POP FILTER

VS.

THE CLASSICS OF 1978

HEAVEN CAN WAIT

Joel Pendleton (Warren Beatty), a possibly mentally retarded 2nd string quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams, is struck in a terrible head on collision while riding his bike through a dark tunnel on Mulholland Drive. This act – in and of itself – would have been a perfectly entertaining film had it ended there. Unfortunately or fortunately, a rookie angel plucks Joe’s soul from his body prematurely and in order to atone for their metaphysical faux pas the angel and his mentor must find Joe a new body for him to inhabit so that he can play in – and win – the Super Bowl.

That’s pretty much the plot of Heaven Can Wait. If it sounds absurd and ridiculous that’s because it is. The entire film reads like a vanity project pipe dream riddled with plot holes, wooden acting, and a cheesy 1970s score that made me want to inhale industrial paint fumes every time it played. After an extended sequence of waiting for various men to die (probably the most entertaining part of the movie) the angels and Joe settle upon the body of a millionaire industrialist named Leo Farnsworth. Farnsworth, an awful greedy shell of a human being in his past life, now inhabited by Joe, is given new purpose to change the world for the better by using his wealth to improve working conditions for the common man and paying a fair and equitable wage to all. Actually that’s not what happens. Instead, Joe uses his newfound millionaire wealth to buy the L.A. Rams and forces them to employ him as their new quarterback so that he can play in — and win — the Super Bowl.

At this point I had to stop the movie because I could not grasp what possible reason there was to continue. The protagonist was a complete and total idiot, the movie had no redeemable message I could possibly comprehend, angels would appear out of nowhere, and the goddamn score was just… awful. Unable to get the grating sounds of Alfred Newman out of my head I immediately drove to Home Depot and picked up two 8 oz cans of BEHR Premium Plus Ultra 8 (China Silk) and decided that if I was going to watch the rest of this I was going to watch it huffing high. The entire experience, replete with terrible football clichés, was like the cinematic equivalent of being smothered by my father’s 1970s wardrobe while Warren Beatty, and his perfect hair, chuckled at me over and over again.

I can’t say I recommend watching this film — sober or high. It’s an overrated movie about a rock-dumb quarterback who is supernaturally transported body to body, but probably would have served the world better had he remained a bloody red smear on the underpass. Nothing about this movie is particularly good and I’m not sure how it was nominated for so many awards — the only reasonable explanation being that this film was actually a documentary and that Beatty could in fact inhabit any living being. The whole concept should have been aborted at conception, never being birthed or realized, thereby preventing me from suffering irreparable brain damage thirty-five years on. Now that I think about it, I should have been assigned to watch the 1943 classic, also entitled Heaven Can Wait, which tells the story of a man who has to prove he belongs in hell by telling his life story. Who can’t relate to that? My mistake.-NP