I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 23
I dunno. The movie was directed by Neil Jordan, who has done a whole lot better (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire). Here he navigates uncertainly through a script that is far too large for its container. Whole subplots could have been dumped; why even bother with the other woman in Australia? Although the drowned village supplies some vivid images, wasn’t it a huge expense just for some atmosphere? And how many viewers will be able to follow the time-shifted parallels as Claire’s escape from a hospital is intercut with the killer’s?
In my dreams, I’m picturing Tony Lawson’s first day on the job. He was the editor of this picture. His survey of the unassembled footage must have been the real horror story.
In Praise of Older Women
(Directed by George Kaczender; starring Tom Berenger, Karen Black, Susan Strasberg; 1977)
In all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones . . . because they have greater knowledge of the world.
So says noted kite-flyer Benjamin Franklin, quoted on the first page of Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women. He may be right. He invented bifocals, after all. But his advice has a built-in male chauvinist flaw, since it assumes that the greater knowledge possessed by older women is not sufficient to warn them away from younger men. This is (we must be fair) a movie clearly inspired by its title. It is in favor of older women, with a top age, I should judge, of about forty. Maybe forty-three. The women pass through the life of Tom Berenger, who plays a Hungarian philosophy teacher who emigrates to Canada. Both Hungary and Canada have their share of older women, who emigrate to Berenger as if he were going out of style, if he had any. He’s a kinda pleasant kid, soft-spoken, with a grateful grin that he has to employ again and again in this movie. Older women can’t get enough of him.
And that’s the problem with the movie: It’s not about sexual encounters with older women, it’s simply the record of them. He keeps running into older women, and having affairs with them, and moving on, and learning nothing. It may well be, as Ben Franklin promises, that older women have greater knowledge of the world, but in this movie, they’re canny, and keep it to themselves. The Berenger character isn’t a young student of life that they can tutor; he’s a heaven-sent one-night stand.
This whole business of older women and younger men is a big deal right now. Another quickly forgettable new movie, Players, also deals with the theme. But it cheats: Ali MacGraw may sleep with Dean-Paul Martin in the movie, and she may be, according to the screenplay, twelve years older than he is, but she isn’t an older woman, for Pete’s sake—she’s Ali MacGraw.
Same problem with In Praise of Older Women. The older women include Karen Black and Susan Strasberg and a Canadian actress named Helen Shaver. Older women? Big deal. I had a pizza with Helen Shaver at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and she wasn’t an older woman then. The movie’s basically just a series of soft-core sex scenes tied together by the hero’s gratitude. It’s not about anything. Berenger has a neat way with his licentious grin, something like Albert Finney’s in Tom Jones, and that’s about it. There are no insights into the relationships involved, no efforts to make the characters into people, no mornings after. No wonder he’s so filled with praise.
And yet the movie’s doing business, maybe because the title is sensational. I saw it up near the Loyola campus, where the students no doubt consider thirty-three-year-olds to be older women, and I had the benefit of a running commentary from the two jocks sitting behind me. “She’s neat,” they agreed, after Susan Strasberg appeared on the screen. “She’s cool,” they agreed about Alexandra Stewart. “She’s nice,” they agreed about Marilyn Lightstone. “She’s neat,” they agreed about Marianne McIsaac. That’s the trouble with younger men. They’re so quick to praise.
In the Army Now
(Directed by Daniel Petrie, Jr.; starring Pauly Shore, Andy Dick; 1994)
We were about halfway into In the Army Now when I realized the movie’s secret ambition, which is to be nice. It’s a movie about a misfit who finds himself in the army—the kind of setup that lends itself to the barbed satire of the Bill Murray movie Stripes. I was waiting for the barbs and they weren’t coming and to my amazement I realized the movie wanted basically to be an innocent, childlike adventure.
The star is Pauly Shore, a curly-haired comedian who comes across like a skinny Richard Simmons and whose characters are never the slightest bit brighter than the screenplay absolutely demands. He plays an incompetent clerk in an electronics store who gets fired and decides, with his buddy Jack (Andy Dick) to join the Army Reserves—because, hey, after all, they like pay you money for like doing practically nothing, right?
The movie comes to life during a basic training sequence in which the boys draw a sexy female drill sergeant (Lynn Whitfield). The biggest laugh comes after she adjusts a trainee’s uniform and Shore quickly dishevels his own, so she’ll tug on his pants, too. The scene doesn’t have a payoff, but, hey, the setup is fun. Shore and Dick join Lori Petty and David Alan Grier on a water purification team, and are amazed when a crisis breaks out in Liberia, and they find themselves in the middle of a potentially deadly situation.
The screenplay, work by five writers, based on a story by three others, is by a committee and about a committee; the most-used phrase of dialogue is, “Hey, you guys!” The bad guys are of course all Arabs, Hollywood’s flavor of the year in villains. But they aren’t really bad, because the movie doesn’t care that much. Most of the war scenes consist of the four heroes slogging through the sand enchanging rueful one-liners and low-key observations. I was waiting for comedy and got whimsy.
The movie clocks in at ninety-two minutes, not time enough to explain why the Arabs didn’t notice anything when U.S. troops parachuted two dune buggies, machine guns, and supplies to Shore and his buddies, immediately outside an enemy camp. Nor time enough to explain such strange details as the Petty character’s conviction that if you tear off a shirtsleeve you can use it to carry water in.
I guess maybe the point of the Pauly Shore character is that he’s cool and unengaged most of the time. Bombs are exploding all around him, but he’s laid-back and doesn’t let anything get to him. Instead of laughs, we get to see him having a good time. Lost in the desert, he has lines like, “We are the few, the proud, the water boys.” As they slog through the sand, a vulture follows them, and eventually I began to identify with the vulture, which seemed to be hanging around in case anyone thought of any vulture jokes.
Instinct
(Directed by Jon Turteltaub; starring Cuba Gooding, Jr., Donald Sutherland, Anthony Hopkins; 1999)
If there’s anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it’s a movie made from the scraps of good ones. At least with the trash we don’t have to suffer through the noble intentions. Instinct is a film with not one but four worthy themes. It has pious good thoughts about all of them, but undermines them by slapping on obligatory plot requirements, thick. Nothing happens in this movie that has not been sanctioned by long usage in better films.
This is a film about (1) why Man should learn to live in harmony with Nature; (2) how prison reform is necessary; (3) how fathers can learn to love their children; and (4) why it is wrong to imprison animals in zoos. It doesn’t free the beasts from their cages, but it’s able to resolve the other three issues—unconvincingly, in a rush of hokey final scenes.
Instinct, directed by John Turteltaub (Phenomenon), is all echoes. It gives us Anthony Hopkins playing a toned-down version of Hannibal Lector, Cuba Gooding, Jr., reprising his nice-guy professional from As Good As It Gets, Donald Sutherland once again as the wise and weary sage, and John Ashton (you’ll recognize him) as a man who is hateful for no better reason than that the plot so desperately needs him to be. Oh, and the settings are borrowed from Gorillas in the Mist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The movie’s just so darned uplifting and clunky, as it shifts from one of its big themes to another while groaning under the weight of heartfelt speeches. The photography labors to make it look big and important, and the music wants to be sad and uplifting at the same time, as if to say it’s a sad world but that’s not entirely our fault.
Hopkins stars as Ethan Powell, an anthropologist who went missing in 1994 in an African jungle, and surfaced two years later while murdering two rangers and injuring three others. After a year in chains, he’s returned to the United States and locked up in a brutal psycho ward. His interrogation is set to be conducted by an eminent psychiatrist (Donald Sutherland), who instead assigns his famous prisoner to Theo Caulder (Gooding), a student just completing his final year of residency. Why give this juicy patient to a kid who admits he wants to write a best-seller about him? Because Cuba Gooding is the star of the movie, that’s why, and Donald Sutherland, who cannot utter a word that doesn’t sound like God’s truth, always has to play the expert who waits in an oak-paneled study, passing around epigrams and brandy.
Powell’s hair and beard make him look like the wild man of Borneo—with reason, since he lived with a family of gorillas in the jungle. He has been mute since the murders, but Caulder thinks he can get him to talk—and can he ever. Hopkins faces one of his greatest acting challenges, portraying a character who must seem reluctant to utter a single word while nevertheless issuing regular philosophical lectures. “I lived as humans lived 10,000 years ago,” he explains. “Humans knew how to live then.” Even 10,000 years ago, don’t you suppose humans were giving gorillas lots of room?
Caulder believes that if he can get Powell to talk about what he did, and why, he can “get him out of there.” No matter that Powell did kill two men; to understand is to forgive. In his struggle to comprehend his patient, Caulder meets Powell’s bitter daughter (Maura Tierney, in a good performance). She is angry with her father. Her father doesn’t want to talk about her. “Leave it,” he snaps, menacingly. What dire issues stand between them? The movie disappoints us with a reconciliation that plays like a happy ending on the Family Channel. One should always have time for one’s children, Powell learned (from the gorillas).
The prison is a snake pit of brutality, run by cruel guards and presided over by a sadistic warden and a weak psychiatrist. Each man is supposed to get thirty minutes a day outdoors. Because this is too much trouble, the guards hand out cards, and the man with the Ace of Diamonds gets to go outside. The toughest prisoner beats up anyone who won’t give him the card. Dr. Caulder sees that this is wrong, and institutes a fair lottery, over the objections of the sadistic guards, but with the prisoners chanting their support. The entire business of the Ace of Diamonds, which occupies perhaps twenty minutes, is agonizingly obvious, contrived, and manipulative; the prison population, colorful weirdos of the Cuckoo’s Nest variety, responds with enthusiastic overacting.
Ethan Powell, of course, sees through the entire system. Superhumanly strong and violent, he puts Caulder through a brief but painful education in the laws of the wild. What he is able to do at the end of the film, and where he is finally able to do it, I leave you to explain, since the film certainly cannot. I also have the gravest doubts about the thank-you note from Powell, which reads not like something that would be written by a man who had lived with the gorillas and killed two men, but by a marketing expert concerned that audiences feel real good when they leave the theater.
Ishtar
(Directed by Elaine May; starring Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman; 1987)
It’s hard to play dumb. There’s always the danger that a little fugitive intelligence will sneak out of a sideways glance and give the game away. The best that can be said for Ishtar is that Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, two of the most intelligent actors of their generation, play dumb so successfully that on the basis of this film there’s no evidence why they’ve made it in the movies.
Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multimillion-dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch. And Beatty and Hoffman, good soldiers marching along on the trip, look as if they’ve had all wit and thought beaten out of them. This movie is a long, dry slog. It’s not funny, it’s not smart, and it’s interesting only in the way a traffic accident is interesting.
The plot involves the two stars as ninth-rate songwriters who dream of becoming Simon and Garfunkel. They perform bad songs badly before appalled audiences. Their agent gets them a gig in Morocco, and once in Northern Africa, they become involved in the political intrigues of the mythical nation of Ishtar. Isabelle Adjani plays the sexy rebel who leads them down the garden path, and dependable Charles Grodin supplies the movie’s only laughs as the resident CIA man.
The movie cannot be said to have a plot. It exists more as a series of cumbersome set pieces, such as the long, pointless sequence in the desert that begins with jokes about blind camels and ends with Hoffman and Beatty firing machine guns at a helicopter. It probably is possible to find humor in blind camels and helicopter gunfights, but this movie leaves the question open.
As I was watching Ishtar, something kept nagging at the back of my memory. I absorbed Hoffman and Beatty, their tired eyes, their hollow laughs, their palpable physical weariness as they marched through situations that were funny only by an act of faith. I kept thinking that I’d seen these performances elsewhere, that the physical exhaustion, the vacant eyes, and the sagging limbs added up to a familiar acting style.
Then I remembered. The movie was reminding me of the works of Robert Bresson, the great, austere French director who had a profound suspicion of actors. He felt they were always trying to slip their own energy, their own asides, their own “acting” into his movies. So he rehearsed them tirelessly, fifty or sixty times for every shot, until they were past all thought and caring. And then, when they were zombies with the strength to do only what he required, and nothing more, he was satisfied.
That’s what I got out of Beatty and Hoffman in Ishtar. There’s no hint of Hoffman’s wit and intelligence in Tootsie, no suggestion of Beatty’s grace and good humor in Heaven Can Wait, no chemistry between two actors who should be enjoying the opportunity to act together. No life.
I don’t know if Ishtar was clearly a disaster right from the first, but on the evidence of this film, I’d guess it quickly became a doomed project and that going to the set every morning was more like a sentence than an opportunity. It’s said this movie cost more than $40 million. At some point, maybe they should have spun off a million each for Hoffman and Beatty, supplied them with their own personal camera crews, and allowed them to use their spare time making documentaries about what they were going through.
Jack Frost
(Directed by Troy Miller; starring Michael Keaton, Joseph Cross, Kelly Preston; 1998)
Jack Frost is the kind of movie that makes you want to take the temperature, if not feel for the pulse, of the filmmakers. What possessed anyone to think this was a plausible idea for a movie? It’s a bad film, yes, but that’s not the real problem. Jack Frost could have been codirected by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg and still be unwatchable, because of that damned snowman.
The snowman gave me the creeps. Never have I disliked a movie character more. They say state-of-the-art special effects can create the illusion of anything on the screen, and now we have proof: It’s possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light and Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects, and I am not forgetting the Chucky doll or the desert intestine from Star Wars.
To see the snowman is to dislike the snowman. It doesn’t look like a snowman, anyway. It looks like a cheap snowman suit. When it moves, it doesn’t exactly glide—it walks, but without feet, like it’s creeping on its torso. It has anorexic tree limbs for arms, which spin through 360 degrees when it’s throwing snowballs. It has a big, wide mouth that moves as if masticating Gummi Bears. And it’s this kid’s dad.
Yes, little Charlie (Joseph Cross) has been without a father for a year, since his dad (Michael Keaton) was killed—on Christmas Day, of course. A year later, Charlie plays his father’s magic harmonica (“If you ever need me . . .”) and his father turns up as the snowman.
Think about that. It is an astounding fact. The snowman on Charlie’s front lawn is a living, moving creature inhabited by the personality of his father. It is a reflection of the lame-brained screenplay that despite having a sentient snowman, the movie casts about for plot fillers, including a school bully, a chase scene, snowball fights, a hockey team, an old family friend to talk to mom—you know, stuff to keep up the interest between those boring scenes when the snowman is talking.
What do you ask a snowman inhabited by your father? After all, dad’s been dead a year. What’s it like on the other side? Is there a heaven? Big Bang or steady state? When will the NBA strike end? Elvis—dead? What’s it like standing out on the lawn in the cold all night? Ever meet any angels? Has anybody else ever come back as a snowman? Do you have to eat? If you do, then what? Any good reporter could talk to that snowman for five minutes and come back with some great quotes.
But Charlie, self-centered little movie child, is more concerned with how Jack Frost (his father’s real name) can help him. His dad has been dead for a year and comes back as a snowman and all he can think of is using the snowman to defeat the school bully in a snowball fight. Also, the kid tries to keep dad from melting. (What kind of a half-track miracle is it if a snowman can talk, but it can’t keep from melting?) Does the snowman have any advice for his son? Here is a typical conversation:
Jack Frost: “You da man!”
Charlie: “No, you da man!”
