Cinema
The Specialist
C15', selected cinemas from Boxing Day)
The Pagemaster (`U', selected cinemas from Friday)
Stone me down
Mark Steyn
As the old Hollywood joke had it, 'Di It d you hear about that hurricane last night. , was so strong a hair on Ann Miller's head moved.' Actually, Miss Miller's famously immobile coiffure saved her life: a safety curtain came crashing down, fracturing her skull; if it hadn't been for her lacquered wig, she'd be dead. If a safety curtain cattle crashing down on Sharon Stone's breasts, it'd shatter on impact. Stone by stone by nature, Sharon's concrete bust is right up there with the Miller hair and the Gregory Peck visage as one of the grea! unmoving performances of all time. Watch Sharon's stones in Basic Instinct, as she writhes naked on top of Michael Douglas; arms flay, legs splay, every other bit of Sharon bounces up and down, but those breasts never move. It was an ingenious bit of casting to team them with Sylvester Stallone's breasts in The Specialist: four non-Rolling stones for the price of two. He's an ex-CIA explosives man, she tempts him into taking on the mob in Miami. Around them, bombs deto- nate, rockets fire, guns blaze, but the Sly and Shaz bosoms remain the calm at the eyes of the storm. As directed by Luis Llosa, The Specialist has an enviably simple structure: the good guys have immobile chests, the bad guys have immobile faces. There's James Woods, inevitably, and also Rod Steiger. But these days, apparently, Just booking Steiger isn't enough; you have to give him a ridiculous Hispanic accent. So You bastard!' comes out as `Chao bas- tard!' — to which the polite response is Gesundheit, motherfucker'. The funniest thing about The Specialist is that it's so doggedly unfunny. But, as ami- able hokum, it's hard to resist. It has low ambitions — `Hey, let's do an action ,nlovie! With, er, Stallone! And, um, Sharon 6torier, — but it fulfils them effortlessly. In contrast, The Pagemaster comes over like heavy-handed propaganda for your local public library: if you're a recalcitrant glue- sniffer from Lambeth Secondary Modern for Young Ramraiders, you won't buy it. If you're someone who can actually read a book, you'll resent the way producer/writer David Kirschner reduces most of the Robert Louis Stevenson ceuvre to bit play- ers, involuntarily conscripted to rescue What's left of Macaulay Culkins's career. Little Mac plays a neurotic, hypochondri- ac kid who gets trapped in a library and transported to an animated fantasy world Where characters from classic adventures come to life. With the aid of three book- sized characters called Fantasy, Horror and Adventure (voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, Frank Welker and Patrick Stewart), he learns to conquer his fears, and to appreci- ate that hey, you know books are pretty c. 001 and that tatty old low-tech library card is, in fact, a passport to a world of dreams and imagination.
hrl. There are all sorts of weird things going on here. Like Macaulay Culkin: ten minutes into the movie, he changes into a cartoon Mac. Why? Did his voice break two weeks into shooting? Or did the kid's agent figure that fans would think he was a tnerd hanging out with all these leather- bound exquisitely-tooled 19th century types? You could argue that Kirschner is introducing the Sonic the Hedgehog gener- ation to the pleasures of Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island, to Moby Dick and the Arabian Nights. On the other hand, what's the point if you drag Moby the Dick down to the same level as Sonic the hedgehog? In this film, Long John Silver is a guy with a parrot and a peg leg and that's it. When the characters have names like Fantasy, Adventure and Horror, it gives you an idea of the creative wit involved. Imagine The Wizard of Oz with the Scare- crnw, the Tin Man and the lion renamed Brainless, Heartless and Spineless and you'll have some idea of some of the lum- bering mechanical feel of the movie. In fact, for a film championing the old hard- backs, spineless is exactly what The Page- master is: even as it commends the virtues of classic literature, it lacks any faith in them. Instead of the adventure story's com- mand of narrative and dramatic tension, it proceeds like a very slow no-risk computer game. And, as for Captain Ahab and co., no character lingers long enough to engage you. If The Pagemaster resembles any liter- ary classic, it's the telephone directory: great cast, lousy plot.
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