Howard Beached
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Howard Beached Stern On-screen Is a Shadow of His Radio Self By John Podhoretz Saturday, March 1. Howard Stern, whose success has been based on his unwillingness to stand for celebrity sanctimony,...
...In Ed Wood, he slipped so artfully into the skin of a cheerful hustler that he helped Martin Landau win an Oscar for his flamboyant portrayal of Bela Lugosi...
...You know the IRA...
...In the relentless prerelease publicity for Private Parts, Stern and his team retailed a line of bull Stern himself would find intolerable if anybody else tried it...
...It is a great pleasure, a few weeks after my bewildered viewing of Private Parts, to discover that Stern's gambit has not paid off...
...I did, unfortunately, or rather, I didn't...
...Oh, and by the way, he's been a movie star for 30 years now...
...Howard Beached Stern On-screen Is a Shadow of His Radio Self By John Podhoretz Saturday, March 1. Howard Stern, whose success has been based on his unwillingness to stand for celebrity sanctimony, has now turned sanctimonious, and therefore he must be destroyed...
...Johnny Depp is the best American actor under the age of 40...
...Instead, it turns Howard Stern, the only remaining spokesman for the defiantly "unevolved" American male, into Tickle-Me Howard...
...would listen to Howard Stern, why anybody would like Howard Stern, or why, for that matter, anybody would really hate Howard Stern...
...And he does...
...Wednesday, March 12...
...But it is often hilarious nonetheless, and director/ co-writer Christopher Guest plays Corky in a performance so daringly fey that it serves as yet another reminder what a wimp Howard Stern proves to be on film...
...Among his contemporaries, only Daniel Day Lewis is his equal...
...What could be the explanation...
...Stern claims he doesn't let his daughters listen to him on the radio...
...There is something horribly disheartening about the idea of Howard Stern changing sides in this fashion—that a man who became famous for his defiance of modern liberal politesse now cravenly becomes yet another suck-up to the Soccer Moms...
...Howard the radio personality would force Howard the movie star to admit that Private Parts is a deliberate effort to file off the rough edges that make him interesting, to soften him...
...And yet Private Parts gives you no sense why Howard Stern is the most notorious radio personality of our time—why anybody John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Depp is also a remarkably generous performer...
...Needless to say, The Devil's Own is a paid commercial announcement for the IRA, and therefore offensive on its face...
...Stern is the most fearless celebrity interviewer the world has ever seen, and if he were paying a promotional call to the "Howard Stern Radio Show," Howard the radio personality would never let Howard the movie star get away with it...
...I hightailed it out of there as soon as I noticed my fiancee had fallen asleep waiting for yet another endless shot of Eastwood walking down a hallway, or up a staircase, or across a sidewalk, to end...
...Take Absolute Power, the new film starring and directed by Clint Eastwood...
...This is a part Pacino could have phoned in...
...there was nothing to see except a black screen and occasionally the mild glint of a saxophone piercing through the darkness...
...And now in Donnie Brasco, he gives the entertaining scenery-chewer Al Pacino renewed gravity and purpose...
...We look at each other and stand up and go because the movie is so bad Corky St...
...Corky resigns in a huff when the town council won't give him $100,000 to fulfill his vision of "Red, White and Blaine," but he quickly gets over his hissy fit...
...I wouldn't have thought you could...
...Did anybody see Bird, his movie about Charlie Parker...
...is enough to make me consider checking into Maze Prison for a nice, long, restful stay...
...His name is Corky St...
...After a big opening weekend and an unbelievably generous critical response (Howard Stern gets overpraised...
...But the atmosphere, the writing (by Paul Attana-sio), and the acting make it easy to overlook the confusion...
...There can be no question after watching his stunning performance tonight in Donnie Brasco...
...Clair, and he is a spectacularly untalented former chorus boy whose musical version of Backdraft led to a fire that burned the local community theater down...
...Sometimes, it's fun to walk out of movies...
...There's a lot of talk about how Eastwood is a no-nonsense director who brings movies in under budget, likes to work fast, and knows what he's doing...
...The movie for which he won an Oscar as best director, Unforgiven, had one of the best screenplays of the last 20 years, and though he almost ruined it, David Webb Peoples's writing masked Eastwood's incompetence...
...Howard the radio guy would try to provoke Howard the movie star by telling him that any man who spends as much time publicly protesting his love for his wife must have a chick on the side...
...There hasn't been a movie this biting about small-town morons in many years, and Waiting for Guffman does seem annoyingly superior to its characters at times...
...And when a New York talent agent responds to his letter by promising to come to the opening, Corky and the cast—a local dentist, a Dairy Queen server, and married travel agents Corky calls "the Lunts of Blaine"—prepare themselves for greatness...
...Thursday, March 27...
...Sometimes, you feel noble for walking out of a movie...
...And Howard the radio personality would make fun of Howard the movie star for making cynical use of his three children as softening devices when he isn't brandishing them as weapons in his battle against those who initiate million-dollar proceedings against him with the FCC...
...Pacino has the showy turn in Donnie Brasco, playing a Mafia flop who will never rise from the third tier for the same reason he never suspects the man he has brought under his wing is a cop...
...That is what is happening as I watch Waiting for Guffman, a funny, deeply patronizing comedy featuring the prissiest sissy since the character actor Franklin Pangborn swished his way through the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s...
...He is riveting, and heartbreaking, and he makes you fear and worry for his character's spiritual health as well as his physical well-being...
...Stern may not have been destroyed, but he's not going to be a movie star...
...Monday, March 10...
...Everybody in Blaine is sure Corky is a genius and a fine fellow— though he speaks of a wife whom no one has ever seen and goes to great pains to seek out a local muscle boy to play one of the parts in the show...
...Private Parts has fizzled at the box office...
...And yet Private Parts is appalling, and not for the reasons you might think...
...Blaine is celebrating its 150th year, and the local theater impresario is asked to stage a musical tribute to the town called "Red, White and Blaine...
...an hour was cut out of it before its release, and if you wanted to follow the plot in the last half, you would be unable to...
...And the prospect of having to continue listening to Brad Pitt speak his dialogue as if he were doing the voiceover for the leprechaun from the Frosted Lucky Charms commercial—I almost expect him to start singing "Stinger shoulder-launched missiles, they're magically delicious...
...I walk out of Private Parts, his autobiographical movie, in a state of bewilderment...
...Do you think he could maybe recite a line without taking a weird pause in the middle like he's trying to remember the next word...
...Or maybe his fans heard Stern's spin and decided to punish him for his betrayal by staying away...
...with Depp at his side, he has to work...
...The guy is so cheap he won't even turn on all the lights when he's filming...
...It's a nice, unmemorable little movie...
...He can do anything, and he will do it, moreover, without a trace of vanity...
...It's the gang of murderous terrorists who deserve to be treated with all the scorn and contempt liberal democracies can express toward those who take up arms against the principle of majority rule...
...Sunday, March 9. What's this...
...It stars Howard Stern, the most notorious radio personality of our time...
...His producer, Ivan Reit-man, describes Private Parts as the story of a Woody Allen-ish nerd who found his true calling by speaking truth on the radio...
...How could he know whether they're listening or not, since he's not in the house when he's broadcasting...
...No matter...
...Evidently, you can still get away with this...
...Waiting for Guffman is a mock documentary set in a small Missouri town called Blaine that was once the Stool Capital of the World...
...Donnie Brasco is terrific, even though it makes no sense...
...And now, in Donnie Brasco, he shows us the way in which a college-educated FBI agent finds himself slowly changing into a crude, lowlife gangster when he is called upon to infiltrate a mob family...
...Clair of Waiting for Guffman could have directed it...
...Stern proves a remarkably adept physical comedian, and there is an astounding comic turn in the last hour by the young actor Paul Giamatti that is alone worth the price of admission...
...The movie says it's about the life and times of Howard Stern, the most notorious radio personality of our time...
...The movie is a love letter to his wife, Alison, Stern says...
...But that's not why we find ourselves leaving after an hour...
...But why doesn't anybody point out that he's a really horrible director with no sense of pace, timing, casting, or character...
...Maybe the Soccer Moms aren't so stupid after all...
...How did Clint Eastwood, of all people, become critically sacrosanct...
...The bowdlerization is all the more remarkable because Stern has deliberately done it to himself...
...In Gilbert Grape, Leonardo DiCaprio got an Oscar nomination for playing a retarded kid when Depp offered a far more challenging and memorable depiction of a young man slowly suffocating from the responsibilities placed on him by God...
...The weird, ethereal hero of Edward Scissorhands gave way to the crushingly burdened young man in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which then was superseded by his amazing transformation into the insanely chipper transvestite movie director in Ed Wood...
...Two weeks after decamping from Absolute Power, my fiancee and I walk out of The Devil's Own, the new Brad Pitt-Harrison Ford movie about the Irish Republican Army...
...Either way, justice has triumphed...
...He is willing to stand aside and allow his co-stars to do the flashier work that gets the attention...
...A sophisticated, left-of-center audience in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood laughing at (I'm sorry to be cruel, but I don't know any other way to put this) fag jokes...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 29
