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...by his director to wear an idiotic rictus of a smile from first shot to final credits...

...Viewers are treated to scenes of vomiting, enema insertion, clitoral massage, farting, masturbation (female variety) on a bicycle, masturbation (male variety) within a kind of electronic jock strap, and much examination of feces...

...All story developments, most characterizations, all social observation and historical insight are overwhelmed by Parker's obsessive need to gross out the audience...

...and the enmity between the doctor (Anthony Hopkins) and his adopted son (Dana Carvey...

...He has been allowed (or forced...

...And their crankishness often turns out to be justified...

...It's the same point made nonsatirically by Oliver Sacks in his chapter on the drug L-DOPA in his book, Awakenings: .. .the delusions of vitalism or materialism, the notion that "health," "well-being," "happiness," etc., can be reduced to certain "factors" or "elements"—principles, fluids, humors, commodities—things which can be measured and weighed, bought and sold....The fraudulent reduction comes from alchemists, witch-doctors, and their modern equivalents, and from patients who long at all costs to be well...

...Jonathan Swift's genius for satire was fueled by his disgust for humanity, and that disgust had one source in his revulsion from, and fascination with, bodily functions...

...It's an artfully crafted performance but lacks resonance...

...The glory of the A's has become the humiliation of the B's...

...a con man's plot to use Kellogg's recipe for corn flakes to make a rival product...

...Now, two minor, eccentric movies give us two more reallife cranks as their heroes...

...Delivering the only performance of distinction in this movie, Martin Landau endows Lugosi with ruined theatrical magnificence, Central European gemiitlichkeit, and doped-up, boozed-out misery...

...John Kellogg, this T. Coraghessan Boyle story is composed of three plot strands: the marital woes of Bridget Fonda and Mathew Broderick, which Fonda believes will be cured by Kellogg's regimen...

...But, in the last two decades, as American films have become more freewheeling and kooky, cranks have often been the protagonists of Hollywood scripts rather than subordinate characters...

...It's a loving, mutually parasitic relationship in which the old has-been depends on the young producer for roles, income, and a sympathetic ear, while Wood needs Lugosi's name on his credits to entice investors, but shows real compassion for the fallen star...

...his unshakably sweet nature...

...Ed Wood is the story of Hollywood's worst director, the man who gave us the sci-fi dud of duds, Plan Nine from Outer Space and the transvestite atrocity, Glen or Glenda?, ineptitudes so klutzily personal that their maker has become a pillar in the pantheon of camp...

...His characterization is a triumph of physical transformation: a Bugs Bunny grin, a Teddy Roosevelt stance, a voice trapped and roaring in the adenoid—you've never seen this Anthony Hopkins before...

...Thus, in this movie, Dr...

...The structure of this movie is a seesaw, not a mountain climb...

...But now the down side...

...First, Burton's skill...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 14...

...But his latest film prompts just one question: Is Alan Parker fourteen years old...

...This, after Kellogg, Jr., blows his foster father's establishment to kingdom come...

...And, for Ed Wood s big moments, the Wellesian texture rightly prevails...

...What is Warren Beatty as Bugsy but a visionary among thugs, and isn't the glorified Jim Garrison of J.F.K...

...This smile embalms Depp's performance...

...Somehow, Burton keeps the two styles from colliding, partly by never allowing either to dominate for too long a time...

...Burton's sweetness is evident in his depiction of the bond between Wood and Bela Lugosi, dope-addicted and semi-crazy in the last years of his life...

...Set at the nineteenth-century Battle Creek health spa of the vegetarian crusader and antisex fanatic, Dr...

...Because of Landau's performance, the several close-ups of the hypodermic tracks on Lugosi's arms aren't merely disgusting but also redolent of pitiable mortality...

...As portrayed in this film, Wood is the patron saint of all who choose to do their "own thing" in the teeth of convention, tradition, or accepted good taste...

...Tim Burton's film treats Wood as a sweet simpleton who cannot see his own transvestism as weird or his own lack of talent as anything other than originality...

...Ed Wood displays the three most salient qualities of Tim Burton's previous work (the Batman movies, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands): his visual skill...

...It's easy to see the satirical point of The Road to Wellville...

...And cranks have always been charming fixtures in the supporting casts of American movies, especially comedies...

...Anthony Hopkins emerges with credit, not his usual glory...

...The most interesting one, the Hopkins-Carvey conflict, is resolved by a cuddle and kiss...

...An Emersonian hero of B flicks...

...Ed Wood had no real visual flair, but he revered the great stylist Orson Welles for his stubborn individualism in the face of studio pressure...

...a wouldbe savior of his country...

...But, I'm afraid, once the lights come up and the final credits roll, you don't continue seeing him in your mind's eye...

...For instance, when Ed runs down the aisle of the theater that's about to premier his latest bomb, the choreography mimics Kane's run into his newspaper office upon his 13 SCREEN return from Europe...

...Kellogg: "The bowels are our passage to health...

...While making a film about a supreme crank, Alan Parker apparently turned into one...

...I know that Alan Parker began his career in the late sixties and has made at least a dozen movies (three of them—Fame, Shoot the Moon, and The Commitments—excellent...

...Locked into this fatuousness is Johnny Depp, a game actor...

...The toothsucking self-satisfaction that Anthony Hopkins quite rightly projects as Kellogg's is also, I'm afraid, the most salient quality of this movie...

...Accordingly, Burton and his cinematographer have created a black-and-white look that miraculously echoes both the underlit, cheesy appearance of Wood's output and the glorious expressionism of Citizen Kane...

...Ed has a few moments of doubt about his abilities after his first fiasco, dismisses them, doubts himself again after the next bomb, revives, and so it goes...

...But whereas Kane is hailed by his adoring staff, Ed's arrival is booed and hissed by a mob of juvenile delinquents...

...Ed Wood, for all its charm, is ample proof that Burton can't shape a story to any real dramatic purpose, isn't interested in character development, and can't bring his narrative to a true climax...

...I don't know what Boyle made of these situations in his novel, but they go absolutely nowhere in this Alan Parker adaptation...

...Our hero's meeting with Orson Welles in which the great man tells Wood to follow his dream against all odds, is meant to be the story's dramatic peak but only reenforces our perception of Ed as a freak of fatuousness...

...But, once this point is made in the first fifteen minutes, Alan Parker can't develop it, only elaborate and overelaborate on it...

...Think of Brook Farm and Oneida, Bronson Alcott and Aimee , Semple McPherson, Christian Science and Scientology...

...and his fundamental disdain for, or indifference to, truly dramatic storytelling...

...Similar revulsion and fascination permeate The Road to Wellville, but certainly haven't resulted in a satire of Swiftian brilliance...

...To be sure, no actor can completely survive a director who has lost all perspective on his own material...