Talkies / Don't Know Much About History
Bowman, James
Don't Know Much About History by James Bowman n Mick Jackson's Clean Slate, Dana / Carvey finds every morning when he wakes up that he has completely forgotten what happened the day before...
...Don't Know Much About History by James Bowman n Mick Jackson's Clean Slate, Dana / Carvey finds every morning when he wakes up that he has completely forgotten what happened the day before and that he must start his life again from scratch...
...Zola, of course, like so many others in his time and since, intended to blame "capitalism" rather than the bosses...
...Thus the film never misses a chance to juxtapose in the most heavy-handed way imaginable the starving nineteenth-century coal miners and their rich bosses living in the lap of luxury, eating crayfish or brioche...
...There is, but it is not at all what he expected...
...T he fate of our Movie of the Month, a Hollywood project that found success last year in Europe when in America it almost went, after a spell on HBO, straight to video leaves the question moot...
...That Hollywood does not recognize artistic quality is old news...
...You are Lyle from Dallas, aren't you...
...Trapped as we are in the eternal fun-house of the present, we know how he feels...
...0 The American Spectator July 1994 63...
...Of course he's not really spineless, just fearless...
...Nor is anything else in the fihn to be taken any more seriously...
...he asks...
...Michael takes the money, but then informs the wife, Suzanne, of her husband's plans...
...It is an old-fashioned movie, to be sure, without the sort of post-modern touches that a more mainstream Hollywood product would have been almost sure to have...
...say that the old Westerns were authentic representations of the way it really was in the Old West...
...In fact, they begin to look rather cheap and gimmicky when a film like this one comes along and shows us that it is still possible to strike a spark among the embers of cinematic realism—embellished, perhaps, with such simple, nonself-referential but effective devices as repeated shots of the "Welcome to Red Rock" sign as a quasi-comic reminder of Michael's inability to get out of the place...
...But of course he has no intention of killing either one: he simply wants to take the money and get out of town...
...Walsh), seeing his Texas plates, says that he has been expecting him for some days and wants him to get on with the job right away...
...Bern must have got carried away by his high moral purpose, or perhaps by a Frenchnational mythology more powerful even "than postmodernism...
...Likewise, the noble savage, here played by Hollywood's current favorite Indian, Graham Greene, was just a regular guy out to hustle a buck like anyone else...
...For just as it is typical of America to see in the past the image of its own national innocence and of Britain to see that of its former social grandeur, so it is typical of the French to see a heroic but doomed workers' struggle against the forces of reaction that sows the seeds of a more successful revolution...
...There were no class or racial distinctions, sex was casual, and it was natural to find a woman like Jodie Foster among the ranks of professional gamblers and thieves...
...The only pleasures such films aspire to provide their audiences are the pleasures of recognition—usually very briefly deferred—and of demythologization...
...His basic decency requires, however, that he write an anonymous note to the local sheriff warning of the plot...
...to be knocked about from end to end of its 158 minutes...
...He misses out on the job because of his bad leg and, down to his last five dollars, goes on to the town of Red Rock because he is told that there might be work there...
...But it is good that films like this continue to be made, because it reminds us that we don't necessarily need those post-modern touches...
...We like to see the hero's trousers fall down...
...Even more insistently than it usually does in these cases, the question arises why Angel and his boys don't just plug him instead of going to all the trouble of finding a burlap bag full of rattlesnakes that they release at the feet of Gibson's increasingly skittish horse before riding, conveniently, away...
...These are potentially brilliant illustrations of the film's epigraph, taken from a certain Dr...
...The heroics are all unabashed hokum, and some serious-looking gunplay as Maverick recovers stolen church funds from some bad guys results in no one's even getting hurt, let alone killed...
...They should not be seen as jokes among other jokes but as nicely judged analogies revealing of our national state of mind...
...don't mean to...
...In another scene he listens to the messages on his answering machine which all consist of cryptic phrases like "It's me," "Why don't you call...
...European aristocracy definitely has to get its own PR guy...
...What, after all, can multi-million dollar Mel have to fear...
...Thrown into the classic nightmare situation where he is called upon to speak to a strange audience without having the foggiest idea of what he is supposed to be talking about or even who he is supposed to be, for example, he points at an indecipherable color slide that he is expected to comment on and says: "I think this one is self-explanatory...
...And worse even than the boorish tourist who doesn't understand why them gol'durned fur'ners can't talk Yewnited States is the boorish reader or filmgoer who doesn't understand that his own culture has not always been the way that it is now...
...Korshakoff, about how memory is the only thing that stands between us and chaos, but there are too few such moments...
...I think that films like Bad Girls and Maverick must appeal to such people—people who must think it fun to watch their favorite stars in Western fancy dress pretending, with no serious attempt to be convincing about it, that they are handy with a shooting iron and can do all that other cowboy stuff...
...The "job" turns out to be the murder of Wayne's wife (Lara Flynn Boyle)—for $5,000 down and $5,000 on completion of the contract...
...Berri probably just didn't have time to squeeze in a more lengthy attack on the church...
...Michael, who, as the film has already taken pains to show, is basically an honest fellow, says "Yes...
...Just as Britain has The Remains of the Day and America has Maverick or, in a different way, The Age of Innocence, the French have Claude Berri's Germinal...
...It's crucial that you call me at the office," and so forth, none of which makes any sense to him...
...Which is worse, to use the past, as Germinal does, as a pretext for the present or to be ignorant, as the new go-go Hollywood Western is, of its very existence...
...But now that we know what a meretricious fraud that kind of social analysis really is, it may be the case that any movie based on Germinal, almost has to vulgarize and moralize it in this way and populate the entire film with moral straw men (and women...
...that it does not even recognize quality that is also commercially viable is a measure of how far into aesthetic imbecility it—and too much of the general culture with it—has sunk...
...For the Man Who Couldn't Remember is a synecdoche for America's chronically forgetful culture...
...G erminal is another costume drama for yuppies, done by the fine director of Jean de Florette, Manon des Sources, and Uranus with a crudity that makes "Masterpiece Theatre" history look sophisticated...
...But they were conscious of a historical distance and turned it to advantage by mythologizing...
...Michael is drawn deeper and deeper into this morass and into mortal peril largely because of his own sense of right and decency, which is continually betrayed by the others...
...Everything is a joke, and an inside joke at that, from having Mel meet up with his partner from Lethal Weapon, Danny Glover, and pretend not quite to recognize him to the incomprehensible twists of the tortuous plot which 62 The American Spectator July 1994 do not even try to make themselves believable...
...But such treatment is inevitable given the movies' vulgar and ignorant attitude towards history, in Europe as much as the United States...
...This promising comic idea gets lost in an over-complicated plot and various subplots, but there are moments when we catch a glimpse of what it could have been...
...James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Interestingly, the film's politically correct Indians can be made to look'just like cool Californian surfer dudes who make their money by camping it up in war paint and feathers, but nobody thinks twice about the grotesque caricature of a Russian archduke whom they are conning...
...In most Hollywood films these days and especially in the ever greater number of those based on old television series, believability is of little importance...
...My favorite of these redundant demonstrations of the criminal indifference of the rich to the sufferings of the poor is when a crowd of starving miners and their families chant to the flint-hearted grocer (who shortly meets a grisly end at the hands of an ancestress of Lorena Bobbitt) "We're hungry...
...And guess what Texan hit man (played by Dennis Hopper) Michael runs into before he can get out of town...
...Red Rock West is a curious little gem of a film by John Dahl...
...Guess what part-time diner owner is also the sheriff...
...Each nation finds its own way to patronize or sentimentalize the past...
...He has been left alone in a desolate spot by a gang of obvious villains led by one Angel (a little irony there...
...One of the infallible marks of barbarism is that it has no capacity for imagining how other cultures are different from itself...
...Like most of thegreat heroic and romantic tales in history, they looked back to a time when there were giants in the earth, when men were of heroic stature and did great deeds that are not done anymore...
...His real purpose in this as in all else is to convince us that there really never was any such thing as the Old West anyway, The people then, we learn, were just like people today: easy-going, casual, jokey, ironic, skeptical...
...But Donner, having realized that there is no poin in pretending that anyone in the audience believes Mel Gibson's character is in real danger at this point, has simply gone for a laugh by spoofing the cliffhanger endings of the old Saturday afternoon serials...
...Nicolas Cage plays Michael, an ex-Marine with a bad leg who drives north to Wyoming from Texas in hopes of finding a job as a roughneck on an oil rig...
...Thus Maverick makes fun of the Code of the West by claiming that "being spineless has kept me alive a long time...
...at the very moment a well-fed priest passes, as indifferent to their cries as the grocer...
...Mystery and romance used to be an essential part of the Western, but postmodern demythologization is as essential to a film like Richard Donner's Maverick...
...When he goes to visit his mother in a nursing home and is greeted by an old woman calling him "son," he naturally greets her as "mother" until it transpires that she suffers from Alzheimer's disease and has greeted him at random...
...The film begins with Mel Gibson (playing the eponymous hero) sitting on a horse with his hands tied behind him and a noose, attached to a dead tree-limb, around his neck...
...When he walks into the diner and orders a cup of coffee, Wayne, the man behind the bar (J.T...
...She promptly offers him double the amount to kill her husband instead...
...Look at what a fool poor old James Fox's Lord Darlington appeared in Remains of the Day...
Vol. 27 • July 1994 • No. 7
