I have a suspicion that, to some degree, Janowitz is right and the Slave/Apartment syndrome does operate in New York. That would certainly explain a great deal of the bad art that’s around. Watching the film, I remembered a conversation I had with the actor John Malkovich about the way that off-Broadway theater was dying in New York while thriving in the provinces. “To have off-Broadway,” he said,”you have to have starving actors. And to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can’t afford to starve there anymore.”
There was once a time, in decades not too long ago, when life for a young artist consisted of living in a threadbare apartment while trying to create great art, instead of trying to live in a great apartment while creating threadbare art.
Sour Grapes
(Directed by Larry David; starring Steven Weber, Craig Bierko; 1998)
Sour Grapes is a comedy about things that aren’t funny. It reminded me of Crash, an erotic thriller about things no one finds erotic. The big difference is that David Cronenberger, who made Crash, knew that people were not turned on by auto accidents. Larry David, who wrote and directed Sour Grapes, apparently thinks people are amused by cancer, accidental castration, racial stereotypes, and bitter family feuds.
Oh, I have no doubt that all of those subjects could be incorporated into a great comedy. It’s all in the style and the timing. Sour Grapes is tone-deaf comedy; the material, the dialogue, the delivery, and even the sound track are labored and leaden. How to account for the fact that Larry David is one of the creators of Seinfeld? Maybe he works well with others.
I can’t easily remember a film I’ve enjoyed less. North, a comedy I hated, was at least able to inflame me with dislike. Sour Grapes is a movie that deserves its title: It’s puckered, deflated, and vinegary. It’s a dead zone.
The story. Two cousins (Steven Weber and Craig Bierko) go to Atlantic City. One is a designer who wins a slot jackpot of more than $436,000. He was playing with quarters given him by the other guy. The other cousin, a surgeon, not unreasonably, thinks he should get some of the winnings. If not half, then maybe a third. The winner offers him 3 percent.
This sets off several scenes of debate about what would be right or wrong in such a situation. Even a limo driver, hearing the winner’s story, throws him out of the car: “You were playing with his money!” The losing doctor nevertheless gives his cousin a blue warm-up suit for his birthday, only to discover that the louse has given the suit away to an African-American street person.
So far all we have is a comic premise that doesn’t deliver laughs. Now the movie heads for cringe-inducing material. We learn about the winner’s ability to perform oral sex while alone. He’s alone a lot, because his wife is mad at him, but that’s an opening for stereotyped Jewish Mother scenes. The feud heats up, until the enraged doctor lies to the winner: “You have terminal cancer. It’s time to set your house in order.” Ho, ho.
The winner wants to spare his mother the misery of watching her son die. So he gives her house key to the black bum in the warm-up suit and tells him to make himself at home. His plan: His mother will be scared to death by the sight of the black home invader. After she screams, we see the bum running down the street in Steppin’ Fetchit style. Was there no one to hint to David that this was gratuitous and offensive?
Further material involves the surgeon getting so upset in the operating room that he reverses an X-ray film and removes the wrong testicle from a TV star—who then, of course, has to be told that they still had to go ahead and remove the remaining testicle. The star develops a castrato voice. Ho, ho.
This material is impossible to begin with. What makes it worse is the lack of lightness from the performers, who slog glumly through their dialogue as if they know what an aromatic turkey they’re stuck in. Scene after scene clangs dead to the floor, starting with the funeral service that opens the film. The more I think of it, the more Sour Grapes really does resemble Crash (except that Crash was not a bad film). Both movies are like watching automobile accidents. Only one intended to be.
Species
(Directed by Roger Donaldson; starring Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen; 1995)
Think about this. According to the movies, out there in space, untold light years from Earth, exist many alien species with the ability to travel between the stars and send messages across the universe. Their civilizations must be wonderfully advanced, and yet, when we finally encounter them, what do we get? Disgusting, slimy morph-creatures with rows of evil teeth, whose greatest cultural achievement is jumping out at people from behind things. How do they travel through space? By jumping out from behind one star after another?
Species is the latest movie to explore this depressing vision. Like the Alien movies and many others, it is founded on a fear of another species, and the assumption that extraterrestrials basically want to eat us. For every rare film like 2001 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a sense of wonder about the vastness of creation, there are a dozen like this, which are basically just versions of Friday the 13th in which Jason is a bug-eyed monster.
There may be a reason for this. Mainstream Hollywood is so terrified of intelligent human characters that it’s no wonder they don’t want aliens who are even smarter than the humans: Hey, dude, you don’t pay for a ticket just to hear words you don’t understand. And there’s a kind of smugness in the assumption that we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder; that other species, even if they do manage to travel to Earth, will look and behave like an explosion at the special-effects factory.
Species, directed by Roger Donaldson from a screenplay by Dennis Feldman, begins with an interesting premise: Radio telescopes pick up signals from space which, when decoded, include a formula for a DNA string that can be combined with our own. Thus a creature might be born that is both human and alien—able to live here, but with attributes of the other species. Scientists in a secret government lab carry out the experiment, which produces a pretty little girl. In the opening scene, they are trying to gas her to death.
One attribute of the creature is its rapid growth rate. After only a few days she looks like a ten-year-old, and by the next time we see her, she has matured into a sexy blonde (Natasha Henstridge) who could star in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue anytime. We know this because the movie spends a good deal of time having her take off her brassiere while seducing her victims in hot tubs, because she wants to mate.
Pure logic would suggest that if she can change from a ten-year-old into a twenty-one-year-old almost overnight, she should die of old age before the movie is over. But, no, she stays at the sex bomb stage for the rest of the film, except when morphing into a gruesome monster. (The ability to instantly change one’s physical composition is, I believe, in violation of the laws of physics, but Species breaks every law but the law of diminishing returns.)
Ben Kingsley, that invaluable actor, does what he can with the lead role. He’s Fitch, the scientist in charge, and he leads a team on a chase of the escaped alien. Because the existence of the monster must remain a secret, a general alert is delayed. Instead, Kingsley gathers Press (Michael Madsen), a hired killer for the government; Dan (Forest Whitaker), an “empathist” who can sense what happened in places; Arden (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist; and Laura (Marg Helgenberger), a molecular biologist, whose primary role is to be rescued by the others.