LEONARD PIERCE'S GUILTY PLEASURES:
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)
Given its date of release – my senior year of high school – you might think that my unrepentant love of this middling John Carpenter action flick is just geek hangover from my formative years. But really, it’s all down to Buckaroo Banzai. I have a lifelong adoration of pulp fiction, the sort of trashy mass-market literary and cinematic entertainments popular from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, which would occasionally yield surprisingly resonant characters like the Shadow or shockingly talented writers like Raymond Chandler. For the same reason, I’m a fan of modern attempts to conjure that rare era, and one of my all-time favorites is the charming, funny, and utterly inimitable 1982 flick The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. At the very end of the movie, a sequel was promised, but it never materialized; however, its director, W.D. Richter, was hired by John Carpenter to punch up a screenplay called Big Trouble in Little China – a B movie he wanted to turn into an A picture. It wasn’t quite that; in fact, a lot of Big Trouble in Little China can’t even aspire to B quality and settles down somewhere around Z. But it occasionally shows flashes of that demented Buckaroo Banzai genius, and while I normally can’t stand Kurt Russell, his insane John-Wayniac performance as two-fisted trucker Jack Burton (who Russell correctly points out is a hero who never does anything remotely heroic) adds an enjoyably louche element to the whole affair. Big Trouble in Little China is a perfect example of a movie that’s better than it has any right to be.
CREEPSHOW (1982)
As my esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak can testify, Stephen King is responsible for a lot of movies. And many of them are very, very bad. (He doesn’t even seem to like the ones that are good; this is a man who’s on record as liking Maximum Overdrive more than Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.) His collaboration with zombie auteur George Romero – and one of the few major adaptations of his work where he actually wrote the screenplay himself – isn’t a very, very bad movie, but it isn’t a very, very good one either. Like the EC horror comics that serve as its inspiration, it’s unapologetic camp, with all that this implies: when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s worse. With an extremely iffy cast, no particular structure or emotional stakes, and Romero directing like a man who’s looking to buy a summer home, Creepshow has a lot going against it; add to the mix the fact that it features an infamous segment involving a man whose home is overrun by cockroaches, and you’d think I’d hate it more than I hate traffic jams. But, as it happens, Creepshow is one of my all-time guilty pleasures; I can’t say that it’s a good movie, exactly, but I watch it again and again, with some of its flattest, lamest scenes – including King’s own extraterrestrially over-the-top acting debut – being numbered among my favorites. Plus, it has an unbilled cameo by my all-time favorite That Guy!, B-movie king Tom Atkins! How could I not love it?
NURSE BETTY (2000)
There’s plenty of people who don’t even like the good movies that Neil LaBute makes; his early work, like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, has plenty of detractors. But while it’s no Wicker Man, his third full-length feature, Nurse Betty, is widely considered a low point in his career. And, to be honest, I can see why. He didn’t write the script (a meandering thing about a small-town nurse who, stricken with a sort of traumatic amnesia, goes to Hollywood to hook up with the soap opera surgeon she has come to believe is real), which is often flat and more than a few times carries suspension of belief beyond the breaking point. The role of a damaged naïf is suitable to Rene Zellweger, but she’s still a bad actress even when she’s in her comfort zone. And Greg Kinnear and Aaron Eckhart, two actors who have never done much for me, continue to not do much for me here. And yet, and yet…I return to the movie a lot more than I ever thought I would on the first viewing. Most of it has to do with the film’s villains: Morgan Freeman, taking a break from his normal Magical Negro gig to play a veteran hit man, is terrific as a consummate professional who can’t see his own fatal weakness, and Chris Rock is downright astonishing as Freeman’s hotheaded protégé – it’s the only thing Rock has ever done that suggests to me that he might have a pretty goddamn great dramatic actor buried in him somewhere. Thematically, the movie promises a lot more than it can deliver, but for some reason Nurse Betty has always been one of those movies where I forgive the wasted potential, because there seems like so much of it to waste.
SPICE WORLD (1997)
Why all the hate for the Spice Girls? They only wanted to zigga zigga, after all. The massive outpouring of hate directed at them smacked of bad faith, and the claim that they represented the death of music clearly came from people who weren’t paying much attention to the rest of the dross on top 40 radio in 1997. And while I’ll be the first to admit that Spice World is no A Hard Day’s Night, it’s not from lack of trying: if the band, the cast, and the crew lacked the genius and charm of the Beatles, they certainly didn’t lack good intentions, and at heart, they were making the exact same kind of movie. The biggest band in the world bond with each other, drop wisecracks, engage in wacky hi-jinks, and avoid their rabid fans while having a good time doing it. If the Spice Girls weren’t a patch on the Fab Four musically, they did have a similar cultural cachet (albeit for only about five seconds), and who can begrudge them trying to have fun with the movie that was inevitably going to get made about them? And if they lacked the pure charisma of the lads from Liverpool, Mel B and Mel C looked better in skimpy outfits than Ringo Starr looked in anything. The girls came up with the idea for the movie themselves, which makes them more praiseworthy or more blameworthy depending on your perspective, and the producers, knowing that they didn’t have a John Lennon or a Paul McCartney on their hands, at least stuffed Spice World with ringers like Mark McKinney, Stephen Fry, Bob Hoskins and Richard E. Grant. Like the band, Spice World is a fun, ultimately irrelevant little pop gumdrop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, damn it.
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Contributor: Leonard Pierce