It is extremely important to some men that the woman of their choice sleep with them. This is a topic not of much interest to outside observers, and often not even to the woman of their choice. No Looking Back is really only about whether Claudia will sleep with Charlie, stay with Michael, or leave town. As the characters unhappily circled those possibilities, I felt like asking Claudia to call me when she made up her mind.
Nomads
(Directed by John McTiernan; starring Leslie-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan; 1986)
I would like to describe the plot of Nomads, but my space is limited. Maybe I can give it a try. A French anthropologist (Pierce Brosnan) moves to Los Angeles with his wife. Their new home is immediately made the target of a roaming band of fierce street people who dress in leather and chains and paint slogans on garage walls.
The anthropologist discovers that these people are not your average, big-city vandals, but an urban version of the Innuat. And, about halfway through the movie, we learn what the Innuat are. According to Eskimo legends, they are nomadic spirits who wander Earth in human form, spreading evil.
That is not the complicated part of the plot. The hard part is what we have to slog through before we find out about Innuats.
The movie starts with Lesley-Anne Down as an emergency-room doctor. A deranged patient (Brosnan) is brought in and handcuffed to the bed. Everybody thinks he’s on a bad drug trip, but no, it’s simpler than that; he has gone stark raving mad.
He keeps screaming the same phrase in French: N’y sont pas; sont des Innuat. This translates as, “They are not there; they are Innuat.” But nobody can figure that out, because they don’t know “Innuat” is an Eskimo word, you see, and they simply think his French is bad.
That reminds me of a classic story from the Cannes Film Festival a few years back, when Rex Reed got an engraved invitation in French. The only word he could read was “Eskimo.”
He had heard that there was a great new Eskimo film in the festival, however, and so at midnight he went bravely out into the rainy night and got a cab and went to the address on the invitation, only to discover that he was a guest at the opening of an Eskimo Pie ice-cream store.
Now you may argue, not unreasonably, that my story has little to do with Nomads. True. But it has at least as much to do with Nomads as the ancient Eskimo myth of the Innuat.
Nomads is a very confused movie, especially after the berserk Brosnan leaps out of his manacles and bites Lesley-Anne Down on the neck, transferring all of his memories into her head, so that she goes crazy and relives all of Brosnan’s traumatic experiences with the Innuat.
This grows very confusing for Brosnan’s wife (Anna-Maria Monticelli), who does not understand why Down is telling her things only Brosnan would know. It is also very confusing for the audience, because the movie keeps switching signals on us. Sometimes we see Down and then we get a point-of-view shot that is supposed to be inside her head but looking out through Brosnan’s eyes. Sometimes we see Brosnan from the outside. Sometimes that means we are looking at the real Brosnan, and sometimes it doesn’t. We’d really be confused, if we cared.
But we don’t. The movie tells one of those stories where the characters have only themselves to blame for going out into dark nights and looking for trouble with the Innuat and not getting on the next plane back to France. Everybody in this movie gets what’s coming to them, except for Lesley-Anne Down, and even she should have been smart enough not to shine her flashlight into the eyes of a man who was foaming at the mouth.
Nomads does, however, have one great shot. An Innuat on a motorcycle is chasing the two women down a lonely interstate highway. Suddenly, the Innuat turns back, and the camera pans slowly to reveal a highway sign: the California state line. Apparently Nevada is not loony enough for the Innuat. And so the lonely Innuat wheels his motorcycle around, and drives slowly back to Los Angeles, where, in keeping with the ancient Eskimo legend, his spirit will haunt the backlots of Hollywood, waiting for another movie that wouldn’t be quite bad enough without him.
North
(Directed by Rob Reiner; starring Elijah Wood, Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander, Dan Aykroyd, Kathy Bates; 1994)
I have no idea why Rob Reiner, or anyone else, wanted to make this story into a movie, and close examination of the film itself is no help. North is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.
The film stars Elijah Wood, who is a wonderful young actor (and if you don’t believe me, watch his version of The Adventures of Huck Finn). Here he is stuck in a story that no actor, however wonderful, however young, should be punished with. He plays a kid with inattentive parents who decides to go into court, free himself of them, and go on a worldwide search for nicer parents.
This idea is deeply flawed. Children do not lightly separate from their parents—and certainly not on the evidence provided here, where the great parental sin is not paying attention to their kid at the dinner table. The parents (Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) have provided little North with what looks like a million-dollar house in a Frank Capra neighborhood, all on dad’s salary as a pants inspector. And, yes, I knew that is supposed to be a fantasy, but the pants-inspecting jokes are only the first of several truly awful episodes in this film.
North goes into court, where the judge is Alan Arkin, proving without the slightest shadow of a doubt that he should never, ever, appear again in public with any material even vaguely inspired by Groucho Marx. North’s case hits the headlines, and since he is such an all-star overachiever, offers pour in from would-be parents all over the world, leading to an odyssey that takes him to Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, and elsewhere.
What is the point of the scenes with the auditioning parents? (The victimized actors range from Dan Aykroyd as a Texan to Kathy Bates as an Eskimo). They are all seen as broad, desperate comic caricatures. They are not funny. They are not touching. There is no truth in them. They don’t even work as parodies. There is an idiocy here that seems almost intentional, as if the filmmakers plotted to leave anything of interest or entertainment value out of these episodes.
North is followed on his travels by a mysterious character who appears in many guises. He is the Easter bunny, a cowboy, a beach bum, and a Federal Express driver who works in several product plugs. Funny, thinks North; this guy looks familiar. And so he is. All of the manifestations are played by Bruce Willis, who is not funny, or helpful, in any of them.
I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
I hold it as an item of faith that Rob Reiner is a gifted filmmaker; among his credits are This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery. I list those titles as an incantation against this one. North is a bad film, but it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover—possibly sooner than I will.