Good “Vibes” with Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper
I get little tingles down my spine whenever I watch a movie released in my birth year. Enter: Vibes, a film that provided a whole lot of necessary good vibes on a lazy Saturday.
Vibes stars Jeff Goldblum as “Nick Deezy” and Cyndi Lauper as “Sylvia Pickell,” a pair of misfit psychics hired to retrieve long lost treasure in Ecuador by Colombo himself, Peter Falk.
It’s basically a psychic Indiana Jones romcom starring a bunch of weirdos, and if that doesn’t sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard, I can’t help you.
But I’ll try. Lauper spends the entire film trying to find the world’s worst outfits and often succeeds. She amps up her Queens accent to an unholy degree and has a friend in the spirit world named Louise. She nicknames Goldblum “Stretch” and somehow manages to say things like, “Being a psychic hasn’t made you too happy, huh?” with a straight face.
Goldblum’s Nick is blessed and cursed with psychometry. Just by touching inanimate objects, he knows where they’ve been. It isn’t surprising, but Vibes proves that I could watch Goldblum hold and “read” inanimate objects forever. Especially when he gets to say award-worthy lines like, “Someone’s had sex on this table.”
Sure, you know the plot. Nick and Sylvia have psychic gifts but they each have blind spots: themselves. Sylvia has terrible taste in men, dating guys named “Icepick” and allowing ex-boyfriend Steve Buscemi to use her at the racetrack. Nick may be a genius at the museum he works at, but he is abused for his gift and has no idea that his girlfriend (they’re “almost affianced”) is cheating on him.
Throw in a dance scene and a slew of superb henchmen, including one played by an actor named Googy Gress (I wish I could make this up) and you have an ideal Saturday afternoon movie. Have enough good vibes and you might even be able to imagine this as a feature length episode of Marvel’s What If? with Goldblum as Doctor Strange and Lauper as the Scarlet Witch.
The only thing missing is a musical sequel where Lauper and Goldblum take their act on the road at jazz lounges across the country.
Get those good Vibes now streaming on Amazon Prime.
