Ed Wood

Oh dear Lord in Heaven. If you're tired of watching Johnny Depp play a wise-cracking pirate or a freaky candy factory owner or a cheeseball 18th-century vampire with lots of money or a wise-cracking freaky cheeseball something else, go back and watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood from 1994. (Also, if you feel Tim Burton has lost his touch, this movie may just perk up your mood.) Yes it's a weird movie, true to the Burton-Depp collaborations, but it's also a delightful one, a faux-morbid chronicle of the infamous career of cult filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., who's infamous as the director of some of the worst movies ever made, including the transvestite trash-gem Glen or Glenda? and the outer-space-invasion spectacular Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Ed Wood is probably one of the best movies about the movie-making business. It's certainly one of the only ones that doesn't genuflect with banal reverence toward Hollywood. Instead of getting some high-minded, self-congratulatory glamor parade, we're treated to the ersatz side of the movie-making business: the world of not just deferred dreams, but squandered dreams, where a guy with too much enthusiasm and too little talent will work his heart out and still struggle to pay the lab fees for his own films. (Thus one of Wood's movies, Night of the Ghouls, sat unreleased and virtually lost to curio-aficionados for years and years.) Somehow, Tim Burton prevents Ed Wood from being a tragic figure: the movie successfully walks the line of sympathy and ridicule, never partaking in either too carelessly. It revels in his sheer, exuberant love of the medium, and I feel like it wants Ed Wood to make a successful movie, even though he never does.

Leave it to Tim Burton to try and do justice to the man who was arguably the worst director in history. (John Waters is the only other director I'd like to see take a crack at the career of Ed Wood.) If you appreciate the deliciousness of failure, you'll find a kindred spirit in Ed Wood. Johnny Depp plays him with wide-eyed, gleeful aplomb, and taps into the intriguing inner-world of a man who loved two things: making shitty movies (although he didn't seem to think they were shitty) and wearing women's clothes, particularly argyle sweaters. (In the movie, Ed swears he isn't gay, just a really uninhibited hetero.) This has to be one of Depp's most engaging and fun performances. In so many of his more recent movies, he plays these cartoonish characters who stand in front of the camera and crack jokes. Luckily, Johnny Depp is still in great shape and can move around convincingly, or he'd really be in trouble. But if you've neglected to go back and re-visit some of his older work, I encourage you to do so. You'll see the Johnny Depp we all fell in love with: the actor who made the grotesque lovable and beautiful and funny.

Depp invests such heart into Edward D. Wood, Jr. that the movie's admittedly cynical (at times) tone is much easier to take. The movie does have a bitter side, much of it expressed through the brilliant performance of Martin Landau, as an aging Bela Lugosi. (Wood meets Lugosi by chance, and the two strike up a friendship that leads to collaborative work on several films, ultimately proving to be both the comeback and the swan song of the legendary ham.) With Bela we get a truly depressing window into the dark side of Hollywood, in which older stars have faded completely from view. Landau's performance (for which he earned an Oscar) recalls the mad pathos of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, and in fact Ed Wood lives on the same edges as Sunset: it's Hollywood in decay, black-and-white, vaguely noirish, out of money, and forgotten by audiences who have long ago moved onto the next big thing.

But ultimately Ed Wood is a loving, blissed-out tribute to sheer audacious zeal and the irony of failure. How could you not love a movie like that? The supporting cast is like a gaggle of amusing and uniquely scary figures in a wax museum or a carnival house of horrors. Ed Wood doesn't have the zany madness of Beetle Juice, but in a way, it is Tim Burton's Citizen Kane. (Orson Welles, incidentally, shows up in a chance meeting with Wood. He's played here by Vincent D'Onofrio.) With Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Juliet Landau, Jeffrey Jones, G.d. Spradlin, Lisa Marie, and Bill Murray.

True Lies

I really don't like giving James Cameron any credit, and I certainly wouldn't do it if I didn't have to. But True Lies (1994) is a good example of how to do action movies right. It's completely mindless, but, except for a tacked on second ending that feels like overkill, it's a fun movie that draws you into its chaotic, mindless action sequences with a fairly fresh take on the whole spies vs. terrorists plot. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, who works for a U.S. counter-terrorism operation. His mousy wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), thinks he's a boring computer salesman, and because the excitement in their marriage is long gone, she's become involved with a con artist (Bill Paxton) whom she thinks is a spy himself.

True Lies enabled Jamie Lee Curtis to show another side of herself: she performs a striptease act in front of a man (her husband, although his face is concealed in darkness so she doesn't know it's him). What's impressive is how good she is at it, and how funny it is when she loses her balance but picks herself right back up. Curtis has always had spunk, and while this scene is a little creepy (especially if it's supposed to be some kind of career marker for her), she also gets to be a heroine in this movie. And her naturally funny personality comes through beautifully too.

What works in True Lies are the comic performances of Curtis and Tom Arnold, who plays Harry's loud-mouthed right-hand-man Mike. (He has all the best lines.) And even Arnold is enjoyable here. The movie doesn't take itself too seriously, so why should he. He's at ease, playing a guy he's played seemingly a hundred times. When he asks Tia Carrere to Tango--and then later when he Tangos with his wife--he's totally unconcerned with all the serious things going on in the movie, a signal to us that we're at least in front of a film that wants to show us a good time. Who can ask for anything more?

With Art Malik, Eliza Dushku, Grant Heslov, and Charlton Heston. Written by the director. 141 min. ★★★

Quiz Show

Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994) covers a scandal involving game show contestants who were given answers ahead of time. It's set in the late 1950s, with Rob Morrow as a hotshot Congressional lawyer who begins to suspect that the producers of a show called Twenty-One have been rigging the game for years. Then one of the contestants starts speaking up about being forced into giving a wrong answer to make way for the next big contestant, Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a promising young intellectual with an impressive literary pedigree: His father is the writer and distinguished Columbia professor Mark Van Doren.

The trouble with Quiz Show is that it never captures your interest. Redford's direction is so carefully calculated in every single second that the film seems blandly important, as though we ought to be riled up by the film's subject matter--the encroaching power that advertisers have over us through television, and the ways that they maneuver supposedly authentic "reality" television shows to keep the audience glued to the screen. These are fascinating ideas in real life, and they're truly infuriating, but this movie fails to ignite them. That's also partly because the characters are so dull. Fiennes doesn't exactly impress as the young literary type: his character has had everything handed to him, so it's hard to feel much sympathy for him.

There is an admittedly powerful scene near the end when Charles Van Doren reads an apology before the Congress, and a politician tells him he shouldn't expect praise for simply telling the truth for once: the crowd erupts in applause, and Charles looks like he's been squashed. It's an effective moment.

Rob Morrow is a charming actor, but his Boston accent is a bit muddy here, and he's not given enough real drive. Everything about his motivation to initiate the investigation into the quiz show scandals seems  too banal: he's just trying to avoid working on Wall Street, so he digs around and looks for trouble, and when he's lucky, he finds it. The film doesn't allow him to show off his naturally funny personality: he looks like an amiable frat boy, and that playful side is squelched by such a serious role. (Although even here he's always smiling; it just comes off as arrogance.)

There is one good idea in all of this: that in the end, television is too powerful, and already too deeply ingrained in our culture, to be defeated by the government or any other entity. The real bad guys--the advertisers who prey on our gullability and our needs--can't be stopped. Middle men take the fall and the scandals are forgotten to be repeated again other day. And maybe then nobody will even mind. That's a cynical outlook, but it rings true, and it's the most authentic and believable idea in Quiz Show.

Written by Paul Attanasio. Starring John Turturro, who plays the first contestant, and who's mocked for being Jewish but displays all the grating stereotypes about Jewish people, as though the movie wanted to have it both ways: he's condemned for being Jewish, but he's genuinely annoying; with David Paymer, Paul Scofield, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald, Elizabeth Wilson, Johann Carlo, and Mira Sorvino. Produced by Redford. 133 minutes. ★★

Serial Mom

Imagine if suburban moms everywhere just...snapped. All the minutiae of daily life, the endless little grievances of maintaining a home, of being a wife and mother, of putting up with the monotony of the PTA and the neighbors and all the stale, banal conventions of middle American values, building and building until they just couldn't take it anymore. John Waters' Serial Mom (1994), starring Kathleen Turner as a Baltimore housewife, imagines for us. 

Turner plays Beverly Sutphin, whose descent into serial killing starts with a little harmless social anarchy: she's been harassing one of her neighbors (Mink Stole) with obscene phone calls (in a disguised voice). She giggles at the thought of this little secret. The police have been in the neighborhood asking questions, but nobody would ever suspect Beverly. But then, Beverly is angered by her teenage son's math teacher, who thinks he's too obsessed with horror movies and that Beverly is to blame. She backs over him with her car, and soon it seems that anyone who gets under Beverly's skin is a potential victim. Not rewinding your video before returning it to the rental store? Dead. Wearing white shoes after Labor Day? Dead. Beverly can't stop.  There are too many rule-breakers out there who evade any kind of consequences for their utter disregard for the social conventions that matter to Beverly.

Her bewildered family (husband Sam Waterson, adolescent kids Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard) doesn't know what to do, and meanwhile the police are putting two and two together, waiting until they have enough evidence to nail Beverly for six gruesome murders. (The piece de resistance is when Beverly bludgeons a woman to death with a leg of lamb while "Annie" sings "Tomorrow" on the television set.)

Serial Mom is a bit slapdash, in typical John Waters form, but it's such an audacious little slice of insanity that it's hard to be overly annoyed by its faults. This is, after all, a funny movie about social anarchy. It doesn't hold up very well as a movie (the sense of pacing is minimal, and at times you wish Waters would build things up with more restraint: Beverly is already cuckoo by the time the opening credits finish, so we don't get the pleasure of watching the progression from "normal" to "crazy.") But as a piece of satire on suburban mores, it's pretty watchable stuff, and it certainly taps into the culture's commercialization of crime and criminals. The people's obsession with Beverly and the accusations against her turns--like all American obsessions--into a capitalist endeavor by the end of the picture. She's a celebrity, and Suzanne Somers (who makes a brief appearance) is vying to play her in a TV-movie. And her daughter is even selling shirts and pins with the emblem "Serial Mom" emblazoned on them. Meanwhile, Beverly agrees to act as her own attorney (Charles Manson/Ted Bundy style), and it's fun to watch all the little surprises she has up her sleeve, geared toward winning over the jury.

With Scott Morgan, Walt MacPherson, Justin Whalin, Patricia Dunnock, and Mary Jo Catlett. Written by John Waters. 95 min. ★★½

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Three drag queens in Australia go on a road trip to do some shows. It's sort of a combination of Easy Rider, a John Waters movie minus most of the vulgarity, and a Village People concert. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert features standout performances by the three leads: Terence Stamp, as the aging drag queen who's getting tired of being in the biz, Hugo Weaving, whose character has the closest link to a "normal life" (he's got a wife and a kid, but he doesn't see much of them), and Guy Pearce, as the most rambunctious of the trio. It's quite an entertainment, particularly when the guys put on their outlandish outfits and lip sync to Donna Summer, ABBA, Vanessa Williams, and a number of other pop music numbers. (The costumes even won an Academy Award.)

For straight men playing gay men in drag, these three are remarkably uninhibited, especially Pearce, who struts around like a peacock with a wig collection as varied as its feathers. And Stamp manages to bring subtlety and graciousness to a role that could very easily have turned into pure camp. He's grieving over the loss of his partner, and agrees to accompany the other boys for a change of scenery, never suspecting it may lead to new opportunities romantically speaking, when he meets an incredulously open-minded rural mechanic, who's married to a kooky mail-order-bride who herself likes to put on a show at the local bar (after she's had too much to drink). Weaving's storyline, in which he's headed for a rekindling of his relationship with his young son, feels almost too carefully designed to tug at the heart strings, particularly when the boy is revealed to be far more open-minded than his father imagined he would be. At the same time, you have to hand it to writer-director Stephan Elliott, who knows when to be garishly offbeat and when to be subtle and unashamedly sweet. It's a welcome dose of eccentricity mixed with heart that most movies seem to have forgotten.

With Bill Hunter, Sarah Chadwick, and Mark Holmes. 1994.