I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 11
(If you look at the names “Fender Tremolo” and “Gibson Rickenbacker” and wonder why they set off strange stirrings in your subconscious, it is because both characters, according to the movie’s press book, “are named after equipment and techniques associated with electric guitars.” This rule presumably also applies to the characters Furman Vox, Nady Simmons, and Roland Pick.)
Once we know the central players, the movie turns into a sadomasochistic passion play, in which the village tries out varieties of unspeakable tortures on the hero, including crucifixion, before the formula is (of course) delivered safely after all. The movie reduces itself to a series of smoking, smoldering cityscapes (which look a lot like urban neighborhoods slated for renewal), and the Pulpspeak is the usual combination of vaguely biblical formalisms, spiced with four-letter words and high-tech gibberish.
Movies like this work if they’re able to maintain a high level of energy and invention, as the Mad Max movies do. They do not work when they lower their guard and let us see the reality, which is that several strangely garbed actors feel vaguely embarrassed while wearing bizarre costumes and reciting unspeakable lines.
Dancers
(Directed by Herbert Ross; starring Mikhail Baryshnikov; 1987)
The idea is not exactly new: The story of a ballet is echoed by the real lives of the people who are dancing in it. But Herbert Ross’s Dancers easily is the most dim-witted recent example of the genre, using Giselle to so little effect that perhaps the only way to save this movie would have been to substitute Peter and the Wolf.
See if any of this sounds familiar. Mikhail Baryshnikov plays Tony, the greatest male dancer of his age. While rehearsing for a film version of Giselle in Italy, he finds himself overtaken by a vague discontent. Things are just not right. Then, one day across a crowded restaurant, he spies the newest member of his company, a seventeen-year-old American teenager with big eyes and long hair. In a grand gesture, he sends her an entire ice-cream cake, and their romance is under way.
So far, the story’s not implausible. I know a lot of people who would go to bed for an ice-cream cake. What is unacceptable about the movie is its refusal to supply the teenager (Julie Kent) with any human qualities other than hero worship and to assume that she would fall in love with Baryshnikov just because he is a famous man and he wants her to. Doesn’t decency require them to at least pretend to have something in common?
The movie is so ineptly structured that maybe it doesn’t even matter. The Baryshnikov character lays his usual line on her, something about a tall white tree he saw in his childhood, and meanwhile rehearsals for Giselle continue. But this is not even an interesting movie about show business.
Everything I have ever heard about the filming of ballet movies leads me to believe that the set usually resembles Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, in which venomous and embittered malcontents hang around the hotel bar telling lies about each other, but not here. On the set of Giselle, much depends on Long Looks. Baryshnikov’s current and former lovers lurk in the wings, looking significantly at him and each other. We read volumes into their gazes, because we have to, and because the movie gives us little else to think about.
One of the best gazers in the movie is Kent, who learns after the magical white-tree story that Baryshnikov has told it to other women—that, indeed, she may not be the only woman in his life. This causes her such distress that she stands in the wings during a dance sequence and provides not one but two Long Looks. We see in her eyes that she is shaken and in despair. If we look closely enough, we see something else. It appears that the editor, William Reynolds, has had to use the same close-up twice.
The girl runs out of the theater. The dance continues. Then there is a search for her. “Call the police!” Baryshnikov cries, and then her jacket is found in the sea, soaking wet. This turns out to be a real mystery after she turns up on land, dry. The movie eventually ends after more dancing.
Dancers does not provide (a) interesting ballet sequences, (b) a coherent plot, (c) a romance of any description beyond the unsatisfactory requirements of Unrequited Love, or (d) pretty pictures. It has one distinction, though. It is one of the worst movies of the year.
The Dark
(Directed by John “Bud” Cardos; starring William Devane, Cathy Lee Crosby; 1979)
Movie critics aren’t supposed to give away the plots of thrillers. That’s part of the unwritten agreement with their makers. The other part of the unwritten agreement, though, is that thrillers should have plots. Since The Dark breaks its side of the bargain, I feel blameless in forging ahead.
This is without a doubt the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years. It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark.
The movie involves a Jack the Ripper from outer space, who has superhuman strength, can tear down brick walls with his bare hands, and has eyes that emit lightning flashes. He kills someone every night. The police are trying to catch him.
That’s about it. The killings are not only unmotivated, but uninvolving, since only strangers get killed. They appear in the movie, walk into dark parking garages, and are murdered. The creature’s favorite means of attack is to pull off his victim’s heads. Wonderful. The press nicknames him “The Mangler,” a title that could more accurately be bestowed on the director.
The Dark alternates the nighttime attacks with endless scenes of cops lecturing each other on how important it is to catch the Mangler. But the case is finally broken open when the father of one of the victims (William Devane) and a local TV newscaster (Cathy Lee Crosby) team up to solve it. A psychic has predicted that a young actor will be the next to go, so they pub-crawl through actors’ haunts to find him. They do, he speeds drunkenly away in his car, they follow, the police tail them, and everyone ends up in a deserted monastery where the Mangler is cornered.
He’s a tough creature to destroy. He’s about six feet six inches, looks like the Wolf Man, snarls and growls a lot, and zaps everybody with his lightning bolts. The special effects are so bad, by the way, that at times the lightning bolts do not seem to come from his eyes, or to hit their targets—but never mind, the victims topple over anyway. Gunshots don’t affect the creature, but after he’s set on fire, he disappears in a puff of smoke.
What is this creature? Where does it come from? How to explain its chemistry, its appetites, its violence? Great questions, I guess, for the sequel. The movie ends with a panorama of Los Angeles and a narration assuring us that mankind must always be afraid of the Dark, because in the vastness of the universe, etc., we are like blind men tapping our way into infinity, etc.
One of the amazing things about The Dark is that it’s only about 85 minutes long—short for a feature film, if more than long enough for this one. If they’d gone all the way and shot for 120 minutes, they might have qualified for the most stupefyingly boring movie ever made. Maybe they win that one anyway.
Day of the Dead
(Directed by George Romero; starring Joseph Pilato, Lori Cardille; 1985)
The zombies in Day of the Dead are marvels of special effects, with festoons of rotting flesh hanging from their purple limbs as they slouch toward the camera, moaning their sad songs. Truth to tell, they look a lot better than the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, which was director George Romero’s original zombie film. His technology is improving; perhaps the current emphasis on well-developed bodies (in Perfect, Rambo, etc.) has inspired a parallel improvement in dead bodies.
But the zombies have another problem in Day of the Dead: They’re upstaged by the characters who are supposed to be real human beings. You might assume that it would be impossible to steal a scene from a zombie, especially one with blood dripping from his orifices, but you haven’t seen the overacting in this movie. The characters shout their lines from beginning to end, their temples pound with anger, and they use distracting Jamaican and Irish accents, until we are so busy listening to their endless dialogue that we lose interest in the movie they occupy.
Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe Romero, whose original movie was a genuine inspiration, hasn’t figured out anything new to do with his zombies. In his second zombie film, the brilliant Dawn of the Dead (1980), he had them shuffling and moaning their way through a modern shopping mall, as Muzak droned in the background and terrified survivors took refuge in the Sears store. The effect was both frightening and satirical. The everyday location made the zombies seem all the more horrible, and the shopping mall provided lots of comic props (as when several zombies tried to crawl up the down escalator).
This time, though, Romero has centered the action in a visually dreary location—an underground storage cavern, one of those abandoned salt mines where they store financial records and the master prints of old movies. The zombies have more or less overrun the surface of America, we gather, and down in the darkness a small team of scientists and military men are conducting experiments on a few captive zombie guinea pigs.
It’s an intriguing idea, especially if Romero had kept the semiseriousness of the earlier films. Instead, the chief researcher is a demented butcher with bloodstained clothes, whose idea of science is to teach a zombie named Bub to operate a Sony Walkman. Meanwhile, the head of the military contingent (Joseph Pilato) turns into a violent little dictator who establishes martial law and threatens to end the experiments. His opponent is a spunky woman scientist (Lori Cardille), and as they shout angry accusations at each other, the real drama in the film gets lost.
In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane, or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive. According to the mad scientist in Day of the Dead, the zombies keep moving because of primitive impulses buried deep within their spinal columns—impulses that create the appearance of life long after consciousness and intelligence have departed. I hope the same fate doesn’t befall Romero’s zombie movies. He should quit while he’s ahead.
Dead Man
(Directed by Jim Jarmusch; starring Johnny Depp, John Hurt, Robert Mitchum; 1996)
I once traveled for two days from Windhoek to Swakopmund through the Kalahari Desert, on a train without air conditioning, sleeping at night on a hard leather bench that swung down from the ceiling. That journey seemed a little shorter than the one that opens Dead Man, the new film by Jim Jarmusch.
A man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) is traveling from Cleveland, where his parents have just died, to the western town of Machine, where he has been promised a job. He is dressed in a checked suit that looks as if it had been waiting a long time in the menswear store for a sucker to come along. The train drones through the endless prairie. There are shots of the inside of the train. Shots of the view from the train. Shots of the train. Then the train’s soot-faced fireman warns Blake that his grave awaits him in Machine.
For some of my readers the name William Blake will have rung a bell, and they will be wondering if there is any connection between this character and the mystical British poet who died in 1827. There is: They both have the same name. Our Blake has not heard of the English Blake, however, but before long he will run into an Indian named Nobody who can quote him by the yard.
We are getting ahead of the story. Blake arrives in Machine, and reports to the Dickinson Steel Works, a dark satanic mill where he expects to be employed as an accountant. The office manager (John Hurt) explains that the job no longer exists. Blake is appalled; he’s spent his last dime getting there. He confronts the owner of the mill (Robert Mitchum), who stands between a stuffed bear and a portrait of himself, which frame his fearful symmetry. Mitchum brandishes a shotgun and advises Blake to leave.
Blake befriends a hapless flower girl, and is invited to her room for an encounter between innocence and experience. Then the girl’s lover bursts in and shoots her. Blake shoots the man, is shot near the heart, leaps from the window, and flees. We discover the dead man is Dickinson’s son, and the mill owner hires men to track and kill Blake.
The next morning Blake regains consciousness in the forest to find his wound being tended by the Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who was raised by white men, educated in England, and treats Blake as if he really is the poet. The two men now undertake an odyssey, pursued by the killers, in search of Blake’s ultimate destiny, which is revealed as a pleasing cross between the mysticism of the original Blake and the American Indians.
Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning. The black-and-white photography by Robby Muller is a series of monochromes in which the brave new land of the West already betrays a certain loneliness. Farmer brings to the Indian a sweetness and a curious contemporary air (he talks like a New Age guru), and Depp is sad and lost as the opposite of Nobody—which is, I fear, Everyman. A mood might have developed here, had it not been for the unfortunate score by Neil Young, which for the film’s final thirty minutes sounds like nothing so much as a man repeatedly dropping his guitar.
Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don’t have a clue what it is. Are the machines of the east going to destroy the nature of the west? Is the white man doomed, and is the Indian his spiritual guide to the farther shore? Should you avoid any town that can’t use another accountant? Watching the film, I was reminded of the original William Blake’s visionary drawings and haunting poems. Leaving the theater, I came home and took down my Blake and found that the poet had even explained the method of this film: “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”
The Dead Poets Society
(Directed by Peter Weir; starring Robin Williams; 1989)
Peter Weir’s The Dead Poets Society is a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something—doing your own thing, I think. It’s about an inspirational, unconventional English teacher and his students at “the best prep school in America,” and how he challenges them to question conventional views by such techniques as standing on their desks. It is, of course, inevitable that the brilliant teacher will eventually be fired from the school, and when his students stood on their desks to protest his dismissal, I was so moved, I wanted to throw up.
The film makes much noise about poetry, and there are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman, and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau’s Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to their language; they’re simply plundered for slogans to exort the students toward more personal freedom. At the end of a great teacher’s course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher’s semester, all they love is the teacher.
The movie stars Robin Williams as the mercurial John Keating, teacher of English at the exclusive Welton Academy in Vermont. The performance is a delicate balancing act between restraint and schtick. For much of the time, Williams does a good job of playing an intelligent, quick-witted, well-read young man. But then there are scenes in which his stage persona punctures the character—as when he does impressions of Marlon Brando and John Wayne doing Shakespeare. There is also a curious lack of depth to his character; compared to such other great movie teachers as Miss Jean Brodie and Professor Kingsfield, Keating is more of a plot device than a human being.
The story in The Dead Poets Society is also old stuff, recycled out of the novel and movie A Separate Peace and other stories in which the good die young and the old simmer in their neurotic and hateful repressions. The key conflict in the movie is between Neil (Robert Sean Leonard), a student who dreams of being an actor, and his father (Kurtwood Smith), a domineering parent who orders his son to become a doctor, and forbids him to go on stage. The father is a strict, unyielding taskmaster, and the son, lacking the will to defy him, kills himself. His death would have had a greater impact for me if it had seemed like a spontaneous human cry of despair, rather than like a meticulously written and photographed set piece.
Other elements in the movie also seem to have been chosen for their place in the artificial jigsaw puzzle. A teenage romance between one of the Welton students and a local girl is given so little screen time, so arbitrarily, that it seems like a distraction. And I squirmed through the meetings of the “Dead Poets Society,” a self-consciously bohemian group of students who hold secret meetings in the dead of night in a cave near the campus.
The society was founded, we learn, by Mr. Keating when he was an undergraduate, but in its reincarnate form it never generates any sense of mystery, rebellion, or daring. The society’s meetings have been badly written and are dramatically shapeless, featuring a dance-line to Lindsay’s “The Congo” and various attempts to impress girls with random lines of poetry. The movie is set in 1959, but none of these would-be bohemians have heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg, or indeed of the beatnik movement at all.
One scene in particular indicates the distance between the movie’s manipulative instincts, and what it claims to be about. When Mr. Keating is being railroaded by the school administration (which makes him the scapegoat for his student’s suicide), one of the students acts as a fink and tells the old fogies what they want to hear. Later, confronted by his peers, he makes a hateful speech of which not one word is plausible except as an awkward attempt to supply him with a villain’s dialogue. Then one of the other boys hits him in the jaw, to great applause from the audience. The whole scene is utterly false, and seems to exist only so that the violence can resolve a situation that the screenplay is otherwise unwilling to handle.
