I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 40
Nonstop chase-and-crash comedies have provided some of the worst movies of recent years (both Cannonball Run movies, the Smokey sequels, etc.), but even in that dismal company Speed Zone sets some kind of record. This is a movie that lasts ninety-five minutes and contains one (1) laugh. To save you the admission price, here is the joke:
Dickie Smothers: “We’ve got to go to the Dulles airport.”
Tommy Smothers: “What are we going to Fresno for?”
Dickie: “What makes you think we’re going to Fresno?”
Tommy: “Well, you said the dullest airport, didn’t you?”
None of the other jokes in Speed Zone measure up to that standard. The movie is still another waste of John Candy, who makes a movie like Planes, Trains and Automobiles that showcases his genuine talent, and then waltzes into a cynical, no-brainer ripoff like this with nothing more on his mind, apparently, than the rent check.
The movie features countless other celebrities in bit roles, but none of them make as lasting an impression as the Michelin trademark, which is displayed throughout the film in a blatant example of product promotion. Will Michelin sell more tires this way? I wonder. Would you trust your life to tires made by anyone who thought association with this film would improve their product’s image?
Spice World
(Directed by Bob Spiers; starring The Spice Girls; 1998)
The Spice Girls are easier to tell apart than the Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that is small consolation: What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?
They occupy Spice World as if they were watching it: They’re so detached they can’t even successfully lip-synch their own songs. During a rehearsal scene, their director tells them, with such truth that we may be hearing a secret message from the screenwriter, “That was absolutely perfect—without being actually any good.”
Spice World is obviously intended as a rip-off of A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which gave the Beatles to the movies. They should have ripped off more—everything they could get their hands on. The movie is a day in the life of a musical group that has become an overnight success, and we see them rehearse, perform, hang out together, and deal with such desperately contrived supporting characters as a trash newspaper editor, a paparazzo, and a manipulative manager.
All of these elements are inspired in one way or another by A Hard Day’s Night. The huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented—while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of thirty standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The Beatles film played off the personalities of the Beatles. The Spice Girls have no personalities; their bodies are carriers for inane chatter. The Beatles film had such great music that every song in it is beloved all over the world. The Spice Girls music is so bad that even Spice World avoids using any more of it than absolutely necessary.
The film’s linking device is a big double-decker bus, painted like a Union Jack, which ferries the Girls past London landmarks (so many landmarks I suspect the filmmakers were desperately trying to stretch the running time). This bus is of ordinary size on the outside but three times too wide on the inside; it is fitted with all the conveniences of Spice Girlhood, except, apparently, toilet facilities, leading to the unusual sight of the Girls jumping off for a quick pee in the woods. (They do everything together.)
So lacking in human characteristics are the Girls that when the screenplay falls back on the last resort of the bankrupt filmmaking imagination—a childbirth scene—they have to import one of their friends to have the baby. She at least had the wit to get pregnant, something beyond the Girls since it would involve a relationship, and thus an attention span. Words fail me as I try to describe my thoughts at the prospect of the five Spice Girls bedside at a childbirth, shouting “push!”
Stanley
(Directed by William Grefe; starring Chris Robinson; 1972)
The old man climbed out of his seat in the sixth row and went shuffling up the aisle, asking people what time it was. “Do you have the time?” he kept asking. “The time? What time is it?”
A woman sitting across the aisle advised him to shut up and get lost. “I paid my money and I want to see the movie,” she said. She gobbled her buttered popcorn and stared at the screen, where a stripper was biting off a snake’s head.
“Ooo-eee,” somebody said in the darkness.
“What time is it?” the man asked. He was back again.
“Quiet!” somebody whispered fiercely.
On the screen, a character named Tim was caressing the head of his pet rattlesnake and cooing at it: “Does that feel good, Stanley? Do you like that, Stanley?” Stanley was the rattlesnake.
Back at Tim’s cabin, a cretinous game poacher had just blown off Hazel’s head with a shotgun. Hazel was Stanley’s wife. Then the poacher killed Hazel’s three baby snakes. At about this point, a couple of other villains sunk into quicksand while screaming fearsomely.
Still to come was the big swimming pool scene, where the head villain jumps into his pool without realizing that Tim had filled it with water moccasins. This is quite a scene. The head villain’s daughter comes riding up on her horse, sees her dead father, shouts “Daddy!” and then is abducted by Tim and taken back to the swamp.
The girl gets over Daddy’s death pretty easily, I’d say. By the time Tim gets her back to the cabin she’s making eyes at him. They kiss and caress and (so help me) the sound track bursts into a song with the lyrics “Let’s play hide and seek with the world.” Meanwhile, her old man has been attacked by dozens of deadly snakes. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, you might say, to have a thankless child.
I think it was when the stripper bit off the snake’s head that I first began to ask myself what I was doing in the theater.
There’s a close-up of blood running down her chin, and then a scene where she gets plowed on Jack Daniels and asks her husband if he has any idea how it feels to bite off a snake’s head every day—twice on weekends. He’s too happy to listen. This was opening night at the club, you see, and he explains: “It always pays to wine and dine the critics! The reviews will be terrific! They loved your act, sweetheart!”
It is my job to go to movies and write about them. If the movie is a work of art, I must try to rise to the occasion. If it’s just an entertainment, then my job is to suggest how well you might be entertained. But how should I approach Stanley? The movie is doing business—but what kind of people are in the audience?
Are they just poor slobs who got suckered in by the ads? Or are they geeks enjoying a busman’s holiday? Should I rate the movie with stars, or vomit bags? Why did the old man want to know what time it was? Had he missed the feeding at the zoo? Why wouldn’t anyone tell him? Didn’t they know? Didn’t they care that it was late . . . very late?
Ooo-eee.
Starship Troopers
(Directed by Paul Verhoeven; starring Casper Van Dien; 1997)
Starship Troopers is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters, and values are pitched at eleven-year-old science fiction fans. That makes it true to its source. It’s based on a novel for juveniles by Robert A. Heinlein. I read it when I was in grade school. I have improved since then, but the story has not.
The premise: Early in the next millennium, mankind is engaged in a war for survival with the Bugs, a vicious race of giant insects that colonize the galaxy by hurling their spores into space. If you seek their monument, do not look around you: Bugs have no buildings, no technology, no clothes, nothing but the ability to attack, fight, kill, and propagate. They exist not as an alien civilization but as pop-up enemies in a space war.
Human society recruits starship troopers to fight the Bug. Their method is to machine-gun them to death. This does not work very well. Three or four troopers will fire thousands of rounds into a Bug, which like the Energizer Bunny just keeps on comin’. Grenades work better, but I guess the troopers haven’t twigged to that. You’d think a human race capable of interstellar travel might have developed an effective insecticide, but no.
It doesn’t really matter, since the Bugs aren’t important except as props for the interminable action scenes, and as an enemy to justify the film’s quasi-fascist militarism. Heinlein was of course a right-wing saber-rattler, but a charming and intelligent one who wrote some of the best science fiction ever. Starship Troopers proposes a society in which citizenship is earned through military service, and values are learned on the battlefield.
Heinlein intended his story for young boys, but wrote it more or less seriously. The one redeeming merit for director Paul Verhoeven’s film is that by remaining faithful to Heinlein’s material and period, it adds an element of sly satire. This is like the squarest but most technically advanced sci-fi movie of the 1950s, a film in which the sets and costumes look like a cross between Buck Rogers and the Archie comic books, and the characters look like they stepped out of Pepsodent ads.
The film’s narration is handled by a futuristic version of the TV news, crossed with the Web. After every breathless story, the cursor blinks while we’re asked, “Want to know more?” Yes, I did. I was particularly intrigued by the way the Bugs had evolved organic launching pods that could spit their spores into space, and could also fire big globs of unidentified fiery matter at attacking space ships. Since they have no technology, these abilities must have evolved along Darwinian lines; to say they severely test the theory of evolution is putting it mildly.
On the human side, we follow the adventures of a group of high-school friends from Buenos Aires. Johnny (Casper Van Dien) has a crush on Carmen (Denise Richards), but she likes the way Zander (Patrick Muldoon) looks in uniform. When she signs up to become a starship trooper, so does Johnny. They go through basic training led by an officer of the take-no-prisoners school (Michael Ironside) and then they’re sent to fight the Bug. Until late in the movie, when things really get grim, Carmen wears a big wide bright smile in every single scene, as if posing for the cover of the novel. (Indeed, the whole look of the production design seems inspired by covers of the pulp space opera mags like Amazing, Imagination, and Thrilling Wonder Stories).
The action sequences are heavily laden with special effects, but curiously joyless. We get the idea right away: Bugs will jump up, troopers will fire countless rounds at them, the Bugs will impale troopers with their spiny giant legs, and finally dissolve in a spray of goo. Later there are refinements, like fire-breathing beetles, flying insects, and giant Bugs that erupt from the earth. All very elaborate, but the Bugs are not interesting in the way, say, that the villains in the Alien pictures were. Even their planets are boring; Bugs live on ugly rock worlds with no other living species, raising the question of what they eat.
Discussing the science of Starship Troopers is beside the point. Paul Verhoeven is facing in the other direction. He wants to depict the world of the future as it might have been visualized in the mind of a kid reading Heinlein in 1956. He faithfully represents Heinlein’s militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.
What’s lacking is exhilaration and sheer entertainment. Unlike the Star Wars movies, which embraced a joyous vision and great comic invention, Starship Troopers doesn’t resonate. It’s one-dimensional. We smile at the satirical asides, but where’s the warmth of human nature? The spark of genius or rebellion? If Star Wars is humanist, Starship Troopers is totalitarian.
Watching a film that largely consists of interchangeable characters firing machine guns at computer-generated Bugs, I was reminded of the experience of my friend McHugh. After obtaining his degree from Indiana University, he spent the summer in the employ of Acme Bug Control in Bloomington, Indiana. One hot summer day, while he was spraying insecticide under a home, a trapdoor opened above his head and a housewife offered him a glass of lemonade. He crawled up, filthy and sweaty, and as he drank the lemonade, the woman told her son, “Now Jimmy—you study your books, or you’ll end up just like him!” I wanted to tell the troopers the same thing.
Stealing Beauty
(Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci; starring Liv Tyler; 1996)
I wait and wait so patiently.
I’m quiet as a cup . . .
I hope you’ll come and rattle me . . .
Quick! come and wake me up!
This is one of several poems written by Lucy, the heroine of Stealing Beauty, as she drifts through an endless house party in Tuscany. I quote Lucy’s poetry because I want to set you a test question. Reading it, how old would you guess Lucy is? Nine? Fourteen? The notion of being “quiet as a cup” is not bad. “Rattle me” is better than “drink from me.” Those double exclamation points, however . . .
Pencils up. Lucy is nineteen. If this poetry seems unsophisticated for a worldly nineteen-year-old, you should read some of her other poems, which are superimposed on the screen in her own handwriting, and (I am afraid) her own spelling.
Lucy is a creature without an idea in her head. She has no conversation. No interests. No wit. She exists primarily to stir lust in the loins of the men. After the death of her mother, a poet who visited these Italian hills twenty years ago, Lucy has come back to an artists’ home with two things on her mind: She wants to discover the identity of her real father, and she wants to lose her virginity. Experienced moviegoers can assess the risk that she will solve these problems simultaneously.
Stealing Beauty is the new film by Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor), who like many a middle-aged man before him has been struck dumb by the beauty of a nubile young girl, and has made the mistake of trying to approach her on what he thinks is her level. The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model, suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift. Look at these hills! These sunsets! Smell the herbed air! See how the light catches the old rose-covered villa! The problem here is that many nineteen-year-old women, especially the beautiful international model types, would rather stain their teeth with cigarettes and go to discos with cretins on motorcycles than have all Tuscany as their sandbox. (For an example of a cannier May–December seduction strategy, consider Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, in which an older man fascinates a young woman by emphasizing his age and experience and pretending to be beyond her charms.)
Lucy is played by Liv Tyler, a young actress who has been profiled in all the glossies by writers who find it delightful that she thought her father was one rock star when in fact he was another. Thus there is an “autobiographical” component to her search among the artistic layabouts at the Tuscan villa for the man who seduced her mother twenty years ago. Tyler is indeed attractive, and looks enough like Lili Taylor to be her sister. But Lili Taylor usually plays smart women, and if she were in this movie her B.S. Alarm would be ringing constantly.
The villa is occupied by a sculptor (Donal McCann), who starts on a tree trunk with a chain saw and is soon sand-papering the curve of Lucy’s chin. His earth-mother wife (Sinead Cusack) is tired after twenty years of cooking and keeping house for a continual house party, and no wonder. The most interesting guest is a gay playwright (Jeremy Irons) who is dying of AIDS and attracts Lucy because he is not after her. Other guests include an art dealer (Jean Marais), an advice to the lovelorn expert (Stefania Sandrelli), a designer (Miranda Fox), and an entertainment lawyer (D. W. Moffet), who sighs, “I think it would be great, you know, to just sit around all day and express yourself.” Neighbors drop in, including assorted young men, one of whom may have sent Lucy a letter that she thinks was romantic and poetic—as indeed anyone who writes like Lucy would.
The movie is great to look at. Like all those other Brits-in-Italy movies (A Month at the Lake, Enchanted April, A Room with a View), it makes you want to find this place and go there. In this case, however, you hope the movie characters have moved out before you get there. There is a simmer of discontent beneath the surface of everyday life in the villa, a sort of sullen, selfish unhappiness that everyone has about his or her lot in life.
The purpose of the Lucy character, I guess, is to act like a catalyst or a muse, shaking up old patterns and forcing these exiles to decide where their homes really are. She is fresh and they are decadent narcissists. Only the Jeremy Irons character, absorbed in his dying, and the Donal McCann character, absorbed in his art, have lives of any meaning.
The young men who buzz about Lucy are of no substance whatever. The older men are similar, but can make better conversation, which would be useful if there were any evidence that Lucy was a conversationalist. Actually she serves for Bertolucci more as a plot device than as a person. She represents some kind of ideal of perfect virgin beauty, and the film’s opening shots, in which a photographer on a plane sees her sleeping and takes close-ups of her lips and crotch, set the tone. The sad thing is that, sleeping, she embodies what she represents to this movie just as well as when she’s awake.
Stealing Home
(Directed by Steven Kampmann, Will Aldis; starring Mark Harmon, Jodie Foster; 1988)
The problem is possibly with me. I detested Stealing Home so much, from beginning to end, that I left the screening wondering if any movie could possibly be that bad. Never mind the hoots and catcalls from others in the preview audience; they had their own problems. I resolved to sit in a quiet place and run through the movie once again in my mind, trying to see through its paralyzing sincerety to the intelligence, if any, inside.
I was not successful. Stealing Home is a real squirmer, a movie so earnest and sincere and pathetic and dripping with pathos that it cries out to be satirized. The only way to save this movie would be with a new sound track with savagely cynical dialogue over the sappy images. This is one of those movies where the filmmakers remember the golden days of their adolescence, and are so overcome with emotion that they fail to recognize their memories as clichés learned from other movies. There is not a second in this film that seems inspired by real life, and since the film is plugged as the hero’s autobiography, that’s a fairly serious flaw.
