Don't Try This at Home: The Sequel

Howards End.

You'll irecall that last year's Merchant-Ivory extravaganza achieves its powerful denouement when the dorky, self-effacing Leonard Bast staggers into a massive bookcase and suffers a heart attack after the bookcase comes tumbling down upon him. The huge bookcase is novelist E. M. Forster's none-too-subtle symbol for the overly educated British upper class, a bunch of snooty toffs who literally crush the lower classes beneath them with what Bob Dylan once referred to as their "useless and pointless knowledge." (Actually, Dylan was probably not talking about the British upper classes at the time.)

Well, the bookcase may be a great symbol for the amorality ot the British aristocracy, but as an instrument of execution it fails miserably. Annoyed by the absurd finale to Howards End, I spent several weeks visiting friends' homes and running headlong into their bookcases, trying to see if the collapsing structures could possibly kill a full-grown man. No way, Jose. It is aerodynamically impossible for a bookcase loaded with heavy objects to collapse onto a human being, and even if the bookcase did collapse, the human being would have plenty of time to get out of the way of the literary cascade. Leonard Bast's contrived demise is an embarrassment to E. M. Forster, an embarrassment to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and an embarrassment to that woman with

the long name who writes all their screenplays. They should have used an ax, a truncheon, or even a deadly asp. Bookcases do not kill.

Sliver.

Remember the 'scene where Sharon Stone goes to a restaurant in Manhattan and takes off her panties during dinner to rise to the challenge of her date? I went to three different dinners in midtown Manhattan with three different female friends, had three different nice conversations, ordered the angel hair pasta with arugula, then asked them to take off their panties. Two refused outright, and one said she'd do it, but only at her apartment. Now, what's the point of that, I ask? Generally speaking, I'd say the odds of getting a woman to take off her panties in a crowded New York restaurant are about the same as getting a woman to fake an orgasm in a crowded New York deli.On the other hand, the request would probably be gladly met in Los Angeles.

Alive.

Hey, what's i the big deal about eating human flesh, anyway? You're stranded in the Andes, you haven't had anything to eat for weeks, you're cold, you're hungry and you're probably going to die. And you honestly expect me to believe that you're going to have qualms of conscience about eating human flesh, just because your friends back home might hold it against you? Hey, get real.

To illustrate how ridiculous this whole premise is, I decided to go on a strict fast and see how long it would take me to succumb to the lure of human flesh. I didn't even make it through Day II. After suffering through an entire day without so much as a breadstick, I got to about four o'clock in the afternoon and decided that I'd had it. Luckily, I'd been playing basketball that afternoon and had scraped my knee on the concrete, so I had a little bit of flesh hanging off my knee. Before it had a chance to scab up, I cut off a little morsel with my nail-clipper and popped it straight into my mouth. It went down nice and smooth. That was 16 days ago, and I still have no qualms of conscience about it. Morally, I think I'm home free. I did what I had to do, and I know that if I'm ever trapped in the Andes--or any other mountain range--and there's nothing to eat but human flesh, I'm noshing anthropoid.

Sophists will object that eating your own flesh is different than eating other people's flesh, and that it's different than eating the flesh of dead humans. Baloney. The day I nibbled that morsel off my knee I would have been more than happy to eat another person's flesh. The problem was: there wasn't any available. If there had been, I would have washed it right down with a San Pellegrino. As for qualms of conscience about eating dead human flesh: hey, get serious. A person who eats his own flesh simply to make a point in a magazine article isn't going to draw the line at eating dead human flesh to save his own life just because society deems such dining tendencies culinarily and ethically unacceptable. He's going to strap on the feed bag and dig right in. Cannibalism is only bad if you think it's bad.

A Tale of Springtime.

After the first installment of "Don't Try This at Home" appeared in 1991, Movieline was literally deluged with letters from European readers complaining that none of the films we investigated were of Continental origin. Determined not to make the same mistake twice, I rented the 1989 Eric Rohmer film A Tale of Springtime, which was released on video in this country earlier this year, and took copious notes. As is true of all Eric Rohmer movies, it is not immediately clear to the viewer what this movie is about; it seems to have something to do with a woman who doesn't want to sleep in her boyfriend's apartment but can't move back into her own because she's sublet it to her student cousin, who is visiting from out of town, so she has to spend a few days with a ditzy, twentyish pianist she met at a party where neither of them actually liked the host. In short, it is not the French Basic Instinct.

Rohmer has always been praised for the incisive realism of his films, for his ability to portray life as it really and truly is. There is a scene in the film where the main character, a school teacher, sits down at a table with the pianist, the pianist's father, and the pianist's father's sexy girlfriend, who is only about 25, and begins to discuss the influence of Immanuel Kant's a posteriori arguments on the schoolchildren she teaches in a working-class district of Paris. Throughout this 10-minute scene, which cleverly weaves together the theories of Kant and Husserl with the vastly overlooked importance of maieutic dialogue, the conversation never flags, as both the pianist's dad and his hip little girlfriend are literally mesmerized by the subject, and jump right into the discussion with their own thoughts on maieutic dialogue and the validity of a priori arguments.

To see if this would work in real life, I had dinner with three of my most pretentious friends, all of whom have spent time in France, all of whom, I have reason to believe, adore Eric Rohmer. While they scanned the menu, I broached the subject of Kant's a priori and a posteriori arguments, pointed out how much I had been influenced by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and even threw in a few nice words about his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. I then sort of threw the floor open for a roundtable discussion.

They all looked at me like I was a complete asshole and went back to discussing how much they used to like The New Yorker before Tina Brown took over.

Indecent Proposal.

It is no secret that Adrian Lyne's latest movie is flawed by an imbecilic premise: the fatuous notion that Woody Harrelson, having been offered $1 million to let his wife sleep with Robert Redford, would need more than eight nanoseconds to decide whether or not to let her do it. When I approached four of my friends about sleeping with their wives for $1 million, they unanimously responded:

1) $1 million was more than fair

2) When could I do it?

3) Check or cash?

4) Did I need their American Bankers Association routing number for direct deposit, or would the insured money market account number be sufficient?

I want to be perfectly honest here and admit that none of my friends' wives look like Demi Moore and thus none of them are worth $1 million for a single night. What's more, my friends know this. So eventually we got into a bit of dickering. One friend said that he wouldn't go any lower than $350,000 because that's how much he would need to buy a new house, which he reckoned was what he would need to salve his conscience for the awesome injustice he had done. But two other friends said, in all seriousness, that $10,000 would do the trick, and one told me, "$3,500 and she's yours."

Here is a sampling of my friends' responses:

"Does she have to know about the money?"

"Can we do this off the books?"

"Will Movieline actually pay for this?"

"How do you report this kind of stuff on your 1040?"

"How much would your wife go for?"

The last question is the most pertinent of all, revealing how profoundly Adrian Lyne's depraved vision of marriage deviates from my own. For although my cash-strapped friends might be willing to whore out their wives for a few grand, this is anything but the case in my nest of conjugal bliss. My wife is not available for sex with lecherous strangers for $1 million; my wife is not available for sex with libidinous plutocrats for $2 million; my wife is not available for sex with a lascivious oligarch for all the gold in Fort Knox, or all the tea in China.

Me, on the other hand, you can have for 50 bucks, motel room included.

Scent of a Woman.

Most of the movies that I investigated for this article proved to be hopelessly out of touch with reality, encouraging behavior that could lead to personal humiliation, catastrophic financial loss, or severe lesions on the penis. Scent of a Woman was the single exception, the single case in which an apparently idiotic action that takes place in a movie can actually be recreated in real life. The incident in question is the scene where the blind Al Pacino strolls directly into traffic on a busy New York street and somehow manages not to be run over by the oncoming traffic. When I first saw this scene, I was appalled by its transparent falsity, by its refusal to depict New York the way it really is: as a place where a blind man walking out into the street doesn't have a prayer in hell of getting to the other side, even if the light is green, even if he looks like Ray Charles.

Well, it just goes to show how wrong a person can be. Kitting myself out with sunglasses and a cane, and boldly strolling into traffic on a very busy, two-way street in Manhattan, I fully expected to be hurled 50 feet in the air by a rampaging, out-of-control taxi driven by somebody named Singh or Mahmud. Either that or leveled by an oncoming limousine carrying some burned-out rock star to a cable TV appearance far too late to stir the flickering embers in the dying hearth of his career.

Imagine my surprise when I repeatedly strode into traffic and was repeatedly given safe passage by the oncoming flotillas of vehicles. Not once, not twice, but three times I managed to walk back and forth across the street without being killed. Indeed, the only reason I did not continue the experiment until I was fatally injured was because of the two beat police officers standing on the corner eyeing me suspiciously. Imagine, being arrested for impersonating Al Pacino. Well, that's still better than being arrested for impersonating Al Yankovic.

Conclusions: Despite the surprising finale to my study, which I believe should be written off as a fluke, the overwhelming evidence suggests that people who attempt to imitate the activities they see in motion pictures are doomed to humiliation, remorse, severe burns, and even death. Conversely, people seeking to kill themselves or others through the fatal intermediary of a large bookshelf are merely wasting their time, and are well-advised to stick to AK-47s or hat pins jammed into the ear drum. Two years after the industry was exposed as an utter sham in "Don't Try This at Home," the same abuses continue. Hollywood remains a twisted dream factory, spoon-feeding the public a hopelessly skewed, transparently fake vision of reality. Movieline readers are thus cautioned, once again, to take everything they see in the movie house with a grain of salt, and to religiously avoid imitating the activities of actors and actresses appearing in movies produced or directed by anyone named Joel. Another thing: this is the last time I'm going to warn you. That candle wax still burns.

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Joe Queenan wrote "A Complete Lack of Direction" about the significance of directors, in the October Movieline.

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