Word: ripleyisms
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Miscellaneous Hooey: Inherited memories, whiskey sours in cube form, Dan Hedaya as your neighborhood movie teamster, Videodroming Ripley's chest...
...next film by Ang Lee, who directed the Oscar-nominated Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. That was so he could do the next film from the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, Anthony Minghella. Damon will play the title role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella's adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel about a charming con man driven to murder. Until recently, scripts sent to him had multiple sets of fingerprints on them; this one came straight from Tom Cruise's reject pile. "There's something so apple pie about him," says Minghella. "You know...
Naturally, the creatures' old nemesis, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), has been--literally--reincarnated, and her wit and toughness were not forgotten in the cloning. Nor did screenwriter Joss Whedon (of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer) neglect to provide her with a spaceship of fools who refuse to believe her warnings of impending carnage. He has even given Ripley a soul sister (Winona Ryder) to bond with. O.K., she's a robot, but she's got a heart of gold as well as buns of steel...
...director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, hurries us past all the desperate explanations required by sequels to movies that ended up pretty definitively (the last we saw of Ripley in Alien 3, she was taking a dunk in molten metal). Since most of these are incomprehensible anyway, especially as they are constantly interrupted by fires, floods and explosions, Jeunet is eager to get on with the really scary stuff. This is not, given the movie's self-satirizing impulse, as terrifying as it once was. But on the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being...
There's some admirable teamwork in Side Show, not just by Emily Skinner and Alice Ripley, joined at the hip as Daisy and Violet, but by composer Henry Krieger (Dreamgirls) and director-choreographer Robert Longbottom (Christmas shows for the Rockettes). The show percolates best in a couple of brisk, ersatz-vaudeville numbers (one features dancing Egyptians, swan-shaped harps and a crocodile) and in a soul-inflected showstopper, The Devil You Know. And there's at least one anthem-like ballad, Who Will Love Me As I Am? that should have Whitney Houston on the phone to her agent...