The Talkies /Proxysms

...What would a movie like this be without a line like: "You're accurate, ethical, and I want you out of this building...

...Certainly Barry Levinson has since his charming early films Diner and Tin Men...

...Actually, practically everybody is accurate and ethical—and very boring about it they are, too...

...This is the actor's, and in particular the would-be actor's, inability to distinguish between illusion and reality...

...He even puts Hugh Grant—who shows in Four Weddings and a Funeral what a good line in abject embarrassment he has--on the screen to cringe for us...

...He is there at carjackings and drug buys miraculously to put a stop to them and deliver the criminals bound to the police in an instant and without breaking a sweat...

...Or perhaps it is because, like Roman Polanski (director of Bitter Moon), they are so jaded and tired of the conventions of their art that they send them up, almost automatically, just for a laugh, just to relieve the boredom of too many fictions...

...Rarely if ever has postmodern satire risen to such heights...

...It is the sort of film that the Papuans might make if they were to appoint, as Saul Bellow assures us they never do, Papuan anthropologists to study contemporary America from the record of its commercial films...

...When Chip lets slip a scatological epithet, she says: "Chip...

...Roman Polanski from his Parisian exile has also, it seems, been dabbling in postmodernism...

...Frank Drebin in apron and furry mules—have conquered and occupied dear old Hollywood...

...From the schmaltzy score by Vangelis to the echoes of old tough-guy clichés in the flashback narration by Oscar (Peter Coyote), his Bitter Moon drags out the story of a tragic love affair to such lengths of melodrama that it becomes a comedy, an amusing tale of failure and self-destruction that has the authentic hard and glittering surface of the postmodern tale: full of cleverness and sparkling irony but without an ounce of real feeling...

...Perhaps it is because, like Ron "Opie" Howard (director of The Paper), they have much more experience of movies and television than they do of real life...

...And Polanski savors every cringe...

...That is why the Movie of the postmodern Month is John Waters's hilarious Serial Mom, with Kathleen Turner as the housewife-cumserial killer ("Don't be silly," she says brightly, "the only cereal I know anything about is Rice Krispies...

...His latest, Jimmy Hollywood, is overloaded with artistic pretension and postmodern technique and itself falls foul of the very foible it purports ever so gently to mock...

...Unfortunately, The Hudsucker Proxy, is not in that class...

...Eternity for me began one fall day in Paris . ." we hear him say—not once but several times...

...Oscar's great work proves to be the narration of the story of his romance with his wife, which he tries to tell in the style of his tough-guy heroes...

...Later she kills a boy who has stood Misty up and a couple who have said insulting things about her husband...

...Later, after she gets off, she beats to death a juror (Patty Hearst) who has annoyed her throughout the trial by wearing white shoes after Labor Day...

...p erhaps the Coens themselves have been spoiled by success...

...A woman customer at the video store where Chip works doesn't rewind the tapes when she brings them back and Serial Mom beats her to death with a roast, screaming at her "Rewind...

...There are echoes here of Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct and others of the genre, but Waters is not just doing pastiche...

...Beverly Sutphin, Turner's character, is obsessive about cleanliness and decorum, does not allow gum chewing in her house, and sternly disapproves of the use of foul language...

...Turns out that Michael Keaton and Marisa Tomei can have it all, even ifpoor old Robert Duvall cannot...

...They do want us to know—and they want us to admire them all the more...

...Instead, he only manages to produce the cliches of bad art, which distance us from him and hopelessly spoil the authenticity of what he is trying to relate...

...It may be that Levinson is trying to do something very bold and daringly postmodern here, but I suspect he has just shown that even postmodernism must be grounded in a modicum of reality...

...Its hero is an innocent, Candide-like figure, played by Tim Robbins, who is supposed to be an imbecile but is not...

...and then looking on in satisfaction as her reply in the negative elicits a gasp of horror from the courtroom...

...It only does comedy well...

...When one of Chip's friends with whom she is constantly annoyed for not buckling his seatbelt reveals that he suspects her of the murders, she chases him down and burns him to death, shouting: "Buckle up, Scottie...

...With it, he is able to make the exquisite joke of bringing on Suzanne Sommers to play Serial Mom in the TV mini series and have her say: "I will play her with the dignity that this feminist heroine deserves...

...But it turns out that it's only a jest...

...Grant listens to that story with the mixture of interest and aversion that we ourselves feel and so puts even more distance between us and the ineptnarration of Oscar...

...p ostmodernism does not do deep and tragic pathos...

...In particular, it looks back to the classics of this genre, like The Front Page and His Girl Friday, where the reporters were always quick-witted and funny, as well as cynical and hard-boiled...

...The comic possibilities are obvious and classic Waters, but his purpose here encompasses a larger and more specific ambition: not merely to parody the media culture in general but also to send up one of Hollywood's newest and silliest cliches: the tough-gal flick...

...There's nothing inherently wrong with another movie about funny, outrageous, fast-talking reporters, but somehow this one doesn't ring true, even though a lot of the jokes are funny...

...At least Joel and Ethan Coen seem to have had a purpose in their exhumation of His Girl Friday in The Hudsucker Proxy.The Coens are the American masters of the postmodern style of movies about movies, and their Miller's Crossing is one of only two in that style that I know of (the other is Jaco van Dormael's Toto the Hero) with something more than wit and sophistication—with, that is, the power to touch our hearts possessed by the old movies that they parody...

...He must learn the lessons taught by all the old movies—to be true to himself and the girl who loves him and not to be spoiled by success—but here the lessons are overwhelmed by the clever, knowing, self-regarding postmodern tricks that still knew their place in Miller's Crossing...

...ters and romanticizes them even when it pretends to be ripping the lid off the secrets they don't want the public to know...

...Without the context of the Hollywood tough galas well as that of the daytime talk-shows and "A Current Affair," which the family exploit during mom's trial—this would just be the exercise in Watersesque bizarrerie that some critics seem to think it is...

...In the denouement she continues the superwoman theme by defending herself at her trial and annihilating the case of the prosecution with a mixture of lawyerly technique learned from television and appeals to suburban prejudices...

...But when Chip and his sitcom sister Misty (Rich Lake) and their sitcom dad, a dim dentist played by Sam Waterston, leave the house, she makes obscenephone calls to a frightened neighbor (Mink Stole), reads about notorious killers and carries on a clandestine correspondence with Richard Speck and Ted Bundy...

...It is set in a city that looks like New York but is not, at a time that is supposed to be 1959 but is not, and purports to be about the invention of the hula hoop but is not...

...The managing editor wants to save some money by sticking more closely to the production schedule...

...Coyote, whose name is itself a postmodern touch, plays a crippled American would-be novelist in Paris whose idols are Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Henry Miller but who is hopelessly out of their league as a prose stylist...

...Howard makes the moral issues a little too easy even for postmodernism...

...She also kills for a standard of fastidiousness that comes out of as bygone an era as that of the perfect housewife and homemaker...

...With nothing more than a starting pistol he is shown catching criminal after criminal and never coming to any harm himself...

...The latter's account of what Grant calls "your perverted sex life" to a total stranger makes us laugh at that which this failed novelist obviously intends should be taken as partly inspirational ("I want to expand your sexual horizons," he tells Grant) and partly redolent of deep and tragic pathos...

...And we groan every time...

...In short, she is the perfect mother: not only can she make a great meatloaf and perform spectacularly in bed, but she also stands up—and mows down—for her brood...

...Joe The American Spectator June 1994 59 Pesci plays Jimmy Alto, a failed actor whose big break as a media star comes when he becomes an anti-crime vigilante...

...Surprise...

...In one case she discredits a witness by asking: "Do you recycle...

...These also make their appearance, in excerpted form, with the help of the sitcom son Chip (Matthew Lillard), who has a wholesome and scholarly interest in cinematic gore...

...who terrorizes a suburban Baltimore neighborhood...

...But this is not any more fudged or simple-minded than the film's other major conflict—between work and family...

...Waters juxtaposes the bland, suburban, Ozzie-and-Harriet existence of the Sutphin family—which of course has never existed and could never exist outside of sitcomland—with the equally artificial world of putatively scary but ultimately comic slasher movies...

...Cringe, cringe, cringe...

...Who do you think is going to win...

...When Chip's math teacher tells her that the boy should see a counselor about his unhealthy interest in horror films—and then compounds the offense by putting a stick of chewing gum in his mouth—she runs him down with the family station wagon and then backs over him to finish him off...

...71 60 The American Spectator June 1994...

...In other words, it is another one of the beautiful people's home movies, like The Player, which flatJames Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...The ostensible conflict that provides the mainspring of the plot is between the city editor (Michael Keaton) and his managing editor (Glenn Close) over stopping the presses to include a story which is (a) a huge scoop and (b) an exoneration of a couple of decent black kids who, had the story not run, would have been proclaimed to the world as murderers...

...These are not the elite corps of academics, the Waffen SS led by Foucault and Derrida, but a ragtag army of couch potatoes who make movies more about other movies than about real life—either simply to send them up, like Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, or for more obscure reasons...

...You can tell that something is not quite right because it became a Hollywood event and real New York reporters were fighting each other for cameo roles and for tickets to the gala premiere...

...Who do you think is right...

...Rather, he puts his tough gal, Turner—who perhaps established her credentials for the role by starring a few years ago in one of the first and the worst of the tough-gal flicks, V.I.Warshawski—in a context where we expect an old-fashioned, fifties style of femininity...

...This is not just fraught with comic potential, it is a brilliant idea for social satire...

...The Paper, for instance, is based at least as much on old newspaper movies as it is on real newspapers...

...You know how I hate the brown word...

...The gates of paradise opened," he says, or "forever's a long time, baby," or "I pressed my lips to hers as if I was mashing a butt in an ashtray" or "I loved her too, but our credit was running out and we were headed for sexual bankruptcy...