The Trouble With Great Expectations

Of all the advantages of being a film critic, and there are several, freedom from the dismaying “ ‘Lady and the Tramp’ effect” is the one I value most.

I first came across that phenomenon, not surprisingly, in 1955, the year that beloved Disney animated film came to my neighborhood theater. If there was such a thing as a media-savvy kid in that day and age, I certainly wasn’t in the group. But I did have friends who were frequent moviegoers, and they all told me, more than once, that this was a top-of-the-line item and not to be missed.

Given the vagaries of childhood, it was rather late in its run that I got to see “Lady and the Tramp,” my friends’ encomiums ringing in my ears. And it’s not that I didn’t enjoy the film; I did. But I was also disappointed. Given all I’d heard from so many, I expected considerably more than it had to offer. Though neither the concept nor the phrase existed in 1955, I’d been over-hyped.

Of course, critics can get over-hyped as easily as civilians, especially in a place like Los Angeles, where, for reasons both rational and otherwise, we’re often the last people in the media food chain to see a picture. But most of the time, if I’m vigilant, I can block out unwanted information and see the film fresh, free from preconceptions of any kind.

What would it be like, I’ve sometimes wondered, if I didn’t see pictures early but had to view them late in their runs, after they’d been reviewed and after the word about them had coalesced into something firm and tangible. What if, like many if not most people, I made my choices not from a close reading of reviews but from glancing at blurbs in the ads and picking up what’s in the air? Would my expectations mislead me? And would I have an altered perspective on films; would I see them differently, perhaps notice other factors, if I wasn’t so focused on deciding if they were worth recommending or not.

Being gone from L.A. for some weeks to submerge myself in the Cannes Film Festival gave me the opportunity to put these musings into practice. Movies of all sizes had opened in my absence, but because studios and producers are forever extolling the virtues of putting critics into theaters full of “real people” so we’ll appreciate how much of a crowd-pleaser they’ve got on their hands, I decided to select the biggest studio films I could find and see if that made a difference in what I thought.

The first film on my list was “Battlefield Earth” and it’s a good thing it was, because if I’d waited one more day I would have had to take a long, hot freeway journey to experience this science-fiction extravaganza on a big screen. Never mind seeing John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker et al with an appreciative throng, I was lucky to be able to see them at all.

As it was, the deadly word of mouth on “Battlefield” meant that when I entered the spacious Westwood 4 theater, there was but a single person sharing the auditorium with me. So much for gauging audience response. We were both early, but in the ensuing 15 minutes before show time only one other individual entered the room. “Is it warm in here or is it just me?” he asked the other guy. “It’s just you,” the other guy responded. It was the most scintillating dialogue I was to hear all day.

For as I feared (or, should I say, hoped?), “Battlefield Earth” was not simply bad. Bad films are a critic’s stock in trade, but this one was jaw-droppingly, mind-bogglingly, pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming bad. It’s the kind of film the legendary Ed “Plan 9 From Outer Space” Wood would have made if he’d had access to a budget, real stars and special effects that worked.

Travolta had originally wanted to play earthling hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a role now taken by Pepper. Instead, he got to be bad guy Terl, “the best security chief this planet ever had,” and the results were even more ruinous than I’d been led to believe.

The combination of a downright silly script by Corey Mandell, Wood-style direction from Roger Christian and Travolta’s bizarre take on his character led to the most misguided performance from a major star since (a) Al Pacino thought he was a race car driver in “Bobby Deerfield” or (b) Al Pacino thought he was a revolutionary war soldier in “Revolution.” When Terl wails, “I’ll be the laughingstock of the universe,” it’s hard not to scream, “You got that right.”

Sitting with my two comrades-in-arms in the nearly empty theater, I started to see “Battlefield Earth” as the reduction-to-absurdity of a filmmaking system that gives total power to stars. Rather than level with Travolta and tell him his pet project was fated to be a fiasco, everyone went along for the ride, content with a paycheck and/or the knowledge that their fealty to a major player would probably be repaid somewhere down the line. The only people in a lose-lose position, unless they are connoisseurs of the terrible, are the people who paid Earth currency for tickets with the reasonable expectation of being entertained.

I had better luck, both with finding an audience and with being diverted, with the comic western “Shanghai Noon,” directed by Tom Dey. Everyone seemed to be talking it up as a feel-good kind of movie, but what I didn’t anticipate was how much that had to do with the relationship between co-stars Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson and how little with the film’s very nominal plot.

The story line provided by writers Alfred Gough & Miles Miller--Chinese Imperial Guard circa 1881 (Chan) ventures to the American West to rescue a princess (Lucy Liu) with the help of a genial outlaw (Wilson)--couldn’t be more desultory, but no one in the audience seemed to notice or even care very much.

Rather they were understandably pleased by the clever dialogue the pair have written for Wilson’s droll boyish hipster and the inimitable Chan. It’s so pleasant to be in Wilson and Chan’s company as they banter with each other that it seems churlish to complain about the paper-thin story. (Gough and Miller wrote one of the “Lethal Weapon” films, and the parallels are obvious.)

It was satisfying and bittersweet to see the crowd responding to the innate likability of Chan, the good-natured fighting machine who’s been a superstar in Asia for more than 20 years. This film is part of Chan’s second foray into Hollywood; the first time, with projects like “The Cannonball Run,” saw him being seriously misused. Now that American audiences have finally come to appreciate Chan, it’s sad to realize they missed the opportunity to see him in his athletic prime, when he joined his irresistible personality to stunts that were literally life-threatening. It’s not for nothing that when New Line released Chan’s “Rumble in the Bronx” in this country, the tag line they came up with was “No Fear. No Stuntman. No Equal.”

So far my expectations had not seriously misled me, but I pushed my luck when I went to see “Road Trip.” The ads and casual conversations had led me to believe this would be good-humored albeit raunchy fun in the manner of “American Pie,” a film I’d truly enjoyed, but it was not to be.

*

In retrospect, I should have known I was in trouble when the cashier attempted to sell me a senior citizen ticket without my even asking. When you see an endless procession of giddy teenagers at the box office, anyone with graying hair probably looks like Methuselah.

“Road Trip’s” story line did have potential. Ithaca College student Josh (Breckin Meyer) has a girlfriend in Austin, Texas, he’s trying to be faithful to, but one night things get out of hand with the lovely Beth (Amy Smart), and error-prone friends send a video of that encounter to Texas. Josh, accompanied by three pals (“What else am I going to do, stay here and learn?” one of them explains), has three days to drive the 1,800 miles to Austin and intercept the tape before it’s too late.

But while “American Pie” had an unmistakable sweetness about it, no one had prepared me for the mean-spirited sourness of many of this film’s encounters, not to mention its racial stereotyping and the leering nature of its attitude toward women. Frankly, the teenage girls in the audience seemed as unsettled as I was.

It was also disheartening to experience a film clearly made to fit a formula established by more genuinely comic items like “There’s Something About Mary.” You almost felt that director Todd Phillips (who co-wrote with Scott Armstrong and cast himself as a toe-sucking harasser) operated off a checklist of sure-fire offensive items. Anal probe joke? Check. Making fools of blind people joke? Check. Underwear sniffing joke? Check. Viagra erection joke? Check. Food in bodily cavities joke? Check. After cringing through a movie that thinks phoning in a bomb scare is a great way to prove your love, I felt I’d earned that senior citizen discount after all.

So how did my grand experiment with expectations work out? In the broadest terms, nothing substantial had changed: Clearly, I wouldn’t have cherished “Battlefield Earth” under any circumstances. But something very important was different. With each of these pictures, instead of judging them for themselves, as they deserved, I unavoidably found myself measuring them against what I had heard. A very bad thing for a critic, and frankly, not recommended for general audiences either.