Hoot is based on a Newbery Honor novel by Carl Hiaasen, the Florida novelist. That gives it a provenance, but not a pedigree. (Having written the preceding sentence, I do not know what it means, but I like the way it reads.) I suspect the movie’s target audience will think it plays suspiciously like an after-school special, and lacks the punch and artistry of such superior family films as Millions and Shiloh. The villains are sitcom caricatures, the kids (especially Mullet Fingers) are likable but not remotely believable, and it is never quite explained why anyone would build a pancake house in a wilderness area that seems to be far from any major road.
The Hot Chick
(DIRECTED BY TOM BRADY; STARRING ROB SCHNEIDER, ANNA FARIS; 2002)
The Hot Chick is about a woman who is magically transported into a man’s body, and takes several days to learn how to urinate correctly with her new equipment. This despite getting a how-to lecture from a helpful washroom attendant. Luckily, she finds that passing gas is a skill that ports easily between the genders. Meanwhile, the former occupant of her male body has been magically transported into her former female body, and immediately becomes a hooker and a stripper.
How is this switch possible? It happens because of a pair of magic earrings. Their history is shown in an introductory scene helpfully subtitled “Abyssinia, 50 B.C.” The scene is clearly inspired by The Arabian Nights; the screenplay is by the director, Tom Brady, and the star, Rob Schneider, who have confused Africa with the Middle East, but the prologue is over before we can grow depressed by its geographical and ethnographic ignorance.
In modern times, we are introduced to a cadre of hot chicks who all go to the same high school. The Rob Schneider character, named Clive, no doubt after Clive of India, who would have been a much more interesting character, mugs one of the hot chicks and gets one of her earrings. When Clive and the chick put on the earrings, they are wondrously transported into each other’s bodies. Jessica (Rachel McAdams) occupies Clive.
Clive also occupies Jessica, but only gets a couple of scenes, in which he quickly masters feminine skills, starting with buying tampons and progressing quickly to stripping. The movie’s conviction that we would rather see the outside of Rob Schneider’s body than the outside of Rachel McAdams’s body is not the least of its miscalculations. Rob Schneider’s outside has most of its scenes with Jessica’s best friend, played by Anna Faris, whose resemblance to Britney Spears in the hair and makeup departments is a complete coincidence.
The way the movie handles the switch is that Rob Schneider, visually appearing as himself, has Jessica trapped inside. He/she convinces his/her best girlfriends of this transformation. This is one of the most astonishing events in the history of mankind, incredible and miraculous, and so what inflames the curiosity of the three girlfriends? His penis.
That they are stupid goes without saying. That the filmmakers could think of nothing more creative to do with their premise is a cause for despair. Body-switch movies had a brief vogue in the 1980s, when there were some cute ones (Big, Vice Versa), but Hollywood has so downgraded its respect for the audience that The Hot Chick is now considered acceptable.
The movie resolutely avoids all the comic possibilities of its situation, and becomes one more dumb high school comedy about sex gags and prom dates. Jessica, as Clive, becomes the best boy/girl friend a girl could want, during a week in which the female Jessica’s parents absentmindedly observe that she has been missing for days. (That a girl looking exactly like the most popular girl in high school is stripping and hooking escapes the attention of the local slackwits.)
Lessons are learned, Jessica sees things from a different point of view, sweetness triumphs, and the movie ends with one of those “deleted” scenes over the final credits. This particular credit cookie is notable for being even more boring and pointless than the movie. Through superhuman effort of the will, I did not walk out of The Hot Chick, but reader, I confess I could not sit through the credits.
(The MPAA rates this PG-13. It is too vulgar for anyone under thirteen, and too dumb for anyone over thirteen.)
House of D
(DIRECTED BY DAVID DUCHOVNY; STARRING ANTON YELCHIN, TEA LEONI; 2005)
Yes, I take notes during the movies. I can’t always read them, but I persist in hoping that I can. During a movie like House of D, I jot down words I think might be useful in the review. Peering now at my three-by-five cards, I read “sappy, inane, cornball, shameless,” and, my favorite, “doofusoid.” I sigh. The film has not even inspired interesting adjectives, except for the one I made up myself. I have been reading Dr. Johnson’s invaluable Dictionary of the English Language, and propose for the next edition:
doofusoid, adj., possessing the qualities of a doofus; sappy, inane, cornball, shameless. “The plot is composed of doofusoid elements.”
You know a movie is not working for you when you sit in the dark inventing new words. House of D is the kind of movie that particularly makes me cringe, because it has such a shameless desire to please; like Uriah Heep, it bows and scrapes and wipes its sweaty palm on its trouser leg, and also like Uriah Heep it privately thinks it is superior.
I make free with a reference to Uriah Heep because I assume if you got past Dr. Johnson and did not turn back, Uriah Heep will be like an old friend. You may be asking yourself, however, why I am engaging in wordplay, and the answer is: I am trying to entertain myself before I must get down to the dreary business of this review. Think of me as switching off my iPod just before going into traffic court.
So. House of D. Written and directed by David Duchovny, who I am quite sure created it with all of the sincerity at his command, and believed in it so earnestly that it did not occur to him that no one else would believe in it at all. It opens in Paris with an artist (Duchovny) who feels he must return to the Greenwich Village of his youth, there to revisit the scenes and people who were responsible, I guess, for him becoming an artist in Paris, so maybe a thank-you card would have done.
But, no, we return to Greenwich Village in 1973, soon concluding Duchovny would more wisely have returned to the Greenwich Village of 1873, in which the clichés of Victorian fiction, while just as agonizing, would at least not have been dated. We meet the hero’s younger self, Tommy (Anton Yelchin). Tommy lives with his mother, Mrs. Warshaw (Tea Leoni), who sits at the kitchen table smoking and agonizing and smoking and agonizing. (Spoiler warning!) She seems deeply depressed, and although Tommy carefully counts the remaining pills in her medicine cabinet to be sure his mother is still alive, she nevertheless takes an overdose and, so help me, goes into what the doctor tells Tommy is a “persistent vegetative state.” How could Duchovny have guessed when he was writing his movie that such a line, of all lines, would get a laugh?
Tommy’s best friend is Pappass, played by Robin Williams. Pappass is retarded. He is retarded in 1973, that is; when Tommy returns many years later, Pappass is proud to report that he has been upgraded to “challenged.” In either case, he is one of those characters whose shortcomings do not prevent him from being clever like a fox as he (oops!) blurts out the truth, underlines sentiments, says things that are more significant than he realizes, is insightful in the guise of innocence, and always appears exactly when and where the plot requires.