Kelly steals the money that Matthew has raised to bring a foreign exchange student from Cambodia, and to replace the funds, the resourceful Danielle flies in two porn star friends (played by Amanda Swisten and Sung Hi Lee), so that Matthew, Eli, and Klitz can produce a sex film during the senior prom. The nature of their film is yet another bait-and-switch, in a movie that wants to seem dirtier than it is. Like a strip show at a carnival, it lures you in with promises of sleaze, and after you have committed yourself for the filthy-minded punter you are, it professes innocence.
Risky Business (1983) you will recall, starred Tom Cruise as a young man left home alone by his parents, who wrecks the family Porsche and ends up enlisting a call girl (Rebecca De Mornay) to run a brothel out of his house to raise money to replace the car. The movie is the obvious model for The Girl Next Door, but it completely misses the tone and wit of the earlier film, which proved you can get away with that plot, but you have to know what you’re doing and how to do it, two pieces of knowledge conspicuously absent here.
One necessary element is to distance the heroine from the seamier side of her life. The Girl Next Door does the opposite, actually taking Danielle and her “producer” Kelly to an adult film convention in Las Vegas, and even into a dimly lit room where adult stars apparently pleasure the clients. (There is another scene where Kelly, pretending to be Matthew’s friend, takes him to a lap dance emporium and treats him.) We can deal with porn stars, lap dances, and whatever else, in a movie that declares itself and plays fair, but to insert this material into something with the look and feel of a teen comedy makes it unsettling. The TV ads will attract audiences expecting something like American Pie; they’ll be shocked by the squalid content of this film.
Gods and Generals
(DIRECTED BY RONALD F. MAXWELL; STARRING JEFF DANIELS, STEPHEN LANG; 2003)
Here is a Civil War movie that Trent Lott might enjoy. Less enlightened than Gone with the Wind, obsessed with military strategy, impartial between South and North, religiously devout, it waits seventy minutes before introducing the first of its two speaking roles for African-Americans; Stonewall Jackson assures his black cook that the South will free him, and the cook looks cautiously optimistic. If World War II were handled this way, there’d be hell to pay.
The movie is essentially about brave men on both sides who fought and died so that … well, so that they could fight and die. They are led by generals of blinding brilliance and nobility, although one Northern general makes a stupid error and the movie shows hundreds of his men being slaughtered at great length as the result of it.
The Northerners, one Southerner explains, are mostly Republican profiteers who can go home to their businesses and families if they’re voted out of office after the conflict, while the Southerners are fighting for their homes. Slavery is not the issue, in this view, because it would have withered away anyway, although a liberal professor from Maine (Jeff Daniels) makes a speech explaining it is wrong. So we get that cleared up right there, or for sure at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party.
The conflict is handled with solemnity worthy of a memorial service. The music, when it is not funereal, sounds like the band playing during the commencement exercises at a sad university. Countless extras line up, march forward, and shoot at each other. They die like flies. That part is accurate, although the stench, the blood, and the cries of pain are tastefully held to the PG-13 standard. What we know about the war from the photographs of Mathew Brady, the poems of Walt Whitman, and the documentaries of Ken Burns is not duplicated here.
Oh, it is a competently made film. Civil War buffs may love it. Every group of fighting men is identified by subtitles, to such a degree that I wondered, fleetingly, if they were being played by Civil War reenactment hobbyists who would want to nudge their friends when their group appeared on the screen. Much is made of the film’s total and obsessive historical accuracy; the costumes, flags, battle plans, and ordnance are all doubtless flawless, although there could have been no Sgt. “Buster” Kilrain in the 20th Maine, for the unavoidable reason that “Buster” was never used as a name until Buster Keaton used it.
The actors do what they can, although you can sense them winding up to deliver pithy quotations. Robert Duvall, playing Gen. Robert E. Lee, learns of Stonewall Jackson’s battlefield amputation and reflects sadly, “He has lost his left arm, and I have lost my right.” His eyes almost twinkle as he envisions that one ending up in Bartlett’s. Stephen Lang, playing Jackson, has a deathbed scene so wordy, as he issues commands to imaginary subordinates and then prepares himself to cross over the river, that he seems to be stalling. Except for Lee, a nonbeliever, both sides trust in God, just like at the Super Bowl.
Donzaleigh Abernathy plays the other African-American speaking role, that of a maid named Martha who attempts to jump the gun on Reconstruction by staying behind when her white employers evacuate, and telling the arriving Union troops it is her own house. Later, when they commandeer it as a hospital, she looks a little resentful. This episode, like many others, is kept so resolutely at the cameo level that we realize material of such scope and breadth can be shoehorned into 3½ hours only by sacrificing depth.
Gods and Generals is the kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else—the Civil War, for example—and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute. The film plays like a special issue of American Heritage. Ted Turner is one of its prime movers, and gives himself an instantly recognizable cameo appearance. Since sneak previews must already have informed him that his sudden appearance draws a laugh, apparently he can live with that.
Note: The same director, Ron Maxwell, made the much superior Gettysburg (1993) and at the end informs us that the third title in the trilogy will be The Last Full Measure. Another line from the same source may serve as a warning: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.”
Godzilla
(DIRECTED BY ISHIRO HONDA; STARRING TAKASHI SHIMURA, MOMOKO KOCHI; 2004)
Regaled for fifty years by the stupendous idiocy of the American version of Godzilla, audiences can now see the original 1954 Japanese version, which is equally idiotic, but, properly decoded, was the Fahrenheit 9/11 of its time. Both films come after fearsome attacks on their nations, embody urgent warnings, and even incorporate similar dialogue, such as, “The report is of such dire importance it must not be made public.” Is that from 1954 Tokyo or 2004 Washington?
The first Godzilla set box-office records in Japan and inspired countless sequels, remakes, and rip-offs. It was made shortly after an American H-bomb test in the Pacific contaminated a large area of ocean and gave radiation sickness to a boatload of Japanese fishermen. It refers repeatedly to Nagasaki, H-bombs, and civilian casualties, and obviously embodies Japanese fears about American nuclear tests.
But that is not the movie you have seen. For one thing, it doesn’t star Raymond Burr as Steve Martin, intrepid American journalist, who helpfully explains, “I was headed for an assignment in Cairo when I dropped off for a social call in Tokyo.” The American producer Joseph E. Levine bought the Japanese film, cut it by forty minutes, removed all of the political content, and awkwardly inserted Burr into scenes where he clearly did not fit. The hapless actor gives us reaction shots where he’s looking in the wrong direction, listens to Japanese actors dubbed into the American idiom (they always call him “Steve Martin” or even “the famous Steve Martin”), and provides a reassuring conclusion in which Godzilla is seen as some kind of public health problem, or maybe just a malcontent.