I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 26
Larger than Life
(Directed by Howard Franklin; starring Bill Murray, Linda Fiorentino, Janeane Garofalo; 1996)
Curious, how in such a disappointing comedy, Bill Murray manages to dash off a hilarious warm-up. The opening scenes of Larger than Life, showing him as a third-rate motivational speaker, are right on target, with one zinger after another aimed at after-dinner speakers who promise to remake your life with touchy-feely slogans.
Murray plays Jack Corcoran, whose trademark slogan is “Get Over It!” He shows a banquet crowd how to unleash its hidden abilities by calling for volunteers to make a human pyramid. His clients include the American Motion Upholstery Assn. (reclining chairs), but his agents promise him some bigger fees, real soon. Meanwhile, he’s preparing to get married, urged on by his mom (Anita Gillette), who has always told him his father drowned while saving helpless children.
Not true. A telegram arrives informing him of his father’s death. “You mean I had a father all these years?” he wails, and his mother explains she left her husband because he was “irresponsible.” Maybe he was. The old man was a circus clown. Jack’s inheritance includes a pile of bills and a trained elephant named Vera.
Most of Larger than Life involves Jack’s attempts to move Vera entirely across the United States, to California, where the elephant will end up either as the victim of a sadistic animal trainer (Linda Fiorentino) or as part of a breeding herd being shipped to Sri Lanka by an environmental activist (Janeane Garofalo).
The formula for road movies, even those involving elephants, includes colorful characters encountered along the way, and two of the bright spots in a dim screenplay are provided by an old carny named Vernon (Pat Hingle) and his tattooed wife Luluna (Lois Smith). They knew and loved Jack’s father, and teach Jack some commands which (sometimes) make Vera perform an amazing repertory of tricks. They also advise him to avoid the straight life and become a carny, not a rube.
Jack’s adventures with transporting Vera include a train journey, followed by an attempt to maneuver a semitrailer truck. And we meet Tip Tucker (Matthew McConaughey), a manic semi owner-operator with weird theories about everything in American society, especially school lunch programs. He pursues Jack and Vera cross-country after they misuse his truck. At the end of the journey, Jack has to decide between the circus and the zoo for Vera—and, in a way, for himself.
The materials are here to make a good comedy, I guess. The screenplay is by Roy Blount, Jr., a funny writer. But the energy isn’t there. Murray often chooses to play a laid-back, detached character, but this time he’s so detached he’s almost absent. He chooses to work in a low key, and the other actors, in matching his energy level, make a movie that drones instead of hums. Comedy is often about people who are passionately frustrated in goals they’re convinced are crucial. Here Jack hardly seems to care, as he and Vera mosey along cross-country, bemused rather than bedazzled by their adventures.
The sad thing is, there are the fixings for another comedy, probably a much better one, right there in the opening scenes. Motivational speakers are ripe for satire. The bookshelves groan with self-improvement volumes, all promising to explain the problems of your universe, and their solution, in a few well-chosen rules. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its “self-help” section: “For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history, and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”
Murray’s portrait of an inspirational speaker is right on target, and filled out with lots of subtle touches of movement and dialogue, and there is humor, too, in the way his audiences will go along with his insane schemes (like the human pyramid), as if being able to balance three people on your back would solve your problems at work. This whole section of the movie is inspired; Murray should star in the movie of The Dilbert Principle.
As for the elephant portions of the movie: They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.
The Last Movie
(Directed by Dennis Hopper; starring Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson; 1972)
Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie is a wasteland of cinematic wreckage. There are all sorts of things you can say about it, using easy critical words to describe it as undisciplined, incoherent, a structural mess. But mostly it’s just plain pitiful. Hopper hasn’t even been able to cover his tracks; the failure of his intentions is nakedly obvious. Near the movie’s end there’s a pathetic scene in which he sits, half-stoned, dazed, confused, and says the hell with it. It feels like he means it.
In Hollywood, they talk about movies and performances being “saved on the Green Machine.” They mean the editing process, when a skilled editor can take mixed-up footage and somehow give a meaning and structure to it. Movies are such a suggestive art form that a good editor can forget about the gaps and chasms in a story line and convince moviegoers—before their very eyes!—that it all somehow fits together.
Based on the evidence in this cut of The Last Movie, every possible effort was made to save the project after Hopper finally returned from Peru with his hours of footage. The plan seems to have been to make the movie look like Easy Rider, whenever possible, and hope the counterculture would get behind it. Well, that didn’t work but I wonder if anything would have worked.
The story line (if you’ll permit me to be linear in the face of the movie’s fragmentation) concerns a Hollywood cowboy extra who stays behind after a B-Western crew has finished filming a potboiler. He shacks up with a girl he’s met, gets involved in a dazed search for gold, passes some time with the local American expatriates, and then he becomes the unwitting star in a “movie” that the local Indians make on the Western sets that were left behind.
It appears from the evidence on the screen that the movie’s events were originally intended to unfold in chronological order. But it didn’t work out that way. Hopper’s gold-mining expedition, for example, is duly announced. But then we get a lyrical sequence of silhouettes against the sunset, trucks driving into the dusk, small figures in a vast landscape, etc., while a suitable song is performed on the sound track. And that is the gold-mining expedition.
After they get back, however, there’s a scene where they try to talk the rich Americans into backing them—and this scene is done in a realistic tone, with lots of dialogue and everything. Then, at the movie’s end, there’s a flashback to a campfire scene on the gold-hunting expedition. This scene, done in the style and mood of the pot-inspired campfire scene in Easy Rider, has the two prospectors reveal that they learned about gold mining by watching Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Fine. The easy, stoned absurdity of the scene reminds us of Jack Nicholson and his warnings about flying saucers in Easy Rider. But if we watch the scene like cinematic archaeologists, we sense the invisible presence of the Green Machine. My notion is that an entire gold-seeking expedition was filmed, and then not used; that the pastoral photography was put in to paper over the hole in the plot, and that the campfire scene was then salvaged and stuck in at the end to give the necessary mood lift before the movie’s downer conclusion.
All of this—the fancy photography, the fragmented editing, the series of expensive performers, and high-royalty songs—is just an elaborate rescue attempt. There are also all sorts of guest appearances by Hopper’s friends, who flew down to the big doings on the Peru location: The Last Movie almost becomes the drug culture’s Around the World in 80 Days.
The idea, I guess, is that we’re supposed to understand that if Peter Fonda and John Phillip Law and everybody had such a dandy time, and if the movie thumbs its nose at making any sense and if Hopper throws us off the scent by using title cards that say “scene missing” and if he leaves in clapboards and puts in a jolly handwritten “The End!” when the movie’s over, why, then, The Last Movie must exist on many levels, some of them droll, some significant, some intended as kind of an underground telegram to users.
I dunno. Audiences and especially the young audience this movie is aimed for (or at) aren’t going for the old razzle-dazzle so much anymore. They’ve played against too much of it. Hip directors aren’t getting away with the fast break and the downcourt pass from nowhere: audiences are playing a more defensive game, and for The Last Movie they may even have to go into a man-to-man.
Last Rites
(Directed by Donald P. Bellisario; starring Tom Berenger, Dane Clark; 1988)
This is it, located at last and with only six weeks to spare—the worst film of 1988. Last Rites qualifies because it passes both acid tests: It is not only bad filmmaking, but it is offensive as well—offensive to my intelligence. Many films are bad. Only a few declare themselves the work of people deficient in taste, judgment, reason, tact, morality, and common sense. Was there no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film, and vomited?
The movie begins with the following premise: Handsome young Father Michael Pace (Tom Berenger) is an assistant priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. His father, Carlo Pace (Dane Clark) is the godfather of the New York Mafia. The movie opens with Michael’s sister, Zena (Anne Twomey) catching her husband with his mistress and shooting him. She’s a pretty good shot. The first shot castrates him, the second one kills him. Then she goes to Father Michael to confess her sin.
The sacrament of confession is handled throughout this movie as a cheap gimmick, without the slightest evidence that any of the characters or filmmakers understand how it works. But never mind. I mention that the sister goes to her brother to make a confession because the movie is inept at storytelling. Unless you are very clever or perhaps psychic, you will actually not catch on until late in the movie that Father Michael is even related to Don Carlo or to Zena. The movie isn’t keeping it a secret; it’s simply so slipshod that this crucial information is not clearly supplied.
The husband’s mistress is named Angela (Daphne Zuniga). After she escapes from the bloodbath of revenge, she finds herself sheltered and comforted by none other than Father Michael, who believes her story that she is a simple Mexican girl who got into some very deep water. Zuniga’s Mexican accent is so unbelievably bad it wouldn’t even qualify for a Taco Bell ad. No one could possibly believe she is really a Mexican—except perhaps in this movie, which is so witless that you’re inclined to give the accent the benefit of the doubt. (The linguistic depths of the movie are murky indeed; Don Carlo pronounces his name, Pace, to sound like “pa-chay,” but young Michael makes it rhyme with “race.” Thus, of course, at a crucial moment a character does not realize they are related.)
Michael and Angela fall in love, after Michael moves her into his bachelor quarters inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. You might ask how a priest could live with a woman inside a cathedral without being noticed, but the cathedral seems to be severely understaffed, and the only other priest in view is genial old Father Freddie (Paul Dooley), who stutters a lot and waxes philosophical. In order to handle the tricky challenge of a love scene between the priest and the young woman, the writer-director, Donald P. Bellisario, gives us an extended erotic sequence and then reveals it was only a dream. Of course, after the “dream,” both characters subsequently change in their behavior toward each other as if they had really made love, the movie being so dishonest that it eats its cake and has it, too.
There are “secrets” in this movie that will gnaw at your credibility, “revelations” that are either (a) not surprises, or (b) completely implausible. The plot is a feverish scavenger hunt through lurid melodrama, impossible coincidence, shocking exploitation of the religious material, utter disregard for the audience, and a cheerful contempt for the talented actors—who have the right, I think, not to be made fools of.
Although Bellisario makes pious bleats in his press releases about the moral crisis faced by his hero in the movie, let’s face it: This movie was made in order to give us a love affair between a priest and a sexy woman. The other stuff—making the Mafia look noble, putting in lots of bloody special effects—are bonuses. Ask yourself this simple question: Would Last Rites have been financed if the priest had resisted all temptations and remained chaste until the end? Are there stars in the sky? Does a bear shine his shoes in the woods?
Lawn Dogs
(Directed by John Duigan; starring Mischa Barton, Christopher McDonald, Kathleen Quinlan; 1998)
John Duigan’s Lawn Dogs is like a nasty accident at the symbol factory. Pieces are scattered all over the floor, as the wounded help each other to the exits. Some of the pieces look well made, and could be recycled. We pick up a few of them, and them together, to see if they’ll fit. But they all seem to come from different designs.
The movie isn’t clear about what it’s trying to say—what it wants us to believe when we leave. It has the form of a message picture, without the message. It takes place in an upscale Kentucky housing development named Camelot Gardens, where the $300,000 homes sit surrounded by big lawns and no trees. It’s a gated community; the security guard warns one of the “lawn dogs”—or yard workers—to be out of town by 5 P.M.
In one of the new houses lives ten-year-old Devon (Mischa Barton), who has a scar running down her chest after heart surgery. Her insipid parents are Morton (Christopher McDonald) and Clare (Kathleen Quinlan). Trent plans to run for office. Clare has casual sex with local college kids. And Trent (Sam Rockwell) mows their lawn.
Devon is in revolt, although she doesn’t articulate it as interestingly as the heroine of Welcome to the Dollhouse. She wanders beyond the gates, finds Trent’s trailer home in the woods, and becomes his friend. There are unrealized undertones of sexuality in her behavior, which the movie never makes overt, except in the tricky scene where she asks Trent to touch her scar. He has a scar, too; here’s a new version of you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
The people inside Camelot Gardens are all stupid pigs. That includes the security guard, the parents, and the college kids, who insult and bully Trent. Meanwhile, Trent and Devon spend idyllic afternoons in the woods, being friends, until there is a tragic misunderstanding that leads to the death of a dog and even more alarming consequences.
Nobody makes it into the movie just as an average person. Trent’s dad is a Korean vet whose lungs were destroyed by microbes in the K rations, and who is trying to give away his American flag collection. Trent is the kind of guy who stops traffic on a one-lane bridge while he strips, drives into the river, and walks back to his pickup boldly nude. Devon is the kind of little girl who crawls out onto her roof, throws her nightgown into the sky, and utters wild dog cries at the moon.
All of these events happen with the precision and vivid detail of a David Lynch movie, but I do not know why. It is easy to make a film about people who are pigs and people who are free spirits, but unless you show how or why they got that way, they’re simply characters you’ve created. It’s easy to have Devon say, “I don’t like kids—they smell like TV.” But what does this mean when a ten-year-old says it? It’s easy to show good people living in trailers and awful people living in nice homes, but it can work out either way. It’s easy to write a father who wants his little girl to have plastic surgery so her scar won’t turn off boys, and then a boy who thinks it’s “cool.” But where is it leading? What is it saying? Camelot Gardens is a hideous place to live. So? Get out as fast as you can.
Little Giants
(Directed by Duwayne Dunham; starring Ed O’Neill, Rick Moranis; 1994)
Just yesterday I was cleaning out the office and I threw away a paperback by Sid Field, the famous Hollywood screenplay coach. Field is the man who is largely responsible for that strange feeling you may have had lately, that every movie seems to be about the same. The characters, locations, and gimmicks may change—but the story structure is right out of the book.
Field teaches screenwriting workshops. The workshops don’t seem able to teach you how to write like yourself, but they sure are able to teach you how to write like everyone else. At a time when Hollywood is bashful about originality, it’s a real career asset to be able to write clone screenplays.
Look at Little Giants, written by James Ferguson, Robert Shallcross, Tommy Swerdlow, and Michael Goldberg. What do you mean, it’s one of the stupidest movies you’ve seen? It got sold, didn’t it? And it got made, didn’t it? So that makes it a success, doesn’t it?
It’s mind-boggling to reflect that this screenplay actually involved work by four writers. It’s such a small achievement, their division of labor must have resembled splitting the atom. I don’t have any idea if Ferguson, Shallcross, Swerdlow, and Goldberg have ever attended one of Field’s workshops. Maybe they didn’t need to. Working in two platoons, they have skillfully removed all vestiges of originality from this story, and turned in a perfectly honed retread of every other movie about how a team of losers wins the big game.
Oops! I gave away the ending! The plot stars Ed O’Neill and Rick Moranis as two brothers in the small town of Urbania, Ohio. O’Neill is a football hero and Heisman Trophy winner. Moranis is a nerd who runs a gas station. His daughter Becky (Shawna Waldron) is one of the best football players in town, but when O’Neill chooses a team for the Pop Warner League, he doesn’t choose Becky, ’cause she’s a girl. He also doesn’t choose the fat kid, the skinny kid, the kid who drops every pass, etc.
