That brings Corky into contact with Howard Schuster (Richard Roundtree), the local FBI chief, who is given the thankless comic task of never knowing more than he needs to know in order to make the wrong decision. There’s also Vinessa Shaw as an FBI agent who goes undercover as a sexy nurse. Or maybe she’s a sexy agent who goes undercover as a nurse. Such a thin line separates the two concepts.
Corky Romano is like a dead zone of comedy. The concept is exhausted, the ideas are tired, the physical gags are routine, the story is labored, and the actors look like they can barely contain their doubts about the project.
The Crew
(DIRECTED BY MICHAEL DINNER; STARRING RICHARD DREYFUSS, BURT REYNOLDS; 2000)
Hot on the heels of Space Cowboys, which was about four astro-codgers, here comes The Crew, about four mobster-codgers. Go with the cowboys. One difference between the two movies is that Space Cowboys develops quirky characters and tells a story that makes it necessary for the old friends to have a reunion, while The Crew is all contrivance and we don’t believe a minute of it.
Of course, The Crew wants only to be a comedy, not a bittersweet coda to Wise Guys. But even at that it fails, because we don’t buy the opening premise, which is that four onetime heavy-duty mobsters would all retire to the same seedy residential hotel on South Beach in Miami, there to tick down their days lined up in wicker chairs on the porch, watching the dollies go by. This is a situation that shouts out Plot, not Life, and everything that happens to them seems generated from overconfident chuckles in the screenwriting process.
The retired mobsters are Bobby Bartellemeo, Joey “Bats” Pistella, Mike “The Brick” Donatelli, and Tony “Mouth” Donato (Bobby violently rejected a nickname in his youth and never got another). In the same order, they’re played by Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya, and Seymour Cassel. After this movie and Mad Dog Time (1996), which reached a kind of grandeur as one of the worst films of all time, Dreyfuss and Reynolds should instruct their agents to reject all further mob “comedies” on sight. The later stages of their careers cannot withstand another one.
The plot has to do with plans to upgrade their fleabag hotel into yet another art-retro South Beach yuppie playpen. The old guys like where they live and want to preserve it, so they dream up a cockamamie scheme in which they steal a corpse from the morgue (Hedaya has a part-time job among the stiffs) and bring it back to the hotel, where they plan to shoot it and make it look like a murder, except that, as Bats complains, the old guy “looks like the pope.” And so he does—Pope Pius XII, who was several popes ago, back when young Bats was no doubt taking a livelier interest in the church.
One thing leads to another. Turns out the corpse is in fact the ancient father of a current Miami crime lord. The old guy had Alzheimer’s, wandered away from the nursing home, died anonymously, and it was just their bad luck to make the wrong choice at the morgue. Their pseudo-whack of the old dead guy is imprudently revealed by Mouth to a nightclub stripper named Ferris (Jennifer Tilly), whose stepmother turns out to be Pepper Lowenstein (Lainie Kazan), known to the Mafia-codgers from the deli she used to run in New York, back in their carefree youth when they were blowing up trucks. Into the mix come two local detectives (Carrie-Anne Moss and Jeremy Piven), and one of them has an unexpected link to the past, too.
And so on. Somehow it all needs to be more desperate, or more slapstick, or have more edge, or turn up the heat in some other way. Lainie Kazan’s presence suggests one obvious idea: Why not a comedy about four Mafia widows in Miami Beach? The Crew unfolds as a construction, not a series of surprises and delights. Occasionally a line of dialogue or two will float into view, providing a hint of the edge the whole movie might have had. (My favorite: A gun dealer, happily selling them a shotgun with no background check, adds, “Don’t thank me—thank the Republicans.”)
Comparing this to Space Cowboys, I realize how much more heft and dimension the cowboys had. Attention was paid to making them individuals, instead of just rattling off attributes and body types. And Clint Eastwood, who directed that movie, is a better filmmaker than Michael Dinner, who seems too content and not hungry enough—too complacent that his material will sell itself. There is also the fact that Eastwood, James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones, and Donald Sutherland have built up goodwill and screen authority by avoiding movies like The Crew instead of making them.
Crossroads
(DIRECTED BY TAMRA DAVIS; STARRING BRITNEY SPEARS, ZOE SALDANA; 2002)
I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbo fest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears’s feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad. Yes, it pulls itself together occasionally for a musical number, but even those are so locked into the “reality” of the story that they don’t break loose into fun.
The movie opens with three eighth-graders burying a box filled with symbols of their dreams of the future. Four years later, on high school graduation day, the girls are hardly on speaking terms, but they meet to dig up the box, tentatively renew their friendship, and find themselves driving to California in a convertible piloted by a hunk.
Lucy (Spears) hopes to find her long-indifferent mother in Arizona. Kit (Zoe Saldana) wants to find her fiancé in Los Angeles; he has become ominously vague about wedding plans. Mimi (Taryn Manning) is pregnant, but wants to compete in a record company’s open audition. Spoiler warning! Stop reading now unless you want to learn the dismal outcome of their trip, as Lucy’s mom informs her she was a “mistake,” Kit’s fiancé turns out to have another woman and to be guilty of date-rape, and Mimi, who was the rape victim, has a miscarriage.
I’m not kidding. Crossroads, which is being promoted with ads showing Britney bouncing on the bed while lip-synching a song, is a downer that would be even more depressing if the plot wasn’t such a lame soap opera.
This is the kind of movie where the travelers stop by the roadside to yell “Hello!” and keep on yelling, unaware that there is no echo. Where Britney is a virgin at eighteen and enlists her lab partner to deflower her. Where when that doesn’t work out she finds herself attracted to Ben (Anson Mount), the guy who’s giving them the ride, even though he is alleged to have killed a man. Where the apparent age difference between Spears and Mount makes it look like he’s robbing the cradle. (In real life, he’s twenty-nine and she’s twenty, but he’s an experienced twenty-nine and she’s playing a naive eighteen-year-old.)
Of the three girls, Mimi has the most to do. She teaches Kit how to land a punch, tells the others why she doesn’t drink, and deals almost casually with her miscarriage. Kit is a slow study who takes forever to figure out her fiancé has dumped her. And Spears, as Lucy, seems to think maybe she’s in a serious Winona Ryder role, but with songs.
“What are you writing in that book?” Ben asks her. “Poems,” she says. He wants her to read one for him. She does. “Promise not to laugh,” she says. He doesn’t, but the audience does. It’s the lyrics for her song “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” Didn’t anyone warn her you can’t introduce famous material as if it’s new without risking a bad laugh? Later, Ben composes music for the words, and he plays the piano while she riffs endlessly to prove she has never once thought about singing those words before.