The Talkies: Twister Act, Part Duh
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Twister Act, Part Duh" by James Bowman Twister Act, Part Duh It's that time of the year again, a season loathed and detested by all true movie lovers— summer blockbuster time. I crave the patience of...
...perhaps it is one consequence of the undervaluing of drama by our culture that often the best films are documentaries, or quasi-documentaries...
...He only has to look mean and nasty and then die, like the others, after a furious tussle with Dave...
...The filmmakers share in the fun of such absurdities with an JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement audience reared on irony and no longer expecting anything much in the way of verisimilitude...
...Why, he reaches into his little knapsack and pulls out a laser-screen neutralizer...
...After all, you are not watching this for the people but for the special effects...
...All the way through she has insisted on "the natural superiority of women over men" and tried to envision the future of the human race as a sort of withering away of the penis...
...It is the film's essential insight to develop this similarity between the two —not with any sort of polemical or ideological purpose, but just to show how, as much as the two of them created the sixties, they also confronted it with something other, something serious that the seriously frivolous sixties could not comprehend...
...I can't help thinking that it is somehow the same illusion which is being catered to by the Hollywood fantasy industry in our own day...
...Yet another unexplained murderous thug pops up, and sits in his big black car outside the house of Baldwin's Dave Robicheaux, an ex-police detective from New Orleans with a drinking problem...
...Do they believe in magic...
...Yet, for all their new sophistication about illusions, the makers of these ironic blockbusters still haven't spotted that one...
...We see the law in operation in Twister by Jan De Bont, the director of Speed...
...Why indeed...
...The result resembles a pornographic movie that simply goes from one sex scene to the next with scarcely a pretense of continuity...
...But none of them have anything much to do with one another, nor do we ever understand why the characters are doing most of the things they do...
...0Ifi The American Spectator • July 1996 67...
...Like Speed, Twister is remarkable for its complete lack of dramatic structure and characterization...
...For any kind of coherent statement about that decade finally boils down to the same statement: What a gigantic illusion it all was...
...In the film, at least, both are real people in a way that others among the "revolutionary" ironists of their era were not...
...How could so many people have been so foolish...
...But then every moviegoer knows how stupid the CIA is...
...I don't know," replies the poor wife, distraught...
...I'm still not sure, but I do remember that Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian DePalma, was markedly less believable than Spy Hard...
...Still the De Bont motto is: When in doubt, give them another tornado...
...Paxton and Miss Hunt are supposed to be divorcing (we have no idea why), when they fall in love for, presumably, the second time...
...She gets the film's one genuinely funny line when, shaken and horrified after almost being blown away, she says: "You used to tell me you chased tornadoes, but I always thought it was a metaphor...
...Here the formula is varied slightly in that Mr...
...The film has only to combine and re-combine the elements of high-technology, miniaturization, disguise, and split-second timing...
...The director can't be bothered to concern himself with such pedestrian details...
...What does he do...
...The similarity is not to impressionist painting but to impressionist music, which is built on what musicologists call non-functional harmonies...
...This year I saw Spy Hard and Mission: Impossible on successive days and found that I could not disentangle the two in my mind...
...I crave the patience of those admirable few who don't wish their blocks busted by special effects and industrial-strength irony, but it is part of my job here to notice what is going on among those who produce exciting entertainment of such dreary uniformity...
...I Shot Andy Warhol by Mary Harron, the Movie of the Month, may be an even better picture about the sixties than Crumb, the MoM last August— although there is a limit to how good a good film about the sixties can be...
...You'd think, by the way, that the CIA would have learned by now from a thousand crummy movies not to put in ductwork that two men with a small hardware store between them could crawl through on their way to pilfering the nation's secrets...
...he looked like a big bad guy, Dave...
...Why should we care what happens after we are dead...
...The best moment in the film is at a wild party where the sixties types are all frugging away to the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic...
...There is a promising comic sideline in the character of Melissa (Jami Gertz), the "reproductive therapist" whom the hero It's not Andy Warhol who should've been shot it's the makers of those lousy summer blockbusters...
...Like Tertullian, movie audiences now believe because it is impossible...
...Here it is the plot which is non-functional...
...Andy Warhol (Jared Harris) and his would-be assassin, Valerie Solanis (Lili Taylor), are the only two people not caught up in the moment...
...Such entertainment is subject to Bowman's Law, which states that the more hi-tech the special effects, the more rudimentary the drama...
...TH THE TALKIES by James Bowman Twister Act, Part Duh It's that time of the year again, a season loathed and detested by all true movie lovers— summer blockbuster time...
...asks hubby thoughtfully.44 Besides the tornadoes, the fetching Miss Hunt, in her snugly-fitting tank top, is the only thing worth watching here...
...There is a great moment in the middle of the film—I would like to think it's self-awareness or self-parody, though somehow I doubt it...
...It used to be thought funny and a sign of aesthetic failure when an author discovered that he'd got his characters into difficulties he couldn't well get them out of and so introduced into the proceedings a deus ex machina —a divine personage of some description winched onto the stage in order to suspend the laws of nature and get the good guys off the hook...
...They are still centers, like the twin eyes of a hurricane, as the dancers jump aroundthem—and other people take drugs or fornicate at the fringes of the storm...
...And it must be admitted that the flying cows and trees and oil-tankers and combine harvesters are briefly amusing...
...In fact, there are so many machinae that the dei are as plentiful and as unremarkable as beetles...
...She goes out to meet him with a shotgun...
...Again and again, dramatic situations build up to set-piece, movie-like scenes...
...It was like the South Sea Bubble or the Dutch tulip craze: a kind of mass hysteria, except that its effects have lasted longer...
...In place of the mere folly of those around them they represent a kind of divine madness —the literal kind in the case of Valerie, who was always more than a little unbalanced and obviously suffered from a form of paranoid dementia by the time she shot Warhol...
...Prim and prissy in her professional woman's suit, she is no match for the fetching Miss Hunt in her snugly-fitting tank-top who, besides the tornadoes, is the only thing worth watching here...
...They alone are somehow apart from all this, though also very much a part of it—an essential part...
...There is not even that much in Heaven's Prisoners by Phil Joanou, which stars Alec Baldwin as a sort of bayou Bogart...
...This is the last in a series of direct-to-camera speeches setting out her beliefs, but somehow the last one is the only one that makes sense —not as a manifesto but as an explanation for why she did what she did...
...It is still funny, but now it is done deliberately...
...But it also does badly what Hollywood does badly...
...I especially liked the bit where Tom Cruise, in the process of breaking into the CIA's secure vault at Langley, Virginia, encounters a laser-screen designed to prevent intruders from wrenching off the grille over the air-conditioning duct...
...In both, a couple (there, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, here Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt), as characterless as they are nerveless, fall in love in the process of surviving a monotonous series of increasingly implausible near-death experiences...
...The thug scares his wife (Kelly Lynch) "half to death...
...He must have picked it up at Radio Shack on the way there...
...Mission: Impossible redefines the standard for dei ex machinis...
...Let's not kid ourselves, it seems to be saying: We both know that this is a fake, that these are not real people...
...What did he look like...
...And so he did...
...It is just such impossibilities, however, which make the mission the perfect subject for the new Hollywood— just as it was for the old TV-land, where nobody expected realistic drama either...
...I don't know if these are indeed the essence of the spy business, but they are certainly the essence of contemporary moviemaking...
...Accordccordingly we have the sense that we are watching a movie that is not nearly so much about spies and intrigue as it is about moviemaking—that is, the manipulation of the higher technologies for purposes of entertainment...
...66 July 1 9 9 6 • The American Spectator proposes to many before falling for his ex-wife again...
...In fact, it seems to go out of its way to pile cliché upon cliché, postmodern style, as a way of thumbing its nose at the whole idea of drama and characterization...
...There is little effort to make it coherent, or even comprehensible...
...Neither Dave nor we have to know, or ever do know, anything more about him...
...Later, she does so, but he knows no more of Victor Romero than we do...
...It is the essential question for an era whose rationale was based on the illusion of youth that death is for somebody else and that the thousands of generations of human history have gone to produce only themselves...
...Either they're the only ones who don't or the only ones who do...
...Of course the film does well what Hollywood does well—special effects, photography, the technical side of things...
...Mary Harron gives Valerie a marvelous moment right at the end of the film when she sums up the manifesto of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men...
...He is only interested in his carefully crafted, evocative but discrete images, derived from film noir of the 1940's and '50's, of tough guys and gals striking poses...
...Yet here, with an air of finally seeing the logic of her own position, she asks: If there are no more males, "Why produce even females...
...Tell your husband that Victor Romero was here," says the plug-ugly...
...But she, too, turns out to be only a caricature...
...This is an example of what might be called impressionist film-making...
...Maybe the French Revolution is the better comparison, except that the FR was a serious affair and the sixties, though they had very serious consequences, fundamentally were not...
...And which is the one with Leslie Nielsen and farting jokes...
...That is, drama...
...There is one, sort of, but only enough to establish a minimal connection between one scene and the next...
...What else would he do...
...Why should there be future generations...
...Now which is the one that makes fun of an unbelievably lucky but moronic action hero who miraculously extricates himself from every difficulty with some implausible piece of gadgetry...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
