The Talkies: Loonie Tunes

...These are represented in this film by Rob Lowe as a smarmy-looking Ralph Reed type, head of something called the "Conservative Coalition," by Jake Busey as a wacko fundamentalist preacher in a white kaftan and shoulder-length bleached hair who turns out to be a terrorist, and by the pseudo-profundities of a New Age gum called Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who is not so spiritual that he is prevented from inducing Ellie to drop her drawers within hours of meeting him...

...I laughed myself silly over the combination of Chan's remarkable physical grace and the unselfishly comic purposes to which he puts it in this absurd but strangely familiar tale of a martial artist and three gorgeous girls braving the perils of the desert in a search for Nazi gold...

...Chloe (Garance Clavel), a lowly makeup girl in the salons of the fashion industry, loses her cat, Gris-gris, and the rest of the film consists of her efforts to find it with the help of her gay roommate, Michel (Oliver Py), a mentally retarded Algerian immigrant, Djamel (Zinedine Soualem), and a whole platoon of cat-loving spinsters and widows in the neighborhood of La Bastille, organized by the redoubtable Madame Renee (Renee Le Calm...

...Ha-ha...

...One of these days, probably in a fit of absentmindedness, a teacher somewhere will set an examination question asking who the Nazis were and find out from his pupils that they were a weird but ruthless criminal gang who hoarded gold, talked in funny accents, and used their money to build fantastically elaborate but completely incomprehensible machines underground in the desert...

...Like Elmer Fudd shooting him-self with his own shotgun, or Wile E. Coyote blowing himself up with his own rocket, Meg enjoys the cartoon privilege of immortality...

...So George the ape man (Brendan Fraser) is forever crashing into trees as he swings through the jungle on his vine, and each time he does he leaves a human-sized imprint on the tree...

...hazards Smith...

...The action of the film calls for some cartoon Nazis and some cartoon Arabs, so why not some cartoon history to go along with it...

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

...Jones condescends to become a mental teenager here for the sake of the joke...

...Here Cartoon Science and Cartoon Religion and Cartoon Politics are all neatly packaged together with a New Age sensibility into the kind of commercial product that absolutely depends on the combination of innocence and imbecility for which American cinema audiences are becoming world-renowned...

...In other words not much...

...Yet the capacity of the largely teenage American cinema audience to believe that, when it hears such banalities, it is hearing something deeply meaningful is apparently limitless...

...Guess what...

...As in all Disney's recent products, the subtext is that anything which is not reducible to the Cartoon terms readily comprehensible to overindulged, late twentieth-century adolescents only exists in order to be made fun of...

...j odie Foster plays Ellie Arroway, a stunningly brilliant astrophysicist who has chosen to throw away (as her scientific colleagues see it) her awesome talent in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence...

...It is a little hard for me to understand the sort of mind for which a universe modeled on these lines would be inspirational, but it is apparently not rare...

...While the Cat's Away by Cedric Klapisch offers up an old-fashioned romanticism about Paris and la vie de Boheme and, well, romance with touches of humor and pathos worthy, almost, of Truffaut...

...Cabdrivers...

...Even cartoons are translated into JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement Cartoon, as in the case of George of the Jungle which, like The Flintstones of a couple of years ago, was made by people who seem to think it is hilariously funny when cartoon conventions are duplicated in live action...

...And it shares with the media a gut-level hostility towards traditional conceptions of holiness or religion...

...So does Hercules, who inherits it not (as his latest redactors pretend) from father Zeus but from father Mickey...

...This is as good a definition as we are likely to have of the new Philistinism...

...So at the climax of the film when it seems that the beauteous Meg has saved both Herc and the world by giving up her own life, and Phil tells the hero, "There's some things you just can't change," Hercules, replying "Oh, yes I can," proceeds to bring her back from the grave...

...Unimaginably distant civilizations have simultaneously adopted as their nearest approach to the transcendent an exchange of radio pleasantries across the light-years, with an occasional expensive meeting for the purpose of putting faces to the disembodied voices...

...Either Hollywood has abandoned any attempt to appeal to a mature audience or (a terrifying but increasingly inescapable thought) there is no longer a mature audience of any commercial significance in America...

...The Cartoon World is at its best when it avoids subjects, like those from Greek mythology, with some traditional connections to the real world and sticks to familiar cartoon subjects like space aliens...

...Alien black marketeers and spies have been joined by alien war refugees, "most of them here in ManhatThe problem is that even kids think they're stupid...

...Alas, I cannot offer a sample of Chan's wit without ponderous explanations, since virtually all the comedy depends on the visual context, as in a well-drawn comic ship...

...Along the way, the search for Chloe's cat becomes a metaphor for her search for love and companionship in the anonymous but strangely hospitable city—and both turn up in the end, unexpectedly, under her nose...

...This month's Movies of the Month shall be one of each sort...

...Even the estimable Mr...

...The ambassador begins his explanation of how the gold got there by asking Jackie what he knows about the Second World War...

...That at least is what they are in Operation Condor, parts of which are dubbed into English in a style reminiscent—as is most of the acting—of cheap foreign pornography...

...But for amusing trash I am drawn back to Operation Condor, in which Jackie Chan directing himself is much funnier than he is in his more calculated assaults on the American market, Rumble in the Bronx, Supercop and Jackie Chan's First Strike...

...Everything is translated into Cartoon these days, for an international audience that increasingly understands little else...

...Smith, who also saved us last year in Independence Day, instead of recognizably authentic heroes...

...Especially among media folk...

...Philoctetes), as a particularly mindless bunch of late-twentieth-century American pop-culture addicts...

...But its real language is Cartoon...

...Their casual sexual liaison is obviously meant to stand for love in the same way that bodiless mathematicians 26 light years away are meant to stand for God...

...To my mind the joke grows quickly tiresome, and I could barely stand to be saved from terrestrial annihilation yet again by such wisecracking kids as Mr...

...The message is almost lost on account of the media circus it gives rise to, and the machinations of nasty and selfish politicians and religious leaders, but it is essentially a message that the media could have scripted (in effect, has scripted), namely that the universe is a cosmic version of the Internet...

...Here the Cartoon language really gets to stretch itself and show what it can do...

...If you liked the bogus uplift of Zemeckis's last film, Forrest Gump, you may find yourself attracted to Contact, but you should be warned that the bogusness has since multiplied exponentially...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site— httpillwww.spectator.org...

...Death has no dominion in Cartoon Land...

...Nor was he much more impressed with Disney's Cartoon Mythology in Hercules, which merrily plays havoc with some of the informing legends of Western culture in order to show "Herc" and his gal-pal "Meg" (i.e., Megara) and his personal trainer, "Phil" (i.e...

...Most importantly, Men in Black does not make the mistake of taking itself or its space aliens seriously, and so it is a thousand times more serious, as well as more entertaining, than the ghastly Contact by Robert Zemeckis, which takes everything, especially itself, with ludicrous seriousness...

...But he has thoughtfully provided an aged, crippled Nazi called (what else...

...Not as many as you'd think...

...She not only finds it (take that, scientific establishment...

...Yes, we learn, the aliens are already among us, but a special agency of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the "Men in Black") are doing a fine job of holding them at bay with the help of a little gadget (called a "neuralizer") which pops like a flashbulb and makes us civilians forget about the alien presence in our midst, allowing us to get on with our lives in blissful ignorance...

...That must be why I am so often driven to dig up some obscure foreign film as the only movie in a given month which is watchable by grownups, or else to adopt the post-modem spirit and recommend some particularly clever piece oftrash from off the commercial shelf, with which it is at least possible to laugh along...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Loonie Tunes N ear the beginning of Operation Condor, Jackie Chan is recruited by the American ambassador to Spain, acting on behalf of "the United Nations," to find a cache of gold bullion buried by the Nazis in the Sahara desert more than half a century ago...

...Naturally, awe and mystery do not survive in such a toxic environment any more than history does...

...E-mail him at po56.3226@compusermcom...

...Well, as Hamlet's good friend Horatio might have put it, "there needs no alien, my lord, come from the constellation Vega to tell us this...

...But at least some of the jokes in MiB are funny, as when Jones's character explains to Smith's that New York has become a sort of galactic Casablanca, "only without the Nazis...

...Perhaps such stuff makes eight-or nine-year-old children paralytic with laughter, but, like the rest of the film's attempts at humor, it left my eleven-year old cold...

...But then what does he, or indeed the audience, need to know...

...Adolf (Alfred Brel Sanchez) to ham it up and so to remind us that, even where the star does all his own stunts, there is nothing here that should be confused with reality...

...I forbear to reveal how it is that Ellie comes to travel to the stars and back in a matter of hours with the help of an eccentric and dying billionaire (John Hurt), or to learn from her Vegan interlocutor (cleverly disguised as her own dead father) the profound revelation that hers is "an interesting species...capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares...

...Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld from the comic book by Lowell Cunningham, never pretends to be anything but a live-action version, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith—of Cunningham's clever comic-book response to a familiar sort of popular paranoia...

...Suffice it to say that it involves a completely gratuitous government conspiracy, of a type familiar from at least a hundred recent movies, Ellie's remaining true to her atheistic principles but still being romanced by the dishy guru, and yet more profound truths imported from the stars—including "how insignificant we are" and, somewhat paradoxically, "that we belong to something greater than ourselves...

...He replies: "Enough to know that there must never be a Third...

...64 September 1997 • The American Spectator tan" and most of them "decent people, just trying to make a living...

...The American Spectator • September 19 9 7 65...

...coming via radio-telescope from the constellation of Vega, but finds with it a message of hope for the world...