"GI Jane" (15) Nationwide
It's surprising, really, that it has taken so long for director Ridley Scott to link up with Demi Moore, given their shared interest in playing with the gender conventions of mainstream movies. Scott has exploited the trick of casting women in "masculine" roles in films like the original Alien and in Thelma And Louise, while Moore's climb up the Hollywood food chain (she always seems to be the highest-placed woman in those ubiquitous Most Powerful lists) has been achieved through a calculated mix of media-friendly feminism and post-Madonna body fetishism, as evinced in her willingness to take her clothes off for magazine covers, and for the disastrous Striptease. Together, Scott and Moore give new meaning to the term "body fascism" in this handsome-looking but ultimately vacuous movie, which purports to be much more interesting than it actually proves.
Moore plays a naval intelligence officer, plucked from her desk job by autocratic Senator Anne Bancroft as a test case to prove that women can take on the most demanding front-line combat roles in the US military. Assigned to training with the covert operations unit known as the SEALs, she finds herself faced with prejudice from her training officers and fellow soldiers, as well as political manipulation from higher up. Of course, she finally wins through, saving lives and winning admiration from all concerned.
Scott handles this with all the slickness you'd expect from such a technically accomplished filmmaker, but you feel that he's tried this genre-bending trick once too often. The depiction of the gruelling and dehumanising training programme has been seen before, most notably and with more impact in Full Metal Jacket. Unlike Stanley Kubrick's film, though, there's not even the slightest implication here that there might be something morally dubious about turning young men and women into blindly obedient killing machines. GI Jane is purely concerned with glorifying Moore's triumph of the will, lingering lovingly on the abuse heaped on her scantily-clad body by sadistic instructors.
Action movies of the last 10 years, particularly those starring Moore's husband Bruce Willis, have tended to luxuriate in the punishment inflicted on their heroes' gleaming torsoes, and she seems intent on showing that anything Bruce can do, she can do better. The effect, though, is less of a feminist Die Hard than a cut-price Alien - the film's apotheosis is reached when our heroine rounds on her tormentors, and to resounding cheers invites them to "Suck my c**k!" Someone obviously thought this was witty, but it just comes across as sad.
"Chasing Amy" (members and guests only IFC)
Fellatio also figures strongly in the third film from American indie director Kevin Smith, after the hilarious Clerks and the less successful Mallrats (which never made it to cinemas here). In the closing credits, Smith promises his parents that he'll make a PG movie some day, but his taste for extremely explicit (and often very funny) sex talk makes it unlikely that we'll be seeing that happen soon.
Chasing Amy is clearly an attempt to move away from the post-teen milieu of the first two films - but not too far away, set as it is in the permanently adolescent world of comic book artists. Ben Affleck plays Holden, a successful comic artist who falls in love with Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) before he discovers that she's a lesbian. Ignoring the warnings of his homophobic co-writer Banky (Jason Lee), Affleck sets out in pursuit of Adams, setting up a complicated and ultimately disastrous romantic triangle.
As in Clerks, Smith is far more interested in what his characters say than what they do - Chasing Amy must be one of the most talk-heavy films released this year, and its chief pleasures are to be found in the incessant verbal riffing of the characters, on subjects ranging from sex to race to pop culture and back to sex again. But Smith's ambition, which seems to be to make a kind of Annie Hall for the post-grunge generation, is not matched by his characterisation. It's difficult to believe that these are real people, and not just mouthpieces for the director's preoccupations, while some of the acting, particularly from Adams, is unacceptably winsome.
At a time when most romantic comedies are so bland and unimaginative, it's good to see one which takes some risks, but Chasing Amy fails to gel, most importantly because, despite all the talk, there's little sense of real sexual tension between the protagonists.
