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Lies and the Hollywood Liars who Tell Them
By Chris Fara1
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With cut and paste methodology in full swing this election season, it’s getting old to see op-ed columnist after op-ed columnist attack the President’s slicing and dicing of his opponent's quotations. Anybody who really thinks that John Kerry said he’ll treat terrorists like prostitutes obviously has no interest in the actual statement and probably still thinks that Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Since the political ruses are out in the open for people who read newspapers other than the NY Post, I decided to investigate another industry that makes just as much use of the selective butcher shop chop. Of course I’m talking about the folks out in Hollywood, whose blatant deception gets past editorial desks every morning.
I’m not a big fan of inflated movie prices, so I hit up the $6.25 matinee of Team America the other day. A triumphant slap at politics and the movie biz itself, it actually inspired me to hop theaters when it was over. My middle school craftiness came back as soon as I exited at the rear entrance and deposited all of my trash in one of the conveniently located receptacles. I casually strolled across the hallway to Taxi, and the timing was flawless -- I just missed the previews. At that moment I figured that even a Queen Latifah meets Jimmy Fallon movie might be worth it for free, which proved to be a nasty misjudgment.
The movie is about Latifah, Manhattan’s fastest taxi driver, and Fallon, a loser cop who always seems to put his car in reverse instead of drive. Together they’re a match made in a Tinseltown boardroom that couldn’t even garner laughs from the prepubescent Abercrombie dipshits behind me. I haven’t walked out of a movie since Armageddon (the Bruce Willis classic in which they teach drillers how to navigate space instead of astronauts how to drill), but this one I couldn’t take for more than forty minutes. Until I saw the ad in today’s New York Times, I was sure that most of America felt the same way.
Like all movie advertisements, the one for Taxi is loaded with review excerpts. There’s one from USA Today that simply says, “HILARIOUS,” one from the San Francisco Chronicle claiming “REAL LAUGHS,” and one from a reviewer at The Washington Post hailing it as “FUN.” I knew that while minimalism may be chic in some of the better publications, surely critics at the Post and the Chronicle weren’t giving one word reviews. I also had an inclination that some of these exclamations might have been taken out of their original context, so I hit the web and did some homework.
But before I saw what the other critics had to say – I imagined how this critic would incorporate some of those choice words into my own review of the front half of the film. I suppose I might have written, “This movie would have been HILARIOUS if I'd brought my third grade sense of humor, four blunts and a sheet of acid along for a wild ride with Jimmy and the Queen.” Another may have read, “Don’t expect REAL LAUGHS, but instead the type that you force out when you just dropped ten bones at the theater and eight more at the concession stand.” As far as the other one, I guess I’m not having enough “FUN” with this asinine flick to even have to show how many ways that could have been toyed with. But let’s see how the people who were paid to sift through this garbage actually reacted.
As far as critic Claudia Puig of USA Today’s alleged claim that Taxi was “HILARIOUS,” well - that wasn’t exactly a word she was attributing to the entire movie, or even to one of its leading characters for that matter. It’s a reference to the actress Ann-Margaret, “who is hilarious as Fallon’s lush of a mom.” This single redeeming moment of course came after I bolted, but I’m sure it was every bit as hilarious as Fallon backing into the car behind him for the second time in the first fifteen minutes.
Then there’s the infamous “FUN” comment, which was attributed to Jane Horowitz of The Washington Post, who didn’t really review Taxi for her newspaper in the way you might think. The critic on that beat was Michael O’Sullivan, who wrote, “What made (Fallon) great on SNL – the fact that he was no movie star – makes him a terrible movie star,” and that, “His first starring vehicle, Taxi, goes nowhere fast.” But while O’Sullivan determined that the outtakes during the credits were the funniest part of the movie, Jane Horowitz, who pens “The Family Filmgoer” column, wrote, “This silly cop comedy offers more fun than one can rightfully expect,” which suggests that toddlers who never really liked Fallon on SNL might sweeten up to his goofy big screen antics. I bet they’ll particularly enjoy his inability to drive a car in the right direction.
Another half-quote featured in the newspaper ad came from Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal, who apparently wrote, “QUEEN LATIFAH IS AN INDOMITABLE…COMIC FORCE.” Knowing that WSJ reporters tend to avoid deliberate fragments, I checked out the businessman’s bible, which appeared to be practicing some sort of affirmative action in its renowned arts and entertainment pages. To my amazement the quote was piecemeal, and really read, “I haven’t seen the original (it’s a rehash of a popular French comedy), but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version,” and “As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.” And there I was thinking The Journal had let down its guard when in fact it was just saying that the overweight, funny black lady was too rebellious to take orders from the man with the bullhorn.
In case you were wondering, Mick LaSalle of the SF Chronicle did indeed spare Taxi from the critical slaying it deserved. That leads me to believe that he gave the movie the only genuine compliment that the studio could find. You might ask if people actually go see films because of some silly quotes in the ads, and the answer is most likely yes, considering that this is a country so lowbrow that movies like Taxi are made in the first place. Like Republicans, those who conceive and give birth to these movies are willing to do whatever it takes to sell them to a country of dingbats. Come to think of it, the one word reviews are a perfect fit for a sound byte nation that’s filled with people too lazy to read 500 word movie reviews, and whose willful ignorance helps keep 300 copies of movies like Taxi on Blockbuster shelves for every one copy of something that’s worth watching.
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Chris FARA1 is a writer living in New York City. He can be reached at fara1andonly@netscape.net.
©
2004 Me Three