The Second Annual White Elephant Blogathon
Theodore Rex (1995)
Director/Screenwriter: Jonathan R. Betuel
I read about this blogathon hosted by Lucid Screening that sounded kinda cool and like something I used to like to do with my film buds. Assign a movie to someone they would never ordinarily see and let them assign one to you. View and exchange notes.
Now, I can’t say I didn’t know what I might be in for. The event is called a White Elephant Blogathon, so I knew the films being exchanged would be clunkers. But I didn’t think anyone would truly be cruel—I knew I wouldn’t be. We’re supposed to have fun, right, not inflict maximum pain?
Well, whoever pulled Theodore Rex out of the tortured recesses of their demented mind just for this occasion will be another extinct being to add to the dinosaurs, passenger pigeons, and dodo birds if ever I get my hands on him or her. This movie isn’t dumb. It isn’t gross. It isn’t juvenile. I have a lot of respect for dumb, gross, and juvenile. This movie is even worse than the Preminger Abomination (don’t ask, I cannot speak its name). It is a crime against humanity. It should be put on trial. It should be disemboweled and hung by the neck until dead. Everyone who agreed to make it should be fired, thrown out of their respective unions, tarred and feathered, and sent to live in Chernobyl.
What’s it about? Does it matter? I’m sure its creator, Jonathan Betuel, wrote it as occupational therapy with the help of celebrity addicts Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Tom Sizemore (he contributed the detective angle) while they were riding out the DTs. In the end, it’s just a bunch of starving actors dressed up like dinosaurs that fart, lust, and whack people with their tails. Now, Theodore Rex (voice of George Newbern, body of somebody too embarrassed to show his face) did have a certain je ne sais quoi. No, really, I have no idea what he had. And, of course, we can't forget, as much as we might try, the infamous Whoopi Goldberg in a dive suit fitted with shoulder pads recycled from Sean Young’s black suit in Blade Runner. Maybe Whoopi should have been wearing fins, too; it might have made the film funnier. At least you could look forward to her tripping and landing on her ass.
Whoopi won a Razzie for her brain-dead appearance in this fugtacular. I’m on the fence as to whether she really deserved it. She didn’t do anything but show up and move her lips. She never tried to create a character, like it wasn’t worth her time. Well, I’m sorry, but Razzies really should only go to bad performances. Maybe if she had flirted a little with Rodney, the dinosaur shown above that had the hots for her, I could lay my doubts to rest. Rodney, at least, gave it a try, though the possibility that he could actually be attracted to Whoopi were slim to none. I think this is a case where the Foundation awarded the film, not the actress.
Also caught in the headlights were Armin Mueller-Stahl, a German actor cast as—what else?—a bad guy. Poor Juliet Landau—you’d think being the daughter of super-cool Barbara Bain and Oscar winner Martin Landau would mean a lifetime free of bad or kooky roles. So far, though, I’ve only seen her play evil Englishwomen—Druscilla (what a name to be stuck with!) on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Shade (so close to very hip Veruca Salt, and yet so far) in this atrocity. Even the normally perky voice of Carol Kane sounded listless and depressed. And I’ll never be able to look at hunky Richard Roundtree the same way again.
Curse the Red Betuel and his kind! Curse the wickedness in this world! Curse the evil that causes all this unhappiness!
Happy April Fools Day! The joke was definitely on me. l
If there's a genuine quality to Juno, it's the strength of the acting. Page is terrific at making her conceit of a character work, Simmons is one of the masterful comic actors of the age, and Garner is luminous, continuing her career of being the best thing about mediocre projects. Perhaps it's just as well that Juno is what it is. If you only watched Larry Clark, Gus Van Sant, and Todd Solondz films (and their European counterparts), you'd come to the conclusion that modern teenage life is a Beckett-like wasteland inhabited by murderers, glue sniffers, and pedophiles. Proposing itself as raw realism, that tired ennui is as much of a put-on as Juno's sunny glibness. Both varieties of teen experience attempt to gratify their audience in false ways: either fulfilling the desire in the audience to be riled, offended, to have their grimmer perspectives confirmed, or presenting a world as generally blithe as its main characters. Juno is something like wish fulfillment—not that there’s anything especially wrong with that. 
The governor of Judea, Herod (Gregoire Aslan), learns of a prophecy that a powerful prophet has just been born in Bethlehem. He summons the head of the Roman guard Lucius (Ron Randell) and instructs him to kill all the newborn males in Bethleham. Lucius, who from the first strikes one as a decent, intelligent man, says he does not kill children and will not obey. Herod reminds him of his duty to the emperor and, reluctantly, Lucius carries out his orders. Despite the bloodshed, the target of the hunt has been spirited away by his parents to Nazareth. Herod has what seems to be an asthma attack after the murders, and we watch his son Herod Antipas (Frank Thring) allow his father to die as viciously as his father ordered the deaths of babies. 
To pay tribute to Scofield’s career, I could have written about his beautifully low-key, heroic turn as Virginia McKenna’s mentor and brother-in-arms in Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), his sublimely serpentine performance as a fixated Nazi culture thief in The Train (1966), his weighty, haunted inhabitations of Charles VI in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) and The Ghost in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990), his hilarious and heartbreaking turn as Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show (1996), and his foreboding Judge Danforth in The Crucible (1996). But it is A Man for All Seasons that is his best claim to cinematic fame, and that’s fine with me, being as it was, an extension of a role he had played about 2,000 times on the stage in Robert Bolt’s fine play of the same name. Bolt wrote the screenplay for the film and pared back the material into a sharper, more concise work. A Man for All Seasons is the sort of film that tends to be despicably patronised by many critics these days, apparently under the impression that intelligent acting and dialogue and skillful, measured direction are liabilities. Yet compare it to, for example, the gothic idiocy of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films, and one cringes at the decline in our supposedly clever contemporary culture. 
The film begins with More being called away from a party with his family—wife Alice (Wendy Hiller), daughter Margaret (Susannah York), and friends, like the Duke of Norfolk (Nigel Davenport)—to consult with Wolsey (Orson Welles), who wants More to support his efforts to secure a divorce for the king from his barren wife Catherine of Aragon. This scene swiftly sketches the succession of traits in More’s character and Scofield’s ability to embody them—wry wit, cagey intellect, unflappable cool, and moral gravity. 
Gradually, however, Jamie's presence becomes problematic. He starts inviting his friends from the afterlife to move into Nina's house. To make more room for them, he starts moving her furniture and rolling up her carpets. The spirits like to watch movies all day and night and commandeer her VCR. They spend most of their time arguing about movies (including Fitzcarraldo!), and Nina starts to feel put upon and left out. When Jamie questions whether she wants them there, she clings to him and insists she wants him with her always.
A man named Mark (Michael Maloney) has spied Nina in a coffee shop they both frequent. One day, he gets up the nerve to approach her. She puts him off initially, but he is persistent. She tries to brush him off on a Thames-side walkway, but he hops on one leg next to her telling her as many essentials about himself as he can. He forces her to do the same. Yes, he's got her attention. She moves toward him and away from him so many times, however, that he finally concludes that she must be living with someone. At this moment, Nina finally seems to reach out. She says, "I loved someone very much. Very much. But he died." She breaks down but continues to reach out.
The film picks up the thread of the arrest as we watch Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn) open hearings on pornography. We see the very pretty Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol) come down a hall and sit on a bench, awaiting her inquisition by the kind of god-fearing Tennessee native she grew up with. Her mind returns to her teen years in Depression-era Nashville, and the comically listless hellfire-and-damnation sermon of her church’s preacher (John Cullum). Young Bettie (Molly Moore) flirts with a boy across the aisle to the preacher’s narrative of sin and tortured damnation. This humorously foreshadows her rise to prominence as a pin-up who specializes in bondage and punishment.
In the second of two brilliant Technicolor fantasies right out of Sirk’s playbook, Bettie heads back to Florida, a place where she once vacationed and where she hooked up with nudie photographer Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) and a handsome young man named Armand (Alejandro Chabán)—in reality Armand Walterson, Bettie’s second of three husbands. Still troubled, she walks along the beach, finally spying a neon cross floating above the treetops. She makes her way into the church and decides to be saved. She walks to the altar and kneels. The preacher prays for her. She says she has been reborn. “What did it feel like?" asks the preacher. “Like a lifting up," replies Bettie. Another montage shows Bettie casting off her sexy persona, putting on loose clothing, and preaching on the streets. 
