By Bub
Jerry Maguire is a mean-spirited genre send-up of late thirties anti-industrial propaganda films. It patronizes class struggle, portraying working-class plight in a series of barely coherent catch-phrases. Here are the most grating examples:
- A gang of drifters under a bridge gather around an abandoned bindle of which’s contents are murmuring and shifting. One of the drifters unties the kerchief and lets it unfurl revealing an orphaned infant playfully gnawing its own fingers. The camera closes in on the child’s belly which has been marked by a hot iron. The lead hobo cautiously reads aloud the scar in a whisper - “Show… Me…The… Money…”.
Suddenly the rumblings of an earthquake engulf the scene. The bridge above collapses onto the group. After a moment, silence supplants the yells and cries and the sounds of earthly terror. The dust cloud disperses revealing corpses with looks of panic and confusion petrified onto their faces amongst the rubble. The camera closes in to where the child had laid and in its place is a pile of one thousand gleaming one dollar bills.
- On a bleak tundra plain in November, at sunrise, two unmarked biplanes landed, having approached from opposite directions. They sat facing each other, engines idling.
"YOU HAD ME AT HELLOOOO!" - The eastern pilot hollered to the western pilot.
"WHAT?!?" - The western pilot replied.
"YOUHADMEATHELLOOOOOO!!!!"
"OK!!!"
The western pilot, having deciphered the message, turned her plane back to the direction it came from and prepared to take off. Before leaving, she turned around, and gave the eastern pilot a thumbs up. The eastern pilot smiled, clasped his hands together and shook them above his head. They had just saved the lives of over a billion people, and countless arachnids.
- Tom Cruise, at Cuba Gooding Jr.'s over the phone instruction, shouts with progressively higher volume, "YOU'VE GOT EMAIL!!!"
- Johnathan Lipnicki walks in on a nude Renee Zellweger in the shower and exclaims "Holy Rhubarb!!" She instantaneously morphs into a single, fresh, one thousand dollar bill.
At the films completion you end up wondering if you yourself have turned into, or been shown, the money. You have not and you go home. You sleep on it, and wake up with radiation poison in a room full of scorpions. You decide to give the film two-and-a-half stars... out of four!
That's a pretty generous rating, considering...!
ReplyDeleteThat is a high rating. Glenn likes it more than Fast Time at Ridgemont High and that movie features pre-marital sex and, I think, an abortion. I might be thinking of Dirty Dancing, though.
ReplyDeleteI wish there were more movies where people were turned into money.
This is the most bizarre interpretation of the Jerry Maguire novel since the 1996 film.
ReplyDeleteYou probably peered into an alternate universe where Richard Kelly directed Jerry Maguire.
ReplyDelete