Credits at the end tell us Mongkut and his son, educated by Anna, led their country into the twentieth century, established democracy (up to a point), and so on. No mention is made of Bangkok’s role as a world center of sex tourism, which also of course carries on traditions established by the good king.
Armageddon
(Directed by Michael Bay; starring Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck; 1998)
Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any thirty seconds at random, and you’d have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.
The plot covers many of the same bases as Deep Impact, which, compared to Armageddon, belongs on the AFI list. The movie tells a similar story at fast-forward speed, with Bruce Willis as an oil driller who is recruited to lead two teams on an emergency shuttle mission to an asteroid “the size of Texas,” which is about to crash into Earth and obliterate all life—“even viruses!” Their job: Drill an 800-foot hole and stuff a bomb into it, to blow up the asteroid before it kills us.
Okay, say you do succeed in blowing up an asteroid the size of Texas. What if a piece the size of Dallas is left? Wouldn’t that be big enough to destroy life on Earth? What about a piece the size of Austin? Let’s face it: Even an object the size of that big Wal-Mart outside Abilene would pretty much clean us out, if you count the parking lot.
Texas is a big state, but as a celestial object it wouldn’t be able to generate much gravity. Yet when the astronauts get to the asteroid, they walk around on it as if the gravity is the same as on Earth. There’s no sensation of weightlessness—until it’s needed, that is, and then a lunar buggy flies across a jagged canyon, Evil Knievel–style.*
The movie begins with a Charlton Hestonian voice telling us about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Then we get the masterful title card, “65 Million Years Later.” The next scenes show an amateur astronomer spotting the object. We see top-level meetings at the Pentagon and in the White House. We meet Billy Bob Thornton, head of Mission Control in Houston, which apparently functions like a sports bar with a big screen for the fans, but no booze. Then we see ordinary people whose lives will be Changed Forever by the events to come. This stuff is all off the shelf—there’s hardly an original idea in the movie.
Armageddon reportedly used the services of nine writers. Why did it need any? The dialogue is either shouted one-liners or romantic drivel. “It’s gonna blow!” is used so many times, I wonder if every single writer used it once, and then sat back from his word processor with a contented smile on his face, another day’s work done.
Disaster movies always have little vignettes of everyday life. The dumbest in Armageddon involves two Japanese tourists in a New York taxi. After meteors turn an entire street into a flaming wasteland, the woman complains, “I want to go shopping!” I hope in Japan that line is redubbed as “Nothing can save us but Gamera!”
Meanwhile, we wade through a romantic subplot involving Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. Liv is Bruce Willis’s daughter. Ben is Willis’s best driller (now, now). Bruce finds Liv in Ben’s bunk on an oil platform, and chases Ben all over the rig, trying to shoot him. (You would think the crew would be preoccupied by the semidestruction of Manhattan, but it’s never mentioned after it happens.) Helicopters arrive to take Willis to the mainland so he can head up the mission to save mankind, etc., and he insists on using only crews from his own rig—especially Affleck, who is “like a son.”
That means Liv and Ben have a heartrending parting scene. What is it about cinematographers and Liv Tyler? She is a beautiful young women, but she’s always being photographed flat on her back, with her brassiere riding up around her chin and lots of wrinkles in her neck from trying to see what some guy is doing. (In this case, Affleck is tickling her navel with animal crackers.) Tyler is obviously a beneficiary of Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She’s not only on the oil rig, but she attends training sessions with her dad and her boyfriend, hangs out in Mission Control, and walks onto landing strips right next to guys wearing foil suits.
Characters in this movie actually say: “I wanted to say—that I’m sorry,” “We’re not leaving them behind!” “Guys—the clock is ticking!” and “This has turned into a surrealistic nightmare!” Steve Buscemi, a crew member who is diagnosed with “space dementia,” looks at the asteroid’s surface and adds, “This place is like Dr. Seuss’s worst nightmare.” Quick—which Seuss book is he thinking of?
There are several Red Digital Readout scenes, in which bombs tick down to zero. Do bomb designers do that for the convenience of interested onlookers who happen to be standing next to a bomb? There’s even a retread of the classic scene where they’re trying to disconnect the timer, and they have to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. The movie has forgotten that this is not a terrorist bomb, but a standard-issue U.S. military bomb, being defused by a military guy who is on board specifically because he knows about this bomb. A guy like that, the first thing he should know is, red or blue?
Armageddon is loud, ugly, and fragmented. Action sequences are cut together at bewildering speed out of hundreds of short edits, so that we can’t see for sure what’s happening, or how, or why. Important special effects shots (like the asteroid) have a murkiness of detail, and the movie cuts away before we get a good look. The few “dramatic” scenes consist of the sonorous recitation of ancient clichés (“You’re already heroes!”). Only near the end, when every second counts, does the movie slow down: Life on earth is about to end, but the hero delays saving the planet in order to recite cornball farewell platitudes.
Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters. “It will obliterate your senses!” reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically. “It will suck the air right out of your lungs!” vows Diane Kaminsky. If it does, consider it a mercy killing.
Ash Wednesday
(Directed by Larry Peerce; starring Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Helmut Berger, Keith Baxter; 1973)
Ash Wednesday is a soapy melodrama that isn’t much good as a movie but may be interesting to some audiences all the same. It’s about how a fiftyish wife (Elizabeth Taylor), her marriage threatened by a younger woman, has a face-lift in order to keep her husband. It doesn’t work, but she gets a nice winter in a ski resort out of it and an affair with Helmut Berger.
The movie opens with clinical precision; a famous plastic surgeon explains his techniques to Miss Taylor as we see them being carried out. He outlines the areas of skin to be removed, and her face looks almost like one of those butcher’s charts with all the cuts marked. Then he begins, with scalpel and needle, and when he has finished and she finally gets the bandages off, voilà! She looks as good as Elizabeth Taylor.
It’s quite an improvement, because when the movie opens, she looks pretty bad. It must have taken some measure of courage for Taylor to allow herself to be made up and photographed so unattractively; maybe she got a double-reverse kick, though, out of knowing that she’s so beautiful she has to be made up to look dowdy. And she is beautiful, which is what the movie’s about, in a way. There are lots of close-ups in which she’s frankly vain as she examines her face with delight; that face is a national treasure by now, and we support any measures to preserve it.