Screen
O'Brien, Tom
318: SCREEN LOST OPPORTUNITIES 'SECRET,1 'LULU,' & 'GARDENS' According to a friend (actually my wife), every once and a while it is refreshing to see a movie that flat out insults your...
...Businessmen have rightly complained about their media stereotypes...
...Like director Sydney Pollack appearing as Dustin Hoffman's agent in Tootsie, Kollek himself appears early in the film as Schygulla's literary agent, and tells her to stop writing serious novels and turn to trash...
...Fox wants a break, not nepotism, and, despite a college degree, accepts a tough job in the mail room...
...Caan is especially protective of one new face (D...
...Could such a productive and ethical vision of the corporation, almost out of The Search for Excellence, have been accommodated to the comic plot...
...in confusion, a passing couple think she is mugging them, and fork over money and furs...
...Her comic timing is delicious, especially when she hesitates before uttering to an ex-lover, in her educated German accent, the ultimate cliche', "Take a hike, babe, you're history...
...The makers of The Secret of My Success had a chance to represent this view of hard work when Fox, an earnest Kansan, tries to make it in Manhattan...
...The film has depth when it stays with the young, its sacrificial lambs...
...Most executives are honest and hardworking...
...But it isn't...
...perhaps The Godfather spoiled us...
...Despite the presence of appealing Michael Fox (fromfiacfc to the Future), the film is an exercise in imbecility, a grotesque version of a bad movie for pseudo-intelligent adolescent males...
...But when the firm becomes the target of a hostile takeover, he adopts an executive's identity and passes himself off as one of the many faceless vice-presidents...
...Phallic jokes are also repeated, and the songs are awful as well as sexually suggestive...
...To cite one example, Sweeney meets Huston, and naively mentions how he disagrees with Caan about Vietnam...
...Written and directed by Amos Kollek, brother of the mayor of Jerusalem, the film is a modern mock Perils of Pauline that amuses but also pushes dry humor to the point of disappearance...
...Aside from the imitative fallacy, the strategy suffers from long-windedness Kollek's early scenes could be twice as funny half as long...
...There are many candidates for the role these days, not the least The Secret of My Success...
...The film catches the look of the 1960s, especially in its interiors and the affectingly awkward miniskirts of Sweeney's girlfriend (Mary Stuart Masterson...
...Fox argues for expansion, driving stock prices up, and saving jobs...
...Like Woody Allen and his many would-be women artists, Kollek also depicts the search of incorrigible romantics for selfvictimization and the many chances for martyrdom that the religion of art provides...
...When some drug thugs capture her later, Kollek can't resist having them echo the phrase...
...The awestruck tone, at first apt for the kid-from-Kansas motif, becomes annoying as the camera repetitively treats heavy post-modernist skyscrapers as sacred temples...
...They are also bursting with angry feelings about the war, with some fresh-faced recruits eager to "get over to the front line," and two grizzled sergeants (James Caan and James Earl Jones) insisting "there isn't any...
...pushes himself into a distant relative's firm...
...Besides the setting (the same as in After Hours and Desperately Seeking Susan), the plot of Forever Lulu also shamelessly employs stock elements...
...Kollek also made Goodbye New York, the droll comedy where the sublimely ditzy Julie Hagerty happens into misadventures on a kibbutz...
...In Forever Lulu, Kollek employs the dreamy Hanna Schygulla in a similar comedy of error and terror on New York's Lower East Side...
...His technique implies, "I know that you know that I know that you've seen this scene before, but that's the joke...
...Never mind our disbelief that someone so beautiful could not get easy work modeling...
...In effect, she is his alter ego...
...But the comment, opening up the chance to study three separate judgments on the war (which still coexist to this day), never builds to anything...
...Schygulla ably carries the burden of her complex role...
...He also flubs a poor scene at an outdoor reception (reminiscent of the opening of The Godfather) where Caan punches out a cartoon version of an obnoxious antiwar activist (played by rock promoter Bill Graham...
...A very small dividend...
...The movie thereafter waffles incoherently between cliche'd satire on business and worship of the crudest materialistic success...
...many despise corporate raiders and insider traders precisely because such parasitism offends their concept of selfgenerated work and real productivity...
...To boot, it flubs an opportunity to say something insightful about youth and its present passion for success in an amoral business environment...
...Forever Lulu is not stupid but at times downright silly...
...The film provides a few moments of fun when Fox has to race from mailroom to boardroom to maintain the secret of his double identity...
...Coppola rarely establishes the rhythm needed to blend his stories into one...
...The soldiers call the cemetery "the garden," and, at the height of the war in Vietnam, are busy "planting...
...Of course, the man turns out to be a drug kingpin, with whom Schygulla naively gets involved in new adventures (always bagging more money...
...Although the film has some fine moments, it never has the sureness of touch and tone that one hopes for from Coppola...
...318: SCREEN LOST OPPORTUNITIES 'SECRET,1 'LULU,' & 'GARDENS' According to a friend (actually my wife), every once and a while it is refreshing to see a movie that flat out insults your intelligence...
...Huston says that she does too, adding, "He thinks it's a mistake in judgment to fight there...
...At the end of her rope, Schygulla waves a gun at her head...
...Kollek begins the film with a series of typical disasters that drive Schygulla, a starving would-be novelist, to near-suicide: she is burglarized, fired, threatened with eviction, and then conned by a man faking blindness who robs her coat...
...I only wish that more of these executives realized how much many people of other classes, races, and sexes want (and deserve) to make money the old-fashioned way...
...The original use of the phrase and the straining for irony in its repetition sum up both the merits and faults of this uneven film...
...The only thing his new film shares with Platoon is the awkward voiceover letter-writing device to tell us the hero's true feelings...
...Lulu suffers from too much straining for complicated effect...
...I think it's genocide...
...Despite Sweeney's fine acting (softer and more difficult than the roles of the stars around him), many scenes in Gardens of Stone feel flat, weakened by a rushed, sometimes obscure narrative style...
...B. Sweeney), who like the hero in Platoon has an idealistic passion to go to Vietnam and share the burden of what he believes to be a just war...
...As a matter of fact, yes...
...In scene after scene, Kollek's style winks at us: he presents the banality of these disasters as one more aspect of the drabness of his heroine's life, especially through flimsy references to other movies...
...But The Secret of My Success eschews comedy for unfocused vulgarity...
...Executives are all jerks or robots...
...319 Yet Kollek redeems this arch satire with several personal touches...
...More awkward is the way Coppola dissipates the power of her ultimate grief by anticlimactic, vapid scenes focusing on Huston and Caan at exactly the wrong moment...
...Up from bohemianism, she attains celebrity and even savors the ultimate triumph, an interview with Dr...
...As the others mouth corporate wisdom about firing whole divisions of workers to save money...
...A Night at the Opera...
...Shakespeare...
...Fox's productive vision is forgotten midway through the film, as the filmmakers drop his expansion plans from the screenplay...
...the film is Kollek's own comment on the trash one must make in order to succeed in contemporary movies...
...hell, cf...
...Gardens of Stone is the poetic title of Francis Ford Coppola's study of the "old guard "that handles military burials in Arlington National Cemetery...
...Ruth...
...One wonders how a director of Coppola's experience could muff something so obvious...
...In bygone days comedy served morals: cf...
...TOM O'BRIEN 320...
...Kollek plays with stereotypes like a child in a toyshop...
...Like Platoon, Gardens of Stone is an elegy for such idealism...
...Better still, Caan's involvement with a reporter from the Washington Post (Angelica Huston) at first promises to make Gardens of Stone a Platoon for the home front...
...Coppola doesn't even register Sweeney's reaction...
...and is outraged by its waste, inefficiency, and sycophancy...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
