A narrator at the beginning of the film has informed us, “This is a story of death and mystery.” The mystery is why these particular lions behaved as they did. I don’t see why it’s a mystery. They had reasons anyone can identify with. They found something they were good at, and grew to enjoy it. The only mystery is why the screenwriter, William Goldmen, has them kill off the two most interesting characters so quickly. (They are Angus, the chatty man on the spot, and an African with a magnificently chiseled and stern face.)
In the old days this movie would have starred Stewart Granger and Trevor Howard, and they would have known it was bad but they would have seemed at home in it, cleaning their rifles and chugging their gin like seasoned bwanas. Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas never for a second look like anything other than thoroughly unhappy movie stars stuck in a humid climate and a doomed production. I hope someone made a documentary about the making of this film. Now that would be a movie worth seeing.
God Told Me To
(Directed by Larry Cohen; starring Tony LoBianco, Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Stanley; 1976)
I wasn’t going to see God Told Me To—God, indeed, seemed to be telling me not to—but then I read the press release and knew immediately this was a movie I had to see. It had been too long, I decided, since I’d seen a film in which the leading character was, and I quote, “the only man alive who can make the choice to help or destroy a mysterious force which has begun to unleash its dread power upon the earth.” Not since Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster had a press release promised so much.
The movie, alas, doesn’t quite live up to the billing. It never even quite identifies the Dread Power, although from the brief glimpses I got of it, it seemed to be a hippie who glowed yellow. But the movie does achieve greatness in another way: This is the most confused feature-length film I’ve ever seen.
There were times when I thought the projectionist was showing the reels in random order, as a quiet joke on the hapless audience. But, no, apparently the movie was supposed to be put together this way, as a sort of fifty-two-card pickup of cinema. The story’s so random, indeed, that by the time Sandy Dennis made her second appearance, I’d forgotten she was in the film.
The plot concerns a New York detective (Tony LoBianco) who investigates a series of murders in which the killers claimed God told them to kill. It turns out they’re under the hypnotic sway of the child of visitors from outer space. LoBianco’s assignment, if he chooses to accept it: Help or destroy this mysterious force that has begun to unleash its dread power, etc.
As I left the theater, dazed, I saw a crowd across the street. A young man in a straitjacket (try not to get ahead of the story, please) was preparing to be suspended in midair hundreds of inches above the ground, and to escape, Houdini style. At the moment he was still standing on the sidewalk—but, believe me, it was still a better show.
Godzilla
Directed by Roland Emmerich; starring Matthew Broderick, Hank Azaria; 1998)
Cannes, France—Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter’s basilica. It’s a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving, and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival’s closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.
It rains all through Godzilla, and it’s usually night. Well, of course it is: That makes the special effects easier to obscure. If you never get a clear look at the monster, you can’t see how shoddy it is. Steven Spielberg opened Jurassic Park by giving us a good, long look at the dinosaurs in full sunlight, and our imaginations leapt up. Godzilla hops out of sight like a camera-shy kangaroo.
The makers of the film, director Roland Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin, follow the timeless outlines of many other movies about Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Gamera, and their radioactive kin. There are ominous attacks on ships at sea, alarming blips on radar screens, and a scientist who speculates that nuclear tests may have spawned a mutant creature. A cast of stereotyped stock characters is introduced and made to say lines like, “I don’t understand—how could something so big just disappear?” Or, “Many people have had their lives changed forever!” And then there are the big special-effects sequences, as Godzilla terrorizes New York.
One must carefully repress intelligent thought while watching such a film. The movie makes no sense at all except as a careless pastiche of its betters (and, yes, the Japanese Godzilla movies are, in their way, better—if only because they embrace dreck instead of condescending to it). You have to absorb such a film, not consider it. But my brain rebelled, and insisted on applying logic where it was not welcome.
How, for example, does a 300-foot-tall creature fit inside a subway tunnel? How come it’s sometimes only as tall as the tunnel, and at other times taller than high-rise office buildings? How big is it, anyway? Why can it breathe fire but hardly ever makes use of this ability? Why, when the heroes hide inside the Park Avenue tunnel, is this tunnel too small for Godzilla to enter, even though it is larger than a subway tunnel? And why doesn’t Godzilla just snort some flames down there and broil them?
Most monster movies have at least one bleeding-heart environmentalist to argue the case of the monstrous beast, but here we get only Niko Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), an expert on the mutant earthworms of Chernobyl, who seems less like a scientist than like a placeholder waiting for a rewrite (“insert more interesting character here”). It is he who intuits that Godzilla is a female. (You would think that if a 300-foot monster were male, that would be hard to miss, but never mind.) The military in all movies about monsters and aliens from outer space always automatically attempts to kill them, and here they fire lots of wimpy missiles and torpedoes at Godzilla, which have so little effect we wonder how our tax dollars are being spent. (Just once, I’d like a movie where they train Godzilla to do useful tasks, like pulling a coaxial cable across the ocean floor, or pushing stuck trains out of tunnels.)
In addition to the trigger-happy Americans there is a French force, too, led by Jean Reno, a good actor who plays this role as if he got on the plane shouting “I’m going to Disneyland!” All humans in monster movies have simpleminded little character traits, and Reno’s obsession is with getting a decent cup of coffee. Other characters include a TV newswoman (Maria Pitillo) who used to be the worm man’s girlfriend, a determined cameraman (Hank Azaria), a grim-jawed military leader (Kevin Dunn), and a simpering anchorman (Harry Shearer). None of these characters emerges as anything more than a source of obligatory dialogue.
Oh, and then there are New York’s Mayor Ebert (gamely played by Michael Lerner) and his adviser, Gene (Lorry Goldman). The mayor of course makes every possible wrong decision (he is against evacuating Manhattan, etc.), and the adviser eventually gives thumbs-down to his reelection campaign. These characters are a reaction by Emmerich and Devlin to negative Siskel and Ebert reviews of their earlier movies (Stargate, Independence Day), but they let us off lightly; I fully expected to be squished like a bug by Godzilla. Now that I’ve inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones.