My standards are not inflexible. There is a scene in Trainspotting in which the hero dives headfirst into the filthiest toilet in Scotland, and I actually enjoyed that scene (you would have to see the movie to understand why). But when we arrived at the tender little scene in Joe’s Apartment where the roaches were tugging at his eyelashes to wake him up, I easily contained my enthusiasm.
The movie is a feature-length version of a 1992 short film made for MTV by John Payson. Less is more. The idea of singing, dancing cockroach buddies can easily be explored in all of its manifestations, I am sure, in a film much briefer than eighty minutes, which is how long Joe’s Apartment runs, illustrating my principle that no good film is too long and no bad film is short enough.
The plot has been recycled out of many another Manhattan comedy about the evil property developer who wants to tear down the colorful little brownstone and put up some architectural monstrosity. The rent-controlled apartment building in this film is occupied by a little old lady, who is tripped by hidden wires and in other ways forced out of her flat by the nephews of the evil slumlord (played by Don Ho; yes, Don Ho). But then the hero, Joe (Jerry O’Connell) moves into the apartment, posing as her heir, and so the nephews start on him. The real tenants of the apartment are tens of thousands of cockroaches, who at first dislike Joe but eventually become his friend and gang up on the slumlord.
I am not sure I need to go into all of the details involving Joe’s new girlfriend Lily (Megan Ward), or how hard she works on her garden, or how well Joe collects manure from the carriage horses of Central Park to help her, or how her dad is a senator (played by Robert Vaughn; yes, Robert Vaughn). If you want to know how the pink scented urinal cakes come into the story, send me a stamped, self-addressed postcard. On second thought, don’t stamp it.
The roaches are the real centerpiece of the movie. These are not ordinary roaches. They sing and dance. Some people will be reminded of the singing mice in Babe, but singing mice are one thing and a roach quintet is quite another. The insects have obnoxious piping little voices and sound like the Chipmunks if they had inhaled helium.
Some of the roaches are given names, but I must say none of them really emerged as individuals for me. They were more of a large squirming mass, and when several hundred of them crawled across Joe’s face, I for one was happy to be sitting in the back row, lest a fellow moviegoer be moved to hurl. The special effects are very good, I suppose. You can see every detail of the carefully articulated armor on their little tummies, if you want to.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
(Directed by Hall Bartlett; 1973)
At the point when I walked out of Jonathan Livingston Seagull—some forty-five minutes into the movie—the hero had learned to avoid garbage and fly high, but the film, alas, had not. I hardly ever walk out of movies, and in fact I sometimes make a point of sitting through bad ones, just to get ammunition for a juicy review. But this one was too much.
It is based, to begin with, on a book so banal that it had to be sold to adults; kids would have seen through it. The Little Engine That Could is, by comparison, a work of some depth and ambition. Consider that the movie made from the book has now been made the object of a lawsuit by the book’s author and you have some measure of the depths to which we sink as Jonathan dives.
Jonathan not only dives, and perfects his aeronautical ability, and makes his name as the flocks leading nonconformist, but he also talks. Allowing him to talk is perhaps the movie’s basic strategic error. Jonathan talks under his breath with great gasping urgency: He talks to himself about how if only he could hold his wings a little different, etc., he, too, could dive for fish and not have to scavenge garbage.
And then there’s the problem of the birds. The movie uses real birds, and it’s a little sickening to show them being knocked out and batted around in the interest of the story line. I left when Jonathan had dragged himself, groggy and bleeding, onto some flotsam. Who wants to pay to see birds bleed?
Jungle 2 Jungle
(Directed by John Pasquin; starring Tim Allen, Sam Huntington; 1997)
There is a scene early in Jungle 2 Jungle that indicates how brainless the movie is. Before I explore its delights, I must make you familiar with the premise. A Manhattan commodities broker journeys up the Amazon to obtain a divorce from the wife he has not seen in many years. She works now among the Indians. The broker is astonished to find that he has a son, who has been raised by his estranged wife in the jungle. The son now wants to return to New York with his father, because he has promised the tribal chief he will bring back the fire from the torch atop the Statue of Liberty.
Now, as we rejoin our story, the broker (Tim Allen) and his son (Sam Huntington) arrive at Kennedy Airport, and here is the brainless part: The boy, who is about thirteen, is still dressed for the jungle. He wears only a loincloth and some feathers and suchlike; no shirt or shoes. If memory serves, he carries his deadly dart blowgun, which is the sort of thing you’re not allowed to have on an aircraft, but never mind: Did either of this child’s parents stop to consider that perhaps the lad should have jeans and a sweatshirt for a 3,000-mile air journey? Such garments are available in Brazil. I know; I’ve been there. I flew upstream in a plane with pontoons, and landed on the Amazon above Belim without seeing a single person in a loincloth, although I saw many Michael Jordan T-shirts.
But no, the parents didn’t stop to think, and that is because they don’t think. Why don’t they think? Because no one is allowed to think in this movie. Not one single event in the entire plot can possibly take place unless every character in the cast has brains made of Bac-O-Bits.
The plot of Jungle 2 Jungle has been removed from a French film called Little Indian, Big City. The operation is a failure and the patient dies. The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City got “no stars” is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve no stars. It doesn’t achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness.
Most of the comic moments come from the “fish out of water” premise, or “FOW,” as Hollywood abbreviates it (you know a plot’s not original when it has its own acronym). The kid has been raised in the jungle, and now, in the city, he tries to adapt. There are many jokes involving his pet tarantula, which he has brought along with him, and his darts, which Allen uses to accidentally put his fiancée’s cat to sleep.
The fiancée is played by Lolita Davidovich, who is supposed to be a successful businesswoman, but dresses as if she aspires to become a lap dancer. The joke is that she doesn’t like the idea of her future husband having a jungle boy. Additional jokes involve Martin Short, who plays Allen’s associate and has stolen Jim Jarmusch’s hairstyle, although not his wit. There are also some Russian Mafia guys, who march in and out like landlords in a Three Stooges comedy.
Little Indian, Big City (1996) got many if not most of the year’s worst reviews, but when I heard it was being remade with Tim Allen, I must confess I had some hope: Surely they would see how bad the premise was, and repair it? Not a chance. This movie has not learned from the mistakes of others, and like a lemming follows Little Indian over the cliff and into the sea.