Robert Zemeckis's escapist romp Romancing the Stone (1984) works as well as it does because it remembers how to have fun. Romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) reluctantly travels to South America to rescue her sister and finds herself in a plot she could easily have written. Michael Douglas, who produced the film and took the male lead only because nobody else would, plays Jack Colton, an adventurer who rescues her and covets the jewel at the centre of a treasure map she carries. Among the others seeking the stone of the title: Danny De Vito, whose short stature Turner recalls in one of several extras on this week's DVD. "You know how someone would put their arm around your shoulder? Well, Danny has to put his around your waist." Pause, levelling of gaze. "Or he likes to go a bit lower."
Screenwriter Diane Thomas, who hammered out the script while working as a waitress at Alice's Restaurant in Malibu, took the inspired approach of blending romance, action and comedy with a strong female and male lead -- not unlike The Thin Man, granted, but Nick and Nora didn't have to spend weeks in the sweltering Mexican jungle (standing in for Colombia) with rock falls, torrential rains and mudslides, one of which half-buried Turner. "I was saying, please don't pull, please dig," Turner says. "But they just yanked me out. Tore all the skin off my left leg." At one point, a car (actually a shell filled with Styrofoam and inner tubes) goes over a 70-foot waterfall. At another, Turner and Douglas memorably cascade down a mountainside, his face landing in her lap. "And of course," Douglas says, "we have to thank a storyboard artist who came up with the famous splash between her legs."
Everyone was contractually obliged to make a sequel, which, since Thomas was busy writing Steven Spielberg's Always, was assigned to two male writers. Trouble was, Turner says, "I didn't feel it was anything like the calibre of Romancing the Stone." (In a 1985 interview with The Globe's Jay Scott, she made it clear she was disgusted by the original script's rape jokes and didn't appreciate her character being reduced to a "wimp.") Douglas called Thomas in to massage the script, which she did, but The Jewel of the Nile (1985) doesn't have the magic of Romancing. The film was made by director Lewis Teague in Morocco, whose sand and heat were as merciless in their own way as the Mexican jungle had been. Douglas thanked Thomas by giving her a Porsche. Weeks later, with her boyfriend at the wheel, the Porsche slammed into a pole and Thomas was killed. The extras are full of impromptu eulogies to her.
In the new DVD edition of Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), Mary Stuart Masterson is heartbreaking as the tomboy in love with Eric Stoltz, who is too fatuous and infatuated with Lea Thompson to notice. In Mel Smith's Radioland Murders (1994), Masterson plays one of the few sane people at WBN, a national radio network that goes on the air in 1939 even as someone starts bumping off people off in the building. It's an exasperating attempt at screwball comedy from a story by George Lucas, whose main interest as producer was in generating all the backgrounds by computer. The cast, largely lost in the frenetic, dopily scripted (by Howard the Duck's screenwriters) but gorgeously shot mayhem, includes Christopher Lloyd, Ned Beatty, Jeffrey Tambor and, as the husband Masterson seeks to divorce, Brian Benben.
In Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money (2006), old friends Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand are, as Holofcener says, "growing up at different rates." McDormand notes in one of the extras that her character is going through a stage "recognizable to a lot of women in their mid-40s and late 40s, and it's called perimenopause." She pauses, smiles. "And I think that that's gonna just bring 'em into the theatres. Everyone's going to be rushing in for that. Perimenopause!" The film was shot as Aniston and Brad Pitt were breaking up. Says producer Anthony Bregman in a commentary with Holofcener: "We'll point out a few times in this movie where you can actually see the paparazzi in the background, because it was impossible to keep them fully away."
EXTRA! EXTRA!
The six-disc collection Desperate Housewives Season 2: The Extra Juicy Edition has 24 episodes and a plethora of bonus features about the sinfully enjoyable soap opera in which neighbour sleeps with neighbour, murder is a lifestyle option and a common refrain is, "I should have told you I was doing your ex." Best of the extras is a canvassing of opinions about the show from TV housewives of the past, including Father Knows Best's Jane Wyatt, Growing Pains' Joanna Kern, Happy Days' Marion Ross, Home Improvement's Patricia Richardson, The Waltons' Michael Learned, The Partridge Family's Shirley Jones and That '70s Show's Debra Jo Rupp, who, remarking on a memorable if sacrilegious tussle in one episode, says: "Oh come on, what's funnier than fighting a nun?"
-- W.C.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
For children savvy or cynical enough to be amused by superhero parodies, the 1994 animated series The Tick is good fun. The blue-costumed Tick has super-strength, a chin the size of a Camaro and limitless self-regard, which makes him impervious to much of what goes on around him and leads him to make portentous pronouncements voiced by Townsend Coleman ("Gravity is a harsh mistress"). His accidental sidekick, Arthur, is an accountant dressed as a white moth. The city's other superheroes include American Maid (read: Wonder Woman) and Die Fledermaus (read: Batman). DF: "I'm not going to team up with her." AM: "There's that fear of commitment again." DF: "Oooh, listen to Miss Intimacy here." AM: "Jerk!" DF: "Jingoist!" The Tick Vs. Season One contains 12 of the 13 episodes, omitting the one about mole-men for "creative reasons," which apparently means there was a problem over the rights. A 2001 live-action version, also on DVD, starred Patrick Warburton as the Tick. -- W.C.