June 29, 1994
I LOVE TROUBLE is a romantic comedy mystery thriller about two reporters at rival Chicago newspapers competing to get the scoop about a series of deaths of people connected to a particular project at a chemical company. Peter Brackett (Nick Nolte, 48 HRS.) is a womanizing columnist so famous and “off the charts hot” that he’s in Gap ads and constantly recognized in public. We meet him when he’s dropped off at work by a very satisfied groupie he picked up at a signing for his new novel White Lies. Meanwhile, Sabrina Peterson (Julia Roberts, THE PLAYER) is new in town, introduced into the movie pumps and legs first, noticed for her looks but quickly establishes herself to the point of having a full-sized photo on the side of a delivery truck that crosses paths with the one that has Peter’s photo on it. I wondered if somebody saw the introduction to Siskel & Ebert and thought, “Hmmm. What if one was a lady, and they fell in love? And solved a mystery?”
Like its predecessor, the not-really-sequel is full of whimsical characters and underpinned with fairy tale menace, but in most other ways it’s wildly different. The colors are subdued rather than vivid, the settings are grounded rather than stagey, it stars 10-year-old newcomer Fairuza Balk as Dorothy rather than a teen like Judy Garland, and she doesn’t sing, because it’s not a musical. While WIZARD’s costumes, jokes and dance numbers come out of the vaudeville tradition, RETURN creates its world and characters with the rapidly evolving cinematic puppetry, animation and visual FX technology of the Lucas/Spielberg era. Murch told Cinefantastique, “At first I was worried about using state-of-the-art animatronics, but so many of the OZ personnel are graduates of The Muppets, 
So, we got this new STAR WARS movie coming up at the end of the month. The world has breathed a sigh of relief that the Star Wars story and characters have been liberated from the tyrannical grip of their creator and are finally where they belong: as a trademarked intellectual property of the Walt Disney corporation to hire different less visionary/uppity directors to make authorized fake versions of every year forever.
Well, I was stupid to write off K-19 all these years. I don’t know why I did. I didn’t even know what it’s about. I think I knew K-19 wasn’t a mountain, it’s a submarine. I knew it had kind of an audacious name but was directed by this year’s #1 Oscar snub, Kathryn Bigelow. That should’ve been enough, but I never heard anything too good about it and didn’t feel the need to see it.
