I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 2
The Alien movies always have expert production design. Alien Resurrection was directed by the French visionary Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children), who with his designers has placed it in what looks like a large, empty hangar filled with prefabricated steel warehouse parts. There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder—nothing like the abandoned planetary station in Aliens. Even the standard shots of vast spaceships, moving against a backdrop of stars, are murky here, and perfunctory.
I got a telephone message that Inside Edition wanted to ask me about Alien Resurrection, and what impact the movie would have on the careers of Weaver and Ryder. Financially, it will help: Weaver remains the only woman who can open an action picture. Artistically, the film will have no impact at all. It’s a nine days’ wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory. Try this test: How often do you think about Jurassic Park: The Lost World?
Alligator
(Directed by Lewis Teague; starring Robert Forster; 1980)
This movie was probably inevitable. What’s amazing is that they took so long to make it. Alligator is inspired by one of the most persistent fantasies of recent years: That countless pet alligators, given as gifts when they were babies, were flushed down toilets when they grew too large . . . and that down there in the sewers of our major cities, they’re growing to unimagin-able size.
My own fantasies about sewers go all the way back to the old Honeymooners TV skits, with Ed Norton breathlessly telling Ralph Cramden about the beasts he encountered on his daily patrols beneath the city streets. But Norton never met anything like the alligator in this movie. In the tradition of Jaws, this creature is gigantic, voracious, and insatiable. It will eat anything (as you might imagine, considering where it lives).
The story opens as it’s gobbling down dead dogs from a laboratory that’s experimenting with new growth hormones. You got it: The alligator reacts to the hormones and grows to a length of thirty or forty feet. People start disappearing down in the sewers. A New York cop (Robert Forster) goes down with his buddy to see what’s happening. The alligator eats the buddy. But Forster can’t get anyone to believe his story.
These early scenes in the movie are probably the best, because they work on the dumb fundamental level where we’re all afraid of being eaten by an alligator in a sewer. (Show me a man who is not afraid of being eaten by an alligator in a sewer, and I’ll show you a fool.) Forster splashes along with his flashlight and the alligator slinks around just out of view.
Come to think of it, the alligator does a lot of slinking in this movie—maybe because it was too difficult to show the whole alligator. There are a couple of fairly phony special effects shots, as when the alligator bursts up through the sidewalk, but for the most part we just see parts of the alligator: His mean little eyes, his big tail, and his teeth. Especially his teeth.
The plot is absolutely standard; this story has been filmed dozens of times. You have, of course, the small-minded mayor who is concerned only with reelection. The police chief, a folksy character who fires Forster for not catching the alligator, but later rehires him. The girl scientist, who falls in love with the hero and helps hunt for the alligator. The villain, an out-of-town big-game hunter brought in to replace Forster.
All of these people do incredibly stupid things, like walking into dark alleys after the alligator, or putting a dynamite charge on a time-delay fuse while they’re still trapped in a sewer with the alligator and the dynamite.
The alligator, on the other hand, is smart enough to travel all over the city without being seen: In one shot, he’s in a suburban swimming pool, and seconds later, he’s midtown. You would not think it would be that easy for a forty-foot alligator to sneak around incognito, but then, New Yorkers are awfully blasé. Meanwhile, I suggest a plan: Why not try flushing this movie down the toilet to see if it grows into something big and fearsome?
American Anthem
(Directed by Albert Magnoli; starring Mitch Gaylord, Janet Jones; 1986)
American Anthem is like a very bad Identikit sketch of Purple Rain, the previous movie by the same director. You can almost hear the police artist as he tries to make his drawing, based on half-witted descriptions of the big hit from the summer of 1984:
Q. Who is the star?
A. A major superstar in another field who has never acted before.
Q. What is his personal crisis?
A. He has an unhappy home life and a father who mistreats him.
Q. What is the suspense?
A. Will he conquer his inner demons and perform once again at the peak of his ability?
Q. Who is his girlfriend?
A. A future star in his field whose excellence inspires him to start trying again.
Q. What’s the movie’s visual style?
A. Kind of a cross between a concert film and an MTV video. Be sure to overedit. And put in lots of shots where the camera peers into the light source, so the heroic youth can be seen in silhouette as he tosses back his head and sweat flies through the air.
With this incomplete description, a filmmaker from Planet X might have made American Anthem from the basic ingredients of Purple Rain. The hero this time is not a rock star like Prince, but a gymnast played by the Olympic champion Mitch Gaylord. But since the movie treats him like a rock star, photographing him not as a sweating, breathing, striving athlete but as a pinup for the girls’ locker room, the difference isn’t as big as you might imagine.
In the movie, Gaylord plays a guy who has dropped off the gym team and refused a college scholarship because his father doesn’t love him. His father, we learn, does indeed love him but is frustrated because he doesn’t have a job. Gaylord sneaks into the gym to spy on his former teammates as they train, and one day he spots a beautiful newcomer (Janet Jones). She has arrived to train under the famous coach who is preparing everyone to try out for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team.
It’s love, and so Gaylord decides to get in shape again, which he does by working out on a bar that he has suspended between two trees in the forest. He especially enjoys practicing during fierce rainstorms when the thunder and lightning make for a better MTV video.
The plot is dumb and predictable, but so what? Everything depends on dialogue and character. And American Anthem is a curious case: The screenplay seems to have been written by people who, on the one hand, were intimately familiar with every commercial and salable ingredient in every hit movie of the last five years, and yet who, on the other hand, had never heard a cliché before. My favorite moment comes after a family fight when the kid brother whines, “Why can’t we be like other families?”
A large portion of the movie is given over to gymnastics competitions, which are not explained or photographed well enough to be very interesting. Seeing a champion gymnast zip through his routine isn’t half as interesting as a beginner being taught a thing or two about dealing with the parallel bars would have been. Skilled moviemakers know that, in sports movies, you don’t create suspense by making something look easy, but by making it look difficult. Yet Gaylord’s competitive routines in American Anthem are the equivalent of a Rocky movie where Rocky knocks his opponent unconscious with the first swing.
One thing is especially annoying about the movie. During the final match, there are dozens of strobe lights flashing incessantly and distractingly behind the contestants. I guess these are supposed to represent camera flashbulbs. Two thoughts are inspired: (1) If the gymnastics were really interesting, they wouldn’t have to be tarted up with flashing lights, and (2) have you ever thought what it says about our national IQ that a lot of people believe you can take a flash picture from the twentieth row?
An American Werewolf in Paris
(Directed by Anthony Wallers; starring Tom Everett Scott, Vince Vieluf, Phil Buckman; 1997)
Now that Scream and Scream 2 have given us horror film characters who know all the horror clichés, the time has come for a werewolf movie about characters who know they’re in a werewolf movie. Not that such an insight would benefit the heroes of An American Werewolf in Paris, who are singularly dim. Here are people we don’t care about, doing things they don’t understand, in a movie without any rules. Triple play.
I was not one of the big fans of John Landis’s original 1981 film, An American Werewolf in London, but, glancing over my old review, I find such phrases as “spectacular set pieces,” “genuinely funny moments,” and “sequences that are spellbinding.” My review of the Paris werewolves will not require any of those phrases.
The new movie involves three callow Americans on a “daredevil tour” of Europe. Played by Tom Everett Scott (of That Thing You Do), Vince Vieluf, and Phil Buckman, they climb the Eiffel Tower by moonlight, only to find a young woman (Julie Delpy) about to leap to her death. They talk, she leaps, and Scott leaps after her, luckily while tethered to a bungee cord. (Hint: always be sure the other end of a bungee line is tied to something else before tying this end to yourself.)
The girl survives, the lads track her to her home, she has blood on her hands, her friend invites them to a rave club, she’s not there, Chris finds her locked in a cell in her basement, the ravers are werewolves, so is she, etc., etc. Please don’t accuse me of revealing plot points: In a movie with this title, are you expecting that the girl who leaps from the tower is not a werewolf, her friends are exchange students, and the club is frequented by friendly tourists?
One of the pleasures of a film like this is the ritual explanation of the rules, in which we determine how werewolves are made, how they are killed, and how they spread their wolfiness. Here it doesn’t much matter, because the plot has a way of adding new twists (like a serum that makes moonlight unnecessary for a werewolf transformation). By the end of the film, any plot discipline (necessary so that we care about some characters and not the others) has been lost in an orgy of special effects and general mayhem.
But let me single out one line of dialogue. After the three American college students are trying to figure out what happened at the tower, one says, “The kind of girl who jumps off the Eiffel Tower has issues, man.”
Starting with that line, a complete rewrite could be attempted, in which the characters are self-aware, know the werewolf rules, and know not to make the same mistakes as the characters in An American Werewolf in London (not to mention The Howling, The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, Howling III, Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, Howling V: The Rebirth, and Howling VI: The Freaks). I even have a great title: Howler.
And God Created Woman
(Directed by Roger Vadim; starring Rebecca De Mornay, Vincent Spano, James Tiernan, Frank Langella; 1987)
Is this the first time a title has been remade, instead of a movie? And God Created Woman shares little with the 1956 Brigitte Bardot movie except for its name and, to be sure, its director, Roger Vadim. It’s a great title, and although I can only barely, dimly remember moments from the original movie, I am prepared to bet that this is a better one. The movie stars Rebecca De Mornay, who in her uncanny first shot looks for a moment like Bardot. Then the Bardot imagery is abandoned and the movie gets on with its business.
De Mornay plays a woman prison inmate (wrongly sentenced, of course), who is determined to be free. She escapes, but makes the mistake of hitching a ride in the limousine of a politician (Frank Langella). Instead of turning her over to the authorities, he helps her break back into the prison. Then he supplies some helpful advice: If she can find a responsible person on the outside who will vouch for her, she can probably be paroled.
This suggestion leads to the movie’s best sequence, when De Mornay discovers a local handyman (Vincent Spano) who is making some repairs on prison property, and seduces him. Then she makes him an offer. She will give him her inheritance, $5,000, if he will marry her and help her be paroled. He agrees, and that leads to another good series of scenes, as these two incompatible people form an unlikely and apparently unworkable couple.
The whole middle stretch of And God Created Woman is good, in part because De Mornay and Spano work so effectively together, and partly because Vadim tells the story efficiently and has a good story to tell. De Mornay plays a young woman who knows her own mind, firmly and without question. Although she had sex with Spano in prison, she won’t sleep with him now: “This is business,” she explains. He’s astonished. She is, too, when she discovers Spano already has a family; he lives with a son and a kid brother. Then she makes adjustments, although Spano remains angry that she’d rather rehearse for a rock band than get a day job or keep house.
Meanwhile, she meets Langella again, and gets publicity as the deserving kid he has helped to rehabilitate. The two of them flirt, have a brief affair, and then separate after Langella’s wife (Judith Chapman) suspects something. And then—the movie has gotten pretty dumb by this point—there’s the threat that De Mornay will have to go back to jail, and then a dramatic moment at a political rally, and then, of course, the heartwarming ending.
Movies like this frustrate me because they do not have enough ambition to match their imagination. De Mornay and Spano have created two very interesting characters, in the reform-school girl and the carpenter who’s trying to be a single father. Why did this plot, and these people, need the mechanical manipulation of the plot about the politician, his wife, and the melodramatic events of the last reel? Wasn’t there a story here already?
I think so. De Mornay brings so much to this performance that it lifts off the screen and threatens to redeem the bankrupt plot. She makes the character live, and Spano is just as good, creating a whole world of hard work and pickup trucks, mortgage payments and romantic confusion. In a movie like this, people are enough. The experience of De Mornay and Spano simply learning to talk to one another is more dramatic than the whole showdown at the political rally. In fact, the characters they create are so convincing that I resented seeing them manipulated by the rigid requirements of the plot: The young woman has broken out of one prison, only to find herself in another.
Is this a movie worth seeing? Sort of. You have to put the plot on hold, and overlook the contrivances of the last half hour, and find a way to admire how De Mornay plays the big scene, even while despising the scene itself. If you can do that, you’ll find good work here—even by Vadim, who may have been as trapped by the plot as everyone else. Now that they’ve remade the title, I have an even better idea. They should remake the movie. Not the first one; this one.
Anna and the King
(Directed by Andy Tennant; starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat; 1999)
King Mongkut of Siam is one of the slimiest characters in fiction, and Anna Leonowens, the English schoolmarm who tries to civilize him, one of the smarmiest. Here is a man with twenty-three wives and forty-two concubines who allows one of his women and her lover to be put to death for exchanging a letter. And here is Anna, who spends her days in flirtation with the king, but won’t sleep with him because—well, because he isn’t white, I guess. Certainly not because he has countless other wives and is a murderer.
Why is she so attracted to the king in the first place? Henry Kissinger has helpfully explained that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Mongkut has it—in Siam, anyway. Why is he attracted to her? Because she stands up to him and even tells him off. Inside every sadist is a masochist, cringing to taste his own medicine.
The unwholesome undercurrents of the story of Anna and the King of Siam have nagged at me for years, through many ordeals of sitting through the stage and screen versions of The King and I, which is surely the most cheerless of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals. The story is not intended to be thought about. It is an exotic escapist entertainment for matinee ladies, who can fantasize about sex with that intriguing bald monster, and indulge their harem fantasies. There is no reason for any man to ever see the play.
Now here is a straight dramatic version of the material, named Anna and the King, and starring Jodie Foster opposite the Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat. It is long and mostly told in the same flat monotone, but has one enormous advantage over the musical: It does not contain “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” The screenplay has other wise improvements on the source material. The king, for example, says “and so on and on” only once, and “et cetera” not at all. And there is only one occasion when he tells Anna her head cannot be higher than his. Productions of the stage musical belabor this last point so painfully they should be staged in front of one of those police lineups with feet and inches marked on it.
Jodie Foster’s performance projects a strange aura. Here is an actress meant to play a woman who is in love, and she seems subtly uncomfortable with that fate. I think I know why. Foster is not only a wonderful actor but an intelligent one—one of our smartest. There are few things harder for an actor to do than play beneath their intelligence. Oh, they can play dumb people who are supposed to be dumb. But it is almost impossible to play a dumb person who is supposed to be smart, and that’s what she has to do as Anna.
She arrives in Siam, a widow with a young boy, and finds herself in the realm of this egotistical sexual monster with a palace full of women. Yes, he is charming; Hitler is said to have been charming, and so, of course, was Hannibal Lecter. She must try to educate the king’s children (sixty-eight, I think I heard) and at the same time civilize him by the British standards of the time, which were racist, imperialist, and jingoistic, but frowned on chaining women in the rain until they surrendered.
