I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 3
By the end of the movie, she has danced with the king a couple of times, come tantalizingly close to kissing him, and civilized him a little, although he has not sold off his concubines. She now has memories she can write in her journal for Rodgers and Hammerstein to plunder on Broadway, which never tires of romance novels set to music.
Foster, I believe, sees right through this material and out the other side, and doesn’t believe in a bit of it. At times we aren’t looking at a nineteenth-century schoolmarm, but a modern woman biting her tongue. Chow Yun-Fat is good enough as the king, and certainly less self-satisfied than Yul Brynner. There is a touching role for Bai Ling, as Tuptim, the beautiful girl who is given to the king as a bribe by her venal father, a tea merchant. She loves another, and that is fatal for them both. There is also the usual nonsense about the plot against the throne, which here causes Anna, the king, and the court to make an elaborate journey by elephant so that the king can pull off a military trick I doubt would be convincing even in a Looney Tune.
Credits at the end tell us Mongkut and his son, educated by Anna, led their country into the twentieth century, established democracy (up to a point), and so on. No mention is made of Bangkok’s role as a world center of sex tourism, which also of course carries on traditions established by the good king.
Armageddon
(Directed by Michael Bay; starring Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck; 1998)
Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any thirty seconds at random, and you’d have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.
The plot covers many of the same bases as Deep Impact, which, compared to Armageddon, belongs on the AFI list. The movie tells a similar story at fast-forward speed, with Bruce Willis as an oil driller who is recruited to lead two teams on an emergency shuttle mission to an asteroid “the size of Texas,” which is about to crash into Earth and obliterate all life—“even viruses!” Their job: Drill an 800-foot hole and stuff a bomb into it, to blow up the asteroid before it kills us.
Okay, say you do succeed in blowing up an asteroid the size of Texas. What if a piece the size of Dallas is left? Wouldn’t that be big enough to destroy life on Earth? What about a piece the size of Austin? Let’s face it: Even an object the size of that big Wal-Mart outside Abilene would pretty much clean us out, if you count the parking lot.
Texas is a big state, but as a celestial object it wouldn’t be able to generate much gravity. Yet when the astronauts get to the asteroid, they walk around on it as if the gravity is the same as on Earth. There’s no sensation of weightlessness—until it’s needed, that is, and then a lunar buggy flies across a jagged canyon, Evil Knievel–style.*
The movie begins with a Charlton Hestonian voice telling us about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Then we get the masterful title card, “65 Million Years Later.” The next scenes show an amateur astronomer spotting the object. We see top-level meetings at the Pentagon and in the White House. We meet Billy Bob Thornton, head of Mission Control in Houston, which apparently functions like a sports bar with a big screen for the fans, but no booze. Then we see ordinary people whose lives will be Changed Forever by the events to come. This stuff is all off the shelf—there’s hardly an original idea in the movie.
Armageddon reportedly used the services of nine writers. Why did it need any? The dialogue is either shouted one-liners or romantic drivel. “It’s gonna blow!” is used so many times, I wonder if every single writer used it once, and then sat back from his word processor with a contented smile on his face, another day’s work done.
Disaster movies always have little vignettes of everyday life. The dumbest in Armageddon involves two Japanese tourists in a New York taxi. After meteors turn an entire street into a flaming wasteland, the woman complains, “I want to go shopping!” I hope in Japan that line is redubbed as “Nothing can save us but Gamera!”
Meanwhile, we wade through a romantic subplot involving Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. Liv is Bruce Willis’s daughter. Ben is Willis’s best driller (now, now). Bruce finds Liv in Ben’s bunk on an oil platform, and chases Ben all over the rig, trying to shoot him. (You would think the crew would be preoccupied by the semidestruction of Manhattan, but it’s never mentioned after it happens.) Helicopters arrive to take Willis to the mainland so he can head up the mission to save mankind, etc., and he insists on using only crews from his own rig—especially Affleck, who is “like a son.”
That means Liv and Ben have a heartrending parting scene. What is it about cinematographers and Liv Tyler? She is a beautiful young women, but she’s always being photographed flat on her back, with her brassiere riding up around her chin and lots of wrinkles in her neck from trying to see what some guy is doing. (In this case, Affleck is tickling her navel with animal crackers.) Tyler is obviously a beneficiary of Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She’s not only on the oil rig, but she attends training sessions with her dad and her boyfriend, hangs out in Mission Control, and walks onto landing strips right next to guys wearing foil suits.
Characters in this movie actually say: “I wanted to say—that I’m sorry,” “We’re not leaving them behind!” “Guys—the clock is ticking!” and “This has turned into a surrealistic nightmare!” Steve Buscemi, a crew member who is diagnosed with “space dementia,” looks at the asteroid’s surface and adds, “This place is like Dr. Seuss’s worst nightmare.” Quick—which Seuss book is he thinking of?
There are several Red Digital Readout scenes, in which bombs tick down to zero. Do bomb designers do that for the convenience of interested onlookers who happen to be standing next to a bomb? There’s even a retread of the classic scene where they’re trying to disconnect the timer, and they have to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. The movie has forgotten that this is not a terrorist bomb, but a standard-issue U.S. military bomb, being defused by a military guy who is on board specifically because he knows about this bomb. A guy like that, the first thing he should know is, red or blue?
Armageddon is loud, ugly, and fragmented. Action sequences are cut together at bewildering speed out of hundreds of short edits, so that we can’t see for sure what’s happening, or how, or why. Important special effects shots (like the asteroid) have a murkiness of detail, and the movie cuts away before we get a good look. The few “dramatic” scenes consist of the sonorous recitation of ancient clichés (“You’re already heroes!”). Only near the end, when every second counts, does the movie slow down: Life on earth is about to end, but the hero delays saving the planet in order to recite cornball farewell platitudes.
Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters. “It will obliterate your senses!” reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically. “It will suck the air right out of your lungs!” vows Diane Kaminsky. If it does, consider it a mercy killing.
Ash Wednesday
(Directed by Larry Peerce; starring Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Helmut Berger, Keith Baxter; 1973)
Ash Wednesday is a soapy melodrama that isn’t much good as a movie but may be interesting to some audiences all the same. It’s about how a fiftyish wife (Elizabeth Taylor), her marriage threatened by a younger woman, has a face-lift in order to keep her husband. It doesn’t work, but she gets a nice winter in a ski resort out of it and an affair with Helmut Berger.
The movie opens with clinical precision; a famous plastic surgeon explains his techniques to Miss Taylor as we see them being carried out. He outlines the areas of skin to be removed, and her face looks almost like one of those butcher’s charts with all the cuts marked. Then he begins, with scalpel and needle, and when he has finished and she finally gets the bandages off, voilà! She looks as good as Elizabeth Taylor.
It’s quite an improvement, because when the movie opens, she looks pretty bad. It must have taken some measure of courage for Taylor to allow herself to be made up and photographed so unattractively; maybe she got a double-reverse kick, though, out of knowing that she’s so beautiful she has to be made up to look dowdy. And she is beautiful, which is what the movie’s about, in a way. There are lots of close-ups in which she’s frankly vain as she examines her face with delight; that face is a national treasure by now, and we support any measures to preserve it.
Most of the movie takes place at an expensive resort, where she goes to await the arrival of her husband (Henry Fonda). She hasn’t told him about the face-lift: “At first,” she says, “I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would seem like a silly thing to have done.” A pause, and then: “Now my only regret is that I didn’t do it years ago.” Her husband is delayed in Washington on “business,” which is part business and partly an affair he’s having with a girl younger than their daughter. Taylor carries on a flirtation with Helmut Berger, mostly to test her new attractiveness, and eventually they make love. The fact that this affair takes about half an hour to develop, and requires yards of schmaltzy Maurice Jarre music to consummate, adds little to its interest.
The whole movie, indeed, feels longer than it is. It’s fifteen minutes short of two hours, and still it takes forever to be over. The problem is that not enough happens; she waits at the resort, she drinks, she eats, she meets her daughter for a tearful lunch, she talks with a friendly fashion photographer, she waits, she has the affair, she waits, sighs, telephones, looks at herself, and models the Edith Head wardrobe. It’s all so slight.
And yet, as I suggested, the movie may interest some audiences. Stars of Elizabeth Taylor’s magnitude lead lives so public and famous that the details of their beauty become important to millions of people. Has she really had a face-lift? Does she need one? It’s that kind of off-screen gossip that gives Ash Wednesday a sort of separate reality. The movie’s story is not really very interesting, but we’re intrigued because the star is Taylor. Weak as the role is, she was nevertheless just about the inevitable choice to play it. The unofficial crown for most beautiful woman in the world gets passed around a lot; one year it’s Ursula Andress, then it’s Candice Bergen, then Catherine Deneuve. But Taylor has won it so many times she ought to get possession. She’s forty or forty-one now, and she looks great. There’s a kind of voyeuristic sensuality in watching her look at herself in the mirror (which she spends no end of time doing). If you’re Elizabeth Taylor, it’s not vain to appraise your beauty, just as if someone’s really after you, you’re not paranoid. Maybe the fundamental problem with the movie is that we can’t quite believe any man would leave Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a good thing we never see Henry Fonda’s bimbo, because if we did, we wouldn’t be convinced. It’s the same problem that sunk Ryan’s Daughter: What woman would leave Robert Mitchum for . . . Christopher Jones? And the final confrontation between Taylor and Fonda is stiff and unconvincing; the movie has really been about the woman, not about the marriage, and Fonda doesn’t so much interact with her as recite an announcement of termination. We can’t buy it.
The movie’s title was inspired, I guess, by the Catholic practice of wearing a smudge of ash on your face on Ash Wednesday as a reminder of man’s inescapable mortality. In Taylor’s case, however, mortality has at least temporarily been held at bay. For that, we can all be thankful—and she, I imagine, most of all.
Assassins
(Directed by Richard Donner; starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore; 1995)
I know how to believe stuff when it happens in the movies. I believe bicycles can fly. I believe sharks can eat boats. I even believe pigs can talk. But I do not believe Assassins, because this movie is filled with such preposterous impossibilities that Forrest Gump could have improved it with a quick rewrite.
The movie stars Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas as professional hit men. They haven’t met when the movie opens, but they receive their orders on matching laptops (the kind where you just put one hand on the keyboard and rattle it in one place, and words get perfectly typed). Stallone is sent to kill a guy at a funeral, and is startled when somebody else does the job.
It is Banderas, hiding behind a nearby tombstone, and he’s soon captured by the police—only to escape and get into a taxi that Stallone has stolen, in order to pick him up and find out who he is. (Stallone’s own brilliant plan for the hit was to conceal a weapon in a cast on his arm and mingle with the mourners. His getaway plan was not explained.) The men are soon shooting at one another, for reasons that are explained without the explanations explaining anything, if you get my drift.
Soon the two men find themselves once again working on the same case and competing for the same prize—a $2 million reward for a stolen computer disk. The disk is in the possession of a woman named Electra (Julianne Moore), a cat fancier and computer whiz who has set up an elaborate scheme for exchanging the disk with some Dutch bad guys. (She has a radio-controlled toy truck in a hotel air shaft . . . but never mind.) Once again, Stallone and Banderas leave bodies littered all over the hotel, and then, as the reward is raised to $20 million, they find themselves in Mexico for a final showdown.
What follows is a *Spoiler,* so please stop reading if through some insane impulse you are compelled to see this movie. The endless last sequence of the film (which is very long and very slow) involves a situation where Stallone plans to enter a bank, collect $20 million in cash, and leave, and Banderas plans to shoot him from the window of the ancient abandoned hotel across the street. But Stallone knows that Banderas will do that, and enlists Electra in a plan to sit in a café and radio him updates.
He knows (for reasons buried in the past) that Banderas will eventually grow impatient while waiting, and after six or seven hours will be compelled to go into the bank to see if Stallone is still there. And Banderas will of course have to leave his guns outside. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens; the two men nod and chat a little, Banderas goes back outside and returns to his sniping post in the crumbling hotel, and Stallone collects the money and goes outside to be shot.
Say what? Well, there’s some kind of a cockeyed plan in which Electra is supposed to sneak into the hotel while Banderas is in the bank, and snatch his rifle. But this hotel is really crumbling, and she falls through the floor. It is the first of many times in which several characters fall through so many floors it is a wonder the hotel is standing at all. And so when Stallone emerges from the bank, Banderas is in the window with the rifle aimed at him, and what does Stallone do? Duck for cover? No, he turns to accept his fate, or whatever, but then is saved through a unique application of the Fallacy of the Talking Killer. That is of course the old movie ploy where the killer talks instead of shooting. This is the first time I can remember where the killer is talking to himself.
There were many, many moments in this movie that left me puzzled. One of them involves the movie’s key shooting. When you see it, you will know which one I mean, and you may find yourself, as I did, puzzled about how it happened. The mechanics of it seem to violate the laws of logic, not to mention physics.
Other problems in the movie: (1) How, when a guy is hanging outside the window of a cab and you crash it against the side of a bus, can he avoid being hurt? (2) If you hold a table up in front of you, will it really save you after a gas explosion blows you out of a third-floor window? (3) If you were holding a briefcase containing a bomb, would you throw it out of the car window, or hold it until you could drive down an alley and place it in a convenient Dumpster? (4) If you knew a sniper was waiting for you to emerge from the front door of a bank, would it occur to you to leave through the back, sneak up on the guy, and kill him—rather than depending on a ditzy computer nerd who says she’s unable to shoot anyone? (5) Would you question the political and history credentials of a man who tells you he had to fake his death in 1980 because “the cold war was ending?”
Examining the movie’s cast list for the answers to these and many other questions, I see that the characters played by Stallone and Banderas are named Rath and Bain. Rath becomes Wrath. Bain is French for “bath.” Wrath and Bath. Has a nice ring. I was looking up Electra when the telephone rang, bringing me back to my senses.
Assault of the Killer Bimbos
(Directed by Anita Rosenberg; starring Christina Whitaker, Elizabeth Kaitan; 1988)
Assault of the Killer Bimbos is one of those movies where the lights are on but nobody’s at home. It is the most simpleminded movie in many a moon, a vacant and brainless exercise in dreck, and I almost enjoyed myself sometimes, sort of. The movie is so cheerfully dim-witted and the characters are so enthusiastically sleazoid that the film takes on a kind of awful charm.
The title is, of course, the best thing about it. I saw this film advertised at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it was a finalist, along with Space Sluts in the Slammer and Surf Nazis Must Die! in my annual search for the most unforgettable bad-movie title since Blood-Sucking Monkeys of Forest Lawn. The amazing thing about the title is that it does, indeed, accurately describe the movie.
Assault of the Killer Bimbos begins at a go-go club located somewhere in the twilight zone. On a tiny stage in front of leering creeps, go-go dancers in weirdly decorated bikinis bounce around to bad music. They never take off any clothes, and when a waitress gets her “big break” and is allowed to dance, she’s fired after the bananas on her brassiere fly off and strike several customers in their drinks. “You can’t strip!” bellows the club owner. “This is a go-go joint, not a strip club!”
After plot complications too simple to describe, veteran dancer Peaches (Christina Whitaker) and newcomer Lulu (Elizabeth Kaitan) are unfairly framed for the murder of the club owner. They escape to Mexico in an old Dodge convertible, pausing along the way to kidnap a truck-stop waitress (Tammara Souza), who decides to join them. In the middle of their escape, they meet three pothead surfers who accompany them, and they are chased by various sheriff’s deputies.
