The movie is based on a novel by Stephen King, unread by me, apparently much altered for the screen version, especially in the appalling closing sequences. I have just finished the audiobook of King’s From a Buick 8, was a fan of his Hearts in Atlantis, and like the way his heart tugs him away from horror ingredients and into the human element in his stories.
Here the story begins so promisingly that I hoped, or assumed, it would continue on the same track: Childhood friends, united in a form of telepathy by a mentally retarded kid they protect, grow up to share psychic gifts and to deal with the consequences. The problem of really being telepathic is a favorite science-fiction theme. If you could read minds, would you be undone by the despair and anguish being broadcast all around you? This is unfortunately not the problem explored by Dreamcatcher.
The movie does have a visualization of the memory process that is brilliant filmmaking; after the character Gary “Jonesy” Jones (Damian Lewis) has his mind occupied by an alien intelligence, he is able to survive hidden within it by concealing his presence inside a vast memory warehouse, visualized by Kasdan as an infinitely unfolding series of rooms containing Jonesy’s memories. This idea is like a smaller, personal version of Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel, the imaginary library that contains all possible editions of all possible books. I can imagine many scenes set in the warehouse—it’s such a good idea it could support an entire movie—but the film proceeds relentlessly to abandon this earlier inspiration in its quest for the barfable.
But let me back up. We meet at the outset childhood friends: Henry Devlin, Joe “Beaver” Clarendon, Jonesy Jones, and Pete Moore. They happen upon Douglas “Duddits” Cavell, a retarded boy being bullied by older kids, and they defend him with wit and imagination. He’s grateful, and in some way he serves as a nexus for all of them to form a precognitive, psychic network. It isn’t high-level or controllable, but it’s there.
Then we meet them as adults, played by (in order) Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Lewis, and Timothy Olyphant (Duddits is now Donnie Wahlberg). When Jonesy has an accident of startling suddenness, that serves as the catalyst for a trip to the woods, where the hunters turn into the hunted as alien beings attack.
It would be well not to linger on plot details, since if you are going to see the movie, you will want them to be surprises. Let me just say that the aliens, who look like a cross between the creature in Alien and the things that crawled out of the drains in that David Cronenberg movie, exhibit the same problem I often have with such beings: How can an alien that consists primarily of teeth and an appetite, that apparently has no limbs, tools, or language, travel to Earth in the first place? Are they little clone creatures for a superior race? Perhaps; an alien nicknamed Mr. Gray turns up, who looks and behaves quite differently, for a while.
For these aliens, space travel is a prologue for trips taking them where few have gone before; they explode from the business end of the intestinal tract, through that orifice we would be least willing to lend them for their activities. The movie, perhaps as a result, has as many farts as the worst teenage comedy—which is to say, too many farts for a movie that keeps insisting, with mounting implausibility, that it is intended to be good. These creatures are given a name by the characters that translates in a family newspaper as Crap Weasels.
When Morgan Freeman turns up belatedly in a movie, that is usually a good sign, because no matter what has gone before, he is likely to import more wit and interest. Not this time. He plays Col. Abraham Curtis, a hard-line military man dedicated to doing what the military always does in alien movies, which is to blast the aliens to pieces and ask questions later. This is infinitely less interesting than a scene in King’s Buick 8 where a curious state trooper dissects a batlike thing that seems to have popped through a portal from another world. King’s description of the autopsy of weird alien organs is scarier than all the gnashings and disembowelments in Dreamcatcher.
When the filmmakers are capable of the first half of Dreamcatcher, what came over them in the second half? What inspired their descent into the absurd? On the evidence here, we can say what we already knew: Lawrence Kasdan is a wonderful director of personal dramas (Grand Canyon, The Accidental Tourist, Mumford). When it comes to Crap Weasels, his heart just doesn’t seem to be in it.
The Dukes of Hazzard
(DIRECTED BY JAY CHANDRASEKHAR; STARRING SEANN WILLIAM SCOTT, JOHNNY KNOXVILLE; 2005)
The Dukes of Hazzard is a comedy about two cousins who are closer’n brothers, and their car, which is smarter’n they are. It’s a retread of a sitcom that ran from about 1979 to 1985, years during which I was able to find better ways to pass my time. Yes, it is still another TV program I have never ever seen. As this list grows, it provides more and more clues about why I am so smart and cheerful.
The movie stars Johnny Knoxville, from Jackass, Seann William Scott, from American Wedding, and Jessica Simpson, from Mars. Judging by her recent conversation on TV with Dean Richards, Simpson is so remarkably uninformed that she should sue the public schools of Abilene, Texas, or maybe they should sue her. On the day he won his seventh Tour de France, not many people could say, as she did, that they had no idea who Lance Armstrong was.
Of course, you don’t have to be smart to get into The Dukes of Hazzard. But people like Willie Nelson and Burt Reynolds should have been smart enough to stay out of it. Here is a lamebrained, outdated wheeze about a couple of good ol’ boys who roar around the back roads of the South in the General Lee, their beloved 1969 Dodge Charger. As it happens, I also drove a 1969 Dodge Charger. You could have told them apart because mine did not have a Confederate flag painted on the roof.
Scott and Knoxville play Bo Duke and Luke Duke; the absence of a Puke Duke is a sadly missed opportunity. They deliver moonshine manufactured by their Uncle Jesse (Willie Nelson), and depend on the General to outrun the forces of Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane (M. C. Gainey). The movie even has one of those obligatory scenes where the car is racing along when there’s a quick cut to a gigantic Mack truck, its horn blasting as it bears down on them. They steer out of the way at the last possible moment. That giant Mack truck keeps busy in the movies, turning up again and again during chase scenes and always just barely missing the car containing the heroes, but this is the first time I have seen it making 60 mph down a single-lane dirt track.
Jessica Simpson plays Daisy Duke, whose short shorts became so famous on TV that they were known as “Daisy Dukes.” She models them to a certain effect in a few brief scenes, but is missing from most of the movie. Maybe she isn’t even smart enough to wear shorts. I learn from the Internet that Simpson has a dog named Daisy, but have been unable to learn if she named it before or after being signed for the role, and whether the dog is named after the character, the shorts, the flower, or perhaps (a long shot), Daisy Duck.
The local ruler is Boss Jefferson Davis Hogg (Burt Reynolds), “the meanest man in Hazzard County,” who issues orders to the sheriff and everybody else, and has a secret plan to strip-mine the county and turn it into a wasteland. I wonder if there were moments when Reynolds reflected that, karma-wise, this movie was the second half of what Smokey and the Bandit was the first half of.