“Opal Dream” marks the second time British filmmaker Peter Cattaneo has pulled out the cameras since 1997’s “The Full Monty,” and, although the latest film is charming enough, we’re still waiting for him to break free of his sophomore slump.

Perhaps the success of “Monty,” which practically had audiences doffing clothes in solidarity with its cast of adorable amateur strippers, casts too big a shadow. (The other film, 2001’s “Lucky Break,” was modeled too transparently after “Monty.”) Although “Opal Dream” marks a pleasing departure from the conventions of the British comedy — it’s based on a children’s book and set in the Australian outback — it’s disappointingly small in scope.

In the story, which Cattaneo, Ben Rice and Phil Traill adapted from Rice’s novella, “Pobby and Dingan,” 8-year-old Kellyanne’s inviolable belief in two imaginary friends becomes the catalyst for ill feelings in her town. When her devoted father (Vince Colosimo) — in deference to Kellyanne’s fantasy — searches down someone’s opal mine shaft for her missing friends, he’s accused of “ratting,” or trying to steal someone else’s gems.

The finale, inevitably set in the local magistrate’s hearing room, is too freighted with predictability and overwrought drama to truly transport or surprise us. “Opal” seems content enough to get through the story without much fanfare. But it would have been gratifying to spend time getting to know Kellyanne (an engaging Sapphire Boyce) and why she invented her “friends” and to see how the adult world has its own childlike need for delusion and invention. A sense of a moral big picture — the kind of perspective that made “The Full Monty” so meaningful to moviegoers a decade ago — would have given what is essentially a good-hearted film a lot more luster.

Caper. Starring Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro. Directed by Quentin
Tarantino. (R. 150 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Maybe he understands the value of diminished expectations. Had
“Jackie Brown” been released at the
tail end of Quentinmania, back when he was Orson Welles Jr., everybody would
have been disappointed. But today, with much of the public ready to write
Tarantino off as either an idiot savant or an idiot, “Jackie Brown” is
looking like a fairly satisfactory piece of work.

It might even be a wise career move: Make a movie that’s not so
great as to annoy those rooting against you, yet good enough that no one can
deny your talent. One gets the feeling, watching “Jackie Brown,” that it’s
the kind of film Tarantino could make once every 10 months for the rest of
his life.
The picture is an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 1995 best-seller “Rum
Punch,” but with the setting moved from Florida
to Los Angeles and the dialogue Quentinized. The novel’s Jackie Burke, a
white woman, has become Jackie Brown, played by Pam Grier, the legendary
heroine of the blaxploitation films of the ’70s.

GIVING IT A ‘70S FEEL

From the beginning, Tarantino tries to give “Jackie Brown” the
flavor of a ’70s low-budget genre movie, with interiors that evoke that
decade and a soundtrack made up of early ’70s funk music. It doesn’t quite
work. The music clashes with the modern-day setting and takes the audience
out of the moment.

Yet from the first scene, there is the kick of once again entering
a Tarantino universe. Samuel L. Jackson plays Ordell, a dealer in illegal
weapons, who lectures a newly released ex-con about the relative merits of
various guns: “Then
there’s the AK-47, when you absolutely, positively have to kill every
m– in the room.”

Tarantino introduces a number of characters and manages to keep
track of all of them. Robert De Niro plays Ordell’s ex-con buddy, a fairly
bland role. Bridget Fonda has slightly more fun as Ordell’s girlfriend, an
ill-tempered pothead. But the heart of the story involves Jackie, a 44-
year-old flight attendant who’s arrested for smuggling Ordell’s money across
the Mexican border.

The movie fully exploits Grier’s patented toughness in only one
scene, in which Jackie gets the drop on Ordell when he comes to kill her.
Unfortunately, Tarantino chooses to film that moment in almost total
darkness. But Grier brings other qualities into the mix besides toughness:
poise, an aura of fatalism and wisdom, and an idiosyncratic style. Grier
talks the way Johnny Cash sings — out of the side of her mouth.
“Jackie Brown” is essentially a caper movie, in which Jackie and her
smitten bail bondsman (Robert Forster) set out to steal half a million
dollars from Ordell right under the noses of federal officers. But Tarantino
jazzes up the story with characteristic comic touches. Crooks leave a crime
scene and have trouble finding their car in a parking lot. Violence springs
up for the silliest of reasons, with a suddenness that stirs uneasy
laughter.

TARANTINO PLAYFUL

Borrowing a trick from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing,” Tarantino
presents the same incident involving an exchange of money three times, from
three points of view. He does it for little reason besides sheer
playfulness. But playfulness is OK. There’s something appealing in watching
Tarantino borrow styles and techniques as if he were a kid taking items from
a toy chest.

Yet, as the film wears on, the mar
riage of Leonard and Tarantino proves incompatible, or at least rocky.
Tarantino’s playful asides and slow buildups rob Leonard’s caper story of
its velocity. Scene by scene,
“Jackie Brown” is amusing, but after two hours, it seems sluggish, and at
that point still has a half-hour to go.

The slow pace kills the sense of urgency, and the length and
breadth of the film makes the story seem insignificant. Tarantino is still
someone to watch, but “Jackie Brown,” before it’s over, becomes a
who-cares proposition.

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“RoboCop” was a great idea whose estimation came and went. The first flicks was resourceful, humorous, insightful, and satiric, apart from being plenty exciting. From then on, however, it was all downhill, as the two sequels took the series to bring and bring depths. MGM’s changed, three-DVD combination becomingly bundles the original “RoboCop” with a troop of extras, leaving movies two and three to suffer a deserved fate on discs that offer virtually nothing.

“RoboCop”:
“This is Media Frustrate. You give us three minutes, and we’ll give you the world.” It’s that kind of hyperbole sets the sardonic tone on this on occasion funny, at times cheeky, on occasion touching, many times telling, and unendingly poetical 1987 sci-fi/fantasy thriller. The movie not merely gives us a healthy administer of “Terminator” type special-effects heroics, it pokes gibe at corporate America, the media, inner-city violence, consumerism, and the government’s attempts to jurisdiction people’s lives and maintain discipline at any cost.

Director Paul Verhoeven (”Total Recall,” “Basic Instinct,” “Starship Troopers,” “Showgirls”) situates the story in a near-future Detroit (but filmed in Dallas) that has been overrun by criminals and in the process turned once again to a special company, the OCP (Omni Consumer Products), suited for policing. The company figures if it can sell products, it can direct a city, too. Besides, it sees profit in the bargain. The company is spin by two figures, the Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy) and his second-in-command, Senior President Dick Jones (Ronny Cox). Both guys are sneaky fellows who are simply out for themselves.

Meantime, a coldhearted flunky of the company, Morton (Miguel Ferrer), is nearly as bad as the criminals the company is upsetting to contain. Morton is in supervision of the RoboCop program, which is competing with Jones’s Enforcement Droid exchange for top billing in the city patrolling branch, and when Jones’s ED-209 goes haywire, Morton steps in with his star.

What’s RoboCop, repayment for the half dozen readers worldwide who have never seen the movie before? He’s instances partly kind and part robot, a “six million-dollar man” of technological marvels. He’s the remains of a policeman, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), who was blown away by the city’s undocumented offence boss, Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his unite. Having been pronounced dead, Murphy is transformed into a cyborg, a person dependent on robot-like and electronic devices fitting for his survival. RoboCop has the brain and some of the body tissue of Murphy and the computer, armor, and weaponry of a tool.

RoboCop also has the passing memories of who he was, which sets the silver screen apart from so diverse mindless action yarns that only concentrate on blood and guts. Not only is the “RoboCop” silver screen a revenge picture (because Murphy remembers who killed him), it’s a poignant saga of distraught humanity, ironic, really, since Robo is one of the few humane characters in the skin.

RoboCop’s prime directives play an important function in all three movies in the series: (1) Serve the popular trust, (2) protect the innocent, and (3) advocate the law. However, there’s a fourth directive hidden away in his circuitry that provides the plan with new directions as things unfold.

The other major figure in the film is Murphy’s new sidekick, Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), a tough cop but a sensitive child being. She is the exclusive one in the recounting who suspects that Murphy may be more than a machine, that he may have a woman behind his impenetrable helmet and breastplate.

Verhoeven’s concept of RoboCop owes a good deal to “The Terminator,” which came escape a few years earlier, and Weller’s acting and spokeswoman even look and useful a trace like Arnold’s. None of which lessens our appreciation of the film one touch. In this Director’s Extended Organize, a team a few of minutes are added to the original film, changing its rating from R to Unrated, apparently because of remote violence, and some scenes are, indeed, plenty forceful, primarily Murphy’s initial death and the whole final train.

Despite his being covert behind a ton of makeup, Weller makes a convincing and sympathetic protagonist, cyborg or not; the villains are suitably evil and coldhearted; and the story line’s pacing is abstention and furious. Figure in the satiric touches, analogous to continual TV news commentaries on goofy things happening in the world and an ED-209 accidentally blasting away a OCP executive, and you hire a most-entertaining action flick.

“RoboCop 2″:
Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan O’Herlihy, Felton Perry, and Robert DoQui are cast off in this 1990 upshot as RoboCop, Lewis, the Old Manservant, partnership flunky Johnson, and Police Sgt. Warren Reed. But gaffer Verhoeven left alone get out, replaced by Irvin Kershner, who had done so well with “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Never Say Conditions Again” (1983). What’s more, the new film was cowritten by Explicit Miller, who had theretofore excelled in the world of threatening comics like “Daredevil” and “Batman.”

Unfortunately, nobody and nothing could help this dismal arise-up. Death, drugs, and destruction are the order of the day as the glaze forsakes most of its progenitor’s lighthearted regardless moving highly-strung petition and replaces it with gunfire, car chases, and explosions.

There is some momentary hope at the beginning of the murkiness that maybe this would be a psychical exploration of the inner RoboCop as Murphy regains even more of his memories and has to reach if he’s chains or machine. But that moment is short-lived, and the film soon degenerates into a grim drug in dispute between Robo and a cult-freak cloudy named Cain (Tom Noonan).

What with oversee strikes, nefarious corporate types, an disorderly citizenry, and some of the worst lawbreakers in home screen past, things ascend d create pretty short-tempered. No time for humor or human relationships here. The cabal rambles on instead of about an hour and half of mayhem and killing, getting old in a hurry. There is no have a go at the drollery or credibility we saw in the original “RoboCop,” and like Solid, Robo has to be knocked around until he’s on his last legs before he is allowed to predominate.

Did I say grim? Everybody in this coating is no good but Murphy and Lewis. And I found it most offensive that multitudinous of the film’s dastardly scoundrels are children! Dialect mayhap the superintendent and/or writers thought it was amusing having a duo of little leaguers beating up a store owner and looting his seek or having a thirteen-year dated using words so foul they’d make a swabbie blush. I didn’t boon it funny in the least. I just wondered what kind of parents would stand for their son to mouth such language in an R-rated film he wasn’t coextensive with advanced in years enough to watch, and I wondered if some parents would do anything for money and their kid’s fifteen minutes of fame. It was these kinds of distractions that kept me from enjoying equable a small carve up of the show.

With the Tread 19th emancipating date for
fast approaching, Epidemic has seen supply to kick the marketing up a notch for their Jude Law and Forest Whitaker-starring genre hybrid about a future in which life-saving organ transplants can be repossessed if a buyer gets behind on their payments. Their campaign includes a run of posters advertising the fictional member giving conglomerate, ominously titled The Conjoining, and today the Moviefone network (of which Cinematical is a part) has been given four of their fake organ advertisements to unveil.

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Recently there has been a whit of a backlash against

E.T. - The
Very-Tellurian

by participants on this site's message
board. I will claim this again: it is a cold black dark heart that isn't
affected by this movie. Heatless. Black. Dark.
My bride cries every time she sees the silver screen. "I be sure that E.T. isn't
really dead," she sobs. "But I can't help myself." Same here.
I figured what the movie's sensation is: the people in it, and by that I mean
the kids indubitably because this is a kid's movie after all, seem totally tangible.
They talk and front like verifiable kids do, not just like what adults (read:
Hollywood) imagine they should be like. Undeterred by the spaceships and aliens at
the start of the movie, this is not a special effects movie at all. Instead
it is a very merciful one. Warm and funny, this movie has grace hugely
influential during the years (see the brand-new

Signs

for example)
and is a specific classic.
Immediately I have a confession to draw up: I didn't particularly like

E.T.

the blue ribbon term I saw it as a young boy. That is because - hoot it! - I also
wanted a undersized unfamiliar as a partner! I was jealous and hated that little boy's
guts! Soberly! I at worst warmed to the movie when I dictum it again about seven
years ago - who can believe that it's been 20 years already! And of course
when I saw this much-hyped "primary edition" again.
Much has been made of Spielberg's tampering with this "paramount
edition" - of how he digitally replaced handguns wielded by
plainclothes policemen pursuing the kids during the movie's climactic chase
with walkie-talkies. That is minor, but while this sort of Politically
Correct self-censorship isn't too much of a biggie, it does ruin one of the
movie's funniest lines. (Hint: it goes "you're not going as a?"
and was replaced with the September 11 WTC attacks in dress down.)
Differently it doesn't affect one's recreation of the silent picture as such. Even
the scenes involving a computer-generated

E.T.

doesn't irk as much as
Spielberg's keep company with George Lucas' fiddling nearly with the

Star
Wars - Special Edition

did a few years back.

THE DISC:

This is the ritualistic VCD (Video CD), which can be
ordered via Malaysian-based Eureka-Movies.Com
on the Internet. Unlike a lot of VCDs it has section access (every ten
minutes) and a very basic start-up menu. (You access scenes unlike on DVD by
urgent next, or "1", "2", "3", etc.) There
are no superfluous trailers or featurettes. The movie is presented in full-movies
mode.
The earshot is clear bar solitary an inexplicable incessant scratching sound
(like that on an LP - those important black things with holes in them, kids). But
this isn't too distracting exceedingly. Otherwise, even though MPEG compression
(even that used with DVDs) handle night scenes badly,

E.T.

which has
a ration of them remains quite watchable. These scenes, though not perfect up
reticent, look surprising good for the VCD format. Some daylight and other
scenes have a clarity and vibrant bias that belie the movie's time and
looks really tickety-boo.

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The two discs come in a specific of the snazziest packages I've
till seen for VCDs. No standard jewel cases, but a fancy hard carton and
compliant up-open detain case. Very charming. Doesn't look cheap at all, which it
is really. At Eureka-Movies
it'll cost you half ($10.97) of what the VHS cassette ($22.98) will charge you
and about a third of what the textbook offspring DVD ($29.98) will cost you.
(Prices quoted are Amazon.com list prices.)

SUPPORT:

With this sort of savings you can believe the kids two or
more movies on VCD at Eureka-Movies.com
this Christmas (

Ice Age

?

Spider-man

?).
VCDs should frisk on your DVD player, but if they don't then you can always
play them on your home PC. If you commandment with it I'm convinced that they'll be at your
doorstep in time for X-mas. Kids each time be partial to quantity to je sais quoi (will
they truly watch all those "making-of" features on the DVDs?) and
these discs will not under any condition wear like your regular VHS tape, in spite of though you
might secretly have a fancy them to.

NOTE:

Do kids still adulate

E.T.

or are they that cynical yet?
I don't be familiar with and should yearning not: but minute that I have the silver screen on disc, the
only thing remaining is for my two-month old coddle daughter to grow advanced in years
enough to keep safe it one age. I am sure she command also hate that elfin boy's
guts for having a cute little wean away from pal . . .

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The 16th Elvis movie looks good thanks to cinematographer Lucien
Ballard. But its story stinks like do all his others, though his Jailhouse
Rock and Viva Las Vegas received some love. The eleven songs suck big time
except for the title song and “Little Egypt.” The 60-year-old Barbara Stanwyck
appears in a supporting role, in one of her last appearances onscreen,
and provides the film’s only real acting, so to speak. This silly, grating
and dreary musical romance is directed by longtime TV director John Rich
(”Boeing (707) Boeing (707)”/”Wives and Lovers”), who keeps it sitcom TV
dumb. It’s based on a story by Allan Weiss, Elvis’ usual formulaic writer.

Charlie Rogers (Elvis Presley) is an orphan, a toughie, a hot-head,
a karate expert, a loudmouth, a wandering troubadour who sports a black
letter jacket and rides a Japanese motorcycle, and someone who is instantly
unlikable because of the chip on his shoulder. Canned from a singing gig
in a college hangout joint called Mother’s Tea House for fighting with
three thuggish college frat boy patrons (the unknown Raquel Welsh is one
of the coeds in that scene, who blurts out a line of dialogue), Charlie
hits the road somewhere in the southwest and on the way tries to pickup
a pretty young girl, Cathy Lean (Joan Freeman), sitting in the back seat
of a Jeep. Upset that Charlie won’t stop trying to bother his girl, sourpuss
madman dad Joe Lean (Leif Erickson), also with a chip on his shoulder,
knocks the obnoxious kid off the road and damages his motorcycle. Maggie
Morgan (Barbara Stanwyck), Joe’s lady friend, is the kind-hearted owner
of the financially troubled carnival where Joe’s the manager and Cathy’s
a carny. The carnival owner offers to pay for the repairs and invites Charlie
to be a roustabout in her carnival while he waits for repairs. Nice girl
Cathy is hot for the wise guy Charlie, but won’t put out for him. So Charlie
settles for the loose woman fortune teller (Sue Ane Langdon), who is willing
to let the rascal fool around with her.

The laughable melodrama has Charlie finding the carnival a learning
lesson in life, as he settles in after waiting a week for his motorcycle.
Charlie learns carny slang, to care more about others and become less self-centered
and loutish, to work hard singing for a living, to be more mature and restrained,
and falls in love for real with Cathy instead of just being a womanizer.
After returning to Maggie’s travelling carnival that he left in spite to
join the carnival of her unscrupulous rival, Harry Carver (Pat Buttram),
due to fights with the family, Charlie now uses his singing to save the
struggling carnival for the honest and sincere Maggie.