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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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