Sure, we all heard the pre-release ballyhoo about the new Harrison Ford-Anne Heche picture, "Six Days, Seven Nights." All the talk revolved around the romantic pairing of the man's man and the woman's woman in this comedy-adventure about an unlikely pair stranded on a a tropical island.
But what's so surprising about that? Ford and Heche are both gifted, appealing actors, and besides, where were these self-ordained chemistry police the last time Ford was paired with a beautiful blond (Brad Pitt in "The Devil's Own")? Somehow lost in all this homo-hetero hoopla was the much more pressing question: Can they simply get off the island at all?
Obviously, the '60 sitcom--and cult fave--"Gilligan's Island" was an influence on "Six Days, Seven Nights." But the creators of "Six Days" evidently felt that a pop-culturally schooled character like Heche's New York fashion magazine editor wouldn't deign to make such an obvious reference when stranded on a deserted isle herself.
Since the formulaic film has received only a lukewarm reception, perhaps the producers would have done better to enlist a technical advisor to help the couple escape the island faster than the allotted six days.
So what would Gilligan do in a situation like this (assuming he wasn't the real-life Gilligan, Bob Denver, who's busy dealing with some legal problems in West Virginia where he got busted for alleged pot possession). After years of fruitless attempts at egress, the Skipper's Little Buddy now stands tall in our collective consciousness like some slapstick Sisyphus whose struggles have lent him stature.
Surely he could channel the Professor and offer sage counsel to Ford and Heche who concentrate so mightily on squeezing out sparks from their nascent relationship that they repeatedly drop the ball when it comes to engineering a way out.
So in the spirit of Gilligan we offer 10 Ways to Avoid Six Days and Seven Nights of an Unwanted Island Stay:
1. Transform a grove of palm trees into two sets of goal posts and wait. The NFL will probably send out a team of cartographers and cheerleaders and proclaim your island its newest expansion site. Teams of concessionaires, parking lot tycoons and souvenir peddlers will magically emerge from the woodwork of the seemingly desolate island. (If not, worst-case scenario is that Raiders owner Al Davis will threaten to move his team there.)
