The Talkies: Too Much of a Good Thing
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Too Much of a Good Thing" by James Bowman Too Much of a Good Thing 0 ne measure of America's greatness is the extent to which we are insulated from the sorts of life and death concerns that have preoccupied...
...This Harold Becker film is another tale of "real" life in the big city, this one involving politics as well as crime...
...We are meant to leave feelingvery much in the know...
...We will all get jobs," he happily assures Gino...
...My favorite bit of it, apart from some hilarious double entendres that establish the cinematic link between sex and violence, is when the crazed Air Force officer played by John Travolta explains what he is going to do with his share of the $250 million (a rather modest demand, surely...
...But the look on their faces is a reminder of the promise that has always brought people to America—the promise of wealth and independence and security...
...Amelio presents the exodus of refugees from Albania to Italy in 1991 as the equivalent of the Italian migration to America in the early part of the century...
...fact a gang of small-time hoods gathered together by one jimmy the Saint (Andy Garcia) to do a job for a crippled crime boss known only as "The Man With the Plan" (Christopher Walken, in what has by now gone way beyond typecasting, through cliché, and out the other side into self-parody...
...National ink: the mother's milk of politics," says the mayor's assistant Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack...
...This kind of thing makes all the characters sound pompous and self-important...
...Pulp Fiction is the exception that proves the rule because now all the imitations of Lynch go through it and are imitations of Tarantino imitating Lynch...
...It's untranslatable...
...He regrets that he is not able to take with him his delicate young wife and their little baby (both probably long dead), but he is determined to go and get a job in America...
...The mayor is supposed to be capable of inspiring a young idealist like Calhoun, but the only examples of his idealism are not promising...
...What's that...
...Christian Slater, as Travolta's straight-arrow adversary, has the modesty and coolness of the true hero, even if he is (like everybody else in the picture) a44 The script in City Hall is too literary—an oddly common failing in these supposedly gritty and realistic dramas—and everybody is always quoting (or misquoting) somebody else...
...I was reminded by seeing a genuinely good and moving film (foreign, of course) —Lamerica by Gianni Aurelio...
...62 April 199 6 • The American Spectator The mayor's classical code of heroism he calls menschkeit...
...says Calhoun, who comes from Louisiana...
...And every Tarantino movie is much worse than the last...
...That's why it's Yiddish...
...The ironies of these two Italians, reduced to Albanian penury and anonymity as they try to make their way home, are fully exploited, and the film ends on a ship packed to overflowing with refugees bound for Italy, among whom are both Gino and Spiro...
...Thus Pentagon types lie about the crash of the nuclear bomber because that is what movie Pentagon types always do...
...The "dead" are in JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...How curious, then, that the more we see on screen of the criminally corrupt and the psychopathically violent, the less real it all looks...
...But Spiro thinks he has got on a boat in Italy for America...
...Not the American heaven...
...The more comfortable we get, the more uncomfortable it makes us...
...We're making a mistake...
...I didn't think they would all get on," he says of the masses of people, "but America's a big place...
...The cleverness with which this is accomplished is the least of what is to be admired in this film...
...This is what a postmodern movie ought to be (assuming that you believe there ought to be postmodern movies at all...
...The general replies: "The truth...
...But it transpires that Spiro is not an Albanian at all, but an Italian like themselves — a prisoner of war who has languished for fifty years in the unspeakable prison...
...There is at least some moral complexity to it, since we are meant to sympathize with Pappas in spite of his moral failings, but it is for the most part frankly unbelievable...
...Unfortunately, we have to sit through a lot of would-be witty dialogue (like most of that in Denver) as we look for them...
...Little did those old-timey immigrants suspect that it might be possible to get too much of it...
...The emphasis on witty dialogue in all these films shows that there is also the almost classical aim of showing a hero acting cool under fire...
...I love to see it in a guy...
...You got the stuff," Pappas says to him...
...Execution, intended to be as painful as possible, consists of the introduction of a large-caliber bullet into the fundament of the victim (called a "buckwheat") by Mr...
...It's graft and favors for friends and dividing up the spoils of power...
...The filmmakers, as they generally are in America, are more ambivalent about "the stuff...
...04 James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...It is such a classic film-heavy line that the general himself laughs at it, as do we...
...Shh, a wimpy-looking little hit-man played by Steve Buscemi...
...Not only have we never had it so good, no one has ever had it so good...
...It is a ludicrous farrago of tasteless nonsense and hyperbole, though it is meant to seem a noble and uplifting effort...
...The American Spectator • April 1996 63...
...It is at this point that the most impressive thing about the film makes itself apparent: the stunning photography of the beautiful Albanian landscape that is the setting for scenes of unforgettable economic and human devastation...
...Suffice it to say that the director, Gary Fleder, makes David Lynch look like Preston Sturges...
...From endangered blue collar workers to suburban feminists, from downsized middle managers to animal-rights activists, everybody these days seems to have a grievance against the system that has brought us all this fantastical wealth...
...We're better off just telling the truth...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Too Much of a Good Thing 0 ne measure of America's greatness is the extent to which we are insulated from the sorts of life and death concerns that have preoccupied most of the human race throughout most of the world for most of its history...
...The main point is always to invite us into the underworld ambiance so that we can pretend we are at home there...
...After so many postmodern movies, I guess it is about time we had a postmodern title...
...We learn some criminal argot (like "buck-wheats"), most of which has been invented by the writer, and watch some appallingly conscience-free behavior the likes of which we have never seen in the real world...
...The script is too literary (an oddly common failing in these supposedly gritty and realistic dramas), and everybody, especially the mayor, is always quoting somebody else...
...It's something about honor and stuff between men...
...Above all there is the universal desire to emigrate to Italy created by the contrast between miserable Albanian poverty and the televised images that waft across the Adriatic...
...But if that is the main point, it is not the only point...
...It would be as tedious and unnecessary as it would be to go over the inessentials of the meaningless plot...
...It is what a correspondent of the British Spectator once called the "Robin Redbreast in a cage" syndrome, from Blake's lines: "A Robin Redbreast in a cage/Puts all heaven in a rage...
...Especially embarrassing is his speech over the coffin of a dead child gunned down by a drug dealer...
...As Jimmy the Saint's love interest (Gabriel Anwar) says to him: "You're doing the talking thing again...
...How did you get this job anyway...
...I plan to live off my dividends content in the knowledge that I'm helping to build the safest automobile in the world...
...The film is in fact an imitation of Lynch that obeys the Postmodern Law of Imitations—namely that every imitation of Lynch is worse than the last, including those by Lynch...
...Woo even makes fun of this convention when he has a baby-faced whiz kid (Frank Whaley) say: "Wait...
...The heroes of films like this one are always doing the talking thing, but, like Jimmy, they rarely do it well...
...When he wanders off into the countryside, thinking that he is back home in Sicily, Gino has to go after him (Fiore, meanwhile, returns to Italy...
...he is asking in return for not blowing up Denver with a pilfered nuclear weapon: "I've got a broker in Stockholm that's going to buy me five percent of Volvo...
...Later, at the climax, Calhoun confronts his old mentor with his own corruption, insisting that "menschkeit is horses--t...
...The humor of it, like that of the film itself, alas, is rather feeble...
...You would think that heaven would have more important things to be enraged about...
...Not only does it move with the speed and slickness of a Spielberg product, but there are even more breathtaking special effects, as all contemporary forms of transportation are seen crashing spectacularly during the course of the film...
...The same is true of Al Pacino playing John Pappas, the flawed mayor of New York in City Hall...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226 @compuserve.com...
...Far be it from me to adumbrate the psychosexual implications of this typically postmodern invention...
...Yet it is not quite irrelevant either, since it also allows the broken mayor to admire "the fire in the belly" that he once had in the young man who turns him in...
...Take, for instance, Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead...
...And then, falling asleep on his shoulder, says: "I want to be awake when we reach New York...
...That is not the case with John Woo, the Hong Kong–born director of Broken Arrow...
...1) clich...
...Iliked Broken Arrow so much that I almost forgot that, good as it is as a movie, it is pretty thin gruel as a representation of reality...
...It's a classic postmodern line but still thoroughly enjoyable, as is the fact that Woo is allowed by the Chinese conventions within which he works to take "the stuff between men" more seriously...
...To the Chinese, at least, menschkeit is not yet horses--t...
...Told that theyrequire an Albanian puppet to head their dummy company, they settle on Spiro (Carmelo Di Mazzarelli), "a hero of democracy" whose years in prison under the Communists have obviously unhinged him...
...Having messed up the job, the members of the gang all find themselves under sentence of death by TMWTP, from which there is not the slightest hope of escape...
...Or misquoting...
...Like Amelio's last film, Il Ladro Di Bambini (Stolen Children, 1992), it is a Movie of the Month...
...The camera pulls back and the film ends on shipboard with a series of close-ups of unforgettable refugee faces, whose poignancy is increased by the knowledge that Italy returned most of them to Albania...
...At the movies, this rather superstitious anxiety manifests itself in a voyeuristic fascination with the seamy and violent side of life, of which most of us would otherwise see very little...
...It is reassuring to me that, for all our worldly wisdom and sophistication, we do still believe in heroes...
...In true postmodern fashion, Woo is unashamed, even proud, of his clichés...
...One paradoxical consequence of our unprecedented prosperity and security has been the proliferation of outrage...
...Moreover, the dialogue, by Graham Yost (who also wrote Speed), is often genuinely witty...
...Or as seriously as he takes anything...
...Two Italians, Gino (Enrico Lo Verso) and Fiore (Michele Placido), come to Albania after the fall of Communism in order to work a scam with the government grants available to those who would bring development to Albania...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
