Perhaps audiences do not require realistic illusions, but simply the illusion of realistic illusions. On the basis of the effects in Jason X and the (much more entertaining) Scorpion King, we could also chat about how bad they are getting. There’s been a lot of talk lately about how good computer-generated special effects have become. Once you know that the ship contains many dark corners and that the crew members wander off alone as stupidly as the campers at Camp Crystal Lake did summer after summer, you know as much about the plot as the writers do. The movie’s premise: Jason, who has a “unique ability to regenerate lost and damaged tissue,” comes back to life and goes on a rampage, killing the ship’s plentiful supply of sex-crazed students and staff members. The movie is a low-rent retread of the Alien pictures, with a monster attacking a spaceship crew one of the characters, Dallas, is even named in homage to the earlier series. The missing two years are easily explained: I learn from the Classic Horror Web site that the movie was originally scheduled to be released on Halloween 2000, and was then bumped to March 2001, summer 2001 and Halloween 2001 before finally opening on the 16th anniversary of Chernobyl, another famous meltdown. The other body belongs to Rowan (Lexa Doig), a researcher who is thawed out and told it is now the year 2455: “That’s 455 years in the future!” Assuming that the opening scenes take place now, you’ve done the math and come up with 453 years in the future. It takes place centuries in the future, when Earth is a wasteland and a spaceship from Earth II has returned to the Camp Crystal Lake Research Facility and discovered two cryogenically frozen bodies, one of them holding a machete and wearing a hockey mask. Jason X is technically Friday the 13th, Part 10. Jason X sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness, and aptness of thought. Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. Here is a movie that needed great trash, great sex, and great gossip, and at all the crucial moments Susann is talking to a tree. Then look at the tepid moment where Ari sighs fondly, “Perhaps I married the wrong Jackie.” Uh, huh. Consider for a moment what Susann could have done with that. There’s a scene here where Jackie and Irving visit with Jackie and Aristotle on the Onassis yacht. A woman who writes Valley of the Dolls shouldn’t be punished with a biopic that makes her look only a little naughtier than Catherine Cookson.
Jackie Susann deserved better than Isn’t She Great. Stockard Channing, who plays Jackie’s boozy best friend, does a better job of suggesting the Susann spirit. Bette Midler would seem to be the right casting choice for Jackie, but not for this Jackie, who is not bright enough, vicious enough, ambitious enough, and complicated enough to be the woman who became world-famous through sheer exercise of will. What we want, I think, is the portrait of a funny trash talker, not a secular saint who bravely bore the birth of an autistic son (visited on weekends in a luxury care center) and later battled cancer. Factual accuracy is not what we’re looking for anyway.
0 kommentar(er)
