I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 31
I have taken another look at my notes, and must correct myself. There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film “is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight.” I think we should stage an international search to find one single person who thinks the film is intended as such a portrayal, and introduce that person to the author of the disclaimer, as they will have a lot in common, including complete detachment from reality.
Mr. Payback
(Directed by Bob Gale; starring Billie Warlock; 1995)
The armrest of your seat contains a little console with red, orange, and green buttons. You do a test run, clicking them. The lights go down, the “Interfilm” trademark appears on the screen, and an announcer encourages you to talk, scream, shout, and snort during the following film: “Feel free to generally behave as if you were raised in a barn.”
Mr. Payback, the first “interactive movie,” is supposed to inspire these reactions because you, the lucky audience member, will be able to make key decisions affecting the progress of the story. The first “interfilm” opens this weekend in forty-four specially equipped theaters around the country, and you can see for yourself.
If you feel, for example, that the headmistress of a private school should torture the handcuffed hero with a cattle prod, you will want to push the red button. Other choices include a paddle or a rod. I was for the paddle, but the majority voted for the cattle prod, after which the hero was given electric shocks to the genitals (thankfully below screen level) and then dropped in a Dumpster while a subtitle cheerfully assured us that his “family jewels” had survived intact.
I went to see Mr. Payback with an open mind. I knew it would not be a “movie” as I understand that word, because movies act on you and absorb you in their stories. An “interfilm,” as they call this new medium, is like a cross between a video game and a CD-ROM game, and according to Bob Bejan, president and CEO of Interfilm, Inc., “suspension of disbelief comes when you begin to believe you’re in control.”
I never believed I was in control. If I had been in control, I would have ended the projection and advised Bejan to go back to the drawing board. While an interactive movie might in theory be an entertaining experience, Mr. Payback was so offensive and yokel-brained that being raised in a barn might almost be required of its audiences.
Few adults are going to find the process bearable. The target audience is possibly children and younger adolescents. That’s why I found it surprising that Mr. Payback shovels as much barnyard material into its plot as possible. The movie seems obsessed with scatology: with excrement, urination, enemas, loudly passing gas, stepping in dog messes, etc. It also involves a great deal of talk about sexual practices, not to mention every possible rude four-letter word except, to be sure, the ultimate one. The movie bends over backward to be vulgar. It’s the kind of film where horrified parents might encourage the kids to shout at the screen, hoping the noise might drown out the flood of garbage.
Hey, I’m not against four-letter words—in context, and with a purpose. But why did Mr. Payback need to be gratuitously offensive? Nonstop? Knowing there would be young children in the audience?
Now what about the process itself? True, you can “influence” events. You sit through the movie once, choosing villains, choosing “paybacks,” choosing fates, even choosing celebrity guests (Paul Anka, Ice T) for a final game show. That takes twenty minutes. Then you’re allowed to sit through the movie again, and this time of course you choose different villains, paybacks, etc. In one version, you can force that evil headmistress to be strapped into a leather bondage uniform and walked on all fours. In another version, the villain might be forced to eat monkey brains. Ho, ho.
How are these choices conveyed to the screen? Four laserdisc players with various plot choices are standing by in the control booth, and double-brightness video projectors are suspended from the theater ceiling. The image is acceptable and the sound is excellent; there is no perceptible delay between the audience vote and the scene it has chosen.
It was clear after two viewings that most of the movie remains essentially the same every time, and that the “choices” provide brief detours that loop back to the main story line. Choose a different villain, and he or she still gets gassed in the backseat of the limousine. It’s said that two hours of material are shot for every twenty-minute movie. Nothing on Earth could induce me to sit through every permutation of Mr. Payback.
Is there a future for “interfilms”? Maybe. Someday they may grow clever or witty. Not all of them will be as moronic and offensive as Mr. Payback. What they do technically, they do pretty well. It is just that this is not a movie. It is mass psychology run wild, with the mob zealously pummeling their buttons, careening downhill toward the sleaziest common denominator.
There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod, or the cattle prod. Because she must have voted for one of them. I saw her pushing her buttons.
The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo
(Directed by Juan Antonio Bardem and Henri Colpi; starring Omar Sharif; 1975)
Lots of movies have been inspired by their special effects, but The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo may be the first movie inspired by its lack of special effects. Here’s a kiddie movie with a nihilistic, suicidal ending—because there wasn’t enough money to show Nemo’s famous submarine, the Nautilus, actually moving under water. Nemo, faced with doom and lacking the expensive special effects necessary to make his escape, chooses to go down with his ship and save the producers money.
We do, however, get the inside of the Nautilus, as well as a cheap set alleged to show its conning tower and upper deck (the rest of the vast vessel is underwater, and, as the saying goes, out of sight is out of mind and also not out of pocket). It’s inhabited by Nemo himself, played by the sad-eyed Omar Sharif, who gets star billing for his approximately ten minutes on screen.
The plot involves a group of shipwrecked balloonists (or balloon-wrecked sailors) and their dog, who are stranded on a strange island guarded by devices that look like a cross between Chinese dragons and death rays. They set up housekeeping in a cave, stay away from the death rays, float to a nearby island to rescue another shipwreck victim, and spend an inordinate amount of time following their dog, who is as clever as, and vastly more humorous than, the rest of the cast.
There are also some pirates who turn up, apparently looking for Nemo, and there are several inconclusive gun battles for no very good reason. The most inexplicable scene (in a movie full of them) is one involving a pet chimpanzee who arrives unannounced, does its stuff, and then is shot by the pirates and buried. Never introduce a chimpanzee in the first act unless you’re going to shoot it in the third?
After adventures too boring to mention, our heroes wind up in Captain Nemo’s grotto and on board the Nautilus. He gives them an illustrated slide lecture of his background and early years, and meanwhile the island is blowing up. That’s our chance to see stock footage of lava flowing from volcanoes. In fear that we may miss the point (after all, this is rented footage), the producers show it to us, not once, but twice. That’s not necessary since we saw the identical stock footage in last month’s The Island at the Top of the World. That volcano gets around.
Movies like this have an obligatory structure (or used to) that requires a climax at the end. We can reasonably expect that our heroes will assist Captain Nemo in freeing himself and his submarine from the grotto, but, no, they don’t. They climb out of the grotto and make their way to the beach. The Nautilus goes down in an orgy of trick photography. A ship steams into sight to rescue the survivors. The movie’s last line of dialogue is one of regret that rescue has arrived “since now our adventures are over.” That’s assuming they ever began.
The Myth of Fingerprints
(Directed by Bart Freundlich; starring Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider, Julianne Moore, Noah Wylie; 1997)
Some families cannot be saved. The family in The Myth of Fingerprints is one of them. There have been a lot of movies where dysfunctional families return home for uneasy Thanksgiving weekends (Home for the Holidays and The Ice Storm come to mind), but few in which the turkey has less to complain about than anyone else at the table.
The film takes place in chilly light at a farmhouse somewhere in New England, where angry and sullen grown children return for Thanksgiving, bringing along apprehensive lovers and angry memories. Waiting to welcome them is their mother, Lena (Blythe Danner), whose relative cheer under these circumstances is inexplicable but welcome, and their father, Hal (Roy Scheider), who, like so many WASP fathers in recent films, is by definition a monster (aware of his pariah status, he walks and talks like a medieval flagellant).
The family drags itself together like torture victims returning to their dungeons. The dialogue, wary and elliptical, skirts around remembered wounds. Angriest of all is Mia (Julianne Moore), who glowers through the entire film, nursing old grudges, and lashes out at her hapless fiancée Eliot (Brian Kerwin), a psychotherapist who, if he were any good at all, would prescribe immediate flight for himself. Mia’s younger sister, Leigh (Laurel Holloman) seems relatively unscathed by the family experience, maybe because her siblings exhausted the family’s potential for damage before she grew into range.
Also in the family are two sons. Warren (Noah Wylie) is interested to learn that the great love of his life, Daphne, is back in town. Jake (Michael Vartan) has brought along his fiancée, Margaret (Hope Davis), who has an alarming taste for immediate sexual gratification (“anywhere, anytime,” as Travis Bickle once said).
During the weekend, two of these characters will meet people from their pasts. For Warren, the reunion with Daphne (Arija Bareikis) will be a chance to explain why he broke off their warm relationship so suddenly and seemed to flee. Mia meets an old schoolmate who now calls himself Cezanne (James Le Gros), and who represents, I think, a life principle the family would be wise to study.
Frequently in the movies, when an alienated, inarticulate, and depressed father starts cleaning his rifle, we can anticipate a murder or a suicide by the end of the film. Here we’re thrown off course when Hal, the dad, buys a turkey at the grocery store and then shoots it with his rifle, so his family will think he hunted it down himself. (I would have appreciated a scene where he explained the plastic bag with the gizzards.)
The movie is not unskillful. The acting is much better than the material deserves, and individual scenes achieve takeoff velocity, but the movie ends without resolution, as if its purpose was to strike a note and slink away. The Myth of Fingerprints makes one quite willing to see the same actors led by the same director—but in another screenplay. This one is all behavior, nuance, and angst, seasoned with unrelieved gloom. Some families need healing. This one needs triage.
Newsies
(Directed by Kenny Ortega; starring Robert Duvall, Ann-Margret; 1992)
Newsies, we are informed as the movie opens, is based on actual events. I do not doubt this. I am sure that shortly before the turn of the century, newsboys organized a strike against the greedy Joseph Pulitzer, and were cheered on by a dance-hall madam with a heart of gold. Nor do I doubt that the lads, some of them boys of nine or ten, hung out in saloons and bought rounds of beer while making their plans, or that the proprietor of an evil city orphanage made himself rich by collecting fees from the city. I don’t even doubt that the newsboys printed their own strike paper on an old flat-bed press down in the basement of Pulitzer’s building. Of course I believe. Yes, Virginia.
What I find it hard to believe, however, is that anyone thought the screenplay based on these actual events was of compelling interest. Newsies is like warmed-over Horatio Alger, complete with such indispensable clichés as the newsboy on crutches, the little kid, and of course the hero’s best pal, who has a pretty sister. Nor does the movie lack the standard villains, including Oscar nominee Michael Lerner as the hard-hearted circulation manager.
In the role of New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer, Robert Duvall, wearing a beard that makes him look like one of the Smith Brothers, plays a standard fat-cat industrialist, with none of the wit or insight that the original Pulitzer employed while selling the first mass-circulation newspapers to the unwashed masses. The real Pulitzer, who was one of the inspirations for Citizen Kane, must have known something about ordinary people; here he seems here to despise them.
Ann-Margret, who plays Madda, the dance-hall star, has a role whose purpose is all but incomprehensible. She acts as a sort of big sister and confidante to the striking newsboys, chucking some of them under the chin while talking to others in terms of fairly alarming intimacy. Are we to guess that her dealings with some of the lads have gone beyond buying a paper for a penny? She performs onstage in her music hall, which functions in the movie primarily as a transparent device for getting an Ann-Margret number into the show.
The newsies themselves are up in arms because Mr. Pulitzer has cut their take by a tenth of a cent. They organize, form a union, and agitate for workers’ rights with such articulate energy that we can only wonder what these kids could accomplish if they were high school graduates, instead of street waifs. They sing and dance a lot, too, on olde New York street sets that stretch unconvincingly for hundreds of yards down studio back lots. The music is by Alan Mencken, whose material for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast was unforgettable. Here he achieves the opposite result.
I saw the movie at a Saturday morning preview attended by hundreds of children. From what I could see and hear, the kids didn’t get much out of it. No wonder. Although the material does indeed involve young protagonists, no effort is made to show their lives in a way today’s kids can identify with. This movie must seem as odd to them as a foreign film. The fact that old man Pulitzer once tried to screw newsies out of a tenth of a cent must represent, for many of them, the very definition of the underwhelming.
Nick and Jane
(Directed by Richard Mauro; starring Dana Wheeler-Nichols, James McCaffrey; 1997)
You don’t want to watch Nick and Jane, you want to grade it. It’s like work by a student inhabiting the mossy lower slopes of the bell curve. Would-be filmmakers should see it and make a list of things they resolve never to do in their own work.
The story involves Jane (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), a business executive, and Nick (James McCaffrey), a taxi driver. She is unaware of the movie rule that requires that whenever a character arrives unannounced at a lover’s apartment for a “surprise,” the lover will be in bed with someone else. She finds the faithless John (John Dossett) in another’s arms, bolts out of the building, and into Nick’s cab. Then follow the usual scenes in which they fall in love even though they live in two different worlds.
I call that the story, but it’s more like the beard. Inside Nick and Jane’s heterosexual cover story is a kinky sex comedy, signaling frantically to be released. Consider. Nick’s neighbor in his boardinghouse is Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp), a drag queen. Nick’s roommate is Enzo (Gedde Watanabe), whose passion for feet is such that he drops to his knees to sniff the insteps of complete strangers. The friendly black woman at the office is into bondage and discipline with the naughty boss. Carter (David Johansen), the boss’s special assistant, is Miss Coco’s special friend. Key scenes take place at a drag club where Miss Coco is the entertainer (her act consists of singing “The Lord’s Prayer”—in all seriousness, and right down to the “forever and ever, Amen,” I fear).
These elements could possibly be assembled into quite another movie (for all I know, they were disassembled from quite another movie). But they don’t build into anything. They function simply to show that the filmmakers’ minds are really elsewhere—that the romance of Nick and Jane is the bone they’re throwing to the dogs of convention. I kept getting the strange feeling that if they had their druthers, director Richard Mauro and writers Neil William Alumkal and Peter Quigley would have gladly ditched Nick and Jane and gone with Miss Coco as the lead.
As for Nick and Jane, they have alarming hair problems. Dana Wheeler-Nicholson goes through the movie wearing her mother’s hairstyle, or maybe it’s Betty Crocker’s. James McCaffrey starts out with the aging hippie look but after an expensive makeover paid for by Jane he turns up with his hair slicked back in the Michael Douglas Means Business mode. I think the idea was to show him ever so slightly streaked with blond, but they seem to have dismissed the stylist and done the job themselves, maybe over Miss Coco’s sink with a bottle of something from Walgreen’s, and Nick looks like he was interrupted in the process of combing yolks through his hair.
The camera work is sometimes quietly inept, sometimes spectacularly so. Consider the scene involving a heated conversation, during which the camera needlessly and distractingly circles the characters as if to say—look, we can needlessly circle these characters! The dialogue is written with the theory that whatever people would say in life, they should say in a movie (“This is a wonderful view!” “I’ve never been in the front seat of a cab before!”).
There is one scene where Nick bashfully confesses to having studied art and reluctantly lets Jane see some sketches he has done of her. The usual payoff for such scenes is a drawing worthy of Rembrandt, but what Nick shows her is one of those Famous Artist’s School approaches where he drew an egg shape and then some crosshairs to mark where the ears and eyes should line up.
Nick’s artistry knows no bounds. Masquerading as a business executive, he effortlessly absorbs the firm’s current challenge, which apparently involves saving 25 percent on the importation of scrap metal from Surinam. He dispatches Enzo (wearing those L.A. Gear shoes with heels that light up) to collect lots of scrap metal from a junkyard, after which Nick dons a handy welder’s helmet to fashion a sculpture that he hauls into the CEO’s office, explaining it is intended “to punctuate the enormity of the idea I’m about to present.” Yes. That’s what he says.
