I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 15
If you can master the comic logic of that scene, you have exhausted 90 percent of the comic invention in this movie, which is based on Vikings speaking as if they were twentieth-century satirists of themselves. The other 10 percent of the movie consists of guest appearances by such stars as Lena Horne and Mickey Rooney, who demonstrate convincingly that Michael Todd exhausted the possibilities of cameo appearances when he made Around the World in 80 Days many, many years ago. (That was the movie where the piano player turned round to grin at the camera, and you shouted, “Look! It’s Frank Sinatra!” More than thirty years later, a little Viking grins at the camera, and we are expected to shout “Look! It’s Mickey Rooney!”)
Erik the Viking was written and directed by Terry Jones, whose previous film, Personal Services, was a splendid and intelligent slice-of-life about a notorious London madam who ran a genteel brothel for elderly gents. The two films could not be less similar. I assume Eric the Viking represents some kind of comprehensive lack of judgment on Jones’s part, and that he will be back among the competent in no time at all.
The Evening Star
(Directed by Robert Harling; starring Shirley MacLaine, Juliette Lewis; 1996)
The Evening Star is a completely unconvincing sequel to Terms of Endearment (1982). It tells the story of the later years of Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine), but fails to find much in them worth making a movie about. It shows every evidence, however, of having closely scrutinized the earlier film for the secret of its success. The best scenes in Terms involved the death of Aurora’s daughter, Emma, unforgettably played by Debra Winger. Therefore, The Evening Star has no less than three deaths. You know you’re in trouble when the most upbeat scene in a comedy is the scattering of the ashes.
The movie takes place in Houston, where Aurora lives with her loyal housekeeper Rosie (Marion Ross) and grapples unsuccessfully with the debris of her attempts to raise her late daughter’s children. The oldest boy (George Newbern) is in prison on his third drug possession charge. The middle boy (Mackenzie Astin) is shacked up with a girlfriend and their baby. The girl, Melanie (Juliette Lewis) is on the brink of moving to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, a would-be actor. (The absence of their father, Flap, played in the first movie by Jeff Daniels, is handled with brief dialogue.)
Aurora has broken up with the General (Donald Moffat), who lives down the street, but he is still a daily caller, drinking coffee in the kitchen with Rosie and offering advice. The next-door neighbor, in the house that used to be owned by the astronaut (Jack Nicholson), is now the genial Arthur (the late Ben Johnson), who also pays Rosie a great deal of attention. And still on the scene is Patsy (Melanie Richardson), Emma’s best friend, now one of Aurora’s confidantes.
All of these people live together in the manner of 1950s sitcoms, which means they constantly walk in and out of each other’s houses and throw open the windows to carry on conversations with people in the yard. I don’t know about you, but if I had to live in a neighborhood where all of my friends and neighbors were hanging out in the kitchen drinking my coffee and offering free advice and one-liners all day long, I’d move. Let them go to Starbucks.
Rosie, a lovable busybody, notices that Aurora has fallen into a depression, and tricks her into seeing a therapist, Jerry (Bill Paxton). Aurora tells him that she is still seeking “the great love of my life.” Anyone who has slept with an astronaut played by Jack Nicholson and can still make that statement is a true optimist. Soon, amazingly, the much-younger Jerry violates all the rules of his profession and asks her out, and we get one of those patented movie scenes designed to show how a rich older lady is the salt of the earth: She takes him to a barbeque joint named the Pig Stand, where she knows everybody by name (this is probably one of the danger signals of alcoholism). Now we’re in for a series of scenes showing how colorful Aurora is, and sure enough, before long she actually crawls in through Jerry’s window.
Developments. Melanie, the granddaughter, wants to move to L.A. with her boyfriend, Bruce. Rosie and old Arthur start dating. The General gets into a snit because Aurora is dating Jerry. Rosie decides to marry Arthur (“Nobody else has ever told me they loved me. Besides, I’ll just be next door”). When Rosie gets sick, Aurora reveals her credentials as a control freak by actually going into Arthur’s house and carrying Rosie back to her own house, in the rain.
As a counterpoint to these events, Aurora rummages in a closet and comes up with a roomful of diaries, photo albums, old dance cards, theater programs, and journals, which collectively suggest set decorators and prop consultants on an unlimited budget. And the astronaut (Nicholson) turns up again, briefly, adding a shot in the arm. “I’m still looking for my true love,” Aurora tells him, and he replies, with the movie’s best line, “There aren’t that many shopping days until Christmas.”
Terms of Endearment was about a difficult relationship between two strong-willed women, the MacLaine and Winger characters. Juliette Lewis, as the granddaughter, is available for similar material here, and indeed her performance is the most convincing in the movie, but the script marginalizes her, preferring instead a series of Auntie Mame–like celebrations of Aurora, alternating with elegiac speeches and clunky sentiment.
Sequels are a chancy business at best, but Evening Star is thin and contrived. Even the music has no confidence in the picture: William Ross’s score underlines every emotion with big nudges, and ends scenes with tidy little flourishes. The title perhaps comes from Crossing the Bar, by Tennyson, who wrote:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And let there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea . . .
His bar, of course, was made of sand, and is not to be confused with the Pig Stand. In Evening Star, however, there is a great deal of moaning when anyone puts out to sea.
Exit to Eden
(Directed by Garry Marshall; starring Dana Delaney, Rosie O’Donnell, Dan Aykroyd; 1994)
There is a scene in Exit to Eden in which the hero butters Dana Delany’s breast, sprinkles it with cinnamon, and licks it before taking bites from a croissant. I’m thinking: The breast or the croissant, make up your mind.
The whole movie is like that. It’s supposed to be a kinky sex comedy, but it keeps getting distracted. On the first page of my notes, I wrote Starts slow. On the second page, I wrote Boring. On the third page, I wrote Endless! On the fourth page, I wrote: Bite-size shredded wheat, skim milk, cantaloupe, frozen peas, toilet paper, salad stuff, pick up laundry.
The movie is based on a novel by Anne Rice, who is said to know a lot about bizarre sexual practices. Either she learned it all after writing this book, or the director, Garry Marshall, just didn’t have his heart in it. The movie is not only dumb and ill constructed, but tragically miscast. The actors look so uncomfortable they could be experiencing alarming intestinal symptoms.
You know me. I’m easy on actors. These are real people with real feelings. When I see a bad performance, I’m inclined to blame anyone but the actors. In the case of Exit to Eden I’m inclined to blame the actors. Starting with Rosie O’Donnell. I’m sorry, but I just don’t get Rosie O’Donnell. I’ve seen her in three or four movies now, and she has generally had the same effect on me as fingernails on a blackboard. She’s harsh and abrupt and staccato and doesn’t seem to be having any fun. She looks mean.
In Exit to Eden, she has the misfortune to star in a subplot involving an unnecessary, stupid, boring police investigation. The movie acts as if we care about this dumb case, involving a suspect who may be hiding out in an island resort devoted to S&M. I was reminded of those old nudist camp movies that pretended to be documentaries about volleyball.
Rosie and her partner, played by Dan Aykroyd, turn up on the island, which is managed by a woman named Lisa (Dana Delaney). Oh, it’s quite a place. They have a merry-go-round with humans instead of wooden horses. A sticky buns booth. Dialogue like, “Baking and bondage? I could do both?!” The male customers look like Chippendale dancers. The female customers look like mud wrestlers. Here is a typical exchange:
“Wow! You’re a CEO!”
“Yes, I am.”
Come on, Garry Marshall, what’s going on here? You’re a smart guy. You made Flamingo Kid and Pretty Woman. Didn’t you realize (a) that the whole police plot had to go, and O’Donnell and Aykroyd along with it? And (b) that sex is funny when it’s taken seriously, but boring when it’s treated as funny? What were your thoughts the first time Rosie turned up in the leather dominatrix uniform? Did you have maybe slight misgivings that you were presiding over one of the more misguided film projects of recent years?
I don’t know what kinds of people would sign up for a vacation resort that specializes in sadomasochism, bondage, and discipline, but I imagine they’d want their money’s worth. The lifeless, listless charades presided over by Delaney are practically family entertainment. The late Harriett Nelson could have attended this camp with only the occasional “Oh, my!”
And of all the actresses I can imagine playing the role of boss dominatrix, Dana Delaney is the last. She’s a cute, merry-faced type—perfect for the dominatrix’s best friend. For the lead, let’s see. How about Faye Dunaway? Linda Fiorentino? Sigourney Weaver? See what I mean?
Anne Rice recently took out two-page spreads in Variety and the New York Times to announce that she has seen the film of her novel Interview with the Vampire, and thinks it is a masterpiece. I don’t think we should look for her ad about Exit to Eden, not even in the classifieds.
Father’s Day
(Directed by Ivan Reitman; starring Robin Williams, Billy Crystal,
Julia Louis-Dreyfus; 1997)
Father’s Day is a brainless feature-length sitcom with too much sit and no com. It stars two of the brighter talents in American movies, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, in a screenplay cleverly designed to obscure their strengths while showcasing their weaknesses.
The story is recycled out of a 1983 French film named Les Comperes, as part of a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made in English with all of the humor taken out. The discussion about this one seems to have been limited to who got to play the Gérard Depardieu role.
Billy Crystal won, I think. At least he’s the one who is a master of the sudden, violent head-butt, which is supposed to be amusing because he’s a high-powered lawyer and so nobody expects him to be good at head-butting. As the movie opens, he gets an unexpected visit from a woman (Nastassja Kinski) he knew seventeen years ago. She’s now happily married, but needs to tell him something: They had a son, the son has disappeared, she’s desperate, and she needs his help in finding him.
Robin Williams plays an unsuccessful performance artist from San Francisco who is at the point of suicide when his phone rings. It’s Kinski, with the same story: Seventeen years ago, they had a son, who is now missing, and so on. She tells both men to be on the safe side, in case one doesn’t want to help. But both men are moved by her story and by the photograph she supplies, of a lad who looks born to frequent the parking lots of convenience stores.
At this point, it is inconceivable that the following events will not transpire: (1) The two men will discover they’re both on the same mission. (2) They’ll team up, each one secretly convinced he’s the real father. (3) They’ll find the son, who doesn’t want to be saved. (4) They’ll get involved in zany, madcap adventures while saving him, preferably in San Francisco, Reno, and places like that. (5) The married one (Crystal) will lie to his wife about what he’s doing, and she’ll get suspicious and misread the whole situation.
Will the movie get all smooshy at the end, with the kind of cheap sentimentality comedians are suckers for, because they all secretly think they embody a little of Chaplin? You betcha. This movie could have been written by a computer. That it was recycled from the French by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel is astonishing, given the superior quality of their collaborations like Parenthood and City Slickers.
Williams and Crystal are pretty bad. You can always tell a lazy Robin Williams movie by the unavoidable scene in which he does a lot of different voices and characters. This time, nervous about meeting his son, he tries out various roles in front of a mirror. All right, already. We know he can do this, We’ve seen him do it in a dozen movies and on a hundred talk shows. He’s getting to be like the goofy uncle who knows one corny parlor trick and insists on performing it at every family gathering. Crystal is more in character most of the time—more committed to the shreds of narrative that lurk beneath the movie’s inane surface.
The kid, played by Charlie Hofheimer, is another weak point. He’s not much of an actor—not here, anyway, in material that would have defeated anybody—but the movie doesn’t even try to make his character interesting. That would upstage the stars, I guess. An indication of the movie’s lack of ambition is its decision to surround the runaway clichés: His girlfriend has run off with a rock singer, he follows her, Crystal and Williams follow him into the mosh pits of rock concerts and to the band’s engagement in Reno, etc. There’s even a gratuitous drug dealer, hauled into the plot so he can threaten the kid about a missing $5,000. Would it have been too much to motivate the kid with something besides sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Do we need a drug dealer in this innocuous material?
And what about poor Julia Louis-Dreyfus? She has the thankless role of Crystal’s wife. When Crystal and Williams drag the kid into a hotel room for a shower, she misunderstands everything she hears on the phone and thinks her husband is showering with strange men and boys. Later she turns up while he’s telephoning her, and he talks into the phone, not realizing her answers are coming from right behind him. This will be hilarious to anyone who doesn’t know how telephones work.
Firewalker
(Directed by J. Lee Thompson; starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett; 1986)
Where to start with this movie? Where to end? Even more to the point, in which order to show the reels? J. Lee Thompson’s Firewalker is a free-form anthology of familiar images from the works of Steven Spielberg, subjected to a new process that we could call discolorization. All of the style and magic are gone, leaving only the booby-trapped temples, the steaming jungle, and such lines as, if I remember correctly, “Witch, woman, harlot—I’ve been called them all!”
Firewalker borrows its closing images from the Indiana Jones movies, but its press notes optimistically claim the movie is “in the tradition” of Romancing the Stone. In literature, it’s called plagiarism. In the movies, it’s homage. The movie stars Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett, and Melody Anderson in a romp through Central America in search of a lost temple filled with gold. Norris and Gossett are professional adventurers and best pals; Anderson is a rich girl who walks into a bar and asks for two men who are strong, brave, and not too smart. She’s got an old treasure map and wants them to help her find the gold.
We know Norris and Gossett are just the guys she’s looking for, because we were observing closely during the title sequence, when they were not too smart. The two men are staked faceup in the desert and left to die. And as a special torture, Norris is given a full bottle of Perrier to hold in his right hand, so that water will be tantalizingly close as the hot sun bakes him. Norris breaks the bottle and uses a shard of glass to cut the rope, which is terrific, except that we can clearly see that all either one of them has to do is simply slip the rope off the top of the stake.
Once they’re in the jungle with Anderson, the movie turns into one of those blood-soaked travelogues in which enemies pop up like targets in a shooting gallery. The bad guys include mercenary soldiers, Indians, rebel troops, crazed would-be dictators, and a man who is named Cyclops because he wears a patch over one eye.
Cyclops was my inspiration to play the game of Continuity with this movie. That’s the game where you count all the mistakes, such as that his patch is over his right eye the first time we see him and his left eye the other times. Also, Norris and Anderson are in a VW bug that sinks while fording a river. It’s two feet from shore, but when they escape from it, they have to swim at least twenty-five yards. Later, they find Gossett suspended above a pool of boiling water by a rope tied around his hands. Norris leaps out to embrace Gossett, and they swing back and forth until the rope frays and allows them to land on a ledge, where Gossett’s hands are miraculously free.
Continuity is a game you play only during a movie that gives you little else to think about. Although Norris and Gossett are capable of better things, nothing in this movie gives that away. They never really seem to feel anything. For example, Gossett disappears, apparently eaten by an alligator, and the most Norris can work up is a case of vexation. Anderson seems to be in the movie mostly so that Norris has someone to drag out of danger.
There are, of course, the obligatory karate fights, in which Norris flies through the air and aims his magic heels at the villains, killing or disabling dozens of them. Karate scenes always inspire the same question: Why doesn’t somebody just shoot the guy dead while he’s whirling around?
Firewalker was directed by J. Lee Thompson, whose credits include The Guns of Navarone. He has recently labored in the Cannon stable, turning out weary action retreads such as the Richard Chamberlain version of King Solomon’s Mines. This time he has directed by rote, failing his actors by letting them appear blasé in the moments when they should be excited, and, even worse, excited when they should be blasé. This effectively short-circuits all the potential moments of humor. For example, Gossett is more excited at the sight of the treasure map than he is at the sight of the treasure.
On second thought, maybe Gossett simply got a good look at the treasure. The temple contains a room roughly as big as Citizen Kane’s warehouse, filled with gold objects. Once or twice, the camera strayed too close, and I was able to see that some of the priceless treasures of the ancients included spray-painted Tupperware.
