October 2, 1992
Dear Everyone:
“Jeannie” is demanding a retraction from last
week's Letter, claiming that there is a "strong implication" that I hold
her responsible for breaking my vacuum cleaner.
Now, this is sheer nonsense.
I
never intended to imply any such thing.
It's not an implication, it's a fact.
She did
break my vacuum cleaner. I'm not
saying that she did it on purpose.
Accidents do happen.
And this one happened when the
cleaner was in her possession. It's
just lucky that it was so easy and inexpensive to repair.
And it's not like I'd asked her
to pay the $4.33 that it took to fix it.
Actually, I'm kicking myself for not having
discovered years ago how easy it is to fix one of these things.
I'm sure that the last time I
took the cleaner into the shop and waited a week for them to fix it, all
they took to repair it was a two dollar belt and 5 minutes, and an arm
and a leg from me.
It's like those old sewing machines that wouldn't
work, so the owner would take it down to the shop; and the repair man
would take the machine into the back, take the needle out and put it
back in front-side-out, then take a coffee break, read the sports page
and finally bring the sewing machine back out and charge real money for
"fixing” it.
But enough of this trivial stuff. On to more important things…
The Last of the Mohicans.
This movie has everything.
Great action.
Great scenery.
Great acting.
Great
music!
So why isn't it a great movie?
It's hard to figure.
Something’s missing. Even after numerous
people have been shot, clubbed, skewered, butchered, tomahawked and
fricasseed, you're still waiting for
something to happen.
Is it the acting? Hardly.
Daniel
Day-Lewis is an Oscar-winning actor, who reportedly even took to
doing his jogging in loincloth and moccasins, authentic replica of a
200-year-old musket in hand, to be able to "more naturally" portray his
character.
(And how’d you like to see
that loping past the kitchen
window while you're making the morning coffee?
"What, dear? Oh, that's
just our new neighbor, Mr. Day-Lewis. Quite
an avid jogger, I'd say by the look of it.
No, I don't think the gun is
loaded.")
(And I can't help hearing Mrs. Paris yelling, "How
many times have I told you not to go jogging with that musket?
You're liable to put somebody's
eye out!”)
And, after light-weight roles in movies like
Stakeout,
Madeleine Stowe
finally has a meat-and-potatoes role that she can, and does, sink her
teeth into.
This setting? Colonial
New York is brilliantly portrayed by the North Carolina mountains.
If you ever wanted to know what
Albany was like when it was little more than a slip of nothing on the
edge of nowhere, this is the place to see it.
(Although, every time I saw those
guys scampering through the woods in their loincloths, I couldn't help
worrying about poison oak.)
The action scenes, then?
In an age of SCUD missiles and
"smart bombs", this movie does a wonderful job of depicting just what
pre--mechanized warfare was like; when it consisted mainly of banging
away at the guy in front of you while praying to whatever god you choose
that there wasn't someone behind you about to do the same to you.
So what went wrong?
When all else fails, you blame the director, in this case,
Michael
Mann.
Mann is best known for inflicting
Miami Vice on the
television world and for a rather boring "thriller" called
Manhunter.
This movie was about an FBI agent
who, in trying to track down a serial killer, consults with another,
already incarcerated serial killer, named Hannibal "the Cannibal"
Lechter.
Sound familiar? A
few years later, a different director took another book by the same
author, including some of the same characters, and turned it into an
Oscar-sweeping, blockbuster called
The Silence of the Lambs.
And herein, I think, lies the problem.
Mann simply isn't the film-maker
that he'd like to think he is. The
Last of the Mohicans is supposed to be a love story set against a
tapestry of colonial life and the French and Indian War.
But Mann put everything into the
backdrop and left nothing in the foreground.
Which just goes to show that, in the hands of the
wrong director, what could've been a great film is like a beautiful car
with a dead battery: Everything
looks great, but it's not going anywhere.
Not that I won't go back and see it again.
Like I said, all the pieces are
there and it does have great
music, scenery, etc. And I can
think of worse ways to spend two hours then sitting in a cool dark,
eating popcorn and watching Daniel Day-Lewis scamper through the woods.
Love, as always,
Pete
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