Reality Bites ***
(1994)
Starring: Winona Ryder, Ben Stiller, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo
Directed by: Ben Stiller
Screenplay: Helen Childress

[Ed. note: I wrote this review, of course, speaking as an uninvolved, neutral third party with no axe to grind. I think you'll agree that it shows.]

This is one of those movies that serves as a cautionary tale: Doing a great job with the first hour and fifteen minutes doesn't mean you're home free. Having said that, I will say that this review gives away the plot in a way I usually don't. The reason for that is that the movie's major flaw -- its huge, unfixable flaw -- is how terribly wrong its plot goes in the last ten minutes or so. It's so bad that it throws off the whole film. So if you're waiting to see it, skip this till later. I'll still be here.

Yes, and he's crying on the inside, etc. etc. etc.

Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder) is a recent college graduate who has a relatively promising future, including an apartment she shares with her friend Vicki (Janeane Garofalo, in the first part that made her really famous) and an internship at a local morning TV show hosted by an unctuous creep (John Mahoney, Frasier). She fills her time hanging out with Vicki, as well as with her friends Sammy (Steve Zahn) and Troy (Ethan Hawke). Sammy is gay (everybody in a chat flick has to have a gay friend), and he's in the process of trying to figure out how to come out to his mother. Troy is a bit more complicated. Intelligent and possessing a brutally sharp wit, he is nonetheless content to drift from one meaningless job to another, apparently gaining most of his pleasure in life from burying barbs under the skin of others -- especially Lelaina. Sure, sure, he does it because he likes her, but as the film progresses, it's bothering her more and more.

When things begin to go bad for Lelaina, they go really bad. First, she gets into a fender-bender with a friendly MTV executive named Michael Grates (Ben Stiller) (oh, it's not officially MTV, but it is), and then she loses her job. She manages to get into fights with her friends regularly, particularly Troy, who she is always needling to get his act together and get a real job and stop living a life where all he does is "eat and couch and fondle the remote control." He hates the needling, but he likes that she's paying attention. (This where anyone who has ever been in one of these relationships says, "Ahhhh, I sense a vicious cycle here.") Clearly, it makes him feel safe and snuggly to know he's causing her so much anxiety -- it seems to remind him that he is still breathing. Thus, when she starts to date the exec, Troy feels a bit intruded upon. He's got the right line -- "Did he dazzle you with his extensive knowledge of mineral water, or was it his in-depth analysis of Marky-Mark that finally reeled you in?" -- but he can't seem to make any headway. She stubbornly sticks it out with the exec for a while and lets Troy stew in his own juices. One senses, however, that her plan is that this will cause him to come to his senses and cause him (according to the Rick Miller Theory of Women announced in the outstanding and underrated Watch It) to change. She has, after all, a clear romantic attachment to Troy which is not exactly serving her well.

My friends would make for a great documentary . . . or would have, when we were all young and ridiculous

The film's gimmick (which Roger Ebert reviewed instead of reviewing the movie) is that Lelaina is a budding documentary filmmaker, so she is always filming her friends talking about their lives and their histories and their feelings about things, as well as filming them in seemingly unimportant activities like eating half-baked brownies out of a Tupperware container and discussing whether anybody has money for pizza. This serves in part as a method of exposition (as when Troy explains some of his family situation or when we follow the promiscuous Vicki to her AIDS test) and in part as a plot element itself, as when Michael becomes fascinated with Lelaina's tapes and wants to sell them to his network. (The ensuing artistic modifications present a challenge for the relationship.)

What makes the first three-quarters of this movie so good is that they contain scene after scene, and moment after moment, in which the overwound emotional dynamics of college and post-college are perfectly captured. Once people reach about twenty-five, they tend to have less screaming matches. Less fights in which everything pours out in a long stream of agony and hurt. In the film, these people are having their last few conversations like this. Troy and Lelaina are forever at each other, with him practicing tugging on her and then pushing on her, and with her constantly measuring herself against what he thinks. The honest truth is that there is just far less time for this sort of thing once everyone has a job. So I think of this movie not so much as a "Generation X" movie, because I think this phenomenon is timeless. I think of it as an anybody-in-college movie. It's not the time in our cultural history that makes this a movie people can relate to, it's the time in life. And so, as the movie dodges back and forth between moments of enormous honesty and revelation, as when Vicki discusses her fear of AIDS, and moments of falsity and game-playing, as when Vicki returns from her first date with Michael, it reveals a lot about the complexity of these dynamics but also hints that the best thing to do is often to devote less time to them.

Is the movie too pretentious and chatty? Sure. Is it whiny at times, and are these people sometimes self-absorbed? Sure. Again, I would emphasize that these kids are right at the part of life where you become responsible for more than just not getting in trouble, which is pretty much your number-one job until you're out of school. Does it have a deserved reputation for some overwrought dialogue? Absolutely. Does that take away from its copious moments of genuine insight? Not for me.

I hate this guy. I mean, in real life, at twenty, I would have fallen in love with him, but I hate this guy.

What's more, Ethan Hawke's performance is utterly brilliant, I am here to tell you. This kind of edgy, not-self-aware character who sees himself one way -- call it "Wounded Rebel" -- and is in fact another way entirely -- call it "Arrogant Pig" -- is terribly difficult to pull off. In fact, the characterization is so subtle that the guy is almost appealing. the performance Hawke gives in this film should be far more admired than it is, because it contains far more truth than 85% of romantic lead acting. Ryder, too, does a very fine job with this girl who is just standing on the brink of figuring out that she knows better than to be in this relationship. She has a great speech in which she begins to pour out her frustrations, saying "Don't fuck around with her [pointing to Troy's latest empty-headed girlfriend] . . . or with me. Try at something for once in your life." The film does a good job of building her character to the point where you can't help but sense that something is going to change.

It's a problem when you draw him well . . .

So where does the film go wrong? It goes wrong because it sets up these characters so beautifully and defines them so well, and then has them do things that make no sense. The movie knows what it is doing right up to and including the day after Troy and Lainie's inevitable sexual encounter, at which time he deserts her and runs off to play with his band. It knows what is doing up to and including a really excellent scene at the club where the band is rehearsing, in which Troy attempts to apologize, but only in the context of a continued desperate attempt at backpedaling. Lainie suddenly realizes what she really already knew, which is that this was not a good idea and he is nowhere near feeling what she wants him to be feeling. She stomps her foot and, in what I think is one of Ryder's most heartfelt lines in the film, says, "I knew this was gonna happen! I knew this was gonna happen!" And she's right. And that is why smart women all over the world watch this scene and say, "Well . . . right." And so when Troy tries to reclaim her by insulting her and almost daring her to put up with him -- "I might do mean things, and I might hurt you, and I might run away without your permission and you might hate me forever and I know that that scares the shit out of you because I'm the only real thing that you have" -- she comes up with the right answer (hooray!), which is that that, if true, is incredibly depressing.

Not to try to improve on a perfectly good exit line, and not to be indelicate, but I would suggest that her correct line is, "Fuck you."

So here is this great moment of learning and growth for this character. Lelaina has just had a light bulb go on over her head that suggests she is figuring out that perhaps it is a mistake to associate, as Troy does, "real" with "excruciating." Yes, perhaps Michael is a little dull for her, and perhaps she was only dating him as part of her ongoing sparring with Troy. Nevertheless, she is beginning to get it. She's a little like the computer in WarGames that doesn't learn it can't win playing itself at Tic-Tac-Toe until it fails to win a thousand times, but then eventually it announces, in a tired little IBM voice, "The only way to win is not to play."

. . . and then suggest he isn't that at all

The movie then goes on to entirely undermine everything it has just done. (I have read that the ending was changed to satisfy test audiences -- perhaps that's the problem. That's almost never a good thing.) Suddenly, we find ourselves watching a weakened Lelaina and a suddenly-heartbroken Troy as they mope and smoke and don't talk to each other. The movie builds to an absurd -- I'm telling you, absurd -- climactic scene in which this guy who has spent his life making sure he isn't obligated to anybody comes back on his own to stand on the front lawn of Lelaina's house and -- get this -- declare his feelings. "I have a planet of regret sitting on my shoulders," he begins. He-llo? This is the same guy who promised a little while ago that he would "do mean things to you," "hurt you," and "run away without your permission," and now all of a sudden he has a planet of regret?

Come on, I holler at the screen, tell him to go to hell. It's time.

But before she can tell him to go to hell, he explains that his father has died, and he has thus had an "arcane glimpse at the universe." Excuse me? An arcane glimpse? She's known the guy for years, obviously, and he's never seemed any more aware of the existence of other people's feelings than an ant is aware of the beginning of the new season of The X-Files, and now he's experienced an arcane glimpse? From one painful event? Certainly, this would have been a painful event, but the sad thing is that in most cases, a painful event such as this reinforces, and does not cure, the problems with this kind of person. The movie goes on, blissfully unaware that it has just sabotaged quite a bit of terrific work by a couple of marvelous and skilled young actors.

He came back to tell her, he says, that he loves her.

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You see, this movie has just done probably the most masterful job I have ever seen displaying the behavior of the emotionally unavailable. And there's a thing about the emotionally unavailable -- emotionally speaking, they tend to be unavailable. Not "difficult," not "challenging," not "time-consuming." Unavailable. So to have this guy show up and spontaneously announce himself in this manner is completely and utterly ridiculous. What makes the unavailable unavailable is that there is, in the end, no love scene on the front lawn.

Thus, the movie takes what could have been a very real and very moving theme -- known as Sometimes One Must Grit One's Teeth, Say Hell With You, and Move On -- and transformed it into the ever-so-slightly different If You Wait Long Enough and Suffer a Really Really Lot, Eventually You Will Hear a Speech in Which a Planet of Regret is Mentioned. Oh, boooooooo.

So as far as I'm concerned, a lot of fine, fine acting and good dialogue goes utterly to waste in this story in which the entire point is betrayed by the last few scenes. If you must watch it, perhaps you should turn it off after Michael and Troy have their discussion outside the club in which the "Alas, poor Yorick" speech is referenced (that's a very funny moment, by the way). At that point, you have learned all you are going to learn, and you are about to see what seems to be an ending written by a seventeen-year-old girl tacked onto a script written by a thirty-year-old woman.

It's a real shame.

Hush *
(1998)
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Lange, Johnathon Schaech, Nina Foch
Directed by: Jonathan Darby
Screenplay: Jonathan Darby, Jane Rusconi

This movie just stinks. Stinks like old shoes. Stinks like banana Chap-Stick. Stinks like exotic French cheese.

Hush is the story of young morons Helen (Gwyneth "Bag of Elbows" Paltrow) and Jackson (Jonathan "I Am Peter Gallagher's Love Child" Schaech), who are living a wonderful up-and-coming city lifestyle at the opening of the movie, despite the fact that it appears that neither of them is intelligent enough to make toast. They have one of those free-and-easy relationships where you sense that they drink a lot of red wine while discussing avant-garde theater and why nobody makes good antique furniture anymore. She is an architect (oh, yeah, right) and he is . . . something else, and the two of them make the perfect couple (assuming that by "perfect," you mean "vapid").

Jackson takes Helen home to meet his mother Martha (Jessica Lange). (I have news for Helen -- anytime you find out that someone in your life is being played by Jessica Lange, you are in trouble. This development ranks, in terms of dangerousness, only slightly below finding out that she is being played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, or that her husband is being played by Gary Oldman.) At any rate, Martha is a horse-breeder, living alone on her enormous farm as she has ever since the long-ago death of Jackson's father. The farm is named, with enormous subtlety, Kilronan. (I suppose this name beat out the also-considered Murderalia, Ominousview, and Evilwood.) Martha is substantially too adoring of Jackson, and it is obvious from the start that she does not appreciate his little friend Helen. In fact, it is obvious from the start that she plans to do mean things to Helen, but Helen doesn't seem to notice, and neither does Jackson (I'm thinking that for one thing, they probably can't hear the music on the soundtrack, which is entitled "The Theme From Unmistakable Foreshadowing.") This is the beginning of their slow torture by their own stupidity.

The peril of the situation is presented in a series of vignettes, beginning with Martha seeing Helen in Jackson's room wearing nothing but her blank expression, and including Helen and Jackson's eye-rolling exasperation when Martha attempts to get Helen to cover up a little for church, that are meant to demonstrate Martha's unhealthy possessiveness. The fact that the dress Helen has chosen looks like it came from a red-lipped girl in a Robert Palmer video and is no more suitable for church than a clown suit is a fact that film overlooks. At first, Helen finds Martha overbearing, but after a while, she learns to ignore all her good instincts and hug the creepy Martha with what appears to be actual warmth. Unfortunately, just as all this warm fuzziness is coming along, Helen and Jackson are suddenly compelled by circumstances to leave New York and move to Kilronan to live with the pushy Martha. (What a concidence! Isn't that amazing?) At around the same time, Helen discovers herself to be pregnant.

Once she arrives at Kilronan, Helen defies the Wicked Matriarch by striking up a friendship with Jackson's grandmother (Nina Foch, who romanced Gene Kelly in An American in Paris about forty-five years ago), who most definitely does not like Martha one little bit. And Martha clearly does not like Grandma, either. One senses that these two women have "issues." Grandma is always hinting about Martha's devious and dangerous ways, but she stops short of giving Helen the kind of direct warning you might expect. Basically, the film spends its middle two-thirds or so establishing something we knew before the opening credits -- there's something about Martha that Just Ain't Right.

It becomes clear as time passes that Martha is just barely hanging on to the few marbles she has left, and is hanging on to Jackson with equal ferocity. Meanwhile, Helen becomes rounder and rounder and more and more convinced that raising her baby in the presence of its grandmother is probably a bad idea. When Helen is a couple of weeks from her due date, Jackson goes away for a little while, leaving Mommie Dearest at home with the little woman. Mommie Dearest, having just had a conversation with the world's least ethical physician, has a plan. As the plan unfolds, one can't help but think, "Who cares?"

And that's the problem. I found Helen to be stupid and snippy, Jackson to be a big wimp who treats his mother better than his wife, and Martha to be one "Boo!" short of scary. As our friends at Mystery Science Theater would say, she's not scary, she's just kinda goofy. The bigger issue I have with the character of Martha is that there's never any indication of why she's doing all this. I mean, by the end, her immediate motivation (meaning what she intends to happen) is clear, but there's no suggestion of what would make her turn out like this. Although bad movies have a tendency to embrace the idea of the random psychotic, I find it much more interesting when there's some way to see what it is that's gone wrong with a person. Consider the lengths to which Martha seems willing to go, she would have to be suffering from a mental illness so severe that I seriously doubt she could have been running a horse farm for the last twenty years without anybody having any idea she was this bad off. To have a character "snap" is fine; to have a character "snap" for no apparent reason is not fine.

It also must be said that both the climactic "scary part" of this movie and the follow-up "payoff" are so dumb they're laughable. Suffice it to say that as the proud aunt of a very, very new little boy, I simply don't believe that if things progressed for Helen as they're presented, Jackson would have shown up, said "Whew!", and gone to sleep. Hello, has anybody in this movie ever heard of a doctor? What's more, Helen's I-Am-Pregnant-See-Me-Run sequence is possibly even more unlikely, as she manages to run through a forest and clamber up a hill into oncoming traffic, but then meekly gives in at the first sign of Martha. Come on, people, let's have some imagination!

As for the "payoff," it comes out of absolutely nowhere. It's one of these scenes where a person who has behaved like a complete idiot for an hour and a half suddenly turns into Sherlock Holmes and lets loose with a Torrent of Long-Held Secrets, the revealing of which causes the wrongdoer to thrash and deny in a highly guilt-displaying fashion. It also has the misfortune of being one of those movies where, when it's over, you think . . . "Ummm, okay. Am I supposed to believe that now everything is okay?" For an ending, it's not much of an ending, if you know what I mean.

Paltrow is too smart for this part, and I honestly can't imagine what she was thinking. How could you not look at this movie and see cliches dripping from every page? As for Schaech, he's a capable guy. He was cute in That Thing You Do!, and he's probably as good in this as anybody could have been. Essentially, though, he's got a whole lot of nothing to do. In a weird way, he's got what is usually the woman's part. Let me explain: unlike most movies, in which the men are the subjects and the women are the objects (with respect to every word from "rescue" to "kill" to "kiss"), this movie is mostly about the women, and Jackson is really only important because of the part he plays in the relationship between them. So he's sort of in the Girly-Role Wasteland. Welcome to Paradise, cutie-pie.

As for Lange, I'm sure it's a kick to play a nutball like Martha, and I'm sure you feel like you're flexing your dramatic muscles when you do things like scream and writhe and throw fits and threaten people's lives. Nevertheless, there have to be better movies out there than this if that's what you want to do. So to those of you who know Jessica personally, pass this on to her: Ms. Linda says this sort of thing is beneath you.

So stay away from this piece of dreck if you value your time or want to retain your respect for some of the fine talent inexplicably lassoed into Hush.

Autumn in New York 1/2*
(2000)
Starring: Winona Ryder, Richard Gere
Directed by: Joan Chen
Screenplay: Allison Burnett

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm really getting tired of movies in which someone teaches Richard Gere the true meaning of love. Most obviously, this was the plot of Pretty Woman, but it's also been the plot of just about every movie he's ever done. (I am exaggerating, of course, but I am allowed.) Now, we are cursed with the wretched Autumn in New York, where poor Winona Ryder is pressed into service.

Old Man Richard, that Old Man Richard, he just keeps rollin' along . . .

I should mention that when this movie was released, a number of people pointed out that it begged for a Reverse Gender-Age Equivalent, so I am happy to provide one. The RGAE for Richard Gere and Winona Ryder is Meryl Streep and Kid Rock. Now that's a movie you'd want to see, admit it. [In fact, I have it on good authority that Kid Rock actually asked Meryl to star with him in the sequel to Autumn in New York, to be called Springtime in My [bleep]in' [bleep], but Meryl declined. Imagine that.]

At any rate, this time Richard breaks his pattern of playing jerk-lawyers (Primal Fear) and jerk-journalists (Runaway Bride) in order to stretch as an actor and play a jerk-restauranteur by the name of Will. No one likes Will, and no one should like Will, because Will is a pompous, arrogant creep who isn't nearly interesting enough to be fawned over by the likes of Jill Hennessy, late of TV's Law and Order, who is entirely wasted here as one of his on-and-off girlfriends. One day, the odious Will is in his fancy restaurant when he notices a birthday party going on, apparently being conducted in honor of a young woman named Charlotte (Ryder), who is coincidentally the daughter of an old friend of Will's. Charlotte's grandma (Elaine Stritch, Elaine Stritch, why are you in this movie?) doesn't think much of Will, but Will is clearly besotted, especially when he learns that Charlotte made the party hats everyone is wearing.

A word here about those hats: These are not good hats. They are not interesting, artistic, stylish hats. They are hats that look like they were made during an afternoon of arts and crafts at a Y camp. A Y camp for very, very stupid children. They are meant to be whimsical hats, of course, in order to convey the general sense of whimsy with which the script surrounds Charlotte, the better to bodily drag tears from our ducts later when we find out, of course, inevitably, that Charlotte is in fact Very, Very Sick. (I do not consider that plot point to be revealing much. They gave it away in every commercial.)

The part of the movie we like to call, "Yeah, whatever."

Will concocts an elaborate hat-related scheme to reconnect with Charlotte, so we have to sit through an interminable series of contrivances in order to arrive at the following: they go out on a date. She wears a white dress -- that would be the Low-Cut White Dress of Girls Who Give It Up But Remain Virgins In Our Hearts, in case you are keeping score at home. They kiss. She is irresistibly attracted to this grizzled misanthrope, for whatever reason. Canoodling ensues.

The dreaded complication arises, of course, when Charlotte reveals that she has a horrible disease (kinda like a "heart stripe," and if you get that reference, you know you are as pathetic as I am) that will soon finish her off. She wants no heroic efforts to save her life, she just wants to die with dignity while having a lot of sex with old men. (Okay, I made up the last part.) You can take it from here -- he struggles with his need to control the situation, they break up and reunite a few times, blah blah blah. She gets paler and paler.

Finally, he has an appropriate relationship

Meanwhile, Will reconnects with his long-lost daughter (Vera Farmiga), which is the movie's way of showing us that Charlotte, though not destined to reach the age of twenty-four, can nonetheless be happy because she has had a permanent effect on one sad and lonely old jerk. I know that would be a great consolation to me, if I were in her shoes.

The problem with a movie like this is that it can only go one of two ways: if she dies, then the movie ends with a trite, obvious, overdone payoff to which we feel begged to respond. If she does not die, then the movie ends with no payoff at all. There isn't a genuine emotion anywhere in the script, and I never believed for one moment that these people even liked each other, let alone were in love. The entire story has a creepy Oedipal undertone, as if Gere is sleeping with the daughter he never knew. I don't think I'm exaggerating or overstating the case if I say, "eeew."

Get a job, sha na na na . . .

Winona Ryder is a very lovely and talented actress, but this part has no substance for her to work with. Charlotte is purely a symbol, a shameless entry into the creaky old dichotomy of women as angels or hookers. She has a sort of bland serenity, as if she has come to understand everything about life through being sick, but she has no spark, no apparent personality, and evidently no job other than her life as a haberdasher. If all she does all day is make pipe-cleaner hats, how interesting can she really be? I'm serious about this, actually -- it does great damage to characters not to give them anything interesting and adult in which they can be involved. An adult with no work life is a strange adult, indeed.

Richard Gere does nothing, and in fact can do nothing, with the part of Will. You have seen him do this a million times. You know how he will play every scene, you know how he will respond to every situation. There is nothing new here for you, for me, or for these actors.

The bottom line

You shouldn't see this movie unless the only alternative is death by firing squad. Even then, please choose carefully.

Anaconda **
(1997)
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Ice Cube
Directed by: Luis Llosa
Written by: Hans Bauer, Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr.

Now I don't know about you, but whenever I see Jon Voight, I always think, "Swarthy Latino reptile hunter."

Believe it or not, that is one of the least silly ideas you will be asked to stomach in the astonishingly wretched Anaconda, a 1997 release featuring Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, and the phoniest snake I've ever seen. In fact, for those of you familiar with the classic "Mystery Science Theater" episode, "Cave Dwellers," the snake that Ator kills (while his sweetheart stands by helplessly) looks a lot more realistic than the computer-generated anaconda in this movie. In fact, this snake is so fake that if it actually did come to life and start slithering around, I have no doubt that the other snakes would refuse to be seen with it, because it would reflect badly on them.

Meat make less money

Believe it or not, some relatively respectable actors show up in this crummy flick, and the cast made me think of a moment in Michael Moore's documentary, Roger and Me. In the movie, Moore visits a rural woman who has a sign out in front of her house that explains what she sells for a living. The sign says something like, "Rabbits/Bunnies -- Pets or Meat." (No kidding.) When you see the characters introduced in a movie like this, you have to sort of think of them as Pets and Meat. Some of them, the Pets, you are supposed to become attached to (either positively or negatively) and they kind of keep you company and theoretically provide context for the story. The other ones, the Meat, are just there to get killed, and you can almost see them patiently biding their time until it happens. Among the Pets are Serone (Voight), a . . . well, a swarthy Latino reptile hunter, Terri (Lopez), a nubile young documentary filmmaker (retch, retch, Male Fantasy #8677), Terri's friend Danny (Ice Cube) (I wasn't sure which was the surname there), and Terri's apparently erstwhile sweetheart (Stoltz), now some kind of professor/cultural anthropologist type who wants to study "the people of the mist," who can be found along the Amazon.

Among the Meat are a sweaty river guide, a blond guy who appears to have no function whatsoever, a perky little production assistant (Kari Wuhrer, who used to be on "Class of '96" along with characters my friends and I referred to as "Doogie-Howser-Girlfriend" and "Doogie-Howser-Girlfriend-Liker"), and an English fop who's such a weenie he actually sits at one point with a white hanky on his head, looking like a refugee from some kind of charitable safari event.

Heeeeere, snakey snakey snakey

At the opening of the story (such as it is), everybody (except Serone) sets off in what looks like one of the "Gilligan's Island" huts on a raft, determined to float down the Amazon and find the Mist People. Soon, they run into Serone, who appears to be in trouble on his own boat, so they bring him aboard. Big Mistake. Serone quickly begins issuing dire pronouncements about the fact that the Amazon is filled with giant anacondas (Ohhhh, so that's where the title comes from!) and how they're all pretty much doomed if they're not careful. He also gives Terri a few lecherous stares. In fact, one of the stares he gave her was so lecherous that I actually burst out laughing.

Now, Terri is a smart girl because, like Helen Hunt in "Twister," she knows how to dress for action. I can imagine Jennifer and Helen engulfed in some major natural disaster together, and I can almost see one of them turn in a horrified fashion to a nearby assistant and say, gravely, "Andre, the thin cotton shirts." And then I can see Andre turn back to them, saying, "Will you be needing any undergarments?" And then Helen and Jennifer look at each other, then back at him, and Helen says, "We'd better not. This looks serious."

Weakly arguing the obvious . . .

As you may be able to tell, I am trying to avoid saying anything in particular about the movie itself, because I don't even really know what to say. It's so bad, it's almost unreviewable. It's so bad it sticks its thumbs in its ears, waggles its fingers at you, and dares you to say something negative about it that implies you took it seriously. I didn't, but let me point out a few things for those among its defenders (I'm assuming they exist . . . every movie has them) who would say it's just good clean fun.

First of all, it's not a very good suspense/thriller plot when you get to the end and you think, "Now was Jon Voight on the snake's team, or were they on different teams?" "How many snakes were there?" "Who was he supposed to be, and why was he doing all this stuff?" And most of all, "Why did I watch this?" Truly, literally, the plot (what there was of it) made absolutely no sense to me at all. Try as I might, I couldn't even figure out who the snake was working for, or whether he was kind of freelancing.

Second, the idea of the supposedly absorbing love story between Terri and the anthropologist is so stupid you can barely believe they really tried it. They have one scene together, and then a bad fate befalls him, and then he spends most of the rest of the movie lying on his back with a hole in his neck.

Third, the snake attacks are so predictable and obviously shot that you can always tell when somebody's about to get eaten. (There was one shot in which I thought the camera work implied that snakes can fly, but I was to discover that in fact, they were only implying that wild pigs can fly, so -- whew!) When this snake gets ready to eat somebody, he does this elaborate dance where he curls around the person for a while, and then he sort of squeezes really hard, and then he maneuvers his head around so that he can really look the hapless victim in the eye. He stands and watches the agonized face somewhat plaintively for a moment (perhaps thinking, "Oh, dear, why must I do such things as this to my fellow creatures?") and then a ball of spit (do snakes have spit?) dribbles off his big fang. Frankly, I was waiting for the time when they were going to show me the snake actually biting somebody's head off, and they never did.

Fourth, the villain in this movie is probably the actual worst movie villain I've ever seen. Serone just wanders around making threats and shooting monkeys and drooling, and you just can't take the guy seriously. I saw somebody describe this performance as "scenery-chewing," but it's way more than that. I think of "chewing the scenery" as meaning you're at least enjoying yourself. Voight, on the other hand, tromps through this bit of garbage with a grim look on his face, undoubtedly thinking, "Do you know how many awards I've won?" I mean, the guy's a good actor, but I just could not swallow this particular character. In fact, it turns out late in the film that even the snake cannot swallow this character.

The tale of Jeff, Jon Voight, and the Inside-the-snake-cam

Speaking of which, the supposed climactic moment in the movie is so boring and stupid that it's actually worse than the REST of the movie. When my friend Jeff (whom some of you know as FlyBoy) came back from seeing this movie and was just ranting about how incredibly bad it was, I begged him to write a guest review, but he declined. His reason? "I couldn't possibly do justice to the snake-cam." He then paused. "Not to mention the inside-the-snake-cam." I can't either, really, but I'll tell you this about the inside-the-snake-cam: this movie may be the first to ever show you up close what it would look like from your point of view if a snake ate Jon Voight right after it ate you.

The bottom line

This may very well be the worst movie I've seen in years. From acting to script to special effects, it has literally nothing to recommend it. By all means, stay away . . . far away.

Tempted to root for the snake,

Linda