My Year of Flops (19 page)

It's easy, and fun, to lampoon the film's lazy reliance on time-tested showbiz-movie conventions, but Carey really seems to believe in them, just as she really seems to feel the sentimental horseshit she screeches at deafening volumes in her ballads. There's a strange poignancy to the scene where Billie explains her fantasy that she'll someday become successful enough that her mother will feel a surge of pride and regret for having abandoned her. Everyone who grew up without a parent has felt that same maudlin sentiment, that desire to become big and successful and accomplished enough to make the slights of the past fade into nothingness. In moments like this, it's possible to see the woman behind the glistening façade, to get a sense of who Carey is as a person. There's a fragility in this scene lacking in the rest of her performance, a star turn that feels like an extension of her music-video vamping rather than an evolutionary leap forward.

“The glitter can't overpower the artist,” a philosophical music-video director argues early in
Glitter
while engaging in a free-form stream-of-consciousness rant about the enigma that is Billie Frank. “Okay, we ask ourselves. Is she white? Is she black? We don't know. She's exotic. I wanna see more of her breasts.” Here, the glitz overpowers Carey's wan presence. It's not even close. Also, I wanna see more of her breasts.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Seasons Of Cynicism Case File #98: Rent

Originally Posted January 1, 2008

A few years back, I was forced to watch
The Passion Of The Christ
to prepare for the final audition of my poorly rated, mildly disreputable basic-cable movie-review panel show
Movie Club With John Ridley
. I'd pointedly avoided seeing
The Passion Of The Christ
during its theatrical run. It was nothing personal: I just dislike Mel Gibson personally.

Since I missed out on seeing the film in a theater, I was reduced to watching it on a 12-inch screen in my hotel room after catching a six a.m. flight from Chicago to LAX on Southwest. I imagine that when Mel Gibson contemplated the ideal viewer for his self-financed labor of love, he didn't envision a leftist Jew watching the movie against his will on a tiny screen in a state of bone-deep exhaustion.

But even if I'd seen
The Passion Of The Christ
on an IMAX screen, I doubt I'd have liked it. I didn't go in expecting a revelatory experience. But I expected to respond to it on some level at least, to be moved or shocked or horrified, or experience convulsions of empathy toward the King of Kings as he endures the ass whipping of ass whippings.

I was, after all, the kind of neurotic Jewish kid who watched Christian televangelists on late-night television and bought into their fiery tirades about the horrors awaiting those who don't accept Jesus Christ. Yet watching
The Passion Of The Christ,
all I felt was slack-jawed disbelief. This was the movie everyone got so worked up about, this cheesy, ham-fisted grindhouse take on the crucifixion? This was the film that became a landmark in our culture's culture war, this blood-splattered, violence-fetishizing cornball Christian kitsch?
The Passion Of The Christ
was depressing, but for all the wrong reasons.

I experienced déjà vu watching the disastrous 2005 film adaptation of
Rent
the first time around just before its ill-fated theatrical run. I was once again gobsmacked that such a buzzed-about cultural phenomenon could be so transparently awful. This was the play that won the Pulitzer Prize, this Up With People take on the New York underground? This was the show that inspired such a fervent cult? This was the show that dragged Broadway kicking and screaming into the present?

It's hard to overestimate the role timing plays in transforming a theatrical smash into a cinematic flop.
Rent
creator Jonathan Larson died the day before the musical opened Off-Broadway. Criticizing Larson's brainchild in the aftermath of his death would be like strangling a cancer-stricken puppy on Christmas with a rolled-up American flag.
Rent
wasn't just a musical; it was an irresistible
human-interest story, a pop-culture fable almost too good to be true.

The show people who brought Larson's Tony-winning pop triumph to the big screen patiently waited for the play's cultural moment to pass, then waited five more years, then a few more years after that, then finally pushed the project into development once it was little more than a quaint nostalgia piece.

Rent
retained much of its original Broadway cast. While keeping the original cast is always a good idea in theory and often a good idea in practice, actors who convincingly played mid-twentysomethings in 1996 can't help but look a little long in the tooth come 2005. They look less post-collegiate than pre-menopausal. It's almost as if an entire decade had passed between the opening night of the Broadway smash and the première of the film fiasco.

That only adds to the surreal lack of verisimilitude plaguing
Rent
. They're fake twentysomethings playing fake bohemians in a wholly inauthentic take on la vie bohème (and
La Bohème
). When writing the play, Larson delved deep into his experiences and those of his boho buddies, but somewhere between the play and the big screen, any lingering traces of authenticity were systematically removed.

But seeing this a second time just after the New Year, I decided to go into
Rent
with a new attitude. No longer would I snicker and sneer. No, I would open my heart and mind to the magic, the music, the wonder of
Rent
. I was going to let the toe-tappingest movie ever made about AIDS, heroin, and poverty infect my soul with its stirring message of “No day but today.”

It didn't work. Mere seconds after the film began, my cynicism returned. The opening song asks, in the most nauseatingly sincere manner imaginable, how one measures a year, then proposes a series of options. They are, in order:

I measured the 135 minutes of
Rent
not in love, but in snickers, derisive snorts, and gales of unintentional laughter.

The film and play follow a series of scruffy bohemians as they try to change the world through their crappy art. There's Roger (Adam Pascal), a Jon Bon Jovi look-alike with big hair, AIDS, and a tormented past that keeps him from being able to accept the sexual advances of heroin-addicted, AIDS-stricken, yet really perky and fun stripper Mimi (Rosario Dawson).

Then there's Roger's roommate, Mark (Anthony Rapp), an aspiring D. A. Pennebaker making a revolutionary documentary where he films his friends and neighbors. Incidentally, there's a name for casual, ramshackle portraits of friends and neighbors shot on the fly: home movies. Last I checked, they're considered something to show bubbie and zayde when they visit, not art.

This dynamic duo and their crazily nonthreatening bohemian pals face a looming crisis in the form of handsome Benjamin (Taye Diggs), a former comrade who sold out and plans to evict his former pals from their Louvre-sized loft so he can build a “a state-of-the-art digital virtual interactive studio.” The battle lines are drawn.

Benjamin offers the boys a Faustian bargain: He'll let them stay in their apartment if they can get a sassy performance artist played by Idina Menzel to cancel a protest where she wears tight pants, calls Benjamin a lapdog, and whines, “It's like I'm being tied to the hood of a yellow rental truck being packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil pushed over a cliff by a suicidal Mickey Mouse.” Obviously, no wealthy real-estate dynasty can compete with the society-changing power of an underground
performance artist's impish pop-culture allegory. So pigs bust the protest before she can disseminate more of her dangerous ideas.

Much singing and dancing ensue en route to the climactic death of a kindly, angelic character named Angel, who continues to hover benevolently over his friends like some sort of … what's the word I'm looking for here? You know, they made a TV show where these creatures touched people, and a movie where they were in the outfield, and a play where they were in America. I'm sure I'll think of it at some point after this book is published.

Mimi threatens to die until she's literally brought back to life through the power of Roger's terrible song. Ah, but what about the music, you say? Doesn't that redeem the whole sorry endeavor? No. No, it does not.

Larson's lyrics, maudlin powerless ballads, and MOR melodies are less Stephen Sondheim than outtakes from
The Apple
. It seems perverse to make a musical about Gen Xers, the most cynical and sarcastic generation known to man, that's wholly devoid of cynicism and sarcasm.
Rent
consequently feels like a Disneyland stage show about those nutty Gen Xers, with their bicuriosity and crazy drug addictions and shameless love of hoofing and crooning. In
Rent,
there's no problem that can't be overcome with singing, dancing, and/or moxie. The film doesn't just feel like a fairy-tale version of New York bohemia created for blue-haired tourists and clueless out-of-towners; it feels like it was created by them as well.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Let's Go Crazy Case File #102: Under The Cherry Moon

Originally Posted January 15, 2008

By 1985, an androgynous, three-foot-tall black man from Minnesota had reached the pinnacle of pop superstardom. Prince was a critic's
darling and a popular favorite. He'd conquered the world of film a year earlier with
Purple Rain
and walked away with an Academy Award and a smash-hit, instant-classic soundtrack.

Yes, everything was coming up Milhouse for Prince. All those years of hard work were paying off. In times like these, Prince is habitually visited by an angry, persistent voice from somewhere deep within his purple-and-paisley soul. This agitated voice regularly issues a cry for professional suicide: “Things … going … too … well … fans … too … happy … career … proceeding … too … smoothly … must … sabotage … self … with … crazy … off-putting … stunt.”