TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070290/0702420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 85 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 64

Revenge of the Dyna-Movies


In the hot summer films, storytelling is out, sensation is in

By RICHARD CORLISS


    From the reviews, you may think that Gremlins 2: The New
Batch is about a cute creature who battles his evil brethren
to save Manhattan. You may read that RoboCop 2 is about a
police officer, half man, half machine, who battles his evil
robot twin to save Detroit. You may have heard that Total
Recall is about Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to reclaim his
memory and save Mars.

    Wrong. For the makers of many summer films, the storytelling
art is passe. These talented fellows want to dream up worlds
that can exist only in the cinema. Call their pictures
dyna-movies, for they are dynamic rather than dramatic. They
trade in sensation, in the jolts a moviegoer gets at seeing a
villain's body blow up real good. Their impact is the sum of
their special effects. And their tone is high facetiousness;
the whole construct is an elaborate joke.

    For decades, critics lamented that cinema, unlike painting
and music, was yoked to narrative. Movies told stories about
real people, and the audience was meant to care about them.
Would Rick leave Casablanca with Ilsa? Would Scarlett get
Rhett? Film theorists didn't care. They wanted movies to slip
the shackles of realism and burst into modernism. For cinema
to enter the intellectual mainstream, there had to be movies
whose subject was movies.

    Now there are such films. But they are not made by starving
artists in a garage in Munich and called, say, Kinesis
Synthesis 3. They are made by hundreds of well-paid technicians
in Hollywood and called Gremlins 2. The film is so much about
itself that it summons up a movie critic (Entertainment
Tonight's Leonard Maltin) to offer a pan of Gremlins One.
Halfway through, the film breaks down, the screen goes blank,
and then gremlins are seen taking over the movie house. In the
lobby a mother shouts at the theater manager, "This is even
worse than the last one!"

    Most films offer the viewer one thing at a time to look at,
one emotion to feel. A dyna-movie demands more; the eye must
search every corner of the film frame for glancing gags. Look
closely in the villain's lair in RoboCop 2 and find effigies
of his patron saints: Jesus, Mother Teresa, Elvis, Oliver
North. Listen hard to Gremlins 2 and catch witty details about
zillionaire Daniel Clamp's cable empire. It includes 24-hour
channels devoted to archery and laundry, and a movie channel
featuring "Casablanca, but with color -- and a happier ending."
Gremlins 2 should carry the warning FOR ATTENTIVE VIEWERS ONLY.

    In their speed, technical wizardry, surface brilliance and
cheerful cynicism, dyna-movies are the ideal art form for the
MTV generation. Zapped for a decade by the lightning impulses
of rock videos, inured to slaughter by campy slasher films,
kids have become scarily sophisticated; they are connoisseurs
of carnage. They know that in a blood ballet like Total Recall
everybody gets killed but nobody gets hurt -- because the
characters aren't human beings but ciphers, cyborgs, stunt
people and stunted characters, no more real than the creatures
vaporized in Nintendo games.

    Even a pre-MTV adult can find the game exhilarating -- for
about an hour. Then it runs out of gas or fizzles out, as
Gremlins 2 pretends to and ultimately does. At the climax, when
other movies are accelerating, a dyna-movie must slow down in
a vain search for emotional heft. By the end, viewers may be
exhausted from information overload. Instead of leaving the
theater with a rosy glow or warm tears, dyna-moviegoers feel
like a James Bond vodka martini. They have been shaken but not
stirred.