I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 30
Agents are dispatched to try to kill the kid and his parents, who live in Chicago. FBI agent Jeffries comes late to the scene, eyeballs the dead parents, immediately intuits it wasn’t really a murder-suicide (“How’s a guy that’s so broke afford a $1,500 handgun?”), and then finds Simon hiding in a crawl space. Putting two and two together (without beeping noises), he deduces that Simon knows a secret, and powerful people want to destroy him.
The movie then descends into formula again, with obligatory scenes in which the police guard is mysteriously pulled off duty in a hospital corridor (see The Godfather), and Jeffries runs down corridors with the kid under his arm while evil agents demonstrate that no marksman, however well trained, can hit anyone important while there’s still an hour to go. (The David Mamet movie The Spanish Prisoner, which is as smart as Mercury Rising is dumb, has the hero ask a markswoman: “What if you had missed?” and supplies her with the perfect answer: “It would be back to the range for me!”)
The movie’s greatest test of credibility comes when Jeffries, object of a citywide manhunt, walks into a restaurant in the Wrigley Building, meets a complete stranger named Stacy (Kim Dickens), and asks her to watch the kid for him while he goes on a quick mission. Of course Stacy agrees, and cooperates again when the agent and the kid turn up at her house in the middle of the night and ask for a safe place to stay. Before long, indeed, she’s blowing off a business trip to Des Moines because, well, what woman wouldn’t instinctively trust an unshaven man in a sweaty T-shirt with an autistic kid under his arm and a gun in his belt—especially if the cops were after him?
What is sad is that the performances by Willis, Dickens, and young Miko Hughes are really pretty good—better than the material deserves. Willis doesn’t overplay or overspeak, which redeems some of the silly material, and Dickens somehow finds a way through the requirements of her role that allows her to sidestep her character’s wildly implausible decisions.
But what happened to Alec Baldwin’s bullshit detector? Better replace those batteries! His character utters speeches that are laughable in any context, especially this one. “You know,” he says, “my wife says my people skills are like my cooking skills—quick and tasteless.” And listen to his silky speech in the rain as he defends his actions.
Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) if a nine-year-old kid can break your code, don’t kill the kid, kill the programmers.
Message in a Bottle
(Directed by Luis Mandoki; starring Kevin Costner, Paul Newman, Robin Wright Penn; 1999)
Message in a Bottle is a tearjerker that strolls from crisis to crisis. It’s curiously muted, as if it fears that passion would tear its delicate fabric; even the fights are more in sorrow than in anger, and when there’s a fistfight, it doesn’t feel like a real fistfight—it feels more like someone thought the movie needed a fistfight round about then.
The film is about a man and a woman who believe in great true love. The man believes it’s behind him; the woman hopes it’s ahead of her. One of their ideals in life is “to be somebody’s true north.” Right away we know they’re in trouble. You don’t just find true love. You team up with somebody, and build it from the ground up. But Message in a Bottle believes in the kind of love where the romantic music comes first, trembling and sweeping under every scene, and the dialogue is treated like the lyrics.
Yet it is about two likable characters—three, really, since Paul Newman not only steals every scene he’s in, but puts it in the bank and draws interest on it. Robin Wright Penn plays Theresa, a researcher for the Chicago Tribune, who finds a letter in a bottle. It is a heartbreaking love note to “Catherine,” by a man who wants to make amends to his true north.
Theresa, a divorced mother of one, is deeply touched by the message, and shares it with a columnist named Charlie (Robbie Coltrane), who of course lifts it for a column. Theresa feels betrayed. (If she thinks she can show a letter like that to a guy with a deadline and not read about it in tomorrow’s paper, no wonder she’s still a researcher.) The column leads to the discovery of two other letters, on the same stationery. Charlie has the bottle, the cork, the stationery, and the handwriting analyzed, and figures the messages came from the Carolinas. A few calls to gift shops, and they know who bought the stationery.
It’s Garret Blake (Kevin Costner). Theresa is sent out on a mission to do research about him. She meets his father (Newman), and then the man himself, a shipwright who handcrafts beautiful vessels. He takes her for a test sail. The wind is bracing and the chemistry is right. “You eat meat?” he asks her. “Red meat? I make a perfect steak. It’s the best thing I do.” With this kind of build-up, Linda McCartney would have tucked into a T-bone.
Soon it’s time for Theresa to return home (where after she writes one column, the paper promotes her and gives her an office with a window view; at that rate, in six weeks she’ll be using Colonel McCormick’s ancestral commode). Of course she wants him to come and see her—to see how she lives. “Will you come and visit me?” she asks. His reply does not represent the proudest moment of the screenwriter: “You mean, inland?”
Sooner or later he’s going to find out that she found his letter in a bottle and is not simply a beautiful woman who wandered onto his boat. That his secrets are known in those few places where the Tribune is still read. Yes, but it takes a long time, and when his discovery finally comes, the film handles it with a certain tact. It’s not just an explosion about betrayal, but more complicated—partly because of the nature of the third letter. (Spoiler: It’s a bit of a stretch that Garret’s dying wife coincidentally hit on the idea of writing a note in a bottle to him on the same typewriter and stationery he was using, especially since she presumably didn’t know about the first two notes.)
As morose and contrived as the movie is, it has a certain winsome charm, because of the personal warmth of the actors. This is Robin Wright Penn’s breakthrough to a different kind of acting, and she has a personal triumph; she’s been identified with desperate, hard-as-nails characters, but no more. Costner finds the right note of inarticulate pain; he loves, but doesn’t feel he has the right to. Paul Newman handles his role, as Costner’s ex-drunk father, with the relaxed confidence of Michael Jordan shooting free-throws in your driveway. It is good to see all three of them on the screen, in whatever combination, and the movie is right to play down the sex scenes and underline the cuddling and the whispers.
But where, oh where, did they get the movie’s ending? Is it in the original novel, The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks? Don’t know. Haven’t read it. The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn, and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.
Meteor
(Directed by Ronald Neame; starring Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Trevor Howard; 1979)
Movie critics are always complaining the special effects are bad, but do they ever say why? Not usually. They satisfy themselves with a snappy one-liner (“Godzilla’s opponent looks like a large, runny blob of Gorgonzola cheese”) and then race on to the sociological implications of the work in review.
Well, the special effects in Meteor are bad, and let’s take ourselves a nice, leisurely conducted tour of their various shortcomings. We can indulge that luxury because the story of Meteor (apart from the special effects) hardly inspires discussion. This basic plot has already been filmed nineteen times. It wasn’t any good before and it’s not any good now.
1. The Meteor. Apparently a very large, false rock, photographed from just above its top surface as it occupies the foreground and rolls toward the camera. The problem here is that since the camera doesn’t seem to move in relation to the background, the meteor appears to be rolling in place on its axis—rather than toward us.
2. Outer Space. In his classic film 2001, Stanley Kubrick revolutionized the way we visualize objects in space by photographing them moving slowly in relationship to one another, while a Strauss waltz filled the sound track. Fine, if the objects are delicately rendezvousing while their speeds are synchronized in the same plane—as his were. Meteor also gives us majestic outer space ballets of space objects, but is guilty of an oversight: Its objects are hurtling toward each other from opposite directions and thus would be perceived as moving at the sum of their speeds—in this case, tens of thousands of miles an hour. You’d have to look fast.
3. Reaction Time. After an explosion, a piece of meteor hits an American space probe. Just before it does, the crew members throw up their arms in horror and recoil. Impossible. At the speeds involved, they wouldn’t have the slightest chance of realizing what was going to happen—let alone see the meteor approach—before they were blasted to smithereens.
4. The Disasters. I’ll be kind here. I won’t mention the unspeakably incompetent obligatory shots of tidal waves and cities in flame. But here are two laughable scenes that didn’t even have to be in the picture:
Scene One: An Eskimo or Mongolian (I didn’t catch the accent) looks up in the sky and gasps as a small meteor flashes down and explodes. Where does it land? Just on the other side of a handy nearby mountain, of course, so its glow can light up the sky. Since it is obvious that in a fiction film the director can place his Mongolians anywhere, why pinch pennies and put him on the wrong side of the mountain?
Scene Two: my favorite. The heartrending incident of the 12,000 dead Olympic cross-country skiers, who are all crushed by a massive avalanche. Hold on! you say. Do we really see all 12,000 skiers? Yes, as a matter of fact, we do: The movie fools us. We see all 12,000 skiers cheerfully speeding past the camera, and then the announcer on a newscast breathlessly breaks the tragic news: “Just minutes after these scenes were shot, the skiers were all killed!! . . . Luckily, our camera crew escaped by helicopter just in time!” What luck.
5. The Case of the Anamorphic Intergalactic Objects. Here we have the ultimate El Cheapo Sleazo effect, but first let me explain “anamorphic.” To make widescreen movies, the images are first squeezed, and then projected through a special lens that stretches them out to lifelike dimensions. But, if you take ordinary, everyday images and then project them through an anamorphic lens, they will look really stretched out. Example: The ads at intermissions with those squatty and fat Coke bottles.
Meteor uses anamorphic effects in a desperate and truly sleazy attempt to make its explosions look bigger. Ordinary explosions and glowing meteors are shot (badly) in regular ratio and run through the lens. Result? All the meteors in this movie are wider than they are high.
Enough. Do the people who made Meteor take us all for total fools? And, if so, could that possibly be because they’re looking for company?
Milk Money
(Directed by Richard Benjamin; starring Melanie Griffith, Ed Harris; 1994)
Sometimes they produce a documentary about the making of a movie. You know, like The Making of “Jurassic Park.” I would give anything within reason to see The Making of “Milk Money,” or, for that matter, to simply listen to recordings of the executive story conferences. In fact, it’s funny . . . as I sit here in a late-summer reverie . . . why, it’s almost as if I can hear the voices now. . . .
* * *
Studio Executive A: So what’s the premise?
Studio Executive B: We got kids, we got sex, we got romance, all in a family picture
A: Can’t have sex in a family picture.
B: Depends. Nobody actually has sex. Sure, you got a hooker, but she’s a good hooker, with a heart of gold. Melanie Griffith is gonna play her.
A: Kind of like Working Girl Turns a Trick?
B: Cuter than that. We start with three twelve-year-old boys. They’re going crazy because they’ve never seen a naked woman.
A: Whatsamatter? They poor? Don’t they have cable?
B: Ever hear of the concept of “the willing suspension of disbelief?” I know the audience will find it hard to believe but it’s true: These kids don’t know what a naked woman looks like. So they pool their pocket money and ride their bikes into the big city, and ask women on the street if they’re hookers, until they find one who is. That’s Melanie.
A: How much they got?
B: More’n a hundred bucks. So she shows them.
A: She strips? This has got to get a PG-13 rating.
B: Like I say, it’s a family movie. She only strips to the waist. And we only see her from the back.
A: (slightly disappointed): Oh. So that’s ten minutes. Where do we go from here?
B: There’s more to the plot. Melanie is in danger from the evil gangsters who control prostitution, and after her pimp is killed they think she has all of his money. So she needs to hide out. And one of the kids thinks she’d make an ideal wife for his dad. So he invites her out to the suburbs.
A: The dad’s not married?
B: We got a nice touch here. The kid’s mother died in childbirth. So all his life he’s had this single father. He wants to fix up dad with the hooker, see? He thinks she’d make a great mom.
A: So we get a Meet Cute?
B: Yeah. See, the kid moves the hooker into his tree house, and then tells his dad that she’s his buddy’s math tutor.
A: What’s she wearing?
B: A kind of clingy minidress with a low neckline. High heels.
A: Is that what a math tutor wears?
B: You ever see My Tutor? Private Lessons? Any of those Sybil Danning or Sylvia Kristel pictures?
A: You got a point. So dad doesn’t catch on.
B: Naw. He falls for her. Also, this is a nice angle, he’s a high school science teacher who is fighting to save the wetlands near the school from an evil developer who wants to pave it and turn it into a shopping center. Dad is played by Ed Harris.
A: (nods approvingly) Ecology. Very good.
B: So the hooker is in the tree house, dad thinks she’s a math tutor, and meanwhile the evil gangster is cruising the streets of the suburb with another hooker, looking for her. While dad fights against the encroachment of the wetlands and chains himself to his automobile so the bulldozers can’t come in. And meanwhile we throw in some of those cute conversations where one person means one thing and another person means something else. You know, so that all of the people in the town know she’s a hooker except for dad, who takes her out to eat and scandalizes your standard table of gossiping local biddies.
A: This is nice, this is original.
B: We put in some nice Normal Rockwell touches. Like, the way the kid communicates between his bedroom and the hooker in the tree house is with one of those old tin-can telephones? You know, where you attach two tin cans with a string?
A: I was never able to get one of those to work when I was a kid.
B: Neither was I. But don’t worry. No kid today has ever seen one before, so they won’t know. Today’s kids use cellular phones and beepers.
A: Good point.
B: And then we get the big climax.
A: What happens?
B: I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let’s just say the gangster doesn’t get what he wants, and true love saves the day.
A: What about the wetlands?
B: The wetlands? Let me just say, from the point of view of the ultimate significance of this picture, the message for the family audience sort of thing, the wetlands are what this picture is all about.
A: Saving the wetlands. A good cause.
B: Of course, you don’t mention the wetlands in the ads.
A: No, you mention the hooker in the ads. So what’s the picture called? Pocket Money?
B: No, it’s called Milk Money.
A: Why Milk Money?
B: You’ll understand when you see the ads.
Mr. Magoo
(Directed by Stanley Tong; starring Leslie Nielsen; 1997)
Magoo drives a red Studebaker convertible in Mr. Magoo, a fact I report because I love Studebakers and his was the only thing I liked in the film. It has a prescription windshield. He also drives an eggplantmobile, which looks like a failed wienermobile. The concept of a failed wienermobile is itself funnier than anything in the movie.
Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted. I wonder if there could have been any laughs in it. Perhaps this project was simply a bad idea from the beginning, and no script, no director, no actor, could have saved it.
I wasn’t much of a fan of the old cartoons. They were versions of one joke, imposed on us by the cantankerous but sometimes lovable nearsighted Magoo, whose shtick was to mistake something for something else. He always survived, but since it wasn’t through his own doing, his adventures were more like exercises in design: Let’s see how Magoo can walk down several girders suspended in midair, while thinking they’re a staircase.
The plot involves Magoo as an innocent bystander at the theft of a jewel. Mistaken as the thief, he is pursued by the usual standard-issue CIA and FBI buffoons, while never quite understanding the trouble he’s in. He’s accompanied on most of his wanderings by his bulldog and his nephew, Waldo, of which the bulldog has the more winning personality.
Magoo is played by Leslie Nielsen, who could at the very least have shaved his head bald for the role. He does an imitation of the Magoo squint and the Magoo voice, but is unable to overcome the fact that a little Magoo at six minutes in a cartoon is a far different matter than a lot of Magoo at ninety minutes in a feature. This is a one-joke movie without the joke. Even the outtakes at the end aren’t funny, and I’m not sure I understood one of them, unless it was meant to show stunt people hilariously almost being drowned.
