Note: movie ratings are out of a possible ***** as follows:

* is lousy
** is ok
*** is good
**** is very good
***** is outstanding

June 15, 1999
by He Jung Kim

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

Look, it's a shiny, smooth shaft soaring through the sky and it looks like… Hey, Willie! Hey Dick! Hey Woody! Hey Mike! That's right, Austin Powers is back, and once again Mike Myers flaunts what he does best in his Austin Powers sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me. If you thought his original was outrageous, wait until you see this sequel where nothing is too sacred for ridicule or blatant expropriation.

If you remember, Austin Powers' nemesis, Dr. Evil, survived the last movie by blasting off into orbit. This time he's back with a plan to steal Austin's "mojo," which Evil believes is Austin's only advantage over him. Fully equipped with a time-warp machine and a self-cloned right-hand man called Mini Me, Dr. Evil goes back to 1969 and robs the still-frozen Austin of his shagging fluid. Consequently, Austin is forced to return to the ‘60s, where he meets his new love interest, Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham), a young, over-sexed, American CIA agent determined to shag Austin Powers. In efforts to repossess his mojo (and yes, also to save the world from Dr. Evil's threat of missile attacks), Felicity and Austin travel back and forth from 1969 London to 1999 Los Angeles, but not without various interludes with grotesque villains, crude slap-stick comedy and certainly a lot of laughs.

The Spy Who Shagged Me is full of references to fads in contemporary pop culture, and Myers openly steals lines from films like Jerry McGuire and Star Wars. In fact, in mimicking guests on Jerry Springer, performing a lounge version of Joan Osborne on the piano, and even rapping parts of the script (complete with hand movements and neck jerking), Myers proves his creativity and talent as a true comedian who can make fun of pretty much anything. Mind you, not all gags are successfully executed, and at times Myers has to divert our attention by jump-cutting to silly song-and-dance sequences. Yet neither Austin nor Dr. Evil are restricted by boundaries in subject matter, and the two almost compete for offensiveness and vulgarity. Look for the silhouette-on-the-tent scene and be prepared to laugh, cringe and blush all at the same time!

The list of cast and credits in The Spy is enormous, with surprise cameos by familiar celebrities like Woody Harrelson, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson. The new leading lady, Heather Graham, is a convincing Bond-esque femme fatale with her molded-for-60's swank hair-do and body. Her performance matches that of Elizabeth Hurley, who was sexy and surprisingly funny in the first movie. Even Rob Lowe does a good job as a relatively silent stand-in for Robert Wagner. If the absurd, crude and ridiculous make you laugh, then this * * * 1/2 comedy is for you.

Notting Hill

From the very first time I saw the trailer for Notting Hill, I knew critics and moviegoers alike would rave about this movie. Notting Hill doesn’t claim to be anything more than your typical summer romantic comedy, and it really doesn't need to. In fact, its selling point is quite the opposite. Flashing pictures of Julia Roberts paired off with Hugh Grant in a Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral) script, there is no doubt that director Roger Michell has the winning combination to make what appears to be a blockbuster sequel to Four Weddings. Notting Hill is safe and picture-perfect enough to appeal to date-movie audiences of all ages.

Julia Roberts plays Anna Scott, a world-famous American movie star shooting a film in London. Hugh Grant's character, William Thacker, is your average Brit who owns a small travel bookstore in London's Notting Hill. When Anna comes to the store browsing for a book, she witnesses William's congenial handling of a shoplifter and is immediately drawn to him, so much so that he ends up spilling orange juice all over her at their next chance meeting. She not only agrees to freshen up at his flat, but she gives him a heartfelt, lingering kiss before she leaves. What follows is obvious and formulaic. While Anna lives in Hollywood and her life is in the public eye, William lives in Notting Hill with only a handful of close friends interested in his goings-on. Their two worlds clash as often as the unlikely couple try to meet for a date. Though there is no doubt that the couple will end up together in the end, what is surprising about this movie is how easily we are made to sympathize and even like the odd group of characters in this movie.

Loyal to the tradition set in Four Weddings, Curtis's script contains an eclectic group of supporting cast members who are so sincerely entertaining on their own that they lend credibility and depth to the leading roles. Let's face it: most people remember Julia Roberts for her role in Pretty Woman; as for Hugh Grant, unless he does quirky British, his drawn-out delivery and confused stutter are hard to take. Both Roberts and Grant play themselves in this movie. (Roberts' love life is publicly chronicled by paparazzi, and Grant is now forever humble and bowing in the shadows of his real-life celebrity girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley.) However, this love story between Roberts and Grant still works due to efforts by supporting cast members like Rhys Ifans (Spike, the mutant flatmate) and Emma Chambers (Honey, William's wacky sister), who keep you entertained (and therefore forgiving) with wit and solid comic acting. Roberts may give her hyena laugh to yet another character, and Grant may ad lib "bugger" about a hundred times, but when star-crazed Honey professes her love for the unwashed, bug-like Spike, you can't help but to be amused at how silly but human these characters are.

As in the end when Anna asks William to see her as "a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her," most viewers will allow themselves to be entertained by this silly love story and perhaps even recommend this * * * movie to friends.

The Thirteenth Floor

We've had weekly episodes of Quantum Leap on TV for how many seasons? Did we really have to have it blown up on the big screen and pay to see its deleted scenes? The Thirteenth Floor, as in most office buildings, should have been skipped over for how disappointingly mediocre it is. Based on a novel written by Daniel F Galouye, Josef Rusnak's movie yet again explores the boundaries between reality and virtual existence. The problem is, in The Thirteenth Floor, the boundaries appear seamless only at first. Jumping back and forth from a modern-day setting to the 1930s within a virtual-game world, most viewers will orient themselves in both settings way before the characters do.

Craig Bierko plays Douglas Hall, a software developer employed by Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the mastermind behind a new virtual game approaching its last stages of development. When Fuller is murdered, his daughter (Gretchen Mol) mysteriously returns from Paris and incites Hall, who fast becomes the main murder suspect, to try out the game for the first time. Though a key developer of this game, Hall is flabbergasted when he's transported into 1937 Los Angeles and seems foreign to the rules of the game. Convinced that the game killed Fuller, Hall enters where Fuller left off and discovers that everyone he knows in real life has another identity in the virtual world. In his investigative interaction with these characters, Hall eventually learns that what he believed to be the real world is actually a constructed entity, and that the REAL world exists in secrecy and inhabited by a chosen few.

This premise that a virtual world was created to conceal the existence of a real world unknown to humanity is never fully explored. Neither are there any particularly stunning special effects used to compensate its huge gaping holes in the plot. Age of Innocence had better recreations of 19th-century New York City, but we don't hear anyone calling it sci-fi, do we? In fact, what you see in The Thirteenth Floor’s advertising poster is all that you get. That's right, a laser-light show at the end of a road is apparently what we've been blind to all these years. In the end, the story is basically a murder mystery that ends with a sappy, unimaginative love story. Moreover, the actors were challenged in this movie, as they each played dual roles, but unfortunately performances by the three leads, Bierko, Mol and Mueller-Stahl, were too two-dimensional to fulfill the promise of a thrilling, sci-fi travel into time and space. Even if you wait for the video release, don't expect anything more than * * entertainment.

Three Seasons

Tony Bui's Three Seasons is a beautifully composed look at present-day life in Vietnam without the war propaganda that's all too common to many Hollywood films about Vietnam. As the first American film to be shot in Vietnam since the war, Three Seasons is silently thought-provoking and contains a rich combination of images and human emotions to render it poetic.

Set in Ho Chi Minh City, this film presents four separate stories that are only marginally tied to one another yet are all linked to the larger messages of human struggle, reconciliation and survival. The focus of the first story is Kien An (Ngoc Hiep Nguyen), a peasant girl hired to harvest lotus blossoms for Teacher Dao, a reclusive poet stricken with leprosy. The second tells the story of Woody (Huu Duoc Nguyen), a homeless boy who's bound to a life of poverty and street peddling. In the third story, a cyclo driver (Don Duong) demonstrates human compassion and genuine love for a local prostitute (Zoe Bui) and opens her eyes to a world that welcomes her as she is. In the last story, Harvey Keitel plays an ex-Marine who returns to Vietnam in search of his illegitimate daughter whom he abandoned years before.

The four stories in Three Seasons are told with minimal dialog, which allows the viewers to absorb and interpret the events with their own understanding of life and its hardships. Though one can argue that all four stories were shot with a sympathetic lens, Three Seasons is one of those rare films that truly engages the audience to partake in the stories and appreciate the time spent exploring a world that is often too easily dismissed in daily life. For all that I managed to experience in this film, I give it a * * * rating.

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