On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen SUMMER DOLDRUMS BY ROBERTASAHINA Remember the mysterious Bermuda Triangle, where all those boats and planes disappeared without apparent cause? Well, Peter Benchley has it all figured...
...It is not the silliest film of the year, though...
...The film's nightmare is simply one of confusion...
...But basically they're atavistic: Whenever a stray fishing boat or pleasure cruiser wanders into their little corner of the Atlantic, their blood runs wild, and they plunder, rape or kill to their hearts' content...
...The parties to this travesty did it for the money, I guess...
...It seems that procreation is a big problem for the pirates, what with inbreeding and the scarcity of women...
...And how could Michael Ritchie, who has done some noteworthy work in the past (Smile, Downhill Racer and The Candidate), direct the hackneyed scenes of the pirates hoisting the Jolly Roger after capturing a Coast Guard cutter, or of a burial at sea, without inviting parody...
...from trash like this, you cannot expect logic...
...I hope we will be seeing more of him in the future...
...What little plot movement there is comes from a contrived romantic quadrangle and from an even less credible robbery attempt by Sissy's lover, Wes (Scott Glenn...
...Indeed, we are urged practically to celebrate their mastery of that silly mechanical bull...
...it doesn't fit in at all with the plot, as the other visions at least make a pretense of doing...
...The camera cuts away to the departing pirates, and we're left having to imagine that the ship has been blown to bits...
...Or for Wendy's running upstairs at the climax of the film, after having sent her son downstairs for protection because she has learned that her husband has turned into a murderous maniac...
...thanks to Windsor, Maynard and Justin fall into the hands of the brigands...
...Of course, asking The Island to make sense is unrealistic...
...Then there are characters who materialize from nowhere and for no reason-like the skeletons at the end of the movie, and the masked figures Wendy sees upstairs engaging in what appears to be a homosexual encounter...
...nothing else...
...It is plain embarrassing whenever Nicholson makes an appearance: Long before he is supposed to go crazy, Nicholson is mugging shamelessly, popping his eyes, wiggling his brows, and even sticking out his tongue...
...Or for Jack's beginning to limp about halfway through the film...
...The fantasies of that Fourth of July celebration are supposed to be Jack's, for instance, but no signal for this has been given...
...King's novel is supposedly-I have not read it-A nightmare of murder and mayhem...
...Naturally, it doesn't turn out that way...
...Further, Kubrick's camera work is often esthetically baffling...
...With the alternating roar and hum of the plastic wheels as the vehicle rapidly crosses from the wood floor to the carpet then back again, and the flashing by of the hotel room doors in our peripheral vision, Kubrick creates a vortex of sound and sight that is cinema at its purest...
...There's also this peculiar fellow, Windsor (Frank Middlemass), who is fascinated-in a sort of anthropological yet romantic way-with these "pure, natural men...
...No, really: These latter-day buccaneers wear bandannas, carry swords, fly the Jolly Roger, and buckle their swashes, or swash their buckles, or whatever...
...Bud's trials and tribulations at work, and at home with his young wife, Sissy (Debra Winger), are all faithfully presented, but we just don't care that they are unhappy or that their marriage is on the rocks...
...The genuine pathos of the article has been turned into a particularly disheartening form of social-realistic soap opera...
...Why the pirates don't simply kidnap some fresh women for Nau is never explained...
...As a journalist, Latham was able to show that there is a difference between playing cowboy and being one, between the reality of the newly industrialized West and the myth of the Wild West...
...Bridges' direction is, for the most part, unobtrusive, and totally free from the kind of hysteria that animated his work in The China Syndrome...
...The book has something to do with reincarnation, extrasensory perception ("shining"), and a married couple named Jack and Wendy Torrance (Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall...
...Kubrick's direction is no more successful at capturing the horror that eluded his screenplay...
...You see, there's this band of pirates on a remote subtropical island who continue to dress, talk and act like their 17th-century forebears, the terrors of the Spanish main...
...I hope they were well paid, in cash, in advance, for I suspect The Island will not make any profits worth having a percentage of...
...Bud (John Travolta), the cowpuncher of the title, works in the Houston oil fields by day and relaxes in the world's largest honky-tonk, Gilley's, by night...
...With his rangy, sinewy body and his crinkled, slit eyes, he resembles a young Clint Eastwood...
...Putting aside the matter of the strange, ubiquitous blue haze, the film lacks a consistent or coherent point of view...
...Far from the "epic horror film" it has been proclaimed, The Shining is a colossal bore...
...True, they are acquainted with such accoutrements of modernity as flashlights, radios, power boats and automatic rifles...
...Regrettably, the film has none of the virtues of the Esquire article upon which it is based-despite the fact that both were written by Aaron Latham (with some help on the screenplay from James Bridges, the director...
...Only once in The Shining does Kubrick rise above the level of an incompetent hack...
...He trades with the pirates and, more important, he supplies them with victims...
...Well, Peter Benchley has it all figured out in The Island, a new film for which he wrote the screenplay based on his novel of the same title...
...Oh, yes...
...Glenn (who played the young soldier in Nashville) looks exactly right...
...One recurring scene, a vision of a wave of blood sweeping through a hotel corridor, clearly was invented by Kubrick and Johnson for use as an advertising trailer...
...Moreover, unlike Saturday Night Fever, the film it is self-consciously styled after, The Urban Cowboy has little dramatic movement...
...At times it is Kubrick's staging that is nutty...
...That brings us to Maynard (Michael Caine), a writer who is investigating the Bermuda Triangle for a men's magazine, and his son, Justin (Jeffrey Frank), who is traveling with his father on what he expects will be a pleasant vacation...
...In its original incarnation, "The Urban Cowboy" took a wry look at contemporary Texans who think they are being true to the manners and mores of Westerners of a century ago...
...So the leader of the pack, Nau (David Warner), needs Maynard as a stud, to infuse some new genes into the local pool...
...If Jack really wants some peace and quiet to work on a book, as he forcibly, nay, violently suggests to Wendy-that's why he took the job in the first place-it is hardly reasonable for him to set up his typewriter on a table in the middle of the hotel lobby...
...Since Kubrick and Johnson presumably had their chance to improve on the original, they have to be held responsible for such unexplained plot elements as a nostalgic look back at a Fourth of July Ball in 1921...
...It's pointless to go on to talk seriously about the acting or directing when the material is so silly...
...T .JL...
...Before abandoning ship, they leave behind some explosives...
...The effect is deadening whenever Duvall is on screen, with her homely and expressionless face...
...Bud and Sissy's unhappiness, by contrast, leads them always back to Gilley's...
...The acting is excellent...
...Neither device is to be found in the original magazine article, suggesting that Latham writes better from his experience than from his imagination...
...The routine of Saturday night at the neighborhood disco was precisely what he sought to break out of...
...On some occasions we see things from Danny's or Wendy's perspective, on others from Jack's, on still others from that of the camera as an omniscient spectator...
...But this brief (and inconsequential, as far as the plot is concerned) sequence does not redeem almost two-and-a-half hours of tedious nonsense...
...Early in the film, just after the Torrances have moved into the inn, little Danny zooms through the corridors on one of those low-slung kiddie pedal cars, followed by the camera at nearly ground level...
...and "thrust," meaning "copulate"-without sounding ridiculous...
...For some reason, he has shot about half the film in closeup...
...As a screenwriter, however, Latham somehow lost this ironic view of his characters: We are stuck right in the middle of their petty little lives and forced to share the dissatisfactions that drive them to spend so much time and energy on what are, after all, pretty inane forms of entertainment...
...The weakness of the script is particularly disappointing, given the many successful elements of the movie...
...Thus when the film finally gets around to making the point that Jack has gone crackers, Wendy and Danny are the only ones who are surprised...
...But when the charges go off, we hear a big bang, see a sudden ball of fire and...
...At one point, for example, the buccaneers capture a sailer, ransack it and kill the crew...
...Tony Ma-nero's discontent at least took him somewhere, if only across the Brooklyn Bridge...
...How could any performer mouth Benchley's notion of 17th-century dialect?Everybody die in toto...
...Unfortunately, the film does not deliver excitement or adventure either, possibly due to its limited budget...
...The result is confusion, especially in the fantasy sequences at the hotel bar in the deserted ballroom...
...There he engages in bouts of drinking, fisticuffs and other masculine rituals ????like hustling his citified female counterparts and riding the now-famous mechanical bucking steer...
...With their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), they are living at a remote mountain inn where they are serving as caretakers during the winter off-season...
...he Urban Cowboy, while disappointing, is never really boring...
...The most absurd part of this movie is the screenplay, written by Kubrick with Diane Johnson...
...Travolta has mastered both the accent and the machismo for the part, though he doesn't look quite right...
...The music, consisting of both live and recorded versions of current country and western hits, is enjoyable (although Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings are inexplicably absent...
...That honor belongs to The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the novel by Stephen King...
Vol. 63 • July 1980 • No. 13
