Cinema
Tarzan (U, selected cinemas) Simply Irresistible (12, selected cinemas)
King of the swingers
Mark Steyn
Most of us assumed Tarzan had been buried with Johnny Weissmuller a couple of years back, when the impeccably shaven- chested, incorrigibly wooden actor was borne to his final resting place by six simian pall-bearers while the PA system blared his famous jungle yodel across the cemetery. Hard to beat that. And, given that in the years preceding we'd had British Tarzans (Greystoke) and erotic Tarzans (with Bo Derek), what more was there to say?
Well, Disney decided to go back to the vine for one last swing. After the way they've handled anything involving trees and/or Brits in the last decade (Pocahontas), one's heart did not exactly leap with the gay insouciance of a playful 'Hi, I'm Lennox from No. 6 — I thought you might fancy coming round for a cup of coffee?' springbok. The caring Nineties Tarzan seemed certain to involve an African- American African princess staring into a limpid pool while singing an overwrought power ballad about 'The Tree Of Life' or 'The Twig And Berries' or 'Leaf Us Alone' or whatever. But, amazingly, this Tarzan isn't packing any messages in his loincloth — as long as you discount the early scenes of the orphaned baby adjusting to his new gorilla parents: 'Forget what you see,' says his hirsute mom Kala (voiced by Glenn Close). 'What do you feel?' Presumably, this is some sort of plug for 'alternative family values': lesbian couples may look different but that doesn't mean they're not loving and supportive parents. So the young boy learns to look beyond the body hair and soon he's best chums with Terk, a wisecracking gorilla voiced by Rosie O'Donnell. As he grows up, he starts work- ing out on those vines and his animators start working overtime — even his knuck- les have muscles — yet, despite the pres- sure to conform to simian notions of beauty, he apparently dunks himself in a vat of industrial strength Immac every morning.
But, just as you're waiting for him to move to Los Angeles and join the Chip- pendales, he meets Jane and the rest of the English camp (voiced by Minnie Driver, Nigel Hawthorne and co. with tremendous brio), and the story resumes its familiar tra- jectory. Him Tarzan, her Jane, who cares? This is one Tarzan where you can't see the ape for the trees: thanks to the latest ani- mation toy, something called Deep Canvas, the jungle backgrounds leap to life as never before and the formerly stock shots of the king of the swingers travelling through the lush forest are one of the highlights of the picture. The lowlight is Phil Collins's score.
Back in the real world — or, more accu- rately, the meal world — Simply Irresistible is a tale of love across the restaurant class- es: Sarah Michelle Gellar is the chef at a homely downtown eatery on its way out, Sean Patrick Flannery is a department store exec presiding over the launch of a multimillion dollar swank dining-room.
If that sounds like the short-order ver- sion of You've Got Mail, it is for a bit. But then You've Got Mail turns into You've Got Crabs: a mysterious crab merchant sells Amanda (Miss Gellar) a pail of magi- cal crustaceans, and a formerly indifferent cook is transformed into a great chef who pours all her emotions into her food. When she's feeling romantic, her caramel pastries spur everyone who eats them into sex in the elevators, etc.; when she's feeling sad, one bite of the hors d'oeuvres and her cus- tomers are also weeping. If that sounds like Like Water For Chocolate, it is, shamelessly — at least until the end when the reason for the upscale Henri Bendel department store setting becomes clear and Miss Gel- lar gets kitted out like a bargain-basement Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
In between are all the other elements
now obligatory in such a story: Tom leans out of the window crying 'Amanda!' as the taxi speeds away; as a biz exec, he must learn to give up his cellphone, appoint- ments schedule and snotty cadaverous bitch of a girlfriend — in this case, Aman- da Peet — and get in touch with feelings he never knew he had. These are chiefly expressed through rather half-hearted hommages to Fred and Ginger in Top Hat which would work if, on the one hand, Gel- lar and Flannery could dance or, on the other, they were charmingly amateur. But they're neither. The film strives for a tone that consistently eludes it: the romance is never quite romantic enough, the fantasy never quite fantastic enough, the whimsy never quite whimsical enough — mostly due to Mark Tarlov's heavy-handed direc- tion. It should be a fluffy souffif but it's as light as a cement block.
The all too resistible Simply Irresistible is an awful waste of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who, in her TV role as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is one of the hottest stars of the moment. I preferred her in Cruel Intentions, the trashy high-school version of Dangerous Liaisons in which she plays a scheming tramp out to seduce her step- brother. But the dance sequences in partic- ular are an embarrassing reminder of how today ostensibly big stars are, at core, terri- bly ... ordinary.
Previous page
