July 26, 1996

Today in Slam Evil Summer catch-up I have a double feature of films released on the same day, both about wayward youth traveling around having adventures, getting into trouble, and finding parental figures. The first of these youths is a wooden puppet voiced by Jonathan Taylor Thomas (THE LION KING).

I did see THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO at the time, and vaguely remembered it having a good puppet (by Jim Henson Creature Shop), an animated cricket, Udo Kier as the bad guy, and especially (since I was still cleaning theaters) two original Stevie Wonder songs on the end credits (“Kiss Lonely Good-Bye” and “Hold On To Your Dream,” and he also provided an instrumental called “Pinocchio’s Evolution”). I think I found it watchable enough. I always like animatronics and seeing different takes on Pinocchio, so I was down to watch it again.

It’s the fourth film from “Billie Jean” video director Steve Barron, following ELECTRIC DREAMS, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES and CONEHEADS – a master of movies with elaborate special effects that make them seem sort of good without being very actually good. In my opinion. It makes sense that this is from New Line Cinema. It’s a pretty New Line Cinema movie.

A major addition to this adaptation – which is credited to writers Sherry Mills & Barron & Tom Benedek (COCOON) & Barry Berman (BENNY & JOON) – is a love story. As a young man Geppetto (Martin Landau in only his second movie since winning the Oscar for ED WOOD) secretly loved someone named Leona and carved a heart and their initials into a tree. Many decades later he finds a nice piece of wood and doesn’t notice at first that it’s that very tree, split apart by lightning. I liked the idea that his love imbued something magical into the wood, until I considered the implication that it makes Pinocchio his and Leona’s child, without her being involved. Doesn’t seem fair to her.

Leona (Geneviève Bujold, DEAD RINGERS) is still around and they bicker and she doesn’t know he’s been in love with her since forever, which to me implies that he’s grown old without ever having a girlfriend or a life outside of this little area. That paired with the fact that he talks to a room full of puppets as if they’re his children (clearly meant to be cute) sincerely made me very sad. I got the impression that he wanted to have a bunch of kids but never had anyone to do it with and couldn’t really let go of it, so this is his way of dealing. Yeah, a certain type of story, if it’s simplistic enough, I’m gonna start reading between the lines and there could be trouble.

Another sad thing about Geppetto: he bathes with his clothes on!? What the fuck is up with this guy?

As I remembered, the puppet is technically impressive – lots of expressive movement in the face even though it looks like solid wood. The Muppet-like goofiness of some of the walking also fits the fact that he has wobbly marionette legs. But I wouldn’t say I particularly like the design. It’s hard to compete with Disney, I guess.

Geppetto walks his wooden boy around the village even though he’s worried he’ll be burned at the stake for this inexplicable act of magic. Instead of being a fox and a cat like in the storyb the thieves who have their eye on Pinocchio are just named Volpe (Rob Schneider, JUDGE DREDD) and Felinet (Bebe Neuwirth, JUMANJI). They tell the sinister puppeteer Lorenzini (Udo Kier, BARB WIRE) about Pinocchio, and trouble follows. The puppet show is maybe a highlight, since this is the rare adaptation where we’re looking at actual puppets.

Yeah, you know, it’s more variations on the familiar concepts, like all Pinocchio movies. The famous nose growing scene happens in class, after he hits Lampwick (Corey Carrier, Indiana Jones age 8-10 on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) for bullying him. The teacher (John Sessions, FREDDIE AS F.R.O.7) seems to somehow know that it means he’s lying. Later he purposely grows his nose to kill (?) the whale.

There’s a cricket that fulfills the same role as Jiminy in the Disney version (narrator and mentor), but they can’t call him that, so he’s Pepe (voice of David Doyle, VIGILANTE FORCE). He’s a computer animated character who looks pretty cool when small and pretty terrible when in close up.

Pinocchio is threatened by termites and a woodpecker and gets to say “Peck on someone your own size.” He gets holes in him that he can play like a flute and that cause him to leak. The donkey transformation is cleverly staged while they’re riding on a rollercoaster through a tunnel, so they reach different stages as the light strobes.

Geppetto has never learned to swim or use a boat (too busy talking to puppets) but he bravely takes a rowboat looking for Pinocchio and gets swallowed by a whale. Luckily so does Pinocchio, to rescue him. The whale exterior is a cool puppet and the interior is a cool set.

At the end Pinocchio turns into real boy J.T.T., and unlike Devon Sawa in CASPER (who I guess wasn’t the voice anyway) he gets more than one scene. In one of them he asks Geppetto to make him a girlfriend. Geppetto and Leona are married, so I guess it is a happy ending for his life, that he gets to spend his last years as an elderly father of a teenage boy. (I wonder if he’ll still talk to the inanimate puppets? Wouldn’t it be weird to stop now?)

The budget was reportedly around $25 million, but it looks pretty lavish. Previous credits for production designer Allan Cameron include 1984, HIGHLANDER, WILLOW and SHOWGIRLS. I’m not sure which are the effects people I should note – maybe mechanical effects/special effects supervisor Garth Inns (HOWLING V: THE REBIRTH)? And maybe computer animation supervisor Phil Johnson (computer graphics animator: LAWNMOWER MAN 2: BEYOND CYBERSPACE)? I’m not sure where it would be in the movie, but there’s a stop motion animator credit for Phil Dale, who later worked on all the Laika movies. Anyway, good work by all of those people. But I guess I didn’t find this characterization of Pinocchio to be compelling enough to keep it consistently entertaining or to overcome how unsettled I was by Geppetto’s sad life. I guess its purpose was for 1996 parents who had already brought their kids to HARRIET THE SPY and the re-release of WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY to not have to see KAZAAM.

There must not have been enough of those, because it only made $15 million. Less than KAZAAM! But they must’ve made a profit on video and cable, because in 1999 there was a DTV sequel called THE NEW ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO. Landau and Kier returned (the latter playing a woman), and it was directed by an old vet, Michael Anderson (AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, LOGAN’S RUN, ORCA and SWORD OF GIDEON), so they must’ve been trying.

The other cinematic youths we’re here to discuss are Manny (Scarlett Johansson, NORTH) and Lo (first-timer Aleksa Palladino, later in WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END) in the indie movie MANNY & LO. 11-year-old Manny is the narrator and 15-year-old Lo her sister; they’ve run away from separate foster homes and are on the road in their late mother’s station wagon, shoplifting food from mini-marts and sleeping in parks, model homes and vacant winter cabins. When they figure out Lo is pregnant they go to a baby store and abduct a clerk named Elaine (Mary Kay Place, MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI) to keep tied up in a cabin, hoping she’ll be able to deliver the baby when it comes.

Manny feels bad about the whole thing, tries to be nice to Elaine and keep her in good spirits, but obviously that’s not really possible. Elaine makes attempts to unlock the combination lock on her ankles and to call for help with smoke signals, but after she realizes that Lo is pregnant the dynamic changes in a really interesting way. She’s still behaving as the hostage but clearly worries about these misguided kids, so she does little things to look out for them and the future baby – cooking for them, trying to get Lo to stop smoking, giving her tips. She also tells her some questionable things like that she shouldn’t dance if she doesn’t want to induce labor. “Especially no hard-rock dancing.”

“Damn, and I was really in the mood,” Lo says.

The same way Elaine takes a closer look at the kids and starts to like them is how I felt about Elaine. She seems like kind of a loon at first, but luckily the kids don’t see it. Watching her work with customers at the store, Manny asks “Did you ever see anybody who knew so much about babies?,” but from our adult perspective we can see that she’s a little much, annoying the shit out of her boss/niece Connie (Angie Phillips) by pushing her opinions too hard on the customers. She also puts on an act about her past that we can see through. At the time she obviously knows plenty of things that they don’t and is a genuine help to them.

There’s a pretty outrageous turn when (SPOILER) the owner of the house shows up and Elaine knocks him out and ties him up. A hostage with a hostage. She hides it from the girls, not knowing that Manny witnessed it. And she tries to give them the idea to move to somewhere else, but “That’s not for me to say. I mean, it’s your show, isn’t it?” I like that Lo very reasonably assumes Elain is trying to trick them so that she can escape, when it’s kind of the opposite!

Manny also meets a boy who lives nearby, and he carries signed photos of himself in his pocket and gives her one. This is not a jokey movie, really, but there are some good laughs and enough undercurrent of innocence that it doesn’t feel grim, despite potentially sad subject matter. Coincidentally it really has a version of the arc I read into Geppetto in the other movie – Elaine knows she would be good with kids but that she was mentally “cluttered” when she was younger. Now life has brought her a chance to be a surrogate mother and grandmother to these three knuckleheads, and everyone benefits. It’s an absurd outcome but it feels so nice and right and I believe it will work out for them.

The three leads are all very good. Obviously Johansson made an impression. She reminds me a bit of Harriet in HARRIET THE SPY, so I looked it up and Johansson was only a year older than Michelle Trachtenberg. I’m glad things have worked out for her. Her films as leading actress have grossed over $15.4 billion worldwide and also she was in THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE.

Writer/director Lisa Krueger had been music coordinator on DOWN BY LAW and script supervisor on MYSTERY TRAIN, KING OF NEW YORK and NIGHT ON EARTH, and she’d done a 1993 short called Best Offer. This screenplay was chosen for the Filmmaker’s Lab at the Sundance Institute, where up-and-comers work with professionals to shoot scenes from their scripts as practice (other movies that have done this include RESERVOIR DOGS, HARD EIGHT and WALKING AND TALKING). She was advised by Arthur Penn.

Sony Pictures Classics released the movie, it basically made its exact budget in theaters, it got so-so reviews, but somehow I knew about it and saw it on video. Still, it doesn’t seem to have kicked off a career for Krueger. Her only movie credit after this is COMMITTED (2000) starring Heather Graham. Too bad. MANNY & LO is pretty good and really seems like something to build on.