When a dog loves a dolphin
Every summer, I try to pick the shittiest movie I can think of and watch it. By shitty, I don't mean unprofessionally made or so-bad-it's good, but painful. It should feel like I'm wearing sandpaper underwear while riding a horse. It can't be any sort of "cult classic" nor very obscure; it should be old enough that most people have forgotten its existence but will have a vague recollection of it upon description. And with a mix of pity, incredulity and disgust, they'll say, "Damn, why did you watch that?"
For some reason, the last few years I've chosen children's movies: "First Kid" in 2004, "Getting Even With Dad" in 2003. I guess that's because awful kid flicks are so much more insipid, simplistic and grating than your average bombs - the Limp Bizkits of the film world, if you will. After hemming and hawing for most of this summer, I started thinking about shitty-looking animal movies. But those always look terrible, right? Which one should it be? Eddie Murphy's "Dr. Doolittle" movies made too much money, and "Racing Stripes" is too new. Thus, I went with the worst-looking one I could think of. No, not "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken," not "Ed," not even "Slappy and the Stinkers." Last night, I watched "Zeus and Roxanne".
And I got totally sharked! It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. As can be seen on this Japanese Arnold Vosloo fan page(!), the international marketing hook for this atrocity was a dog riding a dolphin. I always thought that was basically the plot - these two animals become pals, someone tries to pull them apart, maybe puts them into show business or something, friendship triumphs. Well, I can assure you, the dog rides the dolphin exactly once, early in the film, and the dog is not standing on the dolphin, but just sort of laying there. The rest of the thing concerns Steve Guttenberg's son and Kathleen Quinlan's daughters trying to hook up their parents, who keep using the bizarre psychic bond between his pet dog (Zeus) and her research subject dolphin (Roxanne) to creepily project their feelings during their bungling romance.
Guttenberg's a lousy single dad. He's a fucking bum who won't get a real job, sitting around recording weenie elevator music all day, riding his motorcycle, sporting an earring and doing other stupid things to dupe us into considering him rakishly masculine. But Quinlan's no catch herself. With that ratty fe-mullet, overprotective paranoia and stink of the sea, it's a wonder her bratty daughters aren't smoking Luckys and earning five dollars a dance at the rec center just to get back at her. Vosloo, the guy who played Darkman twice as many times as Liam Neeson, is trying to steal her research on interspecies communication, apparently worth studying even when the only animals doing it are the title pair. He's one of those unthreatening kid's movie bad guys who surrounds himself with disapproving or apathetic help, falls in the water with his clothes on and can't even out-charisma Guttenberg when he tries to horn in on his imminent coupling with Quinlan.
But those two sad sacks deserve each other, and their kids, who become fast friends as plot convenience dictates, know it. Steve's spawn is played by Miko Hughes, a kid I used to love due to his roles in "Pet Sematary" ("Now I want to play with yeeeeouuu!") "Kindergarten Cop" ("Boys have a penis! Girls have a Vagina!") and "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" ("Holy bananas, my mom is freaking H-O-T!"). Here, Miko is as boring as his platonic palhood with Quinlan's girls - the younger of whom incessantly overacts with obsequious mugging, the older a short-skirted tween sexpot we were convinced was a young Scarlett Johansson until Goad checked the IMDB and found out she was just some girl from "Roswell." With the help of the kids' and animals' antics, Guttenberg finally gets over his dead wife and they all laugh and become some sort of semi-nuclear family. (That's probably what gave Jeffrey Lyons such a boner he proclaimed for the ads: "'Will melt your heart - and parents will enjoy it, guaranteed!")
Folks, this movie flat-out sucks, from the score to the offensive "men are like dogs, women are like dolphins" metaphor to the gangly-ass bizarro "Because of Winn Dixie" dog playing Zeus. I knew that it would suck going in. Why do I do this? Because cinematic pain is its own kind of cleansing, and because summer is the shittiest season. Some things in life just plain stink.
Bonus movie review: "A Sound of Thunder". Bonus track: The Arcade Fire - "Rebellion (Lies)". Have a good holiday, laborer.
For some reason, the last few years I've chosen children's movies: "First Kid" in 2004, "Getting Even With Dad" in 2003. I guess that's because awful kid flicks are so much more insipid, simplistic and grating than your average bombs - the Limp Bizkits of the film world, if you will. After hemming and hawing for most of this summer, I started thinking about shitty-looking animal movies. But those always look terrible, right? Which one should it be? Eddie Murphy's "Dr. Doolittle" movies made too much money, and "Racing Stripes" is too new. Thus, I went with the worst-looking one I could think of. No, not "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken," not "Ed," not even "Slappy and the Stinkers." Last night, I watched "Zeus and Roxanne".
And I got totally sharked! It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. As can be seen on this Japanese Arnold Vosloo fan page(!), the international marketing hook for this atrocity was a dog riding a dolphin. I always thought that was basically the plot - these two animals become pals, someone tries to pull them apart, maybe puts them into show business or something, friendship triumphs. Well, I can assure you, the dog rides the dolphin exactly once, early in the film, and the dog is not standing on the dolphin, but just sort of laying there. The rest of the thing concerns Steve Guttenberg's son and Kathleen Quinlan's daughters trying to hook up their parents, who keep using the bizarre psychic bond between his pet dog (Zeus) and her research subject dolphin (Roxanne) to creepily project their feelings during their bungling romance.
Guttenberg's a lousy single dad. He's a fucking bum who won't get a real job, sitting around recording weenie elevator music all day, riding his motorcycle, sporting an earring and doing other stupid things to dupe us into considering him rakishly masculine. But Quinlan's no catch herself. With that ratty fe-mullet, overprotective paranoia and stink of the sea, it's a wonder her bratty daughters aren't smoking Luckys and earning five dollars a dance at the rec center just to get back at her. Vosloo, the guy who played Darkman twice as many times as Liam Neeson, is trying to steal her research on interspecies communication, apparently worth studying even when the only animals doing it are the title pair. He's one of those unthreatening kid's movie bad guys who surrounds himself with disapproving or apathetic help, falls in the water with his clothes on and can't even out-charisma Guttenberg when he tries to horn in on his imminent coupling with Quinlan.
But those two sad sacks deserve each other, and their kids, who become fast friends as plot convenience dictates, know it. Steve's spawn is played by Miko Hughes, a kid I used to love due to his roles in "Pet Sematary" ("Now I want to play with yeeeeouuu!") "Kindergarten Cop" ("Boys have a penis! Girls have a Vagina!") and "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" ("Holy bananas, my mom is freaking H-O-T!"). Here, Miko is as boring as his platonic palhood with Quinlan's girls - the younger of whom incessantly overacts with obsequious mugging, the older a short-skirted tween sexpot we were convinced was a young Scarlett Johansson until Goad checked the IMDB and found out she was just some girl from "Roswell." With the help of the kids' and animals' antics, Guttenberg finally gets over his dead wife and they all laugh and become some sort of semi-nuclear family. (That's probably what gave Jeffrey Lyons such a boner he proclaimed for the ads: "'Will melt your heart - and parents will enjoy it, guaranteed!")
Folks, this movie flat-out sucks, from the score to the offensive "men are like dogs, women are like dolphins" metaphor to the gangly-ass bizarro "Because of Winn Dixie" dog playing Zeus. I knew that it would suck going in. Why do I do this? Because cinematic pain is its own kind of cleansing, and because summer is the shittiest season. Some things in life just plain stink.
Bonus movie review: "A Sound of Thunder". Bonus track: The Arcade Fire - "Rebellion (Lies)". Have a good holiday, laborer.
posted by SoulReaper at 7:34 PM
4 Comments:
The message gets lost in the well-meaning jumble of "Thunder"
You’d hope a movie that wants to make a point about chaos theory would try to be unpredictable.
Hope all you like, but that movie is not “A Sound of Thunder.”
“Thunder” is based on Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story, but the legendary sci-fi/fantasy author’s not to blame for this loud, dingy action flick. Bradbury’s cautionary time travel tale obviously inspired the movie, but it’s not an adaptation.
Romantic comedy auteur Edward Burns (“The Brothers McMullen”) is Travis Ryer, a scientist who works for avaricious businessman Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) in 2055. Hatton runs Time Safari, a Chicago enterprise where wealthy types can literally go back in time to the Cretaceous Era and shoot a dinosaur to death. It’s Jurassic Park for dudes whose Hummers don’t make them feel masculine enough.
Ryer and team are there to make sure everything runs smoothly. The party “jumps” to a precise point in time through a device that looks like the offspring of a roller coaster and a Stargate. There, they fire ice bullets at a particular dinosaur which would have otherwise soon met its natural end by volcano or tar pit.
Everybody says their rehearsed lines, Hatton pumps the rich guys’ egos and the guys fork over enough cash to keep the facility afloat. The team knows not to stray from their path or to mess with anything, because that could bring about catastrophic changes in the present.
Ryer realizes it’s a sleazy gig, but he’s using the time trips for research to revive animal species that went extinct — like lions. What a swell guy! It’s no wonder that despite Burns’ leaden portrayal (somewhere between Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck on the charisma scale), he hooks up right away with the comely daughter of a client.
This character promptly disappears, as if she was simply there to establish that Ryer is heterosexual, not that it matters in the otherwise sex-free plot. But her baffling presence capably proves that thinking too much will spoil this movie.
When prickly Sonia Rand (“Dangerous Beauty” star Catherine McCormack) shows up to protest, she reveals she helped develop the Time Safari technology and she’s convinced something will go wrong. Naturally, something does, and the team must discover and fix the error before all of evolution is altered in a series of “time waves.”
Any guesses as to what unleashes a special effects extravaganza that includes elaborate vegetation, vicious piranha-eels and poorly-lit mutant baboonosaurs? In case you can’t think of the most typical example of chaos theory, the poster gives it away. And which member of the crew, which includes precisely one African-American, do you imagine is the first victim? Yep.
If only it turned out that after all the gang’s pseudo-scientific pontification and shooting and running, the fix actually resided in some red herring the audience was invited to deem insignificant (like, say, Ryer’s one-night stand). That wouldn’t have been an original tactic, but it would have been unpredictable, and that sort of meta-meaning might have given the movie’s non-Bradbury caprices some weight. But it’s not that kind of sci-fi flick.
“Thunder” was a long time coming. How long? While filming in Prague, “Thunder” production was delayed when the summer floods damaged sets — the summer 2002 floods. After original director Renny Harlin bowed out, he made two of last year’s flops, FBI thriller “Mindhunters” and the hasty reshoot “Exorcist: The Beginning.” Kingsley finished this movie before he shot his Oscar-nominated role in “House of Sand and Fog”!
Much effort went into salvaging and releasing “Thunder,” but it wasn’t worth it. Despite the movie’s well-meaning environmental message, its most startling warning is that by 2055, the streets of Chicago somehow turn into a cheap-looking computer graphic.
Oh, yeah. And the Cubs apparently win the World Series in 2022 and 2046. Mark your calendar.
Miko is the creepiest. He made such a good zombie, I had nightmares featuring him for ages after "Pet Semetary"
One of these days I'm going to have to get you some yearbook scans from my mom of "Wesley" Craven. He looked so gosh darn respectable as an officer in Wheaton College's English Club ca. 1963.
Hi-ho, the mysterious "anonymous" here again, with a couple of notes about "A Sound of Thunder":
1. The best parts of the movie revolve around the pre-rehearsed lines that the employees of Time Safari are supposed to say to stroke egos.
2. Ben Kingsley remains good, even in bad movies, but Gandhi would still be apalled.
3. In 65 million years, mankind evolved from small, rodent-like creatures into apes, cavemen, and, ultimately, intelligent civilization builders. If killing something in the past resulted in the dinosaurs not extinct-ifying, then how come they didn't evolve into a race of intelligent, cold-blooded humanoids, instead of simple lizard-chimps? You know... like in the "Super Mario Bros." movie.
4. Sometimes, CGI ideas of what the future will look like seem to contain the absurd notion that, one day, people will want to own ugly cars.
5. "Fifteen Minutes" was a pretty good movie, but it sure as hell failed to present Edward Burns with better projects to work on.
6. If you have a shoestring budget, don't make a dinosaur movie. Just don't. Don't even attempt it unless you can do a better job than "Jurassic Park," which we all know is nigh-on impossible.
7. Lastly, speaking of... Sound of Thunder? Still better than JP3.
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