By now you should be getting the idea that Fools is the most cynically “idealistic” exploitation movie in some time. It is for life and love, against fascism and firearms in private hands. It also has countless songs trying to out-banal each other during at least seven Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interludes. Fools sets a new Semi-OLI ground speed record. When in doubt, throw in a song and a sunset. Right?
On top of all this, we get dialogue so inept that I will provide a free ticket to The Vengeance of She (the next time it plays town) to the first person who can convince me that any two English-speaking human beings ever talked remotely like these characters at any time during the present century. I commend the dialogue, however, to local comedy groups getting up satires on love, if the satires don’t have to be too good.
The only mystery about Fools is how Tom Gries could have directed it. He is the tasteful director of Will Penny, where the situation and dialogue rang absolutely true, and he demonstrated a genuine narrative gift in The Hawaiians. Now we get Fools. How?
Henri Bollinger, the film’s coproducer, was in town last week for interviews. I declined the opportunity, to save embarrassment all around, but he telephoned me to explain that the film had been made with “absolute sincerity” and the “best intentions.” Could be. Nobody sets out deliberately to make a bad film. When I gently suggested to Bollinger that his film was the worst of the year, he gently suggested back that since I was obviously “violently prejudiced” against it, the Sun-Times should provide “the other side.” I demurred. I said my judgment was sober, impartial, and fair: Fools stinks.
Forces of Nature
(Directed by Bronwen Hughes; starring Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck; 1999)
So I’m sitting there, looking in disbelief at the ending of Forces of Nature, and asking myself—if this is how the movie ends, then what was it about? We spend two endless hours slogging through a series of natural and man-made disasters with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck, and then . . . that’s it?
Bronwen Hughes’s Forces of Nature is a romantic shaggy dog story, a movie that leads us down the garden path of romance, only to abandon us by the compost heap of uplifting endings. And it’s not even clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy ending.
By then, of course, any ending is good news. The movie is a dead zone of boring conversations, contrived emergencies, unbelievable characters, and lame storytelling. Even then it might have worked at times if it had generated the slightest chemistry between Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock, but it doesn’t. She remains winsome and fetching, but he acts like he’s chaperoning his best friend’s sister, as a favor.
The movie combines at least five formulas, and probably more: The Meet Cute, the Road Movie, the Odd Couple, Opposites Attract, and Getting to Know Yourself. It also cuts back and forth between a journey and the preparations for a marriage, and it tries to keep two sets of parents in play. With so much happening it’s surprising that the movie finds a way to be boring, but it does, by cross-cutting between one leaden scene and another.
Affleck stars as an ad man who is flying from New York to Savannah, Georgia, for his wedding. On the plane, he’s strapped in next to Bullock, who has held a lot of jobs in her time: flight attendant, wedding photographer, exotic dancer, auto show hostess. The flight crashes on takeoff, and they end up driving to Georgia together, amid weather reports of an approaching hurricane.
Of course circumstances conspire to make him pretend to be a doctor, and them to pretend they’re married, and a motel to put them in the same room, and his best man to see him with this strange woman even though he tries to hide by holding his breath in a swimming pool, and so on. Rarely does the artificial contrivance of a bad screenplay reveal itself so starkly on the screen. And when the contrivances stop the revelations begin, and we learn sad things about Bullock’s past that feel exactly as if Marc Lawrence, the writer, supplied them at random.
They have a lot of adventures. Arrests, crashes, trees falling on their car, hospitalizations. They take a train for a while (standing on top of one of the cars in a shamelessly pandering shot). And they take a bus (with condo-shopping oldsters). And a Spinning Sombrero ride. At one point they both find themselves performing onstage in a strip club—not quite the kind of club you have in mind. This scene would seem to be foolproof comedy, but the timing is off and it sinks.
Despite my opening comments, I have not actually revealed the ending of the movie, and I won’t, although I will express outrage about it. This movie hasn’t paid enough dues to get away with such a smarmy payoff. I will say, however, that if the weatherman has been warning for three days that a hurricane is headed thisaway, and the skies are black and the wind is high and it’s raining, few people in formal dress for a wedding would stand out in the yard while umbrellas, tables, and trees are flying past. And if they did, their hair would blow around a little, don’t you think?
Friday the 13th, Part 2
(Directed by Steve Miner; starring Betsy Palmer, Amy Steel, John Furey; 1981)
I saw Friday the 13th, Part 2 at the Virginia Theater, a former vaudeville house in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The late show was half-filled with high school and college students, and as the lights went down I experienced a brief wave of nostalgia. In this very theater, on countless Friday nights, I’d gone with a date to the movies. My nostalgia lasted for the first two minutes of the movie.
The pretitle sequence showed one of the heroines of the original Friday the 13th, alone at home. She has nightmares, wakes up, undresses, is stalked by the camera, hears a noise in the kitchen. She tiptoes into the kitchen. Through the open window, a cat springs into the room. The audience screamed loudly and happily: It’s fun to be scared. Then an unidentified man sunk an ice pick into the girl’s brain, and, for me, the fun stopped.
The audience, however, carried on. It is a tradition to be loud during these movies, I guess. After a batch of young counselors turns up for training at a summer camp, a girl goes out walking alone at night. Everybody in the audience imitated hoot-owls and hyenas. Another girl went to her room and started to undress. Five guys sitting together started a chant: “We want boobs!”
The plot: In the original movie, a summer camp staff was wiped out by a demented woman whose son had been allowed to drown by incompetent camp counselors. At the end of that film, the mother was decapitated by the young woman who is killed with an ice pick at the beginning of Part 2. The legend grows that the son, Jason, did not really drown, but survived, and lurks in the woods waiting to take his vengeance against the killer of his mother . . . and against camp counselors in general, I guess.
That sets up the film. The counselors are introduced, very briefly, and then some of them go into town for a beer and the rest stay at the camp to have sex with each other. A mystery assailant prowls around the main cabin. We see only his shadow and his shoes. One by one, he picks off the kids. He sinks a machete into the brain of a kid in a wheelchair. He surprises a boy and a girl making love, and nails them to a bunk with a spear through both their bodies. When the other kids return to the camp, it’s their turn. After almost everyone has been killed in a disgusting and violent way, one girl chews up the assailant with a chain saw, after which we discover the mummies in his cabin in the woods, after which he jumps through a window at the girl, etc.