by Nathan Rabin
Pennies illustrates the truth of Noël Coward’s famous line that it’s “extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” a quip that could double as Potter’s epitaph. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Martin’s wholly unbiased take on the film’s defenders and critics: “I must say that the people who get the movie, in general, have been wise and intelligent; the people who don’t get it are ignorant scum.”
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success
Biblical Disco Freak-Out Case File #79: The Apple
Originally Posted October 25, 2007
Not too long ago, in a frozen tundra known as Wisconsin, my editor Keith created a feature called Films That Time Forgot as a way of channeling our shared bad-movie addiction to semi-productive ends. Selecting films for the feature necessitated a never-ending search for the sleaziest, weirdest, most obscure films I could find.
It was easy to see why time forgot most of these films: They were terrible and dated (sometimes amusingly so, sometimes not), and aspired to do little more than glean a few quick bucks out of the public’s enduring appetite for violence, T & A, and/or gratuitous break-dancing sequences. But every once in a while, I’d uncover a secret gem that took up valuable real estate in my imagination.
There was, for example, Death Drug, a hilarious 1978 anti-PCP blaxploitation cheapie that begins with a seemingly stoned Philip Michael Thomas ambling around a pool hall and explaining that he has played many, many roles in his long and distinguished career. Why, he’s played everything from a slick-dressing cop to … uh … He was in something else too, right? But of all the classic characters Thomas has played, one part remains close to his heart: the role of a PCP-addled musician in Death Drug. Deep into his insane improvised rant, Thomas assures the audience that there will be people in their lives who’ll offer them drugs that’ll “get you so high, so high, man, you’ll need a parachute to come down,” but that this film should scare them straight.
Even without this VHS introduction, Death Drug would qualify as the gold standard of camp, but what makes it such a singular boondoggle is that it clumsily inserts a music video from Thomas’ Reagan-era heyday into the middle of the action and expects audiences not to notice that the lead character has suddenly aged dramatically and is swanning his way through a music video even though the medium barely existed when the film was supposed to take place.
The only Film That Time Forgot that can compete with Death Drug for campy goodness is The Apple, a disco fantasia on biblical themes from the director of Over The Top that was released in Germany in 1978 as Star Rock and stateside two years later under its new title. According to show-business legend, audiences at The Apple’s Hollywood première were so horrified by it that they angrily hurled promotional copies of its soundtrack at the screen.
The Apple nakedly aspires to be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show, with a little 1984, Hair, and the book of Genesis thrown in. It’s the story of Adam and Eve reborn as an intergalactic Dionysian sex musical, only much stranger. The film takes place in the faraway future of 1994 and focuses on a hopelessly white-bread couple, Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmour), from Moose Jaw, Canada. When the duo’s nap-inducing brand of offensively inoffensive folk-rock inexplicably wins over the crowd at a Worldvision Song Festival, the hapless pair are wooed by a sinister music-world titan named Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal), who is literally the devil.
Mr. Boogalow ushers the pair into a seductive nighttime realm where sex is everywhere, temptation is omnipresent, and elaborately choreographed Broadway-style production numbers are never more than a few minutes away. Bibi quickly falls for a beefcake Boogalow protégé (Allan Love), who woos her in a production number set in hell, with the immortal couplet, “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire!”
Having satiated her natural, natural, natural desires, Bibi can no longer go back to her vanilla life with Alphie. She becomes the newest star in Boogalow’s constellation and delivers “Speed,” a patriotic ode to America that doubles as a harrowing depiction of our nation as a desperate meth addict.
Alphie, meanwhile, sinks into a deep depression. Boogalow has somehow become powerful enough that everyone in the United States is forced to wear a triangular sticker promoting his record label (Boogalow International Music, or BIM) and observe the National BIM hour, a mandatory national-fitness program. Firefighters, leather-clad bikers, Coca-Cola bottlers, nuns, old people—all are forced to break into Broadway-style choreography during the National BIM hour.
Only The Apple has the audacity to dream up a future where a Simon Cowell–like Svengali is as powerful as Josef Stalin, and disco’s bleary hedonism not only survived the ’70s but grew in power until it conquered the world. Feeling adrift, Alphie eventually falls in with a group of sitar-stroking, bearded cartoon counterculture types wistfully described by their wizened leader (Joss Ackland) as “children of the ’60s, commonly known as hippies.” Alphie and Bibi are joyously reunited in time for a divine fellow in a sparkling white suit (also played by Ackland) to come down from heaven in a giant space car accompanied by videogame noises and offer to whisk his children to a fantastical space paradise where Mr. Boogalow has no power.
The peculiar genius of The Apple is that every time it appears the film cannot get any crazier, it ratchets up the weirdness to almost indescribable levels. It belongs to the subset of movies so all-consumingly druggy and surreal that they make audiences feel baked out of their minds even when they’re sober. The Apple is both the perfect mind fuck to see while high and a movie that makes drugs seem redundant and unnecessary.
I think everyone in the world should see The Apple. It should be taught not just in film classes but in regular schools as well. It should replace the Bible and the Constitution as the cornerstone of our civilization. The Apple lifted my spirits, put a song in my heart, and completely validated my insatiable hunger to see an actual, actual, actual vampire by assuring me that such a seemingly sinful urge was simply a natural, natural, natural desire.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success
Seven-Octave Butterfly-Shaped Case File #90: Glitter
Originally Posted December 4, 2007
In his last e-mail to me, my late friend and fellow critic Anderson Jones suggested that I write up 2001’s Glitter for My Year Of Flops. Mariah Carey held a special place in his heart. I once asked Anderson if he’d ever been recognized in public during his stint on FX’s The New Movie Show With Chris Gore. He said he’d been recognized once at a Mariah Carey concert. This seemed fitting. Carey’s people were his people: They shared his deep commitment to superficiality, to the allure of big fluffy movies and sticky-sweet pop songs.
With this entry, I’m honoring a dead friend’s memory by making glib jokes at the expense of one of his favorite artists. Call me a hero if you must (no, seriously: call me a hero, you must), but I’m just a guy doing my job. And being a hero. Mainly being a hero.
Glitter arrived at a crucial moment in what I like to call the “ho-ification” of Mariah Carey. Ho-ification occurs when an actress or singer stops being judged on her body of work and begins getting judged by the work she had done to her body. It’s a ubiquitous pop-culture phenomenon in which an actress or singer decides that she wants to be recognized not just as an artist but also as a sweet, sweet piece of ass.
For Carey, the process began with the music video for “Honey,” a tour de force of cheesecake iconography in which Carey indulged her 007 fantasies by playing Agent M and gallivanting about in the same bikini Ursula Andress wore in Dr. No. After “Honey,” Carey was suddenly a woman with a message. That message was, “Hey, world; get a load of my tits! They’re fucking great!” Her video concepts went from “having fun at the amusement park” (“Fantasy”) to “jiggling about as a scantily clad racetrack ho-bag” (“Loverboy”), which perhaps not coincidentally was also the first single from the Glitter soundtrack.
Carey unleashed an
avalanche of criticism when she handed out popsicles and indulged in an impromptu striptease during an infamous appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live, well into what can be dubbed the crazification process. These public-relations disasters echo the scene in Nashville where Gwen Welles’ painfully untalented looker dispiritedly takes off her clothes in a pathetic attempt to punish/win back a crowd by giving them exactly what she thinks they really want. Incidents like these speak to the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of our culture’s attitude toward sex and exhibitionism: We leer and ogle with impunity, then, once some vague, invisible line has been crossed, turn into disapproving prudes concerned only with protecting the innocence of children.
Glitter hit theaters at the worst possible time for Carey’s previously blessed career. Her asexual early good-girl image was a distant memory, the ho-ification process had turned off as many fans as it created, and she was careening toward a nervous breakdown. The release of the film was postponed following Carey’s hospitalization for “exhaustion.” But the damage had already been done. A megastar who could previously do no wrong commercially suddenly could do no right.
Even her recording career began to suffer. The soundtrack to Glitter was nearly as big a bomb as the film it accompanied, in part because it faced much higher expectations. At the time of its release, it was unclear whether Glitter would mark the beginning of the end for Carey, or a bump in the road. She has subsequently rebounded on the strength of those terrible dog-whistle ballads they pipe into malls like stale air freshener, but Glitter had the potential to be a career killer.
In a performance that, to borrow an old Dorothy Parker line, runs the gamut of emotions from A to B, Carey stars in the semiautobiographical drama as Billie Frank, a striver who grows up in an orphanage after being abandoned by her white father and drunken, self-destructive African-American mother. After getting discovered by a DJ/producer named Dice (Max Beesley, in the role that launched him to anonymity), Billie becomes a backup singer for Sylk, a talentless looker played by future Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi.
Dice eventually buys Billie’s contract from Sylk’s boyfriend, Timothy Walker (Terrence Howard), and instantly transforms her into a huge star. In its busy first hour, Glitter hops deliriously from one music-melodrama cliché to another, finding time to include my all-time favorite show-business movie trope: Billie and Dice are riding in a taxi when they hear Billie’s song on the radio. She’s made it! They like her! They really, really like her! Dice orders the cabbie to crank up the volume, while Billie orders, “Gimme a dime! Gimme a dime!” so she can call up her friends and order them to crank up the radio so they can hear her. Much jumping up and down, irrational exuberance, and girlish, high-pitched shrieking ensues.
But Dice isn’t too keen on sharing Billie with the world. As her star rises, his descends. The busy rocket-ride-to-superstardom arc gives way to somber piano tinkling, and Carey’s acting goes from strained smiles and perky head nods to frowny faces and forehead crinkling as she reflects on how sad it is that, like, her mom and dad totally abandoned her and stuff, and her boyfriend is going crazy.
In a delicious irony, Carey’s character resents being forced to vamp her way through a music video whose concept seems to be Orgy at Plato’s Retreat. Glitter consequently has it both ways. It gets to show off Carey’s assets in countless skimpy yet strangely unflattering outfits, and it gets to insist that Carey is at heart a deep, soulful artist uncomfortable with cynical attempts to exploit her sexuality.
Timothy kills Dice right before Billie can go onstage at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden and sing a big number about her late Svengali. As if that weren’t enough to satisfy the 10-year-old girl in everyone, Billie then takes a limo to the country for a joyous reunion with her now clean-and-sober mom.
It’s easy, and fun, to lampoon the film’s lazy reliance on time-tested showbiz-movie conventions, but Carey really seems to believe in them, just as she really seems to feel the sentimental horseshit she screeches at deafening volumes in her ballads. There’s a strange poignancy to the scene where Billie explains her fantasy that she’ll someday become successful enough that her mother will feel a surge of pride and regret for having abandoned her. Everyone who grew up without a parent has felt that same maudlin sentiment, that desire to become big and successful and accomplished enough to make the slights of the past fade into nothingness. In moments like this, it’s possible to see the woman behind the glistening façade, to get a sense of who Carey is as a person. There’s a fragility in this scene lacking in the rest of her performance, a star turn that feels like an extension of her music-video vamping rather than an evolutionary leap forward.
“The glitter can’t overpower the artist,” a philosophical music-video director argues early in Glitter while engaging in a free-form stream-of-consciousness rant about the enigma that is Billie Frank. “Okay, we ask ourselves. Is she white? Is she black? We don’t know. She’s exotic. I wanna see more of her breasts.” Here, the glitz overpowers Carey’s wan presence. It’s not even close. Also, I wanna see more of her breasts.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure
Seasons Of Cynicism Case File #98: Rent
Originally Posted January 1, 2008
A few years back, I was forced to watch The Passion Of The Christ to prepare for the final audition of my poorly rated, mildly disreputable basic-cable movie-review panel show Movie Club With John Ridley. I’d pointedly avoided seeing The Passion Of The Christ during its theatrical run. It was nothing personal: I just dislike Mel Gibson personally.
Since I missed out on seeing the film in a theater, I was reduced to watching it on a 12-inch screen in my hotel room after catching a six a.m. flight from Chicago to LAX on Southwest. I imagine that when Mel Gibson contemplated the ideal viewer for his self-financed labor of love, he didn’t envision a leftist Jew watching the movie against his will on a tiny screen in a state of bone-deep exhaustion.
But even if I’d seen The Passion Of The Christ on an IMAX screen, I doubt I’d have liked it. I didn’t go in expecting a revelatory experience. But I expected to respond to it on some level at least, to be moved or shocked or horrified, or experience convulsions of empathy toward the King of Kings as he endures the ass whipping of ass whippings.
I was, after all, the kind of neurotic Jewish kid who watched Christian televangelists on late-night television and bought into their fiery tirades about the horrors awaiting those who don’t accept Jesus Christ. Yet watching The Passion Of The Christ, all I felt was slack-jawed disbelief. This was the movie everyone got so worked up about, this cheesy, ham-fisted grindhouse take on the crucifixion? This was the film that became a landmark in our culture’s culture war, this blood-splattered, violence-fetishizing cornball Christian kitsch? The Passion Of The Christ was depressing, but for all the wrong reasons.
I experienced déjà vu watching the disastrous 2005 film adaptation of Rent the first time around just before its ill-fated theatrical run. I was once again gobsmacked that such a buzzed-about cultural phenomenon could be so transparently awful. This was the play that won the Pulitzer Prize, this Up With People take on the New York underground? This was the show that inspired such a fervent cult? This was the show that dragged Broadway kicking and screaming into the present?
It’s hard to overestimate the role timing plays in transforming a theatrical smash into a cinematic flop. Rent creator Jonathan Larson died the day before the musical opened Off-Broadway. Criticizing Larson’s brainchild in the aftermath of his death would be like strangling a cancer-stricken puppy on Christmas with a rolled-up American flag. Rent wasn’t just a musical; it was an irresistible human-interest story, a pop-culture fable almost too good to be true.
The show people who brought Larson’s Tony-winning pop triumph to the big screen patiently waited for the play’s cultural moment to pass, then waited five more years, then a few more years after that, then finally pushed the project into development once it was little more than a quaint no
stalgia piece.
Rent retained much of its original Broadway cast. While keeping the original cast is always a good idea in theory and often a good idea in practice, actors who convincingly played mid-twentysomethings in 1996 can’t help but look a little long in the tooth come 2005. They look less post-collegiate than pre-menopausal. It’s almost as if an entire decade had passed between the opening night of the Broadway smash and the première of the film fiasco.
That only adds to the surreal lack of verisimilitude plaguing Rent. They’re fake twentysomethings playing fake bohemians in a wholly inauthentic take on la vie bohème (and La Bohème). When writing the play, Larson delved deep into his experiences and those of his boho buddies, but somewhere between the play and the big screen, any lingering traces of authenticity were systematically removed.
But seeing this a second time just after the New Year, I decided to go into Rent with a new attitude. No longer would I snicker and sneer. No, I would open my heart and mind to the magic, the music, the wonder of Rent. I was going to let the toe-tappingest movie ever made about AIDS, heroin, and poverty infect my soul with its stirring message of “No day but today.”
It didn’t work. Mere seconds after the film began, my cynicism returned. The opening song asks, in the most nauseatingly sincere manner imaginable, how one measures a year, then proposes a series of options. They are, in order:
