Movie Time Capsule Blog #14: "North"

Sometimes the dregs of Sunday afternoon television give you an opportunity that is just too juicy to pass up. The hours between noon and four are usually reserved for sporting events or at least fishing shows. If a network doesn’t have that, they will often pad out their schedule with infomercials and sitcom reruns. Sometimes, ever so rarely, these stations will dig into their vaults and pull out the most petrified turd to their shelves and release it on an unsuspecting public because they were just flat out of things to show.

I didn’t even know what the movie I was about to watch was going to be. The satellite program guide simply said “movie” and gave no information whatsoever. I had missed the first five minutes of the movie, but when it was back from commercial break I knew within five seconds what it was. I had seen this evil before and stared into its cold black heart. I slowly got up off the couch and put the remote down; backing away from the television and couch as if there were a large, rabid animal in front of me. Without looking behind me I calmly told Marilyn I was going to go watch television in her room.

“Why are you going to watch it in my room? I mean, you can, but you can watch it down here. I’m not paying attention to it at all.”

“Because even if you aren’t paying attention to it, I don’t want to subject you to this. No one should have to be subjected to this.”

“So why the heck are you going to watch it?”

“It’s my thing.” I kicked the notebook off the edge of the table and into my hands as if it were a shotgun, grabbed it and cocked the pen in my hand, ready as ever for a movie I have wanted to write about but haven’t had a second chance to view until now. “It’s what I do.”

I dashed up the stairs to looks of puzzlement and confusion. As I ascended the stairs and made my way to the master bedroom, a famous quote filled my ears with a combination of dread and adrenaline:

“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

I turned the television on and a chill once again ran down my spine as if the spectre of death itself was right there in the room with me. There are a reason embarrassments like this aren’t put out on DVD, I told myself. I leaned back and readied myself for a movie I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I didn’t care for it much then, but I didn’t think it was as bad as Roger Ebert said it was. I haven’t had the chance to watch it since I read the review and after having seen his review on his show. No video stores ever seemed to carry it; not even the one I worked at in the late 90s. It was never released on DVD and I had never once seen it played on television. I can never find it online and it was never popular enough with anyone to spark bidding wars on eBay. I could only find three clips of it through exhaustive online searching: the trailer, which I lost the link to, but you can find at videodetective.com or through a Google search, a brief musical number that someone deranged enough liked enough to upload, and the infamous television version of the infamous review. Here it was in front of me. The unidentified movie was Rob Reiner’s “North,” a 1994 movie so terrible it seemingly inspired rage blackouts in anyone over the age of 18.

Anyone who fawns over the filmography of Rob Reiner is a moron and you should immediately run in the opposite direction if they ever start talking about him while using the phrases “genius” or “auteur” to describe him. The man has only made 14 movies in his career, and while some of them are really great movies (“Stand By Me”, “The American President”, “The Princess Bride”, “This is Spinal Tap”, and “A Few Good Men”), many more are either vastly overrated (“When Harry Met Sally”, “Misery”, “Ghosts of Mississippi”, and I will include “The Bucket List” here because a ton of people saw it, inexplicably like it in a “Patch Adams” sort of way that I can’t fucking stand) or completely unwatchable (“The Story of Us”, “Alex and Emma”, “Rumor Has It”, and today’s subject). His best movies weren’t even good because he was the one directing them. The directing in all these movies is rudimentary and serves only to move an amazing story with an amazing cast along at an adequate pace. “North” was seemingly the beginning of the end for the former actor turned director, but on paper it certainly didn’t look like it at the time. “North” has a cast that could rival most epics made in Hollywood’s golden age, and everyone involved can thank Reiner for making a movie so toxic Columbia Pictures (and probably Reiner’s own company Castle Rock Entertainment) have seemingly quarantined it for so long. Today, security has seemingly been breached.

“North”, also the name of the main character, was Elijah Wood’s first role as a lead and I can see why someone would take it other than for the money. North is a great kid who excels at everything he attempts. He gets straight As. He is a star on the baseball diamond. He can even act and sing. Any parent on the face of the planet would be thrilled to have a son like North, right?

Wrong, North’s parents are too self-absorbed to realise what a wonderful son they have. North’s mother, played by Julia Louis Dreyfuss, is a cartographer too interested in travelling the world to care about anything else. His father, played by Jason Alexander, is pants inspector number six and spends all his time complaining about his job and how he was passed over for a promotion. They never listen to their son and hardly ever acknowledge his existence.

North’s malaise begins to spill over into every aspect of his day to day life. He forgets the simplest lines in school plays and starts walking numerous batters in a row. One day, he just walks out of a baseball game and goes to his own “secret spot”; the one place that everyone has where they know they can be alone. North’s just happens to be a large leather recliner in a mall department store. He goes there because he knows that while other parents love him and everything he does; by sitting in this chair he knows he looks no different than any other kid waiting for his parents to finish their shopping.

While in his chair, the Easter bunny sits down next to him and tells him when the world is going to end. No wait, that was a metaphysical movie that I hate infinitely more than this movie. It is just a man in an Easter bunny suit, played by Bruce Willis, who sits next to North to eat a carrot (ha-ha) and ask North what was eating him up. The Easter Bunny tells North that out of everything in life you can’t pick who your parents are and that it isn’t like a baseball team where you can declare yourself a free agent. Up until this moment, roughly fifteen minutes or so in, “North” is still not a bad movie, but any good will you might have up until this point will just lure you into a false sense of confidence.

North decides to emancipate himself from his parents and find new ones that will actually appreciate him for the prised child he knows he is. He is aided in his quest by a lawyer he literally meets while chasing ambulances, played by Jon Lovitz, and the editor of his school’s newsletter, a weasly looking kid with slicked back hair named Winchell (ha-ha) and played by a thoroughly annoying Matthew McCurley.

When North’s parents find out he is leaving them, they become paralysed and can’t defend themselves at their own custody hearing. The judge, played by an Al Pacino channelling Alan Arkin in the worst performance he has ever given, has no choice but to award the case to North, but adds the stipulation that North must be in the arms of his new parents (literally) by noon on Labour Day or he will be remanded to an orphanage.

Thus begins North’s whirlwind adventure across the world, but mainly staying in Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii because Reiner and writer Alan Zweibel (a former “Saturday Night Live” head writer and author of the novel “North” was based on. The novel is also long since out of print and wasn’t very good either) think these are the funniest places in the union to stereotype. It is at this point that “North” ceases to be cute and panders to some of the most outright ignorant, lazy, and in some cases outright racist stereotypes ever committed to film. I have talked to some people who say “North” is as bad as “Song of the South”, but since I haven’t seen Disney’s infamous film, I can’t agree or disagree with that statement.

The first family North visits with are a pair of Texan something-or-others played by Dan Aykroyd, in the worst performance of his career and that says a lot since he has starred in some shitty movies, including one where he had a penis for a nose, and Reba McEntire, in the worst performance of her career. Apparently, the love everything big because they are from Texas! You know how those Texans love everything big! You know how they love to shout! You know how they all live on ranches and are so gosh darn excited about everything it all sounds like they have an exclamation point after every statement they make! Yee-hah! North leaves them because they are trying to fatten him up and make him look like their son who had been trampled to death by a pack of longhorns. They tell this to North over the course of a musical number that has backup dancers ready and at the waiting. North talks to a ranch hand, played by Bruce Willis doling out more sage advice, and he decides to leave for his next destination.

Back home, Winchell and Lovitz are scheming of how to frame this new revolution that North has started. North has set a dangerous precedent and children everywhere are using it as leverage against their parents. There is all of a sudden talk about lowering the voting age to seven and having Lovitz run for president. I don’t know how the hell Winchell does it, but he makes enough money to buy a swanky new office in a Manhattan high rise even though being the leader of a revolution partnered with a piss poor attorney doesn’t earn you any money, but whatever, it will all make sense at the end which I am going to spoil mercilessly when I get there.

The second family North visits is in Hawaii, where everything is made of grass and straw and everyone hula dances. Not even Adam Sandler’s “50 First Dates” portrayed Hawaii in such a stereotypical light. North is the guest of the Ho’s, the governor of Hawaii and his wife who is apparently “the only barren land” in the whole state. How witty is that? Everyone on the island is asinine and has stereotypical names; they are all topless perfectly tanned males, female dancers, or fire twirlers. Mr. Ho even tells North he will live longer because of the difference in time zones. North actually like the Ho’s and wants to stay until he finds out he is just a ploy to bring tourists to Hawaii, which apparently has no self esteem and is still pissed about Hands Across America not reaching that far. That is not me being flippant. That is exactly the reason why Mr. Ho puts North’s bare ass on a billboard like he is the Coppertone girl while getting his shorts pulled down by an octopus. Elijah Wood seems like he is going to crack up in this scene because every other word he has to say in his exasperation is “crack.” Bruce Willis turns up as a beachcomber, delivers some sage advice, and North leaves.

The third family... I need a minute on this one. It is now hours after I have seen the movie, but I am about to get into how hateful and wrongheaded this movie truly is. I will try not to let my anger get in the way of this one, but I make no guarantees.

The third family are Eskimos. When North’s plane lands in Juneau, it skids all the way to Anchorage because apparently Alaska is made entirely of ice. Right. North arrives in town on a dogsled and is led into a commune of igloos that look and act exactly like the huts on “The Flintstones” right down to even having garage door openers. Kathy Bates, in not so much a bad performance but one where she wisely blends into the background, greets her prospective son with hot chocolate and “their state dish” and Eskimo Pie. Every piece of clothing has caribou, polar bears, and penguins on it (even though there are no penguins in Alaska, but as I said, it will all make sense at the end). Alaskan Christmas is the best because his dad tells him it lasts for three months because of the amount of sunlight they get. As if the puns weren’t bad enough, it just gets worse.

Apparently these people fish in their living room while whistling the theme to “The Andy Griffith Show”, and it is now that I realise that this movie is filled with nothing but references to old television shows. Every scene has included some theme of some sort from “Bonanza” to “Hawaii Five-O”. Anyway, they stop fishing when North’s prospective father realises it is time to kill Grandpa. Apparently, it is an Eskimo custom to send old people out on ice flows when they reach a certain age just so they can drift out to sea and die “with grace and dignity”. The most ironic part of this was that I saw this movie on the Aboriginal People’s Television Network, who of all the stations out there should have known better.

When was this movie made? 1929? There is no excuse for such a joke in such poor taste handled so stupidly that not even a single shred of it is funny in any way. The grandfather is played by Abe Vigoda, who really is just biding his time until he dies in real life since everyone seems to think he is dead already, and he is set out carelessly on an ice flow with nothing but a stool (some people have recliners and T.V. sets on theirs) and they shove him out to sea without giving a shit and never question it again. No one grieves for a second because the script tells them not to. It is all a fucking joke. North decides to leave Alaska not because it is unsettling but because time has moved by so quickly that Labour Day is one week away (the walk to the ocean took seven weeks and North was too stupid to notice, apparently) and he still has other families to visit. Bruce Willis shows up as the driver of a sled piloted by caribou delivers some sage advice, and North is off again.

The next few families are only briefly glimpsed because the movie seems to have blown all its inspiration and well thought out hatred on the three previous families. There is the Amish family where the parents are played by the same people who played the parents in “Witness” who constantly use “thy”, “thine”, and “art” and have an endless field of kids with only two names: Ezekiel and Art. North makes a joke about needing a butter churner and books it out of there. North walks out on being a Chinese emperor because he doesn’t want a haircut. North goes to Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) where everyone is naked and he thinks he won’t get any work done from staring at his surrogate mother’s naked chest. In Paris, his parents smoke and wear berets while laughing at Jerry Lewis movies that are on every single channel. This is a movie that if it gets out could start wars. I sure as shit hoped no one watched it other than me today.

North’s parents are still frozen in shock and are purchased by Ben Stein (no stranger to hate filled mediocrity these days) and placed in the Smithsonian as exhibits. Just wanted to throw that out there so you don’t forget amongst all the ruckus that North has actual parents. The emotional blackmail by children against their parents continues and North’s face is now on Mount Rushmore.

The last family on North’s trip is a white bread suburban family from Upstate New York. They are normal in every way and the movie doesn’t once make a joke about them. The father is John Ritter, a doctor so gosh darn nice that he still makes house calls. The stay at home mother is played by Faith Ford. They have two kids, one boy and a girl played by Scarlett Johansen in her film debut. They even have a shaggy but loveable dog. Everything seems perfect, but North feels that something is still missing.

In a bid to get their son back, North’s parents cozy up to Winchell upon waking up and cut a video for North to watch in which they tell him how much they love him and want a second chance. In typical journalist fashion, Winchell asks leading questions and edits the video to make it seem like his parents aren’t really even upset about him missing. When North watches the video in his new, idyllic home, he doesn’t decide to stay despite the fact that these parents seem to be the nicest people alive. Instead, North runs off to New York City to simply disappear and never be heard from again. This is an idea that is completely stupid for so many reasons that I think you can figure out on your own, but apparently no one bothered to tell Zweibel, Reiner, or the cast.

Winchell is furious upon hearing that his plans to get North a new family are falling through. If North were to go back to his loving family, all that Winchell had worked so hard to attain (?) would be lost. Winchell decides that the best way to combat North’s unknowing insubordinance is to have either the parents who hate him or the kids who don’t want him to return home to kill him and make him a martyr. At what point did anyone involved in the making of this film think that any of this was entertaining? How the hell did anyone think this was uplifting family fare? It doesn’t help that in the villain category, Lovitz simply doesn’t give a shit and seems to be reading his lines as if he were doing an animated show and he might even think he is invisible. As for McCurley as Winchell, he might not be able to act as well as the rest of the cast, but he is effective. I cringed every time I saw him on screen and wanted someone to desperately punch him in the face, remind him that he is twelve and put a stop to not just the revolution, but this whole God forsaken movie.

After being chased through Central Park in the middle of the night while getting shot at, North meets up with a “deep throat” like character named Adam who worked as the camera man for the doctored video shoot. Adam is the only black person outside of The Congo in the entire movie unless you count his father who admonishes him to floss in the middle of a montage. Adam gives North the unedited footage because North was always nice to him and always treated him well. This could have been a scene that actually works, but Reiner stages it as an Abbott and Costello routine and ends the scene with pointless sentimentality because we have no clue just who the fuck Adam is to begin with. The first thing North does when he gets the tape instead of immediately running again is to stop and buy a hot dog. Needless to say, it is only a matter of time before he starts getting shot at again.

North keeps running before jumping in the back of a delivery truck (because they totally drive around New York City in the middle of the night with the doors open) while getting shot at. North drops his hat and it is covered in some red goo that Wichell’s inept goon-for-hire thinks is blood. For all the villains know, North has been shot in the head. In reality, it is borscht. Since an average child that would be taken to this movie has no clue what borscht is, we are treated to a long monologue delivered by Winchell that spells out what it is in painful detail.

The delivery truck pulls up to some sort of convention being held by A.S.A.P., the Association of Smoke Alarm People, and who should be providing the dreadful stand up routine for this crowd, but Bruce Willis. By this point, you might be thinking Willis is some sort of guardian angel character, and even by this point you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but as I said before, when we get to the end it will all make sense. Willis conveniently has a VCR in his dressing room and lets North view it because he totally needs to see if his new gadget works and then when Willis gives North a ride to the airport to go home, he doesn’t even take it with him. Willis delivers some sage advice about not going to Miami in August because your balls will stick to your thighs and leaves.

The staff at the airport refuse to let North on the plane because all of the newspapers have front page stories saying that North is dead and they just can’t take the chance that he is not a zombie. Conveniently, a bunch of kids he went to school with just happen to be at JFK airport and they all notice they the flight he wants to get on goes back home to his real parents. Instead of getting on the flight that they should be boarding and be content that North will never make it home in time, they chase him through the terminal and try to kill him. North escapes in a FedEx truck driven by... oh what’s the fucking point anymore. Willis delivers some product placement for FedEx, tells North to get in a box, and when North arrives at his parent’s house (two hours later than the package should have arrived) the driver has changed. It used to be so simple to ship small children overnight back then.

Winchell is waiting for North when he gets home and tells him that his parents are at his secret spot in the mall. North only has ten minutes to get over there. The only satisfying point of this half of the movie comes when you think Wood is going to beat the shit out of McCurley, but it never happens. At least they allow North to slightly curse like a normal human being probably would.

Meanwhile, back the furniture store, North’s parents wait anxiously and Arkin is back with an obnoxious countdown clock that every such scene should have. North just barely makes it there with seconds to spare. After all, the ridiculous stipulation states that North has to be in the arms of both parents at noon and neither of them could go and try to meet him half way there. Just as North runs through the store in slow motion, jumping through the air to the loving arms of his family, we see the same incompetent goon lying in wait with a gun; the gun goes off and...

North wakes up in his favourite chair in the store. It was all a dream! None of this ever happened. He fell asleep in the mall after the baseball game he walked out on.

If the movie itself is dreadful, unfunny, and structurally unsound, the ending shows just what an enormous piece of shit this movie really was. The ending is oddly enough what many of this film’s defenders (yeah, there are a few here and there on the internet) cite as defence of the rest of the movie. While I do give the movie some credit for giving us some clues that the movie was heading in this direction (Willis always popping up everywhere, the music and character names from television shows, its utter incoherence), the ending makes this an even more hateful movie. By making it all a dream, all you have done is show that North is a racist sociopath. North, this supposedly perfect kid who is smarter than almost anyone on Earth, dreamed up all these broad stereotypes because that is really what he thinks is true about the rest of the world. Also, the laziest thing you can do to any story (other than adding narration, which this movie also has and is provided by, you guessed it, Bruce Willis) is to end it by saying it was all a dream. It shows either that you had no plot to begin with, had nothing to say, or that you went in without knowing how it was going to end and you let the story get too far away from you to pull it back. Willis gives North a ride home delivers one last piece of sage advice, and leaves. North’s parents greet him at the door and finally show some sort of concern and emotion.

Clearly, this movie didn’t kill anyone’s career with its toxicity. People would have to have seen it to really kill their careers, but its $40 million budget (none of which ever appears on screen) it led Castle Rock Entertainment to temporarily declare bankruptcy before being bought by New Line Cinema. Wood has moved on quite nicely and never looked back and Willis has always had major failures just roll right off his back as if he is coated in Teflon. Willis is pretty remarkable like that. Zweibel occasionally pops up every now and then to write a script for something. The person who seemed to fare the worst was Reiner and while his career is still going strong (“The Bucket List” was his most successful film since before “North” was made), it has never fully recovered.

One has to really wonder what Reiner and Zweibel though the audience for this movie was and how the hell they thought they were pleasing anyone with this movie. It is far too dark and stereotypical to take any child to see it (even I saw it alone in a theatre with four other people) and no adult could possibly take anything on screen seriously because anyone who has up to a grade nine education would know that this movie is complete bullshit. The jokes are lazy and groan inducing. Both times I saw this movie I didn't laugh a single time. In closing, and if you didn’t want to read this entire review, here is the Siskel and Ebert clip where they discuss their hatred for this movie. Both of them said it was the worst movie of 1994, and Ebert still maintains it is one of the worst films he has ever seen in his life. It has clips from the movie, so if you need to see what I am talking about, feel free.

Verdict: Best Left Forgotten