dinner. But Melissa's char- acter calls for strength, fire and bit- ing sarcasm, which Grimes lacked in her reading. She did not seem to be as familiar with the script as Reed, and while the unfamiliarity could have added a newness to the reading, it in- stead pushed Grimes half a step be- hind in cues and character. "Say it!" "No!" "Say it!M "NO! Aaargh! All right, all right! You didn't have asthma as a kid! You didn't grow up in Lansing! You were a real tough guy! You grew up on the streets and joined the CIA! I take back everything else I said!" "That's better, dad. I knew you'd come around." kicks him in the groin and then, while he is writhing on the ground, Courago urinates on him. The ego: Spy magazine reported a month or two ago that Seagal insisted on inserting several self-penned dra- matic monologues into the script during the filming, with the writer of the article implying that Seagal's inexplicable desire to be taken seri- ously would only end up distancing him from his audience. The final word? Well, the only really really awful bit that I could definitely at- tribute to Seagal was a metaphor comparing God to a puppeteer, but that was wedged in between Steve knocking out somebody's teeth with a pool ball wrapped up in a handker- chief and Steve blasting off some- body's leg from the knee down with his shotgun, so I don't think he has anything to worry about. But c'mon, isn't the movie just plain entertaining?: No. OUT FOR JUSTICE is being shown at Showcase. I thought that separating Andy Ladd and Mike Brady would be almost impossible. I was wrong. Reed did an exceptional job in Love Letters. broad." The play is touring right now with at least 20 different casts, and given the strength of the script, it will be a success regardless of who plays Andy and Melissa. The greatest fear I had walking into the Michigan Theater to see Love Letters this Saturday was that the character of Andy would seem too familiar to me. As a product of daytime reruns, I am extremely fa- miliar with Robert Reed's "Mr. Brady" voice, and I thought that separating Andy Ladd and Mike Brady would be almost impossible. I was wrong. Reed did an excep- tional job in Love Letters. As he sat Statements that should have been filled with emotion were a little flat, especially at the beginning of letters. Often what pulled the audi- ence into Grimes' monologues was not her reading, but Reed's reaction to her words. She also had a ten- dency to mumble, a problem for the audience members sitting in the bal- cony. Overall her performance was good but not great, a surprise for the Tony award-winning actress, but I heard that this was her first per- formance of Love Letters. I have no doubts that the minor glitches will be cured by the next show. - Mary Beth Barber Soviets name diverse film influences by Mike Kuniavsky The following is the second part of an interview with Piotr Pospelov and Igor Alienikov, two of the founders of the most recent Soviet underground film movement, the "parallel cinema." The first part of the interview concentrated on Pospelov's background and on the current independent filmmaking sit- uation in the Soviet Union. It turns out that, contrary to what one would assume, the state of filmmaking there is much as it is here, with fi- nancial considerations outweighing ideological ones. Also surprising is the fact that, in many ways, it's eas- ier for the Soviets to make the films they want to make than it is for their American counterparts. The filmmakers and their en- tourage (of three administrative types) were guests of the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the University Program in Film and Video Studies from March 15th through March 25th. This interview was conducted at Drake's on March 23rd. standard question, but what or who influences you in your film? Igor Alienikov: One of my biggest influences was (Andrei) Tarkovsky. I had always been pretty apathetic about film, but then I saw this Tarkovsky film and it inspired me to try andmake some of my own. For a while... MK: Which film? IA: Stalker. Piotr Pospelov: That's the same film that got me interested in film... IA: Anyway, later I became in- terested in German film of the sev- enties and eighties... MK: Fassbinder? IA: Fassbinder, Wenders. Then I moved on to (Jean-Luc) Godard sometime around nineteen-eighty- six, when more diverse foreign films started appearing. Before then it was virtually impossible to see many foreign films. A couple of years ago I started watching German and Soviet silent movies from the twenties and thirties. We digress to the recent Alan Parker restrospective in Moscow and how many American films have - been shown in the Soviet Union re- cently. After my comment about films playing there on as many screens as here, Piotr says... true in Moscow and Leningrad, where we have the big festivals. In smaller towns it's not at all the case. They almost never get large numbers of Western films there. This is why the parallel cinema de- veloped almost exclusively in the two capitals. Now there is some of it springing up in other towns. At the nineteen-eighty-nine Leningrad CineFantomFest ,there was something like fifty filmmakers from all over the country. This year there's going to be another CineFantomFest and we expect roughly seventy to show up. It's really interesting to see the film styles in the provinces. The Baltics have one style, Byelorussia has a different one. So far, though, we haven't seen anything from the Far East or from the Steppes. I also wanted to add something regarding my influences. I like a lot of art, but much of what I like has no direct influence on what I do. For instance, I love Hollywood films of the thirties and forties, the Fred Astaire films, John Ford's classic films, (William) Wyler. I was also very influences by other art forms: poetry, painting, music. Because of my musical training, I would say that modern music has influenced my films as much as anything else, including other films. In a large part, it was modern American music that influenced me: John Cage, Steve Reich, Morgan Feldman are some of my favorite composers. In general, I think that parallel cinema doesn't fit into the standard definition of film, but is a part of the spectrum of modern art in general. See SOVIETS, Page 8 1991 JEWELaRRESOURCE outLCTOaR Wholesale directory to hundreds of jewelry companies. Gold. silver. costume jewelry and much more for just pennies. DTORY Check or money order to: i CREATVEIMGE JEWELRY P.4rBO 40 TAKE fiY 1 st t , ti rf r-f LOOK AT THE Presenting The Best of Ann Arbor. This Friday in the final Weekend Magazine! MK: I know this is a pretty PP: This is all of course... only i - 1 _:=; - :_-. , - 11 J $ K j4 :., f c . ! E " t 1 'tom I u "!Pi ........................................................................................................ I, T'l 4/ //4N 4 i - It took Galileo 16 years to master the universe. You have one night. It seems unfair The oenius had all that time. While you have a few _: OMPIPAW- - T3T I , I'Mi., 1 (1111 1 r-Ill 155, AW t R ."t