Thinner

In 1985, Stephen King published Thinner under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. The movie version has King’s name all over its ads. King got it backward: he should have put his name on the book and Bachman’s name on the movie. Thinner, easily the worst movie of the year, is a wretched excuse for a horror movie and a flat-out disgrace on every level.

King’s premise has an air of AIDS/cancer paranoia. Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke), a 300-pound lawyer, tries everything to lose weight. One night, as Billy drives home from another high-calorie dinner, his wife (Lucinda Jenney) distracts him with, um, romantic overtures — bad timing, because an old woman picks that moment to dart out in front of his car. Splat. The old woman, it so happens, is the daughter of an ancient gypsy (Michael Constantine), who puts a weight-loss whammy on Billy. He goes from 300 pounds to 280, then 240, and so on. This worked in the book, because Billy’s deterioration unfolded in our imagination. In the movie, Billy’s curse is a matter of a slim actor wearing less and less (unconvincing) fat make-up and more and more (unconvincing) thin make-up.

Thinner wants to be a psychological horror film, but director Tom Holland (who made another bad King movie, The Langoliers, for TV) isn’t up to it. He and co-writer Michael McDowell (Beetlejuice) resort to it’s-only-a-dream clichés and pitiful attempts at humor, such as Billy and his daughter (Joy Lenz) swapping amazingly unfunny Godfather jokes in reference to Billy’s Mafioso client Ginelli (Joe Mantegna). Holland has no idea how real people talk or how real movies move; it’s a long 92 minutes.

The movie also deserves an ensemble award for inept acting, since Holland lets everyone underact passively or overact aggressively, shrieking at the poor innocent camera. This could be fun (Bronson Pinchot’s psychotic flailing in The Langoliers kept me amused), but here it’s just embarrassing. To be fair, the script is no help. Michael Constantine, whose gypsy looks like a homeless Buddy Hackett, gets to deliver great stuff like “You die thin, White Man from Town, but you die clean.”

In the difficult lead role, acting through pounds of latex, Robert John Burke is no Eddie Murphy. Partly it’s his dull voice, but mainly it’s his body language. Most real-life large men (John Goodman, for example) move with a mindful grace that comes from a lifelong awareness that they occupy more room. Murphy had it in The Nutty Professor. Burke just shuffles around in a fat suit, which was a rush job by Oscar-winning make-up artist Greg Cannom (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and looks it.

Thinner is angry and depressing aside from being awful. It can be read as a metaphor for AIDS being spread by infidelity; Billy bitterly blames his wife for his condition and suspects her of honking his doctor buddy. King’s twist ending, involving a deadly pie, is nasty and ironic in the tradition of EC Comics and King’s own Creepshow, but the movie botches it. King, at least, served a tasty gypsy pie. Tom Holland’s pie is stale and tasteless.

Get On the Bus

In the days after the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., it was interesting to see it through the wary lens of the white media. We heard about Louis Farrakhan (what’s he up to this time?). We heard about the whiff of sexism in the men-only gathering. We heard about the hopes and doubts that African-American men (seen, as always, as a monolith) would find peace in unity, especially in the tense days after the O.J. verdict.

What we didn’t hear about, except in sidebars and snippets, was the human element. What did the March mean to the men of wildly different backgrounds, generations, and beliefs? Spike Lee’s Get On the Bus throws us in with fifteen men who seem to have been selected for maximum friction. The movie, which rarely leaves the bus, is almost African-American Buffalo. It’s a feat of metaphor and rhetoric — a lot of talk before the “real” story happens (the March is seen only in fuzzy video clips near the end).

One can almost imagine Lee and scripter Reggie Rock Bythewood checking off their list of types. There’s the gang-banger turned Muslim (Gabriel Cassus), the biracial cop (Roger Guenveur Smith), the downsized old-timer (Ossie Davis), the gay couple (Isaiah Washington and Harry Lennix), the camcorder-toting Spike wannabe (Hill Harper), the absentee dad (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) and his wayward son (De’aundre Bonds), the arrogant actor (Andre Braugher), and a trio of drivers (Charles S. Dutton, Albert Hall, and Richard Belzer).

That these men are types, not stereotypes, is due mainly to the performances. Bythewood’s script isn’t bad — it’s sometimes very good — but it’s full of speeches and actor’s moments. In this brand of drama, everyone must stand and unfold himself while Lee zeroes in. Get On the Bus is Spike Lee’s first feature in which he doesn’t appear onscreen, though the kid with the camera is his obvious surrogate (at one point, Charles Dutton waves the kid away dismissively and says something like “Okay, Spike Lee, get the camera outta my face”), and Lee’s camera itself becomes a character. The movie is grainy and jump-cutty, like Lee’s other recent films, making visual jazz out of talking heads.

Lee knows he has a potent metaphor in the bus itself, which resonates with memories of Rosa Parks and school busing. The vehicle of past oppression becomes a symbol of forward movement toward empowerment. You’re either on the bus or you’re not. Some of the men have doubts, and Richard Belzer, as the Jewish driver, elects to get off. He misses the point, but then so do a few of the passengers.

Of the actors along for the ride, veterans Dutton and Davis offer their usual impeccable gravity (though a tragic plot twist mars Davis’s characterization). Washington, of Lee’s Clockers and Girl 6, is fine as the bitter Gulf War vet who found himself doubly ostracized as a gay black Marine. Braugher, of TV’s Homicide, is bitingly funny as the egotistical, womanizing actor.

Get On the Bus, in the end, is a film in the form of a question: Are you on the bus or not? Are you going to stand still or help move things forward? The black men in the movie answer in different ways. But we don’t have to be black or male to find the question relevant, or to seek our own answer.