Bottom Feeders: It’s a dream.

Every Hollywood director’s style can be plotted along a single creative spectrum.  On one end you have entertainment, on the other you have art.  Anchoring the ‘entertainment’ end, you have Michael Bay.  If movies were hookers, he’s the guy that pays just to jerk off on their face and make them call him ‘daddy.’  On the ‘art’ end you have David Lynch, the guy who pays just to cuddle for an hour with panty hose stuffed in his mouth.  This isn’t necessarily an indictment of either director – they can both be enjoyable at times – but wouldn’t either one be better served by occasionally borrowing from the other?  What I’m trying to say is that the best directors tend to fall somewhere towards the middle of the spectrum.

Believe it or not, for a long time Rob Reiner was that perfect ‘middle of the spectrum’ guy.  That’s a hard pill to swallow because he’s sort of a joke now, but for a while he was pretty on top of his game.  Here’s every movie he directed from 1984 to 1992:

This Is Spinal Tap

The Sure Thing

Stand By Me

The Princess Bride

When Harry Met Sally…

Misery

A Few Good Men

That’s a pretty good run.  Not only are they almost all classics, they’re from wildly different genres as well.  Hell, a few of them practically reinvented their respective genres.  Now Rob Reiner is that guy that had to lube himself up with butter to squeeze out of his limo in that one South Park Episode.  What the fuck happened?  North happened.  Now, you may not have heard of North.  It’s one of the few movies that’s actually less famous than one of its negative reviews.  It made about 7 million at the box office against a 40 million dollar budget.  After this movie Reiner was never quite the same.  Having a book about terrible movies be named after a review of yours can take a lot of wind out of your sails.  Unfortunately that’s just how bad North is.  It’s the kind of bad that makes people start forgetting you’re the guy who wrote and directed Spinal Tap and start realizing you look a bit like a fat Keebler elf wearing a sweater that looks like cotton candy throw up.  What exactly is so bad about North?  Basically, it’s a movie that thinks it looks like this:

Plus this:

But actually looks like this:

North tries way too hard to be cute, like a valley girl at a house party.  ‘I never drink rum! I hope this stuff doesn’t get me drunk!  I’m so tiny!’  She squeals.  What a bitch.  Who even invited her?  Probably Zach, ‘cuz he’s always trying too hard to get laid.  Can’t he just cool it for once?  It’s like that but instead of a girl, it’s a child.  And speaking of swapping out girls for children, this movie is the best thing to happen to pedophiles since the invention of chat room lying.  The Megg Vee drinking game of this movie ends with you sobbing into a pillow because you just drank a whole bottle of Jack trying to take a shot every time this kid hops in a car with a total stranger.

The plot of North is that North (an 11 year old) decides his parents don’t appreciate him enough, so he divorces them and travels around the world with strangers, trying to find a new mom or dad.  He keeps running into Bruce Willis, but each time Bruce insists he’s never seen him before.  Bruce is actually just a new person every time.  None of his ‘new’ parents cut it, but due to some plot device bullshit he can’t go back to the old ones.  Don’t worry, it turns out the whole thing’s a dream.  Bruce Willis wakes the kid up from his nap and drives him back to his parents’ house.  North is just happy to see them, forgetting to even mention his crazy dream.  So here’s what this movie is telling children:

1. Leave your parents and travel the world.  Alone.  They don’t appreciate you enough anyways.
2. If it seems like someone is following you everywhere you go, don’t worry.  Those are all just different people.
3. you can’t go back to your parents yet.
4. Hop on in that car with that stranger.  Especially the guy that totally isn’t following you.  He’s just going to take you home.
5. This was all just a dream.  Tell no one.

One final little tidbit: when North falls asleep he’s waiting for his parents to get off from work at the mall.  When he wakes up, Bruce drives him home to his house. So his parents got off from work, walked past their sleeping child, and went home, probably thinking “I’m sure that nice man from the Die Hard movies will take care of it.”  That way you you get just a little more pedo action with your dream ending.  By the way, there’s one thing that makes me more angry than pedophilia, and it’s dream endings.

Way angrier, in fact.  So angry I forget whatever that first thing that got me angry was, and no I won’t reread this just to find out.  Dream endings are the biggest piece of bullshit Hollywood ever dropped on us.  I just watched that whole shitty movie and now you’re telling me none of it even happened?  Don’t try and tell me that kid actually learned from his dream either.  I once had a dream I was riding a dragon.  That dragon split in two and so did I and then me and other me fought each other.  On Dragons.  In the air.  I woke up wet, but learned absolutely nothing.  That’s because you don’t learn from dreams.  North could have been a 10 minute short where a kid goes to bed angry at his parents, sleeps it off and wakes up happy again.  That isn’t movie material, that’s every night of every child’s life.

Going back to that whole ‘spectrum’ thing, Rob Reiner up to this point made movies that were entertaining but clever.  They had just the right amount of substance.  North is the point in his career where he tried to be so much of both those things that he had neither.  If I had to guess why I’d say it’s because Rob Reiner isn’t actually that good of a director, he just had a great sense of storytelling and which ones are and aren’t interesting.  North was probably the point in his career that he stopped thinking he created good things because he surrounded himself with talent and picked his projects well and started thinking that art just poured out of his asshole and all he had to do with throw it up on a canvas.  That happens when you’ve made a bunch of good movies and people start talking you up and it’s unfortunate but basically inevitable.

Lately, I’ve been trying to say something nice after all the mean stuff, and there are actually a few here.  Just like last installment’s Taxi, there are several jokes in here that are funny at least in concept.  I didn’t laugh, but I did think to myself ‘I see what they were going for there.’  North is actually based off a book and adapted to screen by Alan Zweibel, a once long-time SNL writer.  The jokes are very SNL-ish, but are sort of steamrolled by Reiner, who I think has a very different sense of humor.  From what I’ve read, the book itself is actually quite good.  It only has five amazon reviews, but they’re all five stars.  That probably means that 100% of people who read it gave it five stars.  Honestly, who’s going to a read a book that reminds them of this piece of shit?

Is it the worst movie ever?  No.  Is it the worst end of a career that actually occurred right in the middle of it?  Quite possibly.  It also caused me to elicit an ‘Are you fucking serious?’ that might have caused a tsunami somewhere during the ‘It’s all a dream’ scene.  If my goal was to find the most pointless movies ever, I would’ve won big here.  It’s bad enough to make me sit through an hour and a half of crap.  Don’t tell me afterwards none of it even really happened or mattered.  I haven’t been this pissed since I watched all of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ before I realized that didn’t even happen to Americans. Well screw history, and screw North.

 

Am I right or am I right?  Email all opinions, in the form of a yes or no answer, to [email protected] and explain yourself before you cause pain to yourself.  Or, follow me on Twitter @Dan_Tompkins.  You can shout at me there and as a bonus, I will amuse you.