If you can believe all those things, then, at the end, when the reborn priestess Kara turns and snarls at the audience, you’ll believe that The Awakening is set for a sequel. Call me an optimist, but I believe this movie is so bad it’ll never be reborn.
*Okay, there’s some nonsense about air jets to push them down—but what happens when they bend over?
The Babe
(Directed by Arthur Hiller; starring John Goodman, Trini Alvarado; 1992)
Say it ain’t so, Babe.
Say you weren’t a sad, tortured person who just happened to be able to slam homers out of the park better than anyone else.
Say this movie is all a lie, and that you were indeed a glorious American hero, the grandest of all the boys of summer, and that it was great fun, at least sometimes, to be the most famous baseball hero of all time.
Let us believe. We need our heroes.
But The Babe doesn’t give us one. Apart from being a bad film in the first place, aside from being superficially written, aside from being shot with little sense of time or place, the movie portrays Babe Ruth as a man almost completely lacking in the ability to have, or to provide, happiness.
Spending these 115 minutes with the Babe is a little like being jammed into the window seat on a long-distance bus, next to a big guy with beer and cigars on his breath and nothing to talk about but his next meal and his last broad. Babe Ruth comes across as a pathetic orphan lacking in all social graces, who grew up into a self-destructive bore and hit a lot of home runs in the process. And then, in the end, when time caught up with him, he never got the message, and almost destroyed the myth that had grown up around him.
No matter how many homers he hit, Ruth would have never become a Great American Hero in the television age. On the radio and in the newspapers, maybe he came across as quite a guy. But to see and hear him—at least as he is portrayed in this movie—is to cringe. After the magical innocence of baseball as painted in Field of Dreams, after the life-affirming Bull Durham, here is a baseball trading card that looks like it was found in the gutter.
The fault is not John Goodman’s. He plays the Babe as written. You can see, watching this movie, that he could have played a lot of other sides of Babe Ruth and made them work. But John Fusco’s screenplay doesn’t seem to like Babe very much. It shows him as an overgrown, recalcitrant kid who had one skill. He could hit the ball. And then it shows him growing up into a human pig who wenched and cheated on those who loved him, who was drunk during many of his games, who was small-minded and jealous, who wasn’t much of a team player, who lost his temper and screamed at the fans, and whose little trot around the bases looked like the outing of a constipated alderman.
Much has been made of the movie’s use of Wrigley Field and a ball park in Danville, Illinois. They’re supposed to re-create the look of the diamonds of Ruth’s day. But the movie seems to keep showing us the same two parks, while giving us subtitles trying to convince us we’re in Baltimore, or Boston. There don’t seem to be many fans in the stands. There is no sense here of baseball. No smell of peanuts and roar of the crowd.
Babe’s first wife, played by Trini Alvarado, is a nice girl who finally can’t stand the reports of Babe’s raids on the brothels and his demands for three girls at a time. The second wife, a Ziegfeld Follies girl played by Kelly McGillis, has been around the block a few times and is less easily shocked. She stays with the Babe, but more out of loyalty and stubbornness, we sense, than because of love.
Her loyalty is more than organized baseball can muster. Ruth is paid well and tolerated by the Yankees as long as he’s hitting, but when his legs and eye start to go, there’s no love lost between them, and no sense of loyalty. He ends up in Boston, where his final days are portrayed as a mixture of shame, anticlimax, and betrayal.
The famous moments are here. The dying kid in the hospital, who Ruth promises he’ll hit two home runs in the next game. The “called shot” in the World Series. The home run record that has never been beaten, except by an asterisk. But at the end of the movie, when we’re thoroughly depressed anyway, do we really need that maudlin scene where a young man follows Ruth off the field after his final game, introduces himself as the kid whose life was saved by those two homers, and gives back the ball that Babe autographed beside the hospital bed? Talk about shameless.
Baby Geniuses
(Directed by Bob Clark; starring Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd; 1999)
Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses achieves a kind of grandeur. And it proves something I’ve long suspected: Babies are cute only when they’re being babies. When they’re presented as miniature adults (on greeting cards, in TV commercials, or especially in this movie) there is something so fundamentally wrong that our human instincts cry out in protest.
Oh, you can have fun with a baby as a movie character. Look Who’s Talking (1989) was an entertaining movie in which we heard what the baby was thinking. Baby’s Day Out (1994), with its fearless baby setting Joe Mantegna’s pants on fire, had its defenders. But those at least were allegedly real babies. Baby Geniuses is about toddlers who speak, plot, scheme, disco dance, and beat up adults with karate kicks. This is not right.
The plot: Kathleen Turner plays a woman with a theory that babies can talk to each other. She funds a secret underground lab run by Christopher Lloyd to crack the code. Her theory is based on the Tibetan belief that children have Universal Knowledge until they begin to speak—when their memories fade away.
This is an old idea, beautifully expressed by Wordsworth, who said that “heaven lies about us in our infancy.” If I could quote the whole poem instead of completing this review, believe me, we’d all we happier. But I press on. The movie involves a genius baby named Sly, who escapes from the lab and tries to organize fellow babies in revolt. The nauseous sight of little Sly on a disco floor, dressed in the white suit from Saturday Night Fever and dancing to “Stayin’ Alive,” had me pawing under my seat for the bag my Subway Gardenburger came in, in case I felt the sudden need to recycle it.
Every time the babies talk to one another, something weird happens to make it look like their lips are in synch (think of talking frogs in TV commercials). And when the babies do things that babies don’t do (hurl adults into the air, for example), we lose all track of the story while trying to spot the visual trick.
There’s only one way the movie might have worked: If the babies had been really, really smart. After all, according to the theory, they come into this world “trailing clouds of glory” (Wordsworth again: The man can write). They possess Universal Knowledge. Wouldn’t you expect them to sound a little like Jesus, or Aristotle? Or at least Wayne Dwyer? But no. They arrive on this mortal coil (Shakespeare) from that level “higher than the sphery chime” (Milton), and we expect their speech to flow in “heavenly eloquence” (Dryden). But when they open their little mouths, what do they say? “Diaper gravy”—a term used four times in the movie, according to a friend who counted (Cleland).