Shut Up, I Explained

...Fortunately, The People vs...

...But as the movie progresses, I can tell by the noise in the theater that I'm wrong about the nobody-really-likes-it part...

...Some derogatory words about religion are issued in ringing voice by the movie's figure of honesty and conscience, Flynt's stripper-junkie-AIDS- suffering wife Althea...

...He saw the glances, and they just seemed to spur him on...

...We complain a lot—who doesn't these days?—but it doesn't really take very much to entertain those of us who regularly go to the movies...

...The most offensive moment occurs when a politically conservative character—the teenage son of limousine liberals who reads National Review and speaks eloquent words in defense of his beliefs, like "School prayer...

...What director Milos Forman is doing, in his very clever way, is dividing his audience in two: You don't have to like Larry Flynt (although why shouldn't you, given how cute Woody Harrelson is in the part...

...No, all it takes to keep us going back are a few good lines, a surprising performance in a small role, a touching moment...

...Woody Allen makes any movie he wants to, has total control over the movies he makes, and has arranged things so that his sister is his producer...

...It is a musical, but one in which Allen did not cast singers or dancers, just movie actors who were then told to sing and dance...

...Sometimes you feel a bond with your fellow audience members because the experience you are sharing is so ghastly that, like passengers on the Andrea Doria, you know only this select few will ever understand what you went through...

...is rushed to the hospital with an arterial blockage...

...The movie's chief voice of unreason, a right-wing prosecutor, is played by James Carville...

...He wanted to disturb...

...That is not the most offensive moment in Everyone Says I Love You...

...He wanted people to know he was there...

...Streisand was a model of self-effacement compared with Woody Allen, a 62-year-old man who casts Julia Roberts as his own love interest and photographs a scene straight in which she goes on and on to her analyst about how sexy he is...

...I wanted to shake his hand...

...When we meet Dirty Eddie's best friend, another cop, we know he's going to be killed by a crazy mastermind criminal a few minutes later...

...It is a disaster from the first moment, when the hapless Edward Norton (who's terrific in Larry Flynt) starts singing "Just You, Just Me" in a ghastly, froggy voice and is then joined by nannies on the Upper East Side, a bum panhandling for change, and dancing mannequins in the window of Madison Avenue's Yves Saint-Laurent store...

...Metro failed at this...

...Friday, January 17...

...That's what went on tonight at The People vs...

...Just as Kushn-er expects his audience to laugh derisively along with him at the mere mention of "Ed Meese" and "Ed Koch," so does Forman's movie work by reinforcing the prejudices of his chosen audience...

...Why would Woody Allen willingly make a movie that resembles nothing so much as Springtime for Hitler, the deliberately bad show at the center of Mel Brooks's classic comedy The Producers...

...Increasingly, however, the noise is inappropriate...

...Actually, Metro isn't that bad—one of the chase scenes is pretty hair-raising, and Murphy has found new life as a movie actor after a long dry spell—but I will never be able to think about it fondly because of the guy three rows behind me who kept talking at conversational level throughout the movie...

...And '90s teenagers tend to be ill-bred louts who don't know to shut up when the movie starts...

...Larry Flynt, a movie I feared seeing because I really didn't want to like it but suspected I was going to anyway...

...The court is treated here with a reverence familiar to those of us who attended private schools where we were taught that the wildly irresponsible associate justice William O. Douglas was the greatest man of the century (even though the movie's version of Douglas is, of all people, Antonin Scalia, not the kind of person you expect to be canonized in a film produced by Oliver Stone...

...And when Dirty Eddie lets the crazy mastermind criminal live about midway through, you can just bet the crazy mastermind criminal escapes from prison and kidnaps Eddie's cute girlfriend in the last reel...

...Usually, however, they quiet down after a few minutes because, being as ill-educated as they are, these kids have to pay very close attention to expository dialogue...

...Larry Flynt sends out little cultural messages like Morse code, nothing very fancy or complicated...

...liberals in the audience titter and murmur appreciatively, then leave the theater thinking they've had a thought-provoking experience...

...cars have high-speed chases as they approach Fisherman's Wharf...

...Larry Flynt, porn is actually surprisingly wholesome, as only an "anti-Establishment" business can be...

...There's no more obstreperous an audience than the one that shows up Deputy Editor John Podhoretz is a regular panelist on CNN's "Reliable Sources...

...That's because we love the whole shebang: driving to the theater, arguing in the car about where to eat before or after, complaining about the lines and prices at the concession stand, searching for le seat juste, and sharing space with hundreds (sometimes dozens) of others in front of a huge screen in which you hope you might see something you can lose yourself in...

...The only thing taken seriously is "free speech," which is saved by the great men of the Supreme Court...

...The worst scene features an obviously alarmed Julia Roberts, sitting beside a Venice canal moaning "All My Life" in a monotone reminiscent of the sound made when you blow into an empty Coke bottle...

...I felt I dare not move away, because I did not want to offend him, and so he kept right on talking—until the movie became genuinely disturbing, whereupon this parolee from a maximum-security prison put his head in his hands and began rocking back and forth, moaning, "Oh, my Lord...

...I have long puzzled about this, but tonight an answer suddenly occurs to me: the thymotic urge...

...Oh, my Lord...

...These inappropriate noises are offered up as a sign of election—to prove that the audience member is in on the joke with the moviemaker...

...People who don't like pornography, on the other hand, are Victorian prudes all, who probably have deep sexual maladjustments...

...Almost 20 years ago now, at a gruesome horror movie called Mother's Day at a dive theater in the Chicago Loop, I found myself sitting right behind a huge man who was delivering a long monologue about his recent release from Joliet...

...Jerry Falwell, whose lawsuit against Fly-nt is the subject of the movie's last half, is played by an actor named Richard Paul who looks somewhat like Flynt and even more like the Pillsbury Doughboy...

...Or the movie takes over even when the audience doesn't want it to...

...It is the insistence that (to use the drippy phrase from Death of a Salesman) "attention must finally be paid...

...Larry Flynt is a work of cultural shorthand...

...Moviegoers know far more about the medium than people who go only on occasion, and so we expect far less...

...at a screening a few evenings before a movie's opening to generate some buzz, like tonight's showing of the new Eddie Murphy movie, Metro...

...It means the urge for recognition—in political terms, recognizing the rights of ethnicities to their own native lands most especially...

...You want your fellow audience members to make noise as long as it's appropriate noise: laughter, sniffling, a frightened gasp...

...but you certainly have no choice but to despise and be dismissive of his enemies...

...All but one fellow a few rows ahead of me, who did not talk back at the screen...

...He just grabbed his coat, stormed up the aisle, and left the theater...

...Nor did non-confrontational glances from fellow patrons distract the talker...

...Reviews talked about how entertaining this portrait of the notorious pornographer and his run-ins with the law was, and any moviegoer who is also a conservative has long ago had to reconcile himself to the experience of enjoying movies he disapproves of...

...It shouldn't...

...No wonder he felt free to seduce his teenage stepdaughter...

...He was mumbling, so one couldn't actually hear what he was saying...

...Why would he do such a thing...

...The answer can be found in a small scene about twenty minutes into the movie, when an aging cast member turns from a window to whisper the lyrics to "I'm Through with Love...

...A few months ago, critics had a field day making fun of Barbra Streisand for turning her movie The Mirror Has Two Faces into a vanity production in which other characters talked about how much they admired and envied the character Barbra plays...

...Later, in the movie's final scene, Allen and Goldie Hawn (who play a divorced couple) sit beside the Seine while she tells him that he is the only man she ever really loved, and boy, the sex was great...

...Rather like Frank Rich's favorite theatrical experience, Tony Kush-ner's embarrassingly awful six-hour play Angels in America, The People vs...

...The People vs...

...Metro is a paint-by-numbers San Francisco cop movie that seems intent on introducing today's teenagers to all the San Francisco cop-movie cliches the rest of us were already sick of 20 years ago...

...You pays your money and you takes your chances, the old saying goes, and these days one of the things you takes your chances on is who's watching with you...

...Yes, it appears the man wanted to hear himself sing on screen and devised the only kind of movie in which such an act would be possible...

...Saturday, January25...

...Who is the aging cast member...

...He wanted to talk...

...Yes, it has received decent reviews, which only proves that in New York, movie studios must require all journalists to undergo lobotomies before they are given critics' credentials...

...Turns out that he wasn't really right wing, just delusional...

...What does such a gesture mean...

...And he was a big guy, clearly drunk or stoned or both, so even though he was annoying everybody in the place, nobody said a word...

...But it's deserving of our scorn and amusement, too, because it's filled with a bunch of crackers and rednecks who seem to exist just to hand us superior folk in the audience a good laugh at their crudity and lack of taste...

...Larry Flynt doesn't put me to that test, because it's a dud...

...They are followed by a portrait of the evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton as a brilliant seducer who uses sexual wiles to convert Flynt to born-again Christianity...

...I guess at the end of history, the thymotic urge comes in many forms, including the rage of some moviegoer in Washington, D.C., that he is not Eddie Murphy, who commands $15 million a picture because he can honestly hold the attention of hundreds of people in the dark...

...you don't have to read stories about movie-theater violence to know that it may be injurious to your health to say "Ssssh" unless the talker is an overeager prepubescent or a yuppie...

...In the audience: maybe a dozen local movie critics and about 500 teenagers who have come because they received special passes from a radio station...

...Pavlov couldn't have planned it better...

...Larry Flynt is such a stiff, in fact, that it seems like nothing so much as a "snob hit"— William Goldman's term for a Broadway play that nobody really likes but everybody thinks he's supposed to like, in this case because Frank Rich wrote a column two months before the movie's release giving it the New York Times Op-Ed Page Good Liberal Seal of Approval...

...Cars fly through the air as they zoom down the city's hills...

...Does that seem unimaginable to you...

...Well, Everyone Says I Love You may not be the moral equivalent of a snuff film, but if any cast member's career survives this debacle, it won't be thanks to Allen...

...And he knew that because his was a threatening presence, we would suck it in— which is a humiliating experience...

...There's another kind of audience that can ruin a movie—one that brings with it a set of political or ideological assumptions and lets those assumptions be known by well-timed guffaws or snorts...

...From then on until the closing credits, you sit in a state of anxiety, actually frightened that, at any moment, Norton or somebody else might begin singing...

...Every few minutes, The People vs...

...The audience sharing the theater with me in a mall in Wheaton, Md., greeted this jape with the same appalled silence that it did the rest of the movie...

...If we really needed fascinating stories, sophisticated dialogue, and Aristotelian unities to satisfy us, would we be ponying up $7 a ticket to submit ourselves to torture once or twice a week...

...Now, this is not a new phenomenon...

...In the world according to The People vs...

...there's nobody around to tell him that he shouldn't spend $20 million on a movie just to hear himself sing like a frog...

...It has long been a joke that if Allen made a snuff film, the New York Times critics would find something to praise about it...

...Why, none other than Woody Allen himself...

...This is the term popularized by Francis Fukuya-ma in his book The End of History and the Last Man to describe the post-Communist political dynamic...

...The right to bear arms...

...it's not only about the 1970s and photographed to evoke the look of an ambitious 1970s movie, but it feels as though everybody involved in the movie's creation fell asleep in 1976 and awakened in 1996 with every meretricious attitude and idea from the '70s intact...

...Everything else is familiar too...

...Thus it is this afternoon with Everyone Says I Love You, the new Woody Allen movie...