I was raised at the multiplex. I started going to the movies in the first grade, and by the time I was 10, I was already a film buff. Little league? No ability. Piano lessons? Yeech. Hebrew school? I got by. But when it came to the movies, I was an early expert. I had a copy of Leonard Maltin’s film guide on my bedside table and movie posters all over my walls. I watched embarrassing amounts of HBO-especially through that particularly unpretty junior high experience-thinking nothing of viewing the same movies again and again. (Last week, I was at a bar with a friend when “The Breakfast Club” came on TV, and I was embarrassed-or was it proud?-to tell him I knew every line.) Relatives to this day remember me as a walking, talking film encyclopedia. “You not only knew who starred in all the movies,” my cousin Liz recently told me, “you had an opinion on each of them.”
By high school, I kept two lists in my journal: “Movies I’ve Seen,” and “Movies I Need to See.” I commandeered the family VCR most weekends, familiarizing myself with the full oeuvres of Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. I continued my cinematic education during college, where film classes exposed me to the auteur theory, the French New Wave and the concept of the male gaze. But I never became a film snob. For every “Masculin-Feminin” that I analyzed, there was a modern movie like “Thelma & Louise” that I just plain adored. I wrote a paper my senior year on the role of mother in James Cameron’s “Aliens.” I never lost my love for a Friday night flick.
Or so it seemed. As an adult, my appreciation for current movies has been repeatedly tested. Even though I’ve become a pop-culture reporter-writing about entertainment for a living-it has become harder and harder to sit through most of today’s movies. Sure, I loved “Pulp Fiction,” “Fargo” and “American Beauty.” I will even say, for the record, that “Titanic” had me at hello. But most of the films over the past decade left me drowning in disappointment. After an advance screening of “The Phantom Menace” in 1999, I walked out convinced that I’d just seen what would be the biggest bomb of the year. It went on to make $431 million in the United States. I found “Charlie’s Angels” a mind-numbing bore. More than $125 million in ticket sales proved me wrong. It’s disheartening to open the papers every Monday morning and read about the tens of millions of dollars that American teenagers have thrown at the garbage released the previous Friday. But I realize that young moviegoers, like me, are desperately in love with movies-and they will go to see whatever they’re offered.
Last month I turned 30 and once and for all was out of Hollywood’s most desired demographic: teenage and twentysomething males with time on their hands. Now I can officially say that movies aren’t made for me anymore. But just to be doubly, triply sure-or maybe it was because so many of my friends are coupled up these days and I didn’t have much going on last weekend-I went to see two big studio movies coming out this Friday.
Both “Dr. Dolittle 2” and “The Fast and the Furious” are classic current Hollywood-movies designed by the numbers to bring in huge opening weekends and make the top-five list on Monday morning. A month from now, you’ll have forgotten all about them.
The first is more for tykes than teenagers. “Dr. Dolittle 2” is a sequel to the 1998 flick that barely hit my radar screen (though it grossed $144 million) about a veterinarian (Eddie Murphy) who can talk to animals. This time around, the well-meaning doc must find a mate for a near-extinct bear in order to save a forest from being destroyed. It’s a perfectly serviceable plotline for kids. And they won’t notice the overacting or the flatlining dramatic tension. Children want talking animals. And “Dr. 2’s” computer-graphics folks did a darned good job of making it look like the creatures really converse; those scenes got the best response from the 6-to-10-year-olds in the audience. And although my 32-year-old companion and I were hoping for a bit more Adam Sandler-esque humor-believe it or not, there was only one scene involving a toilet!-once we settled into the silliness, we had a few laughs. When it was over, though, we quickly headed for the exit.
“The Fast and the Furious” is more a typical guy movie. If you didn’t know it going in, a car chase in the first three minutes and a fight over a girl at the 10-minute mark will certainly make it clear. The story of outlaw L.A. street racers who soup up stolen vehicles, the film stars Vin Diesel as the gang-leader hero and Paul Walker as the undercover cop who befriends him in order to expose the operation. In a movie like this, a car doesn’t just explode. It blows up with a series of three blasts: the initial fiery bang on the inside; a second, bigger blast that bursts the windows into a million bits; and a final, all-consuming detonation from the bottom of the car that sends it three feet into the air. Boys like things that go boom!
The flick has enormous amounts of blood, lots of screeching tires and the requisite scene of girl-girl kissing-all presented with an amped-up hip-hop soundtrack. But I gotta say, the experience was sort of thrilling. The audience was having a great time. And I was too. The cars were gorgeous and slick, the racing scenes directed for maximum excitement and the characters (while narrowly drawn) somehow very compelling. Plus, the car-wars subculture-a reality in L.A.-was an education in itself.
And in the end, it’s just fun to see the outlaw heroes get away with it. Maybe I haven’t grown up just yet.
