After A.I. , Steven Spielberg’s extravagant
summer banquet, everything else at the movies is scraps. Signaling the arrival
of dog days, we have several bits of flotsam to get out of the way. Most controversial
of them all is Bully , a disturbing
but ultimately pointless little horror from Larry Clark, the overrated director
of the gruesome 1995 film Kids , whose
entire career seems dedicated to showing us all how loathsome American
teenagers really are. Bully is raw,
mean-spirited and filthy. The fact that it is based on a true criminal case
about the murder of a teenage boy by a group of his doped-up, freaked-out
friends in South Florida lends an added shock to a tragic tale, but adds
nothing in the way of enlightenment. The film is so relentlessly
one-dimensional it would have been better as a documentary.
Brad Renfro, the
talented youngster who made an indelible first impression as the little
boy in The Client and matured
blissfully in the riveting Apt Pupil ,
and Nick Stahl, the sensitive, manly little fellow who bonded with Mel Gibson
in The Man Without a Face , are two stars who have graduated to the danger
zone-that awkward age between college and manhood when there isn’t much work in
the Hollywood pasture for young colts. How many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer can you stand
before you begin to think about alternate avenues of employment? Mr. Renfro-who
also gets an “associate producer” credit, whatever that means-must have jumped
at the chance to smoke dope, spout unquotable dirt, slash someone’s throat and
roll around nude in stained sheets. He should have stayed home in his Calvins.
In this repellent film
about self-destructive teenagers spiraling into a quagmire of drugs, violence
and unprotected sex without a shred of parental guidance, Mr. Renfro plays
Marty, a kid who has been insulted and slapped around for years by his best
friend Bobby (Nick Stahl), a bully who rapes, mauls and hits everyone in the
neighborhood. Marty, the awkward, shy one, will do anything to please his
buddy, including stripping in gay clubs and doing phone sex. Bobby, the
dominant, abusive one, lives in a hedonistic moral swamp of his own making.
Bobby gets off on inflicting pain when it’s pretty obvious he’s covering up his
own latent homosexuality (a real theme which might have provided a more cogent
psychological explanation of the dark events if the director had the courage to
explore it better).
Between Kama Sutra
positions, Marty’s pregnant girlfriend Lisa comes up with the idea of killing
off the bully, and before she can light another joint six other teens think
it’s a cool idea, too-as if murder is a no-brainer as blithely accomplished as
scoring another hit of Ecstasy. On the rare occasion when director Clark reluctantly
allows a parent to enter the picture, the adults seem more irresponsible and
clueless than their children. The audience guffaws when one brain-dead mother
finally rises from her stupor long enough to ask, “What are you kids up to?”
And so, on July 14, 1993, the whole gang drives Bobby out to a swamp and stabs
him to death. When he calls out to Marty for help, Marty guts him like a rabbit
and leaves his body for the alligators. Vomiting, dropping tabs of acid like
Chiclets and watching porno flicks, the kids are too immature to understand the
consequences, so they blab about the savage ritualistic murder of the
neighborhood bully to their friends. After what seems like days, the police
arrive at last, and the rest is Florida history. Marty currently faces the
electric chair; the others are serving sentences ranging from 40 years to life
imprisonment. A pathetic horror story, to be sure, but so what?
It isn’t enough to
recreate the events of a brutal murder or record the sadness of a stunned
community unless your audience knows more about the killers at the end of the
movie than they did going in. Larry Clark is no Richard Brooks, Jim Schutze
(whose book inspired the screenplay) is no Truman Capote, and Bully is no In Cold Blood . Instead of narrative coherence, character
development and the kind of moral insight we desperately crave to make a creepy
story relevant, Mr. Clark substitutes rap music and hard rock as the driving
forces of teenage inertia. Instead of a fluid, character-driven script, the screenplay
is a series of wacked-out one-liners suitable for porno flicks. Except for the
two leads, the acting is self-indulgent and amateurish. The direction seems to
be “Act like animals, while the camera circles around you in jerky,
out-of-focus swirls that are guaranteed to make the audience barf.” For a true
story, everyone is tired, bedraggled and potted. Comparing what happens in Bully to Columbine High and the Matthew
Shepard case, Mr. Clark claims “it’s time that we wake up to the way many of
our kids are living.” The alarm bell has a ring of truth, but compiling facts
for the sake of sensationalism doesn’t make for a satisfying movie, and Bully is anything but.
The Kiss of Death
In the lurid,
preposterous action thriller Kiss of the
Dragon , a Chinese cop from Beijing (Jet Li) and a junkie whore from North
Dakota (Bridget Fonda) join forces to fight a corrupt French police chief
(Tchéky Karyo) who is holding the whore’s baby captive. In the violence that
follows, they destroy half of Paris with their feet and an endless supply of
acupuncture needles. I tell you, it has to be seen to be believed, and aren’t
you glad I did it for you?
As the policeman
protagonist, Jet Li-a martial-arts instructor and kung-fu star from Hong
Kong-thinks he’s in Paris to help his embassy rid the Paris underworld of a
gang of heroin-smuggling Chinese gangsters. Sabotaged by the evil police
officer who controls the crime in Paris with his own gang of murderous thugs
masquerading as cops, Li’s character, stranded and alone in a foreign city,
becomes a hunted man who fries faces with hot irons, throws hand grenades down
laundry chutes and kicks a lot of butt.
Ms. Fonda, in another
in a long string of disastrous career choices, plays a nitwit who has been
forced into prostitution by the villain. Whenever she gets out of line, he
slaps her around and injects her with another hypodermic. After the mismatched
odd couple forms a team, all hell breaks loose. In the mayhem, they demolish
luxury hotels, bridges, boats and a noodle shop, and terrorize a medieval
orphanage full of screaming children. It’s gory and absurd, with dialogue so
moronic it keeps the audience in stitches.
Kiss of the Dragon is the work of Luc Besson, the pathetically
untalented French director of such numbing drivel as The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc and the Bruce Willis
potboiler The Fifth Element . In
fairness, he only wrote the loopy script for this one. The director, making his
debut, is Mr. Besson’s protégé, a 32-year-old maker of French commercials and
music videos named Chris Nahon, who demonstrates no aptitude of any kind for
coherent feature films. Ms. Fonda has big hair and a big look of permanent
agony. Mr. Li has a sad face, a sweet, winning personality and a cool,
matter-of-fact way of driving a pair of chopsticks through a jugular vein that
should come in handy at lunch meetings in Beverly Hills. But what can you do
with a hero who is too good to be true, a tragic damsel in distress who is too
dumb to be real, and a villain who is an archfiend so twisted and depraved he’s
downright hilarious? Don’t ask me. I just review them-I don’t write them.
Belting It Out Like
the Merm
Watching Klea
Blackhurst’s critically acclaimed Ethel Merman show (held over through July in
the new cabaret room upstairs at Jack Rose, 771 Eighth Avenue at 47th Street)
reminded me of the time I was a blindfolded panelist on What’s My Line? and the Merm was the “mystery guest.” I guessed her
the minute she opened her mouth (she talked the same way she sang, like an
angry trumpet) and ruined the surprise. There was nothing mysterious about
Ethel Zimmerman from Astoria, Queens. In life, as in death, she was ripe for
parody.
You can’t reinvent the
Merm. She was a crude, brassy broad. She was also an original. Paying no
attention to anything (or anyone) on the same stage, she just opened her mouth
and blasted off. The damage she inflicted on lyrics was estimable (subtlety was
not her forte, which is one reason she was a bomb in movies), but you couldn’t
grouse that you didn’t hear them. I’ve never been much of a fan of her
particular vocal violence, but I must admit she sounded like nobody else. She
could hold a high C for 16 bars and never take a breath. A Merman song was not
so much sung as branded.
Klea Blackhurst is a jolly broth of a lady with a voice the
size of a TWA terminal, and her singing a tribute to the songs and sass of the
copper-piped Merman is a natural. Her clever act is called Everything the Traffic Will Allow , and she says it’s a homage, not
an impersonation-but with all that lung power and songs like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” what else is there? She
grew up listening to Merman when other kids were aping Elvis, and it is clear
that she is besotted. Although Ms. Blackhurst can belt like her idol, she has
more emotional range and texture, and God knows she has more humor. Her patter
is engaging, and while most of her material is familiar, she shapes it in
funny, informative and ingenious ways, bringing you into the act with warmth
and conversation. On “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” she even accompanies
herself on a ukulele.
She’s devoted her life
to studying Merman to the point of obsession, even adorning her stage with
plastic roses because Ethel was allergic to flowers. Unfortunately, her
reverence extends even to the way Merman murdered ballads. “I Got Lost in His
Arms” really hits a sour note. It will be interesting to see what Klea
Blackhurst does next, without the straitjacket. As good as this show is, her
talent makes me want to see and hear less of the Merm and more of her
