I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 39
Now. There are some things about this plot I dare not reveal. Let’s go carefully here. There is an attempted murder, and in terms of its planning, execution, sheer impossibility, and ultimate outcome, it is without doubt the most absurd attempted murder I have seen since Goldie Hawn got involved with that elevator in Deceived (1991).
There’s more. There is, for example, the solution to the murders, which stars little Tim in the performance by an autistic character so remarkable that it makes Dustin Hoffman’s work in Rain Man look like a warm-up. If you see the movie, ask yourself : Assuming (a) that Timmy could do what he does while Dreyfuss explains the mystery, and (b) that Timmy is the best impressionist since Frank Gorshin, then even so, (c) how did he get the flawless timing, so that he performs right on cue during Dreyfuss’s summation?
Silent Fall has a tortuously constructed plot, but the solution to the mystery has been right there all along. I refer you to the entry on “The Law of Economy of Characters” in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, which observes that since there are no unnecessary characters, the guilty person in a whodunit is inevitably the one who otherwise seems unaccounted for.
The Sixth Man
(Directed by Randall Miller; starring Kadeem Hardison, Marlon Wayans; 1997)
The Sixth Man is another paint-by-the-numbers sports movie, this one about a college basketball team that makes it to the NCAA finals with the help of the ghost of one of its dead stars. Let’s not talk about how predictable it is. Let’s talk about how dumb it is.
The film starts with the childhood hoop dreams of a couple of brothers, Antoine and Kenny, who are coached by their father and hope to be stars one day. The father dies before he can see them realize their dream: They’re both starters for the University of Washington Huskies. Antoine (Kadeem Hardison) is the dominant brother, the play-maker who gets the ball for the crucial last-minute shots. Kenny (Marlon Wayans) is a gifted player, but in his brother’s shadow.
The tragedy strikes. Antoine dunks the ball, falls to the court, and dies of heart failure on the way to the hospital. Kenny is crushed, and the Huskies embark on a losing streak until, one day at practice, Kenny throws the ball into the air and it never comes back down again.
Antoine, of course, has returned, this time as a ghost that only Kenny can see. And eventually Antoine returns to the court as an invisible sixth man on the Huskies team. He deflects the ball, tips in close shots, gives a boost to the Huskies, and trips up their opponents, and soon the team is in the NCAA playoffs.
Presumably The Sixth Man is intended to appeal to basketball fans. Is there a basketball fan alive who could fall for this premise? I’m not talking about the ghost—that’s easy to believe. I’m talking about the details of the game.
I was out at the United Center last week for the big overtime contest between the Bulls and the Supersonics. Along with thousands of other fans, I was an instant expert, my eyes riveted on every play. If the ball had suddenly changed course in midair, do you think we would have noticed? What if a ball dropped all the way through the basket and then popped back up again? What if a player was able to hang in midair twice as long as Michael Jordan?
My guess is that any one of those moments would have inspired a frenzy of instant replay analysis, and all three of them together would have induced apoplexy in announcer Johnny (Red) Kerr. But in The Sixth Man, audiences and commentators don’t seem to realize that the laws of physics and gravity are being violated on behalf of the Huskies. Finally a woman sportswriter (Michael Michele) for the student paper uses the stop-action button on her VCR to replay a game, and notices that Kenny never even touched a ball before it went in.
I don’t want to belabor technicalities here. I know the movie’s premise is that nobody notices that the ghost is affecting the game. Because nobody notices, that frees the movie to proceed with its lethargic formula, right to the bitter end. (Will the team decide it has to win on its own? Will the ghost and his brother have to accept the fact of death? Will the Huskies be way behind at half-time of the big game? Will they win? Will the sun rise tomorrow?)
You can’t even begin to enjoy this game unless you put your intelligence on hold, or unless you’re a little kid. A real, real, little, little kid. Why do Hollywood filmmakers hobble themselves in this way? Why be content with repeating ancient and boring formulas when a little thought could have produced an interesting movie? What if Kenny and Antoine had worked out a strategy to secretly affect the outcome of the game? What if they were aware that obvious tactics would be spotted? What if Kenny didn’t tell his teammates about the ghost? What if Antoine, for sheer love of the game, took the other side once in a while?
The possibilities are endless. Movies like The Sixth Man are an example of Level One thinking, in which the filmmakers get the easy, obvious idea and are content with it. Good movies are made by taking the next step. Twisting the premise. Using lateral thinking. I imagine a lot of studio executives are sports fans. Would any of them be personally entertained by this movie? If this answer is “no”—and it has to be—then they shouldn’t expect us to be, either.
Slaves of New York
(Directed by James Ivory; starring Bernadette Peters; 1989)
I detest Slaves of New York so much that I distrust my own opinion. Maybe it’s not simply a bad movie. Maybe it takes some kind of special knack, some species of sly genius, to make me react so strongly. I pause. I leaf through my memories of the film. I try to analyze what I really feel.
Okay. I feel calmer now. The first thing I feel is a genuine dislike for the people in this film—the ambitious climbers on the lower rungs of the ladder in the New York art world. I dislike them because they are stupid, and have occupied my time with boring conversation. It is more than that. They are not simply stupid. They value stupidity. They aim their conversations below the level of their actual intelligence because they fear to appear uncool by saying anything interesting. By always being bored, they can never be passé? No wonder Andy Warhol wanted to film this material.
The second thing I feel is that their entire act is a hypocritical sham. They want to succeed so much they can not only taste it, they can choke on it. And it doesn’t matter what they succeed at. They move through a world of art, fashion, photography, and design, but the actual disciplines and psychic rewards of this world are not interesting to them. They want to use art as a way of obtaining success, which is more important to them than art will ever be.
The heroine of the movie is a young woman who designs hats. They are truly hideous hats, designed to bring embarrassment and ridicule to those who wear them, but never mind what the hats look like. The important thing is, how does the designer herself feel about her hats? I have no idea. She never permits herself to react to them, to care for them, to be proud of them. She looks at them as if they were her fingernail clippings—once a part of her, but not important, and now no longer even attached.
Her boyfriend manufactures paintings he does not love. Other people in her life also play at the extrusion of art, in the hopes that their work will sell, and they will find a gallery to represent them, and that eventually they will be able to afford a really nice apartment in New York City. The title, Slaves of New York, is explained by its author, Tama Janowitz, to mean that life in New York is basically a matter of becoming successful enough to have a nice apartment, and that if you do not have one, you move in with someone who does, and become that person’s slave. The whole idea is to eventually get your own apartment, and have slaves of your own.
I have a suspicion that, to some degree, Janowitz is right and the Slave/Apartment syndrome does operate in New York. That would certainly explain a great deal of the bad art that’s around. Watching the film, I remembered a conversation I had with the actor John Malkovich about the way that off-Broadway theater was dying in New York while thriving in the provinces. “To have off-Broadway,” he said,”you have to have starving actors. And to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can’t afford to starve there anymore.”
There was once a time, in decades not too long ago, when life for a young artist consisted of living in a threadbare apartment while trying to create great art, instead of trying to live in a great apartment while creating threadbare art.
Sour Grapes
(Directed by Larry David; starring Steven Weber, Craig Bierko; 1998)
Sour Grapes is a comedy about things that aren’t funny. It reminded me of Crash, an erotic thriller about things no one finds erotic. The big difference is that David Cronenberger, who made Crash, knew that people were not turned on by auto accidents. Larry David, who wrote and directed Sour Grapes, apparently thinks people are amused by cancer, accidental castration, racial stereotypes, and bitter family feuds.
Oh, I have no doubt that all of those subjects could be incorporated into a great comedy. It’s all in the style and the timing. Sour Grapes is tone-deaf comedy; the material, the dialogue, the delivery, and even the sound track are labored and leaden. How to account for the fact that Larry David is one of the creators of Seinfeld? Maybe he works well with others.
I can’t easily remember a film I’ve enjoyed less. North, a comedy I hated, was at least able to inflame me with dislike. Sour Grapes is a movie that deserves its title: It’s puckered, deflated, and vinegary. It’s a dead zone.
The story. Two cousins (Steven Weber and Craig Bierko) go to Atlantic City. One is a designer who wins a slot jackpot of more than $436,000. He was playing with quarters given him by the other guy. The other cousin, a surgeon, not unreasonably, thinks he should get some of the winnings. If not half, then maybe a third. The winner offers him 3 percent.
This sets off several scenes of debate about what would be right or wrong in such a situation. Even a limo driver, hearing the winner’s story, throws him out of the car: “You were playing with his money!” The losing doctor nevertheless gives his cousin a blue warm-up suit for his birthday, only to discover that the louse has given the suit away to an African-American street person.
So far all we have is a comic premise that doesn’t deliver laughs. Now the movie heads for cringe-inducing material. We learn about the winner’s ability to perform oral sex while alone. He’s alone a lot, because his wife is mad at him, but that’s an opening for stereotyped Jewish Mother scenes. The feud heats up, until the enraged doctor lies to the winner: “You have terminal cancer. It’s time to set your house in order.” Ho, ho.
The winner wants to spare his mother the misery of watching her son die. So he gives her house key to the black bum in the warm-up suit and tells him to make himself at home. His plan: His mother will be scared to death by the sight of the black home invader. After she screams, we see the bum running down the street in Steppin’ Fetchit style. Was there no one to hint to David that this was gratuitous and offensive?
Further material involves the surgeon getting so upset in the operating room that he reverses an X-ray film and removes the wrong testicle from a TV star—who then, of course, has to be told that they still had to go ahead and remove the remaining testicle. The star develops a castrato voice. Ho, ho.
This material is impossible to begin with. What makes it worse is the lack of lightness from the performers, who slog glumly through their dialogue as if they know what an aromatic turkey they’re stuck in. Scene after scene clangs dead to the floor, starting with the funeral service that opens the film. The more I think of it, the more Sour Grapes really does resemble Crash (except that Crash was not a bad film). Both movies are like watching automobile accidents. Only one intended to be.
Species
(Directed by Roger Donaldson; starring Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen; 1995)
Think about this. According to the movies, out there in space, untold light years from Earth, exist many alien species with the ability to travel between the stars and send messages across the universe. Their civilizations must be wonderfully advanced, and yet, when we finally encounter them, what do we get? Disgusting, slimy morph-creatures with rows of evil teeth, whose greatest cultural achievement is jumping out at people from behind things. How do they travel through space? By jumping out from behind one star after another?
Species is the latest movie to explore this depressing vision. Like the Alien movies and many others, it is founded on a fear of another species, and the assumption that extraterrestrials basically want to eat us. For every rare film like 2001 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a sense of wonder about the vastness of creation, there are a dozen like this, which are basically just versions of Friday the 13th in which Jason is a bug-eyed monster.
There may be a reason for this. Mainstream Hollywood is so terrified of intelligent human characters that it’s no wonder they don’t want aliens who are even smarter than the humans: Hey, dude, you don’t pay for a ticket just to hear words you don’t understand. And there’s a kind of smugness in the assumption that we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder; that other species, even if they do manage to travel to Earth, will look and behave like an explosion at the special-effects factory.
Species, directed by Roger Donaldson from a screenplay by Dennis Feldman, begins with an interesting premise: Radio telescopes pick up signals from space which, when decoded, include a formula for a DNA string that can be combined with our own. Thus a creature might be born that is both human and alien—able to live here, but with attributes of the other species. Scientists in a secret government lab carry out the experiment, which produces a pretty little girl. In the opening scene, they are trying to gas her to death.
One attribute of the creature is its rapid growth rate. After only a few days she looks like a ten-year-old, and by the next time we see her, she has matured into a sexy blonde (Natasha Henstridge) who could star in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue anytime. We know this because the movie spends a good deal of time having her take off her brassiere while seducing her victims in hot tubs, because she wants to mate.
Pure logic would suggest that if she can change from a ten-year-old into a twenty-one-year-old almost overnight, she should die of old age before the movie is over. But, no, she stays at the sex bomb stage for the rest of the film, except when morphing into a gruesome monster. (The ability to instantly change one’s physical composition is, I believe, in violation of the laws of physics, but Species breaks every law but the law of diminishing returns.)
Ben Kingsley, that invaluable actor, does what he can with the lead role. He’s Fitch, the scientist in charge, and he leads a team on a chase of the escaped alien. Because the existence of the monster must remain a secret, a general alert is delayed. Instead, Kingsley gathers Press (Michael Madsen), a hired killer for the government; Dan (Forest Whitaker), an “empathist” who can sense what happened in places; Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Laura (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist, whose primary role is to be rescued by the others.
The alien, named Sil, is a quick learner. She checks into a motel, asks the clerk, “Where can I find a man?” and picks up the first of her victims in a bar. As the search team follows her trail, the empathist picks up signals that she rejected one guy because he did not have, perhaps, the right genes. Boy, didn’t he. What happens to him shouldn’t happen to a bug on a windshield. And then the other guy meets her standards, and soon there is the prospect of lots of little Sils.
The movie ends with a chase through a sewer system, and into an underground oil lake. There are lots of flames and struggles and lots and lots of scenes where the creature jumps out from behind things. And of course there are the usual false alarms, in which you think it’s the creature, but whew, it’s only a bat/cat/rat. Eventually it develops a tongue like a frog, and can flick it out several yards to capture its enemies.
There is one line in the screenplay that suggests an interesting direction the movie could have taken. Sil, half alien, half human, is driven by instinct, not intelligence, and doesn’t know why she acts the way she does. She says, “Who am I? What am I?” But the movie never tells her. I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein’s monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.
Speed Zone
(Directed by Jim Drake; starring Peter Boyle, Donna Dixon; 1989)
Read my lips.
Cars are not funny. Speeding cars are not funny. It is not funny when a car spins around and speeds in the other direction. It is not funny when a car flies through the air. It is not funny when a truck crashes into a car. It is not funny when cops chase speeding cars. It is not funny when cars crash through roadblocks.
None of those things are funny.
They have never been funny.
People are not amused by them. No, not even the people unlucky or unwise enough to have paid money to see a movie like Speed Trap—or a movie like Cannonball Run, of which Speed Trap is a pathetic clone. Audiences sit in dead silence.
Hollywood does not seem to understand this basic principle, which is why so many movies have featured chases, crashes, and flying automobiles in recent years. Occasionally a chase will indeed be exciting—when it has something to do with the plot, as in The French Connection or To Live and Die in L.A. But when a movie is all chases and crashes, then the intelligent viewer will realize that what he is seeing is a big payday for a lot of stunt drivers, and he will lose interest.
