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HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
STARRING Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Steve Guttenberg, Dylan McDermott, Cynthia Stevenson, Geraldine Chaplin, Claire Danes. DIRECTED BY Jodie Foster.
DON'T LET ANY of these actors tell you that filmmaking's hard work. Since much of Home for the Holidays takes place around the dinner table of a middle-class family in Baltimore, director Foster treated her actors to Thanksgiving dinner for each of the 10 days it took to shoot the film's extended meal scene. Talk about turkey coma. The cumulative menu: 64 birds, at least 20 pounds of mashed potatoes, 44 pies, 35 pounds of stuffing, 18 bags of minimarshmallows, and 30 pounds of sweet potatoes. ''Nobody ever really eats in movies, and I hate that,'' says Hunter, who stars as a lonely single mother girding herself for a grueling holiday with the folks. ''So I really did eat.'' McDermott, who plays a slightly mysterious houseguest in the film, says he kept the calories in check by simply spitting out the food when Foster yelled, ''Cut!''
Thanksgiving dinner is the climax of this small-scale look at the funny, sad intricacies of family relationships. Foster says the cast -- Bancroft and Durning as Hunter's parents, Downey as her mischievous gay brother, Stevenson and Guttenberg as her uptight sister and brother-in-law, and Chaplin as her semi-senile aunt -- took on its own familial overtones during rehearsals: ''Downey would take his shoes off and put his feet up on the table right in front of Anne Bancroft, and she'd go, 'Oh! Oh!' It was just so funny to watch.''
Foster, who made her directorial debut with 1991's Little Man Tate and doubles as producer this time out, says her favorite scene hinges on Downey's ad-libbed anecdote about his broken nose. ''It's the most disgusting story,'' she says. ''He's describing the pus and blood and spooge and brains and pooky. For some reason, that gets me going more than any other scene in the movie. I guess that's very revealing, isn't it?'' (Nov. 3)
BUZZ: Couldn't be better, both for Foster's direction and her able cast.
NICK OF TIME
STARRING Johnny Depp, Christopher Walken, Marsha Mason, Charles Dutton. DIRECTED BY John Badham.
IT WORKED FOR Keanu Reeves -- maybe it'll work for Johnny Depp. After a string of loopily unconventional roles from Ed Scissorhands to Ed Wood, Depp is finally playing an action hero -- albeit a loopily unconventional one, slipping into a pair of dorky specs as a mild-mannered accountant who gets sucked into an assassination plot when kidnappers grab his daughter and force him to try to kill the governor of California.
''Depp is the modern Jimmy Stewart,'' offers Badham. ''Oh, I know, everyone says Tom Hanks is the modern Jimmy Stewart, but Depp is too. He's an ordinary, natural, appealing guy. He's Everyman.''
Everyman with cheekbones to die for, perhaps, but never mind. Nick gets bonus points for some nifty twists. For starters, the governor is a woman (''I patterned her after Christine Todd Whitman,'' says Mason). Also, the action unfolds in real time, starting at noon and ending at 1:30 p.m. ''It's really hard to do,'' Badham says. ''You can't telescope. The continuity is a nightmare. Even keeping the makeup straight is a problem. I can only think of one or two other directors who've tried it.''
