It’s confusingly plotted. The acting is hammy. There’s a total lack of dynamism. Clint is alone for much of the film so has no one to play off or interact with. Indeed, he has to talk to himself most of the time. Meanwhile, stilted, static scenes of grumpy army generals standing around talking does not make for good drama.
A fundamentally misconceived mess.
Kurt Russell stars as one of a group of US researchers working in Antarctica, where the team encounter an alien life-form able to take on the form of other beings – including dogs and humans.
The plot cleverly explores how no one can trust each other because of the risk that any one of them could have been taken over by the alien. There's plenty of tension, and – although I don't love his acting style – Russell is pretty good in the lead role.
Strikingly unusual romantic comedy.
New Yorker Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) cannot hold down work as an actor because he's too opinionated to accept his directors' instructions. Out of desperation, he pretends to be a woman (reshuffling his name as Dorothy Michaels) and is hired to play a hospital administrator on the popular TV soap opera Southwest General. While on the set he meets and falls in love with another member of the cast, Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), who believes he is both her new best friend and also a woman.
Hoffman is at his best – pushy but vulnerable, quirky but sharply witty. Lange is also excellent. Bill Murray, as Michael's long-suffering friend Jeff, pretty much does his usual thing. Teri Garr, meanwhile, has an intriguing role as his other friend Sandy.
In the film's oddest moment, Sandy catches Michael in a state of undress in her bedroom where he hopes to find new clothing ideas for his Dorothy persona. But hoping to hide this from her, he pretends he wanted to sleep with Sandy and then goes ahead and does exactly that. Moments like this make it quite revealing in terms of the gender politics of the late 1970s/early 1980s, and the film would certainly have turned out differently if it had been made now.
Nick Nolte plays a San Francisco policeman trying to track down two murderers. Helping him is a convict played by the endlessly charming Eddie Murphy, with his own connection to the case. It could have turned into a silly “bromance”, but the tough, witty script is thankfully devoid of sentimentality.
The cars look fantastic. The music soundtrack by James Horner is unusual and distinctive. And the offbeat chemistry between Nolte and Murphy is absolutely spot-on.
Winger is one of the strongest actresses of this era, but she isn’t really given enough to get her teeth into. Likewise Gere, who is perfectly acceptable. More impressive than either of them is Louis Gossett Jr. as the drill instructor who teaches Zack discipline.
It’s entertaining and the final third certainly pulls you in as the sub-plots about the secondary couple (Sid and Lynette) are developed. It would have been stronger if Zack’s father had either been made more of or ditched entirely. And a few laughs would have helped.
The soundtrack is a little intrusive at times. One of the love scenes has what sounds like lift music playing all the way through it. At the end we get the big hit song, “Up Where We Belong” by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes.
My experience of the film was dominated by the fact that this newspaper freebie DVD somehow omitted the subtitles. The extended flashback sequences spoken entirely in German therefore made no sense at all. Given that this dealt with the crux of the film – Sophie’s actual choice – that pretty much ruined it.
That hurdle aside, Meryl Streep is fantastic: you see and feel her pain because she's able to make it seem incredibly real. Kevin Kline is convincingly scary as her paranoid psychotic boyfriend. It was difficult to see Peter MacNicol as "Stingo" because I recognise him as the silly art-gallery villain Janosz Poha from Ghostbusters II, but he did capture the ambiguity of a character we’re unsure whether we’re supposed to like or not.
There’s something a bit lumbering and stilted about the way it’s filmed, and the flashbacks could have been cut altogether. It would have been enough just to watch Sophie telling her story. We certainly didn’t need the washed-out/sepia look applied to the concentration camp sequences. These reservations aside, it's worth seeing for Streep's performance alone.
