The Talkies/The Multicultural Multiplex

...The Women's Picture has always been around, of course, but now more aggressively claims to stand on equal terms with real art...

...It may be that there are rather dumpy single mothers who have come out of nowhere to make it big in stand-up, but if there are they are rare...

...17I The American Spectator May 1992 67...

...No minority can stick its flag in the sands of the Republic of Imagination...

...Locke escapes with the beauteous and long-lost Kathleen, his taxes still unpaid...

...Mickey O'Neill (Adrian Dunbar) is a young nightclub proprietor in Liverpool with a gift for the blarney that is wearing thin among his nearest and dearest...

...Women's Pictures, Black Pictures, Latino Pictures are all Johnny-comelatelys in Hollywood compared with Youth Pictures...

...there ain't nothin' you can tell me about racial hatred...

...Even in the movies these days you can hear the old Pander Bear growling in the background, and this month there is a particularly large collection of special-interest films which, even where they are otherwise good, in some ways are meant to exclude the rest of us in order to stroke the political dignity of some moviegoing constituency or other...

...That is a lot of what the film is about...

...She is also, coincidentally, the mother of Mickey's girlfriend Nancy (Tara Fitzgerald...

...She rightly replies: "Bulls--t...

...But then any movie whose humor is accessible to all and which laughs at fine sounding nonsense is a conservative movie...

...It isolates them and their admirers from common experience...

...And long live the Revolution...

...Always wonderfully impossible and sometimes hilariously funny things happen here, but the people are completely true to life...

...Maybe it is just ordinary, mediocre art...

...Go see it if you can...

...Two Cuban brothers (Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas) come to the U.S...

...Altogether a girl thing, I guess...

...To appreciate American Me, you need to be not only Hispanic but a convict as well...

...This saleswoman's success is pretty much taken for granted, since the standup routine, what we see of it, is not even funny, unless with an esoteric female humor that I don't get...

...A less skilled artist could have ended up with one of those fanciful science-fiction worlds whose non-existence is the only good thing about it, but Chelsom has the requisite lightness of touch...

...A member of one minority insists to a member of another minority that his minority has suffered just as much as the other's minority...

...For though much has been made of the stupidity of the two heroes, Wayne and Garth (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey), the whole enterprise depends upon their knowing complicity with the audience, who to understand them must be plugged in to the same mindless world of junk television and heavy metal music...

...The hip and the cool are the ultimate in privileged minorities...

...This is My Life, by Nora Ephron, the story of a single mother and cosmetics saleswoman, played by Julie Kavner, who decides to risk all to become a stand-up comedienne...

...The real Josef Locke is "a bigger draw than the pope," a singer before whom women weep...

...If it weren't for the acting of Washington, Choudhury, and Seth, it would be very tedious stuff indeed, but they are all such attractive characters in their own way that both the love story and the bitterness of the Ugandan exile are made believable, though not as affecting as they ought to be...

...You can spot the romance, the charm, the danger, and the attractiveness of the grand, self-destructive gesture on behalf of their proud independence, but somehow it all doesn't add up to a dramatic conflict that will be comprehensible to anyone whose cultural roots are planted north of the Rio Grande and the Straits of Florida...

...My Film of the Month, Peter Chelsom's Hear My Song, may not be great art—it is too light and sentimental for that—but it is a thoroughly entertaining example of how the most unpromisingly exotic material can be made accessible to the human generality...

...Clowns like Bill Clinton and George Bush go about trying to please every imaginable constituency, as if the wacko demands of NOW or the America Firsters had come straight out of their own most deeply held convictions, and any sense of what is good for the country as a whole is forgotten for the duration...

...Both Mickey's nightclub and his romance are finished at a stroke...

...The Mambo Kings, by Arne Glimcher, is much more accessible, but it still seems to me to be a minority picture...

...I haven't been where you've been, seen what you've seen . . ." To Nancy he says, with great profundity: "There are givers and there are takers: I've found a kind of giving in my taking...

...He is so used to charming people that he thinks he can get away with booking an act by an awful singer called Franc Cinatra whom people won't be able to tell from his namesake...

...The film is evocative of the period (1902) in which the residually African way of life of the Gullahs, ex-slaves from the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, all but disappeared in the northbound migration...

...Mickey decides that the only thing to be done to recover them is to go to Ireland and find the real Josef Locke (Ned Beatty, of all people), who is living in retirement as a country squire, and persuade him to return to England for a comeback performance...

...Pop culture is thus simultaneously mocked and revered while the sometimes funny but always arch jokes and the youth-cult neologisms cut those in the know off from everyone else...

...People who haven't been in the big house cannot possibly imagine what it is like, which makes it just the sort of subject the multicultural movie-makers want...

...But when it begins to dominate the arts and education, I am tempted to despair...

...The aged matriarch (Cora Lee Day) sees herself as charged with keeping the culture alive in the diaspora, just as women had kept it alive under slavery...

...B lack Pictures are almost as common as Women's Pictures these days, though black women's pictures like Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust are still a rarity...

...Mickey sounds like Bill Clinton when he butters up old folks by saying: "I'm 30...

...It does the heart good to see a film whose romantic hero is a tax rebel...

...I was born in peacetime...

...Girls are allowed their impossible dreams too, I admit, but this is not a picture about the achievement of the dream...

...The latest of the genre is James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Films, like other artistic es-says, are based on somebody's partial experience, and only the somebodies who have a really outstanding artistic gift—i.e., those who are in the minority of artists in all ages—have the ability to make their experience genuinely universal...

...Latino Pictures look like being the next minority fashion...

...When Kathleen goes up to Mr...

...The final scene has a Fellini-like visual quality as Mr...

...Not only does it strike a blow against multiculturalism, and so help to contain the encroachment of politics upon ordinary life, but it also supports those who would roll back the frontiers of the high-tax state...

...The story is as complicated as only an Irishman could make it...

...X/Josef Locke in his Zorro hat and cape is hoisted through the roof of a crumbling theater astride a wrecking ball that the manic Chief Inspector Abbott (David McCallum) tries to commandeer from Franc Cinatra but can't operate...

...In danger of losing his club unless he gets in an act that his fed-up landladies like, he settles with typical chicanery on a "Mr...

...and for a while they ride that era's wave of popularity for Latin American dancing before coming to grief for reasons that 66 The American Spectator May 1992 remain more or less obscure to us non-Latinos...

...n the end, it is probably not politics or multiculturalism or the end of Western Civilization as we know it that is responsible for all this imaginative exclusion...

...To start with, it is full of weird dislocations that, like an Irish version of "magic realism," place us in a world whose non-existence is the guarantee of its universality...

...As it consists of weird voodoo-like rituals and ancestor worship, however, it is hard to wish their efforts well, unless you are really very strongly into multicultural non-discrimination...

...Everything about it is interesting except for its emotional resonance, which seems prettymuch limited to those, like its Indian family expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972, whose lives are defined by the fact that they are "people of color"—i.e., of the wrong color...

...But the big hit among early spring movies, Wayne's World, is so full of in-jokes and adolescent humor that it makes those who don't go for that sort of thing feel as incorrigibly unhip as a Latino at a black film festival...

...X's room to relight the old flame, she comes back down humiliated by the discovery that the man is an imposter...

...And behind whom...

...Wayne and Garth's stupidity, in which the film glories, is really a kind of sly superiority...

...X," who may or may not be the famous Irish tenor Josef Locke, who escaped to Ireland one stepahead of the taxman twenty-five years before...

...At one point, Denzel Washington, who plays the Mississippi black man who falls in love with the daughter of the family (Santa Choudhury), says to the girl's father (Roshan Seth): "I'm Mississippi born and bred...

...Mississippi Masala is another Black Picture, though made by the Indian, Mira Nair, who did Salaam Bombay...

...If you're not a member of either minority it's kind of hard to get into...

...Where is there escape from politics once the "multiculturalist" begins dividing the world up into "minority" constituencies, each with its own proprietary culture...

...Anything this funny has got to be subversive of all political priggery, too...

...It is something to do with pride and honor and sexual jealousy and a strong sense of family—things associated with those hot-blooded Latins, you know...

...in the 1950s and start a band...

...If the circus did nothing more than determine the fate of our national wealth and defense, I could bear to watch it with a good humor...

...Let us experience other cultures by all means, but let's also remember that what gives them value is not the ethnic or sexual identity of their creators but the extent to which they are rooted in universal experience...

...But the photography is nice, and much of the dialogue is happily incomprehensible...

...Do not try this at home...

...The Multicultural Multiplex by James Bowman Election year reminds us how terrifying it is when the political beast is not driven snarling back into its cage with whip and gun but allowed to roam abroad and terrorize people who are trying to get on with ordinary life...

...It's enough to make you want to call it a conservative movie...

...Forsaken when Locke fled to Ireland was Kathleen Doyle (Shirley Anne Field), Miss Dairy Goodness of 1958, who has never been able to forget him...

...I suppose it could be argued that, because even if we are not women, blacks, or Latinos we are all young at some point, Youth Pictures are not in quite the same category of minority-interest flicks...

...It is rather a picture about sisterhood, about keeping the kids on board, giving them "life lessons," etc...

...They land a spot on "I Love Lucy" as pals of Ricky's (played here by Desi Arnaz, Jr...

...As in Mississippi Masala, the acting—together with some exciting music by Robert Kraft—keeps the interest alive, but the whole must be judged an artistic failure if you have to be Hispanic to understand it...

...With the help of some more magic and a friend who is a Dublin theatrical agent (James Nesbitt), he does so...