Word: humanists
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Dale McKussic (Mel Gibson) is your basic existential hero of the California '80s: humanist hunk, thoughtful father, loyal friend, gentle lover and, oh, yes, a cocaine dealer. Now he wants to retire -- no pension, thank you, but no penance either. No police heat courtesy of an old-buddy cop (Kurt Russell). And no mortal wounds from rival coke kingpins or Mexican comandantes (Raul Julia). Just a cozy table for two with a hard-to-get restaurateur (Michelle Pfeiffer) who chirps skepticism like a tequila mockingbird...
Arcadia was the humanist's Club Med. In it, nothing happens. Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town...
Filmed in handsome chiaroscuro and with an austere camera zest, this Russian film makes for a poignant humanist fable. So does the story of its making and suppression. Writer-Director Alexander Askoldov finished his film in 1967. But the Soviet authorities, accusing Askoldov of "promoting Zionism and . . . imperialist chauvinism," shelved Commissar, and Askoldov has never made another picture. Only last year, as glasnost was opening the door of artistic freedom, was the director able to free his kidnaped film. Commissar won a Silver Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, though the Soviet press neglected to mention it. A true...
...unenthralled viewer; he wants to head for Vegas. Milagro is kind to its characters; it works as hard to discover subtleties in their stereotypes as it does to unearth gorgeous new colors in the Southwest palette. But the film remains genially above them, like an Olympian social worker. This humanist western is just too darn nice. It needs to be more butch and less Sundance...
Robert Redford directs The Milagro Beanfield War, a humanist parable with all the right motives and a few of the wrong moves...