Frankenstein, Tarzan and Tonto

A movie review is not a novel, or a poem, or any other work that one could call truly literary. The movie review does not lend itself well to the tools of the serious writer; you will very rarely find foreshadowing or stream of consciousness ramblings or magical realism or any of the other techniques that professional writers use in your average movie review.

Unless, of course, you’re just desperate for an idea, and in that case, anything goes.

So when I say that Rob Schneider’s character in The Animal serves as a metaphor for the whole movie, you know I’m just grasping at straws here. Schneider’s character is a Northern California loser who is injured in the sort of accident that Toonces the Driving Cat* used to have all the time, a one-car rollover crash off the side of a cliff. He is found in the woods by a mad scientist who replaces his damaged organs with organs from various animals. (Presumably Schneider’s brain was damaged as well, but no one seems to notice.) The animal parts interfere with Schneider’s human character, causing him to take over the characteristics of an animal at times, and wackiness ensues. Likewise, The Animal itself is stitched together from parts of other movies in the same way that Schneider is stitched together from parts of different animals. The movie shamelessly borrows themes and situations almost at random and combines them indiscriminately with the goal of creating the aforementioned wackiness.

Neither experiment is particularly successful.

The Animal is like nothing so much as the old Frankenstein, Tarzan and Tonto sketch.** Like Frankenstein, Schneider is a half-human construct that becomes the object of fear and ignorance (he’s even chased by a mob with torches at one point). Like Tarzan, he has all the speed, stealth and cunning (OK, maybe not cunning) of a forest animal, and has problems fitting in with polite human society. And like Tonto, he’s trapped in a buddy-cop script that requires him to undertake a lot of physical abuse. Except, of course, that the Frankenstein, Tarzan and Tonto sketch was much, much funnier than anything you get in The Animal.

Even so, these character archetypes aren’t the real inspiration for The Animal, to the extent that the movie can be said to have inspiration; the movie is much closer in spirit to Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, let’s say. The movie that it’s most like, actually, is the Tom Hanks comedy Turner and Hooch, with Schneider playing the roles of both the bored cop and the snarling dog.***

The Animal lives and dies on the success of Schneider’s abilities to entertain, and he manages to do very well in spots. The real genius of The Animal (I use that word very advisedly) is that when Schneider is overcome by his animal urges, he cannot speak, which means he doesn’t have to do any acting, just barking and running and chewing on things. Anyone who might think that the image of Rob Schneider licking himself or chasing a cat or snarling when a waitress takes away a plate of food is overwhelmingly hilarious (the hyperactive ten-year-old in the seat in front of me seemed to think so) is more than welcome to see The Animal, with my compliments. (The scene where Schneider is fitted with an “Elizabethan collar” is very funny indeed.)****

The real weakness of The Animal is not Schneider, who acquits himself favorably but not extraordinarily. The problem is the rest of the cast, The Animal may have the worst supporting cast of any movie this year. Nobody in the rest of the movie can act worth spit.***** Producer Adam Sandler has one funny cameo, and Ed Asner (yes, that Ed Asner) has a wickedly delicious moment when he injects a little too much realism into a police obstacle course. Everyone else is flat-out terrible, enough so that I’m not even tempted to look up individual actors on the Internet Movie Database and tell you exactly how bad they are. Every time the cameras of The Animal aren’t on Schneider, the movie sputters, stalls, and dies in just the same way that my battered Toyota does on hot afternoons.

(And there’s another metaphor for you, free of charge. Who says that the movie review isn’t a literary form?)

The Animal is not a bad movie (the way that, say, Pearl Harbor is), but it is a poor one, with a main character and concept much more suited for TV sketch comedy than the big screen. It does have its funny moments, though, and keeps the gross-out scenes to a minimum, and you can take the kids, I suppose. Just don’t expect much, and you won’t be that disappointed.

____________

* You usually don’t see footnotes in movie reviews, either, but here goes. Toonces the Driving Cat, for those of you not in the know, was an old Saturday Night Live sketch involving a cat who regularly drove a late-model sedan off the cliff. It had a very funny theme song:

Toonces
The Driving Cat
The cat that could drive a car
He drives around
All over the town
Toonces
The Driving Cat

** This was a “last half hour” SNL sketch that was funny (until it was driven right into the ground); it was a talk show with three hosts who talked in grunts and broken English and involved Frankenstein (the late, great Phil Hartman), Tarzan (Kevin Nealon) and Tonto (Mike Myers). “Bread good,” Hartman would say. “Fire bad.” Great stuff.

*** Of, if you like, Ron Howard’s Splash, with Schneider playing the parts of Tom Hanks and the mermaid. I mention Hanks only to point out that he was making exactly this type of movie twenty years back, and while it’s difficult to imagine Rob Schneider garnering two Oscars down the road, it’s not completely and totally impossible. (UPDATE:  It is now.)

**** I refer to those funnel-shaped collars your dog wears when it comes home from the vet so it can’t lick its wounds. I don’t know what the real name of it is, but it looks like something Sir Walter Raleigh might wear, if he was really drunk.

***** I am told that the part of Schneider’s love interest is someone named “Colleen from Survivor”, which may be of some interest to some of you, I guess. I had never heard of her, but then I’m a little slow sometimes. (Can someone please tell me if there is really a band called “Limp Bisquick”? I’d like to know.) She can’t act, either, but she at least has the excuse of not being an actress.

As Bad As It Gets

The cheap and easy way to do a review of Anger Management would be to get angry. You know me. You know how I get. You know that this is just the kind of movie that is guaranteed to push all my critical buttons. You know that this is just the sort of movie that someone like me will just rip to shreds, given the chance. You know that I know how to use my powers of invective and sarcasm and wit to destroy movies just like this one. You know me. When I see movies like this, I become… Ninja Movie Critic! Armed to the teeth, ready to fling insults around like throwing stars, prepared to spring upon the stupid (talentless director Peter Segal) the inept (screenwriter hack David Dorfman) and the unwary (you good people out in the audience). Anger Management is just the kind of movie that should get me all riled up, evoke my negative energy, you know, make me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

But that’s the cheap way out.

Anger Management is important not because of what it is — a cheesy, pointless piece of offal, directed at an audience that doesn’t ask for much better. It is important for what it represents; a certain style of filmmaking, a certain way of doing things. No, that’s incorrect, or at least it isn’t enough. Anger Management represents a certain attitude, a certain contempt on the part of Hollywood for its audience, a certain belief that, if properly marketed, a movie will attract a substantial audience and make a certain amount of money despite the fact that it isn’t good for anything except being cut up for ukulele picks.

The marketing of a movie is a black art, and is practiced by masters of manipulation and chicanery. (Much like Jack Nicholson’s character here, come to think of it.) There are the master editors who chop the movie up into shreds and reconstitute it as a trailer. There are the less-talented people who take the one or two funny jokes in the movie (here, Sandler and Nicholson sharing a bed) and turn that into a commercial. There are the usual brigade of gullible or easily-impressed movie writers who can be relied upon to turn out favorable-sounding quotes.

But the real marketing effort for Anger Management shouldn’t have to be reliant on any of that nonsense. Its casting of Jack Nicholson opposite Adam Sandler ought to have obviated the need for any such trickery and tomfoolery. There was every possibility that teaming up Sandler, America’s most successful comic actor, with a living legend like Nicholson, would prove to be a fruitful comic collaboration. Simply, Anger Management really should have sold itself. It wouldn’t even need much of a marketing campaign, unless… unless it was really misbegotten and pointless and bad, or something, in which case, not any amount of marketing could save it.

Anger Management is a shell of a movie, a whited sepulcher, a shiny exterior with a corroded and rank interior. Its imagination begins and ends with the casting of its two lead characters. All it does is put Nicholson and Sandler in a room together and expects magic to happen, without ever once having to work for it or think about what the story should be about or where it should end up. I put more thought into my weekly grocery list than what went into this movie.

The lack of thought is most apparent in the characters played by the two leads; they’re not doing anything other than playing amalgams of every other character they’ve ever played. Sandler’s stock character is a modern-day Popeye the Sailor Man, picked on by family and society and love until he learns how to channel that built-up rage and aggression into something positive. Here, he’s a flunky for a pet-supply company who has to assert himself to get a promotion. Nicholson is doing his charismatic psycho bit, primarily from As Good As It Gets, but we see him ordering wheat toast (from Five Easy Pieces) and wearing a USMC T-shirt (shades of Colonel Nathan Jessup from A Few Good Men), etc. etc. But there’s nothing interesting or exciting or new about these characters here; they’re recycled, reconstituted, thin shadows of themselves.

To make matters worse, there are simply very few scenes where Nicholson and Sandler are left alone to work out their comic potential. The movie keeps throwing in all sorts of odd and wacky characters — comic relief, mind you, in what is supposed to be a comedy — and then not doing anything with them. Most of them are in Nicholson’s group therapy; Luis Guzman as a swishy Puerto Rican, John Turturro as a rageaholic New Yorker, some random guy as a rabid Philadelphia sports fan, two lesbian porn stars. For the entire first half of the movie, these are the characters that carry the bulk of the comic workload, and NOT Sandler and Nicholson.

This is a recipe for disaster. It’s like, you know, going to a Lakers game and seeing Robert Horry as the focus for the offense. For most of the movie, the two biggest stars simply are either not on the court, or they’re passing.

The movie reaches its comic potential only when it realizes that Nicholson can manipulate Sandler into doing basically anything that he wants, because otherwise Sandler will go to jail. This results in a string of back-and-forth practical jokes — the best of which ends with the best scene in the movie, in which a nearly-naked Heather Graham whips cupcakes at a fleeing Sandler.

But the whole point of practical jokes is that they are cruel, and this is a movie that is cruel, unnecessarily cruel, to Sandler, certainly, and the audience. The joke here is on us. The joke is that you and I were tricked, enticed, seduced into seeing this movie, and then had our expectations for even a moderately funny movie cruelly dashed. It’s wicked to treat a perfectly nice movie audience this way — even more so because that audience, bless its heart, doesn’t really ask for much out of movies anymore, and a good portion of it won’t even realized how savagely they have been treated.

That’s what’s really disturbing about Anger Management, is its contempt for its audience, its willingness to make a movie that’s only about a tenth of as funny as it could have been, should have been, and its understanding that it doesn’t need to do much more than that to rake in the trusting, the gullible, and the easily amused. Anger Management is a wretched little movie that does the bare minimum to skate by, confident that it will make just enough money to keep the studio afloat to crank out more lowest-common-denominator rubbish, over and over again, until the nation’s movie audiences realize what is being done to them and why. This kind of thing makes me sick. It’s appalling to realize just how low Hollywood will go. I can’t BELIEVE THAT ROTTEN MOVIES LIKE THIS ARE MADE EVERY SINGLE DAY AND NOBODY HAS THE GUTS TO SAY ANYTHING TO STOP THIS INSANITY!!!!

Hey, looks like I got angry after all. So should you.

Rejoice

I don’t think that the rich are necessarily different from you and me, but I think that people in the public eye are. When these people are out in public, they have to play the role, whether it’s Handsome Actor or Charming Politician or Beauty Queen, that we’ve assigned to them. But the role is often a lie, which in turn breeds a curiousity about their private lives. This is why whenever you meet a celebrity, your friends and neighbors want to know, “What’s he really like?” This is why the National Enquirer stalks these people as they carry out their private lives. We all want to get a look behind the mask so that we can see if these people are as we expect them to be — and all too often, we’re disappointed.

In a small town, the preacher is in the public eye as well. And just as a short, vain actor can hide behind a likable screen persona, the pulpit can hide all sorts of shortcomings and flaws. And that’s the initial burden that Robert Duvall’s The Apostle carries. Duval plays a preacher named Sonny who’s a bit of a showman, a real “spirit-filled Holy Ghost preaching machine”, and immediately we’re reminded of the Elmer Gantry-style televangelists we’re all familiar with. There’s a montage that’s supposed to establish Sonny as an evangelist. We see him traveling around the South, holding tent-meting revivals and speaking to conferences. He’s wearing flashy clothes and he’s more than a bit over-the-top. (There’s a creepy bit in this montage where Sonny’s addressing a group of African-American men, and they’re chanting “Jesus”, while doing the Black Power salute.) But even though we see who Sonny is and what he does, we don’t know him. We don’t learn anything about him from his first appearance on screen, where he stops his car at the scene of an accident to lead two young victims to Jesus. Is he grandstanding? Is he doing this to tell the story to his congregation? Or is he really and truly sincere? What’s he really like?

What makes The Apostle great is that we find out.

Sonny finds out that his wife (Farrah Fawcett, who delivers an effective, subdued performace in an unglamorous and thankless role) is having an affair with an assistant minister at his church. It doesn’t take too long for Sonny’s world to collapse. He loses his wife, his children, his church and his temper. He has a screaming match with God loud enough to wake the neighbors, and vents his holy wrath on the hapless assistant minister — at his son’s Little League game, in front of the whole town. He drives away, pausing just long enough to sink his long white car into a Louisiana bayou — but is it a sacrifice, the act of a madman, or a means to keep the police from tracking him down and filing assault charges?

The meat of the movie is Sonny’s rebaptism and resurrection as “The Apostle E.F.”. He shows up in a small Louisiana town, refusing to give any other name, and opens a church. And it’s here that we learn about Duvall’s character and what sort of man he is when he’s not behind the pulpit.

To say more would be to spoil the experience, and this is a movie that should be experienced. This is Robert Duvall’s movie — literally, he wrote, directed, and financed it himself — he’s in almost every frame, and he’s garnered a well-earned Oscar nomination for it. He’s almost spookily effective as The Apostle. He’s got every nuance of the character down, from the rapid-fire Pentecostal pulpit ranting to the sweet way he deals with his congregation. And in the movie’s climax, a fire-and-brimstone church service, he’s hypnotic enough that he almost draws the audience down the movie theater aisle to the mourner’s bench when “Softly and Tenderly” plays during the invitation.

Complimenting Duvall’s star turn is an excellent supporting cast. This is one of those movies where the no-name actors upstage the name actors. Miranda Richardson puts her light under a bushel as The Apostle’s love interest, and Billy Bob Thornton looks as though he’s wandered in from another movie in a brief cameo. But The Apostle’s congregation (interracial, and joyfully so) is a wonderful group of people, from the retired black preacher, to the mechanic who lets The Apostle sleep on his couch, to the bickering “sisters”, to the radio-station owner who moves from cynicism to spirituality.

The Apostle is a totally absorbing look at a man of faith and his congregation. It’s extraordinarily well-written and acted. It takes a position on religion — especially Southern evangelical religion — that’s honest, and not satirical or overly spiritually maudlin. For any serious communicant of the Church of Movies, The Apostle qualifies as a singular miracle, crafted by the strong hands of Robert Duvall, Patron Saint of the Character Actor. If only the rest of Hollywood would go forth and do likewise.

A Smart Movie! Yes!

I hate it when people talk at movies.

Usually, when audience members talk during a movie, it shows a fundamental lack of disrespect to the moviemakers, the actors, and their fellow patrons. If they’re talking about plot points they missed in the movie, it shows that they’re easily confused or just not paying attention. If they’re talking about things other than the movie — like where to go for dinner afterward — that’s a sign that you’re dealing with people who are totally oblivious to their environment and to moviegoing etiquette.

I don’t have any way to measure this, but I believe it’s getting worse. I went to see Lawrence of Arabia last week at the Paramount Theater in Austin (in 70mm format, the only way to go) and this woman behind me asked her date what year the movie was set in… and he gave her a ten-thousand word masters thesis on World War I and the Triple Entente. This intermixed with a blow by blow account of the first ten minutes of the movie that she had missed while standing in line to get popcorn. He talked almost the whole way through the movie… no mean feat when we’re talking about a three-hour movie.

I say that to say two things. First, if you’re the kind of person who talks at movie theaters, you might want to consider renting movies instead, so you can talk all you want without disturbing other people.

Second, Arlington Road has the best screenplay of the summer. I know this because during every slack moment in the second half of the movie, I could hear everyone else in the theater whispering to each other, trying to keep up with the twisty plot. It wasn’t individual voices as such, but a general background buzz from bewildered people trying to figure out what was coming next.

In this, possibly the dumbest summer in movie history, the summer of Jar-Jar Binks, the summer dedicated to the glorification of the lowest common denominator, Arlington Road is… Yes! A Smart Movie! Arlington Road is not one of your artsy-fartsy Merchant Ivory films that you need a degree in art history to appreciate, mind you, it’s just a thriller… but it’s a smart thriller that stays two or three mental steps ahead of its audience and never insults our intelligence by asking us to believe anything really stupid. The plot is simple enough — a family of terrorists move across the street from a terrorism expert, who gets suspicious — but the elaborations of that plot are deftly done.

For example, we know from the outset as an audience that the Tim Robbins character is an evil terrorist. We know this because movies about people who have unfounded suspicions about their wacky neighbors don’t do very well. We know this because of the credit sequence, which shows us negatives of dogs and picket fences and crabgrass and lets us know that evil lurks in the heart of suburbia. And we know this because Robbins plays his character with a featureless, dull exterior that proves that he’s hiding something.

But what makes Arlington Road so smart is that the Jeff Bridges character doesn’t know any of this stuff. He’s got his suspicions, but they’re based on next to nothing. Bridges finds out, for example, that the Robbins character is from St. Louis, where terrorists blew up that federal building. (Arlington Road pretends that the Murrah Building bombing took place in St. Louis, but knows that we’re smart enough to see through this.) Ipso facto, Robbins is a terrorist, right? But Bridges can’t make anyone believe this but us. There’s one wrenching scene where he’s trying to explain things to Hope Davis (in the unappreciated girlfriend role), and he’s raving like a Class-A nutter, and she’s holding him, and he can’t stop spouting off about how this guy next door is a terrorist.

Another sign of intelligence from Arlington Road is how it handles the inherent insanity in the setup. It makes sense, in a twisted, paranoid sort of way, that the Bridges character would see terrorists everywhere, but what would motivate the Robbins character to move right next door to him? (The housing shortage in DC isn’t that bad, is it?) Arlington Road has an answer to this, one I won’t share with you.

In fact, when you get right down to it, when you have a movie that’s this smart, with smart plot twists, there’s not that much you can say about it without spoiling the fun for everyone. The minor things that help make the movie work — the pouty curve of Hope Davis’s mouth, the perky smile of Joan Cusack, the way the Robbins’ two little girls look in plaid jumpers while they bar the door to the house, the horrible things that happen to Bridges’s perfect hair during the course of the movie, Tim Robbins lip-synching to the words of the Boy Scout oath –are great, but they’re secondary to the sinuous curve of the screenplay as it unwinds itself.

For all fans of Smart Movies, Arlington Road is as welcome as a tall glass of lemonade during a heat wave, with smart performances, smart casting, and smart directing complementing an exceptionally smart screenplay. This… yes! is a movie to talk about.

(Just not in the theater while the movie is going on, please, and… HEY! Put that cell phone down! NOW! People are trying to watch the movie, you know…)

The Tears and the Brotherhood

What Armageddon has going for it is The Tears. “The Tears” is the chapter in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Right Stuff that describes John Glenn’s heroic Mercury orbital flight in 1961 and the stunning, overwhelming reception that he received on his return. “That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time,” Wolfe writes. “It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America.”

The Mercury astronauts, Wolfe writes, were glorious Single-Combat Warriors sent into space, armed only with their holy righteous stuff to fight the good fight of the Cold War in space. In Armageddon, the only Russian menace is a leaky space station. The astronauts of Armageddon have “the wrong stuff”: they’re a relentlessly eccentric rabble of oil field roughnecks. Instead of the rigorous training that the Mercury Seven received, our nation’s newest heroes are given a whirlwind orientation through astronaut school, in what’s meant to be a gentle parody of the film version of Wolfe’s novel.

But… they are on a Mission. A holy Mission worthy of the True Brotherhood itself! Yes! There is this asteroid or comet — anyway, this huge big rock — that is going to smash poor Dayton and Buffalo and Atlanta and the whole comprehensible world all to flinders. And the mission is to stop it, blow it apart so that the halves don’t reach earth… and to do that, you have to launch two next-generation shuttles at the same time.. and refuel at the aforementioned space station… and make a sharp hairpin around the moon… and actually land on this heaving, spinning hurtling rock, full of sharp pointy stalactites… and somehow drill a hole through the iron crust of the rock… and take off again before a white-hot nuclear bomb blows the thing apart and… Yes! Save the planet! And the poor, grateful world watching on CNN while eating their popcorn and Junior Mints… well, what can they do but offer up The Tears at this glorious exhibition of the holy righteous stuff?

The problem with Armageddon is this: The sight of Bruce Willis and his oil field Dream Team boarding the space shuttle, risking life and limb on an uncertain outcome, should, in and of itself, be enough to bring on The Tears. Add in the image of the heart-breakingly beautiful Liv Tyler, watching her father (Willis) and her fiancee (Ben Affleck) take off in the heavens, and you’ve got emotional gold. But for some reason — and it’s the hallmark of the film — it isn’t enough. You’ve got a perfectly good story here, a perfectly heart-wrenching scene, and it isn’t enough for the moviemakers. No, they’ve got to add in a lot of quick edits of Kodak moments from around the world, they’ve got to try to blatantly manipulate the audience to bring on The Tears, when the moment was emotionally strong enough to begin with.

The motto of Armageddon is: More is Better — either that, or the old MTV motto, Too Much Is Never Enough. When deep-core driller Harry S. Stamper (Willis) is authorized to bring his crew aboard the space station, naturally, they’re not waiting patiently for him back on the oil rig. No, the FBI has to chase them down with helicopters. It’s not enough that the astronauts are in plenty of danger on the asteroid, Armageddon has to engineer a showdown between the roughnecks and the shuttle pilot (William Fichtner, looking for all the world like a young Christopher Walken). All through the movie, the director and screenwriters suffer from a lack of faith in the quality of their story, and try to embellish it needlessly. You get the feeling that if producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay were in charge of Apollo 13, that they’d have Tom Hanks and his crew fighting off ravenous space serpents on the way to the Moon.

The only person in Armageddon who is completely true to the sense of Mission is Bruce Willis. Although Willis is allowed to display some charm and let loose some wisecracks in the early going, once he arrives at the Johnson Space Center, his performance is all business. For some reason, Willis has been trying to put his old happy-go-lucky performances in Moonlighting and Die Hard behind him lately, and that’s a shame. Here, Willis is in “deep blue hero” mode the whole way through — stoic, confident, leadership. He does a good job — especially in letting his emotional veneer crack at the very end — but a lot of what makes him a special actor is lost in Armageddon.

Billy Bob Thornton plays the leader of Mission Control, and it’s very refreshing to see him be given a normal part for once, after years of playing Southern grotesques. He has the same role here that Morgan Freeman had in Deep Impact: he is there to explain what’s going on, and he does a good enough job that it’s fair to compare him to America’s Finest Actor. Thornton makes up for a lot of the movie’s charm deficit, and so does Ben Affleck, who is Willis’s primary foil. Affleck, for some reason, reminds me a lot of Adam Sandler — he’s got the same sort of innate goofiness about him — but he manages to be effective as both the romantic lead and the action sidekick. All Liv Tyler is given to do is hang around Mission Control and look dewy-eyed, and this she accomplishes tremendously. Will Patton redeems himself for his part in the debacle that was The Postman with a strong, sad-eyed performance, and Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi from Fargo team up again to provide much-needed comic relief. (One wonders what the Coen Brothers would have done with this budget and this storyline.)

But setting all of the above aside, the real question about Armageddon is whether it delivers the goods as an action movie. The answer to that question is YES, in big Day-Glo orange letters. Armageddon fulfills your every desire for high-quality special effects and top-notch action. In every male reptile brain, there’s a longing for thrills and spills and things that go boom and major monuments getting wrecked, and Armageddon specifically and joyfully caters to that basic hunger. However, you’ve got to have more than that to make a great movie, and Armageddon is so blatantly manipulative and action oriented that it’s hard to put it in that class. But if you can’t be great, you can at least be entertaining, and Armageddon is mainstream Hollywood entertainment at its finest.

Human Beings With Problems

As Good As It Gets is the best American comedy of 1997, which may or may not be a compliment. The competition so far has been sparse, not to say nonexistent. In a movie season that has brought us Father’s Day, Magoo, Beautician and the Beast, two Joe Pesci comedies AND two Tim Allen comedies, As Good As It Gets is, uh, well, as good as it gets.

At first glance, As Good As It Gets doesn’t appear to be anything more than a big-screen version of Seinfeld, with Simon (Greg Kinnear) playing straight man to Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall, the wacky neighbor. (Kinnear’s character is a gay artist, so maybe “straight man” isn’t the proper terminology, but you understand what I’m trying to say, right? Good.)

Early on, Melvin shoves Simon’s yappy little dog into a garbage chute. Wackiness ensues when Simon ineffectually confronts Melvin. Melvin delivers an eloquent stream of mean-spirited insults to a mortified Simon, and then slams the door. Wacky, right?

But then… we see Melvin lock the door. Then unlock it, then lock it again, then unlock it, then lock it again… and then repeat the process on the deadbolt lock. One-two-three-four-five. And then Melvin retreats to the bathroom, opens a new cake of soap from his stash, and washes his hands again and again.

As Good As It Gets is a comedy that dares to go beyond shallow, stereotypical characterization and treat its characters as real, three-dimensional human beings with problems. On the surface, Melvin Udall is a bitter, angry, sarcastic and bigoted bully — but he’s also a man struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, trapped inside a set of bizarre routines and fixations.

To its credit, As Good As It Gets is not a sappy disease-of-the-week TV movie, either. Although we understand the reason behind Melvin’s weirdly inappropriate behavior, Melvin is so creepy and twitchy that he never comes off as sappy or tragic. Melvin’s OCD is played for laughs throughout the movie, especially his terror of stepping on a crack in the sidewalk. (The set designers regularly confront Melvin with tiled floors.) Where a lesser movie might turn sentimental or weepy, As Good As It Gets strikes right for the comic jugular and never lets go.

The part of Melvin was written for Jack Nicholson, and there’s not another actor alive who could have made the character believable and charming. He hasn’t had a part this meaty since Batman, and he makes the most of his opportunity. Helen Hunt, as the waitress who is alternately charmed and tormented by Melvin’s antics, is superb, showing a surprising amount of range and depth that wasn’t present in Twister. The script takes Hunt’s character through the emotional wringer, but she’s always charming, always believable, and always compelling. I hadn’t seen Greg Kinnear in anything other than TV’s Talk Soup, and his performance here is genuinely good. Although he’s not in the same acting weight class as Nicholson or Hunt, Kinnear is sympathetic without being sappy, and manages to be sad and depressing without being pitiful and annoying. Cuba Gooding Jr. turns in a slick extended cameo as the most kickass art dealer in Manhattan, and Yeardley Smith (of “The Simpsons”) has one painfully funny scene where she has to use notecards to brief the injured Kinnear on his financial situation.

All honor and credit goes to director/producer James Brooks for this fine movie. Brooks is a voice crying in the creative wilderness that is Hollywood. He has consistently produced grown-up comedies with real people dealing with real-life situations (Jerry Maguire, Broadcast News, War of the Roses) while the rest of Hollywood relies on rubber-faced antics and bathroom humor. I encourage you to see this movie — not just because it’s very good and very funny — but because you’ll be casting your vote for quality entertainment and against the dreck that gets passed around like leftover fruitcake this time of year.

Shagadelic, Baby

I walked into the second Austin Powers movie prepared to write a scathingly bad review. I was ready to deploy my army of poison pens — er, make that poison pixels — in opposition to the overwhelming, shattering avalanche of stupidity I knew to be coming. I entered the theater totally prepared for a never-ending cycle of potty jokes, sniggering references to body parts, and gags drawn out far enough past their normal life expectancy to make an actuary cry. And I wasn’t a bit disappointed.

Most people who liked the first Austin Powers movie won’t be disappointed, either. Mike Myers dons the geeky glasses, the dead-weasel hairpiece, the horribly bad bridgework, the fake chestal hair, the frilly lace cravat and the velvet suit to duel Dr. Evil and save the world yet again. Along the way — and this is the sort of movie where “along the way” matters more than anything else — Austin mugs, grimaces, shags, cavorts around naked, and generally acts annoying. Alternatively, the movie presents Myers as Dr. Evil, who combines the worst features of Ernst Blofeld and Ed Sullivan. I am not inclined to argue with people who think these characters are funny, and will merely state that this sort of thing ain’t my bag, baby.

If the Powers and Evil characters share one trait, it is their mammoth, gargantuan narcissism. The real battle in The Spy Who Shagged Me isn’t between the forces of evil and good, it’s between Myers’s ego and his generosity. This movie could easily have been a Mike Myers extravaganza of self love, with all other comic possibilities squeezed out. Fortunately, though, the forces of good make some inroads here that weren’t made in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. The Spy Who Shagged Me is a better movie because Myers is a little more willing to share the wealth and spread out the good lines more evenly. This allows the focus to be taken off the Powers/Evil duality occasionally and allows a little bit of genuine humor to sneak in now and then.

Consider the treatment of the female leads in both movies. Elizabeth Hurley was perfectly cast as Austin’s sidechick in the first movie (she’s the perfect casting choice for every movie she’s ever been in) but the spotlight wasn’t really ever on Our Liz. Hurley shows up momentarily in The Spy Who Shagged Me and is generously given one of the truly funny lines in the movie — not much, but one more than she had before.

In comparison, the lovely Heather Graham as CIA agent Felicity Shagwell redeems the entire movie. In a movie season replete with special effects, the sight of Heather Graham in a micro-miniskirt is still the best piece of eye candy around. Felicity is smart, dangerous, absolutely ravishing, and has a way with the sexy one liner. “You’re light on your feet,” Austin raves as they dance. “I’m pretty light off my feet, too,” says the shagadelic Felicity, in a tone calculated to make a man’s knees turn to jelly. This is Heather Graham’s happening, baby, and it’s groovy, man.

Seth Green had a marginal part in the first movie as Scott Evil, but he stole the show with his criticism of his old man’s megalomaniacal ways. Green gets a little more time to shine here, imparting a little bit of Generation X common sense to the Sixties silliness. There’s still too strong of a strain of whiny brat in his performance, but he’s got the adolescent sneer down pat. When Dr. Evil dubs his newest plan to destroy the world “The Alan Parsons Project”, Green is there to poke wicked fun; “I can’t wait for Project Bananarama.”

Unfortunately, the wealth isn’t shared all that equally. Rob Lowe, who was so good in Wayne’s World, is well-cast as a young Robert Wagner but gets little to do. (One wishes that Wayne Campbell would make a cameo appearance, if only to remind us how babelicious Heather Graham is.) Kristen Johnson disappears in the second reel, which is too bad — she’s got the Natasha Fatale accent down pat.

I thought The Spy Who Shagged Me was quite a bit funnier than the original. Most of the comedy takes place below the waist, but now and again there’s a funny bit that provides a respite from the onslaught of bathroom and sex jokes. It’s still not that great, though. (The biggest reaction I heard from the audience was when Austin’s own Willie Nelson showed up in a cameo.) Your inner fifteen-year-old will be happy to see see The Spy Who Shagged Me, but those looking for more sophisticated humor should stay away and avoid further disappointment

Only Human After All

“You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination. If you way a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all that means is that you’ve read his autobiography.”

– P.J. O’Rourke, “Notes for a Blacklist for the 1990’s”

This is insightful, as usual, but it isn’t quite true. You can shame celebrities, but only after they become unprofitable. The most embarrassing film of the last ten years, Battlefield Earth was not an embarrasment for John Travolta because of its ridiculous premise or its horrid dialogue or the sight of Travolta with hair extensions and platform jackboots, but because it didn’t make any money. If Battlefield Earth had been profitable, everyone in Hollywood would be studying up on their Dianetics and practicing their evil leers, and you know it. Similarly, no self-respecting Hollywood celeb would ever let film crews come into their mansions and watch them fiddle with the remote control and generally make apes of themselves — at least not until Ozzy Osbourne showed people that you could make money that way. Now everyone wants to do it.

So when we look at Mike Myers, when we see him in that hairpiece that looks like a vole has died on top of his head, when we see his yellow teeth, when we see him wearing a horrid rainbow-colored pinstripe suit, prancing around like a morris-dancer, wearing — at one point in the opening credits — a purple tutu, we can only wonder “Isn’t that a little embarrassing?” The answer, of course, is a resounding “No — at least not until audiences stop showing up, it isn’t.” The Austin Powers series is, in fact, so popular that everyone wants to get in on the act; Austin Powers in Goldmember boasts more than its share of celebrity cameos.

The clothes, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. The embarassment potential for Austin Powers in Goldmember is extraordinarily high because of Mike Myers’s insistence on wringing — literally, in some cases — comedy out of every concievable bodily orifice. And although all of this is very funny — excepting a few scenes with the truly awful and offensive Fat Bastard — one wonders if it is all really necessary, if the obsession that Myers seemingly has with the body and its functions is absolutely integral to the Austin Powers franchise and to his own comic sensibilities. One wonders if the thinking part of the audience could, in the words of Dr. Evil, catch a friggin’ break from all the fart jokes.

Of course, such a thing is not possible, and one wonders if it is wise. A brief example. Fred Savage is introduced as a British agent serving as a spy in Dr. Evil’s headquarters, or a “mole” in the intelligence parlance. When the Savage character is introduced to Austin Powers, the obvious joke would be to cue up the Daniel Stern monologue for a spoof of The Wonder Years. Instead, Savage is given a giant, hairy mole on his upper lip, and the joke — the oft-repeated, overworked joke — is Austin’s reaction to it. “Moley-moley-moley-moley!” Now, the first joke would be funnier, and classier, and would give poor Daniel Stern some much-needed work. But it would go right over the heads of the ten-year olds in the target audience, and it would be absolutely incomprehensible a hundred years from now. The bodily humor, while crass and sometimes unfortunate, is not just low common denominator humor. It is pitched to the lowest possible common denominator, purposefully. Myers’s comic style is lowbrow, coarse, and crude, granted. But Austin Powers in Goldmember is terribly funny and in its way, almost eternal. It is a very human kind of comedy — human in its persistent attention to bodily functions, of course, but human in the way that we all share these bodily functions, human in the way that we want our parents to love and respect us, human in the way we laugh when a little, pompous, evil wart of a man like Dr. Evil gets abused by flying model planets and asteroids.

Austin Powers in Goldmember is not afraid to be human, not afraid to risk embarassment, not afraid to stoop to a low level of comedy. It is hard, then, to say that it is anything other than a complete success, given its goals. Austin Powers in Goldmember is by far the best of the three Austin Powers movies. The first movie introduced us to the characters, and illustrated the problems of transporting a 1960’s agent into the 1990’s, and that was about it. The second movie was a mess, as Austin was forced to mope around without his mojo while jokes were recycled all around him. Austin Powers in Goldmember looks outward, not inward, splicing in DNA from all sorts of diverse sources. Dr. Evil is captured early on, and there is a homage to Silence of the Lambs with a wonderful, absurdist ending. Beyonce Knowles, the lead singer for Destiny’s Child, steps in to channel the spirit of Pam Grier as Foxxy Cleopatra. In the most inspired bit of casting, Michael Caine steals a leaf from Sean Connery’s book in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, stealing scenes as Austin’s no-good father. (There is even a small backhanded reference to the Harry Potter books, although not quite enough is made of this.)

Not everything works here. The new evil character, Goldmember, is painfully unfunny. Played by Myers, he is a gold-spangled, freckled roller-skating Dutchman, and that is all you really need to know. Seth Green is shuffled off to the side for most of the movie; his character, Scott Evil, abandons his snarky ways and starts to follow in his old man’s footsteps a little. The rest of Dr. Evil’s crew gets short shrift, too, especially the inimitable Robert Wagner.

Austin Powers in Goldmember is nobody’s good idea of a great movie, but it is a very funny and very human film, and is enjoyable for what it is. It should be very popular, and deservedly so, for once. And as long as the Austin Powers franchise stays popular — that is to say, as long as it makes money — expect to see Myers prancing across the screen in his cool blue velvet suit with the puffy white ascot for a good long time.

Flying Lumberyard

I was watching The Aviator when it came to me, the great idea, the same way that the idea for Jane Russell’s bra came to Howard Hughes. This is what we need.

Basically, when you got to a movie, you would be given (if you wanted) a small reciever and a set of headphones. It would work something like the self-guided tours they do at museums, or the experimental audio-description systems that describe movies for people who are blind. Except that the recording would contain basic information about the movie and the actors and whatnot.

So we have an early scene in the movie, with Howard Hughes discussing the financing of his movie, Hell’s Angels, with financial adviser Noah Dietrich. Everybody who didn’t have the reciever would be able to see the movie normally. But if you had the reciever, it would explain things to you. “The character of Howard Hughes is played by Leonardo DiCaprio,” it would say. “He won an Oscar nomination for his performance, his third, but Jamie Foxx beat him. He was in Titanic, too. The other guy is John C. Reilly. He’s in a lot of movies. He was Chest Rockwell in Boogie Nights, and sang “Mr. Cellophane” in Chicago.

You see how this works. Normally, if you were in the movie, and you wanted this basic information — “Who is that?” “What else has he been in?” “Is that the guy who was in the first scene?” — how could you get it? Answer: you would have to ask the person next to you. Well, we don’t want that, now, do we? Do we? We emphatically do not. Providing additional information about the movie through a wireless connection for people who are just too dim to watch movies otherwise would go a long way to cut down on that scourge, talking in the movies.

I am saying this not because there were two women sitting behind us when we were watching The Aviator, and they spent the whole movie explaining things to each other. Kate Beckinsale would show up on the screen, and they would have to explain to each other who she was, and what she had been in, and that she was playing Ava Gardner, and then she would go away, and come back twenty minutes later, and then these same two people would have the same exact conversation. It got so you wished a plane would drop on Beckinsale’s character, just to interrupt the conversational flow.

But The Aviator is just that kind of movie. It’s the sort of movie that demands footnotes, or Cliffs Notes, or something. It’s a slice of about twenty years of American history, served up with a disquisition on untreated Obsessive Compulsive Disorder plus the effects of massive milk consumption. It’s a big movie, with big ideas, suited for the big screen, and there are just going to be people who aren’t going to be able to keep up. (If we can’t get a wireless no-chatter system, can we institute a nationwide screening process where you have to have a certain IQ to get into the movies? Or would that bring down the weekend numbers for Vin Diesel movies too far?

DiCaprio is Hughes, and it’s a tough character to play because we know so much about Hughes. You could do a Howard Hughes autobiographical haiku easy enough:

Slept with Kate Hepburn
Flew the Spruce Goose, then his shoes
Were Kleenex boxes

The Aviator doesn’t get quite that far along, but it gets close enough, and that’s probably as close as we want anyway. It starts off with the epic three-year filming of Hell’s Angels, then meanders into Hughes’s relationships with starlets, then wanders into airplane design and construction, then plows through the swamps of the TWA-PanAm rivalry, then starts the same dreary circuit all over again, until Hughes’s manias take hold and the movie starts its long (oh, so, so long) spiral into madness.

There’s a lot that could have been done here that wasn’t to shorten the story a bit, to tighten it up. One could have made the villains less cardboard, for one thing. (That would be Alec Baldwin, looking remarkably beefy in middle age, and Alan Alda, auditioning for The West Wing.) But genius director Martin Scorsese is clearly more interested in the cinematography than the story, just as he was in Gangs of New York. And — at this point — I don’t really feel up to the challenge of criticizing Scorsese. This is a brilliant work. Even given his little quirky film-school touches that result in blue peas on DiCaprio’s plate (the result of some old-school Technicolor process), it’s a remarkable achievement in the lively art of filmmaking.

Having said that, what Scorsese has created here — overlarge, lumbering, retro-design and all that — is remarkably similar to Howard Hughes’s own Spruce Goose. Widely derided as a flying lumberyard, it was not appreciated in its own time for what it was. As a society, we are quite a bit dumber now than we once were, or so it seems, and much less able to tell greatness in a movie — or to even appreciate one without audio Cliffs Notes, apparently. The Aviator is wasted on its audience.

Northwest Passage

I wasn’t going to make a big deal of this, at least not until Bruce Willis mentioned it towards the end of the movie, but there’s something about Bandits that reminded me a little bit of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Stay with me here.

First, and most obvious, is the location. Bandits spends all but a little bit of time in Oregon, taking advantage of the beautiful Pacific Coast scenery. (Bandits seems to find every cheap motel and watering hole on the West Coast, including one joint that offers “Music - Mussels”.) Secondly, Bandits is about an effective partnership between two talented, but dissimilar individuals. Like William Clark, Joe Blake (Bruce Willis) is stolid and fearless, strong and decisive. Like Meriwether Lewis, Terry Collins (Billy Bob Thornton) is… well, something of a mess. Terry is easily as neurotic as Lewis was but is much showier about it. Yet, the two men work well together and complement each other’s weaknesses. (”Together,” Cate Blanchett tells them, “you’re the perfect man.”) There are other similarities; like Lewis and Clark, Terry and Joe split up from time to time and rendezvous later. And both the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Blake and Collins bank-robbing crime spree become dependent on assistance from a woman; our Sacagawea here is Kate Wheeler (Blanchett), who starts out as something of a hostage and becomes something of an accomplice.

There’s something circumstantial about that, I admit. You could just as easily say, for example, that Bandits borrows (actually, “steals” would be a better word here) from Of Mice and Men. However, I think the Lewis and Clark parallel holds up here. The Corps of Discovery was searching for the mythical Northwest Passage, but what they found instead was danger, intrigue, fame, and a vast wilderness. Joe and Terry are searching for something just as mythical; the One Big Score, which will set them up in a comfortable retirement running a nightclub in Mexico. (”You’ll run the front, I’ll run the kitchen,” says Terry, which does make him sound an awful lot like Lennie asking George about the rabbits, come to think of it.) But like Lewis and Clark, what they find along the way to that mythical destination is far more interesting.

In a year where most of the best movies seem to be about clever heists, Bandits wisely chooses to have more fun with the spaces between the heists than with the robberies themselves. Bandits is much less interested in the technical details of the bank-robbing game than it is with things like hitchhikers in pink cowboy boots or old Bonnie Tyler songs or Thornton’s imaginary brain tumor. Other films may obsess over security cameras or silent alarms; Bandits is more interested in plaid shirts and Mary Kay conventions and Dutch stewardesses and bad tabloid television and the world’s coolest set of Venetian blinds. In doing so, it manages to trump each of the other good heist movies of the year.

The Score is largely about whether Robert DeNiro can trust Ed Norton, the talented new guy, in stealing a valuable scepter. Bandits has Joe and Terry trusting a new guy, Joe’s cousin Harvey (Troy Garity), whose talent is setting himself on fire. (If that doesn’t sound like a terribly useful talent, just watch.) It’s also about whether they can trust Kate, which sets up a love triangle that’s much more complicated than any robbery could be.

Heist is largely about disguise, with Gene Hackman and his crew wearing all manner of blue-collar disguises to pull off a daring airplane robbery. Bandits is about disguises as sight gags, and features the funniest clothes this side of Bjork’s closet. The clothes in the movie are so outlandish that we’re not shocked when Harvey shows up at one cheap hotel wearing a genuine Hank Williams sequins-and-fringes getup, causing Terry to ask, “Remember what I told you about lying low?” Bandits even features that necessary staple of Bruce Willis movies, the bad toupee, to hilarious effect, even upstaging that horrible Joan Jett haircut that Rebecca Pidgeon sports in Heist. (That’s three reviews this month where that haircut’s come up.)

Ocean’s Eleven is all about wit and style and savoir-faire. Bandits features a scene where Billy Bob Thornton has a spell of psychosomatic paralysis while on the dance floor with Cate Blanchett that’s funny enough to make a cat laugh. Ocean’s Eleven had exactly one good belly laugh (”They oughta call it whitejack!”), while Bandits has dozens. Willis and Thornton are both underrated comic actors, and they work together like they’ve done it all their lives.

However, Blanchett upstages both of them, turning in the best comic performance by an actress this year, just a bit in front of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Blanchett is the love-starved wife of the most self-centered man on earth; she runs away with Willis and Thornton mostly because she has nowhere else to go and the circus isn’t in town. She is at her best when she teeters on the edge of desperation, at once reckless and bold while lost and vulnerable. It’s outstanding work, and might be enough to earn her a Best Supporting Actress nod.

The third car that Willis and Thornton steal in the movie (the first is a cement truck) is a Chrysler PT Cruiser, and when I saw it, I was worried that the car would reflect the movie; that it would be cute and cool but with not much under the hood. By the end of the movie, they’re driving a vintage GTO, which is a more apt metaphor. Bandits is a sleek, stylish movie with comic horsepower to spare. It’s the perfect vehicle for a mythic journey through the modern Northwest Passage.