Friday, 22 October 1999

WEEKEND PREVIEW

As I've written before, I don't plan on offering my opinion on Body Shots, Bringing Out The Dead, La Ciudad/ The City, Crazy In Alabama or Three To Tango until Sunday or Monday because I'll be reviewing those on "Roger Ebert & The Movies" over the weekend. However, I feel perfectly free to set my target on Bats and The Best Man, two of the six wide-release movies opening this weekend. (And what the heck is with the release of four movies that start with the letter "B" in one weekend?) And for the box office assessment of all these titles and more, check out Box Office Extra after noon ET.

I'll start by batting Bats around and it is child's play. Not Child's Play, child's play. But it does try to turn somewhat of the same trick as the Chuckie flicks. The characters keep explaining how bats don't kill, while in this movie, the bats do nothing but kill. And like Chuckie, the bats have personality. Unfortunately, the anthropomorphizing of the bats keeps the film from any aspirations of being an update of the nature-out-of-control terror of The Birds. And since the bats don't talk or communicate clearly, but really just stare and drool, they simply come off like the cheap Gremlins knock-off, Ghoulies ... you know, those things that came out of the toilet ... except with wings. The humans are a little less stiff. But just a little. Lou Diamond Philips has been great going over the top in some recent films that were otherwise disappointing, but here, as "the hero," he is bland and uninteresting. Dina Meyer is okay, but the character is as bleached out as her hair. And Leon comes as close to yelping, "Feet don't fail me now" as any actor in a long time. But best of all, this is a movie that does things like show us a sequence of fortifying a safe place from the bats and then forgets that the lair is supposed to be impregnable for no real reason. Or how about when an entire platoon of armed men fail to do what a couple of people end up being able to do because they don't care about the knowledge the expert brings ... they just have to move forward because they are cardboard army men. It's true, bats don't kill people. But Bats may well bore some to death.

The Best Man is better than Bats. I'm happy to see young, talented actors like Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Morris Chestnut and Harold Perrineau Jr. in almost anything. And this film offers up breakout, scene-stealing performances by Terrence Dashon Howard, Melissa DeSousa and, in the last act, Monica Calhoun. But is The Best Man a really good movie? No. It's decent TV. Malcolm Lee has some good ideas, but he has almost no discernable style as a director. And this film is remarkably inconsistent. Sometimes, it is clever and surprising. At other times, the film falls into cheap tricks to drive the story via the implausible. For instance, would you be busy reading your best man's book during your bachelor party? I wouldn't. Now, the leap to make that choice plausible is not a huge one. But this film doesn't always bother to adjust to taking the more honest, perhaps more challenging road. Heck, this movie even manages to make Nia Long in a teddy a throw-away. That just ain't right. This is a chewing gum movie. You go in, you get some intense flavor for a while, you keep chewing, the flavor becomes familiar and then starts to fade, and finally, you start wondering where that wrapper is so you can get the thing out of your mouth. It's never so bad that you just spit it out. But it's never something you really want to swallow either.

THE GOOD: I am often suspect of deals that involve famous on-screen talent. Is it because you want to photograph the chicken or do you really want that egg? But when I read about Michelle Williams of "Dawson's Creek" (19 years old) and a couple of young twentysomething friends (Amy Danles and Meghan Perry) selling a screenplay to Good Machine, I wanted to applaud. Of all the Dawson crew and the many teen-playing actors out there, and really, with the exception of Reese Witherspoon, Williams seems to be the most careful about what she chooses to do. To control her work by writing and being good enough for Good Machine to want it, as opposed to a big studio that's just going to bring in a writer who will turn it into more processed goo ... well, that's just great. Congratulations to her, her partners and to us, the audience members, who may actually have someone worth watching to watch for a change.

THE BAD: Supernova continues to corrode. The Hollywood Reporter reports/confirms that Walter Hill will take his name off the film. Big surprise there. In the meanwhile, don't look for Hill to publicly attack the film because the right to use the "Alan Smithee" pseudonym brings with it a gag order. If you rip the movie, you lose the privilege not to be associated. Just ask Tony Kaye, whose next project ... uhhhh ... Tony ... did you ever really think you were going to get a movie financed again in this millennium? Or the next?

THE UGLY: It seems that I wasn't clear enough about what Rosie O'Donnell did on her TV show that I find so offensive. I have no problem with O'Donnell or anyone else using their airtime to offer their opinion about a movie, good, bad or ugly. Heck, I'm okay with her taking out a stick and beating Fight Club to a pulp on her show if she likes. Warn people. Whine about how much you hate it. Swear never to have Brad Pitt on your show as a guest. (That last one was a little facetious.) But when you tell a national audience about important surprises in a movie, which is what O'Donnell did in addition to railing against the film, you have crossed the line. At least, my line.

And it doesn't matter if I like the film or hate the film. Her action was intended to ruin the potential film experience of everyone watching her show and thus to directly effect the box office. And if she had a show on MSNBC or something and did it out of political peak, I would still be unhappy, but not this unhappy. Why do I hold Rosie O'Donnell to a higher standard? Because she is a movie actress. She knows where the line is. And she crossed it. Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace, The General's Daughter, The Sixth Sense and other $100 million films this year had secrets. They also had people who loved and hated the films. But no one gave the ending twists away in order to ruin the experiences of the films.

I did get a letter or two questioning my choice of questioning the secrets in O'Donnell's life as part of what makes her position so hypocritical. Perhaps even bringing such personal matters up was a step too far for me to go. But O'Donnell's self-righteousness in exposing secrets suggests hands so clean that she stands above mere audience members. But her hands are dirty. And not with her secrets, but by her secrecy. And for those of you who offered, "that's just Rosie," I feel about "just Rosie" much like I feel about Pam Anderson's return to her physically abusive husband as being "just Pam." Sick to my stomach with distaste.

RADIO RADIO: Georgie is abandoning me this Saturday on our KABC-790 radio show. His excuse? He's hosting some charity event. The nerve!

BAD AD WATCH: Caught this classic for Beyond The Matt from Tony Lewis of StrictlyECW.com "A Masterpiece ... It's an old movie critic clichˇ, but if you're a wrestling fan ... you'll laugh ... you'll cry ... you'll love this movie!" Uh, Tony, I think you would have to be a movie critic first, then you can become an old movie critic. And who was it who said, "Old critics never die, they just stop writing about English-language film?"

READER OF THE DAY: LL Cool Guy wrote: "I'm wondering if there is any way for someone to disagree with your view on Fight Club without being met with some sort of ad hominem attack. In the past week, virtually anyone who expressed a negative view of Fight Club has been labeled either pathetic, hypocritical, narrow-minded, or some combination of the three. You even suggested that those who dislike the movie have a fear akin to that of whites (I don't limit it to the South) who feared blacks gaining civil rights. Please tell me you were purposely exaggerating, not merely digressing.

Fight Club is a fine movie overall, a great movie technically and visually. But it doesn't speak to everyone the same way it obviously speaks to you, and admittedly, to many others. It IS possible to both understand this movie and dislike it. Too often this past week, I have come away from your work wondering why it was necessary to criticize the person making the argument, as well as the argument against Fight Club. The vitriol in some of your writings these past days has been, to my mind, extreme and sad and completely unworthy of someone who has invoked the First Amendment as often as you have.

Special mention also needs to be brought to your comments about Rosie O'Donnell. I don't watch her show. But if, in fact, she told the secrets of the movie as a way of keeping people from it, she should be criticized for it. But, while her action was tactless, your comment in the e-mail section of The Hot Button was simply rude. O'Donnell criticized a movie, and you offered up innuendo about her personal life as a response. You owe her an apology.

DAVID'S RESPONSE: There are plenty of ways to disagree about Fight Club and not have me respond with a sense that someone simply isn't getting it. Almost, but not all of my vitriol has been aimed at critics for whose opinions I have the evidence of by their writing. Almost unilaterally, these attacking critics have been enraged beyond any reasonable level and have said, "I loved the satire about Ikea and wish that were the whole movie. Then it becomes fascist propaganda. And the third act (the one that I, David, suggests very clearly points to the significant point of all that fighting), well, that was just a cheap gimmick." Roger Ebert, for instance, was not as aggressive in his attacks and did concede some points to the filmmaking. But when push comes to shove, he and I had to agree to disagree, essentially, because ... well, I don't want to put words in his mouth. But I feel that a big part of the rift here, which comes up in many of the reviews, is that certain people cannot see that there is passion and glamour in a fistfight or in living life on the very edge. And even though I choose not to live that way, I see the allure. And I -- and the movie -- also see, very clearly, that the edge is not where mentally healthy people ultimately choose to live. Living on the edge is every bit as bad as living in an Ikea catalogue. And if you don't see that in Fight Club, I'm sorry, you just don't get Fight Club.

And The Other D wrote: "You're so correct on Rosie O'Donnell and the serious breach of any kind of ethics on Fight Club. You know, if a friend came up to me and gave away the plot of a book or a film, I would beat the holy snot out of them. It's crossing a line, it's depriving a person of a choice that they have every right to make themselves. When a person in control of a huge mass media construct like Rosie pulls something like this, it's worse. It's not an opinion she's expressing; it's the stirrings of intellectual fascism. It's the start of the justification for book-burning. It's what's good for you.

My significant other and I went to see Fight Club Friday night, and I'll tell you, I had to do serious cajoling (which, I'm told, is not an unfamiliar story because of the male-oriented perceptions the movie is saddled with). But we went in, and I adored it, and she liked it FAR more than she expected, and even more as she reflected on it. In fact, it's becoming one of her favorite films of the year. This was thrilling as she's nowhere near the cinephile that I am, and she was reflecting on many scenes and really wanted to talk and discuss the film. (And we did, and I got a lot out of the movie that I missed the first go-around.)

Now, if she had skipped the film this weekend and caught the Rosie broadcast first, she would have had a wonderful film experience utterly destroyed for her before she could MAKE HER OWN CHOICE. That outrages me. At the very least, Fox should pull any of the publicity or appearances from Rosie, instead of subsidizing the shilling that keeps her show on the air. I mean, what's Meat Loaf doing on her show Thursday? Does Fox really think she has the class to avoid ambushing him like she did Tom Selleck?

Maybe I'm going too far in railing against this. But damn it, these media pronouncements have power. Let's look at The Omega Code, which viewers are finally reporting as a huge piece of s**t by any measure. And yet, with the Crouches plugging this thing as the nearest thing to godliness night and day on their religious network, it had huge crowds lining up all weekend here in Nashville, and elsewhere, apparently. The bully pulpit is so incredibly powerful, and is taking society from dispensing advice and opinions to trying to control and infringe upon our choices. And no one seems particularly alarmed.

Ugh. This has all left a bad taste in my mouth. I think I'll go see Fight Club again.

E ME: You know, I still have a major piece on Fight Club coming, and yet, while dealing with it every single day here in THB, much like Titanic or Star Wars, even I am tiring of the fight. What ELSE has you buzzing these days folks? Save me from myself by writing.