Gloria Rated (R) By James Sanford The Kalamazoo Gazette
Roger Ebert has often brought up the idea that instead of rehashing the classics, filmmakers should concentrate on revising movies that weren't very good to begin with. Hollywood may have taken his comments to heart.
Director Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" is a loose remake of the unsuccessful 1964 film of the same name, and now director Sidney Lumet has tackled "Gloria," based on a 1980 melodrama that was nothing to shout about, but did feature a memorably flinty, Oscar-nominated performance by Gena Rowlands.
And what are the results of these experiments? Malick's epic is flawed but intermittently fascinating, rife with luscious imagery. "Gloria," on the other hand, finds Sharon Stone doing her darnedest to squeeze into Rowlands' high heels, and it doesn't take long to see they don't become her.
Rowlands' Gloria was a bitter ex-gangster's moll whose heart had long ago gone into a deep-freeze. Stone's Gloria, aside from the occasional flip remark or crude comment, turns out to be a soft-shell crab. For a woman who's supposedly so street-seasoned, she's weirdly skittish and sentimental.
The reason for her transformation from bad mutha to mother figure is Nicky Nunez (Jean-Luke Figueroa), a 7-year-old whose family was been massacred by the henchmen of Gloria's ex-boyfriend Kevin (Jeremy Northam), minutes after Nicky's dad sent the kid off with a valuable computer disk and a teary "you da man." For reasons never made clear, the supposedly steely Gloria steals Nicky from Kevin's clutches and gives him a tour of New York, all the while dodging the bad guys who want that precious disk.
Unable to commit to being a thriller or a character study, the movie settles for being an excitement-free drag. Lumet, whose talent peaked 25 years ago with "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Network," throws in one amazingly sloppy car chase, but otherwise does nothing to perk up the picture's sluggish pace.
Stone's work here has two modes, shrill and mushy, and her Noo Yawk accent quickly unravels; in one scene she's talking about having been in jail for "twee" years, while in the next she sharply pronounces the "h" in "therapy." Bad dialects also hobble Northam and even George C. Scott, who turns up briefly as one of Gloria's former sugar daddies.
If there's anything to be said in the movie's favor, it's that "Gloria" offers a few glimmers of the natural wit Stone demonstrated during her recent appearance on Bravo's "Inside the Actors' Studio." After Nicky, who's shared her motel bed the night before, tells Gloria he likes sleeping with her, Stone delivers her reply - "You're not the first guy to tell me that" - with a smug sneer that would have made Mae West proud. James Sanford
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews