I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 29
We meet a local psychiatrist named Dr. Wanda Bell (Harley Jane Kozak), who runs group therapy for several local people who all share the same conviction that their minds and bodies have been inhabited by Orky. Jack falls for Wanda, and is soon a member of her group—because, yes, Orky inhabits him, too, and makes him a better dad for the experience.
Meanwhile, bad guys lurk around the fringes of the story, and it’s revealed that they are secretly turning the lake into a hazardous waste dump. Could it be that Orky is trying to tell the locals something? Josh and Ashley, who are easily as clever as the Hardy Boys and maybe even Nancy Drew, soon discover the evil secret, and then it’s up to them, and Orky, to save the day.
One of the problems with the first two-thirds of Magic in the Water is that we don’t see Orky. One of the problems with the last third is that we do. Orky turns out to be singularly uncharismatic, looking like an ashen Barney on downers.
The underlying inspiration for Magic in the Water is, of course, the Free Willy pictures, with kids making friends of noble aquatic creatures while bad guys scheme to kill the whales and pollute the waters of the earth. Magic in the Water is innocuous fun, but slow, and not distinguished in the special-effects department. And about those two one-armed brothers, who both allegedly lost an arm to Orky: I’ll bet they could find those missing arms if they’d look closely inside their shirts.
Marie Baie des Anges
(Directed by Manuel Pradal; starring Vahina Giocante, Frederic Malgras; 1998)
At the height of the storm over Last Tango in Paris, Art Buchwald, who had lived in Paris for years, weighed in with some common sense: The movie, he explained, is really about real estate. Both characters want the same apartment, and are willing to do anything to get it.
Marie Baie des Anges is not really about real estate. It is about sex. But I thought a lot about real estate while I was watching it. It takes place on the French Riviera, which is pictured here as an unspoilt Eden in which the film’s adolescent lovers gambol and pose, nude much of the time, surfacing only occasionally for the dangers of the town.
Anyone who has visited the French Riviera knows that it has more in common with Miami than with Eden. It is a crowded, expensive perch for ugly condos and desperate beachgoers, and the only place where teenage lovers can safely gambol is in their bathtubs. Marie Baie des Anges is as realistic as Blue Lagoon, although without any copulating turtles.
The movie stars Vahina Giocante as Marie, a fifteen-year-old who spends her vacations on the Riviera, picking up American sailors and sleeping under the stars. No mention of her parents, home, income, past, experience, etc. She is the pornographer’s dream, an uncomplicated nubile teenager who exists only as she is. Giocante has been billed as “the new Bardot,” and she’s off to a good start: Bardot didn’t make many good films, either.
On the beach, she meets Orso (Frederic Malgras), a sullen lout who lurks about looking like a charade with the answer, “Leonardo DiCaprio.” Together, they run, play, boat, swim, eat strawberries, and flirt with danger, and inevitably a handgun surfaces, so we will not be in suspense about the method used to bring the film to its unsatisfactory conclusion. “Get me the best-looking gun you can find,” Orso tells Marie, who steals it from a one-night stand.
The movie is yet one more evocation of doomed youth, destined for a brief flash of happiness and a taste of eroticism before they collide with the preordained ending. All of these movies end the same way, with one form of death or another, which casts a cold light on the events that went before, showing you how unlucky these young people were to be in a story written by a director who lacked the wit to think of anything else that might happen.
The filmmaker is Manuel Pradal, who in addition to recycling exhausted clichés also fancies himself at the cutting edge of narrative. He tells his story out of sequence, leaving us to collect explanations and context along the way; one advantage of this style is that only at the end is it revealed that the story was not about anything. We get glimpses and fragments of actions; flashforwards and flashbacks; exhausting self-conscious artiness.
Yes, there is beautiful scenery. And nice compositions. Lots of pretty pictures. Giocante and Malgras are superficially attractive, although because their characters are empty vessels there’s no reason to like them much, or care about them. The movie is cast as a tragedy, and it’s tragic, all right: Tragic that these kids never developed intelligence and personalities.
The Master Gunfighter
(Directed by “Frank Laughlin,” aka Tom Laughlin; starring Tom Laughlin; 1975)
A film archaeologist could have fun with The Master Gunfighter, sifting among its fragments of plot and trying to figure out what the hell happened to this movie on the way to the theater. The movie opens with a long-winded narration, in a hapless attempt to orient us, but not long afterward the narrator has to break in again—we’re lost already. It’s all to little avail. I don’t think there’s any way an intelligent moviegoer could sit through this mess and accurately describe the plot afterward.
On the basis of the available evidence, I’d say the director and star, Tom Laughlin, began with a badly confused screenplay (one that never did clearly establish the characters and the main story line) and then shot so much film that he had to cut out key scenes in order to edit everything down to a reasonable playing time.
The movie opens, for example, with Laughlin leaving the California hacienda of his wife, for obscure reasons (and not only the reasons are obscure—I had to read the synopsis to figure out the woman was his wife). Then there’s a title card—“Three Years Later”—and he decides to go back to the hacienda, for more compelling reasons. This is pretty dizzying exposition.
The movie has ambitions to look like one of Sergio Leone’s Italian Westerns—it has the eerie music and the vast landscapes and the irritating habit of opening and closing scenes with zooms as dramatic as they’re arbitrary. Watching it, we reflect that Leone was never too strong on plotting either (what actually happened in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains a matter of great controversy). But Leone at least was the master of great moments—stretches of film that worked, even if they meant nothing.
Laughlin has moments, too, but he has no flair for timing or development or surprise. We leave The Master Gunfighter remembering very long, very pointless conversations in which the characters seemed to be referring to events in another film. These yawn-inducing dialogues are occasionally interrupted by swordplay, so badly staged and photographed we’re not even sure Laughlin could handle a steak knife. In one of his predicaments, he is surrounded by enemy swordsmen—so he backs up against an old shed. But wait a minute, you’re thinking: If he’s surrounded, how does he back up against that shed? What about the guys behind him? Aha!
The opening narration provides some nonsense about samurai training that’s supposed to explain the sword, as well as the MG’s revolver, which can fire twelve shots. After we’ve seen the MG nail all kinds of bad guys with the pistol, only to use the sword in his next emergency, we’re reminded of John Carter of Mars, the Edgar Rice Burroughs hero who kept getting sliced up in swordplay when he could have just pulled out his atomic ray gun. But nothing as simple as logic is going to explain this movie.
Maxie
(Directed by Paul Aaron; starring Glenn Close, Mandy Patinkin, Ruth Gordon; 1985)
Jan is an absolutely normal San Francisco woman. She lives in a big landmark Victorian house, she’s married to a librarian, and she works as the secretary to the local Catholic bishop. (So far, all that’s wrong with this picture is the landmark Victorian house, which Jan and her husband, Nick, could not afford unless he owned the library and she were the bishop.)
One day they are stripping wallpaper from the walls, and they discover a message that was left more than sixty years ago by Maxie, a flapper who once lived in the house. We know the message is from Maxie because Ruth Gordon, the next-door neighbor, drops in and tells them Maxie once had a bit role in a silent film and then died tragically at a young age.
Jan and Nick do what any normal couple would do. They rent a videocassette of the old silent film. And apparently their act of seeing Maxie’s old performance, in Maxie’s old house, causes the psychic energies to flow in such a way that Maxie appears and possesses Jan’s body. Jan begins to talk in Maxie’s penetrating nasal screech and she starts using a lot of 1920s slang. But she still looks exactly like Glenn Close, who plays both Jan and Maxie.
Nick (played by Mandy Patinkin) does not at first figure out what is happening. This leads to some embarrassment, as when Maxie suddenly occupies Jan’s body during an office party and throws her drink down the dress of Nick’s boss (Valerie Curtin, as a sex-mad harridan). There are other horrible moments, as when Jan becomes Maxie at bedtime, and when Maxie forces Jan to audition for a TV commercial. Maxie can be shocking, but she is not anywhere near as shocking as the utter, complete lack of wit and intelligence in this movie, which goes its entire length without producing one single clever twist on its boring premise.
As a service to the screenwriter and director, I herewith supply some ideas they might have used:
(1) Jan becoming Maxie during sex, to Nick’s consternation;
(2) The bishop turning out to be Maxie’s old beau, before he went into the seminary;
(3) Maxie in a San Francisco leather bar;
(4) Nick preferring Maxie to boring old Jan;
(5) Nick being possessed by Maxie’s old boyfriend, who goes after her, only to find the boring yuppie, Jan, in his arms;
(6) Maxie enlisting her friends from the Other Side to possess everyone else at the office party, so that W. C. Fields is talking with Calvin Coolidge, etc.
I offer these possibilities only to illuminate the fact that Maxie does as little with its original inspiration as is humanly possible. This is the sort of movie where, if Maxie had any brains, she’d appear in Jan’s body, take one look at the script, and decide she was better off dead.
Medicine Man
(Directed by John McTiernan; starring Sean Connery, Lorraine Bracco; 1991)
All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together. Medicine Man, which is shot on location in the rain forests of the Amazon, has the great, grizzled Sean Connery as its star, doing research countless miles up an anonymous river with Lorraine Bracco, a tough-talking scientist from the Bronx. If this had been some dumb adventure movie it would probably have been terrific. Alas, it is a “relationship” movie, told along lines of timeworn weariness, and since that is not dreary enough it also throws in several Serious Issues for the characters to discuss.
Connery, first seen wearing an Indian headdress while thoroughly marinated in an intoxicating jungle potion, is an eccentric Scotsman who has been doing research by himself for so long that he has almost forgotten what pajamas look like. Bracco reminds him of them, and other things. She’s the head of the organization that is financing him, and responds to his call for a research assistant because she wants to find out what he’s doing out there in the jungle.
It goes, I think, almost without saying that Connery will resent a “girl” turning up as his helper, that Bracco will be a liberated woman, that they will fight, that together they will overcome great odds, and that eventually they will find themselves in each other’s arms. It also goes without saying that there will be a lot of snakes and ants in the jungle (and one mosquito—announced with a loud buzz on the sound track).
The ads for the movie have already revealed the story line (which, to be fair, is so elementary it can be summarized in a sentence). Connery has found the cure for cancer, but the mercenary villains who are burning and bulldozing the rain forest will soon destroy the only place on Earth where the ingredients for his rare cancer drug can exist. The plot is thickened because, once having concocted a miraculous overnight anticancer serum, Connery cannot repeat his experiment. His failure has him stumped, and Bracco, too, although not the audience, which is able to figure out what he’s doing wrong because of two clues that are as subtle as blows to the head.
There are some beautiful moments in Medicine Man. I enjoyed the freedom of the rope-and-pulley arrangement by which Connery is able to journey to the treetops. And the drollery of his dialogue, although it is interrupted by the screenwriter’s bizarre ideas of how Bracco should talk (“No boat! No boat!” she keeps shouting at one juncture, when Connery wants to send her home). The movie also has a perfect closing line (“Unbutton your shirt”), although it is typical of the filmmakers that they fail to recognize it as the closing line, and keep going.
Meet the Deedles
(Directed by Steve Boyum; starring Steve Van Wormer, Paul Walker, John Ashton; 1998)
The cult of stupidity is irresistible to teenagers in a certain mood. It’s a form of rebellion, maybe: If the real world is going to reject them, then they’ll simply refuse to get it. Using jargon and incomprehension as weapons, they’ll create their own alternate universe.
All of which is a tortuous way to explain Meet the Deedles, a movie with no other ambition than to create mindless slapstick and generate a series in the tradition of the Bill & Ted movies. The story involves twin brothers Stew and Phil Deedle (Steve Van Wormer and Paul Walker), slackers from Hawaii who find themselves in the middle of a fiendish plot to sabotage Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park.
As the movie opens, Stew and Phil are hanging beneath a balloon being towed above the Hawaiian surf, while being pursued by a truant officer on a jet-ski. Soon they’re called on the carpet before their millionaire father (Eric Braeden), who snorts, “You will one day take over the entire Deedles empire—and you are surf bums!” His plan: Send them to Camp Broken Spirit, a monthlong experience in outdoor living that will turn them into men.
Through plot developments unnecessary to relate, the Deedles escape the camp experience, are mistaken for Park Ranger recruits, come under command of Ranger Pine (John Ashton), and stumble onto the solution to a mysterious infestation of prairie dogs.
Now prairie dogs can be cute, as anyone who has seen Disney’s The Living Prairie nature documentary can testify. But in large numbers they look alarmingly like herds of rats, and the earth trembles (slightly) as they scurry across the park. Why so many prairie dogs? Because an evil ex-Ranger named Slater (Dennis Hopper) has trained them to burrow out a cavern around Old Faithful, allowing him to redirect the geyser’s boiling waters in the direction of New Faithful, to which he plans to sell tickets.
Hopper lives in the cavern, relaxing in his E-Z-Boy recliner and watching the surface on TV monitors. His sidekicks include Nemo, played by Robert Englund, Freddy of the Nightmare on Elm Street pictures. At one point he explains how he trained the prairie dogs, and I will add to my permanent memory bank the sound of Dennis Hopper saying, “Inject kibble into the dirt, and a-tunneling they would go.” Study his chagrin when the Deedles employ Mentholatum Deep-Heat Rub as a weapon in this war.
While he schemes, the Deedles fumble and blunder their way through Ranger training, and Phil falls for Jesse (A. J. Langer), the pretty stepdaughter of Ranger Pine. There are a lot of stunts, involving mountains, truck crashes, and river rapids, and then the big showdown over Old Faithful. The Deedles relate to everything in surfer terms (plowing into a snowbank, they cry, “We’ve landed in a Slurpy!”).
I am prepared to imagine a theater full of eleven-year-old boys who might enjoy this movie, but I can’t recommend it for anyone who might have climbed a little higher on the evolutionary ladder. The Bill & Ted movies had a certain sly self-awareness that this one lacks. Maybe that’s a virtue. Maybe it isn’t.
Mercury Rising
(Directed by Harold Becker; starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin; 1998)
Mercury Rising is about the most sophisticated cryptographic system known to man, and about characters considerably denser than anyone in the audience. Sitting in the dark, our minds idly playing with the plot, we figure out what they should do, how they should do it, and why they should do it, while the characters on the screen strain helplessly against the requirements of the formula.
The movie begins with the two obligatory scenes of most rogue lawman scenarios: (1) Opening hostage situation, in which the hero (Bruce Willis) could have saved the situation if not for his trigger-happy superiors; (2) the Calling on the Carpet, in which his boss tells the lawman he’s being pulled off the job and assigned to grunt duty. “You had it—but the magic’s gone,” the boss recites. Willis’s only friend is a sidekick named Bizzi Jordan (Chi McBride), who has, as is the nature of sidekicks, a wife and child, so that the hero can gaze upon them and ponder his solitude.
Experienced moviegoers will know that in the course of his diminished duties, Willis (playing an FBI man named Jeffries) will stumble across a bigger case. And will try to solve it single-handedly, while he is the object of a police manhunt. And will eventually engage in a hand-to-hand struggle with the sinister man behind the scheme. This struggle will preferably occur in a high place (see “Climbing Villian,” from Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary). Plus, it’s a safe bet the hero will enlist a good-looking woman who will drop everything for a chance to get shot at while at his side.
The new twist this time is explained by the evil bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin) in one of several lines of dialogue he should have insisted on rewriting: “A nine-year-old has deciphered the most sophisticated cipher system ever known—and he’s autistic!?!” Yes, little Simon (Miko Hughes) looks at a word game in a puzzle magazine, and while the sound track emits quasi-computeristic beeping noises, he figures out the code concealed there, and calls the secret phone number, causing two geeks in a safe room to leap about in dismay.
