Antz (10/28/98)
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Lurching along the Creek a couple of Saturdays ago I passed under the shadow of Folsom about four in the afternoon and encountered a fair chunk of the Rat Pack toasting marshmallows, hoisting their sodapops, and flashing their rapier wit as they celebrated what the pessimists among them [I will not name names] seemed to think would be the last win of the season for the — must I apply this adjective yet again? — erratic Buffs. I inquired after your whereabouts, but dared not ask whether the Dog had suited up, or whether That Woman had again intervened. By the sound of it we’re going to need him on every down on both sides of the ball in the forthcoming weeks, and I’ve put a word in with Madeleine Allbright regarding the vacant ambassadorship to Gondwanaland, which I think would suit Albino perfectly; let’s hope State can slip this one under the Republican radar before the midterm elections.
In other developments, I stumbled across another novel by Philip Kerr:
Esau, an essay in the Lost-World genre set in the Himalayas; it gives nothing away to say that if you expect Yeti you won’t be disappointed. This seemed much more conventional than the other specimens of his work that I’ve read, a standard thriller albeit executed with more intelligence, and I half expected those portentous sluglines like
WASHINGTON — 1 AUGUST — 0800 HOURS
to be interpolated between scenes. But it was excellent nonetheless; have you seen it?
I stepped into the multiplex at a matinee hour this weekend, intending to see
Antz, but discovered to my disgust when I’d already purchased my popcorn and walked into the theater that it was unacceptably full. Accordingly I had little choice but to slip down the hall to a screening of
Urban Legend. Which sucked, of course, but at least I could get a seat.
Other notes of your itinerant reviewer:
Ronin. [John Frankenheimer, 1998.]
Robert De Niro and Jean Reno star as spyworld Samurai left masterless by the demise of the Cold War, chasing the possessors of a metal case from Paris to the South of France and back again at the behest of the mysterious Natascha McElhone. She sounds Irish, and her rivals appear to be Russians, but beyond this we have no idea who anyone really is or what they’re after; which is [as Hitchcock always said] just as it ought to be. — Rather a triumphant return for John Frankenheimer, who had little luck with
The Island Of Doctor Moreau but shows here he hasn’t lost his unique flair for the thriller. — The carchases in particular are remarkable. And appearances do not deceive: he really did hire a couple of guys fresh off the track at Le Mans and let them race through the streets of Nice at one hundred miles an hour. Check this out.
Pecker. [John Waters, 1998]
The final toast, raised in a crowded pub in Baltimore to a general roar of approval, is “To the end of irony!” And certainly that appears to be the aim of John Waters in this study of the rise, fall, and resurrection of the title character [played by Edward Furlong], an innocent lad from the working class whose candid photographs of his surroundings create an abrupt sensation in the New York artworld when they’re discovered accidentally by a slumming agent, propelling himself and his friends and family into celebrity. Since his girlfriend [Christina Ricci] runs a laundromat, his best friend is a professional shoplifter, his little sister is a drooling sugar addict, his big sister annnounces strippers in a gay bar, his parents are witless buffoons, and his grandmother [the world’s worst unconscious ventriloquist] thinks her statue of the Virgin Mary is talking by itself, this sudden rise to prominence is a mixed blessing; and the contrast between these unpolished and asymmetric characters from the lesser side of the tracks and the gleaming ponytailed blackgarbed robots of Soho — between Baltimore and New York — is drawn sharply; though sometimes it seems to have been at once too emphatically underlined and inadequately detailed. In short Waters the moralist draws again the contrast between the fat oafish unwashed polymorphously perverse and unselfconscious dwellers in the Garden before the Fall and the slender wellrehearsed selfassured absolutely artifical and altogether too completely selfaware inhabitants of the latter world who have the knowledge of good and evil served up to them on silver platters with their wine and cheese [as Ms. Ricci puts it in stunned bewilderment as she stands among the crowd at a gallery, “These people don’t go to the laundromat...they send everything out to be drycleaned!”] — not without his own ironic perspective, and leaving us wondering whether a Catholic education is not unlike one of those boogers you can’t sem to flick off your fingernail. — But who else would cast Patricia Hearst as a matter of course, and who else would give you a beefcake dancer in a gstring teabagging a customer? — Whatever he’s doing, I wish he would do more of it.
Henry Fool. [Hal Hartley, 1997]
A Bohemian drifter takes up residence in the home of an apparently retarded trashman, fucks his deranged mother, marries his nymphomaniacal sister, and induces the garbageman himself to become a poet; not without personal cost. — Hal Hartley is as always brilliant and original, but here his story grows rather selfconsciously epic and drags on too long. Still, the dialogue has an astonishing acuity, and there are the usual assortment of memorable scenes: Henry’s proposal to Parker Posey while noisily voiding his bowels is in particular one of the classic moments of the cinema. If you can find this, check it out.
Star Slammer. [Fred Olen Ray, 1987.]
An essay in that neglected genre, the science-fiction-women’s-prison-on-a-spaceship flick. — What can I tell you? — I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.
Slums of Beverly Hills. [Tamara Jenkins, 1998]
A rather-too-obviously autobiographical essay [with that Sundance-writing-seminar stink all over it] about a precocious [and precociously stacked] Jewish adolescent growing up in the shadow of the upper classes, — Undeniably charming, though [naturally] you have to wonder whether having with such a theatrical display of alchemical effort dragged this personal tale out of the storagelocker of her psyche and rendered it not simply painful, but painfully funny, the author has anything else to write about.
Rush Hour. [Brett Ratner, 1998.]
Though the origins of the Hollywood buddy formula are lost in the mists of time, they must be remote indeed: the famous story conference in which Aristophanes’ producers pitched him the idea of pairing Thales and Anaxagoras as two Athenian cops on the trail of a gang of barbarian drugsmugglers, for instance, is a matter of historical record, as are the later attempted rewrites that nearly brought us Friedrich Schiller’s
Wallenstein and the Sundance Kid and Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance Of Being Tango And Cash. However it may have originated, the idea has grown and thrived over the millenia, and now stands proudly beside other conceptual bulwarks of the Western tradition like ethnic cleansing, the progressive income tax, and object-oriented programming as one of the pillars that support our way of life. So ubiquitous is the formula, in fact, and so universal its application, that it cannot strain credulity to report that, against all odds, it does occasionally work; just as political speeches sometimes have semantic content and sitcoms are occasionally funny. — So, there it is: Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker; not as bad as you’d think. — The fact that Jackie Chan and Newt Gingrich, Jackie Chan and Anna Nicole Smith, Jackie Chan and Pope John Paul, or [a cough behind the hand] Jackie Chan and Jackie Chan might have worked as well or better is beside the point. We must pause here to marvel at the genius of the system. — And having thus paused for a few microseconds, we can resume admiring the genius of Jackie Chan.
Double Team. [Tsui Hark, 1997]
Sure enough,
Knock Off had a prequel, another Van Damme movie directed by Tsui Hark. This one [I am not making this up] costars the lovely and talented Dennis Rodman as Jean-Claude’s accomplice in the struggle against terrorism as masterminded by the Great Satan, Mickey Rourke. — Rourke, incidentally, has either been munching a lot of steroids lately or was fitted specially with a Schwarzenegger suit for this role. — The dialogue probably should have been dubbed into Cantonese for the American release; since it wasn’t, you might be well advised to watch this with the sound turned off.
An admonition that may prove also to apply to the rest of the football season. But let’s hope for the best.
Later.
____________Shuffle off to Buffalo (9/15/98)
