Denzel Washington offers a powerful performance as a proud, intelligent black man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit in “The Hurricane” (1999). Of course, it’s not surprising, since Washington has been nailing variations of the proud, intelligent black man since “A Soldier’s Story.” It would be fair to say Washington has become something like Gary Cooper, James Stewart or John Wayne in that the characters and the man have merged to form a single icon. Sometimes it can imprison an actor. Washington’s challenge, and ours, is to keep finding fresh nuance, as he did with his boxing champ here.
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What if two teenage girls nearly as dense as Forrest Gump also possessed Gumpian powers to alter history? What if their world was the Watergate complex and Nixon White House? What if the girls were played by actresses as good as Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst and the rest of the cast was packed with veteran comedy troupers? There are lots of “parodies” where just one character or one plot element is parodied and everything else is played straight. “Dick” (1999) does the heavy lifting of true parody – it creates an entire, hilariously absurd, alternate universe and makes it work.
I could spend the whole 100 words of “The Addams Family” (1991) talking about how smoking hot Anjelica Huston is as Morticia. I mean, she is a simmering cauldron of restrained sensuality. But I’d get all kinds of restraining orders and stuff, so I’ll stop. This film was part of the first wave of reboots based on old TV shows. With its morbid humor (the family is a conglomeration of witches and monsters), the show was an acquired taste, but it was pretty well executed (see what I did there?). A little cartoonish (hijinks ensue!), but so was the original.
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