Herbie the Self-Love Bug

The Mannions watched Herbie Fully Loaded for family movie night last night, and because I think too much about these things I didn't enjoy it as much as the blonde and the boys did.

For too much of the first half of the movie I kept wanting to know why the Dean Jones character from the original Love Bug and the only halfway decent sequel, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, didn't still own Herbie.

What was Herbie doing abandoned in some old shed?  Why was he being sold for scrap?  Who in their right mind would sell a car that was alive, smarter than most human beings, and capable of winning stock car races to a junk dealer?  Who in their right mind would sell a 1963 WW bug in running condition to a scrap yard instead of to a collector, a museum, or a college kid with a good tool kit and the money to buy some vintage replacement parts?

The only explanation I could come up with was that Dean Jones had died unexpectedly, without heirs, and without leaving a will, probably in some terrible accident that took the lives of his mechanic and partner and the girl he married in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Don Knotts and Julie Sommers.  Herbie fell into the hands of some law firm that promptly forgot about him and then after many years sold him off with a whole bunch of other assets without ever knowing they had a super car in their possession.

It wasn't exactly cheering to think of the main character from one of my favorite movies from my childhood as dead, but once I had explained things to myself so that the premise of the movie made some sense I was able to concentrate on the second half and...

...didn't enjoy it at all.

For one thing, it stopped being a comedy.  As so many contemporary movie "comedies" do, about two thirds of the way through it turned into a sentimental drama.  I figure this happens because most movie comedies are about 30 minutes too long.  Their premises are worth 45 to 60 minutes worth of good jokes, but you can't sell a 45 to 60 minute movie, you need 80 minutes at least.  So the writers give up being funny and go for telling a "story."

If the story involves international jewel thieves, escaped zoo animals, mistaken identities, a science experiment gone awry, or anything that will require a chase and the arrival of the cops, the movie might still feel like a comedy even after the jokes are all used up.

But if the story is, oh, let's say, will the plucky young heroine with the spectacular breasts every character in the movie and the camera are doing their darnedest not to notice recognize her own self-worth and innate wonderfulness and will her irascible dad recognize her worth and innate wonderfulness and will the supporting characters who already recognize her worth and innate wonderfulness and who have talked about almost nothing else the whole time they've been on screen get to tell her one more time that she's wonderful and will all this mutual admiration of the plucky young heroine lead to her doing something that will get the whole world to recognize and celebrate her worth and innate wonderfulness---well, then, the movie isn't a comedy at all.

Comedy is about pushing the heroine into a giant vat of vanilla frosting at the end and having her laugh at herself not bathing her in rosy lights and letting the camera worship her as she walks in slow motion through cheering crowds with an expression of delighted self-adoration on her cute but oddly hard freckled face.

The difference between the original Love Bug and Herbie Fully Loaded is the difference between the end of the Sixties and the middle two thousand-oughts.  In the intervening decades the country has embraced the cult of celebrity.

At the beginning of the Love Bug, Dean Jones' character, Jim Douglas, is a good stock car driver on a losing streak.  Meeting up with Herbie saves his career (and though it's not made much of, because it's a real comedy, probably his life) and his reward for sticking with Herbie and winning the big race at the end is that he knows he will continue to get to do what he's good at, race cars.

Fame and fortune, of a limited sort, are probably in the offing too, but they're not the point, with him, with the girl he loves, or with the makers of the movie.

At the beginning of Herbie Fully Loaded, Lindsay Lohan's character, Maggie Peyton, is on her way to a job as at ESPN, which sounds like a good gig except that, as her best pal tells her, Maggie was made to be the story not to tell it.  In other words, she's destined for stardom!

Why?

Some of the dialogue tells us it's because she's such a damn fine race car driver, if only her irascible dad could admit that girls can drive cars better than boys (or if he can get over the fact that the last time she raced she totaled the car and put herself in the hospital in critical condition---the writers can't seem to make up their mind about the irascible dad's motivation) but the movie never, ever shows her being a great driver.

We get to see her being an unwilling passenger several times while Herbie shows himself to be a supercar.

In The Love Bug, Herbie has to have a driver to win races.  He'll do things for Jim that no other car can do, but Jim has to know what those things are, when he needs them done, and he needs to be able to make Herbie do them.  Herbie will take hairpin turns on two wheels but only if Jim is a skilled enough driver to control him while he does it.

But in Herbie Fully Loaded, Maggie never really drives Herbie.  She makes only one decision in all her races but that's her contribution, telling Herbie what magic act to pull off at the proper moment.

The movie nods at the idea that Herbie is able to do the magic because of Maggie.  Car and driver have a magical melding of souls, so that everything that Herbie does is somehow because he's infused with Maggie's spirit---in other words, it's her self not her skill that is wonderful.  Herbie is just the first character in the movie to recognize Maggie's worth and innate wonderfulness.

Maggie is a chosen one.

Not the way Anakin Skywalker is the chosen one.  Anakin has been given skills that make him worthy of having been chosen.  But he has to then use those skills in a way that will continue to make him worthy.  When he turns to the Dark Side, he rejects having been chosen.  In Star Wars, to be chosen is to be given a choice.

In Herbie Fully Loaded and in the cult of celebrity being chosen is a finality.  You are chosen because you are wonderful and you are wonderful because you were chosen.  Nothing is required of you except that you stand still and let yourself be adored.

The movie doesn't end with the crowds cheering Maggie. The last we see of Maggie she is in the arms of the man who loves her.  Hollywood is still Hollywood.  Whatever other themes and plot threads have been at issue, the overriding concern of every movie is will boy get girl and girl get boy.  Maggie gets her guy.  It's more accurate to say her guy gets her.  He's been smitten with her all movie long.  Meanwhile, she's been treating him like the geeky best male friend in a John Hughes movie from the 80s.  But at the end, no Andrew McCarthy shows up so she's forced to go into a clinch with Jon Cryer.

The guy, by the way, is a genius mechanic.  But Maggie seems to take his skill for granted (and his putting it to use to make her a winner as her due) and in the end she rewards him not for putting Herbie back together, twice, but for his unwavering devotion to her wonderfulness.

By the way, I kept all this to myself while we were watching the movie and don't plan to say anything about it to the guys.  They give it two thumbs up.

And, on just a nuts and bolts level of appreciation, riddle me this.  Where has Michael Keaton been?

Keaton plays the irascible dad and he's very good.  But I've only seen him in two things since he gave up being Batman.  Jackie Brown and Out of Sight.  Playing the same character, in the first as a supporting role and in the second as a cameo.  Has he been in Europe?  Has everything else he's made gone straight to video?  If Kevin Costner can still be hanging around, trading on his one time status as actual movie star, it seems to me that Keaton ought to have been able to pull the same trick, having more actual talent and range.

And Matt Dillon, playing the villain of the story, the egomaniacal star of the NASCAR circuit, Trip Murphy, chews up all the scenery, including the cars, in the grand tradition of the great character actor/heavies like Brian Donleavy, Basil Rathbone, and Lionel Barrymore.  Why can't Hollywood find something to do with this guy?  He's come a long, long way from Little Darlings.

He'd be a swell Humphrey Bogart to somebody's Jimmy Cagney.

Speaking of character parts, the old Disney live action comedies were full of great character parts.  Herbie Fully Loaded has one bit actor in a throwaway role.

I missed Joe Flynn.

Comments

[Jennifer]

"Herbie Fully Stacked"

Lance- you think too much. I'm not judging, I've been accused of that too, it's just the new Herbie obviously had little to do with the first one and had more to do with providing a vehicle for Lohan and a supporting role for her breasts... I haven't seen it just because I have fond memories of the first ones and when my brother-in-law saw it and asked me who was this Lohan girl with the great rack, I knew it probably was not going to be of the Dean Jones variety.

As for Michael Keaton... wasn't he in some horror movie in this past year??? "White Noise" or something like that?

[Douglass Truth]

Matt Dillon in Crash - yow. They could be doing more of that with him.

[Daryl]

Just saw Crash last night, and have to second Douglas there. Dillon has amazing range in that movie.

[Nothstine]

My theory--which is mine--is that talking cars, magical cars, satanic cars, cars posessed by the spirit of one's dead mother, and the like--are like the parrot in "Paulie:" They're sitting there quietly, all around us, right now--even as we speak--watching us, taking our individual measure, waiting for the right person to come along, to whom they will reveal their powers. [The same principle does NOT apply to talking horses and architects, though. That would just be silly.]

Wacky complications [or, in some cases, teen carnage and mayhem] ensue.

It's just a theory that I happen to subscribe to [and that, my friends, is how you work a "Jaws" reference AND a "Monty Python" reference into a single comment]. But keep it in mind the next time you see that "abandoned" car behind that farm house on your Sunday afternoon drive: As you're watching it, it may be watching you.

bn

[Exiled in NJ]

"For one thing, it stopped being a comedy. As so many contemporary movie "comedies" do, about two thirds of the way through it turned into a sentimental drama. I figure this happens because most movie comedies are about 30 minutes too long. Their premises are worth about 45 to 60 minutes worth of good jokes, but you can't sell a 45 to 60 minute movie, you need 80 minutes at least. So the writers give up being funny and go for telling a "story."

Once again you nail it, Lance. And you know when that moment happens because the music changes. In the old days we had swelling choruses or violins; now the score is taken over by a noodling piano and is hushed. It is usually at this point that I want to shout, "Okay Martha, here comes the treacle."

The real problem is that modern storytellers can never be both solemn and humorous; every bit of humor must end with a lesson, like the teacher we have all had at one time who would bring us up short with 'now let's get serious, men.'

Pam and I watched "Heaven Can Wait" last night, and not the Warren Beatty remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, but the Lubitsch wonder from 1943 with Don Ameche and the beautiful Gene Tierney. Even to the end the story is told with warm humor, as Ameche's character dies behind closed doors to the strains of the Merry Widow waltz. See it, rent it for Family night, and you will have a course on why humor has died.

[Jaime Weinman]

Since I love The Love Bug, it's good to read some praise for it.

Another thing about the original Love Bug is that the point of the film is that the hero, Dean Jones, is redeemed when he comes to understand that it's not all about him, that he's not so great or special, and that he can only succeed by being less selfish and self-absorbed. Hollywood films now, and for quite a long time, have tended to deliver the opposite message: heroes and heroines succeed by learning to "believe in themselves," which means recognizing that they really are great and wonderful and special.

I missed Joe Flynn.

I'll see your Joe Flynn and raise you a Peter Ellenshaw.

[mac macgillicuddy]

I've come to realize that, while it's a lot easier to go to the movies if it happens, grown-up appeal buried cleverly in a story for kids is not something to hope for -- or rate a kids' movie by -- when rating these things.

For example, Monster's Inc had a lot of things that grown-ups could appreciate. Madagascar did not. But our kids liked both about the same. The Incredibles had a lot of fun stuff for us, but the kids don't ever even think of renting it nowadays.

And don't get me started on Star Wars. Oh, ok, since you did...

If the first episode had been the first movie, there would have been no second movie. If the second episode had been the first movie, George Lucas would never have worked again. And if the third episode had been the first movie, he'd have been SHOT.

Dreadful, noisy movies all. But my son loves each of them, including Revenge of the Myth.

So, Lance, looks like we have to appreciate the Herbie movies -- saw the first one in NYC's Radio City Music Hall with some friends and still love the scene where Herbie breaks in two -- and realize that even "remakes" or new "sequels" really have nothing to do with us.

I just hope they don't ever remake Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

[The Heretik]

A car with more character than the driver? A magical car that drives itself? Two strains of car criticism currently inhere in this driving edge of cultural angst. From the west by way of sunny California is the work of Hasselhof.

Knight Rider will forever be remembered for its dark implications. A car. Indeed the ultimate representation of the American Eighties. A Trans Am. This car was both smarter and gave better line reading than the driver, Hasselhof, sometimes called the American David.

In the east by way of Maine, the man who would be King, Stephen, offers a bildungsroman embodied in an auto, an auto de fe, a macabre deus ex machina meditation on modern man's inability to compete with the car. Christine, was she named evocative of the heroine in The Phantom of the Opera? Have we become phantoms of our selves, seing nothing but the road behind in the rear view mirror? And what more mournful tomes will tone tomorrow?

Do not ask for whom the gas tank now shows empty . . . the road tolls for thee, unless you have QuikPass. Think less, and put the pedal to the metal.

Have we overdrawn from the literary left bank? And how to make it right with these writers and their lame plots about cars. Alas, my fingers fade now into the keyboard and I am but a ghost in the machine. Oy.

[Linkmeister]

Heh. I think The Heretik, whatever his return address may be, is actually Tracy Kidder.

[sfmike]

I've never seen "The Love Bug" because I can't stand Dean Jones and have always hated that period of Disney films (anything after "The Parent Trap" was a serious decline). Still, I've always been extremely curious about the flick because I went off to Singapore to be a sailor with my uncle in the Merchant Marines back in 1972, and "The Love Bug" had played in the same 3,000 seat theater (with four balconies) five times a day for four straight years. It was a phenomenon.

The Merchant Marines didn't work out, but I did get to discover kung fu movies before the rest of the world and just before they were banned in Singapore because they were "socially disruptive." Ah, to see Bruce Lee and David Chang and Alexander Fu Sheng in their young prime when it was all new, exciting and bizarrely trashy. The Shaw Brothers films in Shawscope of the 1970s really do need to be experienced in a large Chinese movie theatre for their full, weird splendor to be appreciated.

Sorry for the digression. If you tell me I need to see "The Love Bug," Lance, I will obey. Two million Singapore moviegoers can't be wrong.

[Nance]

That movie didn't just stop being a comedy, it also started being a non-stop commercial. I'm reasonably tolerant of product placement in movies, but I thought Herbie went over the top, ran down the side and stopped by the bank six or seven times in selling out so thoroughly to Nascar and their evil minions. That whole scene with Jeff Gordon and the other driver (can't remember) should have been labeled "advertisement." It certainly didn't do a damn thing for the plot.

[Kevin Wolf]

plucky young heroine with the spectacular breasts every character in the movie and the camera are doing their darnedest not to notice

Oh, man - I haven't even seen it but I know what you mean.

And while I think you may be over-indulging in analysis, I still agree with you. You have at least recognized the fact that most comedies these days (and most movies, I would add) are too damn long.

BTW, re Matt Dillon: the movie he directed, and stars in along with James Caan, Stellan Skarsgard and others - City of Ghosts - is very good. Definitely worth a look.

[somewaterytart]

I had to see this on a babysitting job. Halfway through I flashed a handful of quarters at the kid and promised him a good time at Chuck E Cheese if we could just get the hell out of there. I'll take flashing electronic mouse noises and bleeping, blooping colorful video games over Lindsey Lohan's sanctimonious bullcrap any day. BTW, this was in Phoenix, and it was 115 that day.

As for her breasts, they were awesome before she lost all that weight, and I think they were digitally reduced for the movie.

[Kenny]

I enjoyed the movie, and I managed to rationalize a convoluted backstory in my head that didn't involve Dean Jones dying, which helped.

But your criticism of the movie as reflective of the cult of celebrity is very astute and thought-provoking. Well done.

[Bob Croesus]

Please visit our new Love Bug Central Web site! This site is dedicated to the "Herbie" The Love Bug movies and all of his fans around the world. We have put together this site to honor Herbie via information, photos, interviews and contributions by Fans. This site was designed by a few but showcases the generous donations of many.
www.lovebugcentral.com

[Ken Rice]

2 things.
Dean Jones' character (Jim Douglas) didn't marry the gal in "...Monte Carlo." They simply walked off together at the end. Jim Douglas married Carole in "The Love Bug" and then the gal in the 1982 TV series (leaving us to suspect Carole has died or run off with Tennessee Steinmetz).
The other: The website above is fine if you happen to be a White Christian Republican heterosexual.
The site where the owners of authentic Herbies hang is www.LoveBugFans.com and it's popular and busy enough that they're getting over 130 posts per day.

[Oceangirl81]

I really think that all the Herbie movies were great. "The Love Bug" was really funny. Herbie came in first and third. LOL! I just don't get "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo." Jim Douglas married in the first movie, and then in the third one, he is in romance with another girl. It doesn't make sense. There is also the mystery from what happened to Herbie between "Herbie Goes Bananas" and "Herbie: Fully Loaded." I mean, how did Herbie get in a shed? So, I have a few questions with no answers, but other than that, the Herbie movie series is awesome. They should make more movies in the future.

[DR]

In case you're here because you like Herbie, I occasionally look at the site and forum run by owners of authentic Disney Herbies, with about 25 sub pages of Herbie photos, music and media downloads, information, authentic graphics kits, and their online forum is open to everyone, Bug owner or not.
http://LoveBugFans.com
Anyway, strangely enough, even the hard core fans have mixed feelings about the various Herbie movies. if you want to see shameless product placement, the sequels were WAY worse. Most of the stuff, like Dover Fan Belts, in "The Love Bug" was fictitious.

[DR]

Oops. Goofed their URL.
http://www.lovebugfans.com