American Anthem
(Directed by Albert Magnoli; starring Mitch Gaylord, Janet Jones; 1986)
American Anthem is like a very bad Identikit sketch of Purple Rain, the previous movie by the same director. You can almost hear the police artist as he tries to make his drawing, based on half-witted descriptions of the big hit from the summer of 1984:
Q. Who is the star?
A. A major superstar in another field who has never acted before.
Q. What is his personal crisis?
A. He has an unhappy home life and a father who mistreats him.
Q. What is the suspense?
A. Will he conquer his inner demons and perform once again at the peak of his ability?
Q. Who is his girlfriend?
A. A future star in his field whose excellence inspires him to start trying again.
Q. What’s the movie’s visual style?
A. Kind of a cross between a concert film and an MTV video. Be sure to overedit. And put in lots of shots where the camera peers into the light source, so the heroic youth can be seen in silhouette as he tosses back his head and sweat flies through the air.
With this incomplete description, a filmmaker from Planet X might have made American Anthem from the basic ingredients of Purple Rain. The hero this time is not a rock star like Prince, but a gymnast played by the Olympic champion Mitch Gaylord. But since the movie treats him like a rock star, photographing him not as a sweating, breathing, striving athlete but as a pinup for the girls’ locker room, the difference isn’t as big as you might imagine.
In the movie, Gaylord plays a guy who has dropped off the gym team and refused a college scholarship because his father doesn’t love him. His father, we learn, does indeed love him but is frustrated because he doesn’t have a job. Gaylord sneaks into the gym to spy on his former teammates as they train, and one day he spots a beautiful newcomer (Janet Jones). She has arrived to train under the famous coach who is preparing everyone to try out for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team.
It’s love, and so Gaylord decides to get in shape again, which he does by working out on a bar that he has suspended between two trees in the forest. He especially enjoys practicing during fierce rainstorms when the thunder and lightning make for a better MTV video.
The plot is dumb and predictable, but so what? Everything depends on dialogue and character. And American Anthem is a curious case: The screenplay seems to have been written by people who, on the one hand, were intimately familiar with every commercial and salable ingredient in every hit movie of the last five years, and yet who, on the other hand, had never heard a cliché before. My favorite moment comes after a family fight when the kid brother whines, “Why can’t we be like other families?”
A large portion of the movie is given over to gymnastics competitions, which are not explained or photographed well enough to be very interesting. Seeing a champion gymnast zip through his routine isn’t half as interesting as a beginner being taught a thing or two about dealing with the parallel bars would have been. Skilled moviemakers know that, in sports movies, you don’t create suspense by making something look easy, but by making it look difficult. Yet Gaylord’s competitive routines in American Anthem are the equivalent of a Rocky movie where Rocky knocks his opponent unconscious with the first swing.
One thing is especially annoying about the movie. During the final match, there are dozens of strobe lights flashing incessantly and distractingly behind the contestants. I guess these are supposed to represent camera flashbulbs. Two thoughts are inspired: (1) If the gymnastics were really interesting, they wouldn’t have to be tarted up with flashing lights, and (2) have you ever thought what it says about our national IQ that a lot of people believe you can take a flash picture from the twentieth row?
An American Werewolf in Paris
(Directed by Anthony Wallers; starring Tom Everett Scott, Vince Vieluf, Phil Buckman; 1997)
Now that Scream and Scream 2 have given us horror film characters who know all the horror clichés, the time has come for a werewolf movie about characters who know they’re in a werewolf movie. Not that such an insight would benefit the heroes of An American Werewolf in Paris, who are singularly dim. Here are people we don’t care about, doing things they don’t understand, in a movie without any rules. Triple play.
I was not one of the big fans of John Landis’s original 1981 film, An American Werewolf in London, but, glancing over my old review, I find such phrases as “spectacular set pieces,” “genuinely funny moments,” and “sequences that are spellbinding.” My review of the Paris werewolves will not require any of those phrases.
The new movie involves three callow Americans on a “daredevil tour” of Europe. Played by Tom Everett Scott (of That Thing You Do), Vince Vieluf, and Phil Buckman, they climb the Eiffel Tower by moonlight, only to find a young woman (Julie Delpy) about to leap to her death. They talk, she leaps, and Scott leaps after her, luckily while tethered to a bungee cord. (Hint: always be sure the other end of a bungee line is tied to something else before tying this end to yourself.)
The girl survives, the lads track her to her home, she has blood on her hands, her friend invites them to a rave club, she’s not there, Chris finds her locked in a cell in her basement, the ravers are werewolves, so is she, etc., etc. Please don’t accuse me of revealing plot points: In a movie with this title, are you expecting that the girl who leaps from the tower is not a werewolf, her friends are exchange students, and the club is frequented by friendly tourists?
One of the pleasures of a film like this is the ritual explanation of the rules, in which we determine how werewolves are made, how they are killed, and how they spread their wolfiness. Here it doesn’t much matter, because the plot has a way of adding new twists (like a serum that makes moonlight unnecessary for a werewolf transformation). By the end of the film, any plot discipline (necessary so that we care about some characters and not the others) has been lost in an orgy of special effects and general mayhem.
But let me single out one line of dialogue. After the three American college students are trying to figure out what happened at the tower, one says, “The kind of girl who jumps off the Eiffel Tower has issues, man.”
Starting with that line, a complete rewrite could be attempted, in which the characters are self-aware, know the werewolf rules, and know not to make the same mistakes as the characters in An American Werewolf in London (not to mention The Howling, The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, Howling III, Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, Howling V: The Rebirth, and Howling VI: The Freaks). I even have a great title: Howler.
And God Created Woman
(Directed by Roger Vadim; starring Rebecca De Mornay, Vincent Spano, James Tiernan, Frank Langella; 1987)
Is this the first time a title has been remade, instead of a movie? And God Created Woman shares little with the 1956 Brigitte Bardot movie except for its name and, to be sure, its director, Roger Vadim. It’s a great title, and although I can only barely, dimly remember moments from the original movie, I am prepared to bet that this is a better one. The movie stars Rebecca De Mornay, who in her uncanny first shot looks for a moment like Bardot. Then the Bardot imagery is abandoned and the movie gets on with its business.