ROVIN’ AND RAVIN’ WITH MIKE

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved

Drowning the Next Best Planet

Drowning Mona, What Planet Are You From? and The Next Best Thing—three comedies, with the likes of Bette Midler and Rupert Everett. Friday night, I was ready to start singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." Surely, surely this weekend I could find something to enjoy at the movies once again. But, hold onto your Yugos, boys and girls. It didn't turn out that way. Friday night, I went to see Drowning Mona. Then, Saturday, I braved What Planet Are You From?  Sunday, in search of some good news for you, I tried The Next Best Thing. Friends don’t let friends go to dreadful comedies, and you got a friend at Rovin’ and Ravin’.

Comedy is a funny thing. At least, it should be. The problem is, these comedies just aren't funny. The audiences didn't find much funny with them, and I broke my own rule by checking out what other critics thought about them before I wrote my review, and the critics haven't found them funny either.

But comedy appeals to the head, or it should, but it needs a bit of warmth from the heart. Too much warmth, and the whole mess gets overcooked. Too much of the head, and there is a cold, brittle machine. It's like Goldilocks's bowl of porridge. If it's too hot or too cold, it just isn't worth wrestling a houseful of bears. Strangely, even comedies with the most indecent subject matter must have a moral underpinning; there must be a sense that things worked out right, somehow, or else, the laughs are in a vacuum.

Drowning Mona begins with the death by drowning of Mona Dearly (Midler) after the brakes of the Yugo she is driving fail, and the car plunges off a cliff. Mona is the luckiest person in this movie, however, because she dies without having to suffer through it, although she is dragged up in various people's memories and flashbacks.

Officer Rash (DeVito) discovers that those brakes had been tampered with, and then must start sorting out the unusual suspects. Her husband? Her son? The woman they both are having an affair with? Her son's business partner--who happens to be Rash's daughter's fiancé? Just about anyone in the town, where, it seems, everyone hates Mona.

Where are we heading? To American Beauty, and Fargo, it seems, with a Dumb and Dumber detour through Raising Arizona. But, the truth is, we are heading over a cliff, just like poor Mona. What were DeVito and Midler, two veteran comics, thinking when they got bogged down in this mess? Okay, there are a few laughs, but as I heard someone say as I was leaving the theater, "It's not funny, but it's not sad either." It just goes off a cliff. In a Yugo. Near the beginning of the film, DeVito's Rash is heard in an intense telephone conversation about Broadway musicals. Later, his daughter Ellen jumps out of her Yugo and runs into the police station. We see the car start to roll down a hill, and from inside the station, we hear it crash. But, so what? There is no more mention of his Broadway comedies or of her demolished Yugo.

There are a few laughs, yes, a few. Casey Affleck (Ben's little brother) is perhaps the best thing in the film, but his character does not have a chance to act, just react. Perhaps the best measure of this film's sheer awfulness is that Midler doesn't even stand out. She's just loud, obnoxious, and loud. The film is plot-heavy, but the plot curls around itself and doesn't hold any surprises, when a comedy/mystery like this needs some surprises. Oh, excuse me. There is one surprise, that a film like this got made in the first place.

Psycho-babbler John Gray has made a cottage industry out of his pronouncements that men and women are from different planets. This wellspring of profundity has actually discovered that, hey, women and men have different roles and goals in relationships. And Gary Shandling and Mike Nichols (at least, he should have known better), perpetrators of What Planet Are You From? have found out the hard way that such is not the stuff of crackling good comedy.

Shandling plays a being from a planet with no women, who is sent to earth to impregnate a woman, using a—how to put this for a family-friendly freenet?—noisy genital prostheses, since these aliens are as anatomically incorrect as the angels of Dogma. So far, it sounds as if the movie could be good, at least dirty, maybe even funny. But, there is a strange seriousness here, as if the movie is suffering from a split personality and wants us to take it seriously, even as it dishes up naughty one-liners that don't fit together. It's just not dirty enough to be funny or funny enough to justify the dirt. What a waste of a Saturday night!

With The Next Best Thing, Rupert Everett and Madonna bring us the next, not necessarily best installment of a weird little group of movies based on the idea that pairing a handsome gay man and a beautiful straight woman is outrageously funny. The weirdest thing about these films is that they are still being made. Maybe this idea was new, maybe it was even funny, sometime before In and Out, My Best Friend's Wedding, The Object of My Affection, and The Wedding Banquet, not to mention television's Will and Grace.

Certainly, Madonna could be expected to bring a new kink, uh, twist to such a tale, but in her role as a yoga instructor whose biological clock is about to need new batteries, she doesn't find it. Everett could have been counted on to bring a reserved British balance to things, but Madonna comes up with what might be mistaken for a British accent (for a high school production of an Oscar Wilde comedy), and that's the only thing new here.

Even more than Planet, this film is in the throes of multiple personality disorder. Comedy? Drama? Both? How about, neither? The film starts off as a cutesy comedy--see the gay best friend faint when he learns he is going to be a father. (Save your money; you can see it in the television commercials.) Once the child is inflicted on us all, everyone tries to out-cute everyone else. But, right in the middle of all this cutesiness, along comes the custody battle, and we are suddenly asked to ponder whether a gay man can be a good father.

Excuse me, drop a piece of popcorn, and it seems as if we are watching a new film. And that is what I want. A new film. Believe me, I try to write these reviews to celebrate what's good and entertaining about the movies, but those folks in Hollywood aren't cooperating. Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your hopes up that some day soon, we'll all look back on these films... and laugh. As of Sunday night, it hasn't happened yet.

To close on a happy note—yes, your rovin’, ravin’ friend can still like something—here is a web site that will give you more fun than all three of these movies. Enter any date—your birthday, anniversary, any significant date—and get a report on what happened on that date. (Thanks for sharing this, Pat!)

http://dmarie.com/asp/history.asp

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