And if you've never seen any of those films before, then congratulations: you still have most of your brain cells. Me, I'll still try to get through this... uh, thing... and give you a good... uh... whatchamacallit.
Okay, just got back from watching a couple of David Lean movies to get my brain cells to regenerate, I'm fine now. Back to business.
As far as Jeff Goldblum goes, the first film I really noticed him in was 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. Of course, as far as that goes, no one can forget anything about that film once they've seen it. But as red-shirted, white cowboy-hatted New Jersey, Goldblum made quite an impression in what amounted to an ensemble piece. Then again, it would seem that Goldblum excels at ensemble pieces; 1983's The Big Chill was great. I loved Silverado, in spite of its 1985 date of release. Even 1995's Nine Months was something enjoyable due to his involvement. Never before has any actor whose specialty of stream-of-consciousness dialogue made anything he was in more worth watching. Well, him and early-Eighties Robin Williams.
Then Jeff got lead roles where his big eyes, six-foot tall frame and whole arsenal of off-kilter tics and mannerisms essayed unique performances in films like The Fly, Mister Frost and the brightly-colored and wonderfully-titled Earth Girls Are Easy. Any one of those examples will provide you with a great Jeff Goldblum performance that makes the overall experience of watching that given film even more pleasant.
An unfortunate by-product of this kind of thing, though, is the fact that those ever-present Hollywood suits figured if Jeff could be in those films and they turned out good by mere association (though writing, directing and concept may have had a hand in things, too), then he could be in just about anything.
Anything.
Even a comedy about treasure-seeking psychics in South America.
Betcha didn't see that coming. And neither did anyone else see Vibes coming.
Now here's some ESP (Extra-Stupid Plot): Sylvia Pickel (Cyndi Lauper) and Nick Deezy (Jeff Goldblum) are a pair of what can conceivably be called psychics - Sylvia is in constant mental contact with an otherworldly spirit named Louise and Nick can touch anything and give us a history of who touched it before and where that particular object came from. Handy attributes to have, I guess.
They are both approached by the perpetually-rumpled Harry Buscafusco (Peter Falk) to help find his long lost son in Equador. Once they make it South of the Border, all three are approached by the mysterious Doctor Harrison Steele (Julian Sands) and mysterious-yet-prerequisitely-bumbling assistant Ingo Swedlin (Googy Gress) once it is revealed that Harry is really searching for a fabled treasure hidden somewhere in Ecuador...and even then there is more going on than meets the eye...and the brain.
For those of you who didn't know Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper was an actress, apparently director Ken Kwapis caught a few of her MTV videos and figured she was the second coming of Bette Davis...or at least in her case, Bette Midler. The bad part is that Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper has a cute Noo Yawk accent, but that's it for characterization. As a quirky hair stylist/psychic friend, you'd expect at least the same level of manic acting and breakout spastic mugging and flouncing about prevalent in her vids for "She Bop" and "Goonies (R Good Enuf)". Unfortunately, Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper plays it on the same level as she did in such music video classics as "Time After Time" and "True Colors". Aside from an occasional side glance and smirk, we get nothing. They even have the temerity to chop off her magnificent Technicolor mane and mute it into a pixie-ish platinum blonde Mary Martin cut. Too bad.
They also make the mistake of casting Julian Sands as the main villain looking for the MacGuffin treasure. I mean, come on: you couldn't get any more obvious with your villain than this, and Julian doesn't even seem to hide the fact or mute in any way that he is the Bad Guy. Not that he does an absolutely terrible job, but just that he doesn't really try that hard. The worst heresy he commits is speaking with a British accent and glaring. ANYONE can do that. Julian Sands is a man who has played an evil time-travelling warlock TWICE. I expected more, I suppose, from a disciple of Satan.
We are also saddled with the unfortunate casting of Googy Gress as the indecipherably-accented Ingo Swedlin, another psychic who seems a few rungs below the others in terms of ESP. I doubt he even had ESPN. All that Googy (if I may) provides is irritation and the ability to contribute nothing to the flow of story or to any possible action in a plot as wafer-thin as this one. I literally cringed whenever he came onscreen because I knew he would grind things to a halt and give "fingernails scraping down a chalkboard" a run for their money in the irritation department.
There are smaller-still, even-less-important bit-parts for such recognizable faces as Park Overall (the receptionist from TV's "Empty Nest" - remember?), Bill McCutcheon (who played Dropo in that modern-day classic Santa Claus Conquers The Martians) Elizabeth Peña (whose been in just darned-near everything) and Don Bexley - whose name I'm sure you won't recognize but you'd know his face as good ol' Bubba from the classic series "Sanford and Son". Seeing him made me wish hard for a cameo by Redd Foxx coming in to call everybody a "big dummy". Could only have helped.
In acting terms, though, I saved the best two for last. For one, we have the abundantly talented Peter Falk, who made a career out of dishevelment and gravelly-voiced observations. In fact, he was hilarious playing Harry Buscafusco by the sole virtue of him being Peter Falk, not to mention reading his lines as Peter Falk. I swear: I'd watch him do The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare Abridged, just to hear him talk. Just looking at how he interacts with his co-stars: it's like watching Humphrey Bogart in a Three Stooges movie. A BAD Three Stooges movie (you know, the Curly Joe DeRita years...).
And then there's Big Jeff, for whom we already know linear acting is a given, turning just about any line reading on its ear with his effortless delivery and witty aplomb. Of course, he can only do his magic with writing that is there. Meaning? This is Jeff FREAKIN' Goldblum you got in your movie - PUNCH UP THE WRITING!!!
I can't even believe I have to say that, seeing as how the scribes for this script are none other than Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Yes, you know them - how could anyone not remember someone named Babaloo? They wrote Splash and Night Shift and Gung Ho and other movies that are 100 times funnier than Vibes.
(Just to clarify, the story for this was also co-concocted by a lady named Deborah Blum. Know what other big movie she wrote before/after Vibes? None. Nothing at all. You wanna see anymore of her work, watch the tube and catch an old episode of Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of..." series. She'll be writing there, or maybe producing a movie like Clean And Sober. Nothing else that has to do with Peter Falk looking for psychics, though. At least she wasn't a one-trick pony....
Matter of fact, Splash, Night Shift and Gung Ho were directed by Ron Howard, who knows a thing or two about what's funny and what good film-making should be. Why, then, did he executive-produce Vibes? Near as I can tell, when a director the stature of Howard gets into the old executive-producing game, he sees a lot of projects pass by his cluttered desk and green-lights some just on the basis of an entertaining synopsis - or by the fact that it was written by people who wrote funny stuff before. You know, just to expedite the executive-producing process.
I'll bet you an Arnold Burger that Howard kept a closer eye on any and all projects that paused at his office door after Vibes was wrought.
And what about Ken Kwapis? This guy, directing Vibes like a bad sit-com ep, seemed to in fact specialize in TV sitcoms, when he wasn't lensing such classics of cinema as Dunston Checks In, The Beautician And The Beast, License To Wed and The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants. You know, I have a few lady friends who have seen that last movie; their consensus is that it is one of the WORST chick flicks since Sweet November or Autumn In New York. Take THAT, Kwapis!
This movie did so badly and earned back so little (a tad over $1 million for something that HAD to have cost more just to secure the "talent") that I'll bet you didn't even know it came out on DVD a couple of years ago. Didn't know that, didja? Took me by surprise, too.
After being unceremoniously swept under the rug with all the other lesser movies that came out in 1988 (yes, there were lesser than this), Vibes went on to curse just about everybody involved. Ganz and Mandel would never again wrote anything as big as their past hits (except maybe for Parenthood), Kwapis took a hit that kept him away from semi-respectability for years...if he ever had enough to direct something like this, the bit actors herein bit elsewhere though not quite as often as they had before, Falk was still a dependably good actor but perhaps not as dependably busy post-1988, Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper had to depend on her music for her legacy since her bid for Diana Ross super-stardom flopped like a dead fish and even Ron Howard stepped back from comedy for a good long while after this.
The only one who seemed to walk away from this whole mess unscathed was Goldblum, who still has a vibrant career and still manages to elicit a sense of glee with every project he pops up in, giving the viewer hope that what they are watching may be the greatest thing ever.
It's just that for one tiny little moment in 1988, Goldblum gave us the horrific vision of an able-bodied swimmer flailing for his life in the middle of a deep, unfunny ocean.
And under the circumstances, again, I guess he should have seen that coming, as well.
