The Talkies: Polyester Slackers

...Moreover, his professed reason for loving the opera, because its eighteenth century glitter reminds him of the genteel surroundings of his own childhood, including dances in "our ballroom," also turns out to be bogus...

...As no one else cares enough about what they are doing to oppose his passionate interest in this project, they find themselves actually doing it—with a cast that includes a dangerous pyromaniac, a desperately shy lawyer, whom Roy continually taunts as a failure, a young female junkie, an unbelievably uptight and suicidal middle-aged woman, and a manic older woman called Sherry (Jackie Weaver) who imagines that Louis is in love with her...

...An even more impressive film is Cosi by Mark Joffe, the Movie of the Month...

...With the logic of farce (which only a foolish critic would quarrel with) they meet again by chance at a kitschy honeymoon resort called the Hotel de Love where Rick is working and carrying on a loveless affair with the supposed gypsy fortune-teller, Alison (Pippa Grandison...

...And so, perhaps, will you be...

...68 April r 9 9 7 • The American Spectator I t is not, after all, unheard of for a rich country, like a rich parent, to spoil its young, and in our case this natural tendency is exacerbated by the endemic corruption and artistic bankruptcy of Hollywood...

...My favorite of these comes when Rick and Melissa agree to two minutes of absolute honesty with each other and Melissa asks "Why do men lie...

...Linklater, who is adapting a play by Eric Bogosian, is too much enamored of the slacker "lifestyle" (as they would no doubt call it) himself, too much given over to the same kind of childish self-dramatization, not to take them as seriously as they take themselves, in spite of (or even because of) their moral and intellectual nullity...

...Nazir's words are only meant to give us pause for a moment in what is otherwise a shameless wallow in adolescent self-importance and self-pity...

...TH E TALKIES by James Bowman Polyester Slackers On their second time around, it looks as if the Star Wars movies may be even more successful than they were the first time, although their pioneering postmodern effects now look as dated as disco and leisure suits...

...This is enough to bring out the curmudgeon in any man...

...Louis's private life is a complement to the mad house opera...

...The gap between Roy's fantasy life, his exaggerated imagination of himself and reality—so similar to the unhappy reality of the other patients—mirrors the gap between what we continue to hope and expect of love and what it actually is...

...Having watched for nearly two hours another collection of Linklater slackers, a year or two out of high school but with nothing better to do than hang out at the local convenience store and advertise their fecklessness, their uselessness, and their charmlessness, we are more than well-disposed to Nazir's disgusted dismissal of them: "You people are so stupid...

...You throw it all away...

...One such is Craig Rosenberg, whose Hotel de Love is, for all its faults, a much more charming and attractive look at young love in the go's than Smith's...

...Whatever may be the truth of this observation, it is one which the action of the film tends to bear out...

...Like Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee), his slacker creations who are themselves creators of the comic "Bluntman and Chronic," he has been given the freedom of an artist too early, at an age when he ought to be doing his army basic training, or serving as an apprentice in some factory—or in the movie business...

...It suggests that Linklater himself, at least, may grow up some day...

...But thousands of miles away across the Pacific, young Australian filmmakers are showing that it is possible to be fresh and lively and funny without the emotional and intellectual slovenliness of their American counterparts...

...Perhaps surprisingly, there are indications in the films themselves that this may be the case...

...He bets Louis, in an echo of the central incident of the opera, that Lucy will not be true to him, and then goes to work more or less subtly, while Nick becomes more and more obsessed with Cosi, to try to seduce her himself...

...Now, by contrast, even children adopt the singularly unlovely pose of cynical worldly-wisdom known as "hip...

...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...and another to "Joey"—presumably Smith's comely but not very talented female lead, Joey Lauren Adams, to whom he addresses a profession of love under the name of "Poopie...

...What's wrong with you...

...Like their hobbit-like anthropoids, "the force" was a childish, New Age fantasy, involving personal powers that transcended mere materiality...

...Nick's own live-in girlfriend, Emma, has thrown him out after they each discovered the other in infidelity...

...It is hard to imagine that he will not be spoiled by the experience...

...You may get an idea of the comic possibilities here, many of which are well-exploited, but the film also has serious and not entirely callow points to make about love...

...But if we're near you some of your goodness might rub off...

...Bowman's "Movie Takes" on current films are available on TAS's web site— httpillwww.spectator.org...

...Do Australia's twenty-somethings have anything to teach ours about being grown-up and being in love...

...He is paralyzed with stage fright...

...7, with something of Stephen's optimism, based on his survey of the percentage of arriving passengers at airports who are met with a welcoming embrace, about the chances of finding happiness in love...

...Love, that is, which is not merely the youthful sexual experimentation that he and Nick and Lucy have all hitherto treated it as—and as Nick continues to want to treat it as—but as an immensely serious as well as an immensely funny business, inextricably bound up with painfully old-fashioned ideas of fidelity...

...As do the unutterably silly series of dedications at the end of the credits, one of them to God (Oh, God...

...By the end of Chasing Amy, the heroes of which are zo-something authors of comic books whose emotional maturity is still that of their teenage audience, there is the unmistakable suggestion of a dawning maturity...

...Finally, he answers that it is because "we" (meaning men) are not as good as "you" (meaning women) are...

...Yet even that pause, that bump in the road to artistic ruin, is something...

...One can only hope that both Linklater's SubUrbia and Smith's Chasing Amy will look even more dated in twenty years' time than Star Wars does today...

...Cosi fan Tutte, as Roy perhaps intuitively realizes, is a way of restoring for just a moment a primal state of elegance and perfection that no one has ever known first hand...

...Yet even the films' postmodem cleverness has a certain innocence about it...

...E-mail him at 72o56.3226@compuserve.com...

...It tells the story of fraternal twin brothers, Rick (Aden Young) and Stephen (Simon Bossell) who fall in love with the same girl, Melissa (Saffron Burrows) at a party when they are i8...

...So might Kevin Smith...

...And so it persuades us that "real love between two people is possible...

...In the film's climactic scene, Roy's theatrical career is revealed to have consisted of his once having worked, briefly, as a stage electrician...

...Sober and hard-working, he is a part-time engineering student who expects to get a good job and a house with a swimming pool when he finishes his course in two years...

...Nazir is not likely to make the same mistake...

...Melissa arrives with her fiancé, the nerdy Norman (Peter O'Brien), just as Stephen arrives with his and Rick's parents, Edith (Julia Blake) and Jack (Ray Barrett) — who, despite thirty-odd years of more or less constant fighting, have come to renew their wedding vows...

...He had been given up by his parents to an orphanage...

...If not the cult of prolonged adolescence itself, then at least adolescent sexual experimentation (which, it hints, may even include homosexuality) is seen as being ultimately and properly put away, like other childish things, for the sake of old-fashioned monogamy...

...Rick gets in first and claims her, while she thinks of Stephen as just a good friend...

...It is not thus that the Gulf war was won...

...tion in which the film is heading, it would not be such a shocking waste of your time...

...We want to hide our failings so as to be allowed to be near you, and are afraid you might not allow it if you knew how really bad we are...

...When he sees the drunken louts who "hang out" at his family's store and mock and yell racist taunts at him, he is naturally contemptuous of them...

...Based on a play by Louis Nowra, it stars Ben Mendelsohn as Louis, a young college dropout who doesn't really know what he wants to do and takes a job in a mental institution where, as a former drama student, he is expected to assist with the inmates' therapy by directing them in variety shows and the like...

...The American Spectator • April 1997 69...

...But this is not how we are meant to feel...

...As with the film itself, it is a cruelty on the part of his financial backers that they have made it possible for this youth to do something about which he will be cringingly embarrassed once he grows up...

...Ten years pass, and Rick and Melissa lose touch...

...Or so one would suppose from the films of Richard ("Slacker") Linklater and Kevin ("Clerks") Smith, both of whom are exhibiting their latest and equally God-awful opera this spring...

...Or if a more comprehensive judgment against thesekids is intended, it is overwhelmed by the careful attention we are invited to give to their deep, deep shallowness through the tedium of its previous no minutes...

...Just so...

...He is living with a final year law-student called Lucy (Rachel Griffiths) when his best friend and fellow drama student, Nick (Aden Young, who plays Rick in Hotel de Love), asks to move in with them...

...We end44 Cosi restores for just a moment a primal state of elegance and perfection...

...It is hard to sit through all that seventies claptrap about "trusting your feelings" and Luke's shutting down his computers as the sure-fire way of hitting the target...

...Nick says that he was unfaithful to her only after he found out that she had been unfaithful to him and is disposed to a touch of misogyny after his experience with Emma...

...This is a hard one, and Rick asks to be allowed to warm up with some other questions...

...If, for instance, it were possible to take the final words of the Pakistani convenience store clerk, Nazir (Ajay Naidu), in SubUrbia as the real direcJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...It is this faith and not the cheap and vulgar cynicism of Linklater and Smith that is the mark of artistic, as of personal, maturity...

...But his mission is quickly hijacked by Roy (Tony Otto), one of the patients who is supposed to have been an actor and whose lifelong ambition it has been to stage a performance of Mozart's opera, Cosi fan Tutte...

...You throw it all away, huh...

...As the curtain is about to rise and Louis desperately tries to talk him into coming back to take his part, the young man suddenly realizes how much he himself has come to love the opera and its staggeringly humane view of mortal love...

...If he grows up...

...Or, as Louis puts it, "real love...

...The comic books, however, stay...