Little kids may like this movie, if they’ve never seen one like it before. Slightly older kids with good memories will notice that this is not even the first movie this year where a character passes gas to knock out the other team. Even older viewers are likely to bitterly resent the fate that drew them into the theater.
Little Indian, Big City
(Directed by Herve Palud; starring Thierry Lhermitte; 1996)
Little Indian, Big City is one of the worst movies ever made. I detested every moronic minute of it. Through a stroke of good luck, the entire third reel of the film was missing the day I saw it. I went back to the screening room two days later, to view the missing reel. It was as bad as the rest, but nothing could have saved this film. As my colleague Gene Siskel observed, “If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.” I could not have put it better myself.
Little Indian, Big City is a French film (I will not demean the fine word “comedy” by applying it here). It is not in French with English subtitles, however. It has been dubbed into English, a canny move, since the movie is not likely to appeal to anyone who can read. The dubbing means that awkward, hollow-sounding words emerge from the mouths of the characters while they flap their lips to a different rhythm. In an attempt to make the English dubbing match the length of the French dialogue, sentences are constructed backwards and the passive voice pops up at random. People say things like, “You have a son—you hear?”
The character speaking that last line is the mother (Miou Miou) of a boy of about twelve. She was once married to the film’s hero (Thierry Lhermitte), but left him thirteen years ago, when she was pregnant, because he spent too much time on the telephone. She fled to the Amazon, and has raised her child while living with an Indian tribe. Now he has flown to the rain forest to find his wife, so they can be divorced, and he can marry the stupidest woman on earth.
The hero did not know he had a son—you hear? Now he meets him. The son, named Mimi-Siku (Ludwig Briand), wears a cute breechcloth, carries a bow and arrow, has a mask painted on his face, and kills snakes by biting them. His mother is an intelligent, sensitive soul, who loves the environment and the rain forest. She is the only person in the jungle who speaks English (or French, in the original), and so if her son learned to speak it, he learned it from her. I guess it was her idea of a joke to teach him pidgin English, so that he says things like, “Me no able read.” I guess she didn’t teach him to read, either. She is depicted as kind of a secular saint.
Mimi-Siku is so good at a blowgun that he can kill a fly with a dart, and often does so. He has a hairy pet spider. His father brings him back to Paris, where the movie gets worse. The father has a business partner who never knows what to wear, and so always wears the same thing the father wears. Ho, ho. They go to business meetings in matching ties. Hee, hee. The partner has a daughter, and soon the son is bouncing in a hammock with a nubile twelve-year-old and telling his father, “Me like you—love only one female.” I doubt if the relationship will last, since the boy is prettier than the girl.
Later (or perhaps earlier, since it was in the third reel) Mimi-Siku climbs barefoot up the Eiffel Tower. This feat is handled so ineptly by the film that it has neither payoff nor consequence. He does it, and then the movie forgets it. Meanwhile, the father is doing a business deal with some shady Russians, who speak in dubbed accents and drink vodka and seem to be wearing Krushchev’s old suits. The father’s fiancée (Arielle Dombasle) chants mantras, plans a New Age wedding, and wants her guru to live with them. I think she’s in such a hurry to get married because she’s afraid the collagen injections in her lips might shift. By the end of the film, father and son have bonded, and cooked a fish by the side of the expressway. And the father has learned to kill a fly with a dart.
There is a movie called Fargo. It is a masterpiece. Go see it. If you under any circumstances see Little Indian, Big City, I will never let you read one of my reviews again.
The Lonely Lady
(Directed by Peter Sasdy; starring Pia Zadora, Ray Liotta; 1983)
If The Lonely Lady had even a shred of style and humor, it could qualify as the worst movie of the year. Unfortunately, it’s not that good. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there in Hollywood and it’s not enough to be merely awful. You need something to set yourself apart. Pia Zadora tries, and she has pluck, but she’s just not bad enough all by herself.
The movie is bad in all the usual ways, and it would be easy enough to simply list them: The overacting, the use of voice-over narration to bridge awkward chasms between scenes, the predictable plot. But why don’t we take all of those things for granted and move on to the truly unspeakable things in this movie? We could make a list:
1. I suppose it was necessary to have a scene in which the heroine is cruelly treated by men. But (a) couldn’t they have thought of something other than rape by a garden hose? and (b) shouldn’t such a traumatic event have had some effect on the character?
2. After the rape, Pia is seen being comforted in bed by her mother and a doctor. A single thread of stage makeup, representing blood, has trickled out of her mouth and dried. It is left in place for the entire scene, suggesting that at no point did the doctor, her mother, or any other medical personnel or family member care enough to disturb the makeup in order to make the scene realistic by wiping away the blood.
3. Proper nouns are missing from this movie. It seems to exist in a generic alternative universe in which nothing has its own name. The Oscars are known as “these awards” or “the awards.” After Pia and her first lover leave a movie, they have this conversation: “I liked him better.” “I liked her better.” No him or her is identified. This is the kind of conversation that results when a screenplay says, “They leave the theater and briefly discuss the movie,” but the screenplay doesn’t care what movie they saw.
4. The movie has no time for emotional transitions. When Pia marries the successful Hollywood writer, he is attentive and caring in one scene, and a sadist in the next, simply because the plot requires him to act that way. No motivation. When Pia goes crazy, it’s not so much in reaction to what’s been happening to her (she survived the garden hose with nary a backward glance) but because the script requires it, so that, later, she can pull herself back together again just as arbitrarily.
5. The movie’s whole plot hinges on Pia’s ability to rewrite a scene better than her jealous writer-husband. When the star of her husband’s movie weeps that she can’t play a certain graveyard scene, Pia whips out the portable typewriter and writes brilliant new dialogue for the star. What, you may ask, does Pia write? Here’s what. She has the grieving widow kneel by the side of the open grave and cry out (are you ready for this?) “Why? Why!!!”
That’s it. That’s the brilliant dialogue. And it can be used for more than a death scene, let me tell you. In fact, I walked out of this movie saying to myself, “Why? Why!!!”
Look Who’s Talking Now
(Directed by Tom Ropelewski; starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley; 1993)
Look Who’s Talking Now is a fairly misleading title for those who paid attention during English class, since the talkers are dogs, and so the title of course should be Look What’s Talking Now. Anyone who paid attention during English will also find innumerable other distressing elements in the film, including what teachers used to call “lack of originality and aptness of thought.”