Three Summer Reviews
Film reviews by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
I have come back from three-and-a-half weeks in eastern Europe, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I do not really have the time to go out and see a lot of movies and write reviews. Oh, I am still seeing movies, but for a while I will have time to review only the biggees. I have now seen three comedies, for none of which did I really plan to do my full write-up. But three small reviews can go together to make one article. I will review them in order of increasing respect.
NAKED GUN 2-1/2: THE SMELL OF FEAR is something of a disappointment. The team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker worked like a well-oiled machine to make some pretty funny comedies. Now they have split up and gone in three directions. With this film that machine is operating on only one piston, David Zucker. He wrote and directed the film without either of the other two people. The film has about the same number of jokes, but only about a third of the laughs and nothing particularly hilarious. What is worse, the film tries to be about a serious subject. In AIRPLANE! the trio was, in part, saying how silly their own story was. Even the original NAKED GUN tried to steer clear of any hint of seriousness. Here we have a bunch of just okay jokes hung on a paper-thin plot about a conspiracy against the environment. The film has a laugh or two but in general is kind of tired. I give this one only a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale, though I did enjoy Lloyd Bochner's allusion to what is probably his most famous role. (I don't count that a spoiler, because who remembers Bochner's famous role anyway?)
Better constructed and with some better gags is SOAPDISH. This is occasionally a pretty funny comedy, though never as madcap as intended. The story, of course, is about the back-stabbing, the politics, and the personal crises that go on behind the scenes of a popular soap opera, "The Sun Also Sets." Sally Field plays the main character of the program, but will not be for long if another actress (played by Cathy Moriarty) has anything to do with it. The jealous Moriarty constantly flirts with the show's producer (played by Robert Downey, Jr.), getting him to make decisions that are driving Field crazy, including bringing back Kevin Kline, who many years before was Field's on- and off-screen lover. Whoopi Goldberg brings her STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION personality to the screen as Field's friend and confidante as well as the show's writer. The plot is contrived and this is hardly a believable picture of how a soap opera is made, but at least the gags are mostly funny. I rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. The best scene if Kevin Kline's DEATH OF A SALESMAN.
Not too surprisingly, the best comedy is from the writers of PARENTHOOD. Three upper-middle-class Easterners in their late thirties end up fish out of water in a real cowboy cattle drive. Yeah, it sounds like eight different bad movies on cable, except it's not teenagers. But that does not mean that this film could not possibly be done right, and writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel do pull this one off with attention to character and some solid human values. This is not the kind of script that Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd get, in part because they just do not deserve it. This is a film about mid-life crisis and the meaning of friendship. Once you realize these are characters who have fears and consciences and feel pain, when there are action scenes they mean much more. The three are played by Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby as childhood friends who take unusual vacations together. This time they take a packaged vacation to learn basic cowboy skills and go on a real cattle drive--more real than they at first expect. They have a chance to talk out their problems and their relationships and learn to operate as a team. There is a major character named Norman and Billy Crystal's reaction to Norman's first appearance makes the best scene of any of these three films, and also is perhaps the most real. CITY SLICKERS is worth seeing and rates a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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