I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 44
The movie invites us to see the world through the eyes of little Oskar, who on his third birthday refuses to do any more growing up because the world is such a cruel place. My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film’s foreground obscured its larger meaning.
So what does that make me? An anti-intellectual philistine? I hope not. But if it does, that’s better than caving in to the tumult of publicity and praise for The Tin Drum, which has shared the Grand Prix at Cannes (with Apocalypse Now) and won the Academy Award as Best Foreign Film, and is hailed on all fronts for its brave stand against war and nationalism and in favor of the innocence of childhood.
Actually, I don’t think little Oskar is at all innocent in this film; a malevolence seems to burn from his eyes, and he’s compromised in his rejection of the world’s evil by his own behavior as the most spiteful, egocentric, cold, and calculating character in the film (all right: except for Adolf Hitler).
The film has been adapted by the West German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff from the 1959 novel by Günter Grass, who helped with the screenplay. It chronicles the career of little Oskar, who narrates his own life story starting with his mother’s conception in a potato patch. Oskar is born into a world divided: In the years after World War I, both Germans and Poles live in the state of Danzig, where they get along about as well as Catholics and Protestants in Belfast.
Oskar has fathers of both nationalities (for reasons too complicated to explain here), and he is not amused by the nationalistic chauvinism he sees around him. So, on his third birthday, he reaches a conscious decision to stop growing. He provides a plausible explanation for his decision by falling down the basement stairs. And for the rest of the movie he remains arrested in growth: a solemn-faced, beady-eyed little tyke who never goes anywhere without a tin drum that he beats on incessantly. For his other trick, he can scream so loudly that he shatters glass.
There is a scene in which Oskar’s drum so confuses a Nazi marching band that it switches from a Nazi hymn to “The Blue Danube.” The crashing obviousness of this scene aside, I must confess that the symbolism of the drum failed to involve me.
And here we are at the central problem of the movie: Should I, as a member of the audience, decide to take the drum as, say, a child’s toy protest against the marching cadences of the German armies? Or should I allow myself to be annoyed by the child’s obnoxious habit of banging on it whenever something’s not to his liking? Even if I buy the wretched Drum as a Moral Symbol, I’m still stuck with the kid as a pious little bastard.
But what about the other people in the movie? Oskar is right at the middle of the tug-of-war over Danzig and, by implication, over Europe. People are choosing up sides between the Poles and the Nazis. Meanwhile, all around him, adult duplicity is a way of life. Oskar’s mother, for example, sneaks away on Thursday afternoons for an illicit sexual interlude. Oskar interrupts her dalliance with a scream that supplies work for half the glassmakers in Danzig. Does this make him a socialist or an Oedipus?
Soon after, he finds himself on the road with a troupe of performing midgets. He shatters glasses on cue, marches around in uniform, and listens as the troupe’s leader explains that little people have to stay in the spotlight or big people will run the show. This idea is the last Oskar needs to have implanted in his mind.
The movie juxtaposes Oskar’s one-man protest with the horror of World War II. But I am not sure what the juxtaposition means. Did I miss everything? I’ve obviously taken the story on a literal level, but I don’t think that means I misread the film as it stands.
If we come in armed with the Grass novel and a sheaf of reviews, it’s maybe just possible to discipline ourselves to view The Tin Drum as a solemn allegorical statement. But if we take the chance of just watching what’s on the screen, Schlondorff never makes the connection. We’re stuck with this cretinous little kid, just when Europe has enough troubles of its own.
T.N.T. Jackson
(Directed by Cirio H. Santiago; starring Jeanne Bell; 1975)
You remember the story about John Carter of Mars. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s hero, and he galloped all over Mars on whatever passed for a horse up there. One day he was attacked and chased by a band of villains who started hacking at him with their swords.
Carter of Mars drew his own trusty blade and started hacking back at them, while trying to make it up the castle stairs. But they were too much for him. First he lost a leg. Then an arm. They were gaining on him. “The hell with this,” said John Carter, throwing away his sword, drawing his atomic ray gun and zapping the bad guys into a radioactive ash heap.
I think about that story every time I see a Kung Fu movie, because Kung Fu movies depend on the same unwritten rules as John Carter novels: Nobody can have a gun. If they had a gun, they’d just shoot you, and you wouldn’t get to go through the whole “aaaaaiiiiieeeee” number and leap about with your fists flashing, your foot cocked, and your elbow of death savagely bent. It’s great to have a black belt, but it’s better if the bad guys know the rules.
They do in T.N.T. Jackson, which is easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year (yes, worse, far worse, than Rape Squad). And so we get all the obligatory postures, all the menacing glares, and especially all the slow-motion leaps through the air. At the end, so great is the heroine’s wrath that she propels her fingers of vengeance all the way through the villain, who looks mighty surprised at that, let me tell you.
One of the little problems with T.N.T. Jackson, alas, is that the Kung Fu fight scenes have been so loosely staged you can easily see the fighters aren’t even touching each other. This results in some curious moments, as when the heroine thrusts her foot at a bad guy, who recoils violently, though he wasn’t even touched. Maybe what she needs is some Dr. Scholl’s deodorant powder?
The movie’s about a drug-smuggling ring in Asia. T.N.T. Jackson (played by Jeanne Bell) is teamed up with one of the smugglers (Stan Shaw) and is also searching for the killer of her brother. That’s not just the plot summary, it’s the plot. There are innumerable badly staged fights, a confrontation with a U.S. government agent (Pat Anderson in U.S. government-issue bikinis), lots of idle threats, and the quaint notion that T.N.T. Jackson fights better when nude and in the dark.
This leads to a scene in which, after her clothes have been ripped off, she gets into a fierce battle for control of the light switch. She turns off the lights and demolishes three bad guys. The villain turns the lights back on. She turns them off. He turns them on, etc. I began mentally composing a screenplay for Young Tom Edison Meets the Savage Sisters.
Turbulence
(Directed by Robert Butler; starring Ray Liotta, Catherine Hicks; 1997)
Turbulence thrashes about like a formula action picture that has stepped on a live wire: It’s dead, but doesn’t stop moving. It looks like it cost a lot of money, but none of that money went into quality. It’s schlock, hurled at the screen in expensive gobs.
The plot involves an endangered 747 flight from New York to Los Angeles. It’s Christmas Eve, and there are only about a dozen passengers on board, including two prisoners and their federal marshals (anyone who has flown around Christmastime knows how empty the planes always are). One prisoner gets a gun and shoots some of the marshals, after which the other prisoner—the really dangerous one—gets a gun and kills the rest, including both pilots and one flight attendant. He locks the remaining hostages in the “crew quarters,” where they are forgotten for most of the picture.
This prisoner is Ryan Weaver (Ray Liotta), a.k.a. the Lonely Hearts Killer. He claims the evidence against him was faked by an LA cop (Hector Elizondo). In a performance that seems like an anthology of possible acting choices, Liotta goes from charmer to intelligent negotiator to berserk slasher to demented madman. My favorite moment is when he’s covered with blood, the plane is buckling through a Level 6 storm, bodies are littered everywhere, and he’s singing “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”
This is one of those movies where you keep asking questions. Questions like, how much money does an airline lose by flying a 747 from New York to LA with a dozen passengers on board? Like, do passengers board 747s from the rear door? Like, can a 747 fly upsidedown? Like, have you ever seen Christmas decorations inside an airplane (lights and wreaths and bows and mistletoe)? Like, why don’t the oxygen masks drop down automatically when the cabin depressurizes—and why do they drop down later, during a fire? Like, do storms reach as high as the cruising altitude of a transcontinental flight?
The big conflict involves the Lonely Hearts Killer and two flight attendants. One of them (Catherine Hicks) is strangled fairly early. The other (Lauren Holly) wages a heroic fight after both pilots are killed. It’s up to her to fend off the madman and somehow land the big plane. Holly’s performance is key to the movie, and it’s not very good: She screams a lot and keeps shouting “Ooohhh!” but doesn’t generate much charisma, and frankly I wish the killer had strangled her and left the more likable Hicks to land the plane.
The 747 spends much time weathering a big storm. (“It’s a Level 6!” “Is that on a scale of 1 to 10?” “No! It’s on a scale of 1 to 6!”) The storm causes all of the lights inside the plane to flash on and off, including the Christmas lights. That lends to extended sequences in which the attendant and the madman crawl around the aisles in darkness illuminated by lightning bolts—and then there’s the big moment when the plane flies upside down and they get to crawl on the ceiling.
On the ground, events are monitored in the Los Angeles control tower. The pilot of another 747 (Ben Cross) talks the brave attendant through the landing procedure, while a stern FBI agent argues that the plane should be shot down by the air force before it crashes in an inhabited area. Eventually he orders a fighter plane to fire—although by then the plane is already over Los Angeles and looks as if it would crash more or less into Disneyland.
There are more questions. Like, if a 747 sheers off the roof of a high-rise restaurant, wouldn’t that cause it to crash? Like, if a 747 plows through an outdoor billboard, wouldn’t that cause it to crash? Like, if it sweeps all the cars off the roof of a parking garage, wouldn’t that cause it to crash? Like, if it gets a truck caught in its landing gear, what would happen then? (“It’s a Ford!” a sharp-eyed observer says, in a line that—for once—I don’t think represents product placement.)
Oh, yes, there are many moments I will long remember from Turbulence. But one stands out. After Lauren Holly outsmarts and outfights the berserk killer and pilots the plane through a Level 6 storm, the FBI guy still doubts she can land it. “She’s only a stewardess,” he says. To which the female air traffic controller standing next to him snaps, “She’s a—flight attendant!”
20 Dates
(Directed by Myles Berkowitz; starring Myles Berkowitz, Elisabeth Wagner; 1999)
20 Dates tells the story of Myles Berkowitz, a man who wants to make a film and to fall in love. These areas are his “two greatest failures, professional and personal,” so he decides to make a film about going out on twenty dates. By the end of the film he has won the love of the lovely Elisabeth—maybe—but his professional life is obviously still a failure.
The film has the obnoxious tone of a boring home movie narrated by a guy shouting in your ear. We learn how he gets a $60,000 investment from a man named Elie Samaha and uses it to hire a cameraman and a sound man to follow him around on his dates. Elie is never seen on film, but is taped with an (allegedly) hidden recorder while he threatens Berkowitz, complains about the quality of the footage, and insists on sex, stars—and a scene with Tia Carrere.
Elie has a point. Even though $60,000 is a low budget, you can’t exactly see the money up there on the screen. I’ve seen features shot for half as much that were more impressive. What’s worse is that Berkowitz loses our trust early in the film, and never regains it. I don’t know how much of this film is real, if any of it is. Some scenes are admittedly staged, and others feel that way.
Even though Berkowitz presumably displays himself in his best light, I couldn’t find a moment when he said anything of charm or interest to one of his dates. He’s surprised when one woman is offended to learn she’s being photographed with a hidden camera, and when another one delivers an (unseen) hand wound that requires twenty stitches. The movie’s best dialogue is: “I could have sworn that Karen and I had fallen in love. And now, it’s never to be, because I couldn’t ever get close to her—at least not closer than ninety feet, which was specified in the restraining order.”
One of his dates, Stephanie, is a Hollywood wardrobe mistress. He asks her for free costumes for his movie (if it’s a doc, why does it need costumes?). She leaves for the rest room, “and I never saw her again.” Distraught, he consults Robert McKay, a writing teacher, and McKay gives him theories about screen romance that are irrelevant, of course, to an allegedly true-life documentary.
And what about Elie? He sounds unpleasant, vulgar, and tasteless (although no more so than many Hollywood producers). But why are we shown the outside of the county jail during his last conversation? Is he inside? What for? He promises to supply Tia Carrere, who indeed turns up in the film, describing Elie as a “very good friend.” She may want to change her number.
There’s a 1996 film available on video named Me and My Matchmaker, by Mark Wexler, about a filmmaker who consults a matchmaker and goes on dates that he films himself. It is incomparably more entertaining, funny, professional, absorbing, honest, revealing, surprising, and convincing than 20 Dates. It works wonderfully to demonstrate just how incompetent and annoying 20 Dates really is.
200 Cigarettes
(Directed by Risa Bramon Garcia; starring Christina Ricci, Courtney Love; 1999)
All those cigarettes, and nobody knows how to smoke. Everybody in 200 Cigarettes smokes nearly all the time, but none of them show any style or flair with their cigarettes. And the cinematographer doesn’t know how to light smoke so it looks great.
He should have studied Out of the Past (1947), the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time. The trick, as demonstrated by Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca, is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities, and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.
The cast of 200 Cigarettes reads like a roll call of hot talent. They’re the kinds of young stars who are on lots of magazine covers and have Web pages devoted to them, and so they know they will live forever and are immune to the diseases of smoking. I wish them well. But if they must smoke in the movies, can’t they at least be great smokers, like my mother was? When she was smoking you always knew exactly how she felt, because of the way she used her cigarette and her hands and the smoke itself as a prop to help her express herself. She should have been good; she learned from Bette Davis movies.
The stars of 200 Cigarettes, on the other hand, belong to the suck-and-blow school of smokeology. They inhale, not too deeply, and exhale, not too convincingly, and they squint in their close-ups while smoke curls up from below the screen. Their smoke emerges as small, pale, noxious gray clouds. When Robert Mitchum exhaled at a guy, the guy ducked out of the way.
I suppose there will be someone who counts the cigarettes in 200 Cigarettes, to see if there are actually 200. That will at least be something to do during the movie, which is a lame and labored conceit about an assortment of would-be colorful characters on their way to a New Year’s Eve party in 1981. Onto the pyre of this dreadful film are thrown the talents of such as Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Janeane Garofalo, Courtney Love, Gaby Hoffman, Kate Hudson, Martha Plimpton, Paul Rudd, Guillermo Diaz, Brian McCardie, Jay Mohr, Christina Ricci, Angela Featherstone, and others equally unlucky.
Ricci and Love have the kinds of self-contained personalities that hew out living space for their characters no matter where they find themselves, but the others are pretty much lost. The witless screenplay provides its characters with aimless dialogue and meaningless confrontations, and they are dressed not like people who might have been alive in 1981, but like people going to a costume party where 1981 is the theme. (There is not a single reason, by the way, why the plot requires the film to be set in 1981 or any other year.)
Seeing a film like this helps you to realize that actors are empty vessels waiting to be filled with characters and dialogue. As people, they are no doubt much smarter and funnier than the cretins in this film. I am reminded of Gene Siskel’s bottom-line test for a film: “Is this movie more entertaining than a documentary of the same people having lunch?” Here they are contained by small ideas and arch dialogue, and lack the juice of life. Maybe another 200 cigarettes would have helped; coughing would be better than some of this dialogue.
U-Turn
(Directed by Oliver Stone; starring Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton; 1997)
Only Oliver Stone knows what he was trying to accomplish by making U-Turn, and it is a secret he doesn’t share with the audience. This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking—the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources. Much of the story comes from Red Rock West, John Dahl’s 1994 film about a man and a wife who both try to convince a drifter to kill the other. And the images and milieu are out of Russ Meyer country; his Cherry, Harry and Raquel and SuperVixens contain the same redneck sheriffs, the same lustful wives, the same isolated shacks and ignorant mechanics and car culture. U-Turn and Cherry both end, indeed, with a debt to Duel in the Sun.
I imagine Stone made this movie as sort of a lark, after the exhausting but remarkable accomplishments of Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Heaven and Earth, and JFK. Well, he deserves a break—but this one? Stone is a gifted filmmaker not afraid to take chances, to express ideas in his films and make political statements. Here he’s on holiday. Watching U-Turn, I was reminded of a concert pianist playing “Chopsticks”: It is done well, but one is disappointed to find it done at all.
