Not for nothing did Miramax studios earn the reputation of being a classy boutique of cinema. Successes notwithstanding, however, there's a patch of grime on the Weinstein brothers' underbelly, one you wouldn't necessarily even know about if you weren't on the studio's DVD promo mailing list. I'm talking, of course, about the dregs.
Every few months, like a star destroyer jettisoning so much space trash, Miramax dumps piles of movies you'll never hear of, starring actors you know and admire, onto video-store shelves. They do it quietly, in the hopes of preserving their golden reputation while hoping against hope to recoup some of the money they invested in these howling dogs. The most high profile of the recent castoffs was surely Prozac Nation, which features Christina Ricci as '90s relic Elizabeth Wurtzel. Despite boasting a nude scene both gratuitous and untitilating, the film is unremarkable, unless you consider the mere fact of its existence, which is most remarkable. Someone, somewhere thought it would make a good movie; someone else agreed; money was spent, and a film was completed, but it has absolutely not a spark of life. It's not that the film is badâit's that it feels like a rough draft.
That quality is common to the films Miramax has buried through the years; they employ talented people, but skimp on whatever the ineffable x-factor is that produces living, breathing movies. The low budgets don't seem to be the issue (though it's safe to assume the films wouldn't have been made otherwise). The problem is the lack of imagination.
Take When Billie Beat Bobby, a recent depiction of the mid-'70s tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that captured the world's attention as women's lib grew beyond fadness and entered the pop consciousness. It's not like the cast isn't worthyâHolly Hunter and Ron Silver starâand it certainly looks like a movie. But it's more like a sketch. Silver's false teeth alone reduce his performance to a caricature (which, given Riggs's oafish nature, could've been acceptable, but isn't). And Hunter has no option but to play BJK, one of the great female icons of the last 50 years, as an uncomplicated sweetie-pie. I mean, why bother?
The same could be asked of Cypher, a paranoid clone of The Matrix and Philip K. Dick, starring Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu. Sounds promising. Too bad no one read the script before going ahead with it. Likewise with Momentum (Teri Hatcher and Louis Gossett Jr.) and After Image (John Mellencamp!). All these recent releases seem like they might have once sounded good on paper, but have been languishing in the vaults for years. It'd be nice to think of these orphans as the Roger Corman movies of their timeâlow budgets, medium stars, and plenty of genre-based exploitation has gone into them.
The problem is that, unlike the Corman films of the '60s and '70s, nothing comes out. They just seem like misplaced bets. n
