The cruelest month (5/13/99)
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Never Been Kissed. [Raja Gosnell, 1999.]
Toward the end of this mostly charming romantic comedy, in which she depicts a reporter at the
Chicago Sun-Times [a clever choice, ensuring automatically a favorable review from Ebert] who goes undercover at a local high school [as Cameron Crowe actually did to write
Fast Times At Ridgemont High] to try to develop a story about Kids Today, Drew Barrymore makes the obligatory speech to the boys and girls at The Prom about the complete irrelevance of their school days to their later lives, saying, predictably: that what they are now means nothing to what they will become; that status, social prominence, cool, are empty vessels; that high school and what we laughingly refer to as Real Life are, in short, wholly unrelated. And at this point I was, briefly, furious. For manifestly the entire point of the story had been that the exact opposite is the case: since Drew, who portrays with surprising success a recovering geek, had been motivated throughout by an overwhelming desire to relive high school not as a pariah but as one of the incrowd; since her colleagues at the
Sun-Times had been represented as following her adventures via spycam with a compulsive attention plainly energized by their own vicarious participation in her project [“Wow,” says one of them, “this is the Humiliation Channel”]; since her very job, in the penultimate crisis, had been represented as dependent on her ability to attain social redemption; and since the participation of everyone involved in making this movie [as confirmed by the cute touch of the addition of the graduation photographs of the cast and crew to the trailing credits] and the obsession of Hollywood with teenage romances in general only serve to reinforce the conclusion that real life is a mere epilogue to high school in which the correlation between popularity and socioeconomic status has the kind of rigorous mathematical exactitude you usually encounter only in theoretical physics. — Then I calmed down and reminded myself that this is Hollywood after all, where text is inconsequential epiphenomenon and subtext everything: as if one could ever believe that Drew Barrymore had never been kissed. — I guess I could believe she’s never been hosed on the topside of the Goodyear blimp. But if she needs a volunteer, have her call me.
Go. [Doug Liman, 1999.]
Doug [
Swingers] Liman directs a specimen of postPulp fragmented narrative which explores the curvature of space: Sarah Polley et al. follow a family of geodesics which diverge from a grocery store and reconverge upon a rave after hours on Christmas Eve. Very clever and energetic, albeit unrealistic: the audience may have forgotten that radio the cops planted in the actor’s shorts, but he certainly would not have. But check it out.
The Matrix. [The Wachowski Brothers, 1999.]
Without question the definitive essay in cyberpunk to date: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Laurence Fishburne, looking extremely cool in black leathers and mirrorshades, wage war within cyberspace and without for the triumph of the Soul over the Machine. Astonishing effects, fight choreography as good as Hong Kong [thanks to the assistance of Yuen Wo Ping], and a variety of themes [the matrix itself, the idea of physically jacking in, the kinship of hacking to the martial arts, death by black ice, avatars, voodoo, etc., etc.] stolen verbatim from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. One might quibble with the plot, which isn’t really coherent, and for that matter with the governing conception of applying a pseudophysics to virtual reality [an idea Keaton had already implicitly transcended in
Sherlock Junior] but who cares; I’ll probably be watching this once a week until Memorial Day.
Phenomena. [Dario Argento, 1984.]
In the Swiss Transylvania, a killer stalks the babes at the Richard Wagner School For Girls, awakening the dormant telepathic abilities of a very young [but precociously cute] Jennifer Connelly, who has an innate sympathy with insects. With a wicked schoolmistress, a mad scientist in a wheelchair, a midnight swim in a pool of rotting corpses, and an enormous Moon obscured by a cloud of flies.
Ed TV. [Ron Howard, 1999.]
Great cast [Mathew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Jenna Elfman, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Elizabeth Hurley, Rob Reiner, Ellen DeGeneres]; weak plot [amiable slacker McConaughey is discovered by the agents of a reality-based cable channel desperate for product who decide to put him on the air twentyfour hours a day, catapulting him into a celebrity which makes his life a living heck.]
Six-String Samurai. [Lance Mungia, 1998.]
I’ve always been an admirer of the
Mad Max genre, which allows neophyte filmmakers to shoot palatable action movies with great economy of means. This might be the best I’ve seen since the original: In the world after the apocalypse, a Buddy Holly clone wearing taped black hornrims and toting a Gibson hollowbody and a Samurai sword makes a pilgrimage through the Nevada desert to the mythical city of Lost Vegas, where he plans to assume the vacated title of King of Rock and Roll. Accompanied by a small boy in a coonskin cap, he hacks up a variety of savages and quasimythological personages, including The Three Bowlers, The Red Elvises, some guys in spacesuits, assorted denizens of an underworld ruled by The Spinach Monster and the Windmill God, the remains of the Red Army, and finally Death [who dresses like Slash and plays metal on a white Strat] before coming into his kingdom. Beautifully photographed [albeit on that cheapshit Fuji filmstock] and with maybe the best original rockandroll soundtrack I’ve ever heard; the work, apparently, of Brian Tyler and the aforementioned Red Elvises. — And the swordfights are excellent. If this is playing on Showtime at three a.m., hope for insomnia.
True Crime. [Clint Eastwood, 1999.]
Clint Eastwood as Bruce Willis and Isaiah Washington as Julia Roberts in an apparent realization of the project Tim Robbins was using to ensnare his competitor in
The Player; right down to the lastminute rescue from the gas chamber. Of course that was meant as a joke; and anyway [as Robbins explained gleefully] it didn’t have a second act. Come to think of it, neither does this. Hmmm.
Analyze This. [Harold Ramis, 1999.]
Unmanned by anxiety attacks on the eve of a gang war, mobster Robert De Niro seeks professional assistance from psychiatrist Billy Crystal, disrupting the latter’s attempts to get married to Lisa Kudrow. Though it would be less than generous to suggest that this idea was stolen from the classic Belushi portrayal of Don Corleone in group therapy [“You’re blocking, Vito...you’re blocking...”], particularly since that in turn was probably stolen from an episode in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is more than fair to point out that none of this would go anywhere without De Niro and Crystal. Fortunately, they’re perfect. — Nor does it give anything away [incidentally] to say that Tony Bennett’s cameo is the punchline. Check this out.
The Doom Generation. [Greg Araki, 1996.]
The intrepid chronicler of Hollwood youth pens a gripping drama about three beautiful losers [a couple of guys whose names I forget and that chick who goes out with Marilyn Manson] who slip the surly bounds of custom and wander the Earth in quest of enlightenment until they discover the finger up the asshole during intercourse and finally the sandwich. Perhaps the first road movie I’ve ever seen which never even gets out of Los Angeles, raising the question: is this meant to express the idea of Los Angeles as a metaphor for the inescapability of civilization, with the endless freeways which lead only to one another a symbol of the doomed circularity of the urge to flight, that yearning for a freedom which cannot actually exist? Or is it just that idiots like Araki really cannot imagine any life beyond the boundaries of the city, and think that anyone who leaves Los Angeles falls off the edge of the Earth?
Sink Or Swim. [Gary Rosen, 1997.]
Burntout television writer/producer Stephen Rea makes the pitch on automatic pilot [“Monks...with an edge! ...I must have been speaking in tongues...”] and gets a go from the network for twenty-two shows, but has no idea what to do with them. Inviting all his unemployed writer friends over for a poker game, he need not even drop the hint to provoke a feeding frenzy. Complications ensue. — Full of inside jokes and occasionally clever but [must I say it] not very well-written. Perhaps this explains television. — With Illeana Douglas, David Foley, Richard Kind, Robert Patrick, John Ritter, Lisa Kudrow, Ryan O’Neal, and Tom Arnold as the agent who sleeps with his headset on.
The Thin Red Line. [Terrence Malick, 1999]
The legendary Terrence Malick, the Thomas Pynchon of American film, left off a career as a professor of philosophy to make two brilliant and much-discussed features —
Badlands and
Days Of Heaven — in the Seventies and then disappeared; for two decades rumor fancied him a hermit in the desert, a hitch-hiker in Paraguay, an aspirant in a monastery. He returns here as abruptly as he disappeared with a movie that has excited no little critical commentary, much of it baffled protestation that this isn’t very much like other war movies in particular or like other movies in general. True enough, this is not at all like other movies; but, then, this is a work of genius. Perhaps that explains it.
Looking over the box office statistics for the fiscal year just concluded, two unfortunate facts demand attention:
The Waterboy placed fourth in total grosses, meaning that we can expect more of Adam Sandler drooling down his bib; and
Godzilla [presumably by dint of unrelenting promotion] finally made money, which will certainly entail a sequel. One can only hope that it isn’t too late to pitch a project that appeals to the synergistic impulses of the studio executives: you know,
Godzilla meets The Waterboy. Maybe the lizard will step on him.
Terry Rawlings on the editing of
Blade Runner: “After I’d finished my first assembly of the whole film...Ridley and I went into a screening room at Warner Brothers and ran the picture...The entire time, we never said a word. Then, when the film finished and the lights came up, Ridley turned to me and said, ‘God, it’s marvelous. What the fuck does it all mean?’”
Jean Reno on his acting career: “The problem with France is that eighty percent of the films I do are standard, intimate, romantic things, and I don’t like that. It’s always from the director’s point of view — you know, his dick.”
Later.
____________Hits and misses (3/16/99)
