Auditioning for God
I have watched approximately 1000 movies over the past couple weeks, having decided to actually take a break over my holiday break for once. Several of them I was bullied into watching by a child of my acquaintance. Did you know that the plot of the movie Home Alone 3 involves international terrorism? That the Whos in the Whoville of the live-action Grinch movie are unaccountably horny, but in a grotesque and somehow virginal way reminiscent of the film Cats? I could have done without this knowledge, and I also wish that I had the ability to remove every variation on the phrase “Oh, the humanity” from films and television shows made during the twelve-year-or-so-window when people used that phrase. I think one general erasure of “Oh, the humanity” would improve the world’s general taste level by about two percent. Every bit counts.
Probably the best movie I have watched over the holidays—and this I was not bullied into—was Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987), which flopped so conclusively when it came out that I still remember people making jokes about it. I was nine, and not really plugged into Hollywood gossip at this point, but it was one of those flops so massive that it created an event horizon around it, like Heaven’s Gate or Battlefield: Earth. I found it on Tubi (whence it shall disappear today or tomorrow, I think) and thought “Oh, I meant to watch that when I was on my Elaine May kick two years ago.” I had the expectation that it would maybe be interesting, or slightly better than expected, or awkwardly compelling, or so-bad-it’s-good; I did not expect that Ashley and I would immediately commence laughing so loudly that my mother-in-law, from downstairs, thought we had invited someone over. We laughed with the strength of three, if not four. I won’t claim it’s a masterpiece, but I will claim that it’s a film I could rewatch with pleasure, and there just aren’t very many of those. The longer it went on, the more I found its reputation mystifying: It is a very funny and frequently touching buddy movie with an incredible cast, a mildly anti-CIA plot, directed by a comedy legend, and you get to see one of Isabelle Adjani’s breasts for like a quarter of a second. It has something for everyone. (Barbara McClay talks about it here, in a superb little rundown of May’s entire filmography.)
Having thought it over for a day or so, and having read up on the film’s history, I can make a little more sense of its failure now.