See Spot Run
(DIRECTED BY JOHN WHITESELL; STARRING DAVID ARQUETTE, MICHAEL CLARKE DUNCAN; 2001)
See Spot Run is pitched at the same intellectual level as the earlier stories involving Spot, which I found so immensely involving in the first grade. There are a few refinements. The characters this time are named Gordon, Stephanie, and James, instead of Dick and Jane. And I don’t recall the Spot books describing the hero rolling around in doggy poo, or a gangster getting his testicles bitten off, but times change. The gangster is named Sonny Talia, in a heroic act of restraint by the filmmakers, who could have named him Gino with no trouble at all.
The movie is a fairly desperate PG-rated comedy about a dog that has been highly trained for the FBI’s canine corps. After it bites off one of Talia’s indispensables, the mob boss (Paul Sorvino) orders a hit on the dog, which is hustled into a version of the witness protection program, only to accidentally end up in the possession of young James (Angus T. Jones) and his babysitting neighbor, Gordon (David Arquette), who has a crush on James’s mother, Stephanie (Leslie Bibb).
This is all setup for a series of slapstick comedy ventures, in which Gordon is humiliated and besmeared while the dog races about proving it is the most intelligent mammal in the picture. The most excruciating sequence has Gordon shinnying up a gutter pipe, which collapses (as all movie gutter pipes always do), tearing off his underpants and depositing him in one of Spot’s large, damp, and voluminous gifts to the ecology. When Gordon is thoroughly smeared with caca, what do you think the odds are that (1) the lawn sprinkler system comes on, and (2) the police arrive and demand an explanation?
Another long sequence involves the destruction of a pet store, as mobsters chase the dog and Gordon gets encased in a large ball of bubble wrap, which is inflated by helium, causing him to … oh, never mind. And don’t get me started on the scene where he lights the zebra fart.
Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children. There seems to be some kind of desperate downward trend in American taste, so that when we see a dog movie like this we think back nostalgically to the Beethoven dog pictures, which now represent a cultural high-water mark. Consider that there was a time in our society when children were entertained by the Lassie pictures, and you can see that the national taste is rapidly spiraling down to the level of a whoopee cushion.
And yes, of course, there are many jokes in See Spot Run involving the passing of gas and the placing of blame. Also a fight with two deaf women. Also an electrified dog collar that is activated by a TV channel changer, causing David Arquette to levitate while sparks fly out of his orifices. And a bus that slides over a cliff. And an FBI agent named “Cassavetes,” which must be a masochistic in-joke by the filmmakers to remind themselves of how far they have fallen from their early ideals.
The one actor who emerges more or less unharmed is Michael Clarke Duncan, the gentle giant from The Green Mile, who is the dog’s FBI handler and plays his scenes with the joy of a man whose stream of consciousness must run like this: No matter how bad this movie is, at least it’s better than working for the City of Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation. I’m still wading through doggy do, but at least now I’m getting paid a movie star salary for doing it.
Serendipity
(DIRECTED BY PETER CHELSOM; STARRING JOHN CUSACK, KATE BECKINSALE; 2001)
If we’re meant to meet again, we will.
So says Sara Thomas to Jon Trager. This much has already happened: They have a Meet Cute while fighting over the same pair of cashmere gloves in Bloomingdale’s. They feel, if not love, strong attraction at first sight. They go out for hot chocolate. They find out each is dating somebody else. They separate. They return—he for a scarf, she for a parcel. They meet again. He wants her phone number. But no. They must leave themselves in the hands of Fate.
Fate I have no problem with. Leaving themselves in the hands of this screenplay is another matter. It bounces them through so many amazing coincidences and serendipitous parallels and cosmic concordances that Fate is not merely knocking on the door, it has entered with a SWAT team and is banging their heads together and administering poppers.
Jon is played by John Cusack in what is either a bad career move or temporary insanity. Sara is played by Kate Beckinsale, who is a good actress, but not good enough to play this dumb. Jon and Sara have much in common; both are missing an h. The movie puts them through dramatic and romantic situations so close to parody as to make no difference; one more turn of the screw and this could be a satire of Sleepless in Seattle.
Consider. They want to be together. They like each other better than the people they are dating. But they toy with their happiness by setting a series of tests. For example: She says they’ll get on separate elevators in a hotel and see if they both push the same button. Odds are about 30-to-1 against it. They do, however, both push the same button—but do not meet because of a little boy who pushes all the other buttons on Cusack’s elevator. I consider this God’s way of telling them, “Don’t tempt me.”
Another test. Jon will write his telephone number on a $5 bill and it will go out in the world, and she will see if it comes back to her. A third test. Sara will write her number in a copy of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and if Jon finds it in a used-book store, well, there you are. (Marquez is fond of coincidences, but Serendipity elevates magic realism into the realm of three-card monte.) Jon searches in countless bookstores, having never heard of Bibliofind or Alibris, where for enough money every used-book seller in the world would be happy to have a peek inside his copies of the volume.
Years pass—two or three in the movie, more in the theater. Both are engaged to others. Some smiles are generated by her fiancé, a New Age musician (John Corbett) who illustrates the principle that men who chose to wear their hair very long after about 1980 are afflicted by delusional convictions that they are cooler than anyone else. The plot risks bursting under the strain of its coincidences, as Sara and Jon fly to opposite coasts at the same time and engage in a series of Idiot Plot moves so extreme and wrongheaded that even other characters in the same scene should start shouting helpful suggestions.
By the time these two people finally get together (if they do—I don’t want to give anything away) I was thinking of new tests. What if she puts a personal ad in a paper and he has to guess which paper? How about dedicating a song to her, and trusting her to be listening to the radio at that moment, in that city? What about throwing a dart at a spinning world globe? I hope this movie never has a sequel, because Jon and Sara are destined to become the most boring married couple in history. For years to come, people at parties will be whispering, “See that couple over there? The Tragers? Jon and Sara? Whatever you do, don’t ask them how they met.”
Silent Hill
(DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHE GANS; STARRING RADHA MITCHELL, SEAN BEAN; 2006)
I had a nice conversation with seven or eight people coming down on the escalator after we all saw Silent Hill. They wanted me to explain it to them. I said I didn’t have a clue. They said, “You’re supposed to be a movie critic, aren’t you?” I said, “Supposed to be. But we work mostly with movies.” “Yeah,” said the girl in the Harley T-shirt, “I guess this was like a video game that you, like, had to play in order to, like, understand the movie.”