Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
Celebrity is a major force in one’s life. Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Telly Savallas – you name it. At age 24, working in a video store while a film school student, I was ordered by huge black bodyguards to get “Mr Reynolds” a glass of water. I filled up the polystyrene cup and gave it to Burt. I also served Whoopi Goldberg, Sammy Davis Jnr – two weeks before his death, and he wanted to sleep with me nogal.
But the highlight of my time in Hollywood was meeting Clint Eastwood, by far the tallest person I’ve ever seen, let alone met, and he greeted me with that Clint squint – quite the most fabulous famous person I’ve ever met, incredibly tall and more than ever incredibly “Clint”.
Probably my best film about being famous, and being an idol of those who aren’t, is Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, which had Robert de Niro as a nerd fan of comic guru Jerry Lewis. De Niro tried to cash in on Lewis’s famed talk show celebrity status and then even invaded his house. Its frighteningly ambiguous and creepy sense of comedy makes it one of the best movies about fame and trying to be famous – whether that’s for cash or glamour.
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show had Jim Carrey as a guy “trapped” in a virtual one-man show. It was an ingenious satire on media saturation where the main guy didn’t know he was being made a hero all over the world.
Everyone will make inevitable comparisons between EDtv and The Truman Show, but the two are completely different, although both deal with the themes of TV idolatry, public abuse and public fascination.
In Ron Howard’s EDtv, Matthew McConaughey plays a video store clerk who agrees to have his life altered by becoming a TV star. His whole life is filmed, by a TV producer played by Ellen de Generes who’s trying to rescue a cable TV channel from of its falling ratings.
The problem is that he comes from a dysfunctional family, including his wannabe entrepreneur brother (Woody Harrelson) and his drunken sister, who is dating a cocktail lounge player.
But when he falls in love with his brother’s girlfriend (Jenna Elfman), the ratings leap. The nation is hooked on real- time soap opera and our hero becomes completely entangled in his own emotional problems and the struggles of being a celebrity – even though he still wants to be a private being.
Howard has plenty of experience at being a crowd pleaser, having been a star in Happy Days. He tries to pile on the sentiment and sappy appeal at every moment.
The film admirably tries to exploit McConaughuey’s lazy sexiness as the “fall guy” for a celebrity TV trip. But all the same, it doesn’t match up to the cynicism and matchless irony of The Truman Show or King of Comedy.
Howard is best at making populist movies, like Parenthood and Apollo 13, and although he tries hard enough, he’s basically stuck in populism. He refuses to be witty or ironic enough to make this movie a scabrous attack on the American media.
Some may think that Howard has delivered a more intelligent version of The Truman Show. I think Howard and his consistent screenwriters, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell, just want to please the audience without harming or influencing them.
If you’re gonna make a movie about how cameras influence love, or how ordinary people become celebrities, give us cutting edge. No wonder Scorsese’s King of Comedy flopped at the box office.
The reality is that Mr And Mrs Joe like films like EDtv, and that’s part of the glibness and superficiality that exist in movie malls.
Then again, maybe Howard has a point – any average Joe can become a superstar. And that’s what movie malls are made for.