Reviews

Terence Stamp plays a mysterious house-guest of a well-to-do family consisting of a factory owner, his bored wife, their awkward teenage son, their awkward young daughter, and their histrionic maid. They all take a fancy to him, so he does what any red-blooded young man would do - he has sex with each of them one by one. After he's had his fill of bourgeois booty, he packs his things and leaves - presumably off to the next brothel-to-be.

Well, as it turns out, there's something magical about old Terry's stamper. Each of the family members begins a dramatic transformation. The awkward son becomes a pretentious artist, urinating on canvases and tossing paint around with his eyes closed. The awkward daughter falls into a coma. The maid gains the powers of healing and levitation. The wife becomes a whore, and the husband gives his factory away and dubs himself "the screaming naked monk of the desert."

Kneel before Zod, indeed.

This is a bizarre little melodrama brought to you by Kodak (remember them?) It's about a grizzled US Army Sergeant who has the notion to bugle the North Korean army into submission. It is a misguided notion.

At one point he tries to convince his platoon to go along with the blitzkrieg boogie, but they recognize the idiocy of his plan and decide to stick with their rifles and grenades. All except for little doe-eyed Private Cornfed, fresh off the cliché truck from Gollyville. As it happens, he's a bit of a bugle buff himself who likes a little ragtime in his Reveille. Fortunately for him there is only one bugle, so he too is forced to settle for conventional weaponry.

It's a good thing too, because our swingin' sergeant is the only one killed in the battle that follows - presumably because his bugling gave his position away to everyone within a mile. Upon hearing the news, Private Cornfed runs to Sarge's side, pries the bugle from his cold dead hand, and plays Taps all respectful-like... without any dixieland frills. It's all very sad.

Our story begins as Karl Marx the Grey, immersed in the act of reading one of Baudelaire's raunchier tomes, is visited by an actor from the set of the Lumière brothers' (eventually abandoned) production of The Three Musketeers. Mistaking Marx for a pimp, d'Artagnan offers a sack of coins for the procurement of a woman.

Marx decides that Baudelaire is boring anyway, makes the book vanish, and decides to have some fun with the hapless thespian. He creates a woman out of thin air whom d'Artagnan immediately tries to molest. However, just before he can lock her in an embrace, Marx banishes the poor girl to the eternal void from which she came.

This sends d'Artagnan into a rage. He stomps around the room gesticulating wildly and draws his sword. He makes several attempts to skewer the father of socialism, but none succeed. Exasperated, he takes a final swipe at the puckish old man, who disappears into a puff of smoke.

At this point, several human-sized Punch and Judy dolls walk into the room and perform an ancient druid ritual to transform d'Artagnan into a Turkish prince.

Now all but utterly defeated and extremely uncomfortable in his new clothes, our hero falls to his knees and prays for divine assistance, which comes in the form of the Queen of Clubs who appears before him. She waves her staff around, which frightens the Punch and Judy dolls, sending them fleeing for the corners of the room. She summons d'Artagnan's lover from the void, who appears in a wedding dress, and then gives him his own spiffy new set of threads.

As our happy couple walk off into the backdrop to be wed, Karl Marx materializes again, but is immediately caged by the Queen of Clubs, quashing socialism in France forever.

THE END

All in all, a nice little movie, but it's a bittersweet treasure knowing that d'Artagnan never made it back to the set of the Lumière film and a potential classic had to be abandoned.

This movie can only truly be appreciated by alcoholics. Not because their life experiences will better inform them of the movie's nuances, but because you have to be drunk to enjoy it. Also, this movie doesn't have any nuances.

The only highlight of the movie is Denzel Washington's fascinating performance. His glassy-eyed stare, slurred speech, and baffled facial expressions are so plausible that I'm convinced he was actually drunk while filming. I'm sure he read the ham-handed script (or at least part of it) and decided that he wouldn't be able to get through the shoot sober.

There's a subplot involving a sexy heroin addict with a heart of gold, but nobody cares about that. The soundtrack uses pop songs about heroin (Under the Bridge, Gimme Shelter) during her scenes, which is helpful because I found myself forgetting that she was even in the movie and I needed to be reminded every so often what her drama was. Presumably the actress was also actually using heroin during filming and either died of an overdose or stopped showing up, because she vanishes shortly after the halfway point. Not that I'm complaining.

All of this stuff goes on and on in predictable ways, ends in a corny moral lesson, and Denzel takes home a paycheck large enough to install a whole new government in Uganda.

To be totally honest, I think the whole movie was just an excuse for Robert Zemeckis to meet Nadine Velazquez.