The Talkies/Not Up to Speed
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES Not Up to Speed by James Bowman F or those who still profess bafflement about the meaning of "postmodernism" here is a simple definition: it is the process by which The Wolf Man has...
...You're a nice man," says Alden...
...I wouldn't have thought so...
...She informs him that she will accuse him before the police so that he will be lefthunted as well as destitute...
...For all intents and purposes, this is an almost unbelievably conscientious attempt to reproduce the original "Flintstones" carThe American Spectator August 1994 63 toon with all its 1950s cultural references, right down to Rosie O'Donnell's mastery of Betty Rubble's laugh...
...Such scary thoughts and images are beyond the capacities of postmodernism...
...Then, as she sleeps, he steals away...
...He tries to telephone her...
...The sets and the special effects are the stars...
...The result is a crop of cinematic pod people: more or less clever comedies but bland, anodyne, and self-referential, endlessly sending up the conventions of the half-remembered genre to which they now bear only the most superficial resemblance...
...Jim Henson's Creature Shop produced the prehistoric beasts to order, but the actors also have the cartoon features just right...
...This parade of images is a continuous demonstration that the technical challenges of re-creating the old cartoon have been overcome...
...He makes a will leaving everything to her...
...and lets him hear the sounds of her sexual excitement with another man...
...It tells the story of a Polish hairdresser called Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who, as we meet him, is on his way into a divorce court in Paris...
...T here is nothing to compare with this in The Flintstones, where the joke is not very good, or else too obvious and too often repeated...
...she has a shattering climax of which he says with satisfaction, "You moaned louder than on the phone...
...Who outside of the 1950s or early 60s would even have understood the joke about being "a modern stone-age family...
...Though not, perhaps, intentional, this is the best joke, as the romance novel meets Hollywood animal-sentimentality and we get Free Willy-werewolf...
...Why should the mad bomber (Dennis Hopper—also predictable) righis bomb to arm itself when the bus's speedometer hits 50 miles per hour and to explode when it goes below 50 miles per hour again...
...Naturally she is shocked to find him alive, but he talks her into bed...
...Like postmodernism it is the kind of thing you expect from a country where taste and artistic forms are disparaged or dead but there is still plenty of money...
...The Flintstones is a series of technical challenges rather than a movie...
...Of course, he gets his job back—and he gets Alden's gorgeous pouting daughter (Michelle Pfeiffer) into the bargain...
...If I had known you were this ruthless," says the tycoon, "I would never have fired you in the first place...
...Cavemen, we find, had milk delivery and drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants where they attached a tray to your car window...
...Gravelman on "The Young and the Thumbless...
...His modus operandi makes no sense except insofar as it provides the occasion for an action movie...
...There are, to be sure, some 1990s touches: The entertainment at the Cavern on the Green is the B.C...
...If I say I love you, you don't understand, and if I say I hate you, you still don't understand," she tells him...
...Various of his colleagues, including the oleaginous Stewart (James Spader), offer to go with him if he is dismissed, but he is more liked than respected...
...Will, who once rejected a Judith Krantz novel on the grounds that, James Bowman, The American Spectator movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...That's the modern media for you...
...No more is he the passive victim of the brutal Plummer or the treacherous Stewart, who has not only taken his job but is sleeping with his wife...
...From this abject state, however, he gradually recovers with help from his brother, from Mikolaj, and from a black market currency trader...
...they had all-male bowling nights and arcane lodge rituals and were married to stay-at-home housewives who were goofily smitten with the charge card...
...Likewise, there is a song called "Bone to Run" by Bruce Spring-stone...
...Neither the horror film material nor the Western material is used as anything except the basis for the pastiche, the joke...
...B esides making jokes, the only thing that Hollywood can hope to do well is special effects...
...The Spielbergian death-defying switchback ride uncluttered by any concern with characters or ideas but punctuated with a great many satisfying explosions is skillfully done by Jan De Bont in Speed, but he doesn't know when to stop doing it...
...Jack Nicholson stars as Will Randall, a senior editor with a New York publisher which has just been taken over by a giant media conglomerate ruled by Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), a ruthless cutter of anything not conducive to large profits...
...As he rolls down the hill into a pile of garbage he says, "Home at last...
...You have to stand back in admiration, really, at what nostalgia has wrought...
...As she returns to her hotel room, he is waiting for her...
...And this is to say nothing of the preposterousness of the film's "high" concept...
...But after Will is bitten on the hand by a wolf, he begins, like the heroes of the old horror flicks, to take on lupine characteristics...
...She says, "Perfect timing...
...There is, we can't tell how, an unbreakable thread of connection between the two of them that continues even after she mercilessly has him stripped of money and credit cards and then sets fire to the curtains in their former salon...
...The only question for the critic to ask in this brave new, postmodern world is this: Is it any good as a joke...
...Then he stages his own death with a black-market corpse ("these days you can buy anything," says his factotum: "You don't mind a Russian import...
...But Stewart also turns into a werewolf, and the joke becomes exquisite as the two bookish publishing executives with alarmingly aggressive dentition and hair sprouting from unlikely places writhe around in the dirt trying to tear each other's throat out...
...His French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), is divorcing him on the grounds that their marriage is unconsummated...
...But maybe that's just me...
...He begins to make money and before long is rich...
...it's a good thing I got rid of you...
...One of our most distinguished film critics has professed in my hearing admiration for both Wolf and Speed while disparaging the plausibility of my Movie of the Month, White by Krzysztof Kieslowski, because in it a man survives traveling in a suitcase checked through as luggage on a flight from Paris to Warsaw...
...Hanna and Barbera drew up the blueprints thirty years ago, and now, at last, we have the cinematic engineering skills to produce the real thing...
...He pleads that the problem is just temporary, that he needs a little time, but Dominique is unmoved...
...The worm has turned," he tells the folks at work, "and now he's packing an Uzi...
...So too is his flying heel click...
...Is this so incredible...
...In the end, instead of the fair maiden's love saving the lycanthrope for humanity, the two of them run off to the woods for a guilt-free gambol together as wolves tout court...
...Throughout this process there are wonderfully amusing and evocative scenes and very occasional reminders of his continued love for Dominique...
...She says that he is not dead, but of course he has by then disappeared without a trace...
...Blue took on liberte in an interestingly non-political way, and White is an even more interesting look at egalite—also non-political but with a political dimension that remains entirely implicit...
...As he watches this dumb-show through binoculars a tear rolls down his cheek...
...Brian Levant's live-action version of the television cartoon (starring John Goodman as Fred and Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma) casts prehistory in the image not of the 1990s but the 1950s...
...Like the miasma of evil from an old-fashioned horror film, it has consumed in turn each of the old genres—Western, gangster movie, family melodrama, and so forth—and turned them into jokes...
...First the elevator, then the bus, then the train: we begin to look at our watches and wonder how many more forms of transportation are going to smash up harmlessly around Keanu Reeves, how many more impossible situations is he going to get out of by doing the opposite of the expected thing—which has long since become a very expected thing...
...Fred Flintstone's bowling style, involving a gravity defying tiptoe shuffle, is here reproduced...
...THE TALKIES Not Up to Speed by James Bowman F or those who still profess bafflement about the meaning of "postmodernism" here is a simple definition: it is the process by which The Wolf Man has become Wolf, Mike Nichols's ironic homage to the horror film...
...Why anyone would want to bother to try to overcome them is another matter...
...W hite is the second in Kieslowski's three-part series based on the colors of the French revolutionary flag and the corresponding revolutionary demand for liberte, egalite, fraternize...
...In the final scene we see her in prison, making sign language out the window to the effect that if he will get her out of there, she will love him again and they will be happy...
...Listen...
...As it happens, the joke in Wolf is pretty good...
...On arrival in Warsaw, the suitcase is stolen, and when the thieves find Karol inside they beat him up...
...Why not just detonate the thing by remote control while the bus is standing still...
...As he tries to beg a few coins by playing on a comb and paper in the subway, he meets a fellow Pole, Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), who agrees to smuggle him back into Poland in the suitcase because his passport has been confiscated along with everything else by the lawyers...
...as he told her, "no semi-literate 14-yearold would read it" (a less than devastating put-down, since plenty of semi-literate 44year-olds did), is an obvious candidate for redundancy...
...It is as pointless to ask if Wolf is any good as a horror film as it is to ask if Maverick is any good as a Western...
...Somewhere between Werewolf of London (1935) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), it became impossible to play horror straight anymore...
...52s, there is a Cave News Network and a re-enactment of Fred's supposed crime (don't ask: it would take too long to explain and the plot doesn't matter anyway) by an actor who plays Dr...
...They had mother-in-law jokes...
...But these jokes, not exactly kneeslappers in the first place, are irrelevancies...
...Barney (Rick Moranis) is flattened against a cliff face...
...At last he is able to make love successfully...
...Karol watches from a distance as Dominique, arrived from France to claim her sizable inheritance, cries at his funeral...
...Never has hair's-breadth escape from certain death seemed so boringly predictable as it does by the end of this film...
...Shortly after, the police arrive, accusing her of complicity in his murder...
...Even the sort of cartoon disasters where a character is smashed up and then gets up again are essayed: Fred gets hit in the head by a flying bowling ball...
...In other words the film, in the true postmodern style, takes no pains to appear other than highly artificial and cinematic—and, as so often, this suggests to me not wit or irony so much as contempt for the audience, whose capacity for credulity is deemed infinite, as well as for the ostensible subject matter, whose unreality is a matter of indifference...
...Her merciless savagery toward him is breathtaking, of archetypal proportions...
...Neither are the worse for the wear...
...But the Poles haven't yet enough money to be postmodems...
...When she tells the judge that she doesn't love him anymore, Karol becomes violently ill...
...He has learned, as perhaps Poland has learned about its love for the West—or perhaps as every lover in an unequal relationship has to learn—that what he thought was a matter of love was really a matter of power...
...When did cinematic horror become funny anyway...
...64 The American Spectator August 1994...
...That's what postmodernism has done...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
