I don’t know what kinds of people would sign up for a vacation resort that specializes in sadomasochism, bondage, and discipline, but I imagine they’d want their money’s worth. The lifeless, listless charades presided over by Delaney are practically family entertainment. The late Harriett Nelson could have attended this camp with only the occasional “Oh, my!”
And of all the actresses I can imagine playing the role of boss dominatrix, Dana Delaney is the last. She’s a cute, merry-faced type—perfect for the dominatrix’s best friend. For the lead, let’s see. How about Faye Dunaway? Linda Fiorentino? Sigourney Weaver? See what I mean?
Anne Rice recently took out two-page spreads in Variety and the New York Times to announce that she has seen the film of her novel Interview with the Vampire, and thinks it is a masterpiece. I don’t think we should look for her ad about Exit to Eden, not even in the classifieds.
Father’s Day
(Directed by Ivan Reitman; starring Robin Williams, Billy Crystal,
Julia Louis-Dreyfus; 1997)
Father’s Day is a brainless feature-length sitcom with too much sit and no com. It stars two of the brighter talents in American movies, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, in a screenplay cleverly designed to obscure their strengths while showcasing their weaknesses.
The story is recycled out of a 1983 French film named Les Comperes, as part of a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made in English with all of the humor taken out. The discussion about this one seems to have been limited to who got to play the Gérard Depardieu role.
Billy Crystal won, I think. At least he’s the one who is a master of the sudden, violent head-butt, which is supposed to be amusing because he’s a high-powered lawyer and so nobody expects him to be good at head-butting. As the movie opens, he gets an unexpected visit from a woman (Nastassja Kinski) he knew seventeen years ago. She’s now happily married, but needs to tell him something: They had a son, the son has disappeared, she’s desperate, and she needs his help in finding him.
Robin Williams plays an unsuccessful performance artist from San Francisco who is at the point of suicide when his phone rings. It’s Kinski, with the same story: Seventeen years ago, they had a son, who is now missing, and so on. She tells both men to be on the safe side, in case one doesn’t want to help. But both men are moved by her story and by the photograph she supplies, of a lad who looks born to frequent the parking lots of convenience stores.
At this point, it is inconceivable that the following events will not transpire: (1) The two men will discover they’re both on the same mission. (2) They’ll team up, each one secretly convinced he’s the real father. (3) They’ll find the son, who doesn’t want to be saved. (4) They’ll get involved in zany, madcap adventures while saving him, preferably in San Francisco, Reno, and places like that. (5) The married one (Crystal) will lie to his wife about what he’s doing, and she’ll get suspicious and misread the whole situation.
Will the movie get all smooshy at the end, with the kind of cheap sentimentality comedians are suckers for, because they all secretly think they embody a little of Chaplin? You betcha. This movie could have been written by a computer. That it was recycled from the French by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel is astonishing, given the superior quality of their collaborations like Parenthood and City Slickers.
Williams and Crystal are pretty bad. You can always tell a lazy Robin Williams movie by the unavoidable scene in which he does a lot of different voices and characters. This time, nervous about meeting his son, he tries out various roles in front of a mirror. All right, already. We know he can do this, We’ve seen him do it in a dozen movies and on a hundred talk shows. He’s getting to be like the goofy uncle who knows one corny parlor trick and insists on performing it at every family gathering. Crystal is more in character most of the time—more committed to the shreds of narrative that lurk beneath the movie’s inane surface.
The kid, played by Charlie Hofheimer, is another weak point. He’s not much of an actor—not here, anyway, in material that would have defeated anybody—but the movie doesn’t even try to make his character interesting. That would upstage the stars, I guess. An indication of the movie’s lack of ambition is its decision to surround the runaway clichés: His girlfriend has run off with a rock singer, he follows her, Crystal and Williams follow him into the mosh pits of rock concerts and to the band’s engagement in Reno, etc. There’s even a gratuitous drug dealer, hauled into the plot so he can threaten the kid about a missing $5,000. Would it have been too much to motivate the kid with something besides sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Do we need a drug dealer in this innocuous material?
And what about poor Julia Louis-Dreyfus? She has the thankless role of Crystal’s wife. When Crystal and Williams drag the kid into a hotel room for a shower, she misunderstands everything she hears on the phone and thinks her husband is showering with strange men and boys. Later she turns up while he’s telephoning her, and he talks into the phone, not realizing her answers are coming from right behind him. This will be hilarious to anyone who doesn’t know how telephones work.
Firewalker
(Directed by J. Lee Thompson; starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett; 1986)
Where to start with this movie? Where to end? Even more to the point, in which order to show the reels? J. Lee Thompson’s Firewalker is a free-form anthology of familiar images from the works of Steven Spielberg, subjected to a new process that we could call discolorization. All of the style and magic are gone, leaving only the booby-trapped temples, the steaming jungle, and such lines as, if I remember correctly, “Witch, woman, harlot—I’ve been called them all!”
Firewalker borrows its closing images from the Indiana Jones movies, but its press notes optimistically claim the movie is “in the tradition” of Romancing the Stone. In literature, it’s called plagiarism. In the movies, it’s homage. The movie stars Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett, and Melody Anderson in a romp through Central America in search of a lost temple filled with gold. Norris and Gossett are professional adventurers and best pals; Anderson is a rich girl who walks into a bar and asks for two men who are strong, brave, and not too smart. She’s got an old treasure map and wants them to help her find the gold.
We know Norris and Gossett are just the guys she’s looking for, because we were observing closely during the title sequence, when they were not too smart. The two men are staked faceup in the desert and left to die. And as a special torture, Norris is given a full bottle of Perrier to hold in his right hand, so that water will be tantalizingly close as the hot sun bakes him. Norris breaks the bottle and uses a shard of glass to cut the rope, which is terrific, except that we can clearly see that all either one of them has to do is simply slip the rope off the top of the stake.
Once they’re in the jungle with Anderson, the movie turns into one of those blood-soaked travelogues in which enemies pop up like targets in a shooting gallery. The bad guys include mercenary soldiers, Indians, rebel troops, crazed would-be dictators, and a man who is named Cyclops because he wears a patch over one eye.