Summer is the season of junk-food movies, yes, but not all junk food tastes the same. So if Twister is the Big Mac of the summer movie season (large, homogenized, forgettable) and Mission: Impossible is the Arch Deluxe (a little quirky, sort of classy, ultimately given to corporate blandness), what does that make the latest two summer fast-food flicks: the low-budget sci-fi actioner The Arrival and the expensive, effects-laden fantasy Dragonheart? Let’s just say the difference between the two movies is that of a lovingly prepared burger from a local hamburger stand—a sloppy, overstuffed, spicy Fat Mo’s, brimming with flavor and empty calories—versus the same old overhyped McWhatsit.
The Arrival offers Charlie Sheen as a radio astronomer (so right away, you know the film has a sense of humor). Working late one night, Sheen encounters a strange signal from what could be an alien world. He takes the tape to his NASA superior, played by Ron Silver, who promptly and mysteriously fires him. Continuing his investigation independently, Sheen travels to Mexico, where he uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy that involves alien invasion and the Greenhouse Effect. At this point, The Arrival plunges into one of science-fiction’s classic “turnabout” premises: NASA has plans to colonize other worlds—but what if another world had plans to colonize earth?
This premise, with its pale X-Files rip-off overtones, is the least interesting thing about The Arrival. What gives the film its zip is the way the plot unfolds—slowly, and with a real spirit of discovery. As the film’s director, David Twohy is merely competent, but as screenwriter he never stops imagining. When Sheen’s character loses his job at the beginning of the movie, Twohy writes him a new job at a cable company, so that Sheen can tweak his neighborhood’s satellite dishes and carry on his research at their expense. When the action moves to Mexico, Twohy dreams up a Day of the Dead festival as an excuse to wobble skeleton puppets in the background. And then there’s my favorite bit of business: When Sheen is cornered in the aliens’ Mexican lair, he jumps into the machine that cloaks them in human guise and emerges as...a Mexican Charlie Sheen!
That The Arrival had me giggling with delight every few minutes is due to Twohy’s inventive staging and over-the-top dialogue. (“Algorithms I trust, Boolean logic I trust; beautiful women...they just mystify me.”) It’s also due to the presence of Charlie Sheen, whose unsmiling face, thick-headed intensity, and yeoman can-do attitude is practically a living parody of his father Martin. A personable actor who shines in projects appropriate to his talent (Major League, Hot Shots), Sheen may be the only actor who could bring off the combination of paranoia and determination that The Arrival requires. Despite the movie’s length and dogged pace, Sheen’s wide-eyed curiosity keeps the film moving to its next engagingly dopey (though never merely stupid) set piece.
Even at its slowest, The Arrival is more fun than Dragonheart, the week’s other junk-food special. A sword-and-sorcery flick of the most routine variety, Dragonheart is fun for precisely 15 minutes, and those come smack in the middle of the picture. Dennis Quaid, as a disavowed knight and legendary dragon-slayer, strikes a bargain with the last living dragon, Draco (voiced by Sean Connery), to travel the countryside bilking villagers in much the same way James Garner and Lou Gossett Jr. did in Skin Game. In each village, Quaid pretends to slay Draco and collects a sack of gold; as soon as they’re done, dragon and dragoon hit the road once more—solid, entertaining stuff.
Unfortunately, the medieval con game is not at the center of Dragonheart. Instead, we get a wrung-dry recapitulation of the despotic-king/peasant-rebellion plot, culminating in muddy battle scenes and foggy speeches about nobility. It’s basically Braveheart with a computer-animated dragon subbing for a blue-faced Mel Gibson. (That it’s only slightly worse says a lot about last year’s Best Picture winner.)
David Thewlis joins the long line of exciting young English actors who have signed up to play the fop du jour in American adventure films. As the villainous King Einon, Thewlis mostly mumbles his lines (a service, actually) and scrunches up his face (which is quite hideous in widescreen). Dennis Quaid fares only slightly better as the dimwitted and reluctant hero. The real star, of course, is the dragon, impressively brought to life by Connery and special-effects wizard Phil Tippett, who designed the Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back. The dragon has character and style; what he doesn’t have is a story to justify his expense.
It’s possible that kids might enjoy Dragonheart. To continue the burger analogy, Dragonheart is like one of those 59-cent jobbies that accompanies the kiddie meal—it’s flavorless, but it comes with a toy. Adults, however, will either be bored or distracted by little questions: How come Quaid fits inside the dragon’s mouth early in the movie, but in later scenes he’s three times the size of the dragon’s head? Why does the story take place exactly in 984 A.D.? And why, to kill Einon, is it necessary to pierce his heart? Surely cutting off his head is worth a try.
Director Rob Cohen (Dragon, no relation) finished principal photography on Dragonheart last year in order to give the effects team time to fill in the computer-generated dragon, and much of the movie has obviously been composed with a hole where the effect will go. As a result, the movie as a whole feels tentative, and the actors appear unsure of where they’re supposed to go or what’s supposed to happen. Dragonheart is as static as The Arrival is dynamic.
True, The Arrival is no Star Wars; it’s more on the level of a nutty little Cracker Jack prize like Tremors or Darkman. But it does offer relatively guilt-free thrills. Because the effects in The Arrival serve the story and the actors—not vice-versa, as in Dragonheart—the audience can watch the movie instead of watching the money. The Arrival and Dragonheart illustrate the truth of the matter: When it comes to junk-food movies, some are made with more relish than others.—Noel Murray
The Closet and Beyond
The Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is an entertaining but disappointingly facile documentary on an extraordinarily rich subject: the depiction of gays and lesbians in Hollywood films. Based on the famous book by Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet rifles through a century of film clips, from an 1895 experimental Edison film through 1994’s Go Fish, to show how gay characters, themes and subtexts have recurred throughout the history of cinema—often as objects of pity, contempt, mockery or terror.
The clips divide mainly into two categories: disguised inclusion (the use of “sissy” characters understood by audiences and filmmakers alike to be gay) or undisguised hostility (the portrayal of homosexuals as deviants and killers). Scenes of cavorting dandies in the 1932 melodrama Call Her Savage, a mincing, perfumed Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon, and repeated innuendoes from the Doris Day-Rock Hudson canon amply illustrate the former. The latter is represented by amazingly sleazy vignettes from 1968’s The Detective, 1974’s Freebie and the Bean, and the Al Pacino thriller Cruising. Commentary is provided by a stellar lineup of actors, filmmakers and authors, including Susan Sarandon, Shirley MacLaine, Susie Bright, and Gore Vidal, who offers a hilarious anecdote about the insertion of a gay subplot into Ben Hur without the knowledge of its stolid star, Charlton Heston.
The many recontextualized film clips are never less than interesting. At best, they suggest an alternate history of the American cinema—a history in which familiar images hold radically different meanings for groups outside the status quo. In this light, Ben Hur appears as a story of unrequited love, and the macho shooting contest between John Ireland and Montgomery Clift in Red River becomes a riotous seduction scene. (You’ll never view the movie the same way after seeing the two manly cowpokes lovingly compare their guns.)
And yet directors Epstein and Friedman refuse to explore their subject beyond the obvious. While the chronological structure is helpful, the movie rarely places the film clips within a needed social or historical framework. For example, although the movie marks the shift in Hollywood films from gays as sissies to gays as psychotics in the 1970s, the filmmakers fail to mention a crucial fact: This shift from ridicule to fear coincided with the rise of gay activism and visibility—an assumption of power. Nor does the movie establish how the treatment of homosexuals in movies is different from that of any other group marginalized by Hollywood. The only comment we get on the subject is Whoopi Goldberg’s knowing wisecrack: “Join the crowd.”
As fascinating as the clips are, the movie’s lack of depth and follow-through becomes frustrating. The Boys in the Band, a 1970 film depicted by the documentary as a breakthrough, was directed by William Friedkin, who only a decade later made the dreaded Cruising. That provocative detail is never mentioned in The Celluloid Closet. Similarly, although the directors include lengthy scenes from Red River and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, they don’t draw the connection that both movies were directed by Howard Hawks, a renowned tough guy who went on to tweak Rock Hudson’s masculinity unmercifully in Man’s Favorite Sport? The seemingly contradictory attitudes of these directors might’ve been illuminating. Instead, these and other tantalizing threads are merely dropped.
Still, as a starting point for a discussion of images of gays and lesbians in movies, The Celluloid Closet is certain to provoke debate, thought and amusement. As such, it’s a notable lead-off for this week’s ’96 Pride Without Borders Film Festival, a week-long series of movies that starts Friday in celebration of Pride Week. In addition to The Celluloid Closet, the Belcourt will show Dirk Shafer’s mock-documentary Man of the Year and Nancy Meckler’s drama Sister My Sister. On Monday and Tuesday, the Sarratt Cinema will show the documentary Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker, followed Wednesday and Thursday by Randal Kleiser’s comedy-drama It’s My Party, with Eric Roberts as a man dying of AIDS who hosts one final party before his planned demise. The festival closes June 14 and 15 with showings of short films at the Darkhorse Theater.
Of these films, the one you shouldn’t miss is Sister My Sister. Based on the same true story as Jean Genet’s The Maids, Sister My Sister stars Joely Richardson and Jodhi May as two French sisters whose servitude to a tyrannical employer (Julie Walters) plunges them into madness, incest and a gruesome killing frenzy. Richardson, May and Walters are excellent, and director Meckler, a stage director making her film debut, increases the tension and claustrophobia of their surroundings with unnerving skill. Neither Richardson nor May provides what might be termed a “positive image.” However, their characters are allowed to develop into something much finer and more worthwhile: individuals. As The Celluloid Closet demonstrates, where gay or lesbian characters are concerned, that in itself is an achievement.—Jim Ridley
