Movies into Film
Three Blind Mice
Slumming: Royals Richardson and James Fox (Photo: Paramount)
The Prince & Me
Directed by Martha Coolidge
Latter Days
Directed by C. Jay Cox
Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Directed by Larry Blamire
USA, 2004
I have been blessed by a number of bad films recently. Only one of them—the gay Mormon sitcom Latter Days—merits a full-on thrashing. The other two may be gutted quickly and, I hope, painlessly.
Let me say this about Martha Coolidge’s The Prince & Me. When the preview screening I attended was over, people didn’t walk out of the auditorium. They ran. They ran as if burning coals were under foot. The movie, due in early April, wastes Julia Stiles, Miranda Richardson, and Alberta Watson in a script that wasn’t written: it was scraped off a grease pit. Even taking The Prince & Me on terms of major studio fluff, it’s still an agonizing experience to endure. No one seems to be having a good time in this joyless stiff, least of all the talented Ms. Stiles, who has lines like, “That is the beauty of a meritocracy.” In brief: the titular prince, a knave from Denmark, sees a porno ad on late-night TV, and packs up valet in tow to meet loose American college girls. Instead he encounters Ms. Stiles, who douses his ardor with a pitcher of lager in the face. Soon, though, pre-med Julia trades in her Johns Hopkins acceptance for a shot at joining the Royal Danes. “All those things you thought were important don’t matter anymore,” she justifies. Do we need still another mainstream movie promoting such misguided crap?
Of Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, I shall say even less as it has come and gone. The movie, a horribly forced black-and-white DV homage to 1950s sci-fi camp, has a grand total of one funny line. When two travelers from another planet don human garb and swill Scotch with Californians for the first time, the female unit slurs defensively, “I certainly am a normal Earth woman!” Her male compadre covers her gaffe: “My wife sometimes forgets that she is *not* a space alien.”
Latter Days doesn’t have space aliens, but it does have the voices of angels, or rather a bunch of schnooks who are convinced that they hear them. The directorial debut of screenwriter C. Jay Cox (he also penned the execrable Sweet Home Alabama) Latter Days abounds with inane dialogue and plot machinations both feeble and febrile. Shall I just quote a sample? A gay man complains to a co-worker that his ex-lover is fond of leaping out of his apartment window. “You live on the first floor,” the listener protests. “Yes, but it’s hell on my azaleas,” comes the rejoinder. Later, a young Mormon missionary speaks of his suppressed sexual desire: “Some nights I wake up and I find teeth marks on my headboard.” Brilliant, wouldn’t you agree? You can probably already hear the canned laugh tracks in your head. Or are those the voices of angels?
Cox prays to the God of sitcoms, although that hasn’t hindered Latter Days from winning at least six “best in show” audience awards at lesbian and gay film festivals across the nation, including Seattle. If there’s one task that the writer-director has mastered, it’s pandering.
Latter Days surpasses The Hours in offensiveness in the use of AIDS as a defining character trait. (Not that anyone in Latter Days is a character, mind you; Cox trades in cliché and archetype.) Here, the filmmaker uses AIDS to make the person with it exotic, noble, and wise—a veritable Yoda. But because Cox can’t do much of anything without winking and nudging, the AIDS patient eventually pipes up, “I think I’m the oracle at Delphi.”
Cox does even more to incite us to strangle him. In the cheat of cheats, he shows one of the major characters attempt suicide and for about a 20-minute stretch, the director lets us believe that the young man is really dead. But no, he’s alive after all so that Latter Days can have its sugarcoated happy ending.
Ramsey, Bisset, and Rebekah Jordan in Latter Days (TLA Releasing)
Given the poverty of both the material and the driving force behind it, Latter Days benefits immensely from the lead performances of Wes Ramsey and Steve Sandvoss. True, both are Adonis clones in states of physical perfection, whereas most of the men flocking to see this film will more likely resemble Peter Jackson or Michael Moore; still, Sandvoss, as the cornflower clean-cut Mormon boy, and Ramsey, as a narcissistic seducer of anything that breathes, are not without acting chops. I have to complain, though, about the idiocy of the scene where Ramsey “outs” Sandvoss. Ramsey suffers a minor cut, one treatable with hydrogen peroxide and a band-aid. Swooning around, he moans, “It’s so hot.” “Maybe I should get you a cool cloth,” Sandvoss volunteers, and voila—they collapse into bed.
At that point, Cox pulls his lone surprise: the seduction doesn’t become a seduction. The director goes on, however, to negate the grown-up novelty of this by having Sandvoss abandon Ramsey once they ultimately consummate their lust; the Mormon moves back in with his pious Idaho relations, leaving his lover not so much as a note. Cox then treats us to his idea of mise-en-scene: footage of a dreadful (and dreadlocked) pop singer braying about being free in America with cuts to the Mormon church excommunicating Sandvoss for his “sin.”
Finally, there is Jacqueline Bisset wandering through a few scenes. It’s good to see her again. Ms. Bisset has been saddled with one of the most unspeakable lines of dialogue in recent history. Playing the owner of a chi-chi L.A. restaurant, she oozes, “These days, I believe in miracles.” Yes, but you may not after you’ve sat through this. – NPT
March 8, 2004
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com