Issue #20/101, October 12 - 26, 2000  

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The Dane, the Shaft & the Hollow

The instructions were right there, written out perfectly clear in reasonably sized black text on a simple white background. Worst of all, I had written them myself: “I urge all of you who still retain some degree of dignity to steer well clear of the city’s cinemas this month...once that final booze ad or blockbuster trailer has run, it could very well be pretentious moron Lars von Trier’s DANCER IN THE DARK that greets you.”

But did I listen? No, of course I did not. An early evening cup of very bad coffee and some half-baked psychological mumbo-jumbo led me to the dubious conclusion that an encounter with the scum on their own turf would be the most effective way of facing up to the hardest part about getting my head back together these days—i.e., learning to cope with the adjunct paranoia that bombards from all sides in ever-intensifying waves. Jesus, how to deal with all this trash? I don’t know.

But anyway, there I was, nearly experiencing a mental breakdown as I stood in a snaking, geologically slow-moving line at the Radisson—this just to buy a measly ticket to von Trier’s shitstorm. The aging hipsters, the brain-dead idiots, the earnest-faced representatives of Paul Starobin’s reemerging middle class (see p. 4)—they were only too happy to be approaching their intellectual doom. From the look of it, you’d think they were handing out multi-entry Shengen visas at the end of that damn line.

But I maintained and even managed to sit through the so-called film—it wasn’t quite as awful as I had expected, and the times when I nearly walked out were fewer (not much) than five. The less said about the sluggish pace, the humiliating musical numbers shot on grainy video, and Peter Stormare’s one-note performance the better.

Somehow, the whole experience was made more bearable by the middle-aged Texan sitting next to me (along with his “girlfriend,” an aging whorish-looking type with garish makeup and far too many leather articles of clothing—I wanted to tell her that her wardrobe made her look like a weathered Barbie doll pieced together with wrinkled duct tape) who kept talking—not loud exactly, but more than loud enough simply by virtue of the fact that he was a Texan. He was constantly telling his “girlfriend” what was going to happening to next, and seemed pretty damn pleased about his revelatory powers. And that—if anything—is what you’ve really got to love about this Lars von Trier fuck—his technique is so in-your-face and heavy-handed that even a fumigated cockroach like my temporary Texan neighbor can tell what’s coming next.

Even so, Dancer in the Dark was not nearly as unwatchable as Breaking the Waves. Now that was a painful movie.

Meanwhile, new on your store shelves this week is SHAFT, John Singleton’s stylized remake of the 1971 blaxploitation classic. In true fin-de-siecle form, original star Richard Roundtree is on hand for a brief cameo—as the original “Shaft” as it turns out, with Samuel L. Jackson as his crime-fighting nephew of the same name (a twist that’s decidedly reminiscent of the 1980s Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks Dragnet pic). And Isaac Hayes’s South Park-derived resurgence couldn’t have been better timed—his slightly updated original score sounds as good as it ever did.

By and large, there’s nothing much to complain about here. Singleton’s directing may be a bit obvious, but still it deftly toes the line between tough-guy heroics and cartoonish hyperbole. Certainly, Shaft is the most put together of his post-Boyz n the Hood output (just do your best to ignore the over-reliance on Star Wars-style dissolve transitions; presumably it’s a tick Singleton picked up at the USC Film School—which also happens to be George Lucas’s alma mater).

It hardly even seems worth mentioning old Samuel L. This, among many others, is a part he was born to play—and he doesn’t do a whole lot to fuck things up. He wears a whole mess of black leather, utters some cold-hearted shit, and catches the bad guy. In a word—he’s a cool motherfucker. You couldn’t ask much more of the man. True, many fans of the original will miss Roundtree’s white-bimbo-bangin’ sexual bravado, but you don’t me to tell you that we be livin’ in different times here.

Anyway, throw in Dan Hedaya as a hirsute dirty cop, scene-stealing Christian Bale as the rich whitey villain, and Busta Rhymes for some well-times comic relief, and you got a recipe for—if not exactly a memorable film, then at least two hours without of more or less hassle-free viewing, as Taibbi has noted. Hell, you can sure do a whole lot worse these days.

Like HOLLOW MAN, for example. A Paul Verhoeven-directed sci-fi fable about some government scientists who have unlocked the key to invisibility, it sounds a lot more promising than it actually is.

Even the briefest glance over the stars’ names should be sufficient to give you an idea of the score—Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Shue, Kim Dickens, John Brolin, William Devane. In fact, the only cast member we here at the eXile feel deserves the slightest bit of credit (for reasons that will soon be readily obvious) is one Gary A. Hecker, provider of the “gorilla vocals.”

Other than that, Hollow Man manages to squander every starting advantage it has. Examples: the potentially rich amphetamine subtext of a egomaniacal experimental scientist who has undergone the invisibility process for too long, goes insane, and then starts murdering all of his colleagues is never explored in the least. Likewise, our invisible man only ever makes half good on the opportunity to sneak up on his female colleagues and molest them while they’re sleeping—even the scene where Bacon apparently rapes his voyeur-friendly neighbor was deleted by overly sensitive censors, the action being left to the viewers imagination (“what imagination?” my more sensible readers are now reasonably asking). And then there’s that gorilla—she appears prominently (even when invisible) in the opening minutes, then recedes into the background in order to make way for a wax-faced, allegedly maniacal Kevin Bacon. And speaking of my fellow Philadelphia native and namesake, this is yet another film in which he goes out of his way to show us his penis. In this case it’s only a digital rendering of what his cock might look like were he (and it) invisible, but unfortunately we still get the idea.

In closing then, let’s have just one more shout out for the largely unsung Gary A. Hecker (he of the “gorilla vocals”) and call it a day.

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