Cinema
Casper (PG', selected cinemas) The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers ('PG', selected cinemas)
The cost of Idle talk
Mark Steyn
The more I see British actors in Holly- wood movies, the more I wonder why Miss Divine Brown's parking lot off Sunset Boulevard isn't backed up for four blocks. If they'd cast me rather than Hugh Grant in Nine Months, I'd he down there every night just to get the day's shoot out of my system: 'You think this is hard to swallow? You should see my next picture.'
A minute or so into Casper, a suit, a wrinkly face and a ridiculous perm show up, and you think, 'Good grief, Gene Wilder looking even worse than usual.' Then it clicks: Eric Idle, formerly of Monty 'I might write a book about my experiences, if I can nick a typewriter.' Python, star of Rutland Weekend Television, a memorable contributor to Jonathan Miller's Mikado. He's a pretty funny guy, right? Here, he has two jokes in the first two minutes. In the first joke, his hand catches fire. In the second joke, his hand catches fire again. They're not good jokes — both are tired contrivances — but they're all he has. For the rest of the picture, he ain't got zip: for Eric Idle, it seems, there's no joke without fire. As you watch him playing doormat to a coarse, charmless comedy-killer of an actress, you ponder the perversity of Hollywood: why hire a man famous for being funny and bury him in a feed role?
As for Casper himself, he's a friendly ghost who just passes the time aimlessly, increasingly unable to remember who he was all those years ago (possibly something in the story struck a chord with Idle). But, even granted the exhaustive pop culture exhumation of recent years, I'm puzzled by the return of Casper. He doesn't haunt my memory. I vaguely recall him from my childhood, but 90s remakes are invariably worse and anyway I always thought he was a bit of a prat back then. With Steven Spielberg producing, the heart sank even further. Spielberg's non-directing assign- ments mostly have the whiff of franchise takeovers: I'll never forgive him for screw- ing up The Flintstones, a 50s' cartoon a zil- lion times better than Casper. And Spielberg's kiddie films are even more cringe-making: all that let's-recapture-our- lost-innocence stuff in Hook comes over like a guy trying to assuage his guilt at being a Hollywood mogul. So a Spielberg- produced kidvid TV spin-off was a triple threat. As things turn out, Eric Idle aside, it's a pleasant surprise.
This is, of course, only by the debased standards of contemporary children's movies, the apotheosis of Hollywood vul- garity and huckstering. If your moppet is pliable enough to let you choose between Casper and The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, pick Casper. The Mighty Morphin Morons will have the kids demanding all the accompanying dolls and computer games and CD ROMs; Casper, on the other hand, won't set you back anything other than the cost of the movie and maybe a white sheet (single, polyester) with two eye holes cut in it (hours of fun for all the family). It's disfigured by the usual things: Casper is supposed to be a little Edwardian ghost, but, like Disney's Aladdin and the Prince in Beauty and The Beast and every other juvenile lead in Hollywood children's movies, he talks like a surf stud auditioning for Beverly Hills 90210. I was surprised, too, by some of the language — Ter Chris- sakes', etc. One of the reasons why Spiel- berg pines for the lost innocence of Peter Pan is because modern children's culture strikes at the very notion of childhood.
But in between are some neat lines: asked to describe what he's made of, Casper says, 'You know that tingly feeling
when your foot falls asleep? I think I'm made of that.' And the director, Brad Sil- berling, has some fine live action/animation set pieces: at one point, Casper's three rau- cous uncles use him as an accordion and play 'Shine On, Harvest Moon' on him. It's a chaotically structured tale: the Eric Idle buried treasure plot gets ditched ten min- utes in, and we slide into an ever more wobbly blancmange about dead moms, weeping dads, lonely daughters, culminat- ing in an angels-watching-o'er-us frontal assault on the tear-ducts. Silberling draws a wonderful performance from Cristina Ricci as the teenager that Casper takes a shine to (she looks like a female Casper). And, in the traditional Spielbergian bespectacled overgrown schoolboy role, there's the underrated Bill Pulford, who's much better than Robin Williams in Hook. It's funny, thoughtful, soppy, melancholy and the Least Depraved Children's Film of the summer.
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