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American Morning

You Call That a Movie: Peter Travers on This Weekend's Box Office Debuts

Aired April 20, 2001 - 11:37   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MICHAEL OKWU, CNN ANCHOR: It's going to be a green weekend at the movie theaters. One new film has a familiar crocodile, and the other with Drew Barrymore's husband. "HE SAID/SHE SAID" film critic Peter Travers joins us.

Peter, Tom Green: The Jerry Lewis of the new millennium?

PETER TRAVERS, ROLLING STONE: Not to me, Mike. Maybe to somebody out there in the world. The movie, "Freddy Got Fingered," is the first, or what some might hope would be the last movie, the nail in the coffin of the gross-out movies. This movie has collected some of the worst reviews I have ever read and you know what I'm thinking? There must be something good to say about. So, I'm going to search for something good about it.

There is nothing wrong with gross-out, per se. People who have called Mel Brooks gross out, and he's got the biggest hit on Broadway now with "The Producer." Gross-out works when it's funny, and is the problem with Tom Green in "Freddy Got Fingered" is that it's never funny. It's just gross, and that's the problem.

OKWU: Any vermin in his mouth in this one.

TRAVERS: There's a lot in his mouth, but we're not going into that here.

OKWU: Well, let's talk about "Crocodile Dundee." Does the world need another Paul Hogan flick, and particular a "Crocodile Dundee" flick?

TRAVERS: You know, there are fans out there that will see Paul Hogan in anything, and "Crocodile Dundee Goes to Los Angeles" qualifies to me as anything. It looks like a movie that was filmed underwater, it's so slow.

Everything is just dialogue. It's said like this. But the plot, you want to know that, I know that you do. He comes to Los Angeles because the woman he's living with. played by Linda Kozlowski who in real life is married to Paul Hogan, is being summoned by her father to investigate a story of the studio that's making sequels to movies no one is asking for and no one is going to.

So, it's a movie with its own review right inside there. So, we get to see "Crocodile Dundee" go on the studio tours and take out his knife out and stab an animatromic snake. This movie is really completely silly and something worse than that, it's unnecessary. What is it there for? If you like the first one, you can still rent it on video, and that's what I would recommend you do. Remember Paul Hogan in the good days before too many shrimp were thrown on the Barbie.

OKWU: Let's talk about something really positive. This was my favorite movie of the year so far, "Bridget Jones' Diary."

I want to look a clip first.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "BRIDGET JONES' DIARY")

RENEE ZELLWEGER, ACTRESS: One, will find nice, sensible boyfriend to with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment-phobics, peeping Toms, megalomaniacal, perverts and especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all of these things.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OKWU: She is just magnetic in this. What did would think?

TRAVERS: You know, you are hearing that English accent. Everybody in England was furious because Renee Zellweger, a skinny girl from Texas, was cast as a British butterball. Everybody said, why can't Kate Winslet, we can play this without having to do anything but get up in the morning, do it. And everybody was against Renee Zellweger, and you know what, she pulls this movie off. She's great. The accent is great but better than that, she has a quality that works in this movie.

They it's a chick movie, Mike. They says it's a movie we guys aren't supposed to even tolerate because we can't stand it. I liked it. I tried to read this, the famous chick book by Helen Fielding, though it was whiny, couldn't stand it, kept putting it down, never picked it back up. The movie had less whining, more Renee Zellweger, more romance, and I want to say something for Hugh Grant. The guy was terrific in it. He wasn't doing his bumbling, fumbling number. He was a rat, and he played a really terrific rat.

OKWU: And a quick note on that, absolutely no vanity on Renee's part.

TRAVERS: Absolute not.

OKWU: No vanity.

TRAVERS: She gained that 20 pounds and she showed every pound.

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