The Talkies/Summer Fare

...This time, the fantastic voyager is a tough-talking test pilot named Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid), who's in the employ of a Silicon Valley firm seeking to enter the hot new field of miniaturization...

...even for summer movies...

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...And its cleverest moments, interestingly, occur when the plot drops away and the characters start talking to the audience or discuss the fact that they're in a movie...

...In one sequence, for instance, President Skroob and the evil but klutzy Darth Vader-like warrior Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) fast-forward through a videotape of Spaceballs in order to find out where the princess (whom they want to kidnap) has gone...

...Another virtuoso comic performance has been turned in this summer by Steve Martin...

...To be sure, the creators of The Squeeze seem to think they've captured the megalopolitan atmosphere to a T (the ad shows a gigantic Keaton being squeezed between the World Trade Center's twin towers), but the fact is that I've never seen a film made in New York that so thoroughly succeeded in not capturing the feel of the city...

...JOSEPH SOBRAN CHARLIE REESE PLUS Norman Podhoretz Gen...

...Enjoy also, a witty selection from acclaimed cartoonists...

...In an era when American movie comedies tend to present us with heroes who are "common men" with a vengeance (i.e., inarticulate lunkheads) and with villains whose villainy is defined by their erudition and wit, it is very gratifying to see a movie in which the hero wins his beloved's heart because he can express himself intelligently...

...not only the direction but the editing, cinematography, and production design are all considerably improved...

...The early Brooks—of The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein—fussed over plot, lighting, and cinematography, stayed mostly behind the camera, and at times, for all the crudity of his humor, actually perpetrated sequences that were witty and sophisticated...

...The plot is formulaic: in order to save Tuck (who's in danger of running out of air, just like the folks on Druidia), Jack has to swallow his timidity and take on the bad guys, who have stolen a component necessary to Tuck's deminiaturization...

...in the new film the evil planet Spaceballs (led by Mel Brooks himself as the sleazy, bumbling President Skroob, a retread of the Governor William J. Lepetomane role he played in Saddles) seeks to destroy theridiculously idyllic planet Druidia (whose king is played by the worst actor in North America, Dick Van Patten...

...Mainly because they can...

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...Date Name Address Published by Chronicle Publications, a 110 year old independent newspaper company ONSERVATIVE HMZIMMIE THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 37 Princess Vespa of Druidia is a "Druish princess...

...Formulaic as it is, though, the plot is spun out with a charm and cleverness that at times recall Tootsie...

...Then there's a funny bit in which Yogurt introduces the complete line of Spaceballs merchandise: lunchboxes, T-shirts, mugs, all emblazoned with the movie's title—and for the remainder of the movie, the set decoration includes official Spaceballs bedsheets, toilet paper, andso forth...

...How long ago did Brooks, Thomas Meehan, and Ronny Graham write this script, anyway...

...deck of the aircraft carrier Intrepid with hundreds of screaming extras and a painfully unfunny John Davidson as the Lotto drawing's master of ceremonies—it falls completely apart...

...In Saddles a passel of villains threatened to destroy the ridiculously idyllic frontier town of Rock Ridge...

...apparently somebody decided that it might be a good idea to give the audience some clue that this was supposed to be a comedy...

...THE TALKIES SUMMER FARE by Bruce Bawer T he best one can hope for from 1 most summer films is not that they will challenge ones intelligence, but that at any rate they will not insult it too brutally...

...The few truly funny lines in the picture, oddly enough, were plainly dubbed in after principal production was completed...

...In any event, the film doesn't develop so much as drag, and at the end—when Taplitz and Young, in a fatuously executed attempt to generate some climactic energy and drama, fill the Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer and the author of The Middle Generation and The Contemporary Stylist...

...Though many of the parodic references are screamingly funny, too often they seem merely mechanical, as in the Hitchcock take-off, High Anxiety, wherein Brooks seemed determined to allude to as many Hitchcock films as possible...

...But what is most special about Roxanne is its respect for intelligence, sensitivity, and articulateness...

...Though Brooks's new film, the egregiously titled Spaceballs, fits squarely into the later-Brooks mold, in many respects it is an outer-space variation on Blazing Saddles...

...The film's witless excuse for a plot is as follows: Harry unwittingly stumbles upon a conspiracy to rig a $56 million "Lotto" drawing, gets chased by thugs through various discotheques and seedy motels, and along the way becomes romantically involved with a process server played by Rae Dawn Chong (have two less charismatic personalities ever shared a movie screen...

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...C. D.'s beloved, Roxanne (Daryl Hannah), is an astronomer who's in town for the summer, and Chris (Rick Rossovich), the handsome but none too bright young man whose love letters to Roxanne C. D. agrees to ghostwrite (in the original play this character was named Christian), is a young fireman who's also new in town...

...Most of them have every column published in full...

...In Innerspace, director Joe Dante and writers Jeffrey Boam and Chip Proser have taken this "concept" (as such things are called in Lotusland) and explored its comic possibilities...

...Indeed, I kept forgetting that the film was shot in New York, and kept being surprised by the familiar landmarks that periodically turned up...

...Yawn...

...Finally, the relationship between Tuck and Jack is funny and well developed and (for all its ridiculousness) even touching...

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...It's one of those pictures in which the hero and heroine hate each other most of the way through—a sentiment which, in this case, is shared by the audience—and toss lines like "Oh, yeah...

...Martin has not, for the most part, been well served by the movies—or, to name names, by Carl Reiner, who has directed most of his vehicles...

...Martin himself wrote the surprisingly literate screenplay, which resurrects Cyrano as C. D. Bales, a small-town American fire chief with a nose the size of Wisconsin...

...he and his inner-space capsule—whichlooks rather like a lunar module—are supposed to be injected into the body of a rabbit, but some high-tech thugs from a competing outfit (led by Kevin McCarthy) intervene and he ends up instead in the body of a nervous, hypochondriacal supermarket cashier named Jack Putter (Martin Short...

...his strength lies in the realm of TV skitsand sitcoms, and the bulk of his film work (the closest thing to an exception is All of Me) betrays a dismaying lack of visual imagination, as well as a prodigious indifference to such essentials as character, plot, and production values...

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...Reiner's got the same Borscht-belt sensibility as Mel Brooks, but lacks Brooks's comic genius...

...Brooks, in the role of the Yoda-like ancient sage Yogurt, says to the Luke Skywalker-like hero, played by Bill Pullman, "May the Schwartz be with you...

...In classic Mel Brooks fashion, the humor in Spaceballs consists mostly of sophomoric sexual and scatological jokes and outrageous Borscht-belt puns, often Jewish-related (the spoiled It's an all star conservative cast GEORGE F WILL * JEANE KIRKPATRICK * DONALD LAMBRO * R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR * WILLIAM F BUCKLEY, JR * JAMES KILPATRICK “Wonderful Publication...

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...Perhaps there is hope yet for American film comedy—and (could it be...

...and "That's what you think" at each other in a tone that suggests these quips are brilliantly witty...

...Why do they want to shrink Tuck Pendleton and inject him into a rabbit...

...Among the cleverest episodes in Innerspace, in fact, are those that parody the elaborate sequences, so common in recent films, in which impressive high-tech operations are shown or described in reverent detail...

...in doing this Jack learns to be as tough as Tuck, while Tuck, for his part, learns from Jack how to treat his estranged lady friend (Meg Ryan) with respect and consideration...

...M el Brooks's directorial career divides neatly into two phases...

...The film's principal characters and plot are no small potatoes either—both having been borrowed, with a few major changes (e.g., a happy ending), from Edmund Rostand's classic play Cyrano de Bergerac...

...Many of Brooks's films have been parodies of various movie genres, and Spaceballs is no exception: the film gags it up at the expense of the Star Wars series, and along the way also sends up Alien, the Star Trek movies, and even Planet of the Apes...

...The film is more often amusing than it is hilarious, but it is consistently good-natured and charming...

...though Daryl Hannah brings less substance to the title role than one might hope (this is another example of a director trying to make an actress look intelligent by putting glasses on her), Steve Martin is wonderfully impressive in a role that requires him to be at once heroic and pathetic, romantic and ridiculous...

...the film deliberately depicts the miniaturization process as just plain silly, the scientists as absurdly solemn and self-important, the purpose of their experiment as ridiculously obscure...

...Fortunately, Martin's new film, Roxanne, has been directed by Fred Schepisi, and as a result it is, of all Martin's films, the least bumpy and murky, and the most pleasant to look at...

...Nothing in this movie feels real: not the people, not the Lotto drawing (which strikes one as a moron's version of the end of The Day of the Locust), not even New York...

...Harry's a completely unbelievable, uninteresting character, but the hack writer (Daniel Taplitz) and director (Roger Young) who are responsible for this inert, murky mess doubtless think that he is kooky and lovable...

...he handles intimate dialogue, comic patter, and out-and-out slapstick with equal grace and self-possession...

...Great reading...

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...Thanks to some useful devices in the capsule, Tuck is able to see through Jack's eyes, hear through his ears, and speak to him without anyone else hearing his voice...

...The parallels to such recent films as All of Me, The Man with Tivo Brains, and Oh Heavenly Dog cause one to wonder whether the folks in Hollywood are having some sort of crisis of Self and Other...

...And in many ways his script is as impressive as his acting: it is especially entertaining to watch Martin come up with contemporary American equivalents for some of the situations and conflicts in Rostand's play (e.g., he has created a sequence in a bar in which C. D., like Cyrano before him, improvises twenty jokes about the size of his nose...

...Back in- 1966 a director named Richard Fleischer made a movie called Fantastic Voyage, in which Raquel Welch and others were reduced to microscopic size and injected into the body of an Iron Curtain scientist for the purpose of removing a blood clot from his brain...

...both of the lead actors turn in strong performances, and Martin Short in particular does a virtuoso job in one of the more demanding comic roles in recent years...

...There are, then, quite a few laughs here—although one does wish that Brooks would someday favor us with another production as brilliant as his classic The Producers...

...Corny and lowbrow as it is, however, the movie is Brooks's most enjoyable in a long time...

...The later Brooks—of High Anxiety, Silent Movie, The History of the World Part One, and To Be or Not To Be—became the star of his own pictures, which, compared to their predecessors, were less interesting visually, sloppier structurally, and even broader and more vulgar in- their humor...

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...And one relatively original touch is that the film takes an irreverent tone toward advanced technology—a refreshing departure at a time when American movies seem more fascinated by computers than by human beings...

...This tiresome comedy stars Michael Keaton as Harry Berg, a hapless schmo who lives on an abandoned Manhattan pier and spends his time (a) building giant sculptures out of working TV sets and (b) running away from people whom hes tried unsuccessfully to cheat at poker...

...Be warned that one of the more brutally insulting movies of this or any summer is The Squeeze...