Going Goofy at the Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS

All right, class, pencils down, lighten up. It's summer. Summer-movie time. And that means you can have your brains cryogenically frozen till fall. You won't have to take Cliffs Notes to any movie, unless it's Dick, the comedy about two '70s teenagers who were supposedly Watergate's Deep Throat--and that picture boasts giggling girls, a fart joke and a Chief Executive who serendipitously shares his nickname with the male organ. As for mega-serioso drama, the main one is Eyes Wide Shut, and that has Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman making weird whoopee, so it shouldn't be a chore to sit through. Most of the other pictures are minds wide shut. Their only aim is to make you laugh yourself sick. As Eddie Murphy, playing a star actor in the inside-Hollywood comedy Bowfinger, says, "We're tryin' to make a movie here, not a film."

Summer movies mean movement: frantic, farcical, talking-car movement in Inspector Gadget (with Matthew Broderick as the patched-together robocop), or hip, Tim Burtonish bustle in the comic book-derived Mystery Men (with Ben Stiller, Hank Azaria and Janeane Garofalo as all-too-human superheroes). But even in the action films, expect muscles to give way to giggles.

And in the flat-out comedies, movement means the rapid flapping of a wise mouth. Cartman and his smartass school chums will try talking their way back into the pop zeitgeist with the feature cartoon South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. In Mickey Blue Eyes, Brit blueblood Hugh Grant plans to marry into a Mafia family and has to pass himself off as a Brooklyn gangster. Detroit Rock City, set in 1978, is about four guys trying to bluff their way into a KISS concert. It may remind you of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, made in 1978, about a bunch of kids trying to get into the Beatles' first Ed Sullivan gig in 1964. But then, every summer movie tends to resemble every other summer movie. This year, though, movie heroes are less interested in saving the planet than in losing their virginity. That's the difference between macho melodrama and lowbrow comedy.

After a decade of warm-weather box offices defined by mammoth action films, Hollywood is partying in 1999. This is the season of silly--the goofy summer. Also dopey, because the humor is so often about bodily functions. And happy, for the studio bosses pleased not to be sweating out each weekend's take for a Titanic-priced epic that may do Postman-like business.

And finally, in terms of budget, mini. These days an action extravaganza with computer-generated special effects can run up a $120 million tab; often what all those computers generate is a runaway budget. But this summer's two dead-cert hits are the Mike Myers parody Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, each of which cost only $30 million. "Even if your comedy has the biggest star in the world--Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy--it's still more economical than a gigantic effects movie," says Amy Pascal, president of Columbia Pictures, which is releasing Big Daddy. "No matter what you do, no matter who's in it, a comedy doesn't cost $100 million."

Moguls can count. They know that 1998, which was to be Godzilla's summer, became the merry months of Mary. There's Something About Mary, the Farrelly brothers' $25 million gross-out romance with no big stars and no visual wizardry but a pruny chest prosthesis, earned $176 million at the domestic box office. The film's success had three quick payoffs. It sent studios rushing to get a new batch of comedies ready for summer '99. Its ribald humor raised the bar, or lowered the standard, for what was acceptable in a mass-market comedy. And it made people feel good. "I got belly laughs I couldn't hold in," says Stacey Snider, president of production at Universal. "Moviegoing is supposed to be a communal experience, and there's nothing more communal than laughter."

So, naturally, the movie to beat next week is Sandler's Big Daddy, in which the hottest comedy star of the moment teaches a stray five-year-old how to pee in public, toss sticks in the path of in-line skaters and smash cans of SpaghettiOs on the supermarket floor to get a discount on damaged merchandise. The film, directed by Dennis Dugan, is damaged too: it's standard Sandler sociopathic humor with a lethal dose of climactic treacle. Critics get perplexed when the public rejects smart youth comedies like Go and Election (which lace their rude wit with complex characters and formal ingenuity) to wallow in the Sandler sandbox. But his huge constituency is as loyal as Moonies. And hey, somebody's got to make the stupidest comedies around.

Somebody else--two brothers, in fact--had to make the movie at the top of Hollywood's high-hopes list this summer. It's not the Will Smith western Wild Wild West, which opens just before July 4, but a little comedy from Snider's studio: the no-star, no-scruples, no-prisoners American Pie, an $11 million gross-out romantic comedy that makes its debut a week later. The cast of this high-school comedy about sexual anxiety skews younger than the early-30s characters of Mary, and that's fine with Universal, which wants to grab the loyal teen audience before conquering the whole world. But it's the Did-I-just-see-what-I-think-I-saw gonadal gaggery that has Hollywood thinking Mary 2.

The Farrellys' notorious hair gel gives way to a gaudier spread: the penis-in-a-sweatsock opening scene, the semen in a beer cup that an unsuspecting guy drinks, a striptease and double premature ejaculation seen on the Internet, the Niagara of diarrhea one finicky fellow suffers--in the girls' bathroom--and, for dessert, the desperate erotic defiling of Mom's apple pie. (Don't blame us, parents; we're just messengers alerting you to the scenes your kids will be memorizing next month.)

"We didn't want to talk down to teen-agers," says Chris Weitz, who directed the movie with his brother Paul (though only Paul gets credit). "Teenage life is not PG-13. It's a lot more R-rated than people are willing to admit." The good people at the movie industry's rating board thought American Pie was a bit more than R-rated. The Weitz brothers had to make four trips to the principal's office before the movie was softened from a toxic NC-17 to a respectable R. In fact, Pie is no Mary. Last year's film was about emotional embarrassment; this year's is about sexual humiliation. The Weitz brothers have really made a millennial Porky's (more sex play, stronger roles for the girls). That would be fine with Hollywood too: Bob Clark's 1981 ode to horniness cost $4 million and earned $105 million in North America.

"We're in an up period for vulgarity," says Chris Weitz. "I'm proud of our film's vulgarity." Of course he is: it will sell his movie the way that darned zipper sold Mary. Hollywood smells a hit too. Brian Grazer, who runs Imagine Entertainment with Ron Howard, gets a little awed as he tells of taking his son and a friend, ages 13 and 14, to an early screening: "They went insane. They wanted to see it again, like the next second. They go, 'Can we just stay and see it over?'" On the strength of the screening, Grazer hired the Weitz brothers to rewrite the sequel to Murphy's The Nutty Professor.

Pushing the movie envelope of bad taste--also spitting on it, scrawling dirty words in crayon and sealing a fake turd inside--is as old as Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (a toccata of farts around the campfire, 1973) and Steve Martin's The Jerk (a certain Shinola gag, 1979). Humiliation humor is nothing new to Brooks (whose 1974 Young Frankenstein Sandler watches in Big Daddy). "Humor is basically pointing out the flaws in the human condition," he says. "I'm sure cavemen and -women sat around the fire at night, roasting whatever animal, and talked about how Murray couldn't get out of the way of this big, charging buffalo and was crushed to death, and they all laughed. That was the first joke, and that joke holds true. Murray's still getting crushed, and we're still laughing."

Bowfinger, about a hapless producer (Martin) who makes a movie by shooting scenes with a big star (Murphy) who doesn't know he's being photographed, is relatively mild--a dish of sherbet next to American Pie. Its kookiest scene, set in a dark, deserted garage, has Murphy being dogged by the sound of mysterious high heels. (Actually, it's a dog in high heels.) But Martin appreciates the need for comedy: broad, narrow, all widths. "People just want to have a good time at the movies," he says, "whether it's a science-fiction movie or just a comedy they trust. A science-fiction movie doesn't have to succeed as well as a comedy; you just need some aliens and some special effects. But with comedy, you think, 'If I don't laugh, I'm gonna die. I hate that I came in here.' The audience has to trust it."

There's a sweet scene at the end of Bowfinger: the bootleg film has been completed, and all the perpetrators are at the premiere. The movie they've made is probably irredeemable junk, no better than Big Daddy. Yet the producer and his cast stare in wonder at the big screen. However feeble the images, they move! And they move those who watch them.

Comedy, raw or refined, can do that to ordinary moviegoers, can create the community of strangers that Snider speaks of. The next months should reveal whether the genre can sustain a whole summer. If not, it's back to the killer asteroids.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/Los Angeles