HOMER AND EDDIE

title: HOMER AND EDDIE

year: 1989

cast: Whoopi Goldberg, James Belushi, Karen Black, John Waters

rating: **1/2

Road movies usually, no matter what, have the same thing going for them: if they get boring there's always something else up the... road. In this film, a retarded man - because of an injury where a baseball hit him on the head - takes to the highway for no other reason than his curiosity of something outside his small town, and, after getting robbed, meets his polar opposite, a streetwise black woman who, at first, seems like a funny spontaneous crook but as the film progresses we learn she has a terminal brain tumor. She enjoys not only robbing stores at gun point but eventually killing people. The goofy interplay between the duo is hard, almost impossible to take during the first half (not helped by some horrible jump-cut editing), but when the violence begins, the film gets more interesting though never realistic. Belushi's performance embodies the typical Hollywood template when dealing with the mentally-challenged, displaying selective endearingly-childlike simplicity until a sort of "alternate wisdom" occurs: teaching us how we all should be. And Whoopi is being Whoopi, for better or worse.

REAL MEN

title: REAL MEN

year: 1987

cast: James Belushi, John Ritter

rating: ***

Neat odd-couple pairing of James Belushi as a tough CIA agent who does things his own way and John Ritter as a wimpy family man who can't defend his son from bullies. Belushi has to take Ritter across country (by car, for some reason) to Washington because Ritter is a dead ringer for a CIA agent who was killed and has to impersonate the agent for an exchange. Good stuff. The only real problems are the abusive way James Belushi treats John Ritter in the beginning, as Ritter's character isn't annoying enough to deserve it. There's not many big laughs, which doesn't seem to matter with road films, which have enough distractions to keep you occupied.