FisherStevens Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In the '80s and '90s, I fell for Joe Morton. I watched him rock the stage in New York City, and he became my favorite, smart, unbeatable action star in Executive Decision. (One of the most underrated actors out there, and worth a lot more than Eureka.) And then in 2002, I fell for the work of John Sayles, diving into Casa de los babys and soon after, Silver City. But one night, as my eyes scanned the old section of my local rental haunt, I spotted a title: The Brother from Another Planet. I pulled it off the shelf and was shocked that by sheer coincidence, I'd discovered one of Sayles' first films, starring my beloved Joe.

The film focuses on a mute, three-toed alien (Morton) who crashes into New York City, gets transplanted to Harlem, and tries to avoid the two alien Men in Black trying to bring him back (an insanely awesome and comedic Sayles and David Strathairn .. you can see a few clips of them after the jump). Since the scene I'd like to show with the alien hunters isn't floating around the net (mentioned here), here's another great moment, where Joe's alien meets a magical Fisher Stevens, who shows Brother both a card trick and a racial subway trick. It's a spot-on example of the film as a whole -- social commentary on race with the wonderful bite of humor. It's the one film where Sayles really let loose with both his humor and creativity, and it's all the better for it.

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After mentioning the wonderful Joe Morton in my DVD picks this week (for his stint in American Gangster), I started thinking about one of his early roles -- the lead in John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet. (One I listed in my Sayles primer last year.) It's a great film, even in its cheesiness, but there's nothing quite like this absolutely terrible trailer, which you can check out above.

I wonder what Sayles thought when he saw that, because while it's endlessly amusing now, it's pretty embarrassing for such a solid film. Sporting tacky review quotes like: "It's Cheers goes to Harlem"and "it's E.T. rides the underground railroad," the trailer is just terrible and says pretty much nothing about the film. However, you can enjoy bits of Morton's alien, as glimpses of a very young Fisher Stevens, and both Sayles and David Strathairn as creepy aliens. And to think -- one day he'd bring down the world with Cyberdyne.

Greetings from Park City, Utah, where, contrary to what everyone and their mother -- including my own mother -- warned me before I came here, it's nice, sunny and not that cold. Yet.

Part of the fun of Sundance is trying to play prophet and figure out which movies are going to end up becoming the Next Big Indie. Last year, the one movie I truly loved was 'Little Miss Sunshine,' and we all know what ended up happening with that one. So far this year, everyone's asking each other, "What have you heard?" "What's supposed to be good?" and there isn't anything close to a consensus. But we'll do our best to figure it out.

To that end, I saw three films on Friday, the first full day of the festival: 'The Savages,' 'Snow Angels' and 'Rocket Science.' The one I liked best was 'The Savages,' which despite the title is not about a couple who gets stranded in the wilderness and turns to cannibalism to survive. Nope, it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as John and Wendy Savage (get it?), dysfunctional siblings who are forced to take care of their estranged father (Philip Bosco) when he develops dementia. Specifically, he starts writing vulgar words on the bathroom wall using, instead of ink, his ... uh, well, it's a word that rhymes with "grit."

The success of Charlie's Angels seemed to send the film industry into a flurry of television remakes. There's Miami Vice, Starsky & Hutch, and the upcoming CHiPs. They provide a little bit of nostalgia for the older folks, and action for the younger folks, even though some take themselves a bit too seriously, like a certain Crockett and Tubbs. However, this latest batch of remake news has nothing to do with television, and seemingly nothing to do with common sense either.

According to Moviehole, Short Circuit is on its way to a remake. You remember the little guy in that picture, right? This run-of-the-mill robot gets zapped with juice and magically becomes intelligent, with emotions and a personality. It had Steve Guttenberg before he liked kids a little too much on Veronica Mars, Ally Sheedy after her Breakfast Club makeover, and Fisher Stevens before he became an insane hacker working for The Man.

What I think I fear more than anything is that the film would take the Miami Vice route. I can see it now -- instead of a quirky little robot, Number 6 would be a saucy cyborg who gets zapped, grows a heart, and gives birth to Janey 6, a woman fighting to live her life as a robot while she falls for some attractive man who helps her. Then again, there is also talk of some of the original people being involved, so maybe there's nothing more ridiculous than a movie set in 2007, with an 80's robot and a bunch of actors who were popular twenty years ago.