Reviews

I'm not sure how to feel about this movie. As you probably know, Meg Ryan plays an alcoholic mother of two with a pilot for a husband. The husband, in this case, is played by Andy Garcia. Now, while watching this movie, I hated Garcia at first but really grew to like him. I now really like Andy Garcia. I really hated Meg Ryan's performance in this movie. I didn't understand who she was at all. And maybe her character didn't either. Either way, this movie is slow, and in trying to be instructive - instructive about the horrors and difficulties of alcoholism and the dangerous enabling of co-dependence - comes off as didactic. Movies really shouldn't be didactic. Don't know what didactic means? Maybe I don't either. Nevertheless, I don't think this is a great movie, or even a good one. Maybe it's an okay one. It takes place in San Francisco, which is cool. A lot of movies take place in San Francisco, though.

I liked this one. A lot. I wanted to know what happened next. I like Andy Garcia. He plays a cop. Richard Gere also plays a cop. It's a good cop, bad cop tale. Nancy Travis is in it, playing Garcia's wife. And she's pretty good. Not a lot of screen time for her, really. Garcia plays an internal affairs investigator at LAPD who becomes obsessed with nailing a corrupt cop, played by Gere. Garcia's partner is a lesbian, played by Laurie Metcalf, who is pretty great in this one. Nancy Travis' character is jealous of Metcalf's character, and Garcia is jealous of Gere. There's a lot of sexual jealousy informing everything.

William Baldwin is also in this one and he's pretty good in it. The performances are all pretty good. I recommend this one. It's a great story, and in my opinion Richard Gere and Andy Garcia are both really fun to watch. Richard Gere is a slimy bad guy, with an almost satanic dimension. Garcia - Garcia's the good guy but his motives are unclear. He's a complex character. I recommend you check this one out.

I think this is a good movie. It's titillating but don't watch it just for that. You don't have to anymore. You've seen it all, sex-wise. Watch it for the performances of Douglas and Stone. Briefly: Douglas is a troubled cop with a troubled past. Stone is a sexy crime writer whose rocker boyfriend turns up dead in bed. Douglas and Stone's worlds collide and the temperature rises. Oh, also, Douglas' character is seeing a gorgeous cop psychiatrist played by Jeanne Tripplehorn. He's both seeing her for psychiatric evaluation and also seeing her for sex. It's complicated.

This is a well-done movie. Takes place in San Francisco. Seems like a lot of thrillers take place in San Francisco. Anyway, Douglas is great, straddling the line between slimy and sympathetic (isn't he always?). Stone is really great. She's smart AND seductive. I guess you need to be smart to be seductive. Whatever. This one is a lot of fun. There's probably too much sex but then again, the movie may actually be about sex. I don't know. Hard to know what the movie is about really. It's just supposed to make you feel stuff: aroused, scared, intrigued. And in that, it totally succeeds.

This is a thriller. It isn't the best thriller of all time, though there are thrills. If you need lots of thrills, perhaps this isn't your movie. There are other things at work though, things other than thrills. There's anger. This movie will anger you. Infuriate you. It did me. The suffering of Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine at the hands of Michael Keaton is infuriating, in as much as they cannot do anything about it. Keaton plays a bad man: Carter Hayes. He rents a room in a gorgeous Victorian house in San Francisco's - you guessed it - Pacific Heights neighborhood. Drake Goodman and Patty Palmer - Modine and Griffith, respectively - are living in sin, and renting out the room to Hayes. But Hayes never pays the rent and never leaves. It gets worse from there. It's kind of a cautionary tale for Renters. Most reviewers have called out Griffith and Modine's characters as being yuppies - I just see them as a normal middle-class couple. Not much yuppie-ish about them. Maybe I don't really know what a yuppie is. Doesn't seem generous to call them yuppies, though. And here, they are victims.

I like Michael Keaton, though he's not on screen all that much, really. There's some convoluted back story to his character, though it's hard to understand why he's really as bad as he is. No matter. Michael Keaton is the best part of this movie. Matthew Modine is okay. He's kind of a chump. You kind of get the feeling like he partially deserves what is happening to him. Partially. And then there's Melanie Griffith. She's okay in it, too. She's the heart of the movie, really. The movie doesn't really suggest anything about who the characters really are or why they make the choices that they do. The movie is really all about the situation that they are in - and as I said, the situation is a bad one. It may be that the movie is trying to say something about the rights of property owners in this country, or the lack-thereof. But it doesn't explore that enough. Overall, it's a good little movie, and I recommend watching it, especially if you like Keaton. I like Keaton. I'm glad I watched.