I watched this turkey on Showtime the other day and it must have been the full twenty years since I first saw it. This was a prototypical 80s movie. It could have been filmed with the cast of Miami Vice, or had a musical number from Flashdance. The lighting and the makeup and the dayglo red hair. By the way, I watched this movie and would have sworn that it was Molly Ringwald in the female lead and not Melanie Griffith. I guess bad actresses from the 80s all look alike to me.
Ok, normally I will go back and watch some movie I saw a million years ago and say, well, that wasn’t as bad, or rarely, as good as I remember it. But this one was ringing no bells at all, right until the end when they were in the dessert Las Vegas of the future. Did I mention this was a bad movie?
As a portrait photographer I now notice things like key lighting and body angle and head tilt in photos that I would not have noticed before. As a writer, I notice things in films I would not have noticed the first time round. Back in the good old days, when I was young and went to movies for fun, I never cared about plot, character development, or any of that kind of stuff. In those halcyon days before I first watched Siskel and Ebert I didn’t know about production values and good or bad acting, or how clunky the special effects were. Siskel and Ebert succeeded amazingly well in turning us all into critics and ruining the movies for us at the same time.
Just a quick for example-I loved It’s a Wonderful Life before it became a must watch at Christmas time. I didn’t know that it was a hero story about a knight arrant on a quest or that all that stuff in the first half of the film was backstory and that happy feeling at the end was called cathartic. I just knew that I cried every time I saw it and that made me feel better somehow. Now I can see the bones sticking out of the scarecrow of the plot, I’ve seen Jimmy Stewart put on that face in twenty other movies-and it still makes me cry every time I watch it.
Right, back to Cherry 2000. This film is set in the future where everyone loves hair gel and pink and blue lighting. Our hero, such as he is, has the perfect woman at home, she wants to hear about his day, cook him dinner, wash the dishes, and have sex with him whenever and however he wants it. He is in his normal world and all is well. Until he fries the robot’s insides by having at it on the kitchen floor while the dish washer is spitting out gallons of soapy water on top of them. Did I mention it was a bad movie?
Anyway, he takes his ruined one true love down to the sexy robot shop where he is told she can’t be fixed and he must go on a quest to find her a new body-here’s her chip with her personality in it. There was a cute scene in the robot shop when we see Robbie and Gort standing in the corner, ignored and forgotten.
The funny bit was not the movie itself, it was bad, what was funny was how clearly I saw the bones of the story. The hero is in his everyday life and then something happens to send him on mission or quest. He mets someone wise. He mets someone brave. He mets a villain that doesn’t want him to reach his goal. He succeeds in his quest but finds that it wasn’t really what he wanted after all. I could get out a text book on screenplay plots and hit it point by point. This isn’t all that surprising really, all movies to some extend have to follow the same guidelines or they wouldn’t be movies. No, what bothers me here is that it had all the stuff that the books tell you are necessary for a successful screenplay-and this one was successful, it was made into a movie-but it was a bad movie.
I have been trying to remember if I thought it sucked when I watched twenty years ago, and the odds are good that I did not think it sucked. Oh, I would have known it was not exactly Citizen Kane, which is a movie I loved even twenty years ago, but I am not sure I would have hated it as I do now. So I am just wondering, if I were not a writer and didn’t clearly see the structure of the screenplay in the finished film, would I have different feelings about it?
Robert Heinlein was famous for saying there were only three plots and he proved his point by using the same three plots in all of his books. Once I read that I thought about it and read a few more of his books and sure enough, they all have the same underlying structure, the same basic set of characters. But I know people that read his books and don’t see it at all. They say, that one was set on the moon and that one was set on Mars, they are nothing alike. Which is kind of interesting. The plots are the same, that is to say, the same basic things happen in the same basic order, no matter where it is set or what the characters are called, or what year it is set in.
On a more modern note, one of my favorite series of books is about a character called Lovejoy. These are fun books, and they are all pretty much the same. But I keep reading them anyway. Maybe in my heart of hearts I want to be a scoundrel like Lovejoy.
Cherry 2000 was one of those near future where the rich are all happy and the poor all live out in the dessert and kill everyone that ventures near movies. It’s all Mad Max’s fault. The premise of the film, that a man can or can’t be happy with a robot lover is interesting. I didn’t see any women with robot lovers, but then, sci fi is supposed to be for adolescence boys, isn’t it? On a similar but better looking note was A.I., in which our robot little boy longs to be with his bitch from hell real person mother. The love slave in this film was pretty boy Jude Law. Not long after we met the sex robot, someone asks why would anyone make a robot in the shape of a little boy? To me it was pretty oblivious why you would make robots that looked like kids, but maybe I watch too many news shows whining about pedophiles running wild on the internet. That was also a bad movie, despite the fact that it high production values and good acting and fairly strong special effects.
Anyway, I am now concerned that my own current novel in progress is going to suck, even though it has all the plot points and complications in all the right places. Maybe I just need to use one of Heinlein’s three plots, the people that read them would never know the difference.
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