Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Armed in Paradise
Directed by Larry Clark; with James Woods, Melanie Griffith, Vincent Kartheiser, and Natasha Wagner.
How to order

The word is that Another Day in Paradise, the new film by Larry Clark, is eagerly awaited by audiences. Who are they? Certainly not the ones who found Clark's 1995 Kids a cheap and exploitative potboiler that, beneath the shock and faux-cinema verité veneer, was a knuckle-headed bit of middle-class moralism. Kids garnered attention because it "shockingly told the truth about the sexual lives of teenagers today" (whatever that means). But most critics who praised it as "honest" and "brutal" were simply responding like oversexed, confused teens themselves to its overheated and adolescent fantasy of sex-'n'-drugs.

View our poll archive

Another Day in Paradise is more sophisticated and compelling, but with the flaws that gutted Kids of integrity. Written by Christopher B. Landon, from a book by Eddie Little, Another Day tells the story of small-time crooks, junkies, and grifters Mel (James Woods) and Sid (Melanie Griffith) who take on Bobbie (Vincent Kartheiser) and his girlfriend Rosie (Natasha Wagner), a couple of teenagers dazzled by the older couple's cheap and tawdry glamour. But Bobbie is too taken with his new outlaw status and Rosie too doped up on whatever she can get her hands on to know what's happening. Unfortunately, this means that audiences can figure out what's going to happen next before these dumb-assed kids do. And while there are certain pleasures in waiting for and watching the inevitable-- why, after all, go see Hamlet, again?-- here it feels like a set-up.

When Another Day works it's because Clark has borrowed well from other films, and because Woods and Griffith turn in terrific performances. Clark knows how to get us high on the thrill of incipient violence, and once we are hooked, he clobbers us over the head with the real stuff. The film has a jaunty, frivolous, almost luridly dangerous feel for its first third as Mel and Sid entertain Bobbie and Rosie with new clothes and nights-on-the-town. But when this joie de tacky vivre ends in a down-spiral of shootings, death, betrayal, and standoffs, the film becomes obvious and uninteresting. Like, what else is going to happen? Clark is smart enough to recreate genre schemes that work, but not smart enough to invent second or third reversals on the original formula.

The film is helped enormously by the performances of James Woods and Melanie Griffith, who bring to Mel and Sid the necessary energy and exuberance. Their characters are self-knowing and self-deprecating enough to be pretty cool, even while self-destructive and dangerous. At one point Sid admonishes Mel, "We're not role models. You're a thief and I'm a junkie. We're not Ozzie and Harriet." Indeed. But they are a great deal more fun and honest. But both Woods (who produced the film) and Griffith are lost in the chaos of Clark's filmmaking, their astute performances buried under the clutter of the director's main focus: the attractiveness of Vincent Kartheiser's young Bobbie and Natasha Wagner's Rosie.

As with his books-- Tulsa, Teenage Lust, 1992-- and Kids, Larry Clark's most intense work involves the eroticism of teenage boys. Which is great, unless you actually have a story to tell in a narrative film. As with Kids, much of this film features its young stars as sex objects-- in underwear, with their pants hovering about butt-cracks, splayed on mattresses. Not that they aren't nice to look at-- both Bobbie and Rosie have the firm, supple bodies emblematic of models in designer clothes commercials-- and many scenes look like slightly deranged Calvin Klein photo shoots. When Kartheiser and Wagner are in the frame, Clark can think about nothing else but highlighting their sex-appeal and exposing some flesh.

In Kids this approach simply underscored the film's moral hollowness-- all that preaching about the horrors of teen sex and drug use was, at best, hypocritical. But here it merely jars us out of the film's storyline and ultimate dramatic effect. Another Day in Paradise might have been a minor, entertaining independent film on a great American theme: how a bunch of crooks and losers, through their own cockeyed view of American success, have a touch of dignity and grace. But Clark's inability to pay attention to his story reduces Another Day in Paradise to a bad instance of cinematic auturism: in which the director's fixations detract from rather than illuminate his art. **

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com