Pigs and Nazis (12/15/98)
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Home Fries. [Dean Parisot, 1998.]
A twisted but charming romantic comedy with a convoluted plot involving fast food, unanticipated pregnancy, an Oedipal quadrilateral, murder [sort of] by helicopter gunship, and a guy and a girl who have their first date at a Lamaze class. Drew Barrymore is hard enough to handle ordinarily, but in the guise of a pregnant redhead she is almost certainly the cutest girl on earth. Check this out.
Cannibal. The Musical. [Trey Parker, 1996.]
The celebrated directorial debut of Trey Parker, already an underground classic; a tuneful tribute to Colorado’s first tabloid sensation, Alferd Packer. An essay adopting the traditional Boy Meets Horse/Boy Loses Horse/Boy Gets Horse three-act structure, this begins with Parker riding on his soulmate LeAnn and declaiming in his finest
Oklahoma! fashion
The sky is blue
And all the leaves are green
My heart is warm
Like a baked potato
I think I know
Exactly what I mean
When I say it’s
A schpedoinkal day
and doesn’t exactly go downhill from there, if you catch my drift: highlights include his stay among a tribe of Japanese Indians and the lengthy argument after a musical number between a gang of miners and a gang of trappers about the definition of the relative minor. The legendary underground filmmaker Stan Brakhage has a cameo. Available now on video under the auspices of the Troma Team, purveyors of
The Toxic Avenger,
A Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell, etcetera, etcetera. You could do worse; and after gorging yourself on turkey parts I don’t see why you would want to do better.
Very Bad Things. [Peter Berg, 1998.]
Let me summarize this as completely as possible, without [of course] wasting further time or effort looking up any particulars which may have escaped my apprehension: five guys [and for some reason there are now always five, though in the original of this band-of-brothers-let’s-be-gangsters genre,
Reservoir Dogs, there were six] among whom Christian Slater holds the position of ringleader set off for Vegas on the eve of the marriage of one of them [not Slater, and if I knew the guy’s name I’d be trying to forget it] to Cameron Diaz, who is, it’s immediately obvious, way over the line on the phase diagram that marks the transition from sweet single girlfriend to wifely control freak; after the usual interval of deranged gambling and compulsive tequilaswilling and cokesnorting Slater calls in a voluptuous lapdancer who repairs to the mirrored bathroom with the most adventurous of the party and, in the midst of fucking him senseless, somehow contrives to throw her head back into a projecting spike [or, hook, or, something.] During the ensuing group discussion Slater persuades his fellows of the virtues of discretion, which in this instance seems to entail hacking the deceased babe into pieces, hauling her remains out of the hotel in suitcases, and driving out into the desert for a secret burial. Unfortunately a security guard wanders into the middle of this disquisition, prompting Slater to murder him in cold blood [“In the bathroom! not on the carpet! We’ve got to be able to mop this up!”] and add his body parts to the collection. There follow a long drive through the Nevada night, a heated debate on the relevance of Jewish ritual to the proceedings which necessitates the repackaging of the fragmented stiffs to ensure the eternal rest of like among like, and a solemn ceremonial vow of perpetual silence. After this they all drive back to LA and proceed one after another to go mad with guilt and anxiety, resulting successively in the automotive murder of one of the conspirators by another [I think these two were supposed to be brothers], the subsequent dispatching of the victim’s wife and [yes] brother by Slater, the discovery of all of this during the wedding ceremony by Diaz, who, unfazed and determined to be married at any cost croaks Slater herself in an antechamber and dispatches her new husband to the desert again with orders to dispose of the stiff, the last remaining coconspirator, and an unwanted dog [groans from the audience], the failure of this errand in a spectacular headon collision, and the reduction at the last of Diaz herself to a nursemaid gone bonkers caring for the two wheelchairbound survivors, the crippled dog, and the children of one of the earlier victims. All this is punctuated by some stirring oratory on the part of Slater, who is apparently supposed to have been driven over the edge by too many selfactualization seminars, some nicely tuned drunken speeches by various of the participants, and a few momentarily humorous tirades by Diaz along the lines of Fine, so you murdered somebody and hacked her to pieces, did you call about the wedding cake? — Obviously I summarize the plot in such detail to satisfy any idle curiosity that might otherwise tempt you to see this abomination yourself. — Is this black comedy, or not? I am reminded of Hitchcock’s story about the silent cinema, that melodramas the audiences laughed at were often rereleased with different title cards and thus made over into comedies. Save that here, obviously, the question is rather whether the flick would have been funnier if they’d played it straight as a drama and let the audience discover for itself how absurd it really was, rather than pretend they’d planned it all along. — But what else was I going to do? Stay home and watch football?
Enemy Of The State. [Tony Scott, 1998.]
Having inadvertently acquired evidence of a political assassination, Washington lawyer Will Smith is pursued by the minions of evil NSA bureaucrat Jon Voight, whose mastery of the immense surveillance apparatus surrounding us is of course frightening but seems to have clouded his judgment; after all, he could have whacked our hero in the first couple of minutes and saved himself the expense of repositioning all those satellites. Gene Hackman [with reference to Coppola’s
The Conversation] plays a good guy for once. Produced and directed by the team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott, who have brought us
Top Gun,
Crimson Tide, etc.; thus slick, derivative, predictable, but [of course] vastly entertaining.
Celebrity. [Woody Allen, 1998.]
More or less as advertised, this is Kenneth Branagh as Woody Allen as Marcello Mastroianni in, well,
La Dolce Woody: a journalist who might have been meant for better things finds himself caught up instead in the frenetic pursuit of the famous. This wouldn’t go far, but [to give the Branagh character credit] he racks up an impressive string of babes [he is, at least, a successful starfucker], and [to give Woody credit] there’s an amusing ironic plot in counterpoint in which Branagh’s exwife [Judy Davis] herself becomes a journalistic celebrity rather than a celebrity journalist. Whatever the moral here, there are plenty of laughs. — With Melanie Griffith [not quite Anita Ekberg], Charlize Theron, Leonardo DiCaprio, Famke Janssen, Winona Ryder, Donald Trump, Joey Buttafuoco, and probably Jesse [The Body] Ventura and Count Maximilian Dog, if I’d been able to keep track; filmed in highkey Manhattan-looks-like-Rome-in-1960 blackandwhite by Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s own cinematographer.
The Siege. [Edward Zwick, 1998.]
The feelgood martial-law movie that reminds all of us that truckbombdriving towelheads are people too. I only sat through this because I had to finish my popcorn after:
The Star Wars Trailer.
A kinetic teaser for the longawaited prequel [
Episode One: The Phantom Menace] written and directed by George Lucas, who has, apparently, decided to take the development of his personal Nibelungenlied into his own hands once again. Featured players include Liam Neeson, Samuel Jackson [?!!], Ewan MacGregor as the young Obi Wan, a fresherfaced Yoda doll, and Natalie Portman, fresh from playing Anne Frank on Broadway. Obviously if you expect cute aliens, robot armies, exotic planetary landscapes, and hurtling spaceships in highvelocity pursuits you will not be disappointed. The question is whether Lucas can still do everything he invented better than everyone who’s been trying to imitate him for the last twenty years. My guess is that the Force is still with him, and that Cameron’s reign as King of the World is destined to be cut short by the return of the Master of the Universe. In May, 1999.
Later.
____________Liquid refreshment (11/23/98)
