The rooster dance also has nothing to do with the film, which properly gets under way when Julia gets a postcard from her onetime lover Mark, asking her to come to Spokane so he can marry her. This information is presented by filling the screen with a big close-up of the postcard, which Julia then reads aloud for us. Soon we find her in the desert with a bedroll on her back, posing photogenically on the windowsill of a deserted house so that interesting people can brake to a halt and offer her rides.
Her odyssey from San Diego to Spokane takes her via a wedding in Boston. That’s a road movie for you. At one point along the way she shares the driving with a woman who is delivering big ceramic cows to a diary. Julia drops a ceramic calf and breaks it, drives the truck to Vegas to get another calf, but when she gets there the ceramic cow lady’s husband tells her the dairy canceled the order, so Julia wanders the Strip in Vegas, no doubt because the Road Movie Rule Book requires at least one montage of casino signs.
Back on the road, Julia meets a band of women in a van. They are the Virgin Sluts. They dress like models for ads for grunge clubs in free weeklies in the larger cities of smaller states. She is thrilled to meet them at last. She also meets a makeout artist, a sensitive photographer, and a guy who is convinced he has the movie’s Dennis Hopper role. On and on her odyssey goes, until finally she gets to Spokane, where she finds out that Mark is a louse, as we knew already because he didn’t send her bus fare.
Mad Dog Time
(Directed by Larry Bishop; starring Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Diane Lane, Ellen Barkin; 1996)
Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.
The plot: A gangster boss (Richard Dreyfuss) is released from a mental hospital, and returns to a sleazy nightclub to take over control of his organization. He has been gone long enough that a long list of gangsters would like to have his job, led by (Jeff Goldblum), who has been conducting an affair with Dreyfuss’s girlfriend (Diane Lane) and her sister (Ellen Barkin). The girls share the last name of Everly, so they’re the Everly Sisters—get it? Ho, ho, ho. God, what rich humor this movie offers!
Other candidates for Dreyfuss’s throne include characters played by Gabriel Byrne, Kyle McLachlan, Gregory Hines, Burt Reynolds, and Billy Idol. The way the movie works is, two or three characters will start out in a scene and recite some dry, hard-boiled dialogue, and then one or two of them will get shot. This happens over and over.
“Vic’s gonna want everybody dead,” a character says at the beginning, in what turns out to be a horrible prophecy. Vic is the Dreyfuss character. Goldblum is named Mick, and Larry Bishop, who directed this mess, is Nick. So we get dialogue that thinks it’s funny to use Vic, Nick, and Mick in the same sentence. Oh, hilarious.
I don’t have any idea what this movie is about—and yet, curiously, I don’t think I missed anything. Bishop is the son of the old Rat Packer Joey Bishop, who maybe got him a price on the songs he uses on the sound track, by Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, and Frank Sinatra (Paul Anka sings “My Way,” which was certainly Bishop’s motto during the production).
What were they thinking of? Dreyfuss is the executive producer. He’s been in some good movies. Did he think this was a script? (Not a bad script—a script at all?) The actors perform their lines like condemned prisoners. The most ethical guy on the production must have been Norman Hollyn, the editor, because he didn’t cut anybody out, and there must have been people willing to do him big favors to get out of this movie.
Mad Dog Time should be cut up to provide free ukulele picks for the poor.
Magic in the Water
(Directed by Rick Stevenson; starring Mark Harmon, Joshua Jackson, Sarah Wayne; 1995)
Now that the Loch Ness monster has been unmasked as a trick photograph, is there a future for legendary creatures of the deep? Magic in the Water hopes so. It’s about a couple of kids and their preoccupied dad, who visit a Canadian lake said to be inhabited by a mysterious creature named Orky.
The creature has been drummed up into a local tourist industry by the go-getters down at the chamber of commerce, who stretch banners across Main Street proclaiming the town to be the “Home of Orky.” For Josh and Ashley, the two kids, Orky is not much harder to spot than their dad, Jack (Mark Harmon), who is so busy with business calls on his cellular phone that he pays little attention to them.
Better communication between parent and children is but one of the uplifting themes of Magic in the Water, which also introduces a wise old Indian (Ben Cardinal), who spends much time chanting and explaining to the kids that at one time, men and animals could trade places. (The Indian’s name, Joe Pickled Trout, may help explain why animals grew disenchanted with men.)
Josh (Joshua Jackson) is obsessed by vehicles of any kind; his catch-phrase is “I bet I could drive that,” so we know with absolute certainty that sooner or later he will be called upon to drive something. Ashley (Sarah Wayne) spends much time looking at the water, where Orky seems to manifest itself as ripples, waves, heaves, and spouts. Even more proof Orky exists: When Ashley leaves her Oreos on the dock, Orky takes the cookies, eats the white stuff in between, and returns the outsides, still dry. That can’t be easy if you don’t have hands and live underwater. Try it yourself.
We meet a local psychiatrist named Dr. Wanda Bell (Harley Jane Kozak), who runs group therapy for several local people who all share the same conviction that their minds and bodies have been inhabited by Orky. Jack falls for Wanda, and is soon a member of her group—because, yes, Orky inhabits him, too, and makes him a better dad for the experience.
Meanwhile, bad guys lurk around the fringes of the story, and it’s revealed that they are secretly turning the lake into a hazardous waste dump. Could it be that Orky is trying to tell the locals something? Josh and Ashley, who are easily as clever as the Hardy Boys and maybe even Nancy Drew, soon discover the evil secret, and then it’s up to them, and Orky, to save the day.
One of the problems with the first two-thirds of Magic in the Water is that we don’t see Orky. One of the problems with the last third is that we do. Orky turns out to be singularly uncharismatic, looking like an ashen Barney on downers.
The underlying inspiration for Magic in the Water is, of course, the Free Willy pictures, with kids making friends of noble aquatic creatures while bad guys scheme to kill the whales and pollute the waters of the earth. Magic in the Water is innocuous fun, but slow, and not distinguished in the special-effects department. And about those two one-armed brothers, who both allegedly lost an arm to Orky: I’ll bet they could find those missing arms if they’d look closely inside their shirts.
Marie Baie des Anges
(Directed by Manuel Pradal; starring Vahina Giocante, Frederic Malgras; 1998)
At the height of the storm over Last Tango in Paris, Art Buchwald, who had lived in Paris for years, weighed in with some common sense: The movie, he explained, is really about real estate. Both characters want the same apartment, and are willing to do anything to get it.
Marie Baie des Anges is not really about real estate. It is about sex. But I thought a lot about real estate while I was watching it. It takes place on the French Riviera, which is pictured here as an unspoilt Eden in which the film’s adolescent lovers gambol and pose, nude much of the time, surfacing only occasionally for the dangers of the town.