The Pagemaster

Joe Johnston, Maurice Hunt, 1994
Rotten Tomatoes score: 18%

When I reviewed Richie Rich about two years ago, I noted that Macaulay Culkin won a Razzie in 1994 in recognition of his performances in three movies: Richie Rich, Getting Even with Dad, and this one. That was an underrated movie, but all I had to say at the time about The Pagemaster was, "the less said the better."

Well, far be it from me to leave well enough alone.

This was a foray into the style of movie-making that combined live action and animated content, but unlike Roger Rabbit, this movie doesn't combine the animated and real-life characters in the same scene. Instead, it begins as a live-action movie, but then switches to animation after the first act.

I guess that was supposed to be enough of a gimmick to draw you in, because the story certainly wasn't worth telling. But you wouldn't know that to look at the Wikipedia article, a huge portion of which is given over to describing a dispute amongst the writers, the production staff, the studio, and the Writers' Guild of America over who was entitled to take credit for this masterpiece.

Macaulay Culkin plays Richard, a boy so pathologically anxious that he's too afraid to participate in such harmless pursuits as doing dangerous bike stunts without a helmet at a construction site. What a loser! His dad, Ed Begley Jr., wants him to toughen up, so he deploys him on a mission to buy nails at the neighborhood hardware store during a thunderstorm. Amazingly, this turns out to be a bad idea, and Richard has to take shelter in a local library.

It's one of those gigantic, cavernous libraries with multi-million-dollar frescoes painted on rotunda ceilings, no patrons, and a mysterious librarian (Christopher Lloyd) who insists on doling out library cards to every person who wanders in just to get out of the rain. Richard slips on some water and falls headfirst on the stone floor, rendering him unconscious.

Don't worry, this is the fun kind of concussion, the kind that causes you to have mysterious adventures through animated alternate realities. Richard suddenly finds himself in a cartoon world (he is even aware of the fact that he is now a drawing, which I found somehow strange). He is greeted by the Pagemaster (voice of Christopher Lloyd), who tells him about the jaw-droppingly generic journey he's about to embark on to reach the library exit.

Richard makes three new friends on his voyage, and they're all books: Adventure (voice of Patrick Stewart), Fantasy (voice of Whoopi Goldberg), and Horror (voice of Frank Welker). So there you have it—this is one of those inane kids' movies that tries to teach you the joy of childhood literacy by dramatizing bland, uninspired interpretations of Victorian literature.

Our animated heroes venture into the secret laboratory of Dr. Jekyll (Leonard Nimoy), who immediately transforms himself into Mr. Hyde. Fleeing Mr. Hyde's obligatory wrath, they cast off to sea, where they almost instantly come face-to-face with Moby-Dick and the crew pursuing him. Moments later, they wash ashore on a desert island, and—

I'm going to stop here and just list the remaining literary works that are referenced: Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels, some generic dragon story, Jack and the Beanstalk.

Richard then reaches the exit, is congratulated for his bravery by the Pagemaster, and returns to the real world, where he has gained the courage necessary to ride his bicycle over dangerous ramps in inclement weather and sleep in a ramshackle treehouse. End of movie.

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The Pagemaster was in production for three years (which, incidentally, explains why Macaulay looks so much younger here than in Richie Rich). Why did they bother? The DVD even includes a behind the scenes "making of" featurette, hosted by Christopher Lloyd. You can tell he doesn't believe a word he's saying about what a magical experience the movie is.

I remember this kind of drivel being everywhere when I was a kid. We were constantly being told how books can take you to faraway places and how your imagination is your ticket to a new reality. But kids aren't stupid, and they know the difference between books and hallucinogenic drugs. Hearing adults say things like that is just embarrassing.

And what's worst about it is that a lot of these books really are capable of entertaining kids. Treasure Island can be filmed in a way that children will love, as the Muppets proved. But it takes more than just a half-assed 45-second sequence depicting one or two of the characters. The literary vignettes in this movie have all the dramatic sophistication of a Sunny D commercial.

That might not matter if the movie itself had any semblance of a story. But nothing happens in it. Once you take out the homages to public domain classics, all that's left is a story about a nervous child who suffers a head injury.

Heavyweights

Stephen Brill, 1995
Rotten Tomatoes score: 29%

What better plot can you imagine for a family feature than a story about overweight children who commit aggravated kidnapping, aided and abetted by three ostensibly responsible adults?

It's all right, I'll give you time to think.

Heavyweights is an odd film, one of a few from its era that straddles the nostalgia line between dopey kids' movie and mid-90s counterculture talisman. Judd Apatow co-wrote it, it was one of Ben Stiller's early starring roles, and Paul Feig (creator of Freaks and Geeks) appears in it. So does Jeffrey Tambor. Even Tim Blake Nelson (from O Brother, Where Art Thou?) has a pointless cameo as a guy who apparently does door-to-door recruiting for a summer camp.

It also reunited the writer and many of the cast members of the Mighty Ducks trilogy, including Kenan Thompson and Goldberg.

Gerry Garner is a husky, sarcastic kid who gets no respect. When his parents send him off to a weight loss camp, he balks at the idea of spending the summer with "a bunch of fat loads." But once he arrives at Camp Hope, his attitude changes. The other big-boned youngsters are nice to him, and counselor Pat is a cool role model who bears a strangely close resemblance to Gerry, to the point that you keep wondering if he's going to turn out to be his real dad.

(He's not.)

But then comes the bad news. The kindly, encouraging camp owners have come upon hard times and filed chapter 9 bankruptcy. (Will their faces ever be red when they discover chapter 9 is only for municipalities.) The camp has been sold to wannabe fitness celebrity Tony Perkis (Ben Stiller), who is "looking forward to interacting with children for the first time" and plans to put the kids in an info-mercial. Gone are the fun camp pastimes, replaced by grueling "Perki-cising" sessions and co-ed dance parties designed for the sole purpose of humiliation.

Not only that, but the campers are told they will be forced to compete in the Apache Relay, an annual athletic contest against the jocks from Camp MVP across the lake. But if this is an annual source of misery, does that mean the kind-hearted former camp owners made the kids participate in previous summers? I'll let you ponder that in the quiet of your study.

When Uncle Tony discovers that the campers have not been losing weight, he reacts by ordering them on a 20-mile hike. The counselors express entirely well-founded concerns, so they all forbid the children to participate in this obviously dangerous activity, and that's the end of the movie.

No, sorry, I was reading the alternate version of the script where not every adult on the planet earth is totally useless. In the real movie, Tony shouts down the voices of reason and the pushover counselors give up immediately.

During the criminally negligent forced hiking activity, the boys hatch a plan to get the upper hand. They set a cartoon booby-trap for Uncle Tony, trap him in a hole, and somehow transport him back to camp, where they lock him in a cage that they have taken the grotesque extra step of electrifying with a bug zapper. When the counselors discover this Lord of the Flies situation, they instantly free Tony, forbid him to interact with the children anymore, call everyone's parents, and recommend the children seek psychiatric care. So that was Heavyweights—

Whoops, there I go again. No, actually the adults decide that unlawful imprisonment is the way to go, so they leave Tony in the cage and take over the camp. After the kids (and Paul Feig) slather themselves in chocolate syrup and spend the night outside in the grass, Pat takes charge and announces that every eleven-year-old camper is now in charge of his own diet. (What could go wrong?) When Parents' Day rolls around, the parents are horrified to learn how badly Tony has been treating the kids, though no one sees fit to mention that he is being detained in an electrified chicken-wire cage in the adjacent building.

Tony's dad (also played by Ben Stiller) is called in to shut the camp down, but all the kids say they'd rather stay on, and Pat is elected to take over. Pat says he's been at Camp Hope for 18 years, and earlier in the movie he said he's been coming every year since he was ten. Are we supposed to believe that this man

is 28? He was actually 36.

So Pat helps the kids prepare to take on Camp Apache or whatever I said it was called in the annual relay games. Fortunately for the Camp Hope team, the games include such events as balloon-shaving and solving math equations in an impossibly short time, subjects at which the boys just so happen to excel.

The final event is a go-kart race. The race begins with a pistol start, but wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a relay competition? What's the point of all the other events if you can't get a head-start on the final race? (Did you ever use to watch Nickelodeon Guts? Let's not get into that.)

Gerry wins the race with the help of an electric fan that launches him into the air and on top of the other kid's go-kart, which (1) would never work; (2) would surely be against the rules; and (3) would have killed the other racer if he hadn't inexplicably had a roof over the top of his kart.

So there you have it. Gerry has had the best damn summer of his life (allowing him to say the D-word), and all the kids have learned a lesson about... self-esteem, I guess. Or self-confidence? Whichever.

Did you know...?

1. In the scene where Uncle Tony uncovers the secret junk-food stash, I always thought it looked funny when Goldberg makes the "Seymour Butts" joke, as if the line was dubbed over in post-production. Sure enough, it was. The original line was quite a bit more risqué—I shall not repeat it here—and would probably have led to a PG-13 rating.

2. In the dance scene, watch carefully and you'll notice that several of the child actors are apparently sharing costumes. There's at least one other kid dressed exactly like Gerry, and two other actors are wearing identical t-shirts. My only theory is that they needed substitute kids due to work-hour limitations, and I guess there were only so many Les Mis shirts to be had.