Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Reggae legend and Massive Attack collaborator Horace Andy returns to the rootsy style and socially conscious work of his early Studio One career.
By Michelle Goldberg
[03/02/00]

Column
Samurai liar
Hidden identities, an aborted marriage and a hooker without a heart of gold inhabit Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's droll "Mifune."
By Michael Sragow
[03/02/00]

Dreaming in television
Nam June Paik's TV installations paint the Guggenheim Museum with the psychedelic colors of the cathode ray.
By Daniel Kunitz
[03/02/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Message to Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan: You are not God.
By Joe Heim
[03/01/00]

Column
The ballad of Luther and Johnny
In the jungles of Southeast Asia, 12-year-old twins lead a band of rebels. My twin sister and I got into trouble a lot, too.
By Sarah Vowell
[03/01/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

And again.

It's just about the funniest gag in "What Planet Are You From?" the first time, at least. Otherwise we're left mostly with jokes that amble nowhere, and the task of trying to decipher Shandling's eternally blank, doughy expression. The point is, of course, that there's nothing to decipher: Shandling is all about deadpan, and it should work well enough here, since he's playing an alien with no human emotions. But he's never particularly likable, whether he's showing up at an AA meeting with his new Earth pal (Greg Kinnear) hoping to pick up girls, or somehow inducing his infant son to send an arc of pee straight onto the shirt fronts of a bunch of alien baddies. The philosophy here seems to be: When the vibrating penis grows tired, bring on the squirting pee.

What Planet Are You From? Directed by Mike Nichols Starring Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, John Goodman, Greg Kinnear, Ben Kingsley

The story, written by Shandling, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Leeson, smells like any number of sci-fi comedies we've seen before. Shandling lives on a far-off planet headed by Ben Kingsley (doing his best Patrick Stewart), a planet where there's no breeding (its inhabitants are cloned) and no one has any emotions. In fact, each successive generation simply becomes more aggressive and domineering, which means it's time to take over the universe, starting with planet Earth. After a training session in which the awkward aliens are shown, via a hologram cutie, the "access points" to the Earth woman's womb (they're also advised to compliment her on her footwear in order to get her into the sack), Shandling is chosen to zip down and make the initial conquest. Posing as a loan officer, he does his best to assimilate, making the usual predictably clumsy mistakes, and ends up meeting the fragile, spacy, recovering alcoholic Annette Bening, who's anxious to have a child for her own reasons. The two marry in a quickie Vegas ceremony -- there's some stock silliness in which the fountain outside their hotel room gushes gloriously as Shandling's wonder boy vibrates away -- and embark on the grand adventure of conception.

But "What Planet" does little more than go for easy laughs, and Nichols' direction doesn't do much to enhance them. The picture barely works as a silly adult sex farce, it isn't nearly freewheeling and naughty enough, and it's all too easy to predict at the beginning that by the end we'll be handed a nice little lesson about love and commitment. And though it's no great sin to have a few plot holes in a comedy, "What Planet" seems needlessly sloppy. Shandling travels between his planet and Earth by transporting himself, via a big flash of light, onto a regular commercial airplane, and he repeatedly meets Kingsley in the airplane bathroom for emergency meetings. John Goodman, as an airline investigator who's examining these weird air phenomena, finally traces their occurrence to Shandling by scanning the passenger list -- although it's anyone's guess why an alien who can appear and disappear in a blaze of light would bother to purchase a ticket.

Bening is the picture's single saving grace: She never lets her character go too soft, and the crispness of her line readings keeps the movie from going completely slack. When Shandling, visiting her apartment for the first time, takes note of the Buddhas and Ganeshas cluttering her dresser, she explains that in AA she's supposed to appeal to a higher power, but she can't decide on one, "So I'm covering my ass." Bening's prickliness is pure delight, but there's only so much she can do. It's a terrible fate for an actress to be upstaged by a humming penis.
salon.com | March 3, 2000

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon