I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 46
The last half hour of the movie is almost unseeable. In dark dimness, various human and other figures race around in a lot of water and flashlight beams, and there is much screaming. Occasionally an eye, a limb, or a bloody face emerges from the gloom. Many instructions are shouted. If you can explain to me the exact function of that rocket tube that turns up at the end, I will be sincerely grateful. If you can explain how anyone could survive that function, I will be amazed. The last shot is an homage to The African Queen, a movie I earnestly recommend instead of this one.
Volcano
(Directed by Mick Jackson; starring Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche; 1997)
I expected to see a mountainous volcano in Volcano, towering high over Los Angeles. But the movie takes place at ground level; it’s about how lava boils out of the La Brea Tar Pits, threatens a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, and then takes a shortcut through the city sewer system. The ads say “The Coast Is Toast,” but maybe they should say “The Volcano Is Drano.”
This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic. It’s said that Volcano cost a lot more than Dante’s Peak, a competing volcano movie, but it doesn’t look it. Dante’s Peak had better special effects, a more entertaining story, and a real mountain. Volcano is an absolutely standard, assembly-line undertaking; no wonder one of the extras is reading a paperback titled Screenwriting Made Easy.
The movie stars Tommy Lee Jones, professional as always even in this flimsy story, as the chief of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. He races through the obligatory opening scenes of all disaster movies (everyday life, ominous warnings, alarm sounded by hero scientist, warnings pooh-poohed by official muckety-mucks, etc.). Soon manhole covers are being blown sky-high, subway trains are being engulfed by fireballs, and “lava bombs” are flying through the air and setting miniature sets on fire.
Jones is at ground zero when the La Brea Tar Pits erupt and lava flows down the street, melting fire trucks. Like all disaster-movie heroes, he’s supplied with five obligatory companions:
1. His daughter (Gaby Hoffmann), who comes along for the ride, gets trapped by a lava flow, is rescued, is taken to a hospital, and has to be rescued from the path of a falling skyscraper that her dad has blown up to redirect the lava flow.
2. The blonde female scientist (Anne Heche), who warns that the first eruption is not the last, predicts where the lava will flow next, and at a crucial point explains to Jones that it will flow downhill, not uphill. He tells her at a critical moment: “Find my daughter!” She should have replied, “Hey, I’m the one that told you what the lava was going to do! Find her yourself! I’m needed here.”
3. The African-American sidekick (Don Cheadle), whose function is to stand in the middle of the Office of Emergency Management and shout at Jones through a telephone. I don’t know what he did at the office, but nobody else did anything either. One wall was covered by a giant screen showing hysterical anchors on the local TV news. Rows of grim technicians faced this wall, seated at computer terminals that showed the very same TV news broadcast. (All of the anchors are so thrilled to be covering a big story that they can scarcely conceal the elation in their voices.)
4. The Asian-American Female Doctor (Jacqui Kim), who arrives at the scene, gives first aid to firemen and hero’s daughter, and organizes the evacuation of Cedars-Sinai Hospital as the lava flows toward it. (She doubles as the wife of the man who builds the high-rise tower that Jones blows up.)
5. The Dog. In a tiny subplot, we see a dog barking at the lava coming in the front door, and then grabbing his Doggy-Bone and escaping out the back. When that happened, not a single dog in the audience had dry eyes.
Tommy Lee Jones is a fine actor, and he does what he can. Striding into the OEM control center, he walks briskly up to a hapless technician and taps on his computer keyboard, barking: “See that, that, and that? Now watch this!” He sounds like he means business, but do you suppose someone was actually paid for writing that line?
Various subplots are rushed on and off screen at blinding speed. At one point a troublesome black man is handcuffed by police, who later release him as the lava flow approaches. He’s free to go, but lingers and says, “You block this street, you save the neighborhood—right?” The cops nod. Then he pitches in and helps them lift a giant concrete barrier. The scene is over in a second, but think how insulting it is: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they’re trying to save the neighborhood, so the dialogue is for our benefit, implying that the black dude cares merely for “the neighborhood,” and volunteers only when his myopic concerns have been addressed.
The lava keeps flowing for much of the movie, never looking convincing. I loved it when the firemen aimed their hoses way offscreen into the middle of the lava flow, instead of maybe aiming them at the leading edge of the lava—which they couldn’t do, because the lava was a visual effect, and not really there.
I also chortled at the way the scientist warns that the first eruption “is not the last,” and yet after the second eruption (when it is time for the movie to end), the sun comes out, everyone smiles, and she offers Jones and his daughter a lift home. Hey, what about the possibility of a third eruption? What about that story she told about the Mexican farmer who found a mountain in his cornfield?
The movie has one perfect line: “This city is finally paying for its arrogance!” Yes, and Volcano is part of the price.
The Wedding Singer
(Directed by Frank Coraci; starring Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore; 1998)
The Wedding Singer tells the story of, yes, a wedding singer from New Jersey, who is cloyingly sweet at some times and a cruel monster at others. The filmmakers are obviously unaware of his split personality; the screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde. Did anybody, at any stage, gave the story the slightest thought?
The plot is so familiar the end credits should have issued a blanket thank-you to a century of Hollywood lovecoms. Through a tortuous series of contrived misunderstandings, the boy and girl avoid happiness for most of the movie, although not as successfully as we do. It’s your basic off-the-shelf formula in which two people fall in love, but are kept apart because (a) they’re engaged to creeps; (b) they say the wrong things at the wrong times; and (c) they get bad information. It’s exhausting, seeing the characters work so hard at avoiding the obvious.
Of course there’s the obligatory scene where the good girl goes to the good boy’s house to say she loves him, but the bad girl answers the door and lies to her. I spent the weekend looking at old Astaire and Rogers movies, which basically had the same plot: She thinks he’s a married man, and almost gets married to the slimy band leader before he finally figures everything out and declares his love at the eleventh hour.
The big differences between Astaire and Rogers in Swing Time and Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in The Wedding Singer is that (1) in 1936 they were more sophisticated than we are now, and knew the plot was inane, and had fun with that fact, and (2) they could dance. One of the sad by-products of the dumbing-down of America is that we’re now forced to witness the goofy plots of the 1930s played sincerely, as if they were really deep.
Sandler is the wedding singer. He’s engaged to a slut who stands him up at the altar because, sob, “the man I fell in love with six years ago was a rock singer who licked the microphone like David Lee Roth—and now you’re only a . . . a . . . wedding singer!” Barrymore, meanwhile, is engaged to a macho monster who brags about how he’s cheating on her. Sandler and Barrymore meet because she’s a waitress at the weddings where he sings. We know immediately they are meant for each other. Why do we know this? Because we are conscious and sentient. It takes them a lot longer.
The basic miscalculation in Adam Sandler’s career plan is to ever play the lead. He is not a lead. He is the best friend, or the creep, or the loser boyfriend. He doesn’t have the voice to play a lead: Even at his most sincere, he sounds like he’s doing standup—like he’s mocking a character in a movie he saw last night. Barrymore, on the other hand, has the stuff to play a lead (I commend to you once again the underrated Mad Love). But what is she doing in this one—in a plot her grandfather would have found old-fashioned? At least when she gets a good line (she tries out the married name “Mrs. Julia Gulia”) she knows how to handle it.
The best laughs in the film come right at the top, in an unbilled cameo by the invaluable Steve Buscemi, as a drunken best man who makes a shambles of a wedding toast. He has the timing, the presence, and the intelligence to go right to the edge. Sandler, on the other hand, always keeps something in reserve—his talent. It’s like he’s afraid of committing; he holds back so he can use the “only kidding” defense.
I could bore you with more plot details. About why he thinks she’s happy and she thinks he’s happy and they’re both wrong and she flies to Vegas to marry the stinker, and he . . . but why bother? And why even mention that the movie is set in the mid-1980s and makes a lot of mid-1980s references that are supposed to be funny but sound exactly like lame dialogue? And what about the curious cameos by faded stars and inexplicably cast character actors? And why do they write the role of a Boy George clone for Alexis Arquette and then do nothing with the character except let him hang there on screen? And why does the tourist section of the plane have fewer seats than first class? And, and, and . . .
What Planet Are You From?
(Directed by Mike Nichols; starring Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, Greg Kinnear; 2000)
Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut. What Planet Are You From? starts out as a dirty comedy, but then abandons the comedy, followed by the dirt, and by the end is actually trying to be poignant. For that to work, we’d have to like the hero, and Garry Shandling makes that difficult. He begrudges every emotion, as if there’s no more where that came from. That worked on TV’s Larry Sanders Show—it’s why his character was funny—but here he can’t make the movie’s U-turn into sentimentality.
He plays an alien from a distant planet, where the inhabitants have no emotions and no genitals. Possibly this goes hand in hand. He is outfitted with a penis, given the name Harold Anderson, and sent to Earth to impregnate a human woman, so that his race can conquer our planet. When Harold becomes aroused, his penis makes a loud whirling noise. Imagine Mr. Spock with a roto-rooter in his pants.
If I were a comedy writer I would deal with that humming noise. I would assume that the other characters in the movie would find it extremely disturbing. I put it to my female readers: If you were on a date with a guy and his crotch sounded like it contained an operating garbage disposal, how would you feel? I submit that a normal woman would no more want to get into his pants than stick her hand down a disposal unit.
The lame joke in What Planet Are You From? is that women hear the noise, find it curious, and ask about it, and Harold makes feeble attempts to explain it away, and of course the more aroused he becomes the louder it hums, and when his ardor cools the volume drops. You understand. If you find this even slightly funny, you’d better see this movie, since the device is never likely to be employed again.
On earth, Harold gets a job in a bank with the lecherous Perry (Greg Kinnear), and soon he is romancing a woman named Susan (Annette Bening) and contemplating the possibility of sex with Perry’s wife Helen (Linda Fiorentino). Fiorentino of course starred in the most unforgettable movie crotch scene in history (in The Last Seduction, where she calls the bluff of a barroom braggart). There is a scene here with exactly the same setup: She’s sitting next to Harold in a bar, his crotch is humming, etc., and I was wondering, is it too much to ask that the movie provide a hilarious homage? It was. Think of the lost possibilities.
Harold and Susan fly off to Vegas, get married, and have a honeymoon that consists of days of uninterrupted sex (“I had so many orgasms,” she says, “that some are still stacked up and waiting to land”). Then she discovers Harold’s only interest in her is as a breeder. She is crushed and angry, and the movie turns to cheap emotion during her pregnancy and inevitable live childbirth scene, after which Harold finds to his amazement that he may have emotions after all.
The film was directed by Mike Nichols, whose uneven career makes you wonder. Half of his films are good to great (his previous credit is Primary Colors) and the other half you’re at a loss to account for. What went into the theory that What Planet Are You From? was filmable? Even if the screenplay by Garry Shandling and three other writers seemed promising on the page, why star Shandling in it? Why not an actor who projects joy of performance—why not Kinnear, for example?
Shandling’s shtick is unavailability. His public persona is of a man unwilling to be in public. Words squeeze embarrassed from his lips as if he feels guilty to be talking. Larry Sanders used this presence brilliantly. But it depends on its limitations. If you’re making a movie about a man who has a strange noise coming from his crotch, you should cast an actor who looks different when it isn’t.
When Night Is Falling
(Directed by Patricia Rozema; starring Pascale Bussieres, Henry Czerny; 1995)
Patricia Rozema was raised as a Calvinist in Canada, and saw no films until she was sixteen. In this she resembles her coreligionist Paul Schrader, who saw his first film at about the same age, and went on to write Taxi Driver and direct American Gigolo. Both of the Rozema films I’ve seen deal with a young woman coming to terms with her unrealized sexual yearnings. One suspects an element of autobiography.
Rozema’s first feature was the enchanting I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), the story of a young Toronto woman who dreams of becoming a photographer, and goes to work for a sophisticated older woman who runs an art gallery. The young woman idealizes the older one, but discovers secrets about her: That she is a lesbian, and that she is bitter about being a dealer rather than an artist. The film is ingenious in that it seems to be about the young narrator, and ends up being at least as much about the woman she gets a crush on.
Now comes When Night Is Falling, again about a young woman, this one a professor in a Protestant theological college in Toronto. Her name is Camille (Pascale Bussieres), she is from Quebec, and she is engaged to marry a fellow professor named Martin (Henry Czerny). Then one day at a laundromat she encounters a woman her age named Petra (Rachel Crawford), their laundry is exchanged, not by accident, and when Camille returns Petra’s clothes, Petra looks at her solemnly and says, “I’d love to see you in the moonlight with your head thrown back and your body on fire.”
There is a part of me that responds to reckless romanticism like that, and I guess I understand Petra saying it, but before their first date? Slow down, girl! Camille is shocked and tells Petra she has made a mistake. But she hasn’t, and Camille finds herself increasingly fascinated by Petra (whose name may or may not be inspired by the heroine of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fassbinder’s 1973 film about lesbianism).
The film until this point has been absorbing and sensible, but then it begins to go wrong. The emotional center is sound; we believe the growing attraction the two women felt for each other, but the details of their stories seem contrived and awkward.
Petra, for example, is a little too good to be true; she is a member of a circus troupe modeled on Cirque de Soleil, and her act (not terribly difficult although she isn’t very good at it) consists of juggling balls of light in pantomime from behind a backlit screen. She lives in a trailer decorated like an ecological hippie gift shop. First seen in skin-tight leather (not strictly necessary since she is seen only as a shadow), she appears in a series of bizarre “artistic” costumes that hammer home the point: She is a wild free spirit, offering Camille the choice of remaining in the drab Calvinist environment, or running away and joining the circus. Does the symbolism feel just slightly strained when Camille seeks out Petra a second time, and Petra takes her on a surprise hang-gliding date?
Camille’s relationship with Martin is strained and unconvincing (despite their sex scene together, they don’t seem to know each other very well). And her scenes with Reverend DeBoer (David Fox), the president of the college, are stiffly contrived. When she and Martin are offered the job of college cochaplains, but only if they marry, she wears one of Petra’s wildly inappropriate blouses to the first interview and stumbles through a later interview designed to test her soundness on the question of homosexuality. When the reverend unexpectedly visits her apartment while Petra is there, Camille behaves so strangely that she seems to be concealing not lesbianism, but a panic attack.
The mechanics of the story are awkward. Martin discovers the affair through a convenient photograph, and by peering through a window of Petra’s trailer. Petra sets an artificial deadline because the circus is leaving town. The women have ludicrous misunderstandings. Oh, and there’s Bob, Camille’s beloved dog, “who I realize I love more than anyone I’m supposed to love.” Bob spends most of the movie dead in the refrigerator, and then Camille goes out into the wilderness on a dark and snowy night to bury him, meanwhile nipping at cherry brandy until she passes out and seems to freeze to death. . . .
The ending of the movie completely derails. Leave out such details as that Petra is able to arrive at the side of the frozen body well before the ambulance does. Put aside problems of continuity. Forget even Bob’s remarkable reappearance in the end credits. Laughter is the friend of romance but the enemy of sexual passion (which seems funny only to the observer). And When Night Is Falling has too many unintended laughs for its passion to be convincing. We start out nodding solemnly in sympathy with Camille and Petra. We share their angst. We care about their happiness. But then we start to snicker, and all is lost. This movie needed a strict rewrite, preferably by an unsmiling Calvinist. I shouldn’t have left the theater worrying about what was going to happen to Bob.
