Uncle Orson Reviews 1998

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Other Movies I Saw

In alphabetical order ...

Antz. Of the two animated bug movies, the more cleverly written. Too bad they couldn't visually differentiate the characters better. It was nice to hear Woody Allen perform without having to look at him on the screen.

Armageddon. The stupidest science fiction film of the year, this one was also excruciatingly badly written, forcing the cast to dig deep and find their real heroism just to say the lines. I can't think of a single thing about this film that wasn't bad. The only reason it isn't my worst of the year is because at least it wasn't pretending to be anything more than a cynical piece of junk.

A Bug's Life. The storyline allowed a lot more species of bugs than Antz, which meant we could tell the characters apart better. More predictable than Antz and less well-written, it nevertheless worked better for kids.

Dr. Dolittle. This is the first sequel to Babe, which may be part of the reason why the sequel Babe 2: Pig in the City tanked. Eddie Murphy is making the career transition from bratty brother Richard Pryor to awkward uncle Fred MacMurray and it works. It had almost nothing to do with the book, of course, but then, it has just as little to do with the Rex Harrison musical, which is a very good thing.

Elizabeth. Too bad I had read a good biography of Elizabeth I just before seeing this film. The time compression, the oversimplification, the conflation of events, and obviousness of the controlling themes were all the more painful because of it. And for those unfamiliar with the history, this film approached incoherency. And yet ... the performances, the camera work, the scene-for-scene writing were all very good, and if I was frustrated by this film it was not because it was bad, but because it should have been better.

Godzilla. If Armageddon hadn't been even worse, this would have been the dumbest science fiction film of the year. Most other years it would have won. And what was with that "climactic" scene where we find out that Godzilla's eggs look just like the eggs in Aliens -- only bigger? That wasn't an homage or a passing quote, it was a rip-off. The only thing that made this film watchable was the French subplot.

The Horse Whisperer. A book I loathed, and Redford has a way of putting more pretention into his films than anyone but Warren Beatty. And yet, to my surprise, this was a really good movie. It helped that they got rid of the pointless, disloyal adultery that in the book made me despise the two main characters. And it was also a very good thing that they didn't end with the meaningless death scene of the book. In fact, this movie proves that sometimes the novelization is better than the novel.

Lethal Weapon 4. It's still fun. How many franchises can claim as much for installment four?

Mighty Joe Young. I don't like ape movies. I don't like save-the-animal movies. They're all so manipulative and they tend to demonize with a very broad brush. Also, the animals aren't usually very good actors. So if we hadn't found ourselves at a theater where the paper said we could see Babe 2: Pig in the City, chances are I would never have walked into a theater showing this movie. It would have been my loss. Bill Paxson is in peak Humphrey Bogart form. The writing, while it follows the formula, is clever in surprising places and restrained and focused in its handling of the issues. The villains are not caricatures and they seem to be specifically themselves rather than tarring all hunters or all people who take animals out of the wild. Authority is viewed as ignorant, selfish, and bureaucratic, but then is redeemed here and there with human touches. In the end, I bought the whole thing and cried like a baby.

And it must also be said that this is the most successful animation of a nonexistent animal I've ever seen. I absolutely believed Joe on the screen, with only the small exception of the computer-animated romp across an uneven meadow at the end, where his gait was absolutely steady and never compensated for the ground. By then it hardly mattered. Facial expressions worked well and the interactions with the actors were superb. The score was also wonderful. A good movie for grownups -- a pretty scary one for our four-year-old.

Out of Sight. At last, a film in which George Clooney's perpetual smirk worked. (His film career is going to be severely limited until he learns to look serious -- Meg Ryan can get away with pixyish shtick, but leading men cannot.) Elmore Leonard's books always have an insouciance that rarely translates onto the screen, leaving only the plots, which are often not enough. In this case, the adaptation came close.

Practical Magic. Since the vicissitudes of the book business force me to maintain a fantasy element in my contemporary fiction, it's Practical Magic, not You've Got Mail, that represents my own future on film, and it's not entirely discouraging. This movie managed to create both the darkness and the lightness of magic intermingled with ordinary life, and for once I even cared about a character played by Nicole Kidman, an actress who could only seem warm if standing beside Anne Heche or Annette Benning. I liked this film; I'll own it on video and watch it again.

Prince of Egypt. If I had not seen it in a theater full of children, I would not have believed that this film would work for kids. Where were the cute Disney animals? Where was the extravagant villain? Where was the formula? I once had a former Disney director tell me that all animated scripts had to have those elements, which I knew was stupid, but because he was the guy who had made animated films before and I wasn't, I was the one who ended up leaving the project. So you have no idea how good it felt, at the end of this film, to look around and see that when people take the scriptures seriously and tell a story with real care for the underlying values, they can make a non-formula animated film that holds kids spellbound. Maybe kids are able to tell when something important is going on. Maybe they don't always have to be distracted with "cute" and "scary."

Instead, Prince of Egypt has characters, and while some twists and simplifications left me nonplussed (why was Zipporah inserted into the first confrontation with Pharaoh, and Aaron removed from it?), I could see that great care and skill had gone into the compression of the story into the limited timeframe of an animated film. And, considering the cynicism about religion that pervades Hollywood, it was downright astonishing to see that sacred things were rather well-handled. I wished for the focus to be more on the relationship between Moses and God than on that between Moses and Ramses -- but perhaps that was asking too much.

The best moment in Prince of Egypt is an animated dream sequence that takes place among the paintings on a wall. It was breathtakingly beautiful in its reawakening of Egyptian art and hieroglyphics. And if anyone doubted the brilliance of these animators, the film was accompanied by a trailer for the utterly wretched and formulaic treatment of The King and I. (I know it is formulaic because the trailer showed the cute animals and the extravagant villain in a story that can't support and doesn't need either; I know the animation is wretched because I'm not blind.)

And when I tell you that this film is very good, you can believe me, because if anyone in the audience was hopelessly biased against it, it has to be the guy who wrote his own novel about Moses, placing him in another dynasty and making radically different choices in how to fictionalize and realize the characters and situations. I was so predisposed to hate this movie that I almost stayed away. If it can win me over, think what it will do for you.

Simon Burch. I have a friend who thinks A Prayer for Owen Meany is the great American novel of our half-century. I tried to read it, but ended up skimming -- I kept thinking, Chaim Potok has handled religious faith better, and as for miracles, I just don't think they belong in fiction, if only because the only thing that makes miracles miraculous is that they really happen; if you just make them up for a story, they're called "fantasy." So I was skeptical of Simon Burch, especially because I don't think handicapped or terminally ill children like the actor playing the title role or Gary Coleman in Different Strokes are particularly entertaining or cute to watch. Yet somehow I found myself in the theater watching this movie, and to my surprise, despite its clumsiness at times, the simplicity of the performances won me over. The heroism at the end raised theological issues: Why doesn't God plan for a savior for every bus accident? And finding out that the nasty minister is really Simon's father is just cheap -- it would have been far more powerful to have had Simon read A Scarlet Letter and assume the minister was his father and find out at the end that it wasn't true. But these are quibbles in a movie that meant very well and pretty much carried it off.

There's Something About Mary. I thought I hated this film while watching it. It was so crude, so embarrassing to watch that I sank down in my seat in horrified fascination. I rarely laughed while watching it. But the moment the film was over, and I was talking about it with the friends who saw it with me, then I laughed. And I realized: This is just like real life. When something horribly embarrassing is happening, you don't think it's funny, you want to slink away. But when it's over, and you're talking about it to others, then you can see the humor. I just hope that these filmmakers don't think that their career trajectory requires them to top each gross film with an even more offensive one. In the long run, their brutal candor will be better employed on character and society than on sight gags and gross-outs.

The Truman Show. This movie evaporates completely upon examination (as does most satirical science fiction) but it does the classic science fiction task of exaggerating a truth about contemporary society -- the way we ogle the real lives of our celebrities even if it destroys them. This one evaporates, however, for two reasons.

First, the filmmakers couldn't get away from the cliche of rebellion against the authority figure, as if the only important events in life happen at age 14 -- which is, come to think of it, the average social age of American film.

Second, the examination of worship as destruction left out the key component: Celebrities choose to pursue the social role that can so easily destroy them.

Here's how I would have changed the storyline: We find out, near the end, that Truman knew from early childhood on that it was all a show, and as the system has been breaking down around him, he is desperately trying to figure out where the storyline is going so he can fit in with it. He isn't trying to get free, he's trying to hold on -- for the tragedy of modern celebrity (and community!) is that it ends, and those who have built their lives around it are left destitute when fame and fortune seep away against their will. But then again, my films don't get made, and this one did.

The Waterboy. I'm still debating whether to move this up onto my favorites list, I liked it that much. This film was promoted as yet another of those nebbish-becomes-hero-on-the-field-of-play films (Lucas, Angus, etc.). By contrast, I think the screenwriter thought he was creating a comedy like The Jerk, a sort Dolt's Progress. But somewhere along the way, this film was benignly kidnapped, and I think it was Adam Sandler who did it. A wide-ranging actor Sandler is not, but he has Steve Martin's ability to be the wise fool (as opposed to Carrey, the perpetual wise-ass), so that we don't just root for him, we care about him.

Sandler will get all the credit in Hollywood for making this a runaway hit, and properly so; but let's recognize that writer, director, and supporting cast -- what a cast! -- all conspired to raise this material above the level of its genre. Yet Sandler is what Jim Carrey could have been but proved (in Liar, Liar and The Truman Show) that he would never be: an honest comedian. Sandler won't give up the character's soul for a laugh; and that's why, along with our laughter, he gets our love.

The financial success of The Waterboy will give Sandler enormous power over his future projects. I offer him one bit of advice: Look at Steve Martin very closely. He did not keep remaking The Jerk with every film. In fact, for a while he was among the best of our romantic comedians, with All of Me and L.A. Story. Go thou and do likewise. Use your power to move, incrementally, toward realer and more mature films. The Wedding Singer shows more of what you'll be able to play when you're forty than The Waterboy does.

The Wedding Singer. This story is so slight as to be nonexistent, but Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler are such sweet and unpolished performers -- children, they seem, in grownup clothes -- that they made the winsome story work.

The X-Files. I'm not a diehard X-Phile, but I admire and often enjoy the show, and this movie worked about as well as tv-to-film transitions ever do. Who could ask for anything more?

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