BEYOND THE STARS (1989) * It's a movie about the best of the elementals of the human condition, kind of, and I wonder if you try to do that then no matter what a little bit of karma shows through... I mean, for however well meaning it is and well situated its heart, it creates barriers that probably nothing could overcome: these endless and ubiquitous dialogues are unbelievable, even on paper how could anyone not be reduced to astonishment short of laughter, it's like they wan to make every stupid, juvenile, clichéd, and insipid mistake, and as many as time permits. Yes I'm being snide maybe to a point near pettiness, but honest, when I tell you how funny I found it watching Christian Slater, Robert Foxworth, Olivia d'Abo and Sharon Stone fall on them like dull aesthetic swords; the ones that won't kill you, just make you look really bloated in an artistically flatulent way. Now Martin Sheen, on the other hand, is sly enough to pretty much get away with it for the most part, and his drunken speech looked and felt pretty damn authentic, and I may have authored one or two of those myself. F. Murray Abraham somehow distances himself from his own lines so effectively that you kind of wonder what it was that he just said, that gave you sense of how good he can be. So it's a remarkable film in several ways, just not ones that would make most of us want to watch it.
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