Shards from the Fractured Mirror: The Kid & I, Paparazzi, Pawparazzi, Slipstream and The World's Greatest Lover
For the last six months or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page.
I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 185 movies so far and will cover 300 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about.
In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible.
The Kid & I (2004)
Some rich parents buy their fortunate offspring fancy cars or trips to Italy. Billionaire Alec Gores went further. As the ultimate gift, the financial wiz flat out purchased his son Eric a starring role in a major motion picture inspired by his progeny’s love for True Lies.
The story of how a wealthy man paid the eternally game Tom Arnold to write and star in a vehicle for a young man with Cerebral Palsy unsurprisingly doubles as the plot of the film he ended up financing, 2004’s The Kid & I.
Screenwriter Arnold stars as Bill Williams, a VERY Tom Arnold-like funnyman who begins the film in a state of suicidal despair. His career is in the toilet, he’s broke and he’s desperately lonely.
The fading star is saved from suicide by an usual offer: a wealthy man wants him to write and star in a movie directed by Wayne’s World helmer Penelope Spheeris (who plays herself and also directed The Kid & I) and costarring his son.
Rat-faced veteran character actor Richard Edson is a hoot and a half as the bum who prevented our protagonist’s suicide by stealing his pills and vodka and is perversely rewarded with a gig as his scuzzy assistant/sidekick while Henry Winkler steals scenes as Bill’s degenerate agent.
In a likable and engaging turn boldly devoid of vanity, Tom Arnold leaps deliriously past self-deprecation to self-immolation. In a context that’s difficult to the point of impossibility Arnold does fine work as a screenwriter and leading man.
As a ramshackle show-biz comedy The Kid & I is wildly over-achieving but as a drama about a young man who inspires everyone he encounters it’s mawkish and saccharine. The Kid & I is better than it has any right to be but it nevertheless occupies a weird nowhere zone between being a genuine film, a surprisingly watchable vanity project and a rich man’s expensive indulgence.
Paparazzi (2004)
The loathsome 2004 vanity project Paparazzi is unique among movies about movies in that it was seemingly made by, for and about movie stars like producer Mel Gibson, who contributes a cameo and reportedly came up with the film’s premise. It’s about subject matter relatable only to celebrities: being pursued by the invasive cameras of the paparazzi. First time director Paul Abascal, who worked his way up from being a hair stylist on multiple Lethal Weapon sequels, offers a right wing power fantasy where a real man from Montana cold-bloodedly murders tabloid scum so amoral and psychotic that they make the Devil seem like God by comparison and gets away with it.
Bloody red meat for press haters, Paparazzi stars Cole Hauser as Bo Laramie, an action star who came out of nowhere to become a big time box office attraction. But more money brings more problems when Bo and his wholesome, apple-cheeked, All-American family are stalked by the gutter trash that photographs famous people in exchange for dirty money. These scum will stop at nothing to score a lucrative photo, including nearly murdering Bo’s wife Abby (Robin Tunney) and son Zach (Blake Michael Bryan) in a car accident that leaves Zach lingering in a coma.
The scowling, sociopathic actor channels his incandescent rage into murdering the paparazzi involved in the car crash, most notably Rex Harper (Tom Sizemore) and Wendell Stokes (Daniel Baldwin). Baldwin and Sizemore know all too well what it’s like to live in the unrelenting glare of tabloid cameras and bring a deeply personal loathing for the paparazzi into their larger than life performances. Sizemore and Baldwin’s scuzzy magnetism can’t make up for the smoldering charisma void in the lead role. Hauser is so robotic and unlikable that you almost end up rooting for the monsters with cameras and villainous agendas despite them being cartoonishly evil.
Pawparazzi (2019)
The Hollywood high life has seldom looked cheaper than in the bizarrely terrible 2019 talking animal stinker Pawparazzi. Protagonist London Bridges (Sara Fletcher) is supposed to be a Paris Hilton-like product of wealth and privilege infamous for her materialism and diva antics. But the film’s conception of extreme wealth entails taking several modest pieces of luggage for a months-long film shoot in the Midwest instead of a single overnight bag.
For an ostensibly pampered movie star and Hollywood princess, London Bridges cuts a strangely solitary figure. She doesn’t have a personal assistant, driver, entourage or expensive clothes. Of course all those things costs money and that is clearly something the film does not have.
Pawparazzi sends London Bridges and her fancy little dog Latte (voiced by Kristy Swanson) to rural Michigan to film There Will Be Oil. She begins the shoot snooty and high falutin’ but when she falls for rugged, handsome man of the earth local Tom Bridger (Russell Bradley Felton) she begins to understand the homey charm of the simple life and becomes a better person and actress. Meanwhile, in quite possibly the stupidest subplot in the history of film, a pair bumbling comic relief crooks steal a worthless piece of costume jewelry from London and she’s worried that her career will be ruined if the public finds out that she scandalously allowed a cheap necklace to be purloined while on location.
Most of Pawparazzi’s minuscule budget seems to have gone to securing the services of Kristy Swanson and Jay Mohr for the better part of a single day. Mohr plays the host of an Entertainment Tonight-style show co-hosted by a talking dog named Nancy O’Dog whose dead eyes and computer-animated mouth suggest the nightmarish horrors of A Talking Cat!?!? It’s not easy making an adorable-looking little dog completely unlikable and unappealing but Pawparazzi manages that unfortunate feat. In a world where it is perfectly acceptable for movies to end after 80 minutes it is unconscionable that this lasts a torturous 97 minutes. Pawparazzi feels like it was conceived and written by a small child, and not a particularly bright or talented one either.
Slipstream (2007)
A half century into his distinguished career as one of the world’s most respected film and theater actors, Sir Anthony Hopkins decided that what he really wanted to be was a batshit crazy arthouse director with his fascinating, wildly self-indulgent 2007 mind-fuck Slipstream.
The director, who also wrote the screenplay and composed the score, plays the perplexed, passive protagonist, a veteran screenwriter in the midst of an emotional breakdown. The lines separating the present from the past and reality from the fantasy of Hollywood formula begin to blur and distort as the wordsmith’s hectic life spirals out of control.
Hopkins’ dizzy, disorienting exploration of movie-making is unsurprisingly Lynchian. It’s more surprising that Hopkins seems to be channeling Richard Kelly as well. This is particularly true in a film-within-a-film where Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor play Pulp Fiction-style badasses who terrorize the patrons of a diner with a bizarre Yogi and Booboo Bear routine that also touches upon Tambor’s eerie resemblance to Dr. Phil in a disconcertingly sexual way and Kevin McCarthy’s starring role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That McCarthy then pops up as himself in a predictably oddball cameo speaks to the movie’s curious obsession with seemingly the entirety of pop culture.
With Slipstream, a preeminent international thespian chose to give an appropriately confused world his own Southland Tales. Slipstream is a quintessential labor of love/personal project. It’s an acid trip and a very strange dream more than it is a conventional movie. Slipstream wasn’t made for everyone, or seemingly anyone other than its creator but for those willing to give into its divine madness it’s a wild, electric, unpredictable and pleasingly incoherent ride from an unlikely, highbrow source.
World’s Greatest Lover (1977)
For his second outing as a writer, director and star in 1977’s World’s Greatest Lover, Gene Wilder wrote himself the bizarrely unpleasant lead role of wannabe silent screen heartthrob Rudy Hickman/Rudy Valentine. The slapstick comedy’s regrettable protagonist is less a human being than a flailing collection of tics and mannerisms.
When nervous, Rudy sticks out his tongue, grows hoarse and starts stammering Spoonerisms. He’s not much more bearable when relaxed. You don’t root for Rudy to get the girl, you root for the girl to get a restraining order against him.
In World’s Greatest Lover, oddball baker Rudy travels from his hometown of Milwaukee to Hollywood to compete in a massive talent search to find the World’s Greatest Lover run by Adolph Zitz (Dom DeLuise), the perpetually apoplectic head of Rainbow Studios. Rudy’s long-suffering wife Annie (Carol Kane) accompanies her husband on the trip.
With her big eyes, gamine beauty and aura of ineffable sadness, Kane has never been more radiant. She is heartbreakingly beautiful and ingratiatingly vulnerable. That ends up working against the film because her sadist of a husband doesn’t romance her: he terrorizes her.
Rudy is hopelessly jealous, prone to violent rages, reflexively dishonest, sexually demanding and seems to exist in a state of continual hysteria. In a set-piece that seems to last for eternity and then some, Rudy even manages to rope rival Rudolph Valentino into his sick marital mind games.
With the legendary lover’s help, he impersonates the movie star and sleeps with an oblivious Annie, but not before pretending to be a lisping, effeminate caricature of a homosexual in an unsuccessful attempt to repel her.
Wilder delivers a thoroughly misguided performance of tremendous volume and pointless aggression but negligible quality. DeLuise unwisely tries to top Wilder’s screeching bigness, resulting in a horrifyingly loud tribute to silent screen comedy dispiritingly devoid of charm and laughs.
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