My doubts about the possibility of teaching Shakespeare in this way are surpassed only by my doubts about how the exercise has anything to do with the army. Those doubts are shared by a drill sergeant (Gregory Hines), who thinks DeVito is simply wasting the time of his recruits. The formula of this story requires DeVito to eventually “prove himself” to the sergeant, and the moment I saw the base’s “Victory Tower,” a dangerous obstacle course involving lots of climbing and crawling, I knew with a sinking conviction that sooner or later DeVito would be climbing down walls on ropes to win the respect of the men.
Graduate students of Shakespeare are often assigned to do a “source study” on one of his plays, reading Shakespeare’s own sources for one of the histories, say, and then noting what the Bard kept, and what he changed. Renaissance Man could also inspire a source study. It is obviously a cross between Dead Poets Society (unpromising students inspired by unconventional teacher) and Private Benjamin (desperate unemployed civilian joins the army). Advanced students might want to research the sources of those films—which were retreads, yes, but at least less labored than Renaissance Man.
One odd quality about this movie is its gloominess. It seems strangely thoughtful and morose for a comedy, especially as it develops the stories of the various class members. The screenplay also has problems with logic. Are we really supposed to believe, for example, that DeVito can pawn the award he won in an advertising competition for enough money to buy his daughter a telescope and a trip out of the country to view an eclipse?
The ending of the film is an exercise in phony suspense. See if you can follow this army logic. The students are not required to take a final exam in the course. But if they take it, and fail, they’ll flunk out of basic training. Therefore, they shouldn’t take it, right? But so great is their transformation that they insist on taking it, and turn up in the classroom (after the obligatory twenty seconds of suspense in which DeVito thinks they won’t come, and sad music plays). But the final is verbal, not written, with all the students in the room at the same time, so apparently they will pass or fail as a class, not as individuals. I say “apparently” because the ending suggests they do pass, but the movie absentmindedly neglects to supply that information. Not that, by then, I cared.
Return to the Blue Lagoon
(Directed by William A. Graham; starring Brian Krause; 1991)
I had this great idea for a sequel to The Poseidon Adventure. You remember, the movie where the ocean liner was overturned by a tidal wave, and the passengers had to climb to safety through an upside-down ship. In my sequel, just as they got to their destination, another tidal wave would come along and right the ship—and they’d have to retrace their steps.
The makers of Return to the Blue Lagoon are working in the same great tradition. In the original 1980 movie, a boy and girl were castaways on a lost island where the adults built a house and trained them in the ways of survival and then died, leaving the boy and girl to grow up into tanned and beautiful adolescents (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) who studied how the giant sea turtle made love, and drew the obvious conclusions. “All we have to look forward to,” Pauline Kael wrote, “is: when are these two going to discover fornication?”
Return to the Blue Lagoon begins shortly after the young couple set sail from the island with their baby girl, but the young couple died at sea. Their drifting boat is then discovered by a passing ship, and the baby is rescued. It is immediately embraced by a widow on board (Lisa Pelikan), who has a young son of her own. Then it develops that the plague is sweeping the ship. The captain realizes that the only way to save the widow and the two children is to cast them adrift, in hopes they will find rescue or an island. Otherwise, their sure fate is death by plague.
So, the mother and the two children float away in a little boat, only to inevitably wash up on the shores of—wouldn’t you know—the very same island. The palm-thatch cottage is still standing, all of the comforts of home are still in place, and all that is left is for the movie to repeat the earlier story. The mother raises the children until they are self-sufficient; she dies; and the kids grow into tanned and beautiful adolescents (Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause). All we have to look forward to, as Pauline Kael so presciently wrote, is: when are these two going to discover fornication?
The original Blue Lagoon at least had a certain purity of form. This one complicates matters by having the island discovered by a passing ship, which contains, inevitably, a young woman who makes eyes at the hero, and a bearded sailor who bodes no well for the heroine. That leads to the expected developments in which the hero and heroine decide they like each other best after all, and the evil sailor has something terrible happen to him—like, to take a random example, being eaten by a shark.
The most curious aspect of the movie is the presence of island natives on the other side of the island. They apparently visit during every full moon, beat their drums a lot, and then paddle away in the morning. There are ominous warnings about staying away from the other side of the island, staying indoors during the full moon, etc., but nothing really comes of the presence of the natives. It’s as if the filmmakers felt obligated to throw in a few ominously beating drums, but didn’t know where to take it from there.
The sincere idiocy of this film really has to be seen to be appreciated—not that I think there is any need for you to see, or appreciate, it. Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.
Salome’s Last Dance
(Directed by Ken Russell; starring Glenda Jackson; 1988)
Sex is the theater of the poor.—Oscar Wilde
Whether Wilde actually said that, I cannot be sure. The line is not found in any of the standard books of quotations, but it sure sounds like Wilde, and it gets Salome’s Last Dance off to a rousing start, from which it never recovers.
The Wilde character delivers the line as he enters a male bordello in Paris, where as a special treat the owner has planned a clandestine performance of his banned play Salome. The action takes place in 1892, three years before Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment, although in this freewheeling film by Ken Russell the period could be anytime in the past century. Russell’s approach is to stage a play-within-a-film, so that while Wilde languishes on a sofa and drinks champagne, the hardworking bordello staff perform his play on a proscenium stage that has been set up for the occasion.
What do we learn from this approach, and indeed from this film? Not much, except that Ken Russell is addicted, as always, to excesses of everything except purpose and structure. After his previous film, Gothic, which re-created a weekend idyll involving Shelley and Byron, Russell demonstrates again that he is most interested in literary figures when their trousers are unbuttoned. And even then, he isn’t interested in why, or how, they carry on their sex lives; like the defrockers of the scandal sheets, he wants only to breathlessly shock us with the news that his heroes possessed and employed genitals.