The movie opens with a key piece of information. A doctor steers his car past the drive-thru window of a Burger-Matic, and says to the window girl, “My wife knows about us!” The girl (Barrymore) says, “Did you tell her about this?” and thrusts forward her pregnant belly. “Do you want a ride home?” asks the miserable doc. The girl is contemptuous: “I don’t need a ride home. I need a father for my baby.”
Now in a screenplay class this would be a good opening for a movie. But a wise teacher, asking his students to write more, would add, “And, please—no helicopters!” Because, yes, later that night, the doctor’s car is attacked by a combat helicopter, and is literally frightened to death.
The helicopter is piloted by two brothers in the Air National Guard. They are Dorian and Angus (Luke Wilson and Jake Busey), the sons of Mrs. Lever (O’Hara) by a first marriage. Her current marriage, of course, is to the doctor, and she has ordered the attack by her sons in revenge because she knows the doc is fooling around.
She does not know, however, that Sally, the Barrymore character, is the other woman. Nor, after Dorian comes to work at the Burger-Matic, does Sally know Dorian is the stepson of her dead lover. Nor does Dorian know Sally was fooling around with the doc. He takes the burger job at Angus’s urging, because they suspect that radio emissions from the helicopter were picked up on Sally’s radio earphones in the drive-thru line.
Sometimes it really would be easier to just write about the damn characters.
Vince Gilligan, who wrote the original screenplay, at least gets credit for writing the opposite of an Idiot Plot. The Idiot Plot, you will recall, is a plot in which the secrets are so obvious, and are concealed through such a convoluted chain of contrivances, that if one character were to blurt out one piece of information, everything would instantly be solved. In Home Fries, the situation is so complex that even though people constantly blurt out almost everything they can think of, the mystery still persists, and even at the end the puzzled characters are still trying to explain it to one another.
The Catherine O’Hara character is the one person who holds most of the threads (although she only belatedly figures out who Sally the burger girl is). Her relationship to her sons puts one in mind of Greek tragedy (shouldn’t those boys realize it’s time to move away from home?). But at least she’s consistent: You cheat, you pay. And she defends her sons with ferocious intensity.
Drew Barrymore, as Sally, focuses on what her character knows and how she feels about it, and succeeds in creating a pure performance that sort of stands outside the movie. This same burger girl, looking this way, talking this way, could be carefully packed and moved intact into a better film. Even the inevitable childbirth scene is more or less effective in her hands, despite the fact that the insecure screenplay doesn’t take any chances and combines it with a chase scene.
Another problem is that the filmmakers haven’t decided how relatively smart the people in the movie can be. All movies have some people who are smarter than others, of course, but at some point a movie has to decide what the parameters are. O’Hara, as Mrs. Lever, is so much smarter than her dimwit sons that if we were going to pack them up, we’d have to ship them to a Pauly Shore movie. It’s not that a woman that smart can’t have sons that dumb. It’s that they couldn’t get into the Air National Guard.
Howling II
(Directed by Philippe Mora; starring Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning; 1986)
There is a moment in Howling II when Sybil Danning and two other werewolves revert to their native state. Fangs grow from their mouths, their nails turn into claws, and they are covered with fur. Then they have a ménage à trois, snarling and snapping at each other and raking each other with their claws, in what must be the most unintentionally funny movie scene of the week.
You do not see scenes like this in other movies. You do not see a lot of well known actresses appearing in them. Let us therefore speak in praise of Sybil Danning. I have interviewed her three times, and have always found her with one of the best senses of humor in Hollywood. She appears in movies like this for the money, of course, but also (I suspect) because she laughs out loud when she reads the scripts.
I’d like to check out Danning’s closets at home. If they let her keep the costumes from her movies, I’ll bet she has quite a collection. For example, the cloak that Lou Ferrigno made her wear in Hercules and the 7 Gladiators, because her muscles were distracting from his.
I Am Curious (Yellow)
(Directed by Vilgot Sloman; starring Lena Nyman; 1969)
If your thing is shelling out several bucks to witness a phallus (flaccid), then I Am Curious (Yellow) is the movie for you. But if you hope for anything else (that it might be erotic, for example, or even funny), forget it. I Am Curious (Yellow) is not merely not erotic. It is antierotic. Two hours of this movie will drive thoughts of sex out of your mind for weeks. See the picture and buy twin beds.
It is possible, of course, to manufacture an elaborate defense of the movie. I could do it myself with one hand tied behind my back. I could talk about the device of the film-within-a-film and the director’s autobiographical references, and all that. But the movie is boring, stupid, and slow.
I wondered at times, during my long and restless ordeal while the picture ground out at roughly the rate of three feet every seven years, whether it was perhaps intended as a put-on. But I doubt it. I think there actually is a director in Sweden who is dull enough to seriously consider this an act of moviemaking. There is a dogged earnestness about the “significant” scenes in the movie that suggests somebody moved his lips when he wrote the script and had to use a finger to mark his place.
Beyond that, there’s also a pudgy girl with an unpleasant laugh (she thinks she’s so cute). And a boy who looks like Archie rolled into Jughead. They do not exactly talk about current political and social problems, but they recite words associated with them. You can hear words like class structure, labor union, Vietnam, racism, Franco, nonviolence and, of course, the Bomb. But these words are never quite assembled into sentences.
There are also, of course, the celebrated sex scenes. They may not be sexy, but they are undeniably scenes. The boy and the girl perform in these scenes with the absorption and determination of a Cub Scout weaving a belt. The one interesting aspect is that the hero succeeds in doing something no other man has ever been able to do. He makes love detumescently. The hell with the movie; let’s have his secret.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
(Directed by Jim Gillespie; starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.; 1997)
The best shot in this film is the first one. Not a good sign. I Know What You Did Last Summer begins dramatically, with the camera swooping high above a dark and stormy sea, and then circling until it reveals a lonely figure sitting on a cliff overlooking the surf. The shot leads us to anticipate dread, horror, and atmospheric gloominess, but, alas, it is not to be.
Like so many horror films, this one is set on a national holiday—the Fourth of July. (Christmas and Graduation Day are also popular, although Thanksgiving now seems reserved for movies about dysfunctional families.) In a small North Carolina town, a beauty pageant ends with Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) being crowned the Croaker Queen. (The reference is to a fish, but the pun is intended, I fear.) Blinking back tears of joy, she announces her plans: “Through Art, I shall serve my country.”