There’s more. There is, for example, the solution to the murders, which stars little Tim in the performance by an autistic character so remarkable that it makes Dustin Hoffman’s work in Rain Man look like a warm-up. If you see the movie, ask yourself : Assuming (a) that Timmy could do what he does while Dreyfuss explains the mystery, and (b) that Timmy is the best impressionist since Frank Gorshin, then even so, (c) how did he get the flawless timing, so that he performs right on cue during Dreyfuss’s summation?
Silent Fall has a tortuously constructed plot, but the solution to the mystery has been right there all along. I refer you to the entry on “The Law of Economy of Characters” in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, which observes that since there are no unnecessary characters, the guilty person in a whodunit is inevitably the one who otherwise seems unaccounted for.
The Sixth Man
(Directed by Randall Miller; starring Kadeem Hardison, Marlon Wayans; 1997)
The Sixth Man is another paint-by-the-numbers sports movie, this one about a college basketball team that makes it to the NCAA finals with the help of the ghost of one of its dead stars. Let’s not talk about how predictable it is. Let’s talk about how dumb it is.
The film starts with the childhood hoop dreams of a couple of brothers, Antoine and Kenny, who are coached by their father and hope to be stars one day. The father dies before he can see them realize their dream: They’re both starters for the University of Washington Huskies. Antoine (Kadeem Hardison) is the dominant brother, the play-maker who gets the ball for the crucial last-minute shots. Kenny (Marlon Wayans) is a gifted player, but in his brother’s shadow.
The tragedy strikes. Antoine dunks the ball, falls to the court, and dies of heart failure on the way to the hospital. Kenny is crushed, and the Huskies embark on a losing streak until, one day at practice, Kenny throws the ball into the air and it never comes back down again.
Antoine, of course, has returned, this time as a ghost that only Kenny can see. And eventually Antoine returns to the court as an invisible sixth man on the Huskies team. He deflects the ball, tips in close shots, gives a boost to the Huskies, and trips up their opponents, and soon the team is in the NCAA playoffs.
Presumably The Sixth Man is intended to appeal to basketball fans. Is there a basketball fan alive who could fall for this premise? I’m not talking about the ghost—that’s easy to believe. I’m talking about the details of the game.
I was out at the United Center last week for the big overtime contest between the Bulls and the Supersonics. Along with thousands of other fans, I was an instant expert, my eyes riveted on every play. If the ball had suddenly changed course in midair, do you think we would have noticed? What if a ball dropped all the way through the basket and then popped back up again? What if a player was able to hang in midair twice as long as Michael Jordan?
My guess is that any one of those moments would have inspired a frenzy of instant replay analysis, and all three of them together would have induced apoplexy in announcer Johnny (Red) Kerr. But in The Sixth Man, audiences and commentators don’t seem to realize that the laws of physics and gravity are being violated on behalf of the Huskies. Finally a woman sportswriter (Michael Michele) for the student paper uses the stop-action button on her VCR to replay a game, and notices that Kenny never even touched a ball before it went in.
I don’t want to belabor technicalities here. I know the movie’s premise is that nobody notices that the ghost is affecting the game. Because nobody notices, that frees the movie to proceed with its lethargic formula, right to the bitter end. (Will the team decide it has to win on its own? Will the ghost and his brother have to accept the fact of death? Will the Huskies be way behind at half-time of the big game? Will they win? Will the sun rise tomorrow?)
You can’t even begin to enjoy this game unless you put your intelligence on hold, or unless you’re a little kid. A real, real, little, little kid. Why do Hollywood filmmakers hobble themselves in this way? Why be content with repeating ancient and boring formulas when a little thought could have produced an interesting movie? What if Kenny and Antoine had worked out a strategy to secretly affect the outcome of the game? What if they were aware that obvious tactics would be spotted? What if Kenny didn’t tell his teammates about the ghost? What if Antoine, for sheer love of the game, took the other side once in a while?
The possibilities are endless. Movies like The Sixth Man are an example of Level One thinking, in which the filmmakers get the easy, obvious idea and are content with it. Good movies are made by taking the next step. Twisting the premise. Using lateral thinking. I imagine a lot of studio executives are sports fans. Would any of them be personally entertained by this movie? If this answer is “no”—and it has to be—then they shouldn’t expect us to be, either.
Slaves of New York
(Directed by James Ivory; starring Bernadette Peters; 1989)
I detest Slaves of New York so much that I distrust my own opinion. Maybe it’s not simply a bad movie. Maybe it takes some kind of special knack, some species of sly genius, to make me react so strongly. I pause. I leaf through my memories of the film. I try to analyze what I really feel.
Okay. I feel calmer now. The first thing I feel is a genuine dislike for the people in this film—the ambitious climbers on the lower rungs of the ladder in the New York art world. I dislike them because they are stupid, and have occupied my time with boring conversation. It is more than that. They are not simply stupid. They value stupidity. They aim their conversations below the level of their actual intelligence because they fear to appear uncool by saying anything interesting. By always being bored, they can never be passé? No wonder Andy Warhol wanted to film this material.
The second thing I feel is that their entire act is a hypocritical sham. They want to succeed so much they can not only taste it, they can choke on it. And it doesn’t matter what they succeed at. They move through a world of art, fashion, photography, and design, but the actual disciplines and psychic rewards of this world are not interesting to them. They want to use art as a way of obtaining success, which is more important to them than art will ever be.
The heroine of the movie is a young woman who designs hats. They are truly hideous hats, designed to bring embarrassment and ridicule to those who wear them, but never mind what the hats look like. The important thing is, how does the designer herself feel about her hats? I have no idea. She never permits herself to react to them, to care for them, to be proud of them. She looks at them as if they were her fingernail clippings—once a part of her, but not important, and now no longer even attached.
Her boyfriend manufactures paintings he does not love. Other people in her life also play at the extrusion of art, in the hopes that their work will sell, and they will find a gallery to represent them, and that eventually they will be able to afford a really nice apartment in New York City. The title, Slaves of New York, is explained by its author, Tama Janowitz, to mean that life in New York is basically a matter of becoming successful enough to have a nice apartment, and that if you do not have one, you move in with someone who does, and become that person’s slave. The whole idea is to eventually get your own apartment, and have slaves of your own.