The importance of being Cindy (11/11/95)
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Waterworld. [Kevin Reynolds, 1995.]
After a new deluge [preceded, presumably, by some unspecified holocaust, but who’s keeping score] has drowned the world, webfooted misanthrope Kevin Costner sails around in an outrigger looking for the lost legend of dry land; accompanied, to his considerable annoyance, by toothsome refugee Jeanne Tripplehorn and a cute little girl with a map tattooed on her back [yes, it is a Clue] and pursued by the minions of piratical evildoer Dennis Hopper, who smokes cigarettes and sports an eyepatch. Mankind having reverted if not to savagery then to a somewhat rusty re-enactment of the Bronze Age, functioning machinery is rare [thus an occasion for theft, thus mainly in the hands of the buccaneers], and everybody dresses in rags. — This is, in other words,
Mad Max in Polynesia, complete with weird cargo-cult religious rituals, deranged bikers on distressed jetskis, dredlock hairdos, a lot of recycled naval wreckage, windmills, homebrew stills, many native eccentrics [indeed everyone seems a few shrimp short of a salad], crossbows, chain mail, and harpoon guns, a lot of climbing up into the rigging [unaccompanied, for once, by mutterings of “avast, me hearties”], not much in the way of fresh vegetables, the usual weirdo flying around in a balloon, a few unconvincing hints at colorful barbaric practices like rape, pillage, and torture for sport, and guys in funny hats, and probably lacks only Frankie and Annette and a cameo by Dick Dale and the Deltones to keep it from sailing off into worldgirdling Ocean and falling off the edge of the earth.
The joke, of course, is that the
Road Warrior movies represented an inspired answer to the question of how to shoot an action movie for next to nothing [no wonder they engendered a thousand imitations], whereas this piece of shit somehow cost two hundred million dollars. Somewhere George Miller is laughing his ass off.
____________The evil twin (7/21/95)
