Regular VHS of the Week readers know that I repeatedly identify Risky Business as the first film that I ever watched. My mom loves to pour cold water on this claim, citing the fact that she attended a screening of the 1978 film adaptation of Grease while I was in the womb, even though it is not possible to watch a film while in utero, at least to my knowledge. My first words WERE “I got chills...they’re multiplyin’!”, however, so the lady’s got a bit of evidence to back up her argument with. I also spent my first half dozen years harboring an unnatural obsession with Grease star and legendary mangler of Idina Menzel’s name John Travolta. I thought he was just the coolest thing since the Rubik’s Cube. Cooler than The Fonz! Cooler than Billy Dee Williams in Lady Sings the Blues! Hey man...we didn’t have the internet back then. How could I have known that he was a raving lunatic scientologist!? And look--I’m hardly the only one. Scores of people bought tickets to watch Travolta ride a mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy...despite the fact that it is a film about mechanical bull riding called Urban Cowboy. By the early 90’s, though, Travolta couldn’t even get himself shot...unlike his wife Kelly Preston...who actually WAS shot by her former boyfriend Charlie Sheen (just a flesh wound..it’s cool), which doesn’t even place on a Top 10 list of “Terrible Things that Charlie Sheen has Done.” Sure, he was in the Look Who’s Talking movies and they brought in a ton of coin at the box office...but they are also the Look Who’s Talking movies. Anyone remember Shout? Or The Experts?? Speaking of The Experts, I wonder what Arye Gross is up to right now? I bet he’s at some fancy wine and cheese party.
We all know how this story middles: Quentin Tarantino cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction and suddenly dude was hotter n’ Georgia asphalt. It was a full on Travoltidalwave! (Travoltacular? I’m struggling here). He was so popular that MTV started airing a commercial for a John Travolta’s Greatest Hits album ad infinitum (I wasn’t aware he’d had any hits...but whatever). You couldn’t turn on the tube without seeing JT with his enormous head and his Vinnie Barbarino hairdo softly crooning “gonna let her in...MMM mmm.” Dude went on an absolute tear over the next six years, staring in a string of blockbusters. It was the sort of unstoppable hot streak that should have been able to continue for decades so long as Travolta didn’t try something completely irrational...like...say...spend $70 million dollars on an incomprehensible Scientology action movie that even Scientologists would be afraid to watch. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what he did. The film in question is called Battlefield Earth and it’s about the year 3000 battle between humans and a race of humanoid aliens called The Psychlos, who are kind of like Juggalos but without all of the Faygo and the crystal meth. I know this because I read it on Wikipedia. I’m not gonna watch friggin’ Battlefield Earth! I realize the average Rotten Tomatoes score for all of my combined VHSOTW entries is probably around 15%...but I gotta draw the line somewhere! For the last 20 years Travolta has seemed like a man on a mission. That mission: making people question why they ever liked him in the first place. He got into some legal trouble for perving out on his male masseuses...which was bad...and he made a Xmas album with Olivia Newton-John...which was worse. Occasionally he’ll still throw us a bone. He was brilliant as Robert Shapiro in that OJ Simpson mini-series. He then followed that one up with a John Gotti biopic that didn’t make enough dough on its opening weekend to cover lunch at Le Bernardin.
Given his shoddy track record as a human being over the last whenever whenever, I found myself wondering if those Travolta 90‘s renaissance films were actually any good. In the case of Get Shorty or, say, Face/Off I would say definitely totally. But what to make of his 1996 mega-ish hit Phenomenon? I didn’t see it when it came out because I was about to leave home for film school...which means I spent most of my time holed up in my mom’s basement watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder films and pretending that I liked/understood them. I decided to go ahead and check it out for the first time and here’s what I found out: Travolta plays a small town farmer named George Malley who is just one dumb motherfucker. The first 10 minutes of the movie are dedicated to establishing George’s inability to comprehend any and all complex subject matter(s): he can’t figure out how to keep rabbits from eating his garden, he can’t learn foreign languages, he doesn’t know how to play chess. But, I mean, the dude seems to have a pretty solid life overall. He lives in this Norman Rockwell small town/studio backlot where he has steady work as a mechanic and is well liked by his fellow townsfolk. He’s got a sweet spread and his bff is Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker. So maybe he’s not walking around quoting Proust or whatever. Maybe cut the guy some slack, ya pretentious filmmaker dicks.
George’s 37th birthday party is coming up and he’d like nothing more than to bring the town’s resident attractive chair-making divorcee Lace as his date (seriously...that’s really the character’s name. Lace). Lace is played by lady who has been married to Kevin Bacon for an exceptionally long time Kyra Sedgwick. She is not interested in George. Like...at all. Tough luck, homes. Instead he rolls up with Forest Whitaker, who seems to spend all of his time trying to contact Diana Ross on some sort of antiquated ham radio. I really don’t know, dudes--maybe they got some sort of deep discount to plug a shit ton of Supremes tunes into this movie. The whole dang town comes out the fete George at the town’s bar/restaurant/only business, including the local old timey, bow-tie wearing doctor played by man who won more Academy Awards than Forest Whitaker, Robert Duvall. The doc wants to play chess with George but George can’t play chess ‘cuz he’s dumb, remember? They all get good and shitfaced and have themselves a time anyway. Later, when George is loading Forest Whitaker into his car so he can drive home drunk, he’s distracted by a light in the sky that looks like a special effect from an early 80’s Moody Blues video. Whatever it is, this light, it knocks George flat on his ass. Could also be the 16 Keystone Lights he just crushed that knocked him on his ass too. Just sayin’. George rushes inside all like “YO! Did any of y’all just see that crazy light in the sky!?” and they are like “how could we see something in the sky from the inside of a windowless bar, ya friggin’ dumbbell!?”
When George wakes up the following morning he’s sharper than a set of freshly sharpened steak knives. He knows how to install solar panels on his roof and he can speak Spanish fluently and he can make material objects movie with his mind and DOESN’T ANYONE THINK THIS IS WEIRD!?? He tells everyone that he’s currently reading at least 3 books a day. Real smart alecky stuff too. He blows through Infinite Jest in an afternoon, which is crazy to someone like me, who is still on page 50 after 24 years (note: I made this up. The first part, anyway). He suddenly has the touch to build things...which we learn in a montage set to a Peter Gabriel song called “I Have the Touch.” It’s like the music supervisor just watched the movie and decided to license songs with lyrics that describe exactly what is happening in the scene it is scoring. Later we’ll hear Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday is a Winding Road” in a scene where a car is driving down...wait for it...a WINDING ROAD! This music supervisor deserves a serious arse kicking.
George tries to explain his condition to Forest Whitaker. “I’m so smart I can’t stand it! Even crossword puzzles aren’t challenging enough for me!” Ok...so we’re in Good Will Hunting but without any Boston accents or Elliott Smith songs. Forest tells him to go see Doc. He asks Bobby Duvall if he wants to split an uber up to Boston to shoot A Civil Action when filming wraps and he says that he does. Then he moves a pencil with his mind and the Doc is all DAH FUQ!?? “That’s telekinesis!” he shouts. And then....and then it’s the next scene. What is he supposed to take for his Telekinesis, Doc?? Claritin? Vicodin?? Help a brother out, sawbones! Dude is clearly NOT RIGHT...but he just goes about his business. He finds Lace hanging around town and asks her to try some of the apples that he grew and then asks her how she likes them. Literally....how do you like them apples? She likes the apples just fine but still likes him not even a little bit. Undeterred, he kidnaps her two young children and drives them to her farmhouse. Before she can call the sheriff George is all “Ohhh...I think I smell an EARTHQUAKE coming on!” She’s like “whatever you say, kookaburra...you’d better stay for dinner then.” How this makes sense we do not know. While they’re eating dinner an earthquake does, in fact, occur and George says “TOLD YOU, fuckers... may I please get laid, now?” What’s that? This is a PG movie? Well I guess that ain’t happening. She tells him that she doesn’t like complications or surprises and dude’s who can suddenly speak 20 different languages overnight definitely checks both of those boxes. I mean, better than a coke habit though, right?
George keeps on doing his crazy smart people shit...decoding military cyphers and growing cucumbers the size of a brontosaurus pecker. One afternoon there’s some trouble in town: an old Portuguese man has accidentally poisoned himself and his grandson and the grandson is missing! At least I think that’s what happens. Problem is...no one in this town speaks a lick of Portuguese! I mean, can’t they just Rosetta Stone that shit?? They call up George, who learns how to speak Portuguese in like three minutes. He shoots the breeze with the old man...who says the kid is lost in a field or whatever...but George can FEEL that he’s actually someplace else. Dude’s a human Lo Jack receiver now too, apparently. He leads the entire cast of the movie to some dilapidated treehouse in the woods, which he blows apart with his mind, revealing the sick Portuguese kid on the treehouse roof. The kid is saved and everyone should be psyched but they aren’t because PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO MOVE THINGS WITH THEIR MINDS!!! The townspeople start fucking with George: hey George...cure my cancer. Hey George...what are the Powerball numbers. Hey George...get me a beer...with your MIND! Some dude from the seismological institute of seismology wants George to fly to Berkeley to do earthquake stuff. He asks Lace to come with, even though she is still mostly not interested in him. Before he can head to Berkeley he is arrested by the FBI because of that whole military cypher thing I mentioned earlier in this paragraph. They think he’s a spy or an asset or whatever. They make him answer a bunch of Final Jeopardy questions and show them his mind tricks...but then they just let him go.
Back at home things really start to go shithouse for poor George. He shows up at Lace’s window in the middle of the night and asks if he can crawl inside. She says “no Saturday Night Fever for you, lasheroo.” He mostly spends his afternoons wired up like David Bowie on the Dick Cavett show....ranting and raving about how he has so many ideas in his head he can’t stand it! He shows up at the bar with slightly unkempt hair and five o’clock shadow...which is enough to scare the shit out of the townsfolk. He also breaks the mirror behind the bar with his mind...which is even scarier than the uncombed hair. Luckily Lace comes to see him and gives him a G-rated wash and shave that goes on longer than any actual wash and shave I’ve had in my 30 years of washing and shaving. George says that if he can just show up at the upcoming library book sale and explain everything he knows about everything then maybe people won’t be afraid of him. Snorrrrreee! Just what everyone wants to hear--some chowderhead who can’t keep his trap shut! Hard pass. He shows up to the library but people just treat George like a freakshow attraction. They just want to hear about the UFO and see him do his mind tricks. Did I mention that some people think that the light George saw in the sky was a UFO and that aliens made him smart? Well, they do. Sorry...that’s kind of a big part of the movie. I was dicking around with my phone a lot while I was watching this. George is so overwhelmed by the crush of the crowd that he passes out.
So folks--here’s the thing: I just mentioned that business about the UFO. At this point there’s about 30 minutes left in the movie. If George woke up on a spaceship and had to cut some sort of deal with the aliens...you know...go live on a spaceship and stay smart or go back to being simple George...that would be a totally reasonable way to end the movie. I wouldn’t think it was weird...and neither would you. Or maybe he’d wake up to find that his face had been swapped out with Nicholas Cage’s and Nic Cage acted out the rest of the movie...kind of like how Bill Pullman becomes Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway with zero explanation. Also reasonable! What actually happens is this: George wakes up in the hospital and is told that he has a brain tumor. Not just any brain tumor, mind you; a super octopus brain tumor that has crawled into all of the nooks and crannies in his upstairs area and turned his brain function up to 11....TRILLION! He has the most active brain in the history of brains! Dude, sign me up! I still want to read Gravity’s Rainbow and learn how to tie a Sailor’s Knot. Of course the brain tumor is inoperable...so dude is absolutely positively gonna croak. So that’s the big payoff--30 more minutes of sniffly medical melodrama. Awesome.
George is visited by a world renowned brain surgeon played by an actor who looks like Frank Langella but isn’t Frank Langella as Frank Langella was not yet old enough to play this part in 1996. I’m sure he was disappointed. Brain Doc tells George he wants to pop open his dome and observe his brain in it’s pre-death state. Basically he wants to kill him, ok? Me...I’m fine with whatever happens so long as the movie ends. George, on the other hand, is less interested. The brain doc says “do it for science, man! I’ll make you famous!” George says it’s about the human spirit...not science. He also says he needs to clear his brain of engrams so he can meet Xenu after he dies but no one knows what the fuck he’s talking about. The state has George ruled incompetent so they can drill his cabeza open without permission. George escapes to Lace’s farmhouse to live out the rest of his days. He’s pretty sick at this point but, you know, staying alive (sorry...I had to). George brings Lace out into the yard to show her this makeshift bed he’s made. “Are you hoping to get lucky?” she asks. He tells her yes. They finally ball...but we don’t even see them take their jackets off! Shit, after two hours you’d think we’d at least get a peek at a bare shoulder or two. Afterwards they are lying around in a state of post-coital bliss. She says she enjoyed the balling. He says he did too. Then he says he's going to die. And she’s like “wait, you mean RIGHT NOW??” but he cannot hear her as he’s already dead. She cries her eyes out...as do her still fatherless children. If this isn’t a shit sandwich of an ending then I don’t know what is!
Oh wait...there’s a denouement. A year later all of the townspeople have gathered to celebrate George’s 38th birthday as George cannot celebrate it himself...being dead and all. It’s really just an excuse to play the Eric Clapton/Babyface tune “Change the World” which was a big ass hit in the summer of ’96. That and the Macarena. People raise their glasses to their departed simpleton-turned-genius friend George. Forest Whitaker goes outside for a smoke and is knocked on his ass by a blinding light from the sky. The words “Phenomenon 2: Smart Harder...Coming: Summer ’97” flash on the screen. I mean...I wish. The end.