I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 27
Moranis thinks it’s unfair. So he decides to coach his own team—the Little Giants. At first they are utterly incompetent. Then John Madden and a bunch of pro stars (Emmitt Smith, Bruce Smith, Tim Brown, and Steve Emtman) turn up in town after their bus gets lost. And they give the kids some quick lessons, turning them into only severely incompetent players.
Comes the day for the big game between O’Neill’s jocks and the Little Giants. The O’Neill team includes a mountainous kid named Spike, who speaks of himself in the third person, and whose father has the movie’s only funny line: “Every night before he goes to bed I massage his hamstrings with evaporated milk.” Spike, of course, is the instant enemy of Becky, who has despaired of playing football as a girl, and joined the cheerleading squad. But after the first half ends disastrously, she gets steamed, and runs out on the field wearing her helmet, shoulder pads, jersey—and, of course, cheerleader skirt.
Little kids may like this movie, if they’ve never seen one like it before. Slightly older kids with good memories will notice that this is not even the first movie this year where a character passes gas to knock out the other team. Even older viewers are likely to bitterly resent the fate that drew them into the theater.
Little Indian, Big City
(Directed by Herve Palud; starring Thierry Lhermitte; 1996)
Little Indian, Big City is one of the worst movies ever made. I detested every moronic minute of it. Through a stroke of good luck, the entire third reel of the film was missing the day I saw it. I went back to the screening room two days later, to view the missing reel. It was as bad as the rest, but nothing could have saved this film. As my colleague Gene Siskel observed, “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.” I could not have put it better myself.
Little Indian, Big City is a French film (I will not demean the fine word “comedy” by applying it here). It is not in French with English subtitles, however. It has been dubbed into English, a canny move, since the movie is not likely to appeal to anyone who can read. The dubbing means that awkward, hollow-sounding words emerge from the mouths of the characters while they flap their lips to a different rhythm. In an attempt to make the English dubbing match the length of the French dialogue, sentences are constructed backwards and the passive voice pops up at random. People say things like, “You have a son—you hear?”
The character speaking that last line is the mother (Miou Miou) of a boy of about twelve. She was once married to the film’s hero (Thierry Lhermitte), but left him thirteen years ago, when she was pregnant, because he spent too much time on the telephone. She fled to the Amazon, and has raised her child while living with an Indian tribe. Now he has flown to the rain forest to find his wife, so they can be divorced, and he can marry the stupidest woman on earth.
The hero did not know he had a son—you hear? Now he meets him. The son, named Mimi-Siku (Ludwig Briand), wears a cute breechcloth, carries a bow and arrow, has a mask painted on his face, and kills snakes by biting them. His mother is an intelligent, sensitive soul, who loves the environment and the rain forest. She is the only person in the jungle who speaks English (or French, in the original), and so if her son learned to speak it, he learned it from her. I guess it was her idea of a joke to teach him pidgin English, so that he says things like, “Me no able read.” I guess she didn’t teach him to read, either. She is depicted as kind of a secular saint.
Mimi-Siku is so good at a blowgun that he can kill a fly with a dart, and often does so. He has a hairy pet spider. His father brings him back to Paris, where the movie gets worse. The father has a business partner who never knows what to wear, and so always wears the same thing the father wears. Ho, ho. They go to business meetings in matching ties. Hee, hee. The partner has a daughter, and soon the son is bouncing in a hammock with a nubile twelve-year-old and telling his father, “Me like you—love only one female.” I doubt if the relationship will last, since the boy is prettier than the girl.
Later (or perhaps earlier, since it was in the third reel) Mimi-Siku climbs barefoot up the Eiffel Tower. This feat is handled so ineptly by the film that it has neither payoff nor consequence. He does it, and then the movie forgets it. Meanwhile, the father is doing a business deal with some shady Russians, who speak in dubbed accents and drink vodka and seem to be wearing Krushchev’s old suits. The father’s fiancée (Arielle Dombasle) chants mantras, plans a New Age wedding, and wants her guru to live with them. I think she’s in such a hurry to get married because she’s afraid the collagen injections in her lips might shift. By the end of the film, father and son have bonded, and cooked a fish by the side of the expressway. And the father has learned to kill a fly with a dart.
There is a movie called Fargo. It is a masterpiece. Go see it. If you under any circumstances see Little Indian, Big City, I will never let you read one of my reviews again.
The Lonely Lady
(Directed by Peter Sasdy; starring Pia Zadora, Ray Liotta; 1983)
If The Lonely Lady had even a shred of style and humor, it could qualify as the worst movie of the year. Unfortunately, it’s not that good. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there in Hollywood and it’s not enough to be merely awful. You need something to set yourself apart. Pia Zadora tries, and she has pluck, but she’s just not bad enough all by herself.
The movie is bad in all the usual ways, and it would be easy enough to simply list them: The overacting, the use of voice-over narration to bridge awkward chasms between scenes, the predictable plot. But why don’t we take all of those things for granted and move on to the truly unspeakable things in this movie? We could make a list:
1. I suppose it was necessary to have a scene in which the heroine is cruelly treated by men. But (a) couldn’t they have thought of something other than rape by a garden hose? and (b) shouldn’t such a traumatic event have had some effect on the character?
2. After the rape, Pia is seen being comforted in bed by her mother and a doctor. A single thread of stage makeup, representing blood, has trickled out of her mouth and dried. It is left in place for the entire scene, suggesting that at no point did the doctor, her mother, or any other medical personnel or family member care enough to disturb the makeup in order to make the scene realistic by wiping away the blood.
3. Proper nouns are missing from this movie. It seems to exist in a generic alternative universe in which nothing has its own name. The Oscars are known as “these awards” or “the awards.” After Pia and her first lover leave a movie, they have this conversation: “I liked him better.” “I liked her better.” No him or her is identified. This is the kind of conversation that results when a screenplay says, “They leave the theater and briefly discuss the movie,” but the screenplay doesn’t care what movie they saw.
4. The movie has no time for emotional transitions. When Pia marries the successful Hollywood writer, he is attentive and caring in one scene, and a sadist in the next, simply because the plot requires him to act that way. No motivation. When Pia goes crazy, it’s not so much in reaction to what’s been happening to her (she survived the garden hose with nary a backward glance) but because the script requires it, so that, later, she can pull herself back together again just as arbitrarily.
5. The movie’s whole plot hinges on Pia’s ability to rewrite a scene better than her jealous writer-husband. When the star of her husband’s movie weeps that she can’t play a certain graveyard scene, Pia whips out the portable typewriter and writes brilliant new dialogue for the star. What, you may ask, does Pia write? Here’s what. She has the grieving widow kneel by the side of the open grave and cry out (are you ready for this?) “Why? Why!!!”
That’s it. That’s the brilliant dialogue. And it can be used for more than a death scene, let me tell you. In fact, I walked out of this movie saying to myself, “Why? Why!!!”
Look Who’s Talking Now
(Directed by Tom Ropelewski; starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley; 1993)
Look Who’s Talking Now is a fairly misleading title for those who paid attention during English class, since the talkers are dogs, and so the title of course should be Look What’s Talking Now. Anyone who paid attention during English will also find innumerable other distressing elements in the film, including what teachers used to call “lack of originality and aptness of thought.”
The movie revisits John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, who in 1989 made a charming movie named Look Who’s Talking, and in 1990 a less charming movie named Look Who’s Talking Too. The first movie was about how Alley, who was pregnant by her no-good boyfriend, met a taxi driver played by Travolta. The baby, with voice by Bruce Willis, took a liking to Travolta, and so, after a while, did Alley.
In the second film, they had a baby daughter together, who spoke in the voice of Roseanne Arnold. Now their dogs speak with the voices of Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton. The children, in the meantime, have grown up enough to speak in their own voices, although not with the wit and insight they possessed as infants.
All of which leads us to an overwhelming question: Why is it necessary for the dogs to speak? They engage in your standard Lady and the Tramp repartee, but along about the second reel I realized that there was no earthly reason at all for the dogs to talk except that they were in a sequel made by filmmakers who had lost the nerve to produce another talking baby (Look Who’s Talking Three).
The first film had maybe a shred of realism to flavor its romantic comedy. This one looks like it was chucked up by an automatic screenwriting machine. Travolta gets a corporate pilot’s license, and is hired by sexy bombshell Lysette Anthony, a corporate exec who wants to seduce him. She contrives for him to be away from his family on Christmas Eve, after which Alley packs the kids and the dogs into the taxi and heads off for the North Woods, where Travolta is being held captive in a snowbound cabin by the sex-starved exec. After the taxi skids off the road and savage wolves attack the stranded family and the brave dogs fight them off and the kids unwrap their Christmas presents in the middle of a blizzard. . . .
So help me God, I am not making this up. Suggestions, please, for the fourth movie in the series. How about Look Who’s Talking Back, in which the audience gets its turn.
Lord of the Flies
(Directed by Harry Hook; starring Balthazar Getty, Chris Furrh; 1990)
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is, or used to be, a staple of everyone’s teenage reading experience, a harrowing fable about how ordinary kids revert to savagery when they are marooned on a desert island. The story is less poignant nowadays than it once was, if only because events take place every day on our mean streets that are more horrifying than anything the little monsters do to one another on Golding’s island.
When Peter Brook made the first film version of the novel in 1963, most of the viewers no doubt identified with the character of Ralph, the little liberal humanist, instead of with Jack, the little free-market economist. These days, I imagine the audiences are more evenly divided. Of all the films that cry out to be remade, the call of Brook’s Lord of the Flies is very faint indeed. But it has been heard by Harry Hook and Sara Schiff, who have directed and written this new and anemic Classics Illustrated version of the story.
Golding’s tale is a parable, a simple one, ideal as the subject for essays in English class. Schoolboys from a private school are shipwrecked (or, in the new version, their airplane crashes into the sea), and they swim to a deserted island where they must fend for themselves. At first they stick together and act reasonably, but then they divide into two camps: Followers of Ralph, who believe in decency and civilization, and followers of Jack, who paint their faces, sharpen their spears, and become militarists. Despairing of ever being rescued, the boys go to war with one another, with deadly results.
The staging of this story is fairly straightforward. The kids crawl up on the sand, their clothes gradually grow more tattered, they light a signal fire and then fight over who will tend it, they fight for possession of the knife and a pair of glasses that can be used to start fires, and they draw the battle lines between their two camps.
Hook’s visual sense is not acute here; he doesn’t show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, The Kitchen Toto (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue. The color photography tends to turn many scenes into travelogues; this is a film that needs black and white to contain the lush scenery. The “lord of the flies” itself—the rotting head of a wild boar—never becomes the focus of horror it is intended as, and the surprise ending of the film is somehow over before we have the opportunity to be surprised. The acting is workmanlike.
Because this material is so obviously constructed to bear a message, a film made from it will work best if it concentrates on the story elements and lets the symbolism take care of itself. Hook’s version does neither. The symbolism is right up front and unmissable, and the story part—the events that in theory should cause our throats to tighten and our pulses to quicken—is pretty lame. Once you understand what is going to happen (and even the viewer who has never heard of the book will not take long), there are few surprises. It happens.
The reviews of Brook’s 1963 film version were not glowing (“Semi-professional . . . crude and unconvincing”—Halliwell; “Patched together”—Kauffmann). But I recall it having at least a certain force, maybe because in 1963 it was still shocking that ordinary schoolkids could be killers—that they had the seeds of evil in them, and, given the opportunity and freedom from the restraints of society, the seeds would grow.
Golding’s novel is the sort of fable that could shock only those who believe in the onwardness and upwardness of civilization, as some still did in those days. At the time of its publication (1954) attempts were made to find political messages in it, but today it seems more like a sad, literal prophecy of what is happening in neighborhoods ruled by drugs. What week goes by without another story of a Ralph gunned down by a Jack?
Lord Shango
(Directed by Raymond Marsh; starring Marlene Clark, Lawrence Cook; 1975)
The story thus far:
A black church is holding a fundamentalist baptism by complete immersion. The ceremony is interrupted by a young man who belongs to a voodoo sect. In an attempt to prevent his girlfriend from being baptized, he leaps into the water, whereupon the three church brethren baptize him so thoroughly that he drowns.
His body is buried after a ritual held by the voodoo group, who smear him with the blood of a chicken and adjure his spirit to “look out for his friends, relatives, and associates.” His girlfriend suffers a nervous breakdown and is seduced by her mother’s second husband. The mother has a nervous breakdown because she cannot conceive a child by her second husband. The girl runs away from home.
The mother, frantic with grief, refuses to believe that her daughter’s boyfriend was drowned by accident during the baptismal ceremony, despite reassurances from the church elders, including those who held him under a little too long.
She seeks out the voodoo sect at its next meeting, held by the light of the full moon, and after several chants, recitations, and virtuoso solos on the bongo drums, she is invited to step forward and express (a) her loyalty to the voodoo god, Manubeesa, and (b) her desires.
She expresses the desire to have either (a) a child, or (b) her child. This is going to cause some confusion later. The voodoo priest asks who will be sacrificed to attain this (these) goal(s). She doesn’t answer, but she must have been thinking the right thoughts, because after the voodoo priest ceremoniously slices a sweet potato in two, one of the church elders collapses of a heart attack while walking home from the grocery store.
The mother’s devotion to Manubeesa is sealed in an ancient supernatural dance bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Twist as performed by Chubby Checker in ads for top hits of the 1960s. The mother goes home, tosses in her sleep, utters the name “Manubeesa” several times, and in the morning is overjoyed to discover that (a) her daughter has returned, and (b) her daughter is pregnant. It would also appear that (c) the mother is pregnant as well, Manubeesa having come through with all the children any mother could possibly have desired, even in her fondest dreams.
Next time, if I am able to sit through the second half of Lord Shango, we will discover whether the other church elders catch their lunch on the way home from the A&P; whether the dead boyfriend is brought back to life by further applications of chicken, which is at least worth a try; whether the children were conceived by mortal fathers, and whether Manubeesa is having his own little joke or is simply cursed with an overly literal imagination.
Lost & Found
(Directed by Jeff Pollack; starring David Spade, Sophie Marceau, Patrick Breuel; 1999)
Lost & Found is a movie about characters of limited intelligence, who wander through the lonely wastes of ancient and boring formulas. No one involved seems to have had any conviction it could be great. It’s the kind of movie where the hero imitates Neil Diamond—and he’s not making fun of him, he’s serious.
In asking us to believe David Spade as a romantic lead, it miscalculates beyond all reason. Spade is wrong by definition for romantic leads, because his persona is based on ironic narcissism and cool detachment. A girl has to be able to believe it when a guy says she loves her more than anything else in the world. When Spade says it, it means he doesn’t love anything else in the world, either.
Spade plays the owner of an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. Like not very many owners of Italian restaurants, his name is Dylan. I have three hints for Dylan. (1) Unless you know them very well, customers do not like to be caressed on their arms as you pass their tables. (2) Although waiters must touch plates while serving them, it is bad form for the owner to put his thumb on a plate while it is being eaten from. (3) During renovations, do not seat customers directly below drywall with holes ripped in it.
