My Year of Flops (33 page)

Pinocchio
tries to explain away its never-ending parade of jarring incongruities with twinkling narration that ushers viewers gently into a land where “animals can speak, a child can look like a grown-up, and very often grown-ups can act like children.” The narrator neglects to mention that in this magical land of Fantastical Vanity Projects, the words people speak are often bitterly at odds with the movements of their lips.

Pinocchio
opens with an impish log being made into a puppet blessed with the gift of life. Breckini's papa oozes pride as he puts the finishing touches on his wooden brainchild: sagging skin, wrinkles aplenty, and a rapidly receding hairline. It's adorable that in this version, the kindly puppet maker chooses to make a puppet roughly his own age: He's less a child surrogate than a potential canasta partner. Breckini comes alive and prances about wearing more makeup than a two-dollar Parisian whore and a smock that looks like it was made out of any Jewish grandmother's floral-print slipcovers.

In spite of stern warnings from his cricket sidekick/conscience, Breckini quickly develops a taste for trouble. Instead of going to school, he heads to a puppet theater, where he's nearly devoured by a sentimental giant, who ultimately takes pity on him and gives him five gold coins. The coins quickly find their way into the pockets of the Cat and the Fox, scoundrels who don black executioner hoods redolent of both Ku Klux Klan robes and the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Then they string Breckini up on a tree branch and leave him to die in front of an impossibly huge and luminous moon. The Blue Fairy (played by Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife, and voiced by Glenn Close) takes pity on the poor, misguided puppet and saves him from certain death.

This establishes a pattern from which the film seldom deviates: Breckini must choose between doing right and doing wrong. He invariably chooses wrong, suffers disproportionately, and faces imminent destruction, only to be bailed out at the last minute by the Blue Fairy, the film's trusty, oft-employed deus ex machina. Many of these grim elements are taken directly from Carlo Collodi's original novel, but that doesn't make them any less jarring.

If the image of Breckini dangling from a tree isn't enough to traumatize tykes, just a few minutes later, a group of rabbit pallbearers show up at his bedside with a coffin. The rabbit pallbearers are supremely peeved, and they slink away glumly when Breckini makes a miraculous recovery.

Breckini eventually ends up behind bars with fellow juvenile delinquent Leonardo (voiced by Topher Grace) who confides in hushed tones, “I've got something to show you.” Leonardo then whips out a sweet candy phallus of a lollipop and regales Breckini with the story of how he purloined 29 lollipops from a candy store before a cop busted him. “I was just about to lick the first one,” Leonardo shares conspiratorially, “and then I heard a policeman call out to me, ‘Put that tongue back, robber. And hand back those 28 lollipops you have in your pocket.'”

Oozing envy, Breckini pleads, “Will you give me one little lick? Just one?” Leonardo willingly acquiesces. “You lick here, me there. You lick first,” he demands. They then take turns double-teaming the lollipop with long, passionate, open-mouthed, obscenely sensual licks.

After being released from jail, Breckini encounters a gravestone suggesting that the Blue Fairy died from Pinocchio-related causes. Distraught, he pleads, “How do you become dead? I wanna be dead too!” Other than homoeroticism and miscalculation, Benigni's
Pinocchio
is distinguished by a perverse, consistent morbidity in the form of rabbit pallbearers, hangings, and the ever-present specter of death.

Breckini eventually follows Leonardo to Fun Foreverland, a paradise where suspiciously mature-looking “boys” frolic, play, wrestle, and prance about in a girl-free environment.

Still more pain and humiliation await Breckini. He's transformed into a donkey, made to work in a sleazy circus, subjected to the vocal stylings of Regis Philbin, and tossed into the ocean to await a watery grave. Yet the Blue Fairy bails Breckini out of every bind, then makes him into a real boy.

In the transcendent Disney version,
Pinocchio
emerges as a powerful coming-of-age allegory about forsaking the pleasures of adolescence and embracing adult responsibility. Yet Benigni's career is predicated on remaining a child forever. If he had listened to his sober inner adult, he'd never have attempted a project this insanely ambitious or ambitiously insane.

Rewatching
Pinocchio,
I admired its unsupportable belief that audiences would somehow be willing to overlook the incongruity of a 50-year-old Pinocchio and surrender their defenses at the altar of childhood innocence.
Pinocchio
is exactly the sort of weirdly compelling, utterly singular personal project I wanted to pay homage to with My Year Of Flops, even if I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the morbidly curious.

Pinocchio
was originally envisioned as a collaboration between Benigni and Federico Fellini, but I doubt even Fellini could have redeemed a project this fundamentally flawed, though he might have pushed the project's innate weirdness to dizzyingly surreal levels. I suspect that the Italian version is preferable to its American bastardization, and while I planned to watch both before writing this entry, I was sent two copies of the dubbed version. There are limits even to my pop-culture masochism. Unlike Benigni, I know when I'm licked.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Roberto Benigni On Pinocchio

Excitable, rubber-faced cut-up Roberto Benigni is an Academy Award–winning writer, actor, comedian, and director. A huge star in his native Italy, Benigni made an indelible impression on American
arthouse audiences with scene-stealing appearances in cult classic Jim Jarmusch films like
Down By Law, Coffee & Cigarettes,
and
Night On Earth
before triumphing internationally as the writer, director, and star of the 1997 Holocaust comedy-drama
Life Is Beautiful.

Roberto Benigni:
Pinocchio
was a big success in Italy, but it didn't go very well around the world because it was a very particular project. Very Italian and very scary also because it was a bold move, having Pinocchio acted by a man of 50 years old. So it was a very, very special project. I put in this movie all my energy, all my oomph, I would say. It wasn't received very good around the world, but it's a project that I love very, very much.

And you know, there are some movies that are loved and some less. But I am really very proud to have presented one of the most wonderful characters for Italy and the world too, because Pinocchio is a universal subject. Now, Walt Disney did a very American version, which I like very much. But I tried to do this Italian version of
Pinocchio
with a lot of liberty, and a lot of visual imagination. But it was also very hard, very difficult to understand. And I understand the reception of the movie. It could be difficult for some of the audience.

Nathan Rabin:
Were you worried that because you were 50, audiences wouldn't accept you in that role?

RB:
Sometimes it happens, this is not a problem. In United States, they give me such a generous reception of
Life Is Beautiful,
my previous movie, that really I owe to United States a lot of love, because they were so generous at me with this movie.

NR:
People also were a little confused, because in the American version your voice was dubbed. What was the thinking behind that?

RB:
Sometimes the dubbing, you know, it's really a difficult thing to understand. In Italy, we are used to the dubbing because they dub every movie, you know. But not in United States. They think it's better to not dub the movie. It's a problem. We don't know how to present a movie, because subtitles also are difficult, especially for a movie like
Pinocchio,
which is addressed to boys, to children. So they cannot
read the entire time. And I am an actor who talks very, very much during the movies, so it's a problem.

NR:
Right, but why dub your voice? You have such a—

RB:
I know, but I repeat I am really so happy about
Pinocchio
because I did what I felt. It's a very honest movie. And if it's not received very good—for example, in Italy and Japan they loved the movie a lot. So sometimes it happens. But this is, I repeat, very, very normal.

Fuck You, Jew Case File #96: Santa Claus: The Movie

Originally Posted December 25, 2007

There's nothing lonelier than being a Jew on Christmas. When someone says, “Merry Christmas,” all I hear is, “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone says, “Happy holidays,” what he really means is, “Fuck you, Jew.” When they say “Happy Chanakoonah,” that's ultimately just another way of saying, “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone at work says, “Hey, Nathan, can I borrow your
Juno
screener?” all I hear is, “Fuck you, Jew.” Man, I really need to go back on my meds. Fucking seasonal depression.

Ah, but Christmas isn't really about religion, you say. It's that most wonderful time of the year when people forget their troubles and join together to worship the Great God of Commerce and his little buddy Jesus. We pay tribute to the Great God of Commerce with maxed-out credit cards, personal checks, and plain old cash. But then, in a culture-wide fit of passive-aggression, we turn our backs on Him by bombarding children with movies, television shows, and songs where materialism is climactically renounced and everyone learns the True Meaning of Christmas. If these renunciations of greed succeed, then they make everyone involved lots and lots of money, year in and year out.

1985's
Santa Claus: The Movie
represented a transparent attempt to spin a
Superman
-like franchise out of the world's most indulgent gift-giver. Actually, Santa Claus and Superman have more in common
than films produced by Ilya Salkind and cowritten by David Newman. They both can fly. They're both magic. They both got to witness the sad decline of Kevin Spacey's film career up close—Santa in
Fred Claus,
Superman in
Superman Returns
. And they both fucked Margot Kidder back when that meant something.

Like
Superman, Santa Claus: The Movie
offers an elaborate creation story for one of our culture's most beloved icons. Santa (David Huddleston) was just your average jelly-bellied gift-giving enthusiast until a group of immortal little people make Santa an offer he can't refuse: Deliver presents to all the gentile girls and boys on Christmas for the rest of eternity in exchange for immortality and the ability to fly. For a morbidly obese gentleman on the verge of a heart attack, that's an irresistible deal. Besides, it isn't as if he has much choice in the matter: He can either deliver toys until the end of time or he can wake up in bloody sheets next to Prancer's severed head. Elves don't fuck around.