Page 2 - Idiot Plot News Today

Norman Jewison's "Only You" is the kind of lighthearted romance that's an endangered species in today's Hollywood. It is total fantasy, light as a feather, contrary to all notions of common sense, it features a couple of stars who are really good kissers - and it takes place mostly in Venice, Rome, and the glorious Italian hillside town of Positano. What more do you want? Movies like this were once written for Katharine Hepburn ("Summertime"), Audrey Hepburn (&quo...

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"Christmas in the Clouds" is part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part historic breakthrough. The history is made because the movie is about affluent Native American yuppies. So many movies about American Indians deal in negative stereotypes that it's nice to find one that takes place at an upscale Indian-owned ski resort. The only alcoholic in the cast is a white undercover investigator for a guide book.

Neve Campbell is amazingly cute. I have admired her in other movies, but now, in "Three to Tango," which gave me nothing else to think about, I was free to observe her intently. She has wide, intelligent eyes, kissable lips, and a face both sweet and carnal, like Doris Day's. I support her decision to never wear any garment that comes within a foot of her neck.

I like Cameron Diaz. I just plain like her. She's able to convey bubble-brained zaniness about as well as anyone in the movies right now, and then she can switch gears and give you a scary dramatic performance in something like "Vanilla Sky." She's a beauty, but apparently without vanity; how else to account for her appearance in "Being John Malkovich," or her adventures in "There's Something About Mary"? I don't think she gets halfway enough praise ...

It definitely doesn’t kill. It barely even wounds.

"The Brothers" is another movie about black guys who have been friends since childhood and how wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of theirs. This is getting to be a genre; I was reminded of "The Wood" (1999). What makes this one interesting is the way one couple actually deals with the crisis that threatens to keep them apart, instead of saying all the wrong things at the wrong times in traditional Idiot Plot fashion.

My guess is they screened a lot of Hitchcock movies before they made "Bird on a Wire," and the parts they liked the best were where Hitch placed his couples in situations that were dangerous and picturesque at the same time; scenes like the Mt. Rushmore climax in "North by Northwest." That was a delicate balancing act when Hitchcock did it; the locations, sensational as they were, couldn't be allowed to upstage the thrills. In "Bird on a Wire," the act loses its...

"The Secret of My Success" seems trapped in some kind of time warp, as if the screenplay had been in a drawer since the 1950s and nobody bothered to update it. This is the kind of movie that should star Tony Randall or Gig Young opposite Judy Holliday or Doris Day, and, in fact, they were wonderful in the 1950s classics that "Secret" recycles.

The movie is a bargain-basement version of Martin Scorsese's great 1985 film "After Hours," in which an innocent young man sets out looking for a good time, and encounters one horrible incident after another. Scorsese was able to wind his plot up into a high-energy paranoid comedy that played like a thriller. "Run," on the other hand, takes the same basic premise and turns it into a series of stunts, predictable scenes and loose ends.