Murray’s portrait of an inspirational speaker is right on target, and filled out with lots of subtle touches of movement and dialogue, and there is humor, too, in the way his audiences will go along with his insane schemes (like the human pyramid), as if being able to balance three people on your back would solve your problems at work. This whole section of the movie is inspired; Murray should star in the movie of The Dilbert Principle.
As for the elephant portions of the movie: They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.
The Last Movie
(Directed by Dennis Hopper; starring Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson; 1972)
Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie is a wasteland of cinematic wreckage. There are all sorts of things you can say about it, using easy critical words to describe it as undisciplined, incoherent, a structural mess. But mostly it’s just plain pitiful. Hopper hasn’t even been able to cover his tracks; the failure of his intentions is nakedly obvious. Near the movie’s end there’s a pathetic scene in which he sits, half-stoned, dazed, confused, and says the hell with it. It feels like he means it.
In Hollywood, they talk about movies and performances being “saved on the Green Machine.” They mean the editing process, when a skilled editor can take mixed-up footage and somehow give a meaning and structure to it. Movies are such a suggestive art form that a good editor can forget about the gaps and chasms in a story line and convince moviegoers—before their very eyes!—that it all somehow fits together.
Based on the evidence in this cut of The Last Movie, every possible effort was made to save the project after Hopper finally returned from Peru with his hours of footage. The plan seems to have been to make the movie look like Easy Rider, whenever possible, and hope the counterculture would get behind it. Well, that didn’t work but I wonder if anything would have worked.
The story line (if you’ll permit me to be linear in the face of the movie’s fragmentation) concerns a Hollywood cowboy extra who stays behind after a B-Western crew has finished filming a potboiler. He shacks up with a girl he’s met, gets involved in a dazed search for gold, passes some time with the local American expatriates, and then he becomes the unwitting star in a “movie” that the local Indians make on the Western sets that were left behind.
It appears from the evidence on the screen that the movie’s events were originally intended to unfold in chronological order. But it didn’t work out that way. Hopper’s gold-mining expedition, for example, is duly announced. But then we get a lyrical sequence of silhouettes against the sunset, trucks driving into the dusk, small figures in a vast landscape, etc., while a suitable song is performed on the sound track. And that is the gold-mining expedition.
After they get back, however, there’s a scene where they try to talk the rich Americans into backing them—and this scene is done in a realistic tone, with lots of dialogue and everything. Then, at the movie’s end, there’s a flashback to a campfire scene on the gold-hunting expedition. This scene, done in the style and mood of the pot-inspired campfire scene in Easy Rider, has the two prospectors reveal that they learned about gold mining by watching Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Fine. The easy, stoned absurdity of the scene reminds us of Jack Nicholson and his warnings about flying saucers in Easy Rider. But if we watch the scene like cinematic archaeologists, we sense the invisible presence of the Green Machine. My notion is that an entire gold-seeking expedition was filmed, and then not used; that the pastoral photography was put in to paper over the hole in the plot, and that the campfire scene was then salvaged and stuck in at the end to give the necessary mood lift before the movie’s downer conclusion.
All of this—the fancy photography, the fragmented editing, the series of expensive performers, and high-royalty songs—is just an elaborate rescue attempt. There are also all sorts of guest appearances by Hopper’s friends, who flew down to the big doings on the Peru location: The Last Movie almost becomes the drug culture’s Around the World in 80 Days.
The idea, I guess, is that we’re supposed to understand that if Peter Fonda and John Phillip Law and everybody had such a dandy time, and if the movie thumbs its nose at making any sense and if Hopper throws us off the scent by using title cards that say “scene missing” and if he leaves in clapboards and puts in a jolly handwritten “The End!” when the movie’s over, why, then, The Last Movie must exist on many levels, some of them droll, some significant, some intended as kind of an underground telegram to users.
I dunno. Audiences and especially the young audience this movie is aimed for (or at) aren’t going for the old razzle-dazzle so much anymore. They’ve played against too much of it. Hip directors aren’t getting away with the fast break and the downcourt pass from nowhere: audiences are playing a more defensive game, and for The Last Movie they may even have to go into a man-to-man.
Last Rites
(Directed by Donald P. Bellisario; starring Tom Berenger, Dane Clark; 1988)
This is it, located at last and with only six weeks to spare—the worst film of 1988. Last Rites qualifies because it passes both acid tests: It is not only bad filmmaking, but it is offensive as well—offensive to my intelligence. Many films are bad. Only a few declare themselves the work of people deficient in taste, judgment, reason, tact, morality, and common sense. Was there no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film, and vomited?
The movie begins with the following premise: Handsome young Father Michael Pace (Tom Berenger) is an assistant priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. His father, Carlo Pace (Dane Clark) is the godfather of the New York Mafia. The movie opens with Michael’s sister, Zena (Anne Twomey) catching her husband with his mistress and shooting him. She’s a pretty good shot. The first shot castrates him, the second one kills him. Then she goes to Father Michael to confess her sin.
The sacrament of confession is handled throughout this movie as a cheap gimmick, without the slightest evidence that any of the characters or filmmakers understand how it works. But never mind. I mention that the sister goes to her brother to make a confession because the movie is inept at storytelling. Unless you are very clever or perhaps psychic, you will actually not catch on until late in the movie that Father Michael is even related to Don Carlo or to Zena. The movie isn’t keeping it a secret; it’s simply so slipshod that this crucial information is not clearly supplied.
The husband’s mistress is named Angela (Daphne Zuniga). After she escapes from the bloodbath of revenge, she finds herself sheltered and comforted by none other than Father Michael, who believes her story that she is a simple Mexican girl who got into some very deep water. Zuniga’s Mexican accent is so unbelievably bad it wouldn’t even qualify for a Taco Bell ad. No one could possibly believe she is really a Mexican—except perhaps in this movie, which is so witless that you’re inclined to give the accent the benefit of the doubt. (The linguistic depths of the movie are murky indeed; Don Carlo pronounces his name, Pace, to sound like “pa-chay,” but young Michael makes it rhyme with “race.” Thus, of course, at a crucial moment a character does not realize they are related.)