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Starring Matthew Broderick, Bridget Fonda. ![[Photo]](/photos/roadtowellville1.jpg) Every blue moon or so, I genuinely anticipate the opportunity I have to screen a film because the movie is based off of a novel I read, and enjoyed. Unfortunately for me, good books are hardly ever translated well onto the silver screen. Bonfire of the Vanities--how should I put this--sucked, The Firm was going well until a new ending was slapped on the script, and The Road to Wellville, adapted from T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel of the same name, now joins the list of delightful books massacred by Hollywood. This being a film review though, I can't take a lot of time to mention what a treat Boyle's short stories are to read (and besides, that's what the book review next to this review is for), instead I have to write things about director Alan Parker's movie like the fact that The Road to Wellville contains more toilet humor, references to ones bowels, colons, intestines, and eating corn flakes and bran than Dumb and Dumber, The Nutty Professor, and that film I saw in the eighth grade about tape worms combined and multiplied by eleven. Now, I like bathroom jokes just as much, if not more, than the next guy, but when it came to watching Matthew Broderick receiving an enema, I was not amused. I wasn't smiling as I watched Broderick being scrubbed down with a stick and was foully grimacing as I watched Broderick defecate into a pan in front of Anthony Hopkins' John Harvey Kellogg. Thanks to several wrong turns onto north Halsted, right passed the AC/DC Love Boutique, a college class in basic drawing, and an accidental net search including the words "Johnson" and "quarter-horse", I've seen a lot more than I bargained for, but The Road to Wellville takes this sense of primal excess to another level; another more seedy, grotesque, rectum filled level. All of this though seem to be an excuse for Parker to have several big name Hollywood stars running around sans cullottes, having whatever devices or objects that are handy, stuck in whatever orifices below the navel that are currently available. Hands, broomsticks, tubing, water, yogurt, dildos, it doesn't matter, the only pertinent qualification seems to be: can you shove it up your ass? If the answer is 'yes', then the characters generally do so, or discuss doing so in length. Parker, who also wrote the screenplay for The Road to Wellville, also includes John Cusack's bungled attempt to start a cereal company in Battle Creek--in essence, this would be like moving to North Carolina to try and make a name for yourself selling tobacco--so weak and filled with logical and fundamental holes that it barely deserves this mention of it. I love T. Coraghessan Boyle's short stories (again, see the book review to the right). He is a modern fiction author who writes about down-to-earth and realistic people in most unusual situations, as opposed to the ever so popular '90's nihilists who despise the state of society today. The Road to Wellville didn't contain the same electricity that Boyle's short stories hold, but was still somewhat entertaining. The movie couldn't have been further from this; this was positively, astoundingly, and earth-shatteringly bad. With friends like this, who needs enemas?
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![[Photo]](/photos/roadtowellville2.jpg)
Broderick and Bridget Fonda stars as a young, turn-of-the-century, married couple who have deemed themselves 'sick', so that they can travel to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by Kellogg, the cereal giant, to regain their health. At the sanitarium, Broderick is diagnosed with something that necessitates he be anally cleansed five times a day, while Fonda and the other sanitarium patrons follows whatever advice Hopkins gives them on faith. This provides for some rather stupid attempts at satire, including a scene with the people in the cafeteria breaking into song to help Broderick chew his food, while also allowing the viewer to see more naked men's asses than any other movie this side of Braveheart.