Rage 8-The Michigan Daily- Monday, January 13, 1992
Be prepared for some mindless
"musement from Boy Scout $ h
LTie. Last Boy
*oout
Mk. Tony ScottX
by Austin Ratner
Mid you ever wonder what action
rnoyie writers do with all the left-
pver lines, scenes and jokes when
they've finished their final drafts?
At last, I can offer an answer to that
et~ial, burning question: they put
Ite all together and make a com-
preely new action movie!
-Jnfortunately, the resulting
;pIQ doesn't make much sense - but
wli cares? Talk is cheap, movie-go-
erkare dumb and ... yeah, movie-go-
|er re dumb! The Last Boy Scout is
'such a movie; it is, if you will, a Die
Hard without a plot.
-"(The) script went far beyond
the standard "two guys who don't
like each other at first, but then
earn to respect each other" plot-
line. What appealed to me about The
0
Last Boy Scout was that, at its very
heart, it's a tale of redemption,"
says co-producer Joel Silver in the
film's press kit. Silver is exactly
wrong - Scout's plot is no more
than a jumbled series of witty ex-
changes and fun good-guy-beats-up-
scandal-ridden-sadistic-druglord-
henchman action scenes.
The vaguely detectable story, set
in the streets of LA, involves a
down on his luck P.I., Joe
Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) and a
down on his luck ex-football star,
Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) who
slowly get to like each other as they
pursue a typically gangsterish crew
of evil-doers. Exactly how Hallen-
beck's and Dix's goals become inter-
twined, what their goals are, and
how they achieve them are fairly
muddled issues - and are really
irrelevant.
The scenes with some pretense to
seriousness are the weakest. When
Dix portrays his depression, drawl-
ing over his booze in a strip bar,
"All I do these days is drink, lose
friends and nail anything with a
heartbeat," you have to stop and
think - isn't Damon Wayans sup-
posed to be a comedian?
Wayans is at his best when the
script gives him an avenue for his
talent: after being knocked off of a
bridge and landing on a car wind-
shield, he dizzily takes a bow and
suggests to the crowd, "Don't try
this at home."
If there were an Oscar for best
one-liners, Scout would run away
with it. Willis is perfectly suited to
the movie's gruff humor and in-
sult/comeback volleys. The caustic
humor works well with all the vio-
lence against the violent bad guys -
a terrific opportunity for the audi-
ence for vicarious revenge and vic-
tory.
Uniquely, characters Hallenbeck
and Dix actually scar and bruise
when beaten up, adding a realistic
flavor to the unlikely encounters.
This surprising element of realism
Don't see The Last Boy Scout for director Tony Scott's arty cinematography (see above) - see it for some
wham! bam! leave-your-brain-at-the-box-office fun! It might just be the best Bruce Willis film of the year.
reinforces our identification with
the characters and increases our vi-
carious satisfaction.
In the end, Hallenbeck himself
sums up the key to Scout's success
and the success of similar (if
slightly better plotted) movies like
Lethal Weapon, also produced by
Silver. When he gives Dix some ad-
vice about being a good guy P.I., he
says, "This is the nineties. You can't
just walk up to a guy and smack 'em
- first, you have to give 'em a good
line."
THE LAST BOY SCOUT is playing
at Showcase.
ROCK
Continued from page 5
figure out what it means' ... It's
4simply listening to that song and
,sometimes I'll listen to that song
and a thousand other songs and I'll
simply be moved. My jaw will drop
'open. I just won't be able to believe
that human beings can make sounds
that powerful. And I just simply
won't understand where that all
comes from."
But where does the music come
from? Musicians, yes, and the
majority of it used to come from
youth and youth culture. Who made
it and who listened were one in the
same. But because more music now-
adays is bought by the over-thirty
set than the teens and young adults,
the market affects how music is
written about and, to some degree,
who makes it. Can noise age?
Murray says, "It's good-bye to
youth fascism, you know, the whole
notion of never trust anybody over
thirty, hope I die before I get old,
all that stuff. You're dealing with
people who have got old and are sort
of devoutly hoping they won't die
'til they're ninety."
The fact is that Murray and
Marcus themselves are over forty
and have no intention of ending their
musical writing careers, nor should
they, because they are still charting
the territory younger writers could
follow when they reach the over-
forty stage. Their age colors how
they hear, what they hear, how they
write, and who they write for.
"The thing that bothers me is
that there's so much in the music in-
dustry that caters to people my
age," Murray says. "I mean, we've
got more money than the kids have
... it's good-bye to youth fascism.
It's hello to ancestor worship and
the economic hegemony of forty-
something." The evil business side
R E E
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8pm Tuesday 1/14
in the Michigan Union Ballroom
Impact Dance Theatre presents a
FREE WORKSHOP
For more Information, call UAC @ 763 1107
of music rears it's abysmal con-
trolling head again.
Murray and Marcus are not by
any means the be-all, end-all figures
in music journalism. But they write
more for the people who are chang-
ing the music to an older noise than
to kids whose taste is still forming.
Younger writers come to the
music with very different values
and perspectives that are just is le-
gitimate as their forefathers. They,
like Marcus and Murray, don't nec-
essarily write about the same things
as Rolling Stone. Paula Abdul was
created to appeal equally to the over
thirty and teen pop music fans, and
is written about in the appropriate
place.
Personally, I like Guns N' Roses
and Nirvana because they are fairly
young and obnoxious (we'll leave
the fascism out of it, that's another
article). I cut my teeth on the
Beatles, but that was when I was
under ten years of age. They are old.
They say nothing new. Same for
R.E.M., INXS and all these other
college bands that have been around
for a decade or so.
I would still see them live and
check out their new albums, but I
think bands like Uncle Tupelo and
Ned's Atomic Dustbin are in-
finitely more gripping and full of
life by the mere fact of their youth
and, more importantly, they have a
greater chance of doing something
New and Exciting on their albums.
I can more easily trick myself
into thinking something that is real
noise might happen there. And, if
young journalists don't write about
them, few others will.
A friend of mine goes so far to
claim that no "new" (read differ-
ent, important, or what have you)
music is made by anyone over the age
of twenty-five. I doubted the wis-
dom of this rallying cry at first, but
I now believe it is basically true.
For only a few artists, little
changes past the third or fourth al-
bum.
Perhaps the same goes for music
writers, in that we come to the mu-
sic with a "fresh" perspective. We
are making noise too - a smaller-
scale noisy youth fascism with a
sense of history.
0l
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Films shown at MICHIGAN THEATRE each week
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Arrange Interviews with
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January 22
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Thursday
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January 9
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(Park at Miller Auditorium)
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Also At Cedar Point:
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