by Nathan Rabin
Breckini eventually ends up behind bars with fellow juvenile delinquent Leonardo (voiced by Topher Grace) who confides in hushed tones, “I’ve got something to show you.” Leonardo then whips out a sweet candy phallus of a lollipop and regales Breckini with the story of how he purloined 29 lollipops from a candy store before a cop busted him. “I was just about to lick the first one,” Leonardo shares conspiratorially, “and then I heard a policeman call out to me, ‘Put that tongue back, robber. And hand back those 28 lollipops you have in your pocket.’”
Oozing envy, Breckini pleads, “Will you give me one little lick? Just one?” Leonardo willingly acquiesces. “You lick here, me there. You lick first,” he demands. They then take turns double-teaming the lollipop with long, passionate, open-mouthed, obscenely sensual licks.
After being released from jail, Breckini encounters a gravestone suggesting that the Blue Fairy died from Pinocchio-related causes. Distraught, he pleads, “How do you become dead? I wanna be dead too!” Other than homoeroticism and miscalculation, Benigni’s Pinocchio is distinguished by a perverse, consistent morbidity in the form of rabbit pallbearers, hangings, and the ever-present specter of death.
Breckini eventually follows Leonardo to Fun Foreverland, a paradise where suspiciously mature-looking “boys” frolic, play, wrestle, and prance about in a girl-free environment.
Still more pain and humiliation await Breckini. He’s transformed into a donkey, made to work in a sleazy circus, subjected to the vocal stylings of Regis Philbin, and tossed into the ocean to await a watery grave. Yet the Blue Fairy bails Breckini out of every bind, then makes him into a real boy.
In the transcendent Disney version, Pinocchio emerges as a powerful coming-of-age allegory about forsaking the pleasures of adolescence and embracing adult responsibility. Yet Benigni’s career is predicated on remaining a child forever. If he had listened to his sober inner adult, he’d never have attempted a project this insanely ambitious or ambitiously insane.
Rewatching Pinocchio, I admired its unsupportable belief that audiences would somehow be willing to overlook the incongruity of a 50-year-old Pinocchio and surrender their defenses at the altar of childhood innocence. Pinocchio is exactly the sort of weirdly compelling, utterly singular personal project I wanted to pay homage to with My Year Of Flops, even if I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the morbidly curious.
Pinocchio was originally envisioned as a collaboration between Benigni and Federico Fellini, but I doubt even Fellini could have redeemed a project this fundamentally flawed, though he might have pushed the project’s innate weirdness to dizzyingly surreal levels. I suspect that the Italian version is preferable to its American bastardization, and while I planned to watch both before writing this entry, I was sent two copies of the dubbed version. There are limits even to my pop-culture masochism. Unlike Benigni, I know when I’m licked.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Roberto Benigni On Pinocchio
Excitable, rubber-faced cut-up Roberto Benigni is an Academy Award–winning writer, actor, comedian, and director. A huge star in his native Italy, Benigni made an indelible impression on American arthouse audiences with scene-stealing appearances in cult classic Jim Jarmusch films like Down By Law, Coffee & Cigarettes, and Night On Earth before triumphing internationally as the writer, director, and star of the 1997 Holocaust comedy-drama Life Is Beautiful.
Roberto Benigni: Pinocchio was a big success in Italy, but it didn’t go very well around the world because it was a very particular project. Very Italian and very scary also because it was a bold move, having Pinocchio acted by a man of 50 years old. So it was a very, very special project. I put in this movie all my energy, all my oomph, I would say. It wasn’t received very good around the world, but it’s a project that I love very, very much.
And you know, there are some movies that are loved and some less. But I am really very proud to have presented one of the most wonderful characters for Italy and the world too, because Pinocchio is a universal subject. Now, Walt Disney did a very American version, which I like very much. But I tried to do this Italian version of Pinocchio with a lot of liberty, and a lot of visual imagination. But it was also very hard, very difficult to understand. And I understand the reception of the movie. It could be difficult for some of the audience.
Nathan Rabin: Were you worried that because you were 50, audiences wouldn’t accept you in that role?
RB: Sometimes it happens, this is not a problem. In United States, they give me such a generous reception of Life Is Beautiful, my previous movie, that really I owe to United States a lot of love, because they were so generous at me with this movie.
NR: People also were a little confused, because in the American version your voice was dubbed. What was the thinking behind that?
RB: Sometimes the dubbing, you know, it’s really a difficult thing to understand. In Italy, we are used to the dubbing because they dub every movie, you know. But not in United States. They think it’s better to not dub the movie. It’s a problem. We don’t know how to present a movie, because subtitles also are difficult, especially for a movie like Pinocchio, which is addressed to boys, to children. So they cannot read the entire time. And I am an actor who talks very, very much during the movies, so it’s a problem.
NR: Right, but why dub your voice? You have such a—
RB: I know, but I repeat I am really so happy about Pinocchio because I did what I felt. It’s a very honest movie. And if it’s not received very good—for example, in Italy and Japan they loved the movie a lot. So sometimes it happens. But this is, I repeat, very, very normal.
Fuck You, Jew Case File #96: Santa Claus: The Movie
Originally Posted December 25, 2007
There’s nothing lonelier than being a Jew on Christmas. When someone says, “Merry Christmas,” all I hear is, “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone says, “Happy holidays,” what he really means is, “Fuck you, Jew.” When they say “Happy Chanakoonah,” that’s ultimately just another way of saying, “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone at work says, “Hey, Nathan, can I borrow your Juno screener?” all I hear is, “Fuck you, Jew.” Man, I really need to go back on my meds. Fucking seasonal depression.
Ah, but Christmas isn’t really about religion, you say. It’s that most wonderful time of the year when people forget their troubles and join together to worship the Great God of Commerce and his little buddy Jesus. We pay tribute to the Great God of Commerce with maxed-out credit cards, personal checks, and plain old cash. But then, in a culture-wide fit of passive-aggression, we turn our backs on Him by bombarding children with movies, television shows, and songs where materialism is climactically renounced and everyone learns the True Meaning of Christmas. If these renunciations of greed succeed, then they make everyone involved lots and lots of money, year in and year out.
1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie represented a transparent attempt to spin a Superman-like franchise out of the world’s most indulgent gift-giver. Actually, Santa Claus and Superman have more in common than films produced by Ilya Salkind and cowritten by David Newman. They both can fly. They’re both magic. They both got to witness the sad decline of Kevin Spacey’s film career up close—Santa in Fred Claus, Superman in Superman Returns. And they both fucked Margot Kidder back when that meant something.
Like Superman, Santa Claus: The Movie offers an elaborate creation story for one of our culture’s most beloved icons. Santa (David Huddleston) was just your average jelly-bellied gift-giving enthusiast until a group of immortal little people make Santa an offer he can’t refuse: Deliver presents to all the gentile girls and boys on Christmas for the rest of eternity in exchange for immortality and the ability to fly. For a morbidly obese gentleman on the verge of a heart attack, that’s an irresistible deal. Besides, it isn’t as if he has much choice in the matter: He can either deliver toys until the end of time or he can wake up in bloody sheets next to Prancer’s severed head. Elves don’t fuck around.
T
he film’s surprisingly not terrible first half cruises through all sorts of landmarks in Santa Claus’ evolution. At one point, the jolly son of a bitch expresses a suspiciously socialist belief that “every child should get a present,” but then he learns the error of his ways and implements his patented double-checked list delineating the naughty from the nice.
As long as it’s fixated on the goings-on at the North Pole, the film remains on solid footing. The elves’ workshop is so bright and cheery, it’s easy to forget it’s a sweatshop, and the special effects are slick and convincing, especially where flying is concerned. But the moment the outside world comes into play, the film’s cornball charm disappears.
Santa needs an assistant, so he hooks up with an enterprising elf named Patch, played by Dudley Moore. Alas, Patch’s modernization of Santa’s factory results in shoddy workmanship, defective toys, widespread sobbing, and a furious backlash against Ol’ Saint Nick. Children associated with him are terrorized. Bullies taunt a rich orphan (Carrie Kei Heim) by sneering, “How can you be so dumb, Cornelia? Everyone knows he gives out shoddy cheap toys. My daddy says he’s an old fake.” Another pint-sized hooligan twists the knife by braying, “My parents gave me a doll that says whole sentences on a cassette. You don’t have any parents, so nyaaaahh!”
After the Christmas disaster, Patch resigns in disgrace and heads to New York, where he offers his services to sinister defective-toy merchant B.Z. (John Lithgow), a cigar-chomping archvillain desperately in need of good PR. I hope someday to be rich enough to smoke giant cigars while cackling maniacally.
Patch and B.Z. set out to beat Santa at his own game by giving out fantastical lollipops that allow people to fly. Literally. How can Santa compete? He can’t, so he sinks into a holly, jolly suicidal depression. It’s a good thing the elves hid all the knives, ropes, and sleeping pills from their morbidly obese boss until his ennui lifted. When an elf diplomatically shows Santa a new doll that wets itself, all Saint Nick can muster is a dispirited, “But does it fly?”
In spite of its title, Santa Claus: The Movie ignores Santa for long stretches of its dreary second half in order to focus on the low-wattage antics of a pair of moppets: a rich girl (Heim) who says things like, “Would you like some cookies? They’re from Bloomingdale’s!” and a Damon Runyon–esque scamp (Christian Fitzpatrick) who gazes longingly into the window of a McDonald’s at a happy family enjoying the beloved fast-food chain’s wide array of delicious products. The two form a bond that transcends class lines when the girl leaves a mouth-watering can of Coke and leftovers for her homeless Santa-loving pal.
B.Z.’s greed ultimately gets the best of him. When Fitzpatrick’s scamp discovers Lithgow’s evil scheme to sell dangerous, potentially deadly flying candy canes, he ends up bound and gagged until Santa shows up to save the day. And quite possibly save Christmas. And deliver a death blow to his unwanted competition. It’s the free market at work!
As the film lurches to a close, the tone veers between the curdled dark comedy of Lithgow’s scenery-chewing, highly theatrical performance and maudlin, sentimental speeches like, “People don’t seem to care about giving a gift just so they can see the light of happiness in a friend’s eyes. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore” and “If you give extra kisses, you get bigger hugs. That’s what Santa’s wife is always saying.”
Then there are elf-themed puns: Patch insists that the magic lollipop’s flying powers are “elf-explanatory,” that he does not lack “elf-assurance,” and that ultimately, “Heaven helps those who help their elf.” Plot proves the death of Santa Claus: The Movie. Whenever the film strays from Santa’s well-worn mythology, it flounders, and the cynicism at the film’s core rises to the surface. As with so many Christmas movies, the anti-materialist sermonizing feels disingenuous, since Santa Claus: The Movie is a moneymaking venture first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, and a creative endeavor a distinct sixth.
Yet Santa Claus: The Movie ended up angering the Great God of Commerce by losing a mint for Tristar. There would be no sequels, no remakes, no Superman/Santa crossovers where Santa Claus is forced to kneel before Zod … just a bleak yuletide for everyone involved.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure
Totally Tween Case File #118: Bratz: The Movie
Originally Posted September 17, 2008
While on vacation, I briefly became addicted to A&E’s The Two Coreys. In my favorite episode, Corey Feldman, concerned that his tragicomic bud Corey Haim has become a pill-popper, convinces Todd Bridges and Pauly Shore to confront Haim about his substance abuse. As Bridges and Shore contemplate the task at hand, they’re overcome with a profound sense of life’s ridiculousness. How did they get there? What crime did they commit in a past life to merit this karmic mind fuck? Even Pauly Shore, Todd Bridges, and Corey Feldman found the prospect of a semi-intervention featuring Pauly Shore, Todd Bridges, and Corey Feldman to be surreal. You know your life has spun out of control when Pauly Shore is lecturing you about responsibility.
I know the feeling. There are times in everyone’s life when the randomness of fate blindsides you. Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace masterfully chronicled the often ugly, sometimes sublime preposterousness of our universe. They allow readers to take a step back and see the things we all take for granted in a new, disorientingly foreign light, to see the bizarre in the familiar and the familiar in the bizarre.
I experienced a similarly uncanny sense of life’s absurdity when I sat down in a small, cold room on the 16th floor of a nondescript building in downtown Chicago with a platoon of pasty, shabbily dressed middle-aged men in 2007 to watch a series of flickering images and shiny, happy noise called Bratz: The Movie, a live-action movie designed to sell a popular line of skanky plastic dolls. Here’s what the American Psychological Association had to say about these plastic pop tarts:
Bratz dolls come dressed in sexualized clothing such as miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and feather boas. Although these dolls may present no more sexualization of girls or women than is seen in MTV videos, it is worrisome when dolls designed specifically for 4- to 8-year-olds are associated with an objectified adult sexuality.
Alas, those spoilsport eggheads in the APA were no match for the Bratz spokesman (you gotta wonder whom he killed in a previous life), who defended the dolls with the withering retort, “The Bratz brand, which has remained number one in the UK market for 23 consecutive months, focuses core values on friendship, hair play, and a ‘passion for fashion.’”
Bruno Bettelheim argued that a proper appreciation of “hair play” is a vital component of every child’s emotional development. And Abraham Maslow made “passion for fashion” a cornerstone of his hierarchy of needs. But Bratz’s inspiring message of hair play, cultivating a passion for fashion, and friendship is largely wasted on the killjoys in the APA. Also, film critics.
The folks at the screening room were, perhaps, not the ideal audience for a movie about clothing-obsessed teenage girls. When the film began, I wondered why Bratz was being screened for critics at all. Did the Bratzketeers expect us to respond to their product with anything other than disdain? Couldn’t Bratz: The Movie just as easily be titled Not Screened For Critics: The Movie?
Bratz’s first sequence establishes a tone of psychotic peppiness, as the Bratz approach choosing outfits for the first day of high school with orgasmic glee. Ah, but Bratz isn’t afraid to delve into deep issues. One of the girls has divorced parents. Another left her turquoise shirt at her friend’s house.
Bratz veers into Afterschool Special territory when one of the girls literally runs into a boy who’s cute but also deaf, and they have the following exchange:
Brat: What are you, blind?
Totally Hot Deaf Guy: No, but I’m deaf.
Brat: What?
Totally Hot Deaf Guy: I’m deaf.
Brat: You don’t sound deaf.
Totally Hot Deaf Guy: Well, you don’t look ignorant, but I guess you can’t judge a b
ook, right?
Bratz isn’t done teaching valuable life lessons about how the deaf are just like you and me, only hotter, and way better DJs. In a remarkable sequence, the hot hearing-impaired athlete learns that being deaf and being def are not mutually exclusive when a sensitive Mr. Chips–type teaches him how to fuck shit up old school on the turntables by feeling the vibrations, Funky Bunch style.
He isn’t just a brooding, telegenic deaf guy: He’s a deaf jock who loves playing the piano and is also an awesome DJ. He’s got five minutes of screen time and 18 different facets to his personality. I expect the deleted scenes will reveal that he’s also an orphan, a Jehovah’s Witness, a monarchist, double-jointed, telekinetic, and an illegal immigrant.
The four Bratz enter high school intent on ruling the school in their respective niches. “I’m owning the science!” enthuses the Asian science geek with rad cotton-candy-blue hair extensions. That line is followed by the record-skipping sound effect that serves as bad-movie shorthand for, “Oh snap, something zany just happened!”
This vexes the black cheerleader, who frets, “Okay! Work the IQ, girl, but please don’t lose your passion for fashion!” The message is clear: Learning about science is all well and good, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the superficial things that really matter.
In spite of their oft-repeated promises to remain BFF, the girls are pulled in opposite directions by their overriding passions. The jock abandons her friends to hang out with the jocks. The cheerleader kicks it with the cheerleaders, the geek blends in with the brains, and the girl with little discernible personality but a gift for making bitching clothes presumably hangs out with other girls with little discernible personality and a flair for sewing.
We then flash-forward two years. The girls’ utopia of shared clothes and daily video-IM-ing chitchats has died at the hands of cliques and the narrow-minded tyranny of the school’s most popular student. In a moment of haunting sadness, two of the Bratz reconnect briefly over their shared love of Peach Party lip gloss, only to watch their fragile bond dissipate just as quickly.
