‘Clifford’: the movie that Nicolas Cage loved but Roger Ebert despised
There are some movies that are so terrible that you can’t help but love them – especially the ones that truly seem to think that they’re worth seeing. While film is, to a certain degree, a subjective medium, it’s not hard to identify a movie that tries to run with a bold and original idea, only for it to fall face-first into a bottomless pit of failure.
Watching bad movies can often be a comfort – sometimes, you just want something stupidly easy to sink into (emphasis on stupid). Perhaps these movies remind us that everything is all going to be alright because, when the world feels like it’s turning to shit, you can be comforted by the existence of such films as Clifford, a movie in which a 37-year-old Martin Short plays a horrid ten-year-old boy.
The film took four years to emerge following shooting due to Orion Pictures going bankrupt. Perhaps that was a sign that the movie should’ve stayed where it belonged – on the cutting room floor. Unfortunately, Paul Flaherty’s Clifford doesn’t even feature the beloved big red dog anywhere within its 90-minute runtime; instead, an overgrown Short does an odd job of playing a child who is carted off to his uncle’s house after he gets banned from a flight after causing the pilot to perform an emergency landing.
Obsessed with the idea of going to Dinosaur World, Clifford prefers to act like a devilish child rather than asking nicely, and for film critic Roger Ebert, the whole movie was a pure abomination.
“A movie like this is a deep mystery. It asks the question: What went wrong? Clifford is not bad on the acting, directing or even writing levels. It fails on a deeper level still, the level of the underlying conception. Something about the material itself is profoundly not funny. Irredeemably not funny, so that it doesn’t matter what the actors do, because they are in a movie that should never have been made,” he wrote in his review.
Comparing Clifford to a “horny spaniel,” Ebert continued, “It’s not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it’s based on the sense of humour of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe.”
Meanwhile, actor Nicolas Cage had a different view of the movie, with Short revealing a story in his memoir, Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend, which will not come as a surprise to those familiar with Cage’s penchant for bizarre comedy.
“Half an hour into the flight, I noticed a figure hovering in the periphery of my vision: Nic Cage, crouched in the aisle beside me, his eyes locked on mine,“ Short wrote. “‘Can I just say something to you?’ he said, a very Nic Cage-y intensity in his voice. ‘The dining room scene in Clifford, with you and Charles Grodin, where he’s confronting you, and you keep lying to him. Well, I broke my VCR watching it.’”
Believe it or not, Cage is a huge fan of Clifford. He told Short, “I watched that scene 25 times in a row, and I rewound it so much that the machine jammed and the tape broke.” While Ebert might not have had the same view, the movie certainly floated Cage’s boat.
