Expensive wine, cheap wine, cheap movie

Last night, I drank cheap wine watching a movie about expensive wine, made very cheaply.

Oh, I don't know if the budget for Year of the Comet was actually miniscule, though the craft sure is.

Year of the Comet has been a curiosity for me ever since I read William Goldman's book Which Lie Did I Tell? If you don't recognize that name, Goldman is the celebrated screenwriter -- or was, since he died in 2018 -- who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride and numerous other great titles.

He also wrote Year of the Comet, to his great shame.

As I recall, he doesn't speak ill of any movies whose scripts he wrote except this one. I thought he might have been exaggerating ... but no.

I was paying attention to movies in 1992 when Year of the Comet came out, but I didn't remember it at all when I read the book, despite it starring the then-bankable Penelope Ann Miller and TV star Tim Daly, whose own potential movie career might have been short-circuited by this flop. 

But I didn't know how bad it truly was until I stumbled over it last night on Amazon, probably 20 years after I read Goldman's book. 

(And it may have only recently become available, as I just noticed this is the second time I have tagged the movie on this blog. The first time was in a 2010 post about movies I couldn't get my hands on no matter how hard I tried. I requested to review Year of the Comet back when I still wrote for AllMovie, but it wasn't available on DVD -- and streaming didn't yet exist.)

The movie is promoted on Amazon as in the vein of Romancing the Stone, and boy is that generous. The adventures of our leads surround trying to get back a stolen bottle of wine that may have belonged to Napoleon and is estimated to be worth more than a million dollars. The bottle is comically large, the size of a fire hydrant, and about as heavy as you would expect a bottle of wine that big to be -- which doesn't prevent Miller's character from swinging it like a club at one point to knock out a bad guy, though why she would ever take such a ridiculous risk with something she valued so highly is beyond me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Daly is a rogue adventurer in the style of Michael Douglas' Jack Colton, to be sure, but he has none of Colton's charm. In one typically classless sample of Goldman's dialogue -- no, this movie didn't just become bad in the hands of director Peter Yates -- he tells Miller's character that the first time he saw her he knew he wanted to sleep with her. Which is a really clueless example of saying the quiet part out loud. Sure that's the subtext of every on-screen relationship between two movie characters who are supposed to have chemistry, but saying it just makes you sound like a creep. Never mind the conditions in which he says it, when he's probably going to kill them both while about to crash a helicopter he doesn't really know how to fly. Apparently, these were what he wanted his famous last words to be.

Not that Daly's hilariously named Oliver Plexico ever truly believes they will die when they crash their helicopter into the side of a shack in the Scottish highlands. (Tell that to Kobe Bryant.) And naturally, when this does happen, it doesn't even cause a scrape on either of its passengers, who effectively laugh it off. Well, he laughs it off, she's horrified, but don't worry, she'll tell him she's in love with him about ten minutes of screen time later, not long after a particularly vulgar and unclever episode of trying to seduce her. Yes, that's the kind of movie this is. 

They are alternately pursuing and being pursued by Louis Jourdan, who I always think of as Kamal Khan in Octopussy. But see, Jourdan doesn't actually care about the wine he is tracking. He cares about a piece of paper taped to the side of the bottle that contains a scientific formula for some kind of growth hormone that causes anyone who injects it to become young again. This information is introduced comically late in the movie -- in fact, not until the penultimate scene of this curiously brief 90-minute movie. 

After he makes and then injects this, there's this weird scene where he starts to sing, and his vision blurs, and Penelope Ann Miller is singing back to him, as part of some ploy to catch him off guard or something. I really can't explain this any better because it made absolutely no sense, and also because of the cheap wine I was drinking, which means the whole thing could have been a hallucination. The movie thinks it's funny so I can only imagine Goldman, or whoever added this scene, thought it was some sort of oddball tonal detour, the type of thing that might work in a Mel Brooks movie. But this ain't no Mel Brooks movie.

Other terrible things I can remember:

- There's a part where a bad guy is escaping in a rowboat with the bottle of wine, with Daly and Miller following in another rowboat. Yes, this movie features a rowboat chase. But that's not even the terrible part. Instead of sitting, as is customary when you row a boat, the man stands. Not only is it impossible to imagine being able to keep your balance while standing in a rowboat, especially if you are the one working the oars, but I can't see how you would get better thrust on your oar strokes from a standing position than a seated position.

- Helpless woman that she is, Miller's character is being held captive in a tower, Rapunzel-style. Because he can do just about everything, despite being an obnoxious ass, Oliver Plexico attempts to climb up the cobblestone face of the outer wall, even though it is almost entirely lacking in reasonable hand and footholds. Predictably he gets stuck and she has to save him -- he tells her with some amount of irony -- by tying together bedsheets and pulling him up. Accepting for a minute that she might have the strength to do this -- in the spirit of a feminism this movie direly needs, I don't want to suggest she can't -- she ties the bedsheets around her waist as well, meaning all of his dead weight is pulling at her spine. Then again, that's the same super spine that survived the helicopter crash without a scratch, so far be it from me to doubt it.

- Oh, in order to convince her that she should save him, while standing on this small bit of rock that hasn't yet fallen off the outside of the wall, Plexico pledges his undying love for her. Now keep in mind how short this movie is and how recently she hated him because she thought (correctly) he was a sexist pig. Now she tells him "I've been waiting all my life for you, now I'm not going to let you go!" It must be a pretty sad life if you've been waiting all of it to have someone leer at you and tell you they wanted to sleep with you as soon as they laid eyes on you.

- In this spirit, there are multiple wedding proposals in this movie. In fact, Plexico buys time when Jourdan is planning to shoot them both because he tells Jourdan he just wants to propose to her before he dies. Yes this is all as idiotic as it sounds.

- I'm just going to spoil the ending. They recover the bottle of wine and it goes to auction. A bunch of stuffy rich guys are bidding each other up and are on the verge of tapping out when the wine has gotten up to $3.2 million. It's then that Plexico jumps in with a needlessly large bid of $5 million, to gasps around the room. It turns out that not only did he go to MIT (this is revealed casually in the scene where he recognizes the chemical formula of the growth hormone just by its computer diagram), but he also happens to be rich. 

- And as a proposal present -- yes it appears they actually are going to marry -- he of course opens the wine. (I mean, she did earlier say she "would give everything in the world for just one sip," in a typical moment of laughable hyperbole.)

This movie is awful, awful, awful.

Oh yeah, the cheap wine I was drinking. It was actually made by a local winery specially as a tie-in with my baseball club. It's called The Perfect Game and it's a 2017 shiraz. I bought six bottles last year to support the club. And no one is going to pay multiple millions for it, like they spent on the wine in Year of the Comet (and on the movie itself), but for a non-connoisseur like me, it's infinitely more satisfying than this movie ever had any chance of being.

Movies of no importance

We tend to think of the proliferation of movie titles on DVD as absolute. If a movie was made at any point in human history, it should be available on DVD, right? There should be someone, somewhere, who had enough of a relationship with the movie to steer it into a pressing of at least a couple thousand copies. Right?

Well, no.

It makes sense that some of the old, obscure titles from the earliest decades of filmmaking would have been lost over the years, or simply never would have been transferred. They made a huge number of movies back in those days. I doubt that it's an exaggeration to say that there are over a thousand movies made in the United States that are not available on DVD, nor were they even available on VHS. There could be a couple thousand.

But it doesn't make as much sense when this happens with a film from the last 20 years. Like a little film I saw and loved in 1995 called A Man of No Importance, directed by Suri Krishnamma and starring Albert Finney.

Let me set the scene for you a bit, to show you part of why it spoke to me so much. It was the spring of my senior year in college. I went to college in Maine, about 30 minutes from Maine's biggest city, Portland. Portland has an old, nautical history, and one of its most charming areas is call The Old Port, which is a district right near the harbor -- and which I only just discovered in the last semester of my college career, to my great chagrin. This district has art galleries, shops, amazing restaurants and cobblestone streets. Just the experience of being there is highly pleasing to all a person's senses, so going to a movie in the single-screen arthouse theater in the thick of it is like paradise for a person with the right aesthetic sensibilities. A friend and I came down from school and went to see A Man of No Importance in the spring of 1995. To cap the experience, we went across the way and got a coffee in the coffee shop, then called Java Joe's. This was also a bit of a revelation for me, since I was, until this point, unacquainted with the concept of the little coffee shop that supplied its own board games, to encourage you to linger and relax as long as you liked.

The movie itself was wonderful. It's about Dublin bus driver Alfie Byrne (Albert Finney), who is hiding a secret -- he feels "the love that dare not speak its name." In other words, he's gay. He's also a theater lover, and he's trying to mount a performance of Oscar Wilde's Salome, using only the passengers who ride his bus as his cast and crew. In the process of this, he develops a close relationship with a female passenger (Tara Fitzgerald) and a male stud with whom he falls in love (Rufus Sewell). However, when his true nature is accidentally revealed, it remains to be seen how those around him -- particularly his conservative contemporaries who oppose the production -- will react. And whether it will destroy his friendship with one or both of his young friends.

Finney's performance in this film is heartbreaking, but it also sings -- I've never liked him more than here. I was also mesmerized by Fitzgerald and Sewell, falling for both, but in the reverse way from Alfie -- he appreciates Fitzgerald as one would appreciate beautiful art, and Sewell as a love interest. I was the opposite. The film also has good performances from Michael Gambon, David Kelley and Brenda Fricker.

So why in the world can't you get this in any format except for the non-U.S. DVD format? All six actors I've mentioned are known from numerous other roles, and the film clearly played arthouse theaters in the U.S., because that's where I saw it. I even saw it a second time, within the next five years, on VHS.

But the advent of the DVD era was when A Man of No Importance ceased to have all importance outside of Europe. It didn't make the leap to the newer form of technology, which even the most artistically suspect of its cinematic brethren were able to make. It has basically become unattainable, at least for U.S. audiences. Which is quite a shame, because I thought of it over the weekend and wanted to add it to my Netflix queue, so I could introduce it to my wife. Alas, the title search returned no results, nor did a search on Amazon.com. On Amazon, only the non-U.S. format was available -- or else VHS.

This is not the only film where this has happened to me. In fact, I have a half-dozen other titles that I requested to review for the website I write for, only to find out later that they simply did not exist. At least, not unless I wanted to dust off my VHS player ... and find a place that still rents VHS. Or, fly to some other country to rent it.

Last year, I wrote a post called "The unattainables," about films I couldn't get because Blockbuster had excluded them from its catalogue on grounds of indecency. However, I've since seen the two main movies featured in that post, The Brown Bunny and Shortbus -- one rented from a different video store, and one borrowed from the library. The following are the really unattainables, reasonably prominent films that got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way:

1) Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993, Randa Haines). This film was on my radar as the most recent film made by Sandra Bullock when Speed came out and turned her into an instant star. The film also features Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Duvall, and Randa Haines directed Children of a Lesser God among others. Yet for some reason this was not available on DVD until last year -- in fact, up until about two minutes ago, I thought it wasn't available at all, except I now see it's available for purchase on Amazon. However, Netflix still does not have it, and only recognizes a title called Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling With Life when you search for it. I was approved to review this movie probably seven or eight years ago. I'm almost wondering if I should just buy the movie on Amazon in order to review it.

2) The Theory of Flight (1998, Paul Greengrass). Another prominent cast (Helena Bonham Carter, Kenneth Branagh) and prominent director (Greengrass directed two Bourne movies, among others) get left out in the cold, as this film is available only on VHS and non-U.S. DVD. I've been approved on this one probably only half as long, but it still feels like an eternity.

3) Year of the Comet (1992, Peter Yates). This film was on my radar because acclaimed screenwriter William Goldman wrote about it in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, as an example of a turkey from his own body of work. I thought it would be fun to see it myself and assess its status as a turkey, so I requested to review it. I'm still waiting for a DVD copy to be released. Oh, it stars the less household-namey combo of Tim Daly and Penelope Ann Miller.

Then there are a couple other movies I've been approved to review whose DVDs exist -- I can see them on Amazon -- but neither Netflix or Blockbuster carries them. For the African tribesmen basketball movie The Air Up There -- shouldn't every six degrees of Kevin Bacon movie be available to rent? -- Blockbuster let me add it to my queue, but then just listed it as Unavailable. On Netflix, those search words only bring up Up in the Air. For It's Pat: The Movie, Netflix gives you the option to save it for when it's available -- even though the DVD looks to have been released in 2003. Then there's What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole, the sequel to What the Bleep Do We Know?, which isn't searchable at all on Netflix. Then again, that could be because you don't know whether to spell it Bleep or #%?@!. What I find strange, though, is that the original is available -- and searchable -- but not the sequel.

It's frustrating to have movies dangling out there that I can't watch, but I don't really give a flip about any of them except A Man of No Importance. I guess one advantage to eventually moving to Australia, where my wife grew up, would be that I'd finally be able to see this little gem again.