I have been waiting for a dehydrating villain for some time. My wife is of the opinion that I do not drink enough water. She believes the proper amount is a minimum of eight glasses a day. She often regards me balefully and says, “You’re not getting enough water.” In hot climates her concern escalates. In Hawaii last summer she had the grandchildren so worked up they ran into the bedroom every morning to see if Grandpa Roger had turned to dust.
The movie’s villain, whose name is Banning (Ritchie Coster), has a novel scheme for distributing the formula, or virus, or secret ingredient, or whatever it is, that will make water into a dehydrating agent. He plans to use water striders, those insects that can skate across the surface of a pond. In his secret laboratory he keeps his ultimate weapon, a powerful water strider queen.
Do water striders have queens, like bees and ants do? For an authoritative answer I turned to Dr. May Berenbaum, head of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and founder of the Insect Fear Film Festival, held every year at the great university.
She writes: “Water striders are true bugs (i.e., insects with piercing/sucking mouthparts) that run or skate on the surface of bodies of water, feeding on the insects that fall onto the water surface. There are about five hundred species of gerrids in the world and, as far as I know, not a single one of those five hundred species is eusocial (i.e., has a complex social structure with reproductive division of labor and cooperative brood care). I don’t even know of an example of maternal care in the whole group. In short, the answer to your question is an emphatic ‘No!’ I can’t wait to see this film. It definitely sounds like a candidate for a future Insect Fear Film Festival!”
More crushing evidence. Dr. Bruce P. Smith, expert entomologist at Ithaca College, writes me: “There is no known species of water striders that has queens. The most closely related insects that do are some colonial aphid species, and the most familiar (and much more distant relatives) are the ants, bees, wasps, and termites.” He adds helpfully, “One mammal does have queens: the naked mole rats of Africa.” Revealing himself as a student of insect films, he continues, “If my memory is correct, Arachnophobia has a king spider, but no queen—totally absurd!”
So there you have it. Professors Smith and Berenbaum have spoken. The evil Banning has spent untold millions on his secret plans for world domination, and thinks he possesses a water strider queen when he only has a lucky regular water strider living the life of Riley.
But back to The Tuxedo. Jackie Chan plays a taxi driver named Jimmy Tong, who is hired by Debi Mazar to be the chauffeur for Clark Devlin (Jason Isaacs), a multimillionaire secret agent whose $2 million tuxedo turns him into a fighting machine (also a dancer, kung-fu expert, etc). After Devlin is injured by a skateboard bomb, Jackie puts on the suit and soon partners with agent Del Blaine (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who realizes he has a strange accent for a man named Clark Devlin, but nevertheless joins him in battle against Banning.
The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren’t silly, it would still be beyond comprehension. It does have its moments, as when the tuxedo inadvertently cold-cocks James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, and Jackie Chan has to go onstage in place of the hardest working man in show business. He’s very funny as James Brown, although not as funny as James Brown is.
There’s something engaging about Jackie Chan. Even in a bad movie, I like him, because what you see is so obviously what you get. This time he goes light on the stunts, at least the stunts he obviously does himself, so that during the closing credits there are lots of flubbed lines and times when the actors break out laughing, but none of those spellbinding shots in which he misses the bridge, falls off the scaffold, etc. And some of the shots are computer-generated, which is kind of cheating isn’t it, with Jackie Chan? Luckily, special effects are not frowned upon at the Insect Fear Film Festival.
Twisted
(DIRECTED BY PHILIP KAUFMAN; STARRING ASHLEY JUDD, SAMUEL L. JACKSON; 2004)
Phil Kaufman’s Twisted walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but squawks like a turkey. And yet the elements are in place for a film that works—all until things start becoming clear and mysteries start being solved and we start shaking our heads, if we are well-mannered, or guffawing, if we are not.
Let me begin at the ending. The other day I employed the useful term deus ex machina in a review, and received several messages from readers who are not proficient in Latin. I have also received several messages from Latin scholars who helpfully translated obscure dialogue in The Passion of the Christ for me, and, as my Urbana High School Latin teacher Mrs. Link used to remind me, In medio tutissimus ibis.
But back to deus ex machina. This is a phrase you will want to study and master, not merely to amaze friends during long bus journeys but because it so perfectly describes what otherwise might take you thousands of words. Imagine a play on a stage. The hero is in a fix. The dragon is breathing fire, the hero’s sword is broken, his leg is broken, his spirit is broken, and the playwright’s imagination is broken. Suddenly there is the offstage noise of the grinding of gears, and invisible machinery lowers a god onto the stage, who slays the dragon, heals the hero, and fires the playwright. He is the “god from the machine.”
Now travel with me to San Francisco. Ashley Judd plays Jessica Shepard, a new homicide detective who has a habit of picking up guys in bars and having rough sex with them. She drinks a lot. Maybe that goes without saying. Soon after getting her new job, she and her partner, Mike Delmarco (Andy Garcia), are assigned to a floater in the bay. She recognizes the dead man, who has been savagely beaten. It’s someone she has slept with.
She reveals this information, but is kept on the case by the police commissioner (Samuel L. Jackson), who raised her as his own daughter after her own father went berserk and killed a slew of people, including her mother. The commissioner trusts her. Then another body turns up, also with the killer’s brand (a cigarette burn). She slept with this guy, too. She’s seeing the department shrink (David Strathairn), who understandably suggests she has to share this information with her partner. Then a third dead guy turns up. She slept with him, too. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, “To kill one lover may be regarded as a misfortune. To kill three seems like carelessness?”
Det. Sheperd has a pattern. She goes home at night, drinks way too much red wine, and blacks out. The next day, her cell rings and she’s summoned to the next corpse. Is she killing these guys in a blackout? Wasn’t it Ann Landers who said that’s one of the twenty danger signals of alcoholism? To be sure, Delmarco helpfully suggests at one point that she should drink less. Maybe only enough to maim?
So anyway, on a dark and isolated pier in San Francisco, three of the characters come together. I won’t reveal who they are, although if one of them isn’t Ashley Judd it wouldn’t be much of an ending. Certain death seems about to ensue, and then with an offstage grinding noise … but I don’t want to give away the ending. Find out for yourself.