A: You got a point. So dad doesn’t catch on.
B: Naw. He falls for her. Also, this is a nice angle, he’s a high school science teacher who is fighting to save the wetlands near the school from an evil developer who wants to pave it and turn it into a shopping center. Dad is played by Ed Harris.
A: (nods approvingly) Ecology. Very good.
B: So the hooker is in the tree house, dad thinks she’s a math tutor, and meanwhile the evil gangster is cruising the streets of the suburb with another hooker, looking for her. While dad fights against the encroachment of the wetlands and chains himself to his automobile so the bulldozers can’t come in. And meanwhile we throw in some of those cute conversations where one person means one thing and another person means something else. You know, so that all of the people in the town know she’s a hooker except for dad, who takes her out to eat and scandalizes your standard table of gossiping local biddies.
A: This is nice, this is original.
B: We put in some nice Normal Rockwell touches. Like, the way the kid communicates between his bedroom and the hooker in the tree house is with one of those old tin-can telephones? You know, where you attach two tin cans with a string?
A: I was never able to get one of those to work when I was a kid.
B: Neither was I. But don’t worry. No kid today has ever seen one before, so they won’t know. Today’s kids use cellular phones and beepers.
A: Good point.
B: And then we get the big climax.
A: What happens?
B: I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let’s just say the gangster doesn’t get what he wants, and true love saves the day.
A: What about the wetlands?
B: The wetlands? Let me just say, from the point of view of the ultimate significance of this picture, the message for the family audience sort of thing, the wetlands are what this picture is all about.
A: Saving the wetlands. A good cause.
B: Of course, you don’t mention the wetlands in the ads.
A: No, you mention the hooker in the ads. So what’s the picture called? Pocket Money?
B: No, it’s called Milk Money.
A: Why Milk Money?
B: You’ll understand when you see the ads.
Mr. Magoo
(Directed by Stanley Tong; starring Leslie Nielsen; 1997)
Magoo drives a red Studebaker convertible in Mr. Magoo, a fact I report because I love Studebakers and his was the only thing I liked in the film. It has a prescription windshield. He also drives an eggplantmobile, which looks like a failed wienermobile. The concept of a failed wienermobile is itself funnier than anything in the movie.
Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted. I wonder if there could have been any laughs in it. Perhaps this project was simply a bad idea from the beginning, and no script, no director, no actor, could have saved it.
I wasn’t much of a fan of the old cartoons. They were versions of one joke, imposed on us by the cantankerous but sometimes lovable nearsighted Magoo, whose shtick was to mistake something for something else. He always survived, but since it wasn’t through his own doing, his adventures were more like exercises in design: Let’s see how Magoo can walk down several girders suspended in midair, while thinking they’re a staircase.
The plot involves Magoo as an innocent bystander at the theft of a jewel. Mistaken as the thief, he is pursued by the usual standard-issue CIA and FBI buffoons, while never quite understanding the trouble he’s in. He’s accompanied on most of his wanderings by his bulldog and his nephew, Waldo, of which the bulldog has the more winning personality.
Magoo is played by Leslie Nielsen, who could at the very least have shaved his head bald for the role. He does an imitation of the Magoo squint and the Magoo voice, but is unable to overcome the fact that a little Magoo at six minutes in a cartoon is a far different matter than a lot of Magoo at ninety minutes in a feature. This is a one-joke movie without the joke. Even the outtakes at the end aren’t funny, and I’m not sure I understood one of them, unless it was meant to show stunt people hilariously almost being drowned.
I have taken another look at my notes, and must correct myself. There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film “is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight.” I think we should stage an international search to find one single person who thinks the film is intended as such a portrayal, and introduce that person to the author of the disclaimer, as they will have a lot in common, including complete detachment from reality.
Mr. Payback
(Directed by Bob Gale; starring Billie Warlock; 1995)
The armrest of your seat contains a little console with red, orange, and green buttons. You do a test run, clicking them. The lights go down, the “Interfilm” trademark appears on the screen, and an announcer encourages you to talk, scream, shout, and snort during the following film: “Feel free to generally behave as if you were raised in a barn.”
Mr. Payback, the first “interactive movie,” is supposed to inspire these reactions because you, the lucky audience member, will be able to make key decisions affecting the progress of the story. The first “interfilm” opens this weekend in forty-four specially equipped theaters around the country, and you can see for yourself.
If you feel, for example, that the headmistress of a private school should torture the handcuffed hero with a cattle prod, you will want to push the red button. Other choices include a paddle or a rod. I was for the paddle, but the majority voted for the cattle prod, after which the hero was given electric shocks to the genitals (thankfully below screen level) and then dropped in a Dumpster while a subtitle cheerfully assured us that his “family jewels” had survived intact.
I went to see Mr. Payback with an open mind. I knew it would not be a “movie” as I understand that word, because movies act on you and absorb you in their stories. An “interfilm,” as they call this new medium, is like a cross between a video game and a CD-ROM game, and according to Bob Bejan, president and CEO of Interfilm, Inc., “suspension of disbelief comes when you begin to believe you’re in control.”
I never believed I was in control. If I had been in control, I would have ended the projection and advised Bejan to go back to the drawing board. While an interactive movie might in theory be an entertaining experience, Mr. Payback was so offensive and yokel-brained that being raised in a barn might almost be required of its audiences.
Few adults are going to find the process bearable. The target audience is possibly children and younger adolescents. That’s why I found it surprising that Mr. Payback shovels as much barnyard material into its plot as possible. The movie seems obsessed with scatology: with excrement, urination, enemas, loudly passing gas, stepping in dog messes, etc. It also involves a great deal of talk about sexual practices, not to mention every possible rude four-letter word except, to be sure, the ultimate one. The movie bends over backward to be vulgar. It’s the kind of film where horrified parents might encourage the kids to shout at the screen, hoping the noise might drown out the flood of garbage.