Cinema
A Bronx Tale ('18', selected cinemas) Wayne's World 2 (PG, selected cinemas) Heaven and Earth ('15', selected cinemas)
News from nowheresville
Mark Steyn
According to the old moguls, 'Mes- sages are for Western Union.' Their suc- cessors in Hollywood couldn't disagree more, at least to judge from the last month's big releases: save-the-whale, the Guildford Four, the Holocaust, Aids . . . Chugging along behind come films which don't seem to be much about anything except themselves. Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale, as is the fashion, is dedicated to his father, so I suppose one could discuss it in relation to other recent pictures in which sons and fathers work through their rela- tionships (Mac, American Heart). This time it's New York 1950: boy witnesses violent street murder; declines to finger local punk; thereafter his loyalties are torn between his hard-working no-hoper pop and the gun-totin' smart arse. De Niro's directorial debut is no more or less than its title claims: a Bronx tale. That shrewd indefinite article and De Niro's take-it-or- leave-it direction are false modesties. There are a lot of fathers and sons out there and De Niro never quite gives us a reason why we should be interested in his
in particular.
Wayne's World 2 is a tale of Aurora, Illi- nois, where two heavy metal nerds run a cable TV show called Wayne's World'. It came out the other week and I never men- tioned it because I felt duty-bound to slog through the big subject pictures. On reflec- tion, though, it seems to me this is the big subject picture. In little more than an hour and a quarter, in a dumpy nowheresville in Illinois, almost the whole of American cul- ture seems to pass through. Perhaps that's the point of Wayne's World 2: we are part of Wayne's world, too.
Sniffier readers will point out that an hour-and-a-quarter is more than enough to encompass all American culture, but, in their spare time, Wayne (Mike Myers) and his friend Garth manage to fit in a trip to London, England. Wow! Here we are — Piccadilly Circus!' gasps Wayne and looks around. 'What a shitty circus,' says Garth. 'Yeah,' Wayne agrees. 'No clowns or ani- mals.' Add up the number of people who'll see this joke worldwide, contrast it with the combined audiences of Berkoff, Merchant- Ivory, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi, and then give thanks that Wayne's writers deign to honour us with even as modest a quip as this.
Most of the movie jokes come with built- in obsolescence. But, after the bogus frenzy and desperate cowardice of recent Ameri- can film comedy, Wayne's World 2 has the confidence not to try too hard. A distinc- tive comedy should always have a few 'screw you' moments, jokes that nobody will laugh at but which the writers like enough to leave in. Apart from all the obvi- ous stuff — kung fu routines, cameo appearance by Charlton Heston — there's a David Lynch fantasy scene in which a naked Indian leads Wayne through the desert to where the late Jim Morrison of the Doors is discussing the Kennedy assas- sination with Sammy Davis Jnr.
One scene is a textbook lesson in comedy construction. Wayne and Co have been engaged in an undercover operation, dis- guised as a hard-hat construction worker, a traffic cop, etc. When their cover is blown and their mission is aborted, they scram in their disguises, accidentally duck into 'The Tool Box' gay bar, get mistaken for the Seventies disco beefcakes the Village Peo- ple and are obliged to perform the group's big hit 'YMCA'. It's an obvious joke (I did it myself once on television), but it's the set-up which impresses, the way the gag arises effortlessly from the situation. It shames the creaky shoehorning of allegedlY more sophisticated humourists. After Schindler's List, it's my favourite movie scene of the year. In Heaven and Earth, Oliver Stone wal- lows in the hell of Vietnam for another three-and-a-half hours. The scenes of pre- war village life are lush, lyrical, impossiblY idyllic panoramas. The latter half of the picture is a mismatched cartoon of subur- ban America. Stone and Mike Myers seem
to share the same view of the 'burbs: life is stultifying, most people are nuts, and Viet- nam vets are crazier than most. On the whole, Myers argues his case more convinc- ingly. Come to think of it, comparing Wayne's World 2 with Stone's The Doors, he understands Jim Morrison better, too.
Previous page
