Despite innovative ideas for cartoons, Plympton's new movie dissappoints
I never did see Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie, but I bet it was a lot like J. Lyle , the first full-length live-action feature from Oscar-nominated animator Bill Plympton. The film is a mix of live action and Plympton's characteristically offbeat animation.
J. Lyle Hadley is, in the words of the film's publicists, "a sleazoid, a scuzzball, a slug and, naturally, a lawyer!" But for the most part, he's just boring. Played by Richard Kuranda, J. Lyle is a selfish, conniving lawyer-landlord who plans to get rid of his long-suffering tenants and build a toxic-waste dump.
The filmmakers can't seem to stress enough how evil this guy is. We see him throw some poor guy out of his apartment, hit his protégé on the head with a shovel, manipulate and grope a waitress and refuse to date a woman because she won't get breast implants.
J. Lyle threatens to maim the grandson of an intractable tenant, lies to a woman he wants to date and gets his crony to break into apartments.
If any of this sounds exciting, it isn't.
We finally get to the meat of the story when a dog with a cartoon-animated mouth appears from nowhere to straighten J. Lyle out. The pup tells the shyster to be a nice guy, and when evil-boy won't listen, the dog's magical powers threaten to ruin his life.
The dog saddles J. Lyle with a cartoon mouth of his own, and, briefly, a cartoon head. Why this is such a bad thing, I can't tell. At least these animated interludes are more interesting than the endless stilted dialogue scenes.
Only occasionally does Plympton's half-goofy, half-smartass wit shine, making one pine for some of his earlier, entirely animated works such as Boomtown , Your Face or 25 Ways to Quit Smoking .
Meanwhile, we're subjected to too many oddly unfunny nonsequiturs, awkward slapstick humor and a host of other nose-picking, mashed-potato-flinging attempts at comedy. When J. Lyle lies to a woman in a restaurant, the dog makes his arm swell up to an enormous size; J. Lyle, the smooth operator, tells his date "It's my love for you. My arm is having a hard-on."
Indeed. At least that's something about this movie that's not flaccid.
Except for the opening scene, in which we see a man sucked through the electrical wiring of his apartment, and the next, involving J. Lyle's henchman, a vacuum cleaner and a dance sequence, this movie just drags aimlessly.
It's unclear why Plympton, whose previous work has been much more focused than this, fills a feature film with what seems like a five- to 10- minute story. And it's too bad that he sticks human actors into this story as well; his drawings are much more expressive than the real people in J. Lyle .
If there's any reason to check out J. Lyle this weekend, it's to see Plympton's newest animated project, How to Make Love to a Woman .
J. Lyle shows Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Rice Media Center. Admission is $5; $4 with a Rice ID. Plympton himself will appear at the Saturday screening and at the Fine Toon Cartoon Art Gallery on Sunday from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the April 19, 1996 issue.
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