I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 38
But this movie’s dumb in other ways, too. The love triangle between Douglas, Fawcett, and Keitel is so awkwardly and unbelievably handled that we are left in stunned indifference. The purpose of Keitel’s visit is left so unclear we can’t believe Douglas would accept it. The hostility of the robot is unexplained.
And then there are dubious details like (a) the spaceship whizzes through the rocks in the rings of Saturn without hitting any of them; (b) the space station is rambling and spacious despite the fact that every square inch of construction would be at an incredible premium millions of miles from Earth; (c) gravity is the same as on Earth; (d) . . . but never mind.
This movie is awesomely stupid, totally implausible from a scientific viewpoint, and a shameful waste of money. If Grade and Kastner intend to continue producing films with standards this low, I think they ought instead, in simple fairness, to simply give their money to filmmakers at random. The results couldn’t be worse.
The Scarlet Letter
(Directed by Roland Joffe; starring Demi Moore, Gary Oldman; 1995)
The great inconvenience of The Scarlet Letter, from a Hollywood point of view, is that the novel begins after the adultery has already taken place. This will not do. It is like taking up the story of Salome after she has put the veils back on. Another problem is that there is not much action in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, except inside the minds and souls of the characters. A third is that the Reverend Dimmesdale, who impregnates poor Hester, is the leader of the local hypocrites who persecute her. Channel surfing the other morning, I came across Demi Moore just as she was describing The Scarlet Letter as “a very dense, uncinematic book.”
And so it is; many of the best books are. That’s what rewrites are for. The film version imagines all of the events leading up to the adultery, photographed in the style of those Playboy’s Fantasies videos. It adds action: Indians, deadly fights, burning buildings, even the old trick where the condemned on the scaffold are saved by a violent interruption. And it converts the Reverend Dimmesdale from a scoundrel into a romantic and a weakling, perhaps because the times are not right for a movie about a fundamentalist hypocrite. It also gives us a red bird, which seems to represent the devil, and a shapely slave girl, who seems to represent the filmmakers’ desire to introduce voyeurism into the big sex scenes.
The story, you may recall, involves a Puritan woman named Hester Prynne (Demi Moore), who is found to be pregnant even though her husband has not arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and is feared dead. After refusing to name the father of her child, Hester is condemned to wear a scarlet letter on her bodice. Her daughter, Pearl, is born, and grows up as a willful little vixen. It is revealed that the father of the child is Arthur Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman), the leader of the local bluenoses denouncing Hester. And then her long-lost husband, Roger Prynne (Robert Duvall) turns up, assumes another identity, and tries to determine who was the thief of his wife’s affections. The novel ends with poor Dimmesdale confessing his sin, crying out “His will be done! Farewell!” and dying.
It is obviously not acceptable for Dimmesdale to believe he has sinned, and so the movie cleverly transforms his big speech into a stirring cry for sexual freedom and religious tolerance. Instead of dying of a guilty seizure, he snatches the noose from Hester’s neck and pulls it around his own, only to be saved when the Indians attack, driving a burning cart through the village. The roles of the puritanical local ministers are farmed out to supporting actors, and Dimmesdale is left to hang around sheepishly, keeping his guilty secret but regarding Hester with big wet eyes begging forgiveness and understanding.
Roland Joffe, who directed the film, says “the book is set in a time when the seeds were sown for the bigotry, sexism, and lack of tolerance we still battle today . . . yet it is often looked at merely as a tale of nineteenth-century moralizing, a treatise against adultery.” Actually, it is more often looked upon as a tale of seventeenth-century moralizing, and a treatise against hypocrisy. But never mind. Joffe adds: “And, of course, it is also a marvelous romance.”
Not so marvelous really. After insisting on living alone in a cottage outside town, which sets local tongues a-wagging, Hester is walking in the forest one day when she comes upon a man skinny-dipping in a pond. It is the reverend, although she doesn’t know that. She, and we, see him in the altogether, and then she hears him preaching in church, where he sounds a good deal more like Susan Powter than a Puritan.
Hester entertains lustful thoughts about his body, and they entertain her. (Gary Oldman, marvelous actor that he is, may not be everybody’s ideal of the perfect male physique—remember him as Sid Vicious?—but on the whole I think we can be relieved Brad Pitt was not cast.) Hester’s comely slave girl, Mituba (Lisa Jolliff-Andoh) prepares her bath, and then Hester slowly luxuriates in it by candlelight, while dreaming of Arthur. It is hard to see for sure, but I think she may be indulging in the practice that the nuns called “interfering with yourself.”
Meanwhile, through a convenient peephole, Mituba watches lustfully, for no other purpose, I believe, than to provide the additional thrill of one attractive woman observing another one naked. Will the sin that dare not speak its name make an appearance in Massachusetts Bay? Alas, no; the prospect of interracial lesbian love, appealing as it is to today’s filmmakers, would not quite fit into this story, even as revised and updated.
Soon Dimmesdale visits Hester, they become powerfully attracted to one another, and commit adultery on a bed of dried beans in the shed, while Mituba again watches them, disrobing and crawling into her mistress’s bath. Mituba holds a candle with its flame just above the waterline, and at the moment of their climax, she draws it under the water, extinguishing it with a hiss. This is way better than curtains blowing in the wind; it’s the equal of the moment in Ryan’s Daughter when, as the two lovers coupled, his stallion neighed and her mare whinnied.
The rest of the film is more or less as I have described it, although longer, much longer. Lurid melodrama develops after Hester’s husband arrives, played by Robert Duvall as if he’d never had sex in his life and didn’t want anybody else to, either. The movie’s morality boils down to: Why should this old fart stand between these two nice young people? The movie has removed the character’s sense of guilt, and therefore the story’s drama. (“Do you believe . . . what we did was wrong?” asks Hester.) Hollywood has taken that troublesome old novel and made it cinematic at last, although I’m afraid it’s still pretty dense.
S.F.W.
(Directed by Jefery Levy; starring Reese Witherspoon; 1995)
S.F.W. is the kind of movie to inspire members of Generation X to lie about their age. It qualifies Forrest Gump for a genius grant. It is a portrait of the most singularly stupid, obnoxious character I’ve seen on the screen in many a day—which would be promising, if he were not boring, as well.
The movie stars Stephen Dorff as Cliff Spab, who gets his fifteen minutes of fame when he is one of several hostages held inside a convenience store by mysterious terrorists. The hostage ordeal is telecast nonstop from security cameras inside the store, and Cliff soon becomes a global celebrity because of his nihilistic pronouncements and his debates with the terrorists and fellow hostages. His basic philosophy, expressed in the movie’s title, is “so fucking what?” That’s about as deep as it gets.
The hostage ordeal arrives at a crisis point on Day 36, when the store runs out of beer. Shortly thereafter, Cliff Spab finds himself free and back on the street, the adored hero of millions, his photo on T-shirts. Unfortunately, his parents are slow to applaud his heroism, and want him to clean up his room. He responds by trashing his private refrigerator, filled with beer, and going on a rampage before stalking out of the house.
The media hang on Cliff’s every word. “Everybody wanted a piece of me,” he complains in the narration. “Trouble was, there wasn’t enough of me to go around.” That would have been true even if they had only wanted an itsy-bitsy piece, since there is very little of Cliff to begin with. He is culturally deprived, has a low IQ, is narcissistic and alcoholic, and has one of those vocabularies in which the most popular four-letter word is used as an all-purpose substitute for thousands of other words unknown to the speaker.
Basically, Cliff’s pose is, he wants to be famous for not wanting to be famous. He is a reluctant celebrity, cheered for his reluctance. This pose reaches its absurdist climax when Cliff stars at a rock concert. His act is rather simple. The orchestra plays “Thus Spake Zarathustra” while Cliff walks out onstage and stands there, projecting reluctance to be made into a celebrity, and the audience cheers wildly.
The sayings of Cliff Spab will not soon be anthologized in those books of great movie lines. “If you think about it enough, you can go nuts,” he opines at one point. At another, asked “What are you rebelling against?” he rips off Marlon Brando’s famous response to the same question, “What have you got?” This must I think be counted an original line of Cliff’s, since the movie gives no evidence that he has ever heard of Marlon Brando, or anyone else.
In fairness to Jefery Levy, the director and cowriter, the film is intended as a satirical attack on the cult of celebrity, and it uses unconvincing lookalikes for such as Phil Donahue and Sam Donaldson in scenes where TV takes Cliff Spab seriously. One problem may be that Cliff Spab is seen at such great length that we grow very tired of him. His celebrity is no stranger, I suppose, than the attention given to such other marginal personalities as Kato Kaelin and John Wayne Bobbitt, but then again we have not been made to listen to Kato or John W. around the clock for more than a month. It only seems as if we have.
She’s Out of Control
(Directed by Stan Dragoti; starring Tony Danza, Catherine Hicks; 1989)
What planet did the makers of this film come from? What assumptions do they have about the purpose and quality of life? I ask because She’s Out of Control is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it’s a first: The first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom clichés and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.
The film stars Tony Danza as Doug, a divorced dad with an unhealthy obsession about the dating behavior of his teenage daughter, Katie (Ami Dolenz). He wants to keep her forever trapped in an asexual prepubescent hinterland, but then Doug’s fiancée Janet (Catherine Hicks) takes the kid for a complete beauty makeover: hair, makeup, wardrobe, and attitude. And the next time Doug sees his daughter, she’s descending the staircase looking like she stepped out of one of those soft-core perfume ads.
Doug spends a lot of time looking at his daughter. He sees her so specifically as a sexual creature, and is so obsessed by what he sees, that in another movie his attention would probably seem perverse. The character he plays in this movie is so dim-witted and lacking in psychological insight, however, that his behavior is not so much perverse as slack-jawed.
There are a couple of minute subplots in the movie, one involving the romance between Doug and Janet, and the other one involving Katie’s influence on her kid sister, Bonnie (Laura Mooney). But the heart of this movie is the father’s unsuccessful attempts to enforce curfews, dictate behavior, and curtail the emotional development of his daughter.
The scene that sets up this obsession is a sick one—the sicker the more you think about it. Doug takes the family to the beach, and then stares in horrified fascination as Katie comes running out of the surf in her one-piece bathing suit, her breasts bouncing in slow motion like outtakes from a TV jiggle show.
The problem with this scene is that Doug seems to regard his daughter not in parental terms but in sexual ones. The movie does not possess a shred of healthy insight into the process by which people mature; it sees adolescent girls as commodities to be protected from predatory males.
The French director Jean-Luc Godard once said that the way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. By a happy coincidence, just such a movie opened on the same day as She’s Out of Control. It’s called Say Anything, and it is healthy, sensitive, and true about a relationship between a father, his daughter, and her boyfriend. It is a movie about personal standards, about learning to trust, about growing up healthy and sane. The people who made She’s Out of Control could learn a lot from it.
Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline
(Directed by Terence Young; starring Audrey Hepburn; 1979)
After six months, a week, and two days of suspense, we can now relax: The worst movie of 1979 has opened. Just avoid this one film, and anything else you see will be better. The name of the movie is Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, and on second thought, I’m not recommending that you avoid it: See Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, and weep for the cinema.
The movie is based on a novel by Sidney Sheldon, a fact cunningly hinted in its title. It is about a woman who gains control of her father’s multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company after her father dies in a fishy mountain-climbing accident. The woman is played by Audrey Hepburn, making her first screen appearance in four years, and there is this much to be said: When she appears on the screen for the first time, the theater goes silent as everyone absorbs once again the fact of her extraordinary beauty. And then the theater stays silent, as everyone absorbs the astonishing extent of the artistic stupidity wreaked upon her by the screenplay.
I’ve jotted down a few sample lines. “When I yam feenished weev you,” threatens one character, “you vell be lak ze beetle I haf killed: Almost dead!”
At another point, Hepburn learns that a chemist working for her late father’s firm has made an interesting pharmaceutical discovery that may turn out to be marketable: A drug promising eternal youth.
“Normal people will be able to live 100 or 150 years,” he avers.
“How soon can this drug be marketed?” she asks.
“Eighteen months.”
“Make it twelve. This is urgent.”
Faithful moviegoers may recall that Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight was released two summers ago, and that I was unkind enough to give it a reserved review. I now apologize for that error. The Other Side of Midnight was so immeasurably better than Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline that, in retrospect, Sheldon should have sued to have his name taken out of the title of this film and put in the other one. But why should he worry? The novel was sold for a reported $2 million, and Sheldon is laughing all the way to the remedial writing class.
The film’s cast is, of course, horribly mistreated. Ben Gazzara is perhaps the worst victim. He plays Hepburn’s confidant and lover. The fact that Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline and Gazzara’s Saint Jack are playing at the same time in the same town offers mute evidence that a good actor in a bad movie should not necessarily be blamed for everything.
Other people we cannot blame for being in this movie include Irene Papas, arguably the most striking actress in the movies; James Mason, as civilized as ever; Romy Schneider, she of the cool elegance; and Gert Frobe, of the police department. Omar Sharif is not only blameless, he is even praiseworthy: As he plays his scenes, he finds a way to sneak past the director his obvious conviction that the dialogue he has been given is beneath contempt and may, indeed, be hilarious.
I have not yet mentioned why the movie is considered marketable. It is about the favorite fictional subject of the fast-fading seventies: the Woman in Danger. Hepburn is not only made to crawl along burning rooftops and be assaulted by industrial spies, but, such trash is this film, at one point she is almost run down by a truck that isn’t even intended to hit her. In a movie built upon threats on a character’s life, it is a little reprehensible to suggest that she could die in a random accident. But then, this film is a little reprehensible.
Silent Fall
(Directed by Bruce Beresford; starring Richard Dreyfuss, Liv Tyler; 1994)
Silent Fall is a thriller about an autistic little boy who witnesses the murder of his parents. He’d make a great witness, if only he would talk. I was reminded of a T.V. report about a parrot that witnessed a murder. The parrot talked, but was it admissible as a witness?
Psychiatrist Jack Reiner (Richard Dreyfuss), uses a deck of cards while explaining the boy to his older sister, Sylvia (Liv Tyler). Let’s say the solution to the murder is the Queen. You or I might be reminded of it by a million things. But Tim can only get to the Queen from the Jack. And he can only get to the Jack from the 10. And so on, all the way back to the Ace—which is, in a sense, what the psychiatrist is searching for.
Silent Fall approaches this story in a solemn way, in one of those productions where everybody lives in big houses surrounded by autumnal woods, and spends a lot of time walking by the sides of lakes. The Dreyfuss character has retired from treating children after a child died while under his care. Now he’s hauled out of retirement by the local sheriff (J. T. Walsh, playing a nice guy for a change). The parents of Sylvia and Tim have been found brutally slashed to death in their bedroom. When the cops arrive, Tim is swinging a bloody knife and Sylvia is cowering in the closet. She saw the killer, a man who escaped before she could ID him.
The cops use pretty sloppy procedure on the case. Sylvia and Tim are allowed to go back to the house to live while it is still a crime scene. Apart from the possibility they might disturb clues, nobody in the movie even thinks it might be dangerous for an eighteen-year-old girl to be out there unprotected, with a mad slasher on the loose and she as the only witness. Meanwhile, Reiner goes to work making friends with Tim, hoping he holds the clue to the murders.
There is more. Much more. Some of it involves Linda Hamilton (Terminator II), as Jake’s wife, Karen. She gets second billing but the role is just a hair this side of unnecessary. John Lithgow wanders through in a thankless role as a psychiatrist who believes in using drugs instead of therapy. Mostly the action involves Jake and the little boy, and Jake and the sexy teenage girl, who seems sorta attracted to him.
