Cinema
The Mask
(`PG', selected cinemas)
True Lies (`15', selected cinemas)
Ineffective FX
Mark Steyn
The great Hollywood joke shortage continues. In The Mask, Jim Carrey gets to do a parody of Sally Fields's infamous Oscar acceptance speech, just like the Sally Fields Oscar parody Priscilla Presley did earlier this year in Naked Gun 33 113, the film which also included a spoof of The Crying Game's surprise penis scene, just like The Crying Game penis spoof in the earlier Jim Carrey vehicle, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.
The provenance of these gags is instruc- tive. One is from a low-budget Brit hit, the other Sally Fields gave away for free at the Academy Awards (she ought to launch an intellectual property suit). But from tiny acorns mighty jokes grow — big and fat and dripping a million dollars of greenery. Both The Mask and True Lies seem to have no greater ambitions than to spend a lotta dough reminding you of much cheaper movies. It's this year's winning formula: ten-cent yucks dressed in mega-bucks.
In The Mask, genial nerd Carrey stum- bles on a fifth century facepack belonging to the Norse God, Loki. In the comic books of my youth, Loki was the God of Evil, locked in combat with the mighty Thor, God of Thunder, who, for reasons which escape me, was living undercover as a suburban New York doctor. Back then, Marvel was trying to make its comic-book heroes more human, by having them wan- der around agonising over Vietnam, rid- dled with self-doubt, etc. Now, Hollywood reverses the process by taking real human beings and flattening them into comic strips. Loki is merely mischievous here, an excuse to party. It's a Tex Avery cartoon brought to life — or, rather, life reduced to a Tex Avery cartoon.
So the mask is Loki but it isn't low-key; no sooner is it on Carrey's kisser than, thanks to superslick animation, his eyes are popping out on stalks and his elasticated mouth could swallow a city block. If you saw Ace Ventura, you'll know Carrey is a Play-Doh face on a rubberised body any- way and you'll wonder; why wasn't that enough for them? If the computer anima- tion is going to do all the funny faces, who needs Carrey? You might as well hire the impassive granite visage of Gregory Peck. The technology is impressive, but reminds me of those bores in the early days of stereo who could tell you all about the woofers and tweeters but never had any records worth listening to. The funniest joke is when Carrey has the mask off but demonstrates its effects without using the special effects.
The slicker the special effects get, the less special and the less effective they are. Besides, film has always been a cheat's medium. That's why Fred Astaire liked to do his numbers in one long take, just so you'd know: this isn't editing, folks; the guy's actually doing it. When he played an upright piano, he had the front panelling removed so musical movie-goers could tell from the hammers that Astaire was really playing: that's special and effective. True Lies, by contrast, spent over $120 million and can't make Arnold Schwarzenegger look like he can tango. They can blow up causeways in Florida, they can detonate nuclear warheads, they can fly Harriers with schoolgirls dangling from the nose, but a $120 million budget couldn't run to a six-buck lesson from Madame La Zonga. Arnie tangoes twice: he's supposed to be sexy on the dance floor, but, despite editing and above-the-shoulder shots, it's mostly reminiscent of the moment in Mel Brooks's Young Frankesnstein when the monster does Puffin' On The Ritz'.
If he wants to dance, he should try the king-of-the-swingers routine from The Jun- gle Book: 'I wanna Be Like You-oo-oofI wanna walk like you, talk like you ... ' In the latest instalment of his post-Terminator identity crisis, Arnie emerges from a Swiss lake, peels off his frog-suit and steps out in a white tuxedo: I wanna be like James Bond. Unfortunately, Arnie in a tux looks like a bouncer outside Spats in Romford. Director, James Cameron, is great at fire- balls, less good at formal balls.
The plot's piffle: dumb towelheads with nukes, interrupted by a squirmy marital interlude in which Arnie deploys half the secret service and several helicopters to humiliate his mousey wife. Jamie Lee Curtis does her best, but the sadism in these scenes is seriously weirdsville, as if Schwarzenegger is working out his frustra- tion with his acting limitations: you want me to project human failings? Screw that! Les just kick her around and blow the set up.
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