GDP’s Mike Clark’s best quip from Bolt
November 21, 2008 at 3:03 pm by Curt Holman in A&E
Gwinnett Daily Post film critic Mike Clark and I frequently sit next to each other at screenings for movies like the Disney cartoon feature Bolt. Consequently, I know that Mike’s funniest line about the movie does not appear in his review. The film’s premise depicts a TV show about a super-powered canine (voiced by John Travolta) who protects spunky young Penny (Miley Cyrus) from high-tech evildoers. Bolt doesn’t realize the show is fiction, so when Penny is kidnapped on-screen, he ends up lost in the “real” world trying to find her. Penny, despite being an actress, genuinely misses Bolt, whose disappearance holds up the filming of the show.
About halfway through the movie, Penny’s unctuous Hollywood agent shows up with an American White Shepherd and tells her “We found your dog!” Penny embraces the dog with delight, then pauses and says “This isn’t Bolt,” rightly identifying the new dog as an imposter. When that happened, Mike leaned over and said to me “Just like Changeling!” — i.e., the Clint Eastwood film in which the LAPD return a kidnapped boy to his mother (Angelina Jolie), even though they know he’s not the right kid.
Once, our across-the-armrest quipping nearly got us into trouble, which I’ll describe after the jump, because it spoils the ending of Nights in Rodanthe.
So we were watching Nights in Rodanthe, which features a midlife romance between Adrienne and Paul (Unfaithful co-stars Diane Lane and Richard Gere). They have an affair when they’re both the only residents at a bed-and-breakfast on the Carolina coast, and tearfully split up when he (temporarily) travels to the Latin American jungle to renew ties with his son, James Franco’s crusading young doctor. While he’s away, they write letters about how lucky they are to have met each other, how theirs is a love for the ages, how they can’t wait to begin their lives together when he flies back to America, etc. But Paul doesn’t show up at the appointed time, and the next day when Adrienne gets a knock at the door, it turns out to be… the son, who tells Adrienne that Paul died trying to rescue villagers from a catastrophic jungle mudslide.
The son gives her some of Paul’s belongings, which include — what’s this? — his last, unsent letter to her! It’s like a message from beyond the grave. Adrienne opens the envelope, starts reading and I whispered to Mike, “Dear Adrienne: I have Herpes!”
Silence followed on screen. Instead of hearing Gere’s voice-over for the text of the letter, or even bringing the music up, the film held the shot on Lane as she read the letter and wept wrenchingly. It was a great moment in a so-so movie — and also a virtually soundless one, which nearly killed Mike and me, as we were trying to stifle our laughter from exploding in the silent movie theater and potentially disturbing other people in the audience. No laughter is harder to contain than forbidden laughter.
That probably should have taught us a lesson about the perils of movie quipping, but no, not so much.
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