I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 7
But, no, a motorcyclist pulls a bundle of dynamite from his belt and throws it into the cave. No fuse, just the dynamite. Then we cut to footage apparently taken from another film, showing towers of flame. The mountain shakes. Yards below, an old Indian woman cocks her head and nods wisely at the sky. Mountain speak with big voice. Then we cut to a sound stage set decorated with trees, bushes, and a steaming pile of rocks in one corner—the remains of the cave and the mountain, too, for that matter. “Do you—think it’s dead?” Joi Lansing asks. “Nothing could live through that,” Lindsay Crosby assures her. I hope he’s right.
The Big Hit
(Directed by Che-Kirk Wong; starring Mark Wahlberg, Lou Diamond Phillips; 1998)
Hollywood used to import movie stars from overseas. Then directors. Then they remade foreign films. Now the studios import entire genres. It’s cheaper buying wholesale. The Big Hit is a Hong Kong action comedy, directed by Che-Kirk Wong (Crime Story, Hard to Die), starring an American cast, and written by Ben Ramsey, an American who has apparently done as much time in the video stores as Quentin Tarantino.
The movie has the Hong Kong spirit right down to the deadpan dialogue. Sample:
Hit Man: “If you stay with me you have to understand I’m a contract killer. I murder people for a living. Mostly bad people, but . . .”
Girl He Has Kidnapped: “I’m cool with that.”
The characters in these movies exist in a Twilight Zone where thousands of rounds of ammunition are fired, but no one ever gets shot unless the plot requires him to. The bullets have read the screenplay.
As the film opens, we meet four buddies working out in a health club. They’re played by Mark Wahlberg (of Boogie Nights), Lou Diamond Phillips, Bokeem Woodbine, and Antonio Sabato, Jr. The guys are hunks with big muscles, which we can study during a locker-room scene where they stand around bare-bottomed while discussing Woodbine’s recent discovery of masturbation, which he recommends as superior to intercourse, perhaps because it requires only one consenting adult.
Then they dress for work. They’re all garbed as utilities workers, with hard hats, toolboxes, and wide leather belts holding wrenches and flashlights. As they saunter down the street to Graeme Revell’s pumping sound track, they look like a downsized road company version of the Village People.
The plot: They attack the heavily defended high-rise stronghold of a rich pimp who has just purchased three new girls for $50,000 a head. They break in with guns blazing, and there’s an extended action sequence ending with one of the heroes diving out of an upper floor on a bungee cord, just ahead of a shattering explosion. And so on.
They kidnap Keiko (China Chow), the daughter of a rich Japanese executive. Complications ensue, and she ends up in the hands, and later the car trunk, of the leader of the hit man, named Melvin Smiley (Wahlberg). This is most likely the first movie in which the hero hit man is named Melvin Smiley. But he does smile a lot, because his weakness is, “I can’t stand the idea of people who don’t like me.” You would think a hit man would have a lot of people walking around not liking him, but not if he is a good enough shot.
Keiko falls in love with Melvin with astonishing rapidity. Sure, she tries to escape, but by the end she realizes her future lies with his. Will this complicate Melvin’s life? Not any more than it already is.
He has a black mistress (Lela Rochon), who looks at a dismembered body in their bathtub and says, “He’s kinda cute.” And he has a Jewish fiancée (Christina Applegate), who is Jewish for the sole purpose of having two Jewish parents (Elliott Gould and Lainie Kazan), so they can appear in the middle of the movie like refugees from a Woody Allen picture and provide crudely stereotyped caricatures. Gould makes crass remarks about his wife’s plastic surgery, gets drunk, and throws up on Lou Diamond Phillips, in a scene where both actors appear to be using the powers of visualization to imagine themselves in another movie.
Many more action scenes. Cars explode. Cars are shot at. Cars land in trees. They fall out of trees. Remember those old serials where someone got killed at the end of an installment, but at the beginning of the next installment you see them leap quickly to safety? That trick is played three times in this movie. Whenever anyone gets blowed up real good, you wait serenely for the instant replay.
I guess you could laugh at this. You would have to be seriously alienated from normal human values and be nursing a deep-seated anger against movies that make you think even a little, but you could laugh.
Birds in Peru
(Directed by Romain Gary; starring Jean Seberg; 1969)
Oh yes, she has a lovely face. When the camera moves close and Jean Seberg arches that magnificent neck and looks into the middle distance and her lips part slightly . . . yes, Preminger knew what he was doing when he cast her as Joan of Arc.
So, yes, she has a lovely face. We see it for minutes on end in Birds in Peru. Looking up at us, down at us, away, in profile, turning toward, blank, fearful, seductive, nihilistic. It would almost seem that the face was Romain Gary’s reason for making the movie. So that with a camera he could worship the face of his wife. Alas, Gary and Miss Seberg did not get on well while the movie was being made, and shortly afterward there was a divorce. Ah.
The story goes that Gary wanted to direct this movie because he was so displeased by the two previous movies made from his books: Lady L and Roots of Heaven. Those were stinkers, yes. So Gary took his short story Birds in Peru and directed it himself this time. Now there are three stinkers made from his work.
His story involves a frigid beauty (Miss Seberg) who arrives in Peru in the midst of a round-the-world trip in search of fulfillment. She is accompanied by her husband and his chauffeur, who complete a masochistic ménage à trois. The morning after the carnival, we find her on a beach with the bodies (some dead, some alive) of the lovers who tried and failed last night. She wanders away in shock. Arrives at a bordello on the seashore. Makes love with the madam and one of her customers. Wanders away again. Meets a sensitive young artist. Waits with him for her husband and the chauffeur to arrive. When they do, they will kill her. Then the chauffeur has instructions to kill the husband. There is a houseboy involved, too, whose function is to look startled and run about.
This material could have been made into an interesting movie. What was needed was a sense of pace, less impersonal dialogue, and an end to artistic game-playing. In short, it would have worked as a movie but it doesn’t work as a photographed literary idea.
Gary holds his close-ups much too long, especially in the case of Miss Seberg; instead of providing dramatic impact and pacing, they drag the movie to a halt. Gary doesn’t like to move his camera much, either; his ideas of composing a scene are painfully elementary. Shots on the beach are invariably photographed by arranging his actors in a geometric pattern and having them march dreamily ahead.
The beach photography, by the way, was apparently meant to be surrealistic. We get long vistas of barren beach, with figures here and there in the landscape, old Peruvian masks and feathers and dying birds stuck in the sand, and strange rocks on the horizon, as if this were a Salvador Dali retrospective. But none of it works. The movie doesn’t grow. The characters drift through their vacuum. Rarely has so much pretension created so much waste.
But there is one, and only one, good cinematic moment. The woman and the artist are alone in the cabin. They embrace each other. Then they hear a strange sound: tap-tap . . . tap-tap . . . two quick taps, silence, two quick taps again. They look up. It is the chauffeur, come to murder them, impatiently tapping his foot.
The Blue Iguana
(Directed by John Lafia; starring Dylan McDermott, Jessica Harper, Dean Stockwell; 1988)
The Blue Iguana is as close to a no-brainer as you can get, and still have anything left on the screen at all. It’s a smart-aleck parody of private-eye movies, but it knows as little about private eyes as it does about parodies and movies. It’s the kind of experience where you sit in stunned silence, looking at the screen, knowing that even the actors can hardly be blamed, since if they had been allowed to improvise almost anything that came into their heads, it would have been better than the dialogue they’ve been given.
Horrible movies like this sometimes have a chance of working, in a perverse way, if they bring energy and style to the screen. We will never know, alas, whether energy and style could have saved this one. It’s an expensive professional version of the kind of inane spoofs that college students sometimes try to shoot on video—movies where the big thrill is seeing your pals in costume. The movie’s so bad, there isn’t even anyone in it who knows how to smoke. The hero, a private eye named Vince (Dylan McDermott), plays every scene with an unfiltered cigarette stuck in his mouth, and yet he doesn’t come across as a chain-smoker, he comes across as a nonsmoker who detests having this smelly thing under his nose.
Vince is broke, and so he accepts an assignment from the IRS, which wants him to travel to Diablo, a mythical Central American republic where a dragon lady (Jessica Harper) launders crooked money in her bank. The other players in this banana republic (none of them apparently Latinos) include James Russo as Reno, the local hoodlum, and Pamela Gidley as Dakota, who runs the saloon. The IRS agents, who follow Vince south, are played by Dean Stockwell, wearing thick glasses and a neck brace, and Tovah Feldshuh, who has evidently been spending a lot of time pumping iron lately and wants us to know it.
What happens in Diablo will be familiar to any regular viewer of the late movie on the cable station from hell. You know the one. That mystery station on your cable service that seems to show up in the unassigned gaps between the regular channels. The one with no name, no IDs, no number, and no call letters, that always seems to be showing movies that apparently do not exist. In those movies, as in this one, people drive around in old cars, shoot at each other, and say things like “I’ve got fifteen men out there!” The plots always involve coffins full of foreign currency, guys with mustaches, women with garter belts, and a voice-over narration in which the hero does a cynical whine.
I have no idea why this movie was made. I have no notions of what the actors in it thought they were doing. I have no clues as to whether the writer-director, John Lafia, thought it was funny. I do not know why Paramount released it. I do know that they say if an iguana loses its tail, it can grow another one. I do not know, however, if that is true. Wouldn’t you think that in a movie named The Blue Iguana, in which nothing of interest happens for ninety minutes, they’d at least answer a few fundamental questions about iguanas? But the only iguana in this movie is a cigarette lighter.
Blue Velvet
(Directed by David Lynch; starring Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper; 1986)
Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it’s easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what’s wrong with the movie. They’re so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest, and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that’s marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it’s all part of a campy in-joke.
The movie has two levels of reality. On one level, we’re in Lumberton, a simpleminded small town where people talk in television clichés and seem to be clones of 1950s sitcom characters. On another level, we’re told a story of sexual bondage, of how Isabella Rossellini’s husband and son have been kidnapped by Dennis Hopper, who makes her his sexual slave. The twist is that the kidnapping taps into the woman’s deepest feelings: She finds that she is a masochist who responds with great sexual passion to this situation.
Everyday town life is depicted with a deadpan irony; characters use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes. Meanwhile, the darker story of sexual bondage is told absolutely on the level in cold-blooded realism.
The movie begins with a much praised sequence in which picket fences and flower beds establish a small-town idyll. Then a man collapses while watering the lawn, and a dog comes to drink from the hose that is still held in his unconscious grip. The great imagery continues as the camera burrows into the green lawn and finds hungry insects beneath—a metaphor for the surface and buried lives of the town.
The man’s son, a college student (Kyle MacLachlan), comes home to visit his dad’s bedside and resumes a romance with the daughter (Laura Dern) of the local police detective. MacLachlan finds a severed human ear in a field, and he and Dern get involved in trying to solve the mystery of the ear. The trail leads to a nightclub singer (Rossellini) who lives alone in a starkly furnished flat.
In a sequence that Hitchcock would have been proud of, MacLachlan hides himself in Rossellini’s closet and watches, shocked, as she has a sadomashochistic sexual encounter with Hopper, a drug-sniffing pervert. Hopper leaves. Rossellini discovers MacLachlan in the closet and, to his astonishment, pulls a knife on him and forces him to submit to her seduction. He is appalled but fascinated; she wants him to be a “bad boy” and hit her.
These sequences have great power. They make 9 1/2 Weeks look rather timid by comparison, because they do seem genuinely born from the darkest and most despairing side of human nature. If Blue Velvet had continued to develop its story in a straight line, if it had followed more deeply into the implications of the first shocking encounter between Rossellini and MacLachlan, it might have made some real emotional discoveries.
Instead, director David Lynch chose to interrupt the almost hypnotic pull of that relationship in order to pull back to his jokey, small-town satire. Is he afraid that movie audiences might not be ready for stark S&M unless they’re assured it’s all really a joke?
I was absorbed and convinced by the relationship between Rossellini and MacLachlan, and annoyed because the director kept placing himself between me and the material. After five or ten minutes in which the screen reality was overwhelming, I didn’t need the director prancing on with a top hat and cane, whistling that it was all in fun.
Indeed, the movie is pulled so violently in opposite directions that it pulls itself apart. If the sexual scenes are real, then why do we need the send-up of the Donna Reed Show? What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.
The sexual material in Blue Velvet is so disturbing, and the performance by Rossellini is so convincing and courageous, that it demands a movie that deserves it. American movies have been using satire for years to take the edge off sex and violence. Occasionally, perhaps sex and violence should be treated with the seriousness they deserve. Given the power of the darker scenes in this movie, we’re all the more frustrated that the director is unwilling to follow through to the consequences of his insights. Blue Velvet is like the guy who drives you nuts by hinting at horrifying news and then saying, “Never mind.”
There’s another thing. Rossellini is asked to do things in this film that require real nerve. In one scene, she’s publicly embarrassed by being dumped naked on the lawn of the police detective. In others, she is asked to portray emotions that I imagine most actresses would rather not touch. She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated, and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.
That’s what Bernardo Bertolucci delivered when he put Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider through the ordeal of Last Tango in Paris. In Blue Velvet, Rossellini goes the whole distance, but Lynch distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the Hopper character.
What’s worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?
Body of Evidence
(Directed by Uli Edel; starring Madonna, Anne Archer, Joe Mantegna, Willem Dafoe; 1993)
I’ve seen comedies with fewer laughs than Body of Evidence, and this is a movie that isn’t even trying to be funny. It’s an excruciatingly incompetent entry in the Basic Instinct genre, filled with lines that only a screenwriter could love, and burdened with a plot that confuses mystery with confusion.
The movie stars Madonna, who after Bloodhounds of Broadway, Shanghai Surprise, and Who’s That Girl? now nails down her title as the queen of movies that were bad ideas right from the beginning. She plays a kinky dominatrix involved in ingenious and hazardous sex with an aging millionaire who has a bad heart. He dies after an evening’s entertainment, and Madonna is charged with his murder.
But she’s innocent, she protests—and indeed there is another obvious suspect, the millionaire’s private secretary (Anne Archer), who is also his spurned former lover. Willem Dafoe plays the defense attorney who firmly believes Madonna is innocent, or in any event very sexy, and Joe Mantegna has the Hamilton Burger role.
The movie takes place in Portland, Oregon—a city small enough, Madonna volunteers from the witness stand, that she once dated a guy who dated a girl who dated Mantegna. That’s a typical exchange in the courtroom scenes, which involve Dafoe being reprimanded by the judge for just about every breath he draws.
I don’t know whether to blame the director, the cinematographer, or the editor for some of the inept choices in this movie. One example. Dafoe is addressing his opening remarks to the jury, and the camera pulls focus so that we see an attractive young female juror sitting in the front row. She gives Dafoe an unmistakable look. We in the audience are alerted that the movie is establishing her for a later payoff. We’re wrong. She’s just an extra trying to grab some extra business.
