Your friendly neighborhood movie critic is awfully crabby lately. It's all those annoying things in movies, which at best ring false or at worst seem supremely silly.
I understand that movies are not real, of course. But why is it that cinematic distortions are often so bizarre?True, no one hires a lawyer expecting Perry Mason or Benjamin Matlock or Jim Carrey's character in "Liar Liar." And no one takes a college archaeology class expecting the professor to be Indiana Jones.
But sometimes a movie's fractured view - especially one that is repeated over and over - does give the moviegoing public the wrong idea.
For example, because so many movies show the police with guns drawn, there are a lot of people out there who seem to believe that local law-enforcement officials are uniformly trigger-happy. But in real life, the average cop is seldom called upon to draw his or her weapon.
Similarly, if our view of firemen comes from "Backdraft," or psychiatrists from "Dressed to Kill," or journalists from "Absence of Malice" . . . well, you get the idea.
It isn't just professions that are maligned in movies, of course. It's human behavior at large. But let's start off with a couple of job-related examples, both journalists . . . well, sort-of journalists . . . who are even less realistic and more annoying than Sally Field in "Absence of Malice":
- Julia Roberts, in "My Best Friend's Wedding," is introduced in the opening sequence as a famous food critic who is not the least bit discreet about her work.
Restaurant reviewers dine out anonymously, so as not to influence the chef or waiter serving them. The idea is to participate in the dining experience just like any other patron, and to report that experience accordingly.
But not Roberts. Not only does she let them know who she is, not only does she accept special treatment - she announces to all the staff and customers present what she's going to write in her review!
- A few months ago, Eric Stoltz starred in "Keys to Tulsa" as another sort-of journalist - a movie critic!
As far as I know, it's the only movie ever made that features a movie critic as the hero. (Come to think of it, "My Best Friend's Wedding" is probably the only movie with a food critic as the protagonist.)
And, of course, we never see Stoltz in a movie theater, and he never actually sits down to type a review.
Throughout the film, his editor keeps yelling at him to get his review written by Monday. By Monday? He has the entire weekend to come up with whatever mysterious review he's supposed to write? And he still can't get it done?
The reality is, of course, that most movie reviews run on Fridays, since most movies open on Fridays. And that would make the deadline, at the earliest, a Thursday.
Not that any of this matters in "Keys to Tulsa."
This guy never goes to the movies!
- Returning to "My Best Friend's Wedding," the new Roberts comedy is also a prime example of the hypocrisy of the movie rating system, offering two extremely vulgar moments served up in a PG-13 setting.
The first is verbal, as Julia Roberts uses Hollywood's favorite harsh profanity. But here, she uses it in a sexual rather than a profane context.
There was a time when that would automatically give a movie an R rating. But apparently no longer.
The second is a verbal and visual gag, as someone describes a commotion that occurs at the wedding reception, caused by a young woman who tries to lick an ice sculpture. Of course, her tongue sticks to the ice.
But the big joke arrives when it is revealed that the sculpture is a replica of Michelangelo's David. Anatomically correct, of course.
You can imagine the rest.
On the other hand, perhaps you'd rather not.
More to the point, perhaps you'd rather your 13- or 14-year-olds didn't have that image conjured up. But the rating board apparently feels it's no big deal.
To be fair, the initial reaction of members of the rating board was to give "My Best Friend's Wedding" an R. But the studio appealed and the rating was reduced to a PG-13, without any edits.
And according to bulletins issued by the rating board, the initial R and the subsequent PG-13 were strictly for the single harsh profanity. The ice sculpture joke apparently didn't even merit discussion.
By the way, please understand that I'm not urging censorship here. If the filmmakers want to include this kind of "adult" material, so be it.
But if that's the case, why not give the movie the more "adult" rating?
Making it more readily available to children is strictly a box-office decision, not an artistic one.
- In "Batman & Robin," Alicia Silverstone plays Alfred the butler's niece, who eventually becomes Batgirl. Sigh. It was only a matter of time.And Silverstone is so bad that she reduces the character to "Clueless" in rubber.
There is also supposed romantic chemistry going on between her and Chris O'Donnell's Robin, although it never really clicks.
Of course, they don't have a lot of onscreen time together. O'Donnell spends most of the movie whining that Batman doesn't trust him.
In fact, he spends so much of the movie whining that I expected him to bring up another complaint:
Golly, Batman, why does she get to be "Batgirl," when I'm just a stupid bird. Instead of Robin, why can't I be "Batboy"? Or "Batman Jr."? Or "Batman the Second"? Or "Other Batman"?
- Also in "Batman & Robin," Arnold Schwarzenegger plays big ol' bad-guy Mr. Freeze, and it's the first time he's played a villain since James Cameron's "The Terminator" - way back in 1984.
But he seems to have forgotten the lessons learned from Cam-eron's seminal action picture. In "Batman & Robin," Schwarz-enegger dons a RoboCop-type "cryo-suit" to keep his temperature at zero and spouts "cold" jokes one after another.
If you put a bunch of junior high school kids in a room for an hour and told them to come up with every pun they could think of about "cold" and "freezing" and "ice," they would duplicate Schwarzen-egger's dialogue.
Come to think of it, maybe that's how this script was written.
- Why is a pedophile/serial killer (Steve Buscemi) in "Con Air" a comic-relief character?
And why does the movie hint that he has killed a little girl, only to reveal that she's OK after all?
And why does Buscemi's character get a big comic moment at the end, hinting that he's out on the street where he may kill more children?
Hooray for Hollywood. . . .
- QUOTE OF THE WEEK: George Clooney, who follows in the footsteps of Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer in "Batman & Robin":
"It's much easier to be the third Batman than the second. Val had it tougher. Now I get to come into something that's been established. My job is to try and not screw up."
- QUOTE OF THE WEEK II: Michael Keaton, who gave up the role after starring in "Batman" and "Batman Returns," partly because director Tim Burton left the series:
"I'd be a liar if I said I didn't occasionally, for a few weeks or months after walking away, when driving along, screech on the brakes, go into a slide and then say, `Phew . . . that's a heck of a lot of dollars I'm missing.' Then I'd shake it off and get on with my life."
- QUOTE OF THE WEEK III: J.T. Walsh, who plays the chief villain in "Breakdown":
"This person said, `Why, the tension between you and Kurt Russell - that must have been very difficult to sustain.' And I went, like, `Why, we were having the time of our lives!' So who says you've got to have tension in yourself to produce tension on the screen? That's why we call it `acting,' isn't it? Or maybe I'm just not working as hard as some people think I am."