What if God smoked cannabis? (11/14/99)
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I was watching Joe Bob Briggs on TNT the other night, shepherding his audience through the complexities of that old Seventies classic
The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. In the middle of a plot recap he referred to Caroline Munro’s performance as “opening up a can of estrogen whupass,” and, I’ll have to admit, for a moment there I considered hanging it up. — But the violin couldn’t end with Heifetz, could it. One must soldier on.
This week’s Prepare-For-Blair award goes to
The Oz Witch Project, directed by one of Bill Maher’s writers and starring my favorite B-movie babe of the hour, Meredith Salenger. I don’t think we’re in Maryland anymore.
Meanwhile:
Being John Malkovich. [Spike Jonze; written by Charlie Kaufman.]
Unemployed puppeteeer John Cusack takes an office job between floors in Manhattan and discovers a rabbithole behind a filing cabinet that leads into the brain of John Malkovich; complications ensue. I may have laughed louder when first I saw
Duck Soup, but I don’t think I’ve laughed so loudly since. — Not to give too much away: the romantic triangle defined by Cusack, Cameron Diaz, and Catherine Keener may be the weirdest in cinematic history [and should put a period to the sexual-identity genre once and for all]; the concluding chase is the most original I have ever seen [this includes the finale of
Dead Again]; and you might ask yourself, if you were Malkovich, to whom you would turn when you needed therapy. — On balance, I’m reminded of the remark of an envious mathematical colleague about the paper in which Lawvere and Tierney invented topos theory: “It is not so much that they proved these things, but rather that they dared to believe they were provable.” I don’t understand how Messrs. Jonze and Kaufman had enough nerve to think of something like this in the first place; after that, problems like digging up a few million dollars for the production and persuading Malkovich to go along with the joke seem mere trivialities. — And if everybody buys a ticket, they’ll be able to do it again. Check it out.
Bringing Out The Dead. [Martin Scorsese; screenplay by Paul Schrader, after the novel by Joe Connelly.]
Students of Monty Python will not be disappointed to hear that there is, indeed, a moment early in this dark disturbing and entirely beautiful epic about an ambulance driver in New York City when an incredulous physician asks the attending EMTs how they can be wheeling a victim of cardiac arrest into the emergency room when they’ve already pronounced him dead, and Nicholas Cage replies, deadpan: “He got better.” — though hardly, one must hasten to add, with the inimitable panache of Eric Idle. — As for the rest of it, it recalls the Walpurgisnacht passage in
Catch-22 [in the chapter titled
The Eternal City] in which Yossarian descends into the Roman Inferno: Cage, a guy who is now cast for roles like this on the basis of his eyes alone, careens in a deranged frenzy from one escapade to the nest, hurtling through a nocturnal urban nightmare [did anyone before Scorsese see night in the city in color?], haunted, the while, by the ghosts of a girl he couldn’t save and a man he should have allowed to die. — This won’t make anyone forget
Taxi Driver [as if that were possible], and the cinematography [the work of the celebrated Robert Richardson] is a trifle too selfconscious in its exploitation of the grammar of rock video, but on balance this will serve as yet another reminder why Scorsese is generally regarded as the greatest living director; and why Schrader thinks that he’s responsible. — With a remarkable supporting cast, including John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Patricia Arquette.
A brief note in re the television cheapie
Sweepers, a polemical action/adventure preaching the evil of land mines [no, we still haven’t signed the treaty] and starring the ubiquitous Dolph Lundgren: in among the numerous quotes from and homages to the Indiana Jones movies — but, come on, you gotta love that hat — there’s a sequence in the concluding chase in which Lundgren jumps onto a convenient dirtbike and rockets down the tracks in pursuit of an escaping train; hurtling, presently, from an adjacent rise onto a flatcar, and directly into a spirited punchout with the agents of evil. Apparently this is intended as a nod to Michelle Yeoh’s famous stunt in
Police Story Three. However I can’t resist pointing out that, though Lundgren was very obviously replaced by a double [and indeed why should he risk the repeated bisection of that celebrated physique], Michelle did the whole thing herself; and, until she filmed the stunt, had never ridden a motorcycle before. — Anyway, which one would you rather have beat you up?
____________Putting on the hits (10/29/99)
