ROVIN' & RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved

Fireworks for the Fourth at the Megaplex  

For this hot summer movie season, two of Hollywood's hottest firecrackers, Jim Carrey and Mel Gibson, bring distinctly different fireworks to your friendly neighborhood megaplex. Carrey, after almost scaring old fans into thinking that he had become a serious actor (in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon) returns to his roots and rudeness, with enough physical comedy and weird facial expressions for two characters in Me, Myself & Irene. He also returns to collaboration with the Farrelly brothers, the Rodgers and Hammerstein of grossness, who do for Rhode Island what John Waters did for Baltimore—and that is not a good thing.

Perhaps nodding to The Mask, Carrey has a chance to play two personalities in one body. His character, a Rhode Island cop named Charlie, is a single father to huge, black (it involves their mother's mutual Mensa membership with the chauffeur who drove her and Charlie on their wedding day) sewer-mouthed, brilliant triplets, who suddenly finds his inner pig. Me and myself work together fairly well, but the problem is with Irene (Renée Zellweger). Somehow, the Irene plot never works. Even with outright dumb and dumber comedies like this, there has to be a solid intellectual underpinning. But, the Irene plot is based on the idea that everyone thinks that Irene knows something about her gangster ex-boss, while everyone knows that she doesn't.

Well, Zellweger doesn't get in the way of Carrey's love affair with himself or his split personalities' battle with themselves (himself? himselves?). This man is amazing. In Man on the Moon he has serious critics talking about his ability to "channel" the character he was playing. Here, he takes on an actor's greatest challenge, to play not one but two characters at once.

But, this movie has split personalities. One involves Jamaal, Lee Harvey, and Shonte, Charlie's alleged kids. Smart, loving… these guys even kiss their scrawny white daddy. Then, there is Charlie/Hank's poignant story of being the long-suffering good guy. And, Irene's rather pointless story which must give narrative drive to it all.

And, you should know, each of these movie-lets shares a sheer offensiveness that… Don't take my word for it. I sat fairly far up the aisle, one of two aisles, and I counted five couples that stormed down the aisle complaining about the grossness. Frankly, it just isn't that funny. This is the kind of film that reminds me of Nietzche's dictum that "Every laugh is a cry for help." Dying cattle, kids being held under water, thumbs being shot off—this is just not the stuff that I want to laugh at. I wish I could have liked this film, but, frankly, this film would not let me.

German Roland Emmerich has been responsible for July fireworks before, with Independence Day, and Mel Gibson (an Australian, remember) has made two other films that cast a very dim light and a lot of blame on the British, Gallipoli and Braveheart. Speaking of light, when I rambled around Francis Marion's land (some two centuries later), it wasn’t permeated with the glow that it has in this film.

The Patriot is the big film (at more than two and a half hours, a bit too big) that tries too hard. Gibson's dead wife is too good, his house full of kids too cute, and Gibson himself too noble. Maybe too lucky, since he and two of his tikes wipe out a whole passle of Brits. All of this is a combination of Francis Marion, South Carolina's "Swamp Fox," and Robert Rodat, scriptwriter for Saving Private Ryan. While Carrey himself is almost reason enough to sit through MM&I, Gibson, playing Gibson, is almost reason enough not to see The Patriot.

Both of these films are set up to be big-time money-makers, the kind that keep a hot summer cool for the Hollywood moguls. So, who am I to complain? With the crude body-fluid humor of MM&I or the crude manipulation of emotions (oh, no, they aren't going to let the pretty girl die, are they?) of Patriot, Hollywood is providing us an air-conditioned alternative to Fourth of July fireworks displays.

Maybe this summer of standing around watching each of two of the most boring candidates for national office in a long time trying to prove that the other is the more interesting, hence the less suitable to govern, we don't need any more entertainment. We just need excuses to hide in the dark for a couple of hours

Mensa, the organization for folks who score well on standardized tests, figures in the plot of MM&I, so you might want to find out more about this odd organization-

www.mensa.org

I have often referred and linked to the many sites of About.com, and this time out, I turn to their "18th Century History" site, first for "American Revolution: General Information," a page of useful links-

http://history1700s.about.com/homework/history1700s/msub32.htm

Then, for the e-text of "Life of General Francis Marion by Parson Weems"-

http://history1700s.about.com/homework/history1700s/library/mresource/metexts/bios/blwfmarnote.htm?terms=%22Francis+Marion%22

That long URL and long text are interesting, because they give us a chance to see how another age transformed the strange story of Francis Marion.

I like to provide my readers with other perspectives on the films I review, not necessarily perspectives that I share (and not necessarily perspectives that I do not share), but here are the responses of other critics to this week's films. First, here is Kevin Laforest (Norm at the Movies) on Me, Myself, and Irene-

http://www.projet9.netc.net/norm/archives/archive-m/me-i.htm

And here is Dustin Putnam on The Patriot-

http://www.young-hollywood.com/Dustin/patriot.htm

Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your eyes firmly set on movies which, no matter how unpleasant they may be, are at least honest.