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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, January 2nd, 1998 - Comments Off on THE 10 MOVIES I DIDN'T GET IN 1997
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THE 10 MOVIES I DIDN'T GET IN 1997

These are the successful films that I just couldn’t find a reason to love. I tried. I swear. But no luck. Listed in reverse order of financial success.
10. Parker Posey movies: She was the toast of Sundance with The House of Yes, Clockwatchers and SubUrbia. None of them sold tickets. She’s cute. She can act. But I can take her or leave her and apparently, so can you.
9. The Ice Storm: I could see how well-crafted this portrait of the sexual revolution in suburbia was, but I didn’t really care. Maybe too many of these characters were direct reflections of my school friends’ divorced parents.
8. Chasing Amy: Blonde hair, nice tush, squeaky voice and a lesbian to boot. Cool. I didn’t buy it for a minute. I think maybe everyone in the movie was a little too nice for me to care about.
7. Mimic: Guillermo del Toro is a very talented guy, but like the brilliant Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who came from France to make Alien: Resurrection, his ability to offer a straightforward narrative is as limited as his visual style is overwhelming. Great bugs though.
6. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion: Sorry to be doubling up on Mira, but what was up with this lump of gold-plated turd? Two terrific and engaging actresses and a really funny premise. Did they have to invert Rocky and make the stars losers even though they won?
5. Picture Perfect: There are people who enjoyed this movie. I enjoy watching Jennifer Aniston in mini-dresses, but I could have just taped “Friends” for that. A good idea gone disastrously wrong.
4. Cop Land: I wanted to care about Stallone. I wanted DeNiro to do more than sleepwalk through a cameo. I wanted to hate Keitel. But who could care about these mooks? I’d love to see the movie about the women in the lives of these people. They have a story to tell. And about seven minutes total screentime in this flick. Janeane Garofalo‘s cameo ties Winona Ryder’s Alien 4 turn as 1997’s biggest waste of a great talent.
3. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery: Just rent In Like Flint, baby! How many times is “you wanna shag?” funny? For me, once. They even took the very clever “fruit covering genitals” gag and did it twice, ensuring that it would be run into the ground.
2. I Know What You Did Last Summer: Teens, tank tops, terror. I’m not saying I hated this movie. I didn’t. Heck, I might have even liked it. But it dominated the fall in a way that seemed to suggest that it was a movie worthy of repeat viewings. It was a lot fresher than another Freddie Kruger romp, but it was the kind of movie that its screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, mocked in the far better Scream.
1. George of the Jungle: I loved the original cartoon on which this one was based. Loved it! This just didn’t do it for me. It was OK, but not $105 million worth of OK. Oddly enough, it was less layered commercially than the cartoon. And I don’t remember Ursula being as dumb as George in the cartoon. Most jokes could have been funnier.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon