BEVERLY HILLS FAMILY ROBINSON (1988) * Sometimes movies about Hollywood people are good, the reason being that Hollywood people like to think about themselves, and to talk about themselves even more. At its best the Hollywood on Hollywood film can be a sublime (or even better, overblown) meditation (peroration) on certain neuroses and pathologies. At its worst the genre elevates overindulgence to a previously inconceivable magnitude of sin. This accomplishes none of that, nor anything else. Even when it pokes fun at itself you know that it's because they know they're contemptible, rather than any effort to be clever. Strange, the Swiss Family Robinson concept was better than the original movie, but subsequent efforts have invariably been even worse. Dyan Cannon can be fun and good, but here her self-absorbed bits are never bitchy enough to be amusing, and so her conversion to humanity lacks the necessary drama. Her natural charm is not absent, but never threatens the dull pallor that hangs over the film like a ubiquitous toothpaste commercial checking out a very clean bar on a night out. Teenage boys may forgive it all for Sarah Michelle Gellar's presence, but Martin Mull seems in way over his head as always. That can't really be his occupational strategy, can it? Disney didn't used to be this stupid.
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