Reviews: MBFW & MIB

As a fully-rounded, married individual, I sample more than the standard male diet of formulaic special effects movies, and this summer that meant seeing the Julia Roberts comedy My Best Friend's Wedding. The director had previously made Muriel's Wedding, so Hollywood effectively identified the subject matter he's capable of handling. Although its plotline of Julia Roberts attempting to destroy the woman marrying her old flame seems a little sadistic for empowered young women of the '90s, the film is unpredictable enough to make it a breath of fresh air in the wake of earlier would-be frothy affairs (One Fine Day comes to mind). It's given a real boost by the presence of Rupert Everett as Roberts's cool gay pal (this guy has evidently signed on to play a gay secret agent in an upcoming film—John Barry, tune up your electric guitars!).

James Newton Howard has proven himself adept at countering his action movie assembly-line efforts with smaller comic pictures, and My Best Friend's Wedding features some pleasantly sweet romantic moments (featured in a brief suite on the film's song-dominated album), although Howard's thumping mock-classical approach for the comic plotting sequences gets heavy-handed. Howard wrote an extremely busy, Gershwin-style orchestral score for the painfully forced One Fine Day—another example of a composer thanklessly trying to make an audience believe they're watching a funny movie when all evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Howard wrote a memorably direct and effective love theme for Julia Roberts's original star-making vehicle, Pretty Woman, and it's a shame that highly-marketed commodity never received a release of its score.

The composer most in evidence in My Best Friend's Wedding is '60s icon Burt Bacharach, whose song "I Say a Little Prayer for You" gets performed in the movie's best-remembered set piece. Bacharach's indelible pop style was never well suited to film scoring—his Oscar-winning score to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has doomed that movie to endless future unintentional laughter produced by its swingin' a capella vocal effects, although his other major opus, the James Bond mishmash Casino Royale, is a great time capsule of 60s songs and instrumentals. As a songwriter, Bacharach has been consigned to elevators across the nation until the last few years, when aging baby boomers have grown nostalgic for his bittersweet, complex melodies and their Hal David lyrics. He's trotted on-screen in person in Mike Myers's Austin Powers, which was the first film of the year to launch the current Bacharach retrospective. It's all part of my theory that virtually anything cool can trace its roots to the '60s.

Apparently the runaway blockbuster hit of summer '97 is preordained to be Men In Black, which has managed to defeat its competition by being the least moronic event movie of the season. Based on a cult comic book, MIB (as people who refer to Independence Day as ID4 call it) follows the adventures of shades- sporting secret government operatives whose job is to cover up the fact that Earth has been swarming with thousands of bizarre extraterrestrial beings since the '50s. MIB is imaginatively designed and written (I love the idea that the movie's MacGuffin is a galaxy the size of a marble, which is also a setup for the film's existential final shot) and reasonably, if not hysterically, funny. I was looking forward to something along the lines of the enjoyability factor of Ghostbusters here, and while MIB is infinitely superior to the moribund Ghostbusters 2, its laughs are scattershot. Oddly enough, it's Tommy Lee Jones who gets off most of the major yuks by playing everything as a sort of a Texan Jack Webb, while the coveted Will Smith seems a little low on bluster, generating fewer laughs in his full-length role here than he did with his intermittent appearances in Independence Day. Even the brilliant Rip Torn is only allowed a couple of opportunities to reveal his mastery of the blunt put-down, while Vincent D'Onofrio manfully struggles through a great physical performance as a possessed farmer that's sadly monotonous as written. It all goes to show what a miracle the original Ghostbusters was: it's hard to create an atmosphere of improvisational comedy when you're spending $80 million, which is probably why most giant comedies like 1941 and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World aren't really all that funny.

I can't imagine anyone other than Danny Elfman scoring Men In Black: no one has straddled the opposing poles of mega-blockbusters and quirky, oddball comic films more skillfully than the former Oingo Boingo musician. Elfman's rock background makes him perfectly suited for capturing the inherent Blues Brothers "cool" factor, with a "walk theme" seemingly derived from such classic Henry Mancini bass lines as those in Peter Gunn and the second Inspector Clouseau movie, A Shot in the Dark. Other moments feature Elfman at his most Bernard Herrmann, with bold, overlapping low brass chords a la Day the Earth Stood Still and the Harryhausen films, and delicate harp arpeggios in the style of vintage Twilight Zones. Unfortunately, the film's comic pacing and jumpy editorial flow don't allow for the greatest scoring opportunities: there are few lengthy cues, mostly just transitions to the next comic vignette, and much of the composer's more interesting effects get buried under explosions or Ben Burtt-style alien gibberish. Compared to Elfman's full-bore, operatic Mars Attacks! this score is almost unnoticeable. Two cuts of the composer's score—the main theme and the great title sequence that follows a dragonfly in flight over a desert highway—have been released on the movie's pop-crammed soundtrack album, the primary feature of which is a forgettable rap number by Will Smith. All the more reason to hasten the day when we all have DVD players and all movie soundtracks are isolated in stereo on their video releases.