|
Mike Myers' Cavalcade of European Accents
What is Mike Myers' fascination with Europe and her accents?
Scotland has born the brunt of Myers' assaults ("If it's
not Scottish, it's CRAAAAP!", "Scottish Soccer Hooligan
Weekly," Fat Bastard), as has England Proper (modster
Austin Powers, the gay British theater, Simon and his "droorings"),
as has Ireland and her drinking songs. He even took on the
Germans (The Dieter dream sequence with the "Touch My
Monkey" jockstrap is top-rate). But Myers' most vicious
campaign has trampled the Low Countries: Dr. Evil, the bald-scrotum
Belgian; and now this most bizarre, fascinating, utterly compelling
creation: Goldmember. As if it's not enough that the Netherlands
had to endure a World Cup without the Orange, now Mike Myers
blasts them with this dry-skinned, double-jointed, gilded-penised
sex monger. I'm having trouble mustering a description of
Goldmember—you've seen the commercials, I'm sure, getting
just a taste of this creation that's the first he completely
disappears into. In each of Myers' previous characters, we
are cognizant of the fact that Mike Myersis performing a character
with a goofy accent. But with Goldmember, Myers is barely
recognizable, this character existing outside of the usual
vernacular of the Austin Powers universe. Oh sure,
there's still the sex gags and whatnot, but Goldmember sits
at the Austin Powers table like an uninvited guest
that everyone else is whispering about. This "Goldmember"
character, whatever it is, reserves Austin Powers'
place next to The Pink Panther franchise.
The star of that series, Peter Sellers, is generally recognized
as the thinking man's modern slapstick genius—a man who
can slip on a banana and still be too classy for the world
of American Pie. Sellers was a character actor who
did not need stunts to generate laughs. In the last twenty
years, American comedy has become mostly a battle against
itself to create the most outrageous stunts. Most American
"comedies" are the execution of sight gags about
bodily functions, the ante being upped from the belching of
Animal House to the regular occurrence of semen brought
about the Farrelly Brothers styling of Cameron Diaz' bangs.
American slapstick has forgotten Sellers' lesson that it's
not what you do, but how you do it.
For much of the past decade, Jim Carrey has been the most
obvious choice as the torchbearer of American slapstick. I
think back to 1999 when "Saturday Night Live" was
still regaining its balance after the pratfall of the Sandler/Schneider
years: Jim Carrey came on the show and did everyone's reoccurring
characters better than the originals. He also turned a stupid
little skit about a hot tub lifeguard into something memorable.
But Carrey may have missed the boat: He has tried to sublimate
his reckless abandon into dramatic energy lurking beneath
a Jimmy Stewart veneer.
This leaves us with our only choice as Sellers' successor:
Mike Myers, impresario of the fun and lucrative Austin
Powers universe. For critics, Austin Powers is
useful as a vehicle of debate over what-is-funny-and-what-is-not,
but the ultimate importance of Austin Powers is that
it reveals Mike Myers, not Jim Carrey, as the successor to
Peter Sellers. And with Austin Powers at an end, we
must now wait for a Stanley Kubrick to hand Myers his Dr.
Strangelove.
I nominate Steven Spielberg, who still needs to atone for
1941. He gets a cameo in the Goldmember opening,
which I won't spoil for you, only to say that it's finally
confirmed that Crossroads is indeed the work of a Fembot.
I'm not sure how to review this movie without erring in the
way of Goldmember's own promotional campaign, in which
all the good jokes are given away for free. I said in the
Filmsnobs Summer Movie Preview that we weren't looking forward
to this one, but the commercials gave me hope, so much so
that my expectations were raised impossibly high. With such
hype, any flat joke is punch to twig-and-berries. Myers loses
too much focus on what made the original such an icon: The
interplay between these caricatured, but ultimately recognizable
characters. But I did laugh really, really hard more than
a few times, and since I can't shake this "Goldmember"
character from my mind, I'll give it a recommendation. Like
you're not going to see it anyway.
Austin Powers has never really been about Austin Powers—it's
about Dr. Evil and the family dynamic in his evil lair. Myers
wrote the first one as a therapeutic mourning over the passing
of his own father, and it's easy to see those issues play
out in Dr. Evil. The Girls of Austin Powers (Liz Hurley, Heather
Graham, Beyonce Knowles) have all been duds, making our time
with Dr. Evil all the more valuable: the underlying sexual
tension with Frau, the disrespect of No. 2, the strain of
his relationship with Scott. The second film was saved by
the creation of Mini-Me, precisely what Evil-ish fathers want
from their children: a miniature replica of themselves. In
this film, the original crew gets second billing, and it loses
the Bond-villian spoof that made the original so funny. Rather
than contemplate incredibly slow death traps with one inept
guard, Myers raps with Mini-Me and talks like a trucker. Otherwise,
it spends too much time spinning a plot that goes nowhere—telling
that Dr. Evil's best moment comes when a balding Scott finally
presents his father with sharks with frickin' laser beams
attached to their heads. There's an amusing subplot concerning
Dr. Evil at spy school, but nothing that compares to the best
line of the entire series, when Dr. Evil tells Austin, "There's
nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster. Kill him!"
As for Austin himself, he doesn't do much with what should
have been the masterstroke: Michael Caine as Nigel Powers,
Austin' dad. In fact, Michael Caine first became a star as
Harry Palmer (an Austin Powers name if I've ever heard
one), the nearsighted, pudgy superspy in The Ipcress File.
American audiences immediately recognize Austin Powers
as a Bond spoof, but its roots include more British comedy
than anything, and this homage recognizes Caine as more than
just "serious Oscar actor"—this and Stallone's
Get Carter prove him a kick-ass Cockney. Unfortunately,
as the plot gets complicated, Caine's entrance as the Dirty
Old Man only hits intermittently.
However, Caine is funny and in on the joke, which is more
than can be said for Miss Knowles. She's supposed to be Pam
Grier, but she's way too skinny—not only would Foxy Brown
kick her ass, but Sheba probably would too. Knowles apparently
thinks that the costume is enough and lets her fro do her
acting for her. She's too soulless, too weak, too MTV for
the role: Michael Bolton crooning Percy Sledge's "When
a Man Loves a Woman" is a better fit than Beyonce Knowles
judo-chopping like Tamara Dobson's Cleopatra Jones. I doubt
Knowles has even seen a Pam Grier movie (I'll bet she's too
young for Jackie Brown.), and I know she hasn't seen
Cleopatra Jones, not to mention my personal favorite,
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (and Stella
Stevens as the Dragon Lady!). Knowles seems like she's at
a Halloween party with a seventies' theme, so Austin's Avenging
Disco Godfather get-up really doesn't get the support
it needs. Only two months after the inspiration of Undercover
Brother, I kept wishing that Denise Richards would show
up—when was the last time you heard that from
a film critic? Knowles, I'm afraid, did zero research for
her role.
And research, believe it or not, is part of what made this
series so strong in the first place. American cinema has a
grand canon of hippie movies, but the British liberation movement
has remained largely untapped cinematically. Shawn Levy, author
of Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall
of Swinging London, notes that the American hippie movement,
as much as it proclaimed "free love" and whatnot,
was really about separation, dividing the generations along
the fault line of Vietnam, the subtext of antiwar protests
involving a rebellion against the shirt-and-tie fifties. The
British mod movement, Levy postulates, was more about inclusion:
the suit-and-tie style of the mods allowed one to easily be
cast as a banker by day and club-hopper by night without even
a change of uniform. American youth rebelled against parents
and responsibility, so the argument goes, where the British
movement was against squares of all ages and classes. As Levy
told Terri Gross on "Fresh Air," the brilliance
of Austin Powers is that it captures the spirit of
the era in the style of the era. Obviously Myers and director
Jay Roach have its affection: The close-ups, the stop-frames,
the wild colors—they get it all, wrapping the Bond-spoof
plot around this style.
And it works. For the most part. But all films like this
are going to misfire pretty often. The method is more Zuckers
than Farrellys. The Farrellys fire their comedy like a bazooka:
They buy time to jostle to get in position for the big blast.
The Zuckers are more like machine guns: They spray as many
jokes as possible and hope more hit the target than not. The
first Austin Powers movie didn't really find legs until
video release, and this one too will be better judged over
a few beers and a group of friends on a Friday night couch.
But I will give Myers the benefit of the doubt because, not
only does he labor for the audience, he respects us, witness
the $20 million bath he took on Dieter because the
screenplay, which he wrote, sucked. Goldmember is far
too randy for a PG-13, but there's a lot less poop jokes than
the second, and even the horribly unfunny Fat Bastard scores
when Myers sends-up wire-assisted fight scenes in a way none
of the dozens of Matrix spoofs have yet managed. Consider
me satisfied until Myers gets his immortal film, and if James
Lipton is willing to give him a two-hour "Inside the
Actor's Studio" (in which he told mimicked Lipton, "And
then......you drank poop."), then I'm convinced he'll
get his Dr. Strangelove.
|
