From the director of “101 Dalmations”, the writer of “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag” and the star of “Metro” comes another colossal piece of s**t in the grand tradition of Hollywood Pictures.
Jeff Goldblum is Ricky Hayman, an executive with the Good Buy Shopping Network who will be fired by Robert Loggia unless he improves sales. Matched with new marketing exec Kate Newell (Kelly Preston), Ricky stumble into a traveling holy man named “G”. Ricky puts G on television to preach his non-denominational new age message while G tries to save Ricky from himself. Jeff Goldblum plays Jeff Goldblum, Robert Loggia screams Robert Loggia, and Kelly Preston has a great a*s. If the movie starred Mickey Roarke and Louis Farrikhan, I might have cared.
What does Hollywood teach us here? Materialism BAD! Television BAD! Media BAD! “The Truman Show” did a much better (and subtler) job of exploring issues of exploitation. “Holy Man” is just a dumb romantic comedy passing itself off as something else. The media is just a big, stupid child with Attention-Deficit Syndrome that will do anything to get your attention. If television programming is exploitive or catering to the lowest common denominator, it’s only because the people in charge aren’t really capable of any better.
Time Warner is one of the biggest, richest media companies in the world, but the year after they made “Batman and Robin”, they made “The Avengers”, an equally unwatchable mess. Do they look like they know what they’re doing?
The one thing “Holy Man” gets right is that people will watch the most crass s**t if it’s able to connect with its audience. That’s always been and probably always will be true. If Hollywood wants to explore the issue, show me how the this stuff damages the American people. I don’t want to see how bad the producers feel about making this garbage, because I don’t think they feel bad at all. I’m sure Jerry Springer sleeps very well at night, as do the producers of any show on Fox that begins with the word “When”.
