The Talkies / Clueless Kids at the Apollo
Bowman, James
Clueless Kids at the Apollo by James Bowman / t is perhaps unseemly for me to speak ill of my fellow critics, but I sometimes think that the fraternity to which I belong comprises the most gullible...
...Take a brief look at the film's press kit, and see what a leitmotif the words real or reality form: "As Clark remembers, none of the teenage films of his youth possessed the elements of reality the genre was begging for...
...Clark must have thought to himself: What is the sure way to win the media's Janet Cooke "Reality" Prize for 1995...
...When Poke's daddy, the noble Indian chief Powhatan (who also looks a bit like Robert Shapiro), tells her that the champion warrior of the tribe wants to many her, she replies with a fetching little curl of her lip: "But he's so—serious...
...Moreover, her true passion, Captain John Smith, has the voice of Mel Gibson and the appearance of some teen heartthrob like Luke Perry who, we know, make up between them Cher's ideal of masculine pulchritude...
...And, as if the gross stuff were not in itself testament to the film's authenticity, all the way along we have those classic hallmarks of cinematic "reality," the moving camera, the blurry foreground or background in extreme closeups, the use of traffic and street noise and polyphonic talking to make portions of the dialogue difficult or impossible to hear...
...A lot of people just got sold a bill of goods is what happened...
...The obviousness of this pitch for the teen market, and thus of the film's contempt for historical authenticity, is one of the less happy consequences of the vogue for the ironic and postmodern—as is the shamelessness of its political message...
...Looking a bit like Robin Givens or Naomi Campbell, Poke is certainly as sexy as Cher in an off-the-shoulder buckskin number that barely covers the essentials...
...It is just silly to complain that a film like Apollo 13 doesn't look as if it were directed by Ingmar Bergman...
...Lovell (Tom Hanks), Haise (Bill Paxton), and Swigert (Kevin Bacon) and their dedicated ground support—especially Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell, Ed Harris as Gene Kranz, and Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly—are too busy with matters of life and death and mind-boggling technical difficulties to devote any attention to the state of their own psyches...
...That's exactly what it looks like inside...
...Even Smith appears as ethnocentric and insensitive when he says to Poke: "We'll teach your people how to use this land properly...
...I especially liked Cher's telling her father, a $500-an-hour litigator who looks like Robert Shapiro (Dan Hedaya), that she has not yet got a final report card because "some teachers are trying to lowball me...
...For those in the know, the paral60 The American Spectator September 1995 lels to Emma make an interesting diversion (Frank Churchill, for instance, is gay), but what promises to be a satire of mindless teen culture ends up, like most Hollywood attempts at satire, taking the part of those that it would satirize...
...You only have to look at the phenomenon of Kids, the new film by Larry Clark, which has made its impression on critics, journalists, and op-ed writers for exactly the same reason...
...You have to believe that these are some bad kids—because that's what the kids and their impresario want you to believe...
...it's no surprise that Clark's vision of the great American teenage movie was one that breaks the genre free of the barriers of cinematic fantasy, and is unquestionably grounded in the reality of its generation...
...Easy...
...You produce a story that fits our preconceptions and we will swallow it whole, not pausing even to nibble...
...He envisioned twenty-four hours in the lives of teenagers caught in the action of being teenagers, dealing with the realities of life that are unique to the 90s, as well as the realities James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement and media columnist for the New Criterion...
...Completely and utterly bogus from beginning to end, as any fool not blinded by liberal and intellectual preconceptions could tell...
...Stress on the TV drama of the astronauts' return also adds a cheap and vulgar touch: That everyone was or was not watching it on TV was the important thing about it, according to Howard...
...The standard of verisimilitude here can be little more than that of Jim Lovell, who told the New York Times interviewer: "It's really amazing," as he looked at the film's mock-up of the command module: "Everything...
...And so on...
...The evil English governor, Radcliffe, is given to saying things like "We'll eliminate these savages once and for all" or "Anyone who so much as looks at an Indian without killing him is guilty of treason and will be hanged" or "A man's not a man unless he knows how to shoot...
...As an exercise in teenage postmodernism, I prefer The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers by Bryan Spicer...
...That story concerned a child drug addict, and was instantly accepted by Ms...
...Telly tells us he is fond of deflowering virgins, but he is unaware that he is being pursued by one of his victims, Jennie (Chloe Sevigny), who has just found out that he has given her HIV...
...As "reality" this may not be much, but it sure beats the factitious variety pretentiously concocted by Kids...
...It will never even occur to us to doubt or question it...
...In both cases, violence is parodied and thus domesticated—made safe for the little ones, who could hardly be scared by the evil in this film...
...of life that are true to every adolescent generation...
...This is not to say that the film doesn't provide some richly comic moments...
...And the first-rate excitement of the drama of getting the spacecraft home safely is better than second-rate psychologizing about it anyway...
...Clueless Kids at the Apollo by James Bowman / t is perhaps unseemly for me to speak ill of my fellow critics, but I sometimes think that the fraternity to which I belong comprises the most gullible people in the world...
...In such a film the real conflict is with the machine and the elements, and everything else is a distraction...
...Get some 17-19year-old kids with time on their hands to do the most awful, disgusting, gross-out things you can think of (or, even better, that they can think of) on camera, add a touch of pathos about AIDS, and all the dorky parents who have been trying to keep abreast of the intellectual fashion since they were growing up in the sixties will hail it as a masterpiece of reality simply for fear of being thought out of touch...
...To be sure, Ron Howard is not above such old-fashioned tricks as adding soaring strings to the already impressive, computer-generated pictures of the rocket taking off, or making an annoying sub-theme out of American Graffiti-like nostalgia for 1970-vintage clothes, cars, music, and technology...
...The one thing, almost the only thing, that Hollywood still does well is the techno-thriller...
...But criticism of the film for the two-dimensionality of its characters seems to me to be misconceived...
...There's always something that doesn't ring true...
...Little kids of six or seven will take it seriously and get excited by the subplot in which children rescue their parents, who have been turned into zombies by the bad guy, Ivan Ooze...
...The instrument panels, the console switches...
...Later there are more drugs, group sex, rape, and the trashing of one boy's parents' apartment while they are out of town (this will cause reality-sniffing oldies a particular frisson...
...The Power Rangers works on two levels...
...7 The American Spectator September 1995 61...
...The real-life Beavis and Butthead are Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce), who, though white, talk in the foul-mouthed accents of black street lingo, full of yos and bros and wassups, with the all-purpose s-word a frequent signifier for the entire range of the comprehended but unexpressed...
...I remembered what you said about never accepting the first offer," she says, and when she successfully negotiates her grades upward he tells her: "I couldn't be happier if they were real grades...
...Kids themselves are more sophisticated and likely to see through the pretense of "reality," which is perhaps the only happy consequence of the vogue for ironic and postmodern pictures over the last fifteen years or so...
...Though the literal-minded Germans have taken "The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" TV show off the air for being too violent, they might as well take professional wrestling off for the same reason...
...Cooke's journalistic peers because such sordidness fits so many preconceptions about what modern-day intellectuals insist on calling "reality...
...And they won't get the 12-year-old comedy of having one elaborate fighting machine, looking like an insect made out of an erector set, kick another in the groin...
...Of course only people who have taken civilization for granted all their lives could have crafted such a dialogue as that, or depicted the Indians as sentimentalists who sing nonsensically about painting with all the colors of the wind...
...Like Pocahontas, the Power Rangers have to learn to "trust in your sacred animal spirit," but at least they are clean-cut California teenagers who do wholesome things like skydiving, roller-blading, and kickboxing to pop music and don't, like Poke, talk to trees...
...I n the grand tradition of teen flicks, Kids is essentially a buddy picture...
...It's never real,' Clark says [so...
...It is a female buddy picture about spoiled and fashion-conscious kids in Beverly Hills, featuring Alicia Silverstone as Cher and Stacey Dash as her best friend, Dionne (both "named after great singers of the past who now do infomercials"), who take up and make over a newcomer to their posh school just as Emma does with Harriet Smith in Jane Austen's novel...
...When you hear the words real and reality being used this much, you can pretty much bet that a fake is being described...
...Slightly older kids of 12 or 13 will enjoy feeling superior to their younger siblings, but will find in the film's lurid villainy, its stilted and self-consciously "hip" dialogue, its over-the-top, color-coordinated fashions and stylized fighting, an introduction to camp...
...during a wild party watched by a quartet of dope-smoking 11-year-olds...
...According to an interview with the real Jim Lovell in the New York Times, even the one bit of the picture that attempts to inject a bit of dramatic conflict—where Lovell and Haise quarrel with Swigert—was a complete fabrication...
...The final line of the film is delivered by Casper, alone, speaking to the camera: "Jesus Christ, what happened...
...A s long as we are on the subject of kids' movies, we might as well make Apollo 13, the best one of this summer season, the Movie of the Month simply for telling its story straightforwardly and without making Power Rangers—or worse—out of the astronauts...
...And, my God, what a fake Kids is...
...The last presumably marks him as wicked even more indelibly than "All the gold is mine...
...While she is searching for him he not only bags another brace of maidenheads, but he and Casper steal some food from a Korean grocery, go to a friend's house to smoke some dope and sniff some nitrous oxide, dodge the fare on the subway, steal money from Telly's mother, beat a guy senseless in the park, then spit on him, and even kick a cat...
...They are more likely to be impressed by Amy Heckerling's Clueless, which covers the same territory as Kids only with tongue in chic...
...Naturally she bridles at this and primly instructs him that when he calls the Indians "savage"and "uncivilized" what he really means is "not like you...
...Intellectuals in general are predisposed to this malaise, which should be called the Janet Cooke syndrome, after the Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize a few years ago for an entirely made-up story...
...Fortunately, they are most of them over 40 and have been getting suckered like this for years...
...Actually, Cher reminded me a lot of the suburban American high school girl that Disney has made out of Pocahontas in its latest animated feature...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
