There are a lot of shots of snowboarders in the movie, mostly doing the same things again and again, often with the camera at such an angle that we cannot get a clear idea of the relationship between where they start and where they land. To be sure, if it’s hard to ski down a virgin mountainside, it must be even harder to film someone doing it. (When I saw the IMAX documentary about climbing Everest, it occurred to me that a more interesting doc would have been about the people who carried the camera.) In this case, the action footage is repetitive and underwhelming, no match for the best docs about surfing, for example. The powerful surfing film Riding Giants (2004), directed by Stacy Perata, does everything right that First Descent does wrong.
The movie’s fundamental problem, I think, is journalistic. It doesn’t cover its real subject. The movie endlessly repeats how exciting, or thrilling, or awesome it is to snowboard down a mountain. I would have preferred more detail about how dangerous it is, and how one prepares to do it, and what precautions are taken, and how you can anticipate avalanches on virgin snow above where anybody has ever snowboarded before.
The kicker on the trailer says: “Unless you’re fully prepared to be in a situation of life and death, you shouldn’t be up here.” So, OK, how can you possibly be fully prepared in a situation no one has been in before, and which by definition can contain fatal surprises? Since the five stars of the movie are all still alive as I write this review, they must have answers for those questions. Maybe interesting ones. Maybe more interesting than what a thrill it is.
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
(DIRECTED BY BRIAN LEVANT; STARRING MARK ADDY, STEPHEN BALDWIN; 2000)
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas has dinosaurs that lumber along crushing everything in their path. The movie’s screenplay works sort of the same way. Think of every possible pun involving stones, rocks, and prehistoric times, and link them to a pea-brained story that creaks and groans on its laborious march through unspeakably obvious, labored, and idiotic humor.
This is an ideal first movie for infants, who can enjoy the bright colors on the screen and wave their tiny hands to the music. Children may like it because they just plain like going to the movies. But it’s not delightful or funny or exciting, and for long stretches it looks exactly like hapless actors standing in front of big rocks and reciting sitcom dialogue.
The story isn’t a sequel to The Flintstones (1994) but a prequel, recalling those youthful days when Fred and Wilma Flintstone first met and fell in love. Fred is portrayed this time by Mark Addy, the beefiest of the guys in The Full Monty. His best pal, Barney Rubble, is played by Stephen Baldwin, who recites his lines as if he hopes Fred will ask him to come out and play, but is afraid he won’t. As the movie opens, Fred and Barney have gotten jobs at the rock quarry, and have settled down to a lifetime of quarrying rocks, which their world does not seem to need any more of, but never mind.
Meanwhile, in a parallel plot, Wilma Slaghoople (Kristen Johnston) resists the schemes of her mother (Joan Collins) to get her to marry the millionaire Chip Rockefeller (get it?). Fleeing the rich neighborhood, she ends up working in a drive-in restaurant (“Bronto King”) with Betty O’Shale (Jane Krakowski), and soon the two of them have met Fred and Barney. There’s instant chemistry, and the two couples grind off to a weekend in Rock Vegas. The jealous Chip (Thomas Gibson) is waiting there to foil romance and get his hands on the Slaghoople fortune. His conspirator is a chorus line beauty named Roxie (Second City grad Alex Meneses), whose boulders are second to none. The Vegas sequence is livened by a sound-track rendition of “Viva Las (and/or Rock) Vegas” by Ann-Margret.
Another story line involves Gazoo (Alan Cumming), an alien who arrives in a flying saucer. He looks exactly like a desperate measure to flesh out an uninteresting plot with an uninteresting character. The movie would be no better and no worse without Gazoo, which is a commentary on both Gazoo and the movie, I think.
The pun, it has been theorized, is the lowest form of humor. This movie proves that theory wrong. There is a lower form of humor: jokes about dinosaur farts. The pun is the second lowest form of humor. The third lowest form is laborious plays on words, as when we learn that the Rock Vegas headliners include Mick Jagged and the Stones.
Minute by weary minute the movie wends its weary way toward its joyless conclusion, as if everyone in it is wearing concrete overshoes, which, come to think of it, they may be. The first film was no masterpiece, but it was a lot better than this. Its slot for an aging but glamorous beauty queen was filled by Elizabeth Taylor. This time it is Joan Collins. As Joan Collins is to Elizabeth Taylor, so The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas is to The Flintstones.
Formula 51
(DIRECTED BY RONNY YU; STARRING SAMUEL L. JACKSON, ROBERT CARLYLE; 2002)
Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting were two of the most influential movies of the past ten years, but unfortunately their greatest influence has been on rip-offs of each other—movies like Formula 51, which is like a fourth-rate Pulp Fiction with accents you can’t understand. Here, instead of the descent into the filthiest toilet in Scotland, we get a trip through the most bilious intestinal tract in Liverpool; instead of a debate about Cheese Royales, we get a debate about the semantics of the word bollocks; the F-word occupies 50 percent of all sentences, and in the opening scenes Samuel L. Jackson wears another one of those Afro wigs.
Jackson plays Elmo McElroy, a reminder that only eight of the seventy-four movies with characters named Elmo have been any good. In the prologue, he graduates from college with a pharmaceutical degree, is busted for pot, loses his license, and thirty years later is the world’s most brilliant inventor of illegal drugs.
Now he has a product named “P.O.S. Formula 51,” which he says is fifty-one times stronger than crack, heroin, you name it. Instead of selling it to a drug lord named The Lizard (Meat Loaf), he stages a spectacular surprise for Mr. Lizard and his friends and flies to Liverpool, trailed by Dakota Phillips (Emily Mortimer), a skilled hit woman hired by The Lizard to kill him or maybe keep him alive, depending on The Lizard’s latest information.
In Liverpool, we meet Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), a reminder that only six of the two hundred movies with a character named Felix have been any good. (The stats for “Dakota” are also discouraging, but this is a line of inquiry with limited dividends.) Felix has been dispatched by the Liverpudlian drug king Leopold Durant (Ricky Tomlinson), whose hemorrhoids require that a flunky follow him around with an inner tube that makes whoopee-type whistles whenever the screenplay requires.
The movie is not a comedy so much as a farce, grabbing desperately for funny details wherever possible. The Jackson character, for example, wears a kilt for most of the movie. My online correspondent Ian Waldron-Mantgani, a critic who lives in Liverpool but doesn’t give the home team a break, points out that the movie closes with the words “No one ever found out why he wore a kilt,” and then explains why he wore the kilt. “You get the idea how much thought went into this movie,” Waldron-Mantgani writes, with admirable restraint.
Many of the jokes involve Felix’s fanatic support of the Liverpool football club, and a final confrontation takes place in an executive box of the stadium. Devices like this almost always play as a desperate attempt to inject local color, especially when the movie shows almost nothing of the game, so that Americans will not be baffled by what they call football. There are lots of violent shoot-outs and explosions, a kinduva love affair between Felix and Dakota, and an ending that crosses a red herring, a Maguffin, and a shaggy dog.