The Flukes Of August
THE DUKES OF HAZZARD
Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar
STEALTH
Directed by Rob Cohen
T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month, but if he'd survived into the blockbuster era, he might have changed it to August. Every year, moviegoers limp through the end of summer, battered by loud, crude, pre-fab blockbusters as they anxiously scan the horizon for glimpses of so-called "serious" movies scheduled for fall. The fatigue leads to what I call September syndrome-the tendency to overrate interesting-but-not-great movies simply because they were released in September, after three months of watching things explode. I doubt American Beauty, LA Confidential and Lost in Translation would have met with such intense, borderline desperate appreciation if they hadn't hit theaters in September. After three months of having your brain cooked by the summer movie desert, any sip of water tastes great.
In the meantime, we keep trudging through the dunes. Many of the same oases that delighted me earlier in the season are still playing in local art houses and on small multiplex screens-The World, Tropical Malady, My Summer of Love, The Beat that my Heart Skipped, Tony Takitani, 2046, Howl's Moving Castle, Broken Flowers and, on the mainstream side of the aisle, War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Land of the Dead and parts of Revenge of the Sith. That's a diverse, eccentric lineup for a traditionally safe, dull season, though it's counterbalanced by high profile disappointments like Batman Begins (as tediously talky and representational as Sith is ecstatically image-driven-no wonder critics liked it better) and polished turds like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Bewitched, The Island and Fantastic Four.
After suffering through The Island-basically two hours of jumpsuits, incoherent chases and product placement-I couldn't imagine encountering another summer blockbuster I'd hate more. But then I saw The Dukes of Hazzard. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, and really, I don't see movies like that expecting a masterpiece. But I do expect to see something that justifies its own existence-a hint that the filmmakers and cast were doing something besides helping themselves to piles of cash and secretly chortling at all the suckers who would one day waste two hours suffering through the result. Movies based on TV shows don't have to be dead from the neck up; The Untouchables and The Fugitive spring to mind, as do the Brady Bunch films, whose odd mix of naivete and self-awareness implicitly chided America's boundless affection for crap.
There's no chiding here, just gleeful and unimaginative stupidity of the frat house variety. Hazzard is a stool sample in movie form, proudly trashy and juvenile and lacking even the lowest sorts of invention. Incredibly, it makes the original CBS series-a weekly rehash of the then-current hit film Smokey and the Bandit-seem charming in retrospect. Johnny Knoxville plays randy moonshiner Bo Duke, opposite Seann William Scott as his wild-eyed, fast-driving cousin Luke, Willie Nelson as cantankerous Uncle Jessie, Jessica Simpson as curvy cousin Daisy and Bandit star Burt Reynolds as Boss Hogg, the Colonel Sanders-suited rapscallion who wants to strip-mine the town. In place of the TV series' willful innocence, which somehow made the vehicular mayhem seem light, even fluffy, director Jay Chandrasekhar substitutes a contemporary equivalent of Laurel and Hardy/Three Stooges slapstick, including a scene where Bo clings to safe that's being dragged by a car, a moment where Luke teases Bo by attacking him with a blowtorch, and numerous groin injuries.
The movie's substitution of cynicism for innocence is even more obvious in its depiction of Daisy. On the series, she was a Marilyn Monroe/Daisy Mae type nymph, a sexy innocent. Simpson's Daisy is more knowing, a hardbitten, two-fisted dame who cynically works her assets. The director confirms the movie's coldly knowing tone by pushing the camera into her cleavage and rump whenever he can justify it.
I'm all for surreal slapstick when it's done right, but Chandrasekhar's choreography and composition (the key elements in slapstick) are so uninspired that they make his previous efforts in this vein (Club Dread and Super Troopers, which at least had demonic energy and a few good gags apiece) seem like neglected gems. There's one faintly promising gag: while the boys drive around Atlanta, local citizens praise or insult them for the confederate flag emblazoned atop their newly refurbished hot rod, the General Lee. But the gag goes nowhere, even in its final moments, when Bo and Luke nearly get stomped by outraged inner-city Atlantans. The latter confrontation builds nicely enough, but then peters out, as if Chandrasekhar lost his nerve at the last minute.
The fumble-fingered handling of the Confederate flag symbol points up a larger problem: nobody onscreen seems to believe in the world they inhabit, and nobody behind the camera seems to believe in it either. The lead actors on the TV series weren't master thespians, but they threw themselves into the show's L'il Abner universe, and they looked and moved like rural people, not pampered Hollywood stars. In its own imitative, repetitious, dumb way, the series was trying to create a world, which is a lot more than you can say for the movie, which seems to have no ambition beyond giving bored young moviegoers a couple of hours' worth of air conditioning.
Stealth, on the other hand, is a real movie, a smart film advertised as a stupid one. Starring Josh Lucas, Jessice Biel and Jamie Foxx as futuristic Navy combat pilots flyingalongside an untested, defective, easily manipulated intelligent warplane, the movie's synopsis reads like a a paranoid sci-fi twist on Top Gun, and inattentive reviewers predictably dimissed Stealth as a gloss on the computer-goes-mad subplot from 2001. But while all the easy comparison points apply (there are other Kubrick references as well, from Dr. Strangelove through The Shining), Stealth is actually much more playful, intelligent and serious than you've heard. Viewers who agree with the notion that images create their own meaning will be pleasantly surprised by the movie's ambitions, and thrilled by how many are realized. It's not a perfect movie. Lucas' devil-may-care character is a military adventure cliche, Biel looks more like a Lancome model than a combat pilot, and Foxx, who shot this movie before Ray got released, is pretty much wasted as the likeable black friend whose character might as well have "Dead Meat" stitched on his breast pocket.
There's a transparently gratutious beefcake/cheescake interlude at a waterfall, some of the dialogue is too comic book clunky-philosophical, and the plotting grows increasingly frenzied as the closing credits draw nigh. But all things considered, Stealth is probably the third most imaginative Hollywood blockbuster of the summer, after War of the Worlds and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's a series of visual surprises, executed with muscular grace.
Stealth is a rare summmer blockbuster that knows how to abstract and heighten action without making it incoherent. Every year, I keep a running list of favorite action scenes. This year, the list has 12 entries, and five of them are from Stealth, including a dazzling sequence of an ejected pilot falling to earth amid a firestorm of debris, a vertical dive-bomb sequence that explicitly invokes Dave Bowman's final voyage into the monoloth in 2001, and an extended set-piece involving two warplanes and a refueling Zeppelin that plays like the opening credits sequence of Dr. Strangelove re-imagined as a mechanized rape/murder.
Film critics don't think in pictures, so Stealth won't win any prizes, but you should see it in a theater while you can. In sheer wit and craftsmanship, it's one of the year's best studio movies-a series of casual astonishments, and an antidote to the August blues.