15 Minutes (121 mins, 18) Directed by John Herzfeld; starring Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer
Brother (113 mins, 18) Directed by Takeshi Kitano; starring Beat Takeshi, Omar Epps, Claude Maki, James Shigeta
Miss Congeniality (110 mins, 12) Directed by Donald Petrie; starring Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt
An Everlasting Piece (102 mins, 15) Directed by Barry Levinson; starring Barry McEvoy, Brian F. O'Byrne, Anna Friel, Billy Connolly
The 15 minutes of John Herzfeld's satirical thriller are that quarter-hour of fame that Andy Warhol said everyone would have in the future. Searching for their moment in the spotlight and the subsequent spin-offs in the form of books and movies are the sly Czech criminal Emil Slovak, who comes to New York to collect a debt from a treacherous comrade, and his dim Russian sidekick Oleg. While Emil murders people, Oleg films their antics on a camcorder he steals on Fifth Avenue, and the ultimate aim of these natural born killers is to appear on Kelsey Grammer's high-paying, unscrupulous TV show Top Story.
Chasing these crooks are ace homicide detective Eddie Flemming (Robert De Niro) and inexperienced arson investigator Jordy Warsaw (Edward Burns), a pair of decent public servants whose hands are tied by bureaucratic red-tape, whose actions are exploited and misrepresented by television, and who are traduced by the beneficiaries of victim culture.
This slick, not unentertaining movie is a crude assault on the media, the legal profession and psychiatrists, and concludes with a rabble-rousing climax with the Statue of Liberty in the background. We're incited to violence, and bullets and punches are the catharsis.
The body count in 15 Minutes is quite high, but the death toll in writer-director-editor Takeshi Kitano's Brother, his first gangster movie set in America, is larger than you'd find in a fairly serious earthquake. Takeshi himself plays a middle-aged yakuza who's sent into Californian exile after playing a leading role in a Toyko gang war. While a couple of bent cops appear in Japan, the US police are nowhere to be seen when he arrives in Los Angeles to join his younger brother, who has abandoned his university studies to work with a gang of black drug pushers. Takeshi immediately sets about instigating a succession of gang wars - blacks against Hispanics, blacks and Japanese against the established Little Tokyo gang, and finally Japanese against the Mafia.
The killings are mostly by handgun or knife, though occasionally chopsticks are pushed up an informer's nostrils into his brain. The film is very cool, carefully composed and pared down, and everyone lives and dies by ancient codes. Like an Asian Charles Bronson, the stocky, bow-legged Takeshi strolls through it all, imperviously smoking, drinking beer and murdering people. It is a numbing experience.
A more jocular approach to crime and law enforcement is found in Miss Congeniality, a police comedy starring its producer, Sandra Bullock, as a New Jersey tomboy who graduates from socking her male grade-school classmates to being an FBI agent. Her colleagues are so dumb they would probably say 'pass' if Anne Robinson asked them what FBI stands for, and when she convinces them that a mad bomber is planning to target the Miss United States pageant they press her into becoming an undercover agent.
Such moving targets as beauty parades are sitting ducks for would-be satirists, and the picture has some amusing moments with Candice Bergen and William Shatner as the all-too-credible veteran presenters of the show. More laboured is the Henry Higgins-style makeover of Bullock into a beauty queen by gay British pageant consultant Victor Melling (Michael Caine reprising his seedy agent from Little Voice). Bullock, who acts with her nose the way some stars act with their eyes, is a likeable presence, and is much more attractive as a tomboy than as a made-up, depilated Miss New Jersey.
Sean O'Casey was putting comic IRA men on the stage 80 years ago, and for more than 30 years now writers have been trying to see the funny side of the Ulster Troubles and find metaphors to capture its absurdity. Back in the mid-Seventies, for instance, Stewart Parker's Spokesong used a bicycle shop to represent Northern Ireland, and Bill Morrison's Flying Blind depicted a deranged world cruising helplessly without navigational aids. In the appallingly titled An Everlasting Piece, Barry Levinson has left the security of his native Baltimore to make a comedy set in 1980s Belfast where, God help us, the metaphor is hair.
A Catholic barber (Barry McEvoy) and a Protestant barber (Brian F. O'Byrne) meet while giving short-back-and-sides to mental patients, and discover that one of the hospital's inmates (Billy Connolly) had the monopoly on selling wigs in the Six Counties until he was incarcerated as 'The Scalper'. With help from a feisty girlfriend (Anna Friel) they go into business peddling toupeés as 'The Piece People', until they face a knock-out competition with a rival firm, 'Toupée or not Toupée'. Their work creates trouble on both sides of the fence, and also with the RUC who think they can capture a bald IRA leader through his captured toupée and launch 'Operation Glass Slipper'. Can you guess where the police inspector loses the crucial hairpiece?
The makers appreciate, more or less, that baldness isn't funny per se, but that toupées, objects of vanity and embarrassment, are. But they turn serious and preachy at the end when our heroes and heroine decide that to win the business competition in its final two days they must target a special area of society. After rejecting cancer victims, they arrange a deal with the British Government to provide hairpieces for British soldiers who've contracted alopecia as a result of the stress of military service in Ulster.
As someone who has lived with this condition for most of my life, I'm probably the person least qualified to review the picture. If I say it's rotten, I'll be considered a bad sport, though no one would say it to my face. If I praise it I'll be thought a good sport. So I'll neither raise nor flip the wig I have never worn.
