But the violence raises another question. How exactly do the laws of physics apply to the Byrne character? Called “The Man” in the credits, he is Satan himself, for my money, yet seems to have variable powers. Jericho shoots him, and he pulls up his shirt so we can see the bullet holes healing. But when Jericho switches to a machine gun, the bullets hurl The Man backward and put him out of commission for a time, before he attacks again. What are the rules here? Is he issued only so much anti-injury mojo per millennium?
The movie’s final confrontation is a counterpoint to the Times Square countdown toward the year 2000. Only a churl would point out that the new millennium actually begins a year later, on the last day of 2000. Even then, End of Days would find a loophole. This is the first movie to seriously argue that “666,” the numerical sign of Satan, is actually “999” upside down, so that all you have to do is add a “1” and, whoa! You get “1999.”
Endless Summer II
(Directed by Bruce Brown; starring Robert Weaver, Pat O’Connell; 1994)
Endless Summer II is the kind of movie that observes, quite seriously, that if you had money enough and time, you could spend the rest of your life traveling around the world, surfing on perfect waves. And those waves, it observes, have been rolling ashore for “tens of thousands of years” (or even longer, I’ll bet), “just to give us pleasure.”
One of the charms of the movie is that it adheres so rigorously to this worldview. Man exists to surf, and waves exist to allow him to. Ultimate bliss is a “sixty-second ride,” after which, “no matter how many times it happens,” the lucky surfer feels “stoked.”
The documentary stars two young surfers, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, twenty-six, and Pat O’Connell, twenty, who set out on an around-the-world odyssey to find the perfect wave. For O’Connell, that must not be difficult, since he is famous for finding “the greatest wave of my life” every single day. We know this from the movie’s narration, spoken by Bruce Brown, the director, since O’Connell is never heard on the sound track except to emit a creepy, high-pitched giggle.
Endless Summer II is a sequel to a movie made before either Weaver or O’Connell were born. The original Endless Summer came out, according to Brown, in 1964, although reference books cite the year 1966 and I recall meeting Brown when the movie opened in Chicago in 1967. None of this is of the slightest importance, but all through the movie I kept being distracted by Brown’s insistence on the year 1964—maybe because there was so little else for me to think about.
The movie is wonderfully photographed. Right at the beginning, we see fabulous shots of waves and surfers. Some of the shots even go inside the “barrel,” so we can see the wave curling over the head of the surfer. What a way to get stoked. These are terrific shots. We see them again, and again, and again. The operative word in the title is endless, not summer.
Seeking perfect waves, we follow the lads on their odyssey from southern California to Costa Rica to France to South Africa to the Fiji Islands to Australia and back home again, with some footage of Hawaii even though Pat and Wingnut inexplicably did not visit there. On their travels they meet the bronzed veterans of the first Endless Summer movie, all of them now thirty (or twenty-eight, or twenty-seven) years older, but still hanging out on the beach. Occasionally there is a small nugget of information, for example: “There are eight million Zulus in South Africa, but only one of them is a surfer.” Uncannily, the filmmakers have found that very Zulu, and interview him on the one subject he cannot discuss with his 7,999,999 fellow Zulus. This is a movie with tunnel vision.
Although the movie runs ninety-five minutes, it contains nothing much in the way of information about surfing. It observes that in 1964 surfers mostly used long boards, but today they use short boards. There is no mention of the differences between the two boards, or the reasons why one might use one, or the other. Nor do we discover how you learn to surf or what techniques and skills are useful. We do find out that there is a “pro tour,” but there’s no information about how the sport is scored, or how competition is held. Brown seems basically interested just in finding great waves, surfing them, and getting “stoked.”
He intercuts his surfing scenes with various bits of local color, as when Pat and Wingnut drive through a game reserve in a beach buggy and are pursued by lions. That’s risky, but not nearly so disturbing as the topless beaches of France, where the lads encounter several breasts, and ask the advice of local surfers about where to look during such an emergency.
There is such a harmless innocence about all of this that it’s seductive. Surfers, like all hobbyists, have a certain madness: They see the world through the prism of their specialty. Nothing else matters. “If you spent one day at every place where surfers ride the waves,” the movie tells us wistfully, “it would take you fifty years to visit all of them.” But boy, would you be stoked.
Eric the Viking
(Directed by Terry Jones; starring Tim Robbins, Lena Horne, Mickey Rooney; 1989)
Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes me feel like a human dialysis machine. The film goes into my mind, which removes its impurities, and then it evaporates into thin air. Eric the Viking is a movie like that, an utterly worthless exercise in waste and wretched excess, uninformed by the slightest spark of humor, wit, or coherence.
Movies like this show every sign of having gotten completely out of hand at an early stage of the production. Perhaps everybody was laughing so hard at the jokes they thought they were telling that they forgot to tell any. The movie looks obscenely expensive, but the money is spent on pointless scenes without purpose or payoff, as for example an interminable storm sequence in which the actors hold onto masts and say inane things to one another while water is splashed in their faces.
The basic comic technique in Eric the Viking is the use of the deliberate anachronism. There is a scene, for example, in which Vikings attack and pillage a village, and Eric the Viking (Tim Robbins) finds himself required to assault one of the townswomen. But his tastes do not run toward rape, and so they engage in a discussion on the economic realities of pillaging, and then he asks her to shout “Rape!” as a courtesy, so the other Vikings will think he has done his part.
If you can master the comic logic of that scene, you have exhausted 90 percent of the comic invention in this movie, which is based on Vikings speaking as if they were twentieth-century satirists of themselves. The other 10 percent of the movie consists of guest appearances by such stars as Lena Horne and Mickey Rooney, who demonstrate convincingly that Michael Todd exhausted the possibilities of cameo appearances when he made Around the World in 80 Days many, many years ago. (That was the movie where the piano player turned round to grin at the camera, and you shouted, “Look! It’s Frank Sinatra!” More than thirty years later, a little Viking grins at the camera, and we are expected to shout “Look! It’s Mickey Rooney!”)
Erik the Viking was written and directed by Terry Jones, whose previous film, Personal Services, was a splendid and intelligent slice-of-life about a notorious London madam who ran a genteel brothel for elderly gents. The two films could not be less similar. I assume Eric the Viking represents some kind of comprehensive lack of judgment on Jones’s part, and that he will be back among the competent in no time at all.
The Evening Star