Word: costner
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Biggest Surprise: Waterworld, the $200 quillion sump that has sucked in Kevin Costner, Universal Pictures and director Kevin Reynolds -- who recently walked off the production, leaving the final editing to Costner and others. It might actually be an entertaining movie. such, at least, is the accumulated wisdom to be gleaned from watching not the actual summer movies-that would be cheating! -- but the films' trailers. Hollywood will be spending more than $2 billion to make and market 50 or so pictures between now and summer's end, and the moguls want you to want to see what they...
...Braveheart. It's one more genre, like westerns (and astronaut films), that studios make mostly because veteran stars and directors want to. Walter Hill has a new western, Wild Bill, with Jeff Bridges, and the principals hope it will imitate the popular oater Tombstone and not Wyatt Earp, Costner's pricey flop on the same subject...
...Costner surely hopes Waterworld returns him to top-star status. The film's trailer suggests a high-voltage adventure with a mythic overlay; James Earl Jones lends his patriarchal voice to images of hope and horror. Jones can also be heard promoting Judge Dredd. His voice is one of many summer-trailer talismans, along with '60s songs, computer imagery, sexual facetiousness of the sort pioneered by James Bond films, and a lot of urgent I-love-you's. In Fluke, one of the summer's few kids' movies, a boy whispers...
Unfortunately, Liam Neeson's performance is sloppier on all accounts. From semi-artsy actor, he seems to be mutating into an Irish Kevin Costner. The plains of the Midwest may be far from the Scottish highlands, but sensitive tribal men vanquish all boundaries. Bekilted and long-haired, Neeson is only concerned with his honor and his woman. Embarrassing petal-strewn love scenes are only a little worse than Rob Roy's lifeless professions of integrity and honor. Neeson's pallid presence does more to ruin the film than anything else...
Hanks distanced himself from the Pudding's sophmoric excess. He told reporters that past Men of the Year, Stephen Spielberg and Kevin Costner, had encouraged him to seize the opportunity to watch undergraduates in tuxedos vomit from champagne. Meg Ryan told him, "It's a hoot!" At the end of the night, there was indeed puke on the stairs, so the evening was a success...