Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001) - David Cross #12

Director: Steve Carr

Runtime: 87 minutes

In case you forgot, back in 1998, when Murphy was in decline and starting to do kids movies (he voiced Mushu in Mulan in 1998, and would play Donkey in Shrek a couple years later), Murphy starred in the modern update of Doctor Dolittle (based on Hugh Lofting's series of children's stories from the 1920s, as well as a 1967 musical film starring Rex Harrison).  The movie received mixed reviews but made a crapload of money. (It was the eighth highest worldwide grossing film of 1998, right between Mulan and Shakespeare in Love.)  So, of course, it got a sequel.  Interesting point to note, the 1998 film was rated PG-13, while the sequel was rated PG.

In the sequel, Dolittle is world famous, as we're told through a series of brief gags narrated by the family dog, Lucky (Norm MacDonald, who made the wise choice to remain uncredited).  This narration continues throughout the film, despite usually providing no information beside describing what's happening onscreen, like a film for the blind.  Dolittle comes home from a world tour to his wife and daughters, just in time for his oldest daughter's sixteenth birthday.  Charisse (Raven-Symoné) is more interested in seeing her boyfriend, of whom the doctor does not approve, than having a birthday dinner with her family who are just soooo embarrassing.   We also here start getting the first of terrible attempts at jokes for the parents.  Dolittle got his younger daughter Maya (Kyla Pratt, who stars in the direct to video sequels because holy shit there are three more of these goddamned movies) a chameleon from Mexico, who is extremely overconfident about his ability to change color.  In his extremely thick Mexican accent he talks about how he's going to disappear just "like the baby daddy."  This is just the first in a film long series of jokes that the kids won't get and the parents would roll their eyes at.

Anyway, the plot gets moving when a mafia raccoon and opossum have Dolittle go see The Beaver, in an annoying parody of mob films (the filmmakers seem to think that any premise is funny if it's followed by the phrase "but they're animals"), who requests a favor from the doctor:  a logging company is destroying the forest and he needs the doctor's help.  Dolittle is moved by the destruction and agrees.  Long story short, the doctor discovers that there is a single female of an endangered species of bear in the forest.  He finds a circus bear of the same species, and gets a court injunction to prevent logging while he sees if he can get the bears to mate.  Obviously, the circus bear, Archie (Steve Zahn, from Chain of Fools) is woefully unprepared to live in the wild.  When he first sees the female bear, Ava (Lisa Kudrow), by the river, he remarks that he'd "like to see her wet."  Once again, pointless for the kids, and rather creepy for the adults.

Archie and Dolittle

Of course, the evil lumber mill owners play dirty and almost win, but Dolittle convinces the animals to fight back, as the animals of the world go on strike, refusing to race or perform or even behave.  The mill owners relent, Dolittle and his daughter grow closer, and Archie and Ava make little cubs.  (This, of course, leads to a couple other questions, as Archie has one son and one daughter, who are, besides himself and Ava, the only two members of his species in the forest.)

I'm confused as to why, when going from a PG-13 movie to a PG sequel, they choose a plot entirely about Dr. Dolittle trying to help a bear get laid.  Of all the plots that could have been used, this one seems among the least fitting for the audience being aimed at, and it affects the final product as all the underlying sex jokes are made to go over the kids' heads, but are still unfunny.

If you're between the ages of eight and twelve, this movie will be a lot of fun because there's a bear who likes to say the word "butt" a lot, and farts sometimes.  If that doesn't sound like the highest form of humor, then you'll probably want to stay clear.

Rating:★☆☆☆☆

The Cross Section:

David Cross is credited as "Dog/Animal Groupie #2."  There are a couple dogs it could have been, but they each have one line and speak in a silly voice.  I'm not at all sure what "Animal Groupie" refers to.  So, basically, there's no notable character, and a matter of a couple seconds of screentime.

 Character:☆☆☆☆☆

Review: Closing Time by Joseph Heller (1994)

Heller's first novel, Catch-22 (1961), is easily one of my favorite books of all time, so the existence of a sequel was both exciting and worrisome.  Closing Time, written more than thirty years after its predecessor, features an elderly Yossarian, who has survived the war, gone on to start a family and, eventually, work as the conscience of M & M enterprises, a major conglomerate run by Milo Minderbinder and ex-Private Wintergreen.  The life of Yossarian and his companions make up about half the volume of the novel, the other half is written as a first person account of two other WWII vets, Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, working class Jews from Coney Island who moved up after the war.  Their stories are much more grounded than Yossarian's, whose life gets crazy again when Chaplain Tappman finds him. (Tappman, it turns out, has started naturally passing heavy water, a nuclear compound.) Sammy and Lew are tangentially connected to Yossarian, and to be honest, I preferred their sections to those centered on the Catch-22 characters.  The best word I can use to describe Yossarian in 1994 is 'weary.'  He's an old man now; a virile, sardonic old man, but an old man nonetheless.

This is a book about anti-climax, about Heller's generation, the young men who went to war, saw and endured great and terrible things, then came back to a country that was economically booming and with the benefit of the G.I. bill, many of whom grew up poor then made good, raised families, and were now starting to die of old age.  In Catch-22, death was cataclysmic and unexpected, in Closing Time it's a slow, inevitable wasting away.  The problem with the Yossarian segments is that they are often incomplete attempts to recapture the Yossarian of Catch-22. At one point, he paraphrases Camus to his son, saying that the only freedom we truly have is the freedom to say 'no.'  But this Yossarian isn't the kind that would refuse a medal by appearing to the pinning ceremony naked; this Yossarian says no, then does it anyway.  While I can appreciate the contrast between the Singer/Rabinowitz sections, showing how vast a gulf separates the lives of these men from the defense contractors and politicians and billionaires Yossarian deals with, it harms the Yossarian sections.  Yossarian away from the war is like Ahab away from the sea.

There are a couple other aspects of the novel that need mentioning.  The structure seemed very messy, especially compared to Catch-22, which is meticulously organized, whereas Closing Time meanders.  There's also a strange supernatural element to this novel, that I'm still not sure how I feel about.  It most reminds me of the heaven scenes in Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970).

But while it has many faults, Closing Time is worth reading.  Heller is one of those authors cursed with a debut novel that was not only a masterpiece, but a commercial success.  Unlike, say, William Golding, whose first novel (The Lord of the Flies) is certainly his most famous, but went on to win a Nobel, Heller never managed to recapture the success of Catch-22.  And Yossarian in Closing Time has had to come to terms with the limits of his success, the realization that there isn't much more he can accomplish.  Yossarian frequently talks about author William Saroyan, regretting obscurity falling on the man's life and works, and it is all too easy to see in these passages Heller's struggles with his own legacy. Too often Yossarian et. al. seem like wraiths of their former selves, but, as unpleasant as it is to see our literary heroes withered, that may very well be the point.   Despite how the novel ends, this is a book about old age and the inevitable anti-climax that entails.

1991: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley

The Author:

Alexandra Ripley (1934-2004) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, as Alexandra Braid.  She describes her upbringing as that of a Southern belle, who, nonetheless, left the south to attend Vassar college, where she received her B.A. for studying Russian in 1955.  In 1958, she married Leonard Ripley, who she divorced in 1963.  Her first novel, Who's That Lady in the President's Bed? was published in 1972.  In 1981, she published her second novel, a work of historical fiction titled Charleston.  That year, she also married university professor John Graham, with whom she had two daughters.  She published three more historical fiction novels in the 1980s: On Leaving Charleston (1984), The Time Returns (1985), and New Orleans Legacy (1987).  The Mitchell estate tapped Ripley to write Scarlett, the sequel to the classic Gone with the Wind, which was published amid great publicity and controversy in 1991. 

After the publication of Scarlett, Ripley wrote two more novels: From Fields of Gold (1994) and A Love Divine (1996).  She died of natural causes at her home in Richmond, Virginia.

The Book:

Length: 823 pages
Subject/Genre: Gone with the Wind characters/historical fiction

Scarlett takes place soon after the ending of Gone with the Wind.  It opens at Melanie's funeral, where Scarlett finally comes to terms with her past infatuation with Ashley Wilkes and, in preventing Ashley from throwing himself into Melanie's grave, commits a major faux pas, further solidifying her status as a social outcast among Atlanta's elite.  She goes back to Tara for a bit, only to find Mammy dying.  Rhett shows up to see Mammy before she dies, then leaves, telling Scarlett that he'll help maintain the illusion of their marriage, but he doesn't want to see her again.  Scarlett, however, is determined to get him back.  This leads to the rest of the novel, detailing Scarlett's descent in Atlanta's social life, and from there to Rhett's family home in Charleston.  She gets knocked up by Rhett before he leaves again.  Scarlett then goes to live with her father's relatives in Ireland, which is on the verge of its own civil war.  Here she gives birth to a daughter and sets up a new home.

I usually try to avoid giving away the endings in the summaries, but it's important in this case.  Whereas in Gone with the Wind, Rhett and Scarlett's daughter dies, causing Rhett to flee, in Scarlett, they team up to save their second daughter, and then profess their love to each other. Ripley has, essentially, rewritten the close of the first novel, to give it a Hollywood happy ending.  This approach is evident throughout the novel.  Scarlett has become a whiny socialite who thrives on the attention of others.  While she was never a really generous person, in Gone with the Wind, Scarlett's self-centeredness is offset by personal boldness, by determination and ambition, and by the dire necessity of her circumstances, much like Sabra Cravat in Edna Ferber's Cimarron.  Here, all she really cares about is getting her man back.  She's become petulant, with everyone else's success or misfortune considered only in terms of how they affect Scarlett.  Mammy's death hurts Scarlett  most because, as she repeats incessantly, this is when she really needs Mammy's support.  She has no problem associating with nouveau-riche con-men scamming Southerners, until they start scamming "her type of people."   Scarlett has become a typical historical romance heroine, pining for her distant lover.  The word 'simpering' comes up a lot in reviews of this novel.

Basically, Scarlett is Gone with the Wind if Gone with the Wind were content with being a potboiler.  Although, it's not entirely fair to blame Ripley, who has herself admitted to taking the job for the money, arguing that after this, she'd be able to write whatever she wanted.

The fact is, Margaret Mitchell had been vocally against a sequel while alive.  So had her husband, who managed the rights after Mitchell's death in 1949, and her brother after that.  But soon enough, the estate was in the hands of more distant relatives.  An attempt at a film sequel in the mid 1970s got tangled in legal problems and never came to fruition.  Over a decade later, the publication rights to Scarlett were sold at auction, with Warner Bros. paying nearly $5 million. The sequel was the subject of considerable advertising, and the controversy merely fueled public interest upon release, leading a mediocre historical fiction novel by a little-known author to be an international bestseller.

Because the cash-grab that is Scarlett wasn't enough, a miniseries debuted in 1994, starring Joanne Whalley and Timothy Dalton as Scarlett and Rhett.

Of course, if one sequel is successful, why not try for another?  In 2007, Donald McCaig's Rhett Butler's People was released.  The novel tells of events before, during, and after Gone with the Wind from Rhett's perspective.  Oh, and McCaig doesn't consider Ripley's novel to be canonical, so he contradicts it whenever possible (which, to be fair, isn't necessarily a bad thing in terms of the quality of the novel, although what it says about the Mitchell estate is less than flattering).     

All in all, I can't recommend this book to anyone.  As I've said before, I like to look at the goodreads reviews from readers with an opposite opinion to my own.  Most of the positive reviews fall into the 'wanting closure/a happy ending' category.  If you loved Gone with the Wind, but hated the fact that everything wasn't tied up with a neat bow, if you can't sleep at night because Scarlett didn't get the man of her dreams, if the very idea that a story can live on past the final page gives you migraines, then read Scarlett.  Otherwise, save yourself the time, money, and disdain.

Bestsellers of 1991:

1. Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley

2. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

3. Needful Things by Stephen King

4. No Greater Love by Danielle Steel

5. Heartbeat by Danielle Steel

6. The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon

7. The Firm by John Grisham

8. Night Over Water by Ken Follett

9. Remember by Barbara Taylor Bradford

10. Loves Music, Loves to Dance by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1991:

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Mao II by Don DeLillo

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Sex by Madonna

Sources:

"Alexandra Ripley." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web.

Ripley, Alexandra. Scarlett: the sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. New York:
     Warner Books, 1991. Print.

Good Cover Art

I've previously written a couple posts making fun of terrible cover art (here and here).  While hilariously bad cover art is worth noting, we should also remember good cover art.  One of my favorite particular pieces of cover art was from the Dell paperback edition of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night.

A bizarre cover that successfully incorporates a lot of detail from the book.  Unfortunately, the artist wasn't credited and for a long time I was unable to find out who it was.  It turned out though, that I had other books with his cover art.

The artist is Don Ivan Punchatz, and he's done some very clever, weird, and awesome covers:

Another 'necessary' sequel

A very necessary sequel

And my personal favorite:

A parody of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson

Famous Books You Didn't Know Had Sequels

A brief list of famous books with obscure sequels.  Oh, and, you know, SPOILERS and such.

1. CATCH-22/CLOSING TIME by Joseph Heller

The Original:

Joseph Heller's famous World War Two satire, Catch-22 follows Captain Yossarian and a large cast of characters through the horrors and absurdities of the war and each other's personalities and ambitions.  A scathing criticism of bureaucratic and military hypocrisy set in a time and place of loss and tragedy, Catch-22 is loaded with dark humor.

The Sequel:  

Closing Time is about the darkness at the end of the tunnel.  Taking place 50 years after the end of Catch-22, the characters are all in their late 60s or older, and, as opposed to dealing with the possibility of an untimely death, they have to deal with the inevitability of a timely one.



2. Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer Detective/Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain

The Original:

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest pieces of American literature, and the sequel his The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  It tells the story of a young boy running from home with an escaped slave and discovering his own sense of morality and identity.

The Sequels:

As the title of Tom Sawyer, Detective suggests, Tom and Huck are parodying the detective genre in an attempt to solve a murder.  In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom, Huck, and Jim are kidnapped by a mad scientist and brought to Africa.  These novels have largely been overlooked because they have nowhere near the depth of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn.

3. The Three Musketeers/Twenty Years After/The Vicomte of Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas

The Original:

Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers is a historical novel, recounting the brave deeds and adventures of d'Artagnan as he joins the a unit of musketeers and becomes close friends with the mysterious Porthos, Athos and Aramis.  Together, they foil plots by the evil cardinal and others.

The Sequels:  

Twenty Years After takes place twenty years after the events in the first novel.  D'Artagnan is still employed as a musketeer, and must, in the course of political intrigue, recruit the help of his friends, who had retaken their lives of nobility since the end of the first book.  About ten years after that, d'Artagnan becomes Captain of the King's Musketeer's and once again, he and his friends are caught in the middle of political intrigue, surrounding the rise of Louis XIV and the mysterious man in the iron mask.

4. The Witches of Eastwick/The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

The Original:      

John Updike's novel is about three small town women who, as a result of being left by their husbands, become adept at witchcraft.  Things go well until a devil-like figure appears and seduces them.

The Sequel:

In the three decades since the end of The Witches of Eastwick, the main characters had all moved from the town and gotten married.  But as they are widowed one after the other, they move back to Eastwick and reconnect.

5. All Quiet on the Western Front/The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque

The Orginal:

All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel about the horrors of war and the alienation it causes, told from the perspective of a young German soldier fighting in World War One.

The Sequel:

The Road Back tells the story of soldiers coming back from the war, only to find a world that they cannot connect with.  Only one major character, Tjaden, appears in both novels.

6. Trainspotting/Porno by Irvine Welsh

The Original:

Trainspotting is about a group of heroin addicts and their friends in late '80s Scotland.  A portrait of drug and punk subcultures, in a variety of local dialects, Trainspotting was longlisted for the Booker prize.

The Sequel:  

Ten years after the events in Trainspotting, the characters' lives cross paths again, connected not by heroin addiction but by involvement in the porn industry.