TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.1 KB | 161 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 64

Go Ahead. Make Me Laugh


Hollywood keeps churning out hit comedies, but the exhaustion is
showing

By RICHARD CORLISS


    Stay out of my way. Send the kids to Grandma's. I've just
seen the latest comedies, and I'm in no mood to laugh.

    Those who know me will testify that a good joke can launch
me into giggle fits; a valentine can set me weeping; nearly any
episode of The Simpsons can do both. So I am no emotional slug.
When I enter a movie theater, I bring high spirits and modest
needs. I merely say, as Clint Eastwood might, "Go ahead. Make me
laugh."

    America feels that way too. Comedy, as Hollywood has long
known, is the most reliable movie genre. It can make a bundle
but doesn't cost one. No one need spend $100 million on a
comedy. But audiences will pay that much in just two months to
see City Slickers, Billy Crystal's cowboy caper. When a comedy
is a hit, everybody smiles.

    And in Hollywood, everyone heads for the Xerox machine.
Used to be that moguls would tell their minions, "Gimme the
same, only different." Now they skip the different. But this
doesn't work for comedy, which is based on the shock of wit. A
joke is a story with a surprise ending; it should explode like
a novelty-store cigar. It fizzles when the gags are sequeled
and recycled. Why pay $7 for a summer rerun?

    An air of desperation hangs over much of Hollywood comedy,
and it may be due to the exhaustion of several formats. Last
winter John Hughes' Home Alone became the all-time surprise
comedy hit. Now three more Hughes movies have come and --
quickly, ignominiously -- gone. Career Opportunities, Only the
Lonely and Dutch together have grossed $35 million, just
one-eighth of Home Alone's take. Suddenly audiences are tired
of Hughes' cute family strife. Streaks end. It happens.

    Mel Brooks' winning streak lasted through the '70s. But
people are avoiding Brooks' Life Stinks, a kind of Homeless
Alone about a billionaire on the bum, as if it were trying to
wipe a rag across their windshield. Brooks' old colleague Gene
Wilder has fared no better with Another You, in which he plays
a compulsive liar coupled in a complex scam with con man Richard
Pryor. On its second weekend of release, this mediocre jape
averaged a pathetic $262 per screen; that's about 50 people in
each theater all weekend. With those numbers, a moviemaker can
go broke, and an usher can get awfully lonely.

    And a critic can get blue when considering other comedy
styles and stylists:



    The Saturday Night Live Wires. Saturday Night Live and
SCTV unearthed a generation of gifted farceurs and mimics. The
farceurs displayed their oversize personalities on TV, then did
more of the same in Hollywood. John Candy, for instance, plays
the jolly lug, coping with crisis by wearing it down. In his
O.K. new movie Delirious -- the season's second daytime-drama
parody, after Soapdish -- he is a soap-opera writer who is
knocked silly and dreams that he is a prisoner in his own show.
The premise is frail, but Candy gives it his usual shrug-it-off
assurance. No big deal. No problem.

    The SNL-SCTV mimics -- Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Martin
Short -- did have a problem. On TV they hid like a subversive
subtext inside their brilliant impersonations. But in movies an
actor doesn't disappear; he displays himself. So Short has put
his mimetic, improvisatory genius on hold and marketed one
facet of his personality: the winsome whiner.

    Short on a roll, skyrocketing jokes and impressions on
David Letterman's show, is a wonder to behold. Short in his
painful new movie, Pure Luck, is a shame and a waste, like a
pianist in a straitjacket. In this search-for-a-missing-heiress
comedy co-starring Danny Glover, Short plays the world's
unluckiest man, and the picture is one long physical
humiliation. Get creamed, register pain, get up. Repeat ad
nauseam. Somehow Cary Grant survived an entire comedy career
without having to walk into a door and squash his nose against
it. But the elegance of Cary Grant has been replaced by the
gooniness, pratfalls and infantilism of Jerry Lewis. What has
Hollywood degenerated into, France or something?



    The Dictatorship of Dumb. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
was perhaps the stupidest picture ever to have a sequel. Valley
dudes Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore"
Logan (Keanu Reeves) lurched through time corralling the likes
of Lincoln, Freud and Genghis Khan, all to pass a history test.
The comedy was so comatose it could have been made by the kids
it was about. The idea of a sequel was not promising; it was a
threat.

    The mild pleasure of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, snappily
directed by Pete Hewitt, is that it leavens one's despair about
the California school system with some low-octane inventiveness.
Bill and Ted are killed by their evil twins. They go to hell,
which is not what they expected: "Yeah, we got totally lied to
by our album covers." They play chess -- well, Clue and Twister
-- with Death (William Sadler), whom they address as "the Duke
of Spook, the Doc of Shock, the Man with No Tan." Bill and Ted
will never replace Hope and Crosby, but at least they are no
longer the Twits with No Wits.



    All That ZAZ. In 1982 the comedy writer-producer-director
team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker devised a
bright cop-show parody called Police Squad! Seven years later,
they expanded the premise into a movie: the hit The Naked Gun.
But doing a sequel to a remake of a TV series can make sense
only to accountants. The scattershot style of the ZAZ zanies is
reminiscent of Mad comic book at its mid-'50s apex. But, guys,
Mad didn't do sequels! Especially one like The Naked Gun 2 1/2:
The Smell of Fear, which reprises jokes from the old show and
boasts no fewer than three set pieces involving people stuck
inside or under runaway vehicles.

    Maybe the ZAZ boys -- or at least Abrahams, working with
Naked Gun co-screenwriter Pat Proft -- needed to pillage a new
genre. Hot Shots! begins as a parody of the daredevil fly-boy
anthem Top Gun, with Charlie Sheen as a tough Navy pilot and
Valeria Golino as his gorgeous psychiatrist. But its glancing
anarchy cannot be confined to one target. It makes derisive
strikes on Dances with Wolves, Gone With the Wind, Rocky, 9 1/2
Weeks, The Fabulous Baker Boys . . . if somebody made it, these
guys make fun of it. Handsomely too: the film is as
good-looking as its game cast. Not the least attraction of this
delightful lampoon is that it compels you to pay attention at
every moment -- scanning the frame for, say, soldiers doing what
looks like a number from A Chorus Line. More poignantly, Hot
Shots! may remind you of the richness of film comedy. It is a
heritage that, at this late sorry stage, deserves not just
parody but revival. Until then . . . sigh . . .

    Anyone for a night at the old movies? You make the
popcorn; I'll bring my tapes of The Lady Eve and His Girl
Friday. We'll have some good laughs and feel better.