From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: DANGER, ROMANCE EDGY MIX IN 'JENNIFER 8'
Date: Sun,  8 Nov 92 20:49:52 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

DANGER, ROMANCE EDGY MIX IN `JENNIFER 8'
By Michael Wilmington
Special to the Los Angeles Times 11/05/92

	   HOLLYWOOD - Movie thrillers often try to mix danger with
romance, but in Bruce Robinson's strange, flawed ``Jennifer 8,'' the fusion
is particularly edgy. The lovers are an obsessive cop on the trail of a
serial sex-killer, and a blind woman who may be the next victim. Robinson
takes this odd pair, played by Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman, and drenches
them in new-style Gothic chic: a world of crystalline shadows, lowering
skies and punishing sheets of rain.
	   The lovers are trapped in a region of snow and ice, a Northern
California town (re-created in Canada) to which the cop, John Berlin, has
retreated after getting burnt out in sunshiney Los Angeles.
	   Berlin's obsession with the killer keeps mounting after the
first inklings of his existence: bloody body parts in a horrific local
junkyard. The killer's presence hangs over the lovers, as does the
disapproval of the other cops, who want Berlin to drop the case and the
girl - and also, finally, the edgy possibility that there may be no killer,
that all the violence comes from Berlin himself.
	   Superficially, ``Jennifer 8'' is in the latter-day
sleek-thriller mode of ``Jagged Edge'' ``Fatal Attraction'' ``Pacific
Heights'' or ``The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.'' It is a movie with chic
surfaces and maniacal undercurrents. But, though ``Jennifer 8'' looks like
these earlier movies - it has the same brittle, translucent images and
knife-edge technique - it doesn't share all their basically shallow world
view, their formula plots, their yuppie protagonists, their bloody
bogeymen.
	   Here, the milieu is more ordinary; the cops and their families
played by interesting actors like Lance Henriksen, Kathy Baker, Kevin
Conway and Graham Beckel. This movie tries for a bit more - which may
actually be its commercial undoing. The dark surfaces, neurotic
undercurrents and complex, tricky dialogue - on a sound track that often
seems slightly swallowed up or muffled - give ``Jennifer'' a more opaque,
private quality. And unfortunately, audiences often prefer dumbness in
their swank thrillers - as ``Single White Female'' is there to prove.
	   Robinson, the writer-director of ``Jennifer 8,'' has written
leftist docudramas (``The Killing Fields'') and satiric portraits of
British theater (``Withnail & I'') and advertising (``How to Get Ahead in
Advertising,'' in which a hapless adman developed a truth-telling boil on
his neck). Robinson has more wit and dash than most scenarists who work
this genre and the elements here strongly recall a 1951 thriller classic,
Nicholas Ray's ``On Dangerous Ground.'' It's probable that, like Barbet
Schroeder in ``Single White Female,'' he's trying to use the thriller form
to get, as a director, to a wider audience.
	   But, as before, he's questioning the status quo. The cop is a
divided man; the department is volatile; the victim is stronger than we
suspect; the menace may come from a totally unexpected direction. Robinson
is trying to tell a mystery story - he wants to keep us guessing, to
consistently undermine our certainty about what we're seeing - but he's up
against the fact that many audiences these days don't want to guess. And
``Jennifer 8'' is also burdened by its expectations and heavy-industrial
stylistics. The tempo seems off; even the 'objet d'art' cinematography,
another beautiful job by Conrad Hall, gets almost too consciously hypnotic.
	   Midway through, there's a sequence that exposes most of the
problems of this movie, maybe of the whole genre. It's a show-stopping
interrogation scene, with John Malkovich as St. Anne, an FBI agent
questioning Berlin about a possible crime. The grilling has a
stripped-down, spider-and-fly quality. Malkovich - his eyes looking
deceptively bored, his voice lisping, soft and insinuating, his entire
manner radiating an implacable, calm menace - tries to tear the other cop
open, gently. The scene is so good, Malkovich and Garcia build and play off
each other so expertly, that nothing else in the movie - not even Thurman's
glassy-eyed beauty or the final patented shock payoff - can measure up to
it.
	   ``Jennifer 8'' (MPAA rated R for language and violence) is
smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it's also too hemmed-in
by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player's
skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built
entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes - because it's in the
exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the
quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

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`JENNIFER EIGHT': KILLER CLICHES
By Rita Kempley
(c) 1992, The Washington Post 11/06

	   WASHINGTON - An obsessed cop protects a vulnerable beauty from a
serial killer: The concept behind the thriller ``Jennifer Eight'' is hardly
original, but it becomes even hoarier if we think of him as a blue knight,
her as a fair damsel and the killer as a monstrous lair-dweller. The twist
is that the damsel's blind, and the heroic quest has to do with the unholy
use of Braille.
	   An exercise in mythic recycling, this uneven drama concerns a
burned-out big city cop's search for spiritual rejuvenation in rainy,
redwood-forested Eureka, Calif. Alas, Sgt. John Berlin (Andy Garcia) finds
not peace of mind but a new outlet for his compulsion to solve murder
mysteries before he's even officially begun the job. Eager to get started,
he catches up with his new partner (Lance Henriksen) at the town dump,
where an investigation turns up a severed hand among the garbage bags.
Inevitably Berlin's obsession with the gruesome artifact leads him to the
trail of a maniac with no fondness for blind blondes.
	   Though none of his new peers will believe him, Berlin becomes
increasingly certain that an unsolved homicide, code name Jennifer One, was
only the first of the killer's victims. A student missing from a nearby
college, he insists, is the madman's eighth victim. And he's got the hand
to prove it. The chief forbids him to pursue the case, yet Berlin persists
in his investigation, which leads him to frail, vulnerable Helena (Uma
Thurman), his only witness and doubtless the killer's next victim. What's a
cop to do but fall in love?
	   Garcia, beard stubble pulsing, black eyes boring bullet holes,
brings a swaggering fanaticism to his role, and Thurman is an exquisitely
pathetic bit of dragon bait. But where, oh where is the skulking,
hand-hacking nut case? Perhaps he was lost in the bad weather that
apparently prevailed throughout filming. Even when he does manage to find
the set, he isn't especially menacing. British writer-director Bruce
Robinson, who won kudos for his screenplay ``The Killing Fields'' and his
novel adaptation ``Withnail & I'' doesn't have a clue when it comes to this
populist genre. What he has are cliches.
	   - - -

	   Jennifer Eight is rated R for violence and nudity.

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HUNTER ON FILM: `JENNIFER' MEANDERS AIMLESSLY
By Stephen Hunter
(c) 1992, The Baltimore Sun 11/06

	   If ``Jennifer 8'' was calculated to make a star out of Andy
Garcia, it will only make one out of John Malkovich - who doesn't need to
be made a star because he already is one.
	   And you can see why. ``Jennifer 8'' meanders murkily all over
creation for close to two hours, following the tortured Garcia's
peregrinations as he attempts to find a serial killer who specializes in
raping and dismembering blind women. Problem One: The killer may not exist.
Problem Two: If he does exist, he may be Garcia.
	   Suddenly, when Garcia is deepest in the do-do, Malkovich comes
into the film as a wily, tough-minded FBI agent, an interrogation expert,
and he quickly sets the movie back on its feet. Malkovich is terrific; he
represents everything the movie lacks: he's incisive, practical,
unflappable and unstoppable. He gives his character just the faintest nasty
edge; he's focused and dynamic.
	   But bring me the head of Andy Garcia! He spends most of the
movie's considerable running time glowering menacingly or roughing up
fellow cops - that is, when he has not collapsed into a cocoon of
self-pity. The movie follows as he's moved to a small Northern California
town after having burned out as a big city cop in Los Angeles, chiefly
because he couldn't get anybody to buy into his psycho-killer theory.
	   British writer-director Bruce Robinson is gifted. He wrote ``The
Killing Fields,'' and wrote and directed several perversely nasty British
items - ``Withnall and I'' and ``How To Get Ahead in Advertising.'' He
brings that perversity to his first American project, but that isn't quite
as interesting as it sounds.
	   Also uninteresting is poor Uma Thurman, lanky and beautiful and
opaque-eyed behind hazed contacts, playing the young woman who may become
the next Jennifer. Robinson gets some mileage out of her growing
relationship with Garcia and her entree, through him, into sighted culture.
But this also seems so flamboyantly unprofessional that it makes you lose
sympathy with Garcia.
	   Then there is a too trickily filmed shooting death for which
Garcia may or may not be responsible, in which Robinson is guilty of
pushing the did-he-did-he-not? thing too far, until it seems coldly
manipulative.
	   All in all, ``Jennifer 8'' (rated R) is about four bricks shy a
load and two hours too long.
	   Two stars.
From: bo@hpfcmgw.FC.HP.COM (Bo Viger)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 17:10:00 GMT
Subject: Re: The 100 Funniest Movies (Re: Ent. Weekly...)
Organization: HP Fort Collins, CO