The Talkies/Dead Meat

...Maybe the shopping was better over there...

...says Hollywood...

...The Miracle, by Neil Jordan, is about two Irish teenagers, Jimmy and Rose, who make up stories about people theysee along the seafront...

...to which the other replies: "Yeah, we got totally lied to by our album covers...

...In the climax at the very louche Hotel Earle, the descent into Hell suggests Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey more than it does The Seventh Seal...

...As always, the art that makes you forget its own artistry is the rarest and toughest to create...

...In fact, if anyone belongs in Hollywood, she does, but since she has supposedly got her values from the rural South it hardly strains credulity any more to suppose that she wants to live there instead...

...It is just the flip side of taking itself too seriously...

...Either way, somebody is being self-indulgent...

...But the real inspiration here is to have elevated this sort of mindlessness into a kind of terminally bland philosophy of life`Be excellent to each other and party on"—which is imagined to dominate the earth in the 27th century...

...How they managed to do the former is unknown, butthe latter was easy: the ladies just said they were going out to do some shopping...

...You've got to put it down to the Zeitgeist, that mischievous spirit that also made Mike Nichols do Regarding Henry...

...transformed from a greedy yuppie doctor on his way to a lucrative career in cosmetic surgery in L.A...

...It does so, in fact, in every celebration of small-town and rural America, whose wholesome values triumph over the sophistication of the coasts...

...It was a stroke of genius to cast George Hamilton in the role of the chief plastic surgeon, complete with pigtail and mahogany tan...

...And it is a truly delicious joke to make one of the two idiot heavy metal fans say to the other on their arrival in Hell: "This is not what I expected this place to look like at all...

...In the same way, Joel and Ethan Coen's new film, Barton Fink, which won the Palme d'Or in Cannes this year, is about a writer (John Thrturro in the latest in a series of splendid performances) who goes to Hollywood full of big ideas about a theater of the common man, which he preaches sanctimoniously even at the common man in the next-door hotel room—who turns out to be a multiple murderer...

...He also laments the amateurism of the Soviet foreign service, overwhelmed as it is by semiliterate party honchos whose language skills in Russian, let alone other tongues, leave a great deal to be desired...

...As a tough, wisecracking surgeon who plays Frankie Valli's "Big Girls Don't Cry" when he cuts people open and Jimmy Buffett's "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw...

...The joke is on them, however, since none of the lurid stories they invent is anywhere near as fantastic as the truth about one of their fantasy subjects—that she is in fact Jimmy's mother, whom he had supposed was dead...

...Here we could see the very embodiment of what middle America understands of a world where, as the brilliantly stupid peasant played by Woody Harrelson says, "women have their chests enlarged, their thighs vacuumed, and barf on purpose...

...Just before he gets into his plane for the last time he says: "Things just couldn't be better...

...Stallone's version of Jack the Giant Killer was mythmaking Hollywood-style, a kind of engineering of sentiment...

...The Doctor, about a surgeon who learns his true values from getting throat cancer and becoming a patient himself, is not as bad as it deserves to be...

...It is another film by rich people who pretend to hate the rich, successful people who insist that success is corrupting...

...Perhaps it was some such ordeal that recently prompted two staffers of the Soviet embassy in Mozambique and a typist from the Soviet trade mission to take the unusual step of fleeing to South Africa...

...as a self-congratulatory anthem when he closes them up again he is fun...

...And was that ever on a best-seller list...

...At the time of the first I wondered if the ending of this column might prove prnphetk and if there would be a next column or a Soviet press to watch...

...Dances with Wolves, 91/2 Weeks, The Godfather, Rocky, Superman, and a host of others all get sent up, usually very funnily...

...It was a lousy book and it made a lousy movie...

...In the pre-Gorbachev "years of stagnation," says Zimelev, assignments to certain lands "with soft climates and hard currencies" were handed out as rewards to nomenklatura dons about to retire...

...And it is not even mildly entertaining...

...The summer season has produced some excellent based-on-fact movies, including My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle by Yves Robert, based on the memoirs of Marcel Pagnol, and Europa, Europa by Agnieszka Holland, based on the true story of Solomon Perel, a Polish Jew who unexpectedly found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth...

...One is a scum-sucking bottom dweller and the other is a fish...

...The latest example of such innocuous fakery is Doc Hollywood, in which Michael J. Fox is James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...into a warm and caring person by the charms of Grady, South Carolina, "the squash capital of the world...

...The movie is worth seeing just for the splendid bad taste of the pre-caring Hurt who reassures the patient whose chest he has just opened up, a mousy little woman who wonders whether she will still be attractive to her husband, by saying: "You tell your husband you'll soon look like a Playboy centerfold—you've already got the staple marks...

...It shows how Tinseltown's imaginative world presents to us a sheer, unscalable rock-face of philistinism that renders it inaccessible not only to alien art forms but to much of life itself...

...T hat is a joke to relish, even though I you know the Hollywood ethos could never let it stand without giving its perpetrator his comeuppance...

...If you could surgically remove the last third of it, a gangrenous appendage suppurating with schlock uplift and junk psychology, the surviving organism would be quite watchable...

...erhaps the movie culture is never more self-absorbed than when it seems to disparage itself...

...This past July, reports the irrepressible Kommersant (July 15), things really got rough in the Siberian city of Omsk, whose democratic representatives in the Russian parliament had launched a drive to recall their fellow deputy Sergei Baburin after he attacked Yeltsin...

...Meanwhile, the seamy side of Soviet diplomacy is explored in a June issue (No...

...It doesn't do much, but what it does it does well...

...But, going characteristically over the top, the film makes him add that he will sign the life insurance policy after he comes back and that he is carrying with him the solution to global warming and vital new evidence about the assassination of President Kennedy...

...Of course there is no Grady, South Carolina (the film was shot in Florida), except in Hollywood's imagination, so naturally we fmd that it is full of amusing grotesques, lovable rustics, and committed environmentalists...

...23) of the weekly Stolitsa ("The Capital") in an interview with Alexander Zimelev, who achieved the distinction of spending seventeen years (1973-90) in the Soviet foreign service without being a party member (though mostly working, for that very reason, in the ghetto of the publishing department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs...

...At home in Omsk, there were rallies for and against Baburin, culminating in an article in the Omsk Pravda by 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...

...At least Doc Hollywood is funny...

...Mel Brooks's Life Stinks stinks...

...Later that day, they called to announce that they were in South Africa, doing fine...

...But this engineer came to believe that he was a real, world-class artist...

...what could go wrong...

...But there is something rather incestuous about the exercise...

...Barton Fink's highly wrought symbolism takes on an expressionist, almost surrealist quality that I find occasionally gets in the way of its powerful meditation on the connection between life and art...

...When the purveyors of the lbugh Woman myth, for example, decide that the time is ripe for a female private dick, they don't know any way to represent one except to put Philip Marlowe or Jake Gittes in skirts...

...In the same way, in the old days of movies, you knew that both the bad guy who bragged that no cop could kill him and the good guy who had a dream of something he want-ed to do before he died were goners...

...While this initiative was eventually dropped, Baburin, a leader of the nationalist, pro-empire "Russia" faction in parliament, was successfully blocked from being elected chairman of the Russian legislature in a July 13 vote...

...There is something almost charming about such unashamed imbecility...

...Bad Hollywood...

...The beating Miss Turner suffers, spitting out one-liners along with her teeth, is nothing by comparison...

...Giving Dirty Politics a Bad Name Before glasnost made breast-beating an approved national sport, there were many clandestine jokes that made fun of official propaganda's tendency to proclaim the superiority of all things Soviet by twisting these slogans into such lines as, "We have the world's smallest dwarfs...

...How can the man who produced some of the funniest movies of the last twenty-five years be guilty of this sentimental rubbish about an uncaring billionaire who learns true-life values from a supposedly wacko bag lady (the horribly miscast Lesley Ann Warren) but still gets to go on being a billionaire...

...SOVIET PRESSWATCH ON THE EVE by Cathy Young This column was completed before the stunning roller-coaster events set off on August 19...

...There is a good joke about this in the Tbp Gun parody called Hot Shots, where one of the pilots is affectionately known as "Dead Meat...

...Both these films are marredby a little too much artistic self-consciousness...

...The love interest (Julie Warner) is a vegetarian law student who urinates around a hunters' blind in order to keep the deer away...

...Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...And all Hollywood's fans cheer...

...For one thing, it's got some good lawyer jokes...

...But it is a lot more exciting than mere myth-making...

...You've got to love a God with such a sense of humor...

...Corrupt, decadent, phony Hollywood...

...The Miracle's use of stage imagery—a second-rate production of Destry Rides Again and a traveling circus—pushes to the limits the idea of life as a series of grotesque and demeaning public performances...

...All are highly to be recommended, but our films of the month (there are two), like others of the cinematic culture's self-referential syndrome, get into the mirror world of fiction about fiction...

...What's the difference between a lawyer and a catfish...

...Hurt, for all his soulful sensitivity, is much more likable when he is the bad and insensitive doctor, before he learns to be the caring doctor, ever solicitous of his patients' tender feelings...

...Here is the Hollywood ethos pressing its nose against the dingy glass of its shop window in an attempt to see what lies outside...

...This is the second introduction I have written since then...

...Somehow, this new Geist is more offensive to the spirit of comedy than to the spirit of melodrama...

...Conversely, assignments to friend-ly socialist states in the Third World were used as punishment for provincial party bosses who had, for example, made an especially egregious mess of the fall harvest drive—Cuba being a popular place of banishment...

...You come away from it feeling depressed that Hollywood has to prey on itself to come up with its best comic situations...

...To make their escape, they had to extricate their passports from the clutches of the embassy's consular division and slip past Soviet counterintelligence officers...

...The trouble is that you are half afraid this may be true prophecy THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 33 If that is the direction in which our culture is headed, the day may be coming when all films are films about other films—unless they are quasi-documentaries...

...CY Edifying thoughts on Soviet global policies, diplomacy in the new age, and such are coming our way this October, when the Free Press brings out the memoirs of former CPSU attack dog in Georgia, ex-Soviet minister of foreign affairs, and democrat extraordinaire Eduard Shevardnadze...

...In Barton Fink, as in the Coens' last picture, Miller's Crossing, the admittedly improbable combination of rich visual imagery, snappy dialogue, and bizarre incidents works together to create a filmic world that at times seems more frighteningly real than we could have imagined from the real world itself...

...When the dead Rd decides to possess the body of his father he observes: "Well, it worked in The Exorcist--I and III...

...Bill and Ted Bogus Journey branches out a little into parody not only of cinematic after-death scenarios but also of the whole California youth culture...

...The reluctant diplomats, Zimelev goes on to say, took out their injured feelings on the embassy staff and sometimes on the local friendly leadership: One, brooking no objections, would force the politburo of the fraternal party to master the difficult science of the game of "billygoat" [a Soviet variety of dominoes], while another, from Central Asia, would raise a flock of sheep at the embassy and entrust their care to the staff as a top priority...

...When I saw the film the audience laughed with delighted recognition at the very sight of a man who has always seemed a walking self-parody...

...THE TALKIES DEAD MEAT by James Bowman AA round the time that the first ,It„Rocky film came out, Sylvester Stallone bragged in an interview about how easy it had been for him to write the screenplay: I'm astounded by people who take 18 years to write something...

...ut both these pictures are superb Lill examples of movie-making that does all art can do to remind us of how much more miraculous and terrifyingthe world is than our most compelling imaginative re-creations of it...

...The number of filmic motifs parodied here must reach some kind of all-time high...

...Such values are good box office, and so, to that extent, they are Hollywood's values too...

...Soon, the Soviets may be able to boast of having the world's dirtiest politics...

...That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary...

...According to a report in Izvestia (May 28), the women, who had access to classified materials, were apparently forbidden to leave embassy grounds without escort...

...In fact, you know that Hurt's fate is sealed when he says that...

...There is enormous fun—though perhaps not a feature length's worth of it—in watching Bill and Titd win a return to life by defeating Death (William Sadler) in a game of Twister...

...In The Miracle, Jimmy's adolescent attempt to blame God for that which he cannot blame on anyone else leads to an epiphany, engineered by Rose, in which escaped circus animals stand for both the absurdity and the pathos of the human condition...

...Next month: the Russian Revolution of 1991...

...For another, it's got William Hurt in the title role...

...Zimelev complains that despite their image as high-living sexual profligates, low- and mid-ranking members of the Soviet diplomatic corps have been kept not only on a tight budget—barely enough to scrape by abroad—but on a tight leash: "immorality" or divorce could be grounds for a freeze on promotions, a transfer to a ghettoized job, or a ban on foreign travel...

...Kathleen Tirrner in V Warshawski ("a private eye as tough as her name") is the kind of absurdity that is infallibly to be expected when Hollywood has found a popular motif that it is determined to beat to death...