I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 35
One goes to this movie in the same spirit one visits an ancient town buried by lava centuries ago: To try to determine by examining the ruins what made the gods punish man so.
The Postman
(Directed by Kevin Costner; starring Kevin Costner, Olivia Williams; 1997)
There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it’s too good-hearted for that. It’s goofy, yes, and pretentious, and Kevin Costner puts himself in situations that get snickers. And it’s way too long. But parables like this require their makers to burn their bridges and leave common sense behind: Either they work (as Forrest Gump did), in which case everyone involved is a genius, or they don’t—in which case you shouldn’t blame them for trying.
In choosing The Postman as his new project, however, Kevin Costner should perhaps have reflected that audiences were getting to be overfamiliar with him as the eccentric loner in the wilderness, coming across an isolated community, and then joining their war against evil marauders. He told that story magnificently in Dances With Wolves (1990) and then did another version in the futuristic fantasy Waterworld (1995). Now he sort of combines them, in a film that takes place in the post-Apocalyptic future like Waterworld, but looks and feels like it takes place in a Western.
The movie, based on an award-winning science fiction novel by David Brin, takes place in 2013. The dust clouds have settled after nuclear war, and scattered communities pick up the reins of civilization. There is no central government. Costner is a lone figure in the wilderness, friendly only with his mule, named Bill. They support themselves by doing Shakespeare for bands of settlers. Bill can hold a sword in his mouth, and in Macbeth he plays Birnam Wood. His master recites lines like, “Life is a tale told by a moron,” not the sort of mistake he’d be likely to make, especially with a woman helpfully prompting him by whispering, “Idiot! Idiot!” Or maybe she’s a critic.
Costner is conscripted into a neofascist army run by General Bethlehem (Will Patton). He escapes, stumbles over an abandoned U.S. Mail van, and steals the uniform, cap, and letterbag of the skeleton inside. At the gates of a settlement called Pineview, he claims he’s come to deliver the mail. Building on his fiction, he tells the residents of a restored U.S. government in Minneapolis. The sheriff spots him for a fraud, but the people want to believe, and the next morning, he finds letters pushed under his door. Walking outside, he discovers that all the people of the town have gathered in hushed silence in a semicircle around his lodging, to await his awakening and appearance—the sort of thing townspeople do in movies, but never in real life, where some helpful townsman invariably suggests, “Let’s just wake the sonuvabitch up.”
In a movie that proceeds with glacial deliberation, the postman becomes a symbol for the survivors in their struggling communities. “You give out hope like it was candy in your pocket,” a young woman tells him. It’s the sort of line an actor-director ought to be wary of applying to his own character, but Costner frankly sees the postman as a messiah, and there is a shot late in the film where he zooms high above a river gorge in a cable car that serves absolutely no purpose except to allow him to pose as the masthead on the ship of state.
That young woman (Olivia Williams), by the way, wants the postman’s semen. Her husband is infertile after the “bad mumps,” and the couple desire a child. The postman eventually obliges, and she makes love with him in a scene reminiscent of those good Victorian wives who closed their eyes and thought of the empire. Her husband is murdered, and she’s kidnapped by General Bethlehem, who has seen Braveheart and knows about the feudal system where the lord gets first dibbies on the wedding nights of his vassals. She and the postman eventually escape into the wilderness and spend the winter together while she comes full term. This is some frontier woman; in the spring, she burns down their cottage so they’ll be forced to move on, and “we can find someplace nice for the baby.”
In his absence, the postman’s legendary status has been magnified by young Ford Lincoln Mercury (Larenz Tate), who has named himself after an auto dealership and in the absence of the postman has organized a postal service in exile. It is clear that the postman and Bethlehem will sooner or later have to face each other in battle. When they do, the general produces a hostage he has captured—Ford L. Mercury—and the postman pales and pauses at the prospect of F. L. Mercury’s death, even though the postman’s army consists mostly of hundreds of women and children he is cheerfully contemplating leading to their slaughter.
The movie has a lot of unwise shots resulting in bad laughs, none more ill-advised than one where the postman, galloping down a country lane, passes a gate where a tow-headed little tyke holds on to a letter. Some sixth sense causes the postman to look back, see the kid, turn around, then gallop back to him, snatching up the letter at full tilt. This touching scene, shot with a zoom lens in slow motion to make it even more fatuous than it needed to be, is later immortalized in a bronze statue, unveiled at the end of the movie. As a civic figure makes a speech in front of the statue, which is still covered by a tarpaulin, a member of the audience whispered, “They’ve bronzed the postman!” Dear reader, that member was me, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was right.
Priest
(Directed by Antonia Bird; starring Linus Roache; 1995)
Priest, one critic has written, “vigorously attack(s) the views of the Roman Catholic Church on homosexuality,” which is just the way the filmmakers probably want the film to be positioned. Actually the film is an attack on the vow of celibacy, preferring sexuality of any sort to the notion that men should, could, or would live chastely.
The story takes us into a Liverpool rectory where the senior priest sleeps with the pretty black housekeeper, and the younger priest removes his Roman collar for nighttime soirees to gay bars. When he and his partner are caught in a police sweep, he is disgraced, but the older priest is pleased that the young man has finally gotten in touch with his emotions, and begs him to return to the church to celebrate Mass with him. (The bishop, who advises him to “piss off out of my diocese,” is portrayed, like all the church authorities, as a dried-up old bean.)
The question of whether priests should be celibate is the subject of much debate right now. What is not in doubt is that, to be ordained, they have to promise to be celibate. Nobody has forced them to become priests, and rules are rules. The filmmakers seem to feel that since they wouldn’t want to live that way, of course it is wicked that priests must.
I am aware that the touchy-feely movement is so well established that no commercial film could seriously argue for celibacy. What I object to is the use of the church as a spice for an otherwise lame story; take away the occupations of the two central characters, and the rest of the film’s events would be laid bare as tiresome sexual politics. The most obnoxious scene in the film is the one where the young priest, tortured by the needs of the flesh and by another problem we will soon get to, lectures Christ on the cross: “If you were here, you’d . . .” Well, what? Advise him to go out and get laid?
The priest, named Father Greg and played by Linus Roache, picks up Graham (Robert Carlyle) for a night of what he hopes will be anonymous sex, but later Graham recognizes him on the street, and soon they are in love. This is all done by fiat; the two men are not allowed to get to know one another, or to have conversations of any meaning, since the movie is not really about their relationship, but about how backward the church is in opposing it.
Instead of taking the time to explore the sexuality of the two priests in a thoughtful way, Priest crams in another plot, this one based on that old chestnut, the inviolable secrecy of the confessional. Father Greg learns while hearing a confession that a young girl parishioner is being sexually abused by her father. What to do? Of course (as the filmmakers no doubt learned from Hitchcock’s I Confess) he cannot break the seal of the confessional—a rule that, for the convenience of the plot, he takes much more seriously than the rules about sex. This dilemma also figures in his anguished monologue to Jesus.
Once again, the church is used as spice. (Can you imagine audiences getting worked up over the confidential nature of a lawyer-client or a doctor-patient relationship?) But here the movie leaves a hole wide enough to run a cathedral through. The girl’s father confronts the priest in the confessional, threatens him, and tells the priest he plans to keep right on with his evil practice (we don’t simply have a child abuser here, but a spokesman for incest). What the film fails to realize is that this conversation is not protected by the sacramental seal, because the sinner makes it absolutely clear he is not asking forgiveness, does not repent, and plans to keep right on sinning as long as he can get away with it. At this point, Father Greg should pick up the phone and call the cops.
The unexamined assumptions in the Priest screenplay are shallow and exploitative. The movie argues that the hidebound and outdated rules of the church are responsible for some people (priests) not having sex although they should, while others (incestuous parents) can keep on having it although they shouldn’t. For this movie to be described as a moral statement about anything other than the filmmaker’s prejudices is beyond belief.
Prison Girls
(No credits—not listed on the Internet Movie Database; 1973; also includes references to The Devil’s Window and The Blind Dead)
During the past week, I have seen the end of The Blind Dead, the beginning of The Devil’s Widow, and two of the three dimensions of Prison Girls. Here is my report.
Prison Girls was the toughest because the right lens fell out of my 3-D glasses and got lost on the floor. That was the whole ball game right there.
From what I could understand of the dialogue, the movie was about a group of girls in prison who were given two-day leaves in order to go home and appear in sex scenes for the movie.
There were very few scenes in the prison itself, I was sorry to see. From what I could determine (it was a little hard with the 3-D images overlapping), there was a scene in the prison psychiatrist’s office, and that was about it. Why no prison?
The first explanation that leaps to mind is that the movie was so cheap they couldn’t afford prison sets. But, no, that doesn’t make sense, because the current wave of prison movies was invented to save money on sets. If you shoot a whole movie in a motel room, the audience is going to notice the cheap sets. But if you shoot a whole movie in a prison cell, everybody understands because the characters are locked in anyway. So I guess Prison Girls didn’t have a lot of prison sets because it was a big-budget exploitation movie. Maybe.
Anyway, I was disappointed, because whenever I go to a prison movie, I always look in the cell next to the cell where the main characters are. Burgess Meredith always used to be the guy in the next cell, and I wanted to see if he ever got out.
The Devil’s Widow was a movie I wanted to see because I saw Roddy McDowell, the director, on a TV talk show about three years ago and he was talking about it. He said he made it because he wanted to make a tribute to Ava Gardner, and the movie was a gesture of love. I hope Ava Gardner appreciated it. The movie was finished two years ago but has only been released now because it took the brains in the promotion department all that time to figure out that the movie’s original title, Tam Lin, sounded like a Cantonese restaurant. The Devil’s Widow, I am sure you will agree, is a title with a lot more class, although I, for one, did not even know the devil was dead. I guess he got lonely after God passed on.
The Blind Dead is a movie about centuries-old corpses who rise from the dead and chase people around cemeteries and churches. They are blind. After being dead 200 years, I think it’s pretty good that they can even walk.
They have to listen for you before they can chase you. Sometimes they ride slow-motion horses. The horses are not blind, but they do have arthritis, and the lead horse suffers from the heartbreak of psoriasis. The way to escape from the blind dead is to keep real quiet. Then they don’t know where you are, and the movie would be over. To avoid this, the people in the movie bang on doors, shout, breathe heavily, scream, gasp, cough, clear their throats, snap their fingers, tap their toes, step on twigs, grind their teeth, and ream out their ears. Then the blind dead chase them, catch them, and eat them.
Prom Night
(Directed by Paul Lynch; starring Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis; 1980)
Prom Night is merely an execrable movie—not despicable, like I Spit on Your Grave. But the experience of watching it at the Adelphi Theater last week was the worst of my moviegoing career. On one of the hottest nights of the year, the theater had no air conditioning (a fact revealed only after customers had entered). There was no ice for the soft drinks. The management relented and opened the theater’s exit doors, and some of the crowd stood outside in the marginally cooler summer night. When a scream went up, they dashed back inside to see what moment of violence they’d just missed.
What’s amazing is that despite these subhuman viewing conditions, there was a large crowd, and most stayed until the end. What was the attraction? Well, Prom Night was playing on a double bill with I Spit on Your Grave—which had been held over after the reviews hailed it as one of the sickest movies of all time.
I arrived early for Prom Night, sat through the last twenty-five minutes of I Spit on Your Grave, and got a bizarre surprise: The movie had been extensively edited since I’d seen it last, and a great deal of the most offensive violence was missing. In the scene where the heroine castrates the rapist in the bathtub, for example, there was now only one brief shot of the bloody victim. All the shots of him thrashing about in the bloody water were missing, as was a later shot of her mopping up the blood with towels.
How do we interpret the fact that the movie was secretly edited in midrun? The movie was beneath contempt in the first place. But for exhibitors to hold it over on the basis of its reputation for nauseating violence—and then to show a censored version without that violence—is a species of doublethink too diseased for me to penetrate.
Anyway, back to Prom Night. The plot is simple: A bunch of little kids semi-accidentally cause the death of a playmate, and vow to keep the secret all of their lives. Then we flash forward to their senior prom, as a maniac killer stalks and kills them. Who is the killer? The movie makes it painfully obvious very early on—and then insists on boring us with repeated shots of another suspect. It’s as if we know who the killer is, but the movie doesn’t.
After an endless hour of buildup (with a sound track so muffled and so badly played in the theater that most of the words couldn’t be understood), the night for the prom arrives. And the killer, dressed in black and with a ski mask, starts the killing spree. To the terminally bored audience, every killing was an occasion for screams, laughter, and applause. To call such a response cretinous would be generous. One typical killing went this way: bloody murder, followed by a loud disco song and a cut to a bloodred bowl of punch. Barf.
Why do people go to these movies? Probably because they’ve been browbeaten by the hard-sell advertising exploitation campaign on TV. It’s easy to make a great-looking, thirty-second TV spot, so why bother making a good film? As your friendly neighborhood movie critic, I have only one piece of advice. If you have an appetite for violence and the macabre, at least try to satisfy it in a movie done with artistry and craftsmanship—Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill, for example. Prom Night should be cut up to make bookmarks.
Psycho
(Directed by Gus Van Sant; starring Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn; 1998 remake)
The most dramatic difference between Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s “shot by shot” remake is the addition of a masturbation scene. That’s appropriate, since this new Psycho evokes memories in an attempt to re-create remembered passion.
Curious, how similar the new version is, and how different. If you have seen Hitchcock’s version, you already know the characters, the dialogue, the camera angles, the surprises. All that is missing is the tension—the conviction that something urgent is happening on the screen at this very moment. The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.
Students of trivia will note the differences. The opening shot is now an unbroken camera move from the Phoenix skyline into the hotel room where Marion Crane (Anne Heche) is meeting with her lover, Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen). There is a shot of Loomis’s buttocks, and when he turns toward her, a quick downward glance of appreciation by Marion. In the scene where Marion packs while deciding to steal the money, Heche does more facial acting than Janet Leigh did in the original—trying to signal what she’s thinking with twitches and murmurs. Not necessary.
The highway patrolman who wakes her from her roadside nap looks much the same as in the original, but has a speaking voice which, I think, has been electronically tweaked to make it deeper—and distracting.* We never get the chilling closer shot of him waiting across the street from the car lot, arms folded on his chest. When Marion goes into the “parlor” of Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), the stuffed birds above and behind them are in indistinct soft focus, so we miss the feeling that they’re poised to swoop. There is a clearer shot of “Mrs. Bates” during the knife attack in the shower. And more blood.
As for the masturbation scene, as Norman spies on Marion through the peephole between the parlor and Room No. 1: Even if Hitchcock was hinting at sexual voyeurism in his 1960 version, it is better not to represent it literally, since the jiggling of Norman’s head and the damp offscreen sound effects inspire a laugh at the precise moment when one is not wanted.
All of these details would be insignificant if the film worked as a thriller, but it doesn’t. One problem is the casting of Vaughn in the Norman Bates role. He isn’t odd enough. Norman’s early dialogue often ends in a nervous laugh. Anthony Perkins, in the original, made it seem compulsive, welling up out of some secret pool of madness. Vaughn’s laugh doesn’t seem involuntary. It sounds as if he intends to laugh. Possibly no actor could have matched the Perkins performance, which is one of the unique creations in the cinema, but Vaughn is not the actor to try. Among actors in the correct age range, my suggestion would be Jeremy Davies, who was the frightened Corporal Upham in Saving Private Ryan.
