I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 24
Jack: “No, I da snowman!”
Eventually the snowman has to leave again—a fairly abrupt development announced with the cursory line, “It’s time for me to go . . . get on with your life.” By this time the snowman’s secret is known not only to his son but to his wife (Kelly Preston), who takes a phone call from her dead husband with what, under the circumstances, can only be described as extreme aplomb. At the end, the human Jack Frost materializes again, inside swirling fake snow, and tells his wife and son, “If you ever need me, I’m right here.” And Charlie doesn’t even ask, “What about on a hot day?”
The Jackal
(Directed by Michael Caton-Jones; starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier; 1997)
The Jackal is a glum, curiously flat thriller about a man who goes to a great deal of trouble in order to create a crime that anyone in the audience could commit more quickly and efficiently. An example: Can you think, faithful reader, of an easier way to sneak from Canada into the United States than by buying a sailboat and entering it in the Mackinaw-to-Chicago race? Surely there must be an entry point somewhere along the famous 3,000-mile border that would attract less attention than the finish line of a regatta.
To be sure, the Jackal (for it is he) has the money to buy the boat. He is charging $70 million to assassinate the head of the FBI—half now, half payable on completion. He’s hired by the head of the Russian Mafia, who, like many a foreigner with extra change in his pocket, doesn’t realize he is being overcharged. There are guys right here in town, so I have heard, who would do a whack for ten grand and be happy to have the business.
The Jackal is based on the screenplay of Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 classic The Day of the Jackal. That was a film that impressed us with the depth of its expertise: We felt it knew exactly what it was talking about. The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.
Examples: In the Washington, D.C., subway system, the Jackal jumps across the tracks in front of a train, to elude his pursuers. The train stops, exchanges passengers, and pulls out of the station. Is it just possible, do you suppose, that in real life after a man jumps across the tracks, the train halts until the situation is sorted out?
Or, how about the scene where the Jackal parks his van in a garage, and paints the hatch handle with a deadly poison? One of his enemies touches the handle, convulses, and dies an agonizing death. Is that a good way to avoid attention? By being sure there’s a corpse on the ground next to your van?
Or, how about the scene early in the film where a fight breaks out on cue, and then stops immediately after a gunshot is fired? Bad handling of the extras here by the assistant director: Everybody in a bar doesn’t start or stop fighting at once. Even in the movies, there are always a few guys who delay before joining in, or want to land one last punch at the end. These barflies are as choreographed as dancing Cossacks.
The Jackal is played by Bruce Willis, as a skilled professional killer who hires a man to build him a remote-controlled precision gun mount. The man unwisely asks the kinds of questions that, in his business, are guaranteed to get you killed. Hint: If you should find yourself doing business with a man who wants to pay cash for a device to hold, move, and aim a rifle capable of firing 100 explosive rounds before the first one hits its target—hey, don’t go into a lot of speculation about what he may be planning to do with it.
On the Jackal’s trail is the deputy head of the FBI (Sidney Poitier), who enlists the help of an IRA terrorist (Richard Gere). The IRA man is a federal prisoner, released into Poitier’s custody to lead them to his lover, a Basque terrorist (Mathilda May), who knows what the Jackal looks like. The other major character is a Russian-born agent named Valentina (Diane Venora), whose character trait (singular) is that she lights a cigarette every time she is not already smoking one. I kept waiting for her to be killed, so that a last puff of smoke could drift from her dying lips as her fingers relaxed their grip on her lighter.
There was never a moment in The Jackal where I had the slightest confidence in the expertise of the characters. The Jackal strikes me as the kind of overachiever who, assigned to kill a mosquito, would purchase contraband insecticides from Iraq and bring them into the United States by hot-air balloon, distilling his drinking water from clouds and shooting birds for food.
Without giving away too much of the plot, I would like to register one dissent on the grounds of taste. There is a scene making a target out of a character clearly intended to be Hillary Clinton (hints: She is blonde, fiftyish, the wife of the president, and is dedicating the New Hope Children’s Hospital). The next time Bruce Willis or Richard Gere complains about the invasion of their privacy by the media, I hope someone remembers to ask them why their movie needed to show the first lady under fire.
Jaws the Revenge
(Directed by Joseph Sargent; starring Lorraine Gary, Michael Caine, Lance Guest; 1987)
Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one—a ripoff. And that’s a surprise, because the film is the fourth in a series that has served Universal Pictures long and well, and it stars Lorraine Gary, the wife of the studio’s chief executive officer. Wasn’t there someone in charge of assuring that the film was at least a passable thriller, however bad? I guess not.
The plot centers on the character of Ellen Brody, who, you may recall, was the wife of the Roy Scheider character in the first and second Jaws movies. Now she is a widow, and her son has his dad’s old job at the police department. The story opens at Christmas, as the son is eaten by a shark right off Martha’s Vineyard, while a children’s choir drowns out his screams with Christmas carols.
Mrs. Brody (Gary) flees in horror to the Bahamas, where her other son (Lance Guest) works as, you got it, a marine biologist. She pleads with him not to go into the water, but he argues that the great white shark has never been seen in warm waters. Not long after, the shark is seen, having made the trip from Martha’s Vineyard to the Bahamas in three days.
Mrs. Brody, meanwhile, falls in love with a local pilot (Michael Caine), and there is a subplot about how her son is jealous of this new man in his mother’s life. This jealousy, like every other plot device in the movie, is left unresolved at the end, but so what? The screenplay is simply a series of meaningless episodes of human behavior, punctuated by shark attacks.
Since we see so much of the shark in the movie, you’d think they would have built some good ones. They’ve had three earlier pictures for practice. But in some scenes the shark’s skin looks like canvas with acne, and in others all we see is an obviously fake shark head with lots of teeth. The shark models have so little movement that at times they seem to be supporting themselves on boats, instead of attacking them. Up until the ludicrous final sequence of the movie, the scariest creature in the film is an eel.
What happens at the end? Ellen Brody has become convinced that the shark is following her. It wants revenge against her entire family. Her friends pooh-pooh the notion that a shark could identify, follow, or even care about one individual human being, but I am willing to grant the point, for the benefit of the plot.
I believe that the shark wants revenge against Mrs. Brody. I do. I really do believe it. After all, her husband was one of the men who hunted this shark and killed it, blowing it to bits. And what shark wouldn’t want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it?
Here are some things, however, that I do not believe:
• That Mrs. Brody could be haunted by flashbacks to events where she was not present and that, in some cases, no survivors witnessed.
• That the movie would give us one shark attack as a dream sequence, have the hero wake up in a sweat, then give us a second shark attack, and then cut to the hero awake in bed, giving us the only thing worse than the old “it’s only a dream” routine, which is the old “is it a dream or not?” routine.
• That Mrs. Brody would commandeer a boat and sail out alone into the ocean to sacrifice herself to the shark, so that the killing could end. That Caine’s character could or would crash-land his airplane at sea so that he and two other men could swim to Mrs. Brody’s rescue.
• That after being trapped in a sinking airplane by the shark and disappearing under the water, Caine could survive the attack, swim to the boat, and climb on board—not only completely unhurt but wearing a shirt and pants that are not even wet.
• That the shark would stand on its tail in the water long enough for the boat to ram it.
• That the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence.
There is one other thing I can’t believe about Jaws the Revenge, and that is that on March 30, 1987, Michael Caine passed up his chance to accept his Academy Award in person because of his commitment to this movie. Why? Well, as the marine biologist in the movie explains, if you don’t go right back in the water after something terrible happens to you, you might be too afraid to ever go back in again. Maybe Caine was thinking that if he ever left the set, he could never bring himself to return.
The Jazz Singer
(Directed by Richard Fleischer; starring Neil Diamond, Lucie Arnaz, Laurence Olivier; 1980)
The Jazz Singer has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list. Let me start with the most obvious: This movie is about a man who is at least twenty years too old for such things to be happening to him. The Jazz Singer looks ridiculous giving us Neil Diamond going through an adolescent crisis.
The movie is a remake, of course, of Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer, which was the first commercially successful talking picture. The remake has played with time in an interesting way: It sets the story in the present, but it places the characters in some kind of time warp. Their behavior seems decades out of date, and some scenes are totally inexplicable in any context.
For example: In the film, Diamond plays a young Jewish cantor at his father’s synagogue. He is married, he has apparently settled down to a lifetime of religion. But he also writes songs for a black group. When one of the quartet gets sick, Diamond takes his place, appearing in a black nightclub in blackface. Oh yeah? This scene is probably supposed to be homage to Jolson’s blackface performance of Mammy in the original, but what it does in 1980 is get the movie off to an unintentionally hilarious start.
The bulk of the movie concerns Diamond’s decision to leave New York, his father, and his wife and go to Los Angeles, where he hopes to break into the music industry. This whole business of leaving the nest, of breaking the ties with his father, seems strange in a middle-aged character: Diamond is just too old to play these scenes. But no matter; the movie is ridiculous for lots of other reasons.
When he arrives in LA, for example, he’s instantly “discovered” in a recording studio by Lucie Arnaz, who plays an agent and is filled with energy and spunk—she’s the best thing in the movie. She thinks he has promise, so she gets him a job as the opening act for a comic. This gives Diamond a chance to sing, and his onstage appearances, I guess, are supposed to be the big deal in this movie. Because of that, the film sacrifices any attempt to present them realistically: For his West Coast debut as a warm-up for a comic, Diamond is backed up by dozens of onstage musicians, which look like the LA Philharmonic and, at union scale, would cost upward of $80,000. Sure.
The plot plods relentlessly onward. Laurence Olivier plays the aging father in the film, in a performance that seems based on that tortured German accent he also used in The Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man, and A Little Romance: Is it too much to hope that Sir Laurence will return to the English language sometime soon? Father and son fight, split, grudgingly meet again, hold a tearful reunion—all in scenes of deadly predictability.
One sequence that is not predictable has Neil Diamond abandoning the (now pregnant) Lucie Arnaz in order to hit the highway and become a road-show Kristofferson. This stretch of the film, with Diamond self-consciously lonely and hurting, is supposed to be affecting, but it misfires, it drips with so much narcissism.
But then Diamond’s whole presence in this movie is offensively narcissistic. His songs are melodramatic, interchangeable, self-aggrandizing groans and anguished shouts, backed protectively by expensive and cloying instrumentation. His dramatic presence also looks overprotected, as if nobody was willing to risk offending him by asking him to seem involved, caring, and engaged.
Diamond plays the whole movie looking at people’s third shirt buttons, as if he can’t be bothered to meet their eyes and relate with them. It’s strange about the Diamond performance: It’s not just that he can’t act. It’s that he sends out creepy vibes. He seems self-absorbed, closed off, grandiose, out of touch with his immediate surroundings. His fans apparently think Neil Diamond songs celebrate worthy human qualities. I think they describe conditions suitable for treatment.
Jennifer 8
(Directed by Bruce Robinson; starring Andy Garcia, Lance Henrickson, Uma Thurman; 1992)
Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the story line turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: “Hi! I’m the serial killer!” This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its tortuous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Somebody should have taken a hard look at the screenplay and decided that it wasn’t finished.
The movie stars Andy Garcia as a big-city detective who is recovering from a bad marriage with a cheating wife, and returns to the smaller city where his brother-in-law (Lance Henriksen) is a cop. Within minutes of his arrival, he’s digging through a garbage dump in search of body parts, and in no time flat he’s on the trail of a serial killer.
Deducing that a severed hand belonged to a blind person (yes, the fingertips are worn down from reading Braille) and that it was in a freezer for a long time, Garcia runs a computer search and discovers a pattern: Eight blind women have been killed and mutilated, all with .22 revolvers, within a 300-mile radius. (The fact that it takes a computer to discern this trend reminds me of the classic line from Fargo, “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”) This is obviously the work of a serial killer, Garcia announces, only to arouse the fury of the local cop (Graham Beckel) who was on the case of the original missing woman.
The movie turns into a police procedural as Garcia interviews the blind roommate (Uma Thurman) of one of the missing women. Before long they have fallen into a particularly unconvincing love affair; I didn’t believe it because Thurman, usually so alive in her roles, here interprets her character as a soggy zombie who occasionally musters a smile. At Christmas she gets all dressed up to go to a party, but retreats in tears to the bedroom after she loses her way and everybody talks loud at the same time. That wouldn’t stop any of the blind party animals I’ve known.
The movie has no insights about the blind, other than they benefit greatly from talking alarm clocks and don’t need any lightbulbs in their bedrooms. Blindness is simply another plot gimmick in a movie with so many it can hardly remember what corner it’s currently cutting. Like many needlessly complicated movies, it plays long—real long—and it’s a relief when John Malkovich appears, at about the ninety-minute mark, playing an FBI man (I think) who accuses Garcia of murder.
The murder in question has to be seen to be believed. One cop climbs a fire escape into a building where he suspects the killer is hiding. He tells his partner, “If anyone comes down this fire escape but me, shoot.” Somebody else comes down the fire escape, shining a flashlight into the eyes of the other cop, who of course stands in full view to make himself a better target, and does not shoot. Even movie cops should be smarter than that.
And then there is the big climax, a red herring of truly startling proportions, indicating that the movie is willing to cheat, lie, and defraud to get a cheap thrill. The audience simply laughed in disbelief. Jennifer 8 has aspirations to be a cross between the murderer-next-door thriller and the Pathology Picture, so named because everybody stands around making hard-boiled comments about body parts (my favorite: A cop, examining a corpse at the dump, asks, “How long has he been feeling like this?”).
The cast in this movie has been outstanding in other movies; in addition to Garcia, Thurman, Malkovich, and Henriksen (The Stepfather), there’s Kathy Baker as the sister-in-law, plucky and determined, and even Kevin Conway as a police chief. It was quite an achievement to assemble them into one picture, but my guess is they’ll skip the reunions.
Joe’s Apartment
(Directed by John Payson; starring Jerry O’Connell, Megan Ward, Robert Vaughn; 1996)
I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe’s Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production. I do not like cockroaches, and I wonder if they even like themselves. Although it is said that after a nuclear holocaust they would inherit the earth, my guess is they would still scurry out of sight even when there was no one left to see them.
Joe’s Apartment would be a very bad comedy even without the roaches, but it would not be a disgusting one. No, wait: I take that back. Even without the roaches, we would still have the subplot involving the pink disinfectant urinal cakes. Not everybody’s cup of tea.
My standards are not inflexible. There is a scene in Trainspotting in which the hero dives headfirst into the filthiest toilet in Scotland, and I actually enjoyed that scene (you would have to see the movie to understand why). But when we arrived at the tender little scene in Joe’s Apartment where the roaches were tugging at his eyelashes to wake him up, I easily contained my enthusiasm.
