New Cult Movie

While putting in long, boring hours at work this weekend, I watched the following DVDs: The Rutles, Tombstone, GoodFellas, Cutthroat Island, Stagecoach, Saving Private Ryan, Pleasantville, Braveheart, and the Clerks Animated Series. Today, I finally got around to going to a theater to see Memento.

Now that's a pretty good list of movies. Braveheart won Best Picture, and there were three more nominees in Stagecoach, Goodfellas, and Saving Private Ryan. A total of thirteen Academy Awards were issued to the weekend's movies, and Memento seems like it'll probably win at least Editing or Adapted Screenplay. My point is that I've seen plenty of high-quality cinema over the last three days, along with plenty of violence.

So naturally, the movie I want to talk about is Cutthroat Island. Life's like that, isn't it?

Cutthroat Island cost $92 million to make, and it earned $11 million in theaters. That's not good. Apparently, people weren't ready for the rollicking story of Geena Davis as the nigh-invincible pirate Morgan Adams. And I can understand that, because it's by no means a good movie. Geena Davis and her then-husband Renny Harlin essentially made this movie as a vanity project, and it pretty much shows.

And yet, I loved it. I know, shocking, right? But it's a big slice of cheesy swashbuckling fun, and I'm a sucker for swashbuckling. And this movie has everything a pirate movie is supposed to have: hidden treasure, foul villains, sea battles complete with people swinging from deck to deck, and swordfights aplenty. There's no classic "Yarrrrr!"-type pirates, but there's lots of eyepatches to make up for that.

The stunts are great. And the $92 million is pretty much up there on the screen, too. What, you think it's cheap to blow up an entire pirate ship?

Now, make no mistake: it's a bad, bad movie. I realized that almost right away. Geena Davis, while by all accounts a remarkable woman (she's a member of Mensa and was a semifinalist for the 2000 US Archery team), does not make a convincing nigh-invincible pirate. So while her character is whooshing around being an unkillable super-pirate, the audience is sitting there wondering how on earth that's happening. Well, that's just how I reacted, but I feel qualified to comment, since I represent a pretty big fraction of the total set of people that have ever seen this movie.

The main villain ("Dawg", Geena's character's uncle) is played by Frank Langella. It's a shame about Frank Langella. He's a fine Stage actor, and onscreen, he's played Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Zorro. Not a bad trifecta of legendary characters, and he did them pretty well, too. And yet, his roster of movies ain't pretty. 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Brainscan, Cutthroat Island, Body of Evidence, Ninth Gate . . . not all of these movies are bad (Ninth Gate is actually one of my favorite movies ever), but it's not like they were big critical successes. Oh, and Langella was Skeletor in the Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe movie. Suffice it to say that a Frank Langella film festival is inevitably going to have some cheese in it. And yet, if they hadn't recast his role when Dangerous Liaisons moved from stage to screen, there could have been a movie called Being Frank Langella.

Sorry. Too much Frank Langella. I was afraid that would happen. You need to see him in the Cirque du Soleil movie Alegria, though. Really. Get the DVD and see it. Now. He's great.

There's a key moment in some bad movies where you start enjoying them even while knowing they're bad. The first ten or twenty minutes of Cutthroat Island were just, well, bad. I rolled my eyes so hard that I could clearly see the back of my skull. Then came the make-or-break moment. Geena has a small monkey of some sort named "King Charles". He spends most of the early movie hanging out on her shoulder, because monkeys are cooler than parrots. And Geena's bidding on a slave (played by Matthew Modine), who's going to end up being the male lead. And when she wins the bidding, the auctioneer shouts:

"Sold to the lady with the monkey!"

Come on. You can't hate a movie with a line like that.

But here's the thing. It can't be a "cult movie" if I'm the only one that likes it. So I'm asking nicely: please watch it. It's not the best pirate movie I've ever seen (that would be The Sea Hawk), and it's certainly not the best pirate movie I can imagine (that'll have to wait until someone makes a movie out of George MacDonald Fraser's The Pyrates, which is one of the funniest books ever written), but it's cheerful fun, with really good stunts.

And if just a few people end up liking it, then it'll be a cult movie, and I can stop feeling bad about liking it.

---

Oh, before I forget -- go to Blue Armadillo. I don't know quite how to put this, but it seems I was, er, inspirational.