I was hoping Tidal Wave would be a movie like that. When the publicity photographs arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I was heartened by the sight of the staples holding together the cardboard skyscrapers: Here was a movie with real lack of promise! It even looked like a good bet to outflank King Kong vs. Godzilla. (What happened in that one, as I recall, is that King Kong lost and is currently trying to promote a bout with the Smog Monster, to establish himself as a contender once again.) But Tidal Wave let me down. It is purely and simply a wretched failure, a feeble attempt to paste together inept special effects (filmed in Japan) and Lorne Greene (filmed in America—to his everlasting regret, I’ll bet).
The story involves ominous happenings along the Japan Trench, a vast underwater geological feature which, when it’s viewed from a submarine, looks suspiciously like mud being stirred up by a garden hose. Japanese scientists regard it with horror, and no wonder: Their computers inform them all the Japanese islands will soon sink into the trench, with the possible loss of more than 100 million lives (under the circumstances, the title Tidal Wave becomes the understatement of the season).
This would, of course, be a great catastrophe, something the people in the movie are constantly assuring each other: “What a great catastrophe,” they intone. Cut to the United Nations, where poor Lorne Greene is addressing the world’s governments on plans to bail out the Japanese. There is, he observes, a certain degree of technological difficulty involved in an air and sea rescue effort involving 100 million people—but this is a catastrophe that threatens not just Japan, you understand, but all Earth’s nations, since who knows what will slide into the Japan Trench next?
There’s the obligatory love story, involving a scientist whose girlfriend makes a last-minute dash up Mt. Fujiyama and is trapped in a phone booth, where she calls him and makes plans, rather optimistically, I thought, to meet him in Geneva, Switzerland, when all of this is over. There are also people in boats who drift hither and yon before being swamped by tidal waves that look suspiciously like regular waves shot from a very low position with a wide-angle lens. The movie never ends, but if you wait long enough it gets to a point where it’s over.
’Til There Was You
(Directed by Scott Winant; starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Jeanne Triplehorn; 1997)
Here is the most tiresome and affected movie in many a moon, a 114-minute demonstration of the Idiot Plot, in which everything could be solved with a few well-chosen words which are never spoken. The underlying story is a simple one: A man and a woman who are obviously intended for one another are kept apart for an entire movie, only to meet at the end. We’re supposed to be pleased when they get together, I guess, although the movie ends with such unseemly haste that we never get to experience them as a couple.
’Til There Was You, directed by Scott Winant with a screenplay by Winnie Holzman, plays like half-digested remnants of a dozen fictional meals. We have flashbacks to the love stories of parents, college love affairs, shocking revelations about sexuality and parentage, a maladjusted former sitcom star, an architect who is a “perfectionist with low self-esteem,” a ghostwriter who falls in love with a colorful old apartment building, not one but two colorful old ladies who stick to their guns, a restaurant that’s an architectural nightmare, zoning hearings, bad poetry, endlessly falling rose petals, chain-smoking, gays in the closet, traffic accidents, and at the end of it all we have the frustration of knowing that 114 minutes of our lives have been wasted, never to be returned.
Oh, and we have disastrous casting decisions. I find it helpful, as a general rule, to be able to tell the characters in a movie apart. Several of the characters in this film (a gay college professor, an architect, and another guy) look so much alike I was forever getting them confused. They were all sort of would-be Pierce Brosnan clones. Since the plot depends on coincidental meetings (and close misses) involving people who should know each other but don’t, and people who do know each other but shouldn’t, the look-alikes grow even more confusing. The casting director no doubt thought that since several of the leads have appeared on TV sitcoms, the audience would recognize them and not be distracted by superficial physical similarities. Sorry.
The plot: A former sitcom star (Sarah Jessica Parker) owns a wonderful old apartment complex that has been earmarked for replacement by a condo. She begins to date the architect (Dylan McDermott) who will design the condo. His hero is an old lady architect (Nina Foch) who is apparently the Frank Lloyd Wright of her generation. She designed the colorful old apartment complex, but he doesn’t know that. (How likely is it that an architect would be unfamiliar with one of his famous mentor’s key buildings in the city where he lives? Not very.)
Meanwhile, a ghostwriter (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is hired by the sitcom star to write her autobiography. The ghostwriter and the architect met when they were children at summer camp. They are destined to meet again, but keep missing each other by inches or minutes. Some of their near-misses take place in a restaurant the architect designed.
This restaurant, of frightening ugliness, seems designed to keep personal-injury lawyers in work. When Tripplehorn enters it for the first time, she can’t get the door open. Then it flies open and she staggers across the entire room and bangs into something. Later, she beans herself on a low-flying sculpture, trips over a waiter, catches her heel in the floor, falls over a chair, etc. Did she train for a Three Stooges movie?
All of the movie’s heartfelt scenes are tangential. They involve major characters talking to minor ones instead of to each other. There is the heartfelt talk between the architect and his mentor. The heartfelt talk between the ghostwriter and a dotty old lady (Gwen Verdon) who lives in the colorful old building (which the writer staggered into after a coincidental car crash). There is the heartfelt talk between the writer and her old father, who tells her the childhood legends the movie began with were all fiction. There is the heartfelt love scene between the writer and her college professor, who is later revealed to be gay, and then disappears from the movie just when we thought the story would be about him.
Many details are just plain wrong. Since the Tripplehorn character is a literature student, we expect her to be a fairly sophisticated writer. Yet when we hear one of her poems read (after it accidentally sticks to the bottom of an architectural model thrown out of a window—but never mind), it turns out to be written in rhyming couplets of the sort found beneath the needlework column in women’s craft magazines. All of the characters smoke unpleasantly, and want to stop, and one of the movie’s near-misses, where the predestined lovers almost meet, is an “N.A.” meeting, which is described as “Nicotine Anonymous.” Warning: Before dropping “N.A.” into your conversation, be aware that most people think it stands for something else.
And what about those rose petals? Or lilac petals, or whatever they are? The courtyard of the colorful old building, we can clearly see, has no foliage above it. Yet petals drift down in endless profusion for days and weeks during every scene—so many, I sat through the end credits in the futile hope there would be mention of the Petal Dropper.