When I saw Andrew Fleming's 2003 remake of The In-Laws I knew it wasn't very good, but it was a little good and so naked and so eager to please that I felt a little protective of it. The picture was just torn apart by critics and utterly indifferent audiences. The new In-Laws was a puppy that just wanted to snuggle and as it didn't quite snuggle them well enough, filmgoers brutally dropkicked it across the room. I don't think that I would really defend it; there's a little too much chatter and the gay jokes are groan-worthy and at the end positively cruel. But it was great seeing Robin Tunney, the soundtrack was more than decent, and that climactic slow-motion flood scene pressed my buttons just right. One of the things that I love seeing in films is stuff being destroyed slowly. I have a weak spot. As faint praise as it is, The In-Laws was definitely the best comedy of the summer of 2003 (excluding Dreamcatcher and Bad Boys II, I suppose). The thought that people actually preferred Bruce Almighty, Legally Blonde 2 and Shanghai Knights, well, it pisses me off a little. (Amendment hours after first posting: I originally credited Andrew Bergman with helming the remake. Not so: he wrote the original and had absolutely nothing to do with this one. I got my Andrews confused. Complicating things further, of course, is that both films suffer from that same strained desire to please.) Bergman's 1992 Honeymoon in Vegas isn't really that much better or worse than The In-Laws, but its treatment was more or less the same. Reviews were warm, but audiences were similarly indifferent.

Like The In-Laws, Honeymoon in Vegas is basically just a puppy that wants to cuddle. And you should see how hard Hollywood dropkicked this one. Columbia's DVD release is in fullscreen only with no extras save a trailer. The transfer looks terrible; the film is more than ten years old and looks it. Down to the day. I think this DVD was even given away when you ordered a large three-topping pizza from Pizza Hut. Of course, the real humiliation came one year later when the very premise of Honeymoon in Vegas was redone STRAIGHT as Indecent Proposal. And Indecent Proposal, as melodramatic and crass as it was, has since been adopted into the fabric of popular culture. It was a hit! Possibly out of professional respect, when Mad Magazine did their parody of Indecent Proposal they had one of Honeymoon's famed Flying Elvii in the splash page. When asked what he's doing there, he asks, "Isn't this the movie where a rich guy buys a poor guy's wife and has sex with her?" "Yeah!" "Well, that's the plot of Honeymoon in Vegas and we're in it!"

That is, in fact, the plot of Honeymoon in Vegas. In the beginning of the film, Jack Singer (Nicolas Cage) promises his mother that he will never marry. Years later he has a steady career as a private detective specializing in divorce cases, a profession that sours him further on the prospect of marriage. He really loves his girlfriend Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker), but she's sick of being a girlfriend and wants to move onto the next level. Jack decides to just go for it and elope in Vegas. They fly down, but before he gets down to doing the deed, he gets conned into playing a poker game with Tommy Corman (James Caan), who may or may not be a gangster. Jack loses thousands of dollars, and the only way for him to wipe his slate clean is to lend Tommy his fiancee. You see, Betsy bears an incredible semblance to Tommy's deceased wife Donna and he has been hoping all his life to get a second chance with her. Tommy whisks her off to Hawaii to seduce her a little more thoroughly in a controlled environment. Jack goes crazy, lamenting that he let her go, and he decides to track her down and win her back.

The storyline is simple and linear, requiring no heavy lifting at all. You don't watch the movie as much as coast through it. I don't think that I would argue that Honeymoon in Vegas is a great movie or even a very funny one. Indeed, it's a little low-key and rather mediocre. Although it ultimately may deserve a little better, you understand how it could be pushed into bargain bin hell. Many of the jokes seem pretty labored, a symptom of trying to please. Peter Boyle makes a guest appearance as a senile Hawaiian chief that is obsessed with showtunes. The performance is apparently making fun of Marlon Brando, revenge by Bergman for Brando's public trashing of his earlier film The Freshman. I guess I can see it, but it's lame and embarrassing. Better, but still strained, are Bergman's attempts to score cheap laughs by having Elvis impersonated by children and—ahem—Asians. Then there is the scene where Betsy protests that Jack has turned her into a hooker, into a whore, by offering her up as payment of his gambling debts. She throws this big fit in front of the video arcades and all the latchkey kids look on at this and giggle to themselves. It works OK, but we seen the machinery and we're mostly indifferent. Of course, Honeymoon in Vegas is at its best when it isn't trying very hard and it's worst when we see the strain. One of the best moments is when Jack gets desperate and steals a cab to get to Betsy in Hawaii. He's caught and brought to jail where there is a naked man lying down in his cell. He enters, screams, and then turns to the guard to beg his way out. It's not the scream that's funny, but the way he screams and then more or less ignores the naked man in his cell. And that the naked man in the cell is never explained.

Watching the recent Without a Paddle, I found myself the only person laughing when a redneck chops the head of a fish and screams at the flopping corpse, "How you like me now, fish?!" I was nearly the only person not laughing at the scene where the heroes have to snuggle for warmth, although I appreciated the moment where one plays into the other's heterosexual fantasies in order for him to produce an erection and freak out the guy he's snuggling with. I'll argue that I'm more sophisticated than the audience I was with, but not that I am more liberally minded. The problem with most homophobic humor isn't as much that it's offensive (in movies like Braveheart and The Rock, the ugly machismo of the attitudes can be down right exhilarating), just that it's obvious and tiring. What's funny to me is that absurdist off-the-wall kind of humor, which is funny because you can't relate to it; you can't find the connections or the psychology behind it. For the most part, I can only appreciate the comedy of humiliation in an academic way. As soon as I get it, it's not really very funny to me.

Age has been good to Honeymoon in Vegas. Or rather, it's been bad to it, but bad in a good way. Peter Boyle's appearance is a bit of a surprise, but what about Pat Morita?! He shows up here, void of the Mr. Miyagi goatee, as a hipster Japanese-Hawaiian cab driver on the take. Ben Stein is in the movie also. He plays a guy holding up the head of the line of the airport's ticket line by slowly asking the clerk the most tedious and esoteric questions possible. When Cage confronts him saying that all these people need to leave today, Stein reveals that he's planning a trip that's still three weeks away. It's a funny bit, but jeez, it's been a long while since I've seen a movie that milks a Ben Stein appearance for laughs. Ben Stein is some kind of relic, a phenomenon that I will have to explain to my children. Both Morita and Stein are symbolic of a very specific quality to Honeymoon in Vegas. I initially thought that Honeymoon in Vegas was a truly square film, complete with four corners and sharp right angles. Well, yeah, in a sense it's cuddly inoffensive stuff. But what I think is really going on is simply that the picture has dated, that it is purely a product of that specific time and place. Like The In-Laws there isn't really the sense that it panders to teens and tweens like the modern comedies do. This was really right before Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the age of a Carrey-centric cinema. It was right before the new wave of SNL alums (very different from the earlier waves) broke in, really; David Spade, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler had yet to really leave their stain. It was right around the corner, but it hadn't really happened yet. That specific quality in Honeymoon in Vegas, it's in effect highly insular and alienating. It's early nineties camp; we're pushed to the outside and invited to condescend to it. I mean, Pat Morita and Ben Stein? They're very good in this film and they're used very well, but what kind of movie in this day and age would cast Pat Morita and Ben Stein? Especially in these roles. Early nineties camp. That's a conceit ripe with "I don't know why it's funny but it is" absurdism.

Aside from the machine-like structure, much of the problems with Honeymoon in Vegas are as strange as its virtues. Nicolas Cage’s aggressive Italian-ness, for example, injects some momentum into the proceedings. Even if it's a mediocre picture, Cage prevents it from being an ordinary one. But his yelling and screaming isn't really very funny; it goes back to that problem with forceful silliness, and even more problematic it introduces a dark edge into material that isn't really prepared to withstand it. When he is screaming at Pat Morita, Ben Stein or Peter Boyle you feel that he is really screaming at them. There are times when you're not sure that Cage really understands what kind of movie he is in; he's bringing depth and pain where none is really required. There is something abrasive, intrusive and even sort of anachronistic about his work here. (Cage was much smoother in Bergman's admittedly more substantial It Could Happen to You.) I actually have to say that I find Cage creepier here than James Caan is when he becomes possessive and threatening toward Parker near the end of the picture. I suppose I mean that as a backhanded compliment, actually; I never really got James Caan as an actor. I'd love to see an impassioned defense of his persona and his body of work; he always seemed to me to be a strictly meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Cage in his fuck-ups proves to still be far more interesting than Caan in his modest successes.

The highlight of the movie is undoubtedly the climax, where Betsy decides to marry Tommy in Las Vegas and Jack has to stop them. Tommy’s cronies block all the flights though, and so Jack has to hitch a ride with a plane full of ski-flying Elvises: the famed Flying Elvii. The Flying Elvii are real; I saw them at the opening of a new casino in Wendover some seven years back. Pretty much all the news stories and press releases regarding them seem to mention "that they were made famous in the film Honeymoon in Vegas", but refusing to refute my previous statement about the film's insignificance in the pop culture lexicon I would argue still that this is a modest amount of fame. This climax ends the film off with a visceral bang; it’s action-packed and there is a sense of suspense to it. But what I think makes it so successful is that it is genuinely truly romantic. Even though Besty has known Jack for years, and Tommy for only a few days, the latter is presented as an almost "sane" choice. I mean, Jack lost her in a poker game and jumped out of a plane in order to get her back. He's literally a gambler and a nut job, unpredictable and insecure. Not a safe bet. As an arm ornament to the filthy rich if obsessive/possessive Tommy Corman, she can have her every need fulfilled and, what's more, she knows what to expect. Mind you, Tommy is every bit the romantic that Jack is, if not more. Upon seeing Betsy in his hotel he declares, "God has given me a second chance.” Indeed, how likely is it that she arrives in his hotel the same day that he happens to be there? And how likely is it that Jack would happen to enjoy the occasional poker game? Tommy believes in fate, but he's too deeply in love with Besty to trust it. There is accordingly something really boring about his courtship of her. He would never join the Flying Elvii and jump out of a plane in order to see her; he'd just hire his own pilot and plane and go down there himself. In choosing Tommy, all that Betsy would be sacrificing are those banal mythological ideals like self-fulfillment and true love. The conflict is one of spirituality over materialism, of two in the bush over one in the hand. It's the expected ending for the film, and I think that there is a temptation to call it a cliché, but in truth very few romantic comedies place this conflict into such broad of terms.

I've said before that the romantic comedy genre is doomed to fail, as most comedy is characterized by irony and most romance is void of irony. You can't really fall in love if you're constantly kidding yourself. I guess that Honeymoon in Vegas is not really a romantic comedy as much as a kitschy romance. When Jack and Besty reunite, he's dressed like Elvis and she (in order to escape from Tommy, but that’s a pretty lousy excuse for a motivation) is dressed like a showgirl. The romance is genuine then and the film is void of the inherent nihilism of the philosophy of comedy (of showing people at their weakest or their pursuits toward happiness and fulfillment as ultimately futile or naive). Kitschy romanticism is still romanticism; we're just supposed to laugh at the kitschy drag. Just at the idea of the Flying Elvii and glittery Vegas showgirls. This big romantic ending happens in Las Vegas of course. The city itself is romanticized in the film; Bergman and his characters see the gambling capital of America as the one place where distinctly separate lines of fate intersect, where fortunes can be made and lost at the role of the dice and you never know what the next day will bring. This is unique to most films about Vegas, as we will see in these coming months. (My next three to be reviewed are Showgirls, Casino and Leaving Las Vegas, and that's just for starters!) These latter films illustrate what I think is germane to most modern portrayals of the city; that is, they view it as an embodiment of the worst traits of America: our superficial friendliness (Las Vegas is a leader in the courtesy industry, but of course people go there to lose money), our Puritanical sexuality (Vegas sexuality is sanctioned as something vulgar and sinful), our lack of a real distinct cultural identity (you can visit both the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower in Vegas) and the way that we essentially live life quantitatively rather than qualitatively (the phenomenon of the buffet). The motivation behind this isn’t anything as simplistic as "anti-Americanism.” While those attributes certainly have a negative connotation they are still an inseparable part of the American identity, and thus movies like Showgirls, Casino and Leaving Las Vegas can’t divorce themselves away from Americanism to be effectively anti-American. They get high on the cruelty and plasticity; they understand it all too well backwards and forwards. Those films are very dark, but shaded and emotionally complex. Honeymoon in Vegas’s romanticization of Vegas seems unnecessarily simplified and ordinary in comparison. You have to reflect that even the official ads for Las Vegas’ tourist industry ("What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas") cheekily celebrate its reputation as a din of sin.

This perspective helps to place Honeymoon in Vegas lower on the totem pole than subsequent entries into the genre, but it has a truth to it all the same. A major part of the appeal of Star Wars was its unthreatening pop spirituality. It was spirituality without commitment, a fairy tale that would remind you in every frame that it was little more but a fairy tale. It's not quite irony, but it's a close cousin: comfortably distancing and sanitizing the audience from experiencing something genuine. There is temptation to view the film's kitsch romanticism as a similar junk food substitution for the real thing. I suppose that it is, in a sense, but it seems to work too deeply for that to really be the whole story. Far from being a lightweight love story, Honeymoon in Vegas ends as an essay on the intimacy of goofiness. The honeymoon in Vegas of the title becomes a sort of private joke between Jack and Betsy and by implication American audiences. Bergman shoots Tommy Corman's Hawaii as a sterile travelogue; in contrast, Las Vegas is kinetic and, as Jack and Betsy's reunion at the end suggests, homey even. A honeymoon in kitschy Vegas is a honeymoon that is distinctly their own.