Hey, I’m not against four-letter words—in context, and with a purpose. But why did Mr. Payback need to be gratuitously offensive? Nonstop? Knowing there would be young children in the audience?
Now what about the process itself? True, you can “influence” events. You sit through the movie once, choosing villains, choosing “paybacks,” choosing fates, even choosing celebrity guests (Paul Anka, Ice T) for a final game show. That takes twenty minutes. Then you’re allowed to sit through the movie again, and this time of course you choose different villains, paybacks, etc. In one version, you can force that evil headmistress to be strapped into a leather bondage uniform and walked on all fours. In another version, the villain might be forced to eat monkey brains. Ho, ho.
How are these choices conveyed to the screen? Four laserdisc players with various plot choices are standing by in the control booth, and double-brightness video projectors are suspended from the theater ceiling. The image is acceptable and the sound is excellent; there is no perceptible delay between the audience vote and the scene it has chosen.
It was clear after two viewings that most of the movie remains essentially the same every time, and that the “choices” provide brief detours that loop back to the main story line. Choose a different villain, and he or she still gets gassed in the backseat of the limousine. It’s said that two hours of material are shot for every twenty-minute movie. Nothing on Earth could induce me to sit through every permutation of Mr. Payback.
Is there a future for “interfilms”? Maybe. Someday they may grow clever or witty. Not all of them will be as moronic and offensive as Mr. Payback. What they do technically, they do pretty well. It is just that this is not a movie. It is mass psychology run wild, with the mob zealously pummeling their buttons, careening downhill toward the sleaziest common denominator.
There were lots of small children in the audience. I thought about asking one little girl if she had voted for the paddle, the rod, or the cattle prod. Because she must have voted for one of them. I saw her pushing her buttons.
The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo
(Directed by Juan Antonio Bardem and Henri Colpi; starring Omar Sharif; 1975)
Lots of movies have been inspired by their special effects, but The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo may be the first movie inspired by its lack of special effects. Here’s a kiddie movie with a nihilistic, suicidal ending—because there wasn’t enough money to show Nemo’s famous submarine, the Nautilus, actually moving under water. Nemo, faced with doom and lacking the expensive special effects necessary to make his escape, chooses to go down with his ship and save the producers money.
We do, however, get the inside of the Nautilus, as well as a cheap set alleged to show its conning tower and upper deck (the rest of the vast vessel is underwater, and, as the saying goes, out of sight is out of mind and also not out of pocket). It’s inhabited by Nemo himself, played by the sad-eyed Omar Sharif, who gets star billing for his approximately ten minutes on screen.
The plot involves a group of shipwrecked balloonists (or balloon-wrecked sailors) and their dog, who are stranded on a strange island guarded by devices that look like a cross between Chinese dragons and death rays. They set up housekeeping in a cave, stay away from the death rays, float to a nearby island to rescue another shipwreck victim, and spend an inordinate amount of time following their dog, who is as clever as, and vastly more humorous than, the rest of the cast.
There are also some pirates who turn up, apparently looking for Nemo, and there are several inconclusive gun battles for no very good reason. The most inexplicable scene (in a movie full of them) is one involving a pet chimpanzee who arrives unannounced, does its stuff, and then is shot by the pirates and buried. Never introduce a chimpanzee in the first act unless you’re going to shoot it in the third?
After adventures too boring to mention, our heroes wind up in Captain Nemo’s grotto and on board the Nautilus. He gives them an illustrated slide lecture of his background and early years, and meanwhile the island is blowing up. That’s our chance to see stock footage of lava flowing from volcanoes. In fear that we may miss the point (after all, this is rented footage), the producers show it to us, not once, but twice. That’s not necessary since we saw the identical stock footage in last month’s The Island at the Top of the World. That volcano gets around.
Movies like this have an obligatory structure (or used to) that requires a climax at the end. We can reasonably expect that our heroes will assist Captain Nemo in freeing himself and his submarine from the grotto, but, no, they don’t. They climb out of the grotto and make their way to the beach. The Nautilus goes down in an orgy of trick photography. A ship steams into sight to rescue the survivors. The movie’s last line of dialogue is one of regret that rescue has arrived “since now our adventures are over.” That’s assuming they ever began.
The Myth of Fingerprints
(Directed by Bart Freundlich; starring Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider, Julianne Moore, Noah Wylie; 1997)
Some families cannot be saved. The family in The Myth of Fingerprints is one of them. There have been a lot of movies where dysfunctional families return home for uneasy Thanksgiving weekends (Home for the Holidays and The Ice Storm come to mind), but few in which the turkey has less to complain about than anyone else at the table.
The film takes place in chilly light at a farmhouse somewhere in New England, where angry and sullen grown children return for Thanksgiving, bringing along apprehensive lovers and angry memories. Waiting to welcome them is their mother, Lena (Blythe Danner), whose relative cheer under these circumstances is inexplicable but welcome, and their father, Hal (Roy Scheider), who, like so many WASP fathers in recent films, is by definition a monster (aware of his pariah status, he walks and talks like a medieval flagellant).
The family drags itself together like torture victims returning to their dungeons. The dialogue, wary and elliptical, skirts around remembered wounds. Angriest of all is Mia (Julianne Moore), who glowers through the entire film, nursing old grudges, and lashes out at her hapless fiancée Eliot (Brian Kerwin), a psychotherapist who, if he were any good at all, would prescribe immediate flight for himself. Mia’s younger sister, Leigh (Laurel Holloman) seems relatively unscathed by the family experience, maybe because her siblings exhausted the family’s potential for damage before she grew into range.
Also in the family are two sons. Warren (Noah Wylie) is interested to learn that the great love of his life, Daphne, is back in town. Jake (Michael Vartan) has brought along his fiancée, Margaret (Hope Davis), who has an alarming taste for immediate sexual gratification (“anywhere, anytime,” as Travis Bickle once said).
During the weekend, two of these characters will meet people from their pasts. For Warren, the reunion with Daphne (Arija Bareikis) will be a chance to explain why he broke off their warm relationship so suddenly and seemed to flee. Mia meets an old schoolmate who now calls himself Cezanne (James Le Gros), and who represents, I think, a life principle the family would be wise to study.
Frequently in the movies, when an alienated, inarticulate, and depressed father starts cleaning his rifle, we can anticipate a murder or a suicide by the end of the film. Here we’re thrown off course when Hal, the dad, buys a turkey at the grocery store and then shoots it with his rifle, so his family will think he hunted it down himself. (I would have appreciated a scene where he explained the plastic bag with the gizzards.)