I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 37
Brandon Lee is an adequate martial arts performer, if not a particularly riveting actor, although he has his work cut out for him in a movie where the drugs are smuggled in as starch in bed linens, and then removed in a laundry. But what can we make of the rest of the film?
The screenplay is so absentminded that it provides a love scene between Lee and Kate Hodge (as a good Chicago cop) without remembering that up to that point their only relationship consisted of Lee taking her hostage during a shoot-out. Powers Boothe, as the movie’s other good cop, has such deathless lines as “Why don’t you take your fists of fury and get out of here?” And Mancuso, who informs Lee he is going to break his fingers one at a time, seems to run a Mafia empire that consists of a lot of guys who are always sitting around in an Italian restaurant, eating.
Where is the audience for a movie like this? It’s out there, I guess. Martial arts movies generally make their money back and then some, perhaps because their fans are connoisseurs who evaluate the fight scenes and don’t mind that the dialogue is brainless. Truly inspired action scenes do, of course, have a special energy of their own. Rapid Fire is not truly or any other kind of inspired.
Reach the Rock
(Directed by William Ryan; starring Allesandro Nivola, Bruce Norris; 1998)
Reach the Rock plays like an experiment to see how much a movie can be slowed down before it stops. It was produced and written by John Hughes, who should have donated his screenplay to a nearby day-care center for use by preschoolers in constructing paper chains. How can the man who made Plains, Trains and Automobiles have thought this material was filmable?
The story involves an unhappy young man named Robin (Allesandro Nivola), who in the opening scene uses a flagpole to break the window of a hardware store. When Ernie the small-town cop (Bruce Norris) arrives, he finds Robin seated in a beach chair before the window, cooling himself with an electric fan. Robin is returned to the station, where the only other cop on the overnight shift is Sergeant Phil Quinn (William Sadler).
Robin is well known to the officers. His arrest sheet lists such offenses as loitering, disturbing the peace, vandalism, and so on. The sergeant and the kid dislike one another, and the actors demonstrate this with various reliable techniques, including the always dependable flaring of the nostrils.
The cops lock Robin in a cell. He steals the keys to the cell, lets himself out, steals a squad car, drives downtown, fires a shotgun through a coffee-shop window, returns, and locks himself back in. This is a pattern that will repeat itself many times during the long night. “How are you gettin’ out of here?” asks Sergeant Quinn, convinced that Robin is the culprit. It never occurs to him to search the prisoner for the keys. I can’t say much for his police work. (That line is borrowed from Fargo, a movie I thought of during this one as a drowning man will think of an inflatable whale.)
Robin’s sneaky activities unfold with the velocity of sleepwalking. There are two cells in the jail, and at various times Robin is locked in both, Ernie is locked in one, Quinn is locked in the other, a bunk catches fire, Robin’s old girlfriend is locked in with him, and Quinn is locked out of the building. Sounds like a maelstrom of activity with all those cell doors banging open and shut, but imagine the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, enacted in slow motion and with sadness.
Yes, Reach the Rock is very sad. Halfway through the film we learn that Sergeant Quinn blames Robin for the drowning death of his nephew. Even later, we learn that Robin has been moping and pining for four years because a rich local girl (Brooke Langton) dated him in high school but dropped him when she went to college—except of course for summers, when she comes home and resumes their sexual relationship, which seems sporting of her. “Time stopped for you about four years ago,” somebody tells Robin, or maybe it is everyone who tells Robin that.
There is a subplot. When we first see Ernie the dim-witted deputy, he is drinking in a parked squad car with a local woman named Donna (Karen Sillas). He’s about to make a move when he gets the call to check out the alarm at the hardware store. Throughout the entire movie, Ernie and Donna try to get horizontal, and are repeatedly interrupted. This is a running gag, or, in this movie, a walking gag. Donna grows frustrated, and wanders the deserted night streets in her nightgown—forlorn, neglected, and in heat. At one point, when Ernie arrives for yet another rendezvous, she warns him, “This is your last chance,” but one senses that with Donna there are as many last chances as with Publisher’s Clearing House.
All of the elements of the plot at long last fall into place, including an old tattoo that explains an earlier parable. Comes the dawn, and we are left with questions which only a policeman could answer. (Spoiler Warning—read no further if you intend to see the film.)
Attention, officers! If a perpetrator has a three-page arrest record, and during one night, angry at being dumped by an old girlfriend, he breaks a store window, breaks out of a jail cell, steals a police car, uses a police shotgun to shoot out another window, locks an officer out of the police station, locks two officers into cells, starts a fire, and tries to frame an officer for the crimes, would you, in the morning, release the kid and tell him to go home because “her old man has insurance”? Just wondering.
Renaissance Man
(Directed by Penny Marshall; starring Danny DeVito, Gregory Hines; 1993)
Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters. Watching it, I felt embarrassed for the actors, who are asked to inhabit scenes so contrived and artificial that no possible skill could bring them to life. It’s hard to believe that this is the work of Penny Marshall, whose films like Big and A League of Their Own seemed filled with a breezy confidence.
The movie stars Danny DeVito as a divorced and broke Detroit advertising man who is fired from his job. He applies for unemployment compensation, and his counselor eventually finds him a job—as a civilian instructor on a nearby army base. His assignment is to take a classroom of eight difficult cases and somehow increase their “basic comprehension”—of everything, I guess. This is made more difficult by DeVito’s own lack of any basic comprehension of how the army works.
The class seems impossible to teach, and besides, he’s no teacher. In desperation he begins to talk about Shakespeare, and the students, desperate for action, encourage him to say more. Eventually the class turns into a seminar on Hamlet, and we are subjected once again to the dishonest fiction that academic knowledge can somehow be gained by enthusiasm and osmosis. Why, the students’ mastery of the subject is so profound that in no time they’ve put together a classroom rap musical based on Shakespeare’s story! (It helps that one of the students is played by Marky Mark.)
My doubts about the possibility of teaching Shakespeare in this way are surpassed only by my doubts about how the exercise has anything to do with the army. Those doubts are shared by a drill sergeant (Gregory Hines), who thinks DeVito is simply wasting the time of his recruits. The formula of this story requires DeVito to eventually “prove himself” to the sergeant, and the moment I saw the base’s “Victory Tower,” a dangerous obstacle course involving lots of climbing and crawling, I knew with a sinking conviction that sooner or later DeVito would be climbing down walls on ropes to win the respect of the men.
Graduate students of Shakespeare are often assigned to do a “source study” on one of his plays, reading Shakespeare’s own sources for one of the histories, say, and then noting what the Bard kept, and what he changed. Renaissance Man could also inspire a source study. It is obviously a cross between Dead Poets Society (unpromising students inspired by unconventional teacher) and Private Benjamin (desperate unemployed civilian joins the army). Advanced students might want to research the sources of those films—which were retreads, yes, but at least less labored than Renaissance Man.
One odd quality about this movie is its gloominess. It seems strangely thoughtful and morose for a comedy, especially as it develops the stories of the various class members. The screenplay also has problems with logic. Are we really supposed to believe, for example, that DeVito can pawn the award he won in an advertising competition for enough money to buy his daughter a telescope and a trip out of the country to view an eclipse?
The ending of the film is an exercise in phony suspense. See if you can follow this army logic. The students are not required to take a final exam in the course. But if they take it, and fail, they’ll flunk out of basic training. Therefore, they shouldn’t take it, right? But so great is their transformation that they insist on taking it, and turn up in the classroom (after the obligatory twenty seconds of suspense in which DeVito thinks they won’t come, and sad music plays). But the final is verbal, not written, with all the students in the room at the same time, so apparently they will pass or fail as a class, not as individuals. I say “apparently” because the ending suggests they do pass, but the movie absentmindedly neglects to supply that information. Not that, by then, I cared.
Return to the Blue Lagoon
(Directed by William A. Graham; starring Brian Krause; 1991)
I had this great idea for a sequel to The Poseidon Adventure. You remember, the movie where the ocean liner was overturned by a tidal wave, and the passengers had to climb to safety through an upside-down ship. In my sequel, just as they got to their destination, another tidal wave would come along and right the ship—and they’d have to retrace their steps.
The makers of Return to the Blue Lagoon are working in the same great tradition. In the original 1980 movie, a boy and girl were castaways on a lost island where the adults built a house and trained them in the ways of survival and then died, leaving the boy and girl to grow up into tanned and beautiful adolescents (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) who studied how the giant sea turtle made love, and drew the obvious conclusions. “All we have to look forward to,” Pauline Kael wrote, “is: when are these two going to discover fornication?”
Return to the Blue Lagoon begins shortly after the young couple set sail from the island with their baby girl, but the young couple died at sea. Their drifting boat is then discovered by a passing ship, and the baby is rescued. It is immediately embraced by a widow on board (Lisa Pelikan), who has a young son of her own. Then it develops that the plague is sweeping the ship. The captain realizes that the only way to save the widow and the two children is to cast them adrift, in hopes they will find rescue or an island. Otherwise, their sure fate is death by plague.
So, the mother and the two children float away in a little boat, only to inevitably wash up on the shores of—wouldn’t you know—the very same island. The palm-thatch cottage is still standing, all of the comforts of home are still in place, and all that is left is for the movie to repeat the earlier story. The mother raises the children until they are self-sufficient; she dies; and the kids grow into tanned and beautiful adolescents (Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause). All we have to look forward to, as Pauline Kael so presciently wrote, is: when are these two going to discover fornication?
The original Blue Lagoon at least had a certain purity of form. This one complicates matters by having the island discovered by a passing ship, which contains, inevitably, a young woman who makes eyes at the hero, and a bearded sailor who bodes no well for the heroine. That leads to the expected developments in which the hero and heroine decide they like each other best after all, and the evil sailor has something terrible happen to him—like, to take a random example, being eaten by a shark.
The most curious aspect of the movie is the presence of island natives on the other side of the island. They apparently visit during every full moon, beat their drums a lot, and then paddle away in the morning. There are ominous warnings about staying away from the other side of the island, staying indoors during the full moon, etc., but nothing really comes of the presence of the natives. It’s as if the filmmakers felt obligated to throw in a few ominously beating drums, but didn’t know where to take it from there.
The sincere idiocy of this film really has to be seen to be appreciated—not that I think there is any need for you to see, or appreciate, it. Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.
Salome’s Last Dance
(Directed by Ken Russell; starring Glenda Jackson; 1988)
Sex is the theater of the poor.—Oscar Wilde
Whether Wilde actually said that, I cannot be sure. The line is not found in any of the standard books of quotations, but it sure sounds like Wilde, and it gets Salome’s Last Dance off to a rousing start, from which it never recovers.
The Wilde character delivers the line as he enters a male bordello in Paris, where as a special treat the owner has planned a clandestine performance of his banned play Salome. The action takes place in 1892, three years before Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment, although in this freewheeling film by Ken Russell the period could be anytime in the past century. Russell’s approach is to stage a play-within-a-film, so that while Wilde languishes on a sofa and drinks champagne, the hardworking bordello staff perform his play on a proscenium stage that has been set up for the occasion.
What do we learn from this approach, and indeed from this film? Not much, except that Ken Russell is addicted, as always, to excesses of everything except purpose and structure. After his previous film, Gothic, which re-created a weekend idyll involving Shelley and Byron, Russell demonstrates again that he is most interested in literary figures when their trousers are unbuttoned. And even then, he isn’t interested in why, or how, they carry on their sex lives; like the defrockers of the scandal sheets, he wants only to breathlessly shock us with the news that his heroes possessed and employed genitals.
As Wilde (Nickolas Grace) reclines on his sofa, the performers in Salome perform his play with great energy. Their dialogue is more or less faithful to what Wilde wrote, but the bizarre excesses of the staging are all Russell. The plot retells Wilde’s version of the biblical story of Salome’s request to Herod that she be presented with the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. But the story is complicated mightily by the use of Douglas Hodge in a dual role, playing both John the Baptist and “Bosie”—Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover. While Bosie struggles to stay in character onstage, Wilde reclines in the arms of a young page from the brothel.
Russell is known for his cheerful willingness to involve his actors in embarrassing situations, at whatever cost to their dignity, and in Salome’s Last Dance such performers as Glenda Jackson and Stratford Johns show what good sports they are by grappling manfully with their lines while all about them disintegrates in Russellian excess. There is, for example, the matter of the three dwarfs dressed as Hassidic Jews and sent on stage to mimic their behavior. The presence of two busty British “Page Three” girls, who stand in the background of nearly every scene, with no visible purpose. The trickery by which Imogen Millais-Scott, as Salome, is replaced by a male dancer in one scene so that the character can be revealed as a transvestite.
There are, I am sometimes convinced, two Ken Russells: The disciplined and gifted director of such films as Women in Love, Altered States, and Tommy, and the orchestrator of wretched excess in films like The Music Lovers, Gothic, and this one. Despite the fact that Salome’s Last Dance encompasses almost the entire text of a play by Oscar Wilde, it seems shapeless and without purpose. Russell has devised a production without inventing a goal. At the end of the film, there are some shocks and surprises, some foreshadowing of Wilde’s long fall into despair, but they seemed tacked on as a favor to the history buffs. There’s never the feeling that this whole film was thought out from beginning to end with any particular structure in mind.
By looking at a film like this, however, you can possibly learn something about what does and doesn’t work on the screen. I would like to suggest the following postulate: When characters in a movie shock each other, it works a lot better than when they are intended to shock us. Everyone in Salome’s Last Dance—both within and outside the play—is unshockable. Russell frames their bizarre behavior by a stage and presents it to us, presumably so that we will be shocked. But we are not. The movies are a voyueristic medium, and to some degree we identify with the characters in a movie, so that if they aren’t shocked, we aren’t either. Thank God theater is not the sex of the poor.
Saturn 3
(Directed by Stanley Donen; starring Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas; 1980)
Given the fact that written science fiction encourages the greatest possible free play of ideas, why is it that filmed science fiction almost always seems required to be dumb, dumb, dumb? How, this late in the game, can we still get movies like Saturn 3? Who paid for it? The credits name Lord Lew Grade and Elliott Kastner. They’ve got a tidy little partnership over in England that’s well enough financed to chum out about a dozen international releases a year, some of them as good as The Muppet Movie, most of them as bad as Saturn 3.
How dumb is Saturn 3? I will give you an example. The movie’s about Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett, who are the only two crew members on Saturn 3, a space research station near Saturn. They have a visitor, who is supposed to be a Captain James, but is really the evil Benson (Harvey Keitel) who has killed James and replaced him for reasons of his own. Benson has brought along a robot named Hector. And, toward the end of the movie, Hector is chasing Kirk and Farrah. So what do they do? They remove the floor panels of the space station and cover the hole with a flimsy material, so that when Hector steps on it, it’ll collapse, and Hector will fall through to the bitterly cold cauldron beneath. Amazing! We haven’t seen this brilliant idea since Tarzan was putting stakes in the bottoms of holes to catch elephants. And Tarzan, at least, would have been bright enough to realize that if you make a hole in the floor of a space station, your atmosphere will rush out explosively. How can they still get away with disregarding all the elementary laws of physics in science fiction movies?
