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Lindsay Lohan was born the second of July, 1986 in New York City. A precocious kid born into a large family led by two ambitious parents — the father a businessman, the mother, nê Sullivan, a former Rockette — Lohan was soon appearing in TV commercials and print ads: she was a child Ford model from the age of three on. In emulance of the usual career trajectory of cute kids, she ended up on soap operas, which are still primarily shot in Manhattan, the last vestige of television's origins. Soaps led to a movie and to a short lived stint on a sit com, abandoned in favor of movies. But none of these early career decisions, presumably made by Lohan's mother, who remains her business manager, readily clicked with either the public's appetite or for Lohan's peculiarly engaging appeal, until she was "discovered" by Nancy Meyers and the team remaking THE PARENT TRAP for Disney in 1998.
Preternaturally professional, very relaxed, able to do both an "American girl" voice and a reasonable facsimile of a British accent, and, like Shirley Temple before her (at least in Graham Greene's estimation), with an erotic allure that treads into the taboo, the lentiginous Lohan, at age 12, looked poised and ready for fame. Yet even PARENT TRAP might have been the end of her career. After all, she would soon be older and entirely different. Yet Lohan's vast experience and Disney's ability to see fuller potential in her (as the new Kurt Russell?) led the corporation to make another remake (five years later, though she made two Disney TV movies in between), this time of FREAKY FRIDAY, which was the film, back in 1976 with Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris, that caused critics to take Disney seriously for the first time in 20 years.
Part of the reason that Disney was viewed with distemper at the time was films such as THE LOVE BUG. Released in 1969, and based on a story by Gordon Buford called CAR-BOY-GIRL, this kids comedy came to represent not just everything that was wrong with Disney but with Hollywood in the 1970s. The fact that THE LOVE BUG went on to make $23 million dollars and spawn some three sequels, a TV movie remake and a short lived series only compounded the alienation of sensitive film fans to the demise of classical Hollywood, resurrected only when the likes of Coppola and Lucas turned to that pool of expertise for their tales.
THE LOVE BUG told the story of Herbie, a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle deluxe ragtop sedan magically imbued with a form of life, which he used, in the first film at least, to facilitate the mating habits of inept human beings, hence the title. The first beneficiaries of Herbie's powers were Dean Jones and Michelle Lee. Buddy Hackett was also in there somewhere. Later, Jones drove Herbie to triumph in a series of races. Herbie was only the latest of numerous mechanical or inanimate objects given life Frankenstein-like in the national media, the odd show MY MOTHER THE CAR being another occasion.
But THE LOVE BUG and its successors were innovative in another category. LOVE BUG was one of the first films to endorse the philosophy of cheating. If this seems strange coming from a kids pix studio, it is especially strange coming from a supposedly Christian society or at least a capitalist economy that emphasizes fair competition between opposing forces as the best way to maintain a healthy and prosperous society. Instead, movies such as THE WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE, ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD, and AIR BUD, and xx are barely disguised odes to cheating, finding a hidden advantage that helps you triumph, which, in fact, more accurately reflects the way American capitalism works.
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HERBIE: FULLY LOADED (Disney, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005), the Lohan-geared remake or sequel or rethinking of THE LOVE BUG, is more along the lines of the cheating movie than the love connection (though there is that minor element). It's more like SIX-PACK, the Kenny Rogers movie about a NASCAR family, an ultimately cozy tale of love and family values.
Lohan plays Maggie Peyton, the first member of the NASCAR Peytons to graduate from college. She has always wanted to be a driver herself, but her troglodyte dad (Michael Keaton) prevents it (though he explains why in less sexist terms later) in favor of her older brother (Breckin Meyer). When Maggie picks up a broken down Herbie at the junkyard, rescuing him from demolition, the car slowly reawakens her dormant dream of driving a racecar. A street race against the No. 1 driver on the circuit, Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon), leads to a full blown competition between Maggie (in disguise at first) that ends up with Maggie replacing her brother and Herbie replacing the Peyton team's car in a crucial NASCAR race.
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HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is, as other reviewers have noted, a step back for Lohan from the more mature hijinks of MEAN GIRLS. As a college grad her character is at least 22, but is presented as an idealized teen. One scene of her in an alluring dress was cut from the finished film and appears in deleted scenes, suggesting that the filmmakers were still striving for the tweener market. But as other reviewers have noted, LL shouldn't be playing kids anymore and there are gratifying signs, such as a Robert Altman project, that she is attempting to change the path of her career, or match her films with her age and aspirations. After all, in 2044, Lohan could be a candidate to play the mother part in a PARENT TRAP remake, a dim star reflecting the light off of another newer LL. It's even harder to maintain the Disney image when in her private life she parties with the alacrity of a Tara Reid, or crashes her car after making a car movie (neither accident, by the way, was her fault).
Part of her trouble may be that she is a red head. There aren't that many of them in the history of popular cinema: Rita Hayworth, maybe; Lucile Ball, but on television. Red heads have a complex history in the media, which is to say, since Victorian times. They were looked down upon in England, partially because red is the color of Satan, partially because of racial rivalry with Ireland and Scotland. Red heads were viewed as both dangerous and low class, a blend of reactions that Lohan's persona also suffers from. Pre-Raphaelite paintings did much to eroticize red hair, and though red heads had been villains in earlier novels, George Eliot and Thackeray both provided sympathetic portraits of red heads, which was a major change in the perception of red hair in Victorian England. Red heads were still exotic enough, however, for Wilkie Collins to designate his villains as such, or to make plausible something unique as the "red headed league" whom Sherlock Holmes is called upon to rescue.
On the streets these days red, or a shade thereof, is the color of choice for girls, groupies, musicians, street punks, and other varieties of female fauna. One of the most famous of Jennifer Garner's ALIAS costumes has her in shocking red hair. Which is the point. Red hair still has the power to shock. To seem unnatural, unruly, outrageous. It may be simply that red hair doesn't photograph as well as blonde or dark hair. Lohan's hair has naturally darkened as she has gotten older, but the fact that she "blonded" herself during her skinny phase may suggest that even she is grappling with the power and mythos or her own red hair.
In the experience, HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is very much like every other Disney kids movie off the assembly line. It promotes "the family" and "girl power"" at the same time, to a succession of not totally irrelevant pop tunes by Van Halen Loverboy, Steppenwolf and others, over montages that don't so much advance the story as celebrate it. This technique was briefly borrowed by Disney scion Brett Eisner when he made SAHARA for Paramount, showing that the apple truly does not fall far from the tree. The film employs the split screen approach to racing footage that John Frankenheimer used in GRAND PRIX and some of the outlandishly bad blue screen special effects found in all the Herbie movies. By borrowing the sub title "fully loaded" as a trope from action movies from the 1990s and beyond the film also promises more excitement than Disney movies are usually prone to offer.
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Unfortunately, the film also subscribes to the Disney template of story construction. Maggie (also called "Mags" — after mag wheels?) is "willful" and needs to be taken down a peg. The viewer is invited to see her as such, but to this viewer the machinations around her comeuppance seem unfair and come from people who don't understand her. Her ambition is both encouraged and punished. Her dad chastises her, saying, " Your word used to mean something." But that wasn't really established in the movie. In fact, the opposite is established, that she has always been willful. But the dad's ire isn't the only unmotivated action in the film. When everyone else gets mad at her, you are not exactly clear why. Maggie reaches her lowest moment at the 1:01 moment, and its very contrived. Even worse, you don't know Herbie's motivation, absurd as that statement is out of context. But at one point he purposely loses a race; then he is depressed about something and you are not sure what it is but it is causing Herbie to act self-destructively. Crazy as it sounds, they should have worked more on clarifying Herbie's character. After all, the movie is named after him.
My main complaint about the movie as a Lohan vehicle is that there is no dancing. Lohan is an excellent dancer, showing confidence, sexiness, imagination. She usually dances at some point in most of her movies, and the dance deprivation of this film is telling. They didn't understand Lohan, either. Lohan could be the next Ann-Margret (see Joe Bob's latest book, PROFOUNDLY EROTIC, for an excellent summary of Ann-Margret's career). Instead, here she is offered up as fading Haley Mills.
Disney offers up HERBIE: FULLY LOADED in a fine widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced), with DD 5.1 in English, French, and Spanish, and with French subtitles. Extras are abundant. Leading off is an audio commentary by the director, who previously did, surprisingly, D.E.B.S Her sexy film background does not prevent her from embracing the Disney way. "In classic Disney fashion, the villain goes one step too far," she points out near the end, showing a familiarity with Disney patented story structure.
Next up are seven deleted scenes that for the most part delineate a crucial subplot in which Maggie's brother doesn't really want to be a racer, he wants to be a rock musician ("Chicken Shack," "Garage"). I wish these had been left in; they round out Meyer's character and provide motivation. There is also an alternative opening montage.
Making of material includes "A Day at the Races," "Breaking the Rules: Stunts from HERBIE: FULLY LOADED," and "Bringing Herbie to Life." There is also a blooper reel (which shows that the boys on the set had a fun time pranking Lohan with scary things like rubber spiders), and Lohan's music video for the movie, which, though justified, like every other music video these days, has her rolling around on a car.
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It is not so entirely ridiculous to link HERBIE: FULLY LOADED to LE SAMOURAÏ (The Criterion Collection, No. 306, 1967, $29.95, Tuesday, October 25, 2005), Jean-Pierre Melville's highly influential noir knockoff. Melville's anti-hero, Jef Costello (the somnambulistic Alain Delon), carries a huge ring of car keys that he uses to steal his transportation to (the opposite of a getaway car?) the hits he performs for mysterious clients. Both films are examples of cinema's obsession with car culture. HERBIE does it superficially and SAMOURAÏ does it subtly, but they both show an obsession with cars, because cars are, basically, one of the few things that are truly cinematic (and weren't they both invented around the same time?).
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The plot of LE SAMOURAÏ is unusually simple for Melville, and it will be misleading for newcomers. Cunningly, Criterion has issued it near the end of its cycle of Melville films, rather than at the start. Also, it is one of the most anticipated DVDs among film buffs, and so holding it off as long as possible means that the hunger builds, and, presumably, they can work at getting it right. The result is perhaps much less than one would have hoped.
I first saw LE SAMOURAÏ in 1973 as the third on a triple bill with ELVIRA MADIGAN and THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS at a small theater called the Fine Arts. The American distributors called the film THE GODSON, because THE GODFATHER was such a huge hit (and in fact that's still how you find it in the IMDB). The audience, perhaps naively expecting James Caan to reappear and succumb yet again to a hail of bullets, was palpably bored. I, on the other hand, being better than the crowd, was entranced (for the record, I loved the FINZI-CONTINIS, too). I've been trying to put it into words every since, but the beauty of the film was found in its taken super seriously the pop culture ethos of loyalty, toughness, silence; indeed, childish things, and lending them a dignity that only pop culture can.
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What's funny is that you think you know LE SAMOURAÏ until you see it again. Then you realize that there is a great deal of it that you forget, and that in fact the film has a lot more scope than just Jef in his Spartan apartment with a symbolic bird in a cage, that it is more than just his hat, his trench coat, his solemn stare and his ring of keys. The film also features cops, victims, and a snazzy nightclub where Jef has an almost invisible crush on a singer. You can see how the film would influence later directors, such as Walter Hill in THE DRIVER, and John Woo in THE KILLER. However, the influence can also be very subtle. Take Tarantino. One interesting feature of his films, especially PULP FICTION, is crime as a performance art. Jules says something like, "Let's get into character." That is, let's get serious about what we are doing here. But also, there is an acknowledgement that what they are doing is a show, a play that needs to convince. And one whole important component of RESERVOIR DOGS is Mr. White rehearsing to play a role, that of a crook among thieves. I think this comes from Tarantino's 10 years as an acting student before he even started working at the video store. He is hyperaware of how much what we do in society is sheer performance, something he shares with British actors, and the sociologist Irving Goffman. But this hyperawareness also comes (I think) from LE SAMOURAÏ, which revels in the care with which Jef adjusts the brim of his hat and the hang of his trench coat. Yet at the same time Jef is as far as you can get from a performer, in the strict sense of the word. He emotes little if anything. He wards off life with his pose of existential indifference. Yet at the same time he appears to be attracted to that most artificial of all performers, a nightclub chanteuse. Being African-Française, she is The Other in the terms of 1970s post structuralism. But she is also Jef's funhouse mirror image, wholly different from himself, yet alluring. Here, love is not narcissism; opposites do really attract.
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The Criterion Collection finally unveils LE SAMOURAÏ in a good widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced). For sound, it has the original French mono in DD 1.0, with optional English subtitles. Extras include a two part feature that consists of two interviews with authors on Melville: Rui Nogueira, who wrote the first book available in English on the director, MELVILLE ON MELVILLE, and another with Ginette Vincendeau, who has also dedicated himself to Melville. Meanwhile, "The Line Up" consists of vintage interviews with Melville, Alain and Nathalie Delon, Cathy Rosier, and Francois Perier. Finally, there is the theatrical trailer. Inserted in the box is a 32-page booklet with cast, crew, chapter titles, transfer info, stills images, and essays by David Thomson and John Woo, plus excerpts from Nogueira's MELVILLE ON MELVILLE.
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And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October or November (fingers crossed) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, November 9, at 9 AM.
COMING SOON:SAW II, the 3rd Annual DVD Tray of Terror, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, GOODNIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!
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