Unloosen tag:unloosen.com,2005-04-10:/thestuff//2 2010-07-22T10:59:24Z Stories, Photos & Commentary Skewed Absurd Movable Type 5.02 Top Secret!, reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.634 2010-07-22T10:45:09Z 2010-07-22T10:59:24Z "Things change, people change, hairstyles change... Interest rates fluctuate." - HILARY FLAMMOND Sometimes it feels like I grew up during the golden age of the genre parody, and that age -- now sadly passed -- will never return. The... Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=45
"Things change, people change, hairstyles change... Interest rates fluctuate." - HILARY FLAMMOND

Sometimes it feels like I grew up during the golden age of the genre parody, and that age -- now sadly passed -- will never return. The year after I was born, Mel Brooks released not one but two classic spoofs, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and while he didn't invent the form he certainly was its standard-bearer for many years. In addition, my comedy intake also included healthy doses of Woody Allen, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker and Monty Python, and they were no slouches in the parody department, either. The problem is they were a little too good at it because most everything that has come down that road over the past two decades can't help but seem anemic and undercooked in comparison. And just so we're clear, I'm not just talking about the oeuvre of odious crap merchants like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer here (although they have led the charge in recent years). Even before they came along there was half-baked dreck like Repossessed, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, Fatal Instinct, The Silence of the Hams, Wrongfully Accused and 2001: A Space Travesty, none of which did a whole lot to advance the art of the parody film. Even Brooks himself stumbled with his last two directorial efforts, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which were made to parody one specific film almost exclusively. That sort of thing is very rarely a recipe for success.

Of course, this isn't to say the single-film parody can't work. When the Kentucky Fried Theater (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker) made the transition from stage to screen with The Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, the centerpiece of the film was A Fistful of Yen, a dead-on parody of Enter the Dragon that takes up about a third of its running time. And that trend continued when the trio stepped into the director's chair with Airplane! three years later. While it may seem like just a take-off of the Airport series of the '70s (which had already descended into self-parody by the time The Concorde ... Airport '79 limped into theaters), Airplane! is actually a shockingly faithful remake of a thriller from 1957 called Zero Hour! that stars Dana Andrews as a war veteran who has to be coaxed into landing a commercial airliner when the crew takes sick and he's only passenger on board with any flying experience. The ZAZ team not only borrowed the basic plot, they even incorporated whole scenes from the original film into their script without having to change so much as a single line. That's how deliriously over-the-top and melodramatic Zero Hour! is. (The casting is also key, with Robert Stack's part being played by Sterling Hayden. And the stunt casting of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as co-pilot Roger Murdoch is prefigured by the pilot in Zero Hour! being played by football hero Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch.) The genius of the ZAZ approach was to take the conventions of whatever situation they started with and tweak them ever so slightly, upping the ante with each iteration until it reaches the point of total absurdity. It would have been good for a shock if Steve McCroskey had declared right off the bat that he had picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue, but it's a lot funnier after we've seen him progress through smoking, drinking and taking amphetamines first.

]]> Following the success of Airplane!, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker set their sights on the boob tube (the source of the numerous television and commercial parodies that dotted The Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane!) and created the police procedural parody Police Squad! around Airplane! MVP Leslie Nielsen, who showed such a flair for deadpan comedy that he essentially got a second career out of it. (In fact, in recent years he's appeared almost exclusively in spoof movies, with roles in two parts of the Scary Movie quadrilogy, Superhero Movie, An American Carol, Stan Helsing and a cameo in something called Spanish Movie which has mercifully not made it to these shores yet.) As for Police Squad!, it was summarily canceled after just six episodes and the premise put on the back burner (from whence it would return at the end of the decade as the first part of The Naked Gun trilogy) while the ZAZ team regrouped and plotted their return to the big screen. That came in 1984 in the form of Top Secret! (they really liked their exclamatory titles, didn't they?), one of the strangest genre mash-ups in film history: an anachronistic rock and roll musical/cold war spy thriller starring Val Kilmer as singer Nick Rivers, who gets himself into a whole heap of trouble when he agrees to take part in a cultural festival behind the Iron Curtain.

From start to finish, it's never really clear exactly when the film is taking place, which I have to believe is intentional on the parts of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (who collaborated on the script with Martyn Burke, the Canadian auteur behind The Clown Murders, starring a pre-SCTV John Candy, and the late-period Sylvester Stallone vehicle Avenging Angelo). Is it the present day (i.e. 1984) as the divided Germany and contemporary references to the Jimmy Carter presidency, Howard Johnson's and the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes (among other things) would indicate? Or is it the early '60s, which would be a better fit for Nick Rivers's musical repertoire, which ranges from a Beach Boys pastiche (the opener "Skeet Surfin'") to rockin' rave-ups ("Tutti Frutti," "Straighten the Rug") to Elvis-style crooners ("Spend This Night With Me," "Are You Lonesome Tonight?")? In either case, what in the name of Buckaroo Banzai's Blue Blaze Irregulars is the French Resistance doing operating in East Germany anyway? I know the East Germans in the film act like they're the second coming of National Socialism, but the way those guys run around you'd think there was still a war on.

For his part, Nick seems determined to cause an international incident right off the bat by mouthing off to the border guards at the East German checkpoint, but his long-suffering manager Martin (Billy J. Mitchell) smooths things over as best he can -- not an easy task when you have a machine gun pointed at you. Meanwhile, there is skullduggery afoot as trenchcoat-wearing secret agent Cedric (Omar Sharif, who's clearly having a ball) meets his contact, a blind souvenir vendor (Ian McNeice, whose singular reading of the line "Souvenirs, novelties, party tricks" is genius personified), and has to endure all sorts of humiliations in order to keep up appearances. When Cedric gets double-crossed and winds up in a car crusher you'd think that would be the end of him, but he's extremely resourceful and determined and still makes it to Hilary (Lucy Gutteridge), the daughter of a scientist being held captive by the East Germans, and hands off his ballet ticket so she can meet the leader of the Resistance in his stead. It's at this point that our two plots intersect, as Hilary is being pursued by the secret police and Nick, who's dining alone, pretends she's his date to get her out of trouble. He also comes to her rescue that night at the ballet and, after mortally wounding her pursuer, gets thrown into prison. There he's beaten and tortured and, while trying to effect an escape, winds up in the secret laboratory of Hilary's father, Dr. Flammond (Michael Gough, then best known as a Hammer Studios regular), where he's developing a secret weapon called the Polaris Mine. This puts Nick in dutch with the authorities and he's only saved from a firing squad so he can perform "How Silly Can You Get?" in front of a crowd of screaming girls (who behave like he's all four Beatles rolled into one). This time it's Hilary who comes to his rescue and sparks fly between them as they get closer to "The Torch," the mysterious Resistance leader who's going to help get Nick out of the country and spring Hilary's father from prison.

Unlike in Airplane!, where the romantic leads had matching flashbacks, in this film only Hilary gets one and it's an extended Blue Lagoon parody that doesn't play as well today as it did 26 years ago. As for Nick, he tells a weepy story about getting lost in a department store, which isn't quite as dramatic as being shipwrecked on a desert island, but it did lead to him becoming a singer, so that's something. Once they reach the headquarters of the Resistance they learn that the Torch is none other than Nigel (Christopher Villiers), the boy Hilary was shipwrecked with, which makes things a little awkward between her and Nick, but they have little time to sort things out before the hideout is ambushed by enemy forces. They manage to escape, though, and when they regroup as Der Pizza Haus they determine that there is a traitor in their midst and Nick comes under suspicion when he's recognized by a couple of teenage girls and passes himself off as Mel Torme. This leads to what is probably my favorite musical number in the whole film ("Tutti Frutti" runs a close second) as Nick cuts loose to "Straighten the Rug" and everybody in the place spontaneously joins in. Thus having cleared himself of being Mel Torme, the indispensable Nick joins the others on a daring mission to break Dr. Flammond out of prison (which somehow involves two people disguising themselves as a cow) and uncover the identity of the traitor. Then comes an ending that's equal parts Cloak and Dagger (the 1946 Fritz Lang spy flick starring Gary Cooper, not the kiddie adventure about Henry Thomas and his imaginary super-spy friend Dabney Coleman) and The Wizard of Oz as Hilary bids farewell to Resistance members Du Quois (Harry Ditson), Déjà Vu (Jim Carter), Chocolate Mousse (Eddie Tagoe), and Scarecrow (who apparently left Mrs. King home that day).

I realize I've probably made the film seem a lot more straightforward than it really is. Nothing could be further from the truth. After all, the plot of Top Secret! is basically a mechanism to allow Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker to string together as many jokes -- ranging from the obvious (the obligatory Jaws music cue, the Pinto gag) to the surreal (Nick scaring the bicycles off like horses, the fireplace on a parachute, the underwater saloon brawl) as they possibly can. I haven't even mentioned the officious East German general (Jeremy Kemp) who gets some of the best sight gags in the whole film (the shot with the boots up on his desk, the one of him reading Herman Goering's Workout Book, and, of course, the big phone). He also gets some terrific lines, as evidenced by the scene where he introduces Nick to the men who will be interrogating him: "Otto is deaf and blind. He operates solely by touch. Klaus is a moron who knows only what he read in the New York Post." In the absence of Leslie Nielsen, Kemp gets my vote for best deadpan performance in the whole film. The performances across the board are just a delight, though. I'm particularly fond of Harry Ditson and Jim Carter's double-act, with the perpetually grousing Du Quois correcting the empty-headed Déjà Vu at every turn. The scene that gets the most points for creativity, though, is the one in the Swedish Bookstore (which is run by Peter Cushing, another Hammer veteran making one of his last screen appearances) that was filmed entirely in reverse. I wonder how many takes it took to get that right.

In a way, Top Secret!'s inherent strangeness is probably what kept it from making more of a splash at the box office. Whereas audiences in 1980 were primed for a movie like Airplane! (it was easy to identify what it was spoofing and it was able to shoehorn in parodies of other movies like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever without any fuss), the people of 1984 apparently weren't ready to embrace a zany comedy that couldn't be as easily pigeonholed. It's no surprise, then, that Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker chose to downplay some of their more absurdist tendencies for their follow-up project, 1986's Ruthless People, but they were back in full force for 1988's The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, which was the last time all three of them collaborated on one film. Still, the ZAZ ethos soldiered on with that film's sequels, which were largely the domain of David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams staked out his own territory with the Hot Shots! diptych, but after a while it seemed like even they couldn't recapture their former glories. (To this day I had yet to even attempt Mafia!, which is the last we've heard out of Abrahams apart from a co-writing credit on Scary Movie 4, and the less said about David Zucker's post-Naked Gun work, the better.) One has to wonder what they would come up with if they reunited for something more than just a group commentary on one of their old films, but I'd say the chances of that happening are less than a load of dead rats in a tampon factory.

"I remember the day we did shoot the Swedish Bookstore scene. I think it was going very, very slow, and I think we had gotten one rehearsal by the time we broke for lunch. And I walked up to Peter Cushing, and I said, 'Not like the old days, huh, Peter? At Hammer they would've had the scene shot and be striking the set by now.' He looked at me and smiled and said, 'At Hammer, they would have finished the picture and be starting the sequel.'" - DAVID ZUCKER

"How silly can you get?" - NICK RIVERS

They just don't exist! Just flat-out, plum do not exist! There simply are no Elvis Presley spy/romance/WWII action-musicals! Try and find one! I dare ya!

So far in this 1980s project, Richard O'Brien has parodied a kind of reality television that wouldn't really exist for another decade (Shock Treatment), and Amy Heckerling has parodied the gangster films of a half-century previous (Johnny Dangerously). But with their film Top Secret!, the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team attempted something altogether different: a feature-length spoof of a sub-genre which hadn't existed before, didn't exist at the time, and wouldn't exist in the future. In other words, Top Secret! is that rarest of rarities, a parody without a clear antecedent. Sounds like a veritable license to print money, doesn't it?

But it wasn't. Top Secret! lagged behind its competitors in 1984, outpaced by Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop and even a pair of comedies penned by Neil Israel and future ZAZ collaborator Pat Proft: Bachelor Party and Police Academy. On the brutal Top Secret! DVD commentary track, the ZAZ boys maintain that the film has yet to turn a profit, a sad fact which perhaps explains their utter lack of enthusiasm for it. But no matter! The film may have swung and missed at the box office, but it found a cozy home on video and television as the kind of flick that trivia-minded comedy nerds recommend to one another.

While re-re-rewatching Top Secret! for this article, I was reminded of just how many delightful moments there are in this film: the German guard who falls from a tower and shatters on the ground, the underwater saloon fight (complete with underwater barkeep, underwater hooker, and underwater gamblers), the "little German" and "little horse" visual puns. Not to mention the East German Women's Olympic Team (played by 'roided-up male bodybuilders), the giant statue of a pigeon befouled by flying men, and an incredible run of gags featuring two men in a cow costume. (I daresay the ZAZ boys exploited every last comedic possibility of two men in a cow costume... and then some!) In this age of easily freeze-framed DVDs, there are so many further tidbits one can discover, like the pop chart which features such unlikely also-rans as "Enough Already!" by the Rolling Stones and "Beige Tones" by Procol Harum. And can it be that I never noticed the headline, "My Daughter Is Dead... But So Is the Burglar!" on the cover of a gun magazine before? In our review of Johnny Dangerously two weeks ago, I complained that Heckerling's film didn't seize every possible opportunity for jokes and simply played some scenes relatively straight for plot or exposition purposes. Nothing like that here. In Top Secret!, if the main characters are earnestly discussing the plot in the foreground, you can bet there's some visual distraction occurring right behind them, e.g. that aforementioned "pigeon statue" gag, an incredibly elaborate bit which occurs entirely in the background of a scene and is never once mentioned or even acknowledged by the main characters.

This is not to say that Top Secret! is a perfect film. On the commentary track, the ZAZ boys say they brought in that fourth writer, Martyn Burke, because they needed someone who knew about "story." But I'm not 100% sure that Martyn earned his Paramount paycheck, because after many viewings of this film, I have found the plot of Top Secret! to be nigh-unfollowable. In fact, when I was watching the film's final, seemingly Casablanca-inspired scene just this morning, I was unclear as to which characters were boarding the plane, which ones weren't boarding the plane, where the plane was going, and what the passengers were going to do once they got there. And aren't the Naz... I mean, Commies supposed to be in hot pursuit of the heroes at that moment? Don't they all need to get on that plane, regardless of their divergent life choices? I'm thinking, Get on the goddamned plane and sort out your problems later. I'm sure the answers to these questions can be found somewhere in all that expository dialogue elsewhere in the film, but do you really feel like looking for them? I didn't. Ultimately, a movie like Top Secret! is just a delivery system for gags. There's no shame in that. The gags here are good, inventive, and (above all) frequent. But whenever I watch Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles, I somehow find myself getting wrapped in the storyline and really caring what happens to the people onscreen. That doesn't quite happen when I watch Top Secret! Somehow, when Gene Wilder tells Cleavon Little his tragic backstory in Blazing Saddles, it's both funny and sad. When Nick and Hillary swap tragic backstories in Top Secret!, it's just agreeably silly and not even a little more than that. Maybe that's why, for me at least, it's something of a chore to watch Top Secret! in one sitting. I'd much rather parcel it out in, say, 20-minute increments with snack/bathroom breaks in between. For me, it plays better that way. In that way, Top Secret! is tailor-made for the Internet age. It's all but begging to be quoted out of context and excerpted on YouTube, as indeed it has been.

But don't get me wrong, citizens. I come here to praise Top Secret!, not to bury it. This flick is a heck of a lot of fun and definitely worthy of 90 minutes of your time. If you've read this far in the article, I'm guessing you've already seen it, but it does merit repeat viewings if only to glimpse Val Kilmer during his days as a Tiger Beat-ready heartthrob. (Side note: Is it a mere coincidence that both Kilmer and Michael Keaton starred in unsuccessful spoof movies in 1984 before going on to play Batman? Well, yes, it is. Now if George Clooney had also made one of these things back in '84, that'd be a different story.) Anyway, Val's great here as hip-swiveling, cheerfully oblivious Nick Rivers, a Presley-type American rock star who finds himself involved in some Cold War intrigue in a suspiciously WWII-ish East Germany. Here's Nick's off-the-cuff defense of his beloved homeland: "We've got the Liberty Bell, Disneyland on both coasts. It's happening!" And then there are the songs. As Craig pointed out, these turn out to be highlights of the film, rather than dead spots. Top Secret! supplies Kilmer/Rivers with six unfailingly catchy songs, both remakes and originals, and then presents these tunes very effectively with rapid-fire visual gags and outlandish choreography. I'd like to particularly point out "Spend This Night With Me," a pleading, urgent romantic ballad which Nick sings during a concert sequence to his weeping, adoring fans. Like Elvis frequently did, Nick brings one lucky young gal with him onstage, and her very believable hysteria makes this one of the film's more emotionally affecting sequences. As the number progresses, Nick gets, shall we say, way into the drama of the lyrics, threatening to kill himself in a variety of ways (noose, head in the oven, lying down on train tracks) complete with props and scenery. During this scene, Nick Rivers recalls James Brown, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Spike Jones and "poor old Johnnie Ray" all rolled into one! Each time Nick tries to off himself, he is pulled back from the brink by his plaid-jacketed backup singers, who are meant to look like the Jordanaires. I really can't say enough about those backup singers; they're the funniest of their kind to be found outside of Peter Gallagher's scene in The Hudsucker Proxy. I cannot tell you how delighted I was when Nick Rivers and his Faux Jordanaires reappeared during the film's end credits.

With a couple of arguable exceptions, the real Elvis Presley generally never got to make a movie this good. If only the ZAZ boys had guided his screen career instead of Hal B. Wallis, imagine the films that could have resulted! Overall, I think the Big E would've gotten a kick out of Top Secret! One of my favorite little corners of the pop culture world is Elvis Presley's acting resume, particularly the names of his characters, as if Elvis Presley could ever be anything but himself. "Nick Rivers" is pretty close to a genuine Presley character name. Elvis actually did play a Deke Rivers once, alongside such memorable roles as Ted Jackson, Greg Nolan, Mike McCoy, Tulsa McLean, Chad Gates, and even Toby Kwimper. On the infamous spoken-word album Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, the King spoke with charming irreverence about his stint in Hollywood, cranking out 31 films in just 13 years:

I made some movies, you know, G.I. Blues, Blue Hawaii and several pictures that did very well for me. Thank you. But as the years went by, I really missed the people, the audience contact. I really was getting bugged. I was doing so many movies, and I couldn't really do what I could do. You know, they would say, "Action," and I would say, "Wha? Wha? Huh? Memphis!" And they'd say, "That ain't what you're supposed to say!" And I'd say, "Huh?"
There's very little I could add to that except to say: Mitzi Gaynor. Ad nauseum. Amen.

Up next: In August, we'll see what those wacky Monty Python boys were up to in the 1980s. For one thing, they tried to figure out the meaning of life and turn their findings into a movie, the title of which escapes me.

]]> Johnny Dangerously, reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.633 2010-07-08T21:15:35Z 2010-07-10T22:04:34Z "You're dead for a real long time. You just can't prevent it. So if money can't buy happiness, I guess I'll have to rent it." -- "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC To paraphrase one Tom Servo, some films simply defy the... Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=44
"You're dead for a real long time. You just can't prevent it. So if money can't buy happiness, I guess I'll have to rent it." -- "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC

To paraphrase one Tom Servo, some films simply defy the laws of sequential occurrence in space and time. Such a film is Amy Heckerling's 1984 sophomore effort, Johnny Dangerously. Why did 20th Century Fox feel that America needed or wanted an Airplane!-type spoof of melodramatic 1930s gangster pictures, specifically those of James Cagney? As it turned out, the film died a quick and ignoble death, shunned by critics and audiences alike one grim September before finding a marginal place in the pop culture landscape as a perennial time-slot filler on local TV stations and a semi-cult favorite on home video. When viewed objectively in 2010, Johnny Dangerously seems like a well-intentioned near-miss, chockablock with spirited comic performances, endearingly baroque touches, and memorable running gags, yet somehow missing that indefinable spark of creative genius that elevates a film to the level of a classic. And yet, for some nebulous reason, the film holds a mysterious, hard-to-explain charm. I myself have fallen under the film's sway to some degree and have watched it several times in preparation of this very article. Why? What is the secret of Johnny Dangerously?

To answer that question, I have made rather a study of this curious film -- unscientific, yes, but earnest in its diligence nevertheless. Herewith, I present (with very minimal attempt at organization) my observations on Johnny Dangerously. I hope you will find them edifying.

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  • Let's start with the good stuff. Clearly, the film's chief asset is a swell comic turn by the oft-overlooked and underestimated Michael Keaton, who deftly channels the ingratiating arrogance and brashness of Cagney without ever descending into a "you dirty rat" caricature that could have grown tiresome of the course of a feature film. And, boy, can this man do an eye-roll! Keaton's character, poor newsboy turned flashy gangster Johnny "Dangerously" Kelly is some terrific guy, I tell ya. Not only does he all but entirely avoid committing actual crimes (save from one completely justifiable nightclub bombing), he even takes time out from the plot to give a straight-to-the-camera anti-smoking PSA and even has a movie screen and projector set up in his bedroom for times when he needs to counsel his younger brother, Tommy, on the proper care and treatment of one's testicles.

  • Tommy Kelly, Johnny's goody-two-shoes brother, could have been a thankless and largely laughless role, essentially the Pat O'Brien to Keaton's Cagney. But not with Griffin Dunne on duty. Dunne improbably wrings every last ounce of hilarity out of his character, a straight-arrow, bow-tie-loving assistant D.A. whose allegiance to the law is so strict that he won't even allow metaphorical gambling. Tommy's sexual frustration is one of the film's better running gags, and Dunne gets what to me is the film's single funniest line, affecting in its utter desperation: "Oh, God, how do you get laid in 1930?"

  • Maureen Stapleton is on hand, too, as Tommy and Kelly's hard-working Irish immigrant mother who at the age of 29 doesn't look a day over 60. Granted, this role is essentially a worn-out comedy cliché: the sweet-looking old lady with the mouth and temperament of a Marine drill sergeant. But Stapleton just naturally projects such warmth and gravitas that it's somehow funny when Ma Kelly tearfully tells Marilu Henner, "I go both ways." Or when she punches her son in the face. Or when she fishes a vibrator out of her purse. Or when she staggers up to the camera to tell us, "The Lower East Side... it really sucks!" And if one foul-mouthed Irishwoman wasn't enough, the film generously gives us a second one late in the proceedings.

  • Joe Piscopo gets his best-ever screen role -- and I realize that's not saying much -- as the film's main baddie, a sneering thug named Danny Vermin, a childhood rival of Johnny's who has grown up to achieve his goal of becoming a real scumbag. Armed with an obscenely-long, custom-made ".88 Magnum" ("It shoots through schools!"), Danny is also the source of one of the film's best-remembered running gags: his vague warnings to Johnny that always end with the word "Once!" accompanied by a raised index finger. (By the end of the film, Danny is no longer allowed to get to the punchline of this bit.) Piscopo might have known this film was his cinematic peak, because a mere two years later he starred in another mob comedy, Wise Guys, re-teaming with at least two Dangerously veterans: co-star Danny DeVito and co-writer Norman Steinberg. Back in '84, incidentally, Roger Ebert fretted that the role of Danny Vermin was too "limiting" for the talented Piscopo. In this particular instance, Mr. Ebert was grossly mistaken. Never again would Piscopo be trusted with dialogue like: "Dames are put on this earth to weaken us, drain our energy, laugh at us when they see us naked."

  • Of the film's many, many supporting players (this is a crowded flick!), the two real standouts are DeVito as gloriously venal D.A. Winston Burr and Richard Dimitri as the frequently apoplectic enemy kingpin Roman Moronie. To me, the D.A. is a fascinating character deserving of more screen time, once again illustrating DeVito's talent for characters who take such joy in their villainy that we can't possibly dislike them. A flirtatious homosexual dandy with a toupee and pencil mustache Winston Burr seems like a forerunner of Jon Polito's character in the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. I wonder if the Coens ever saw this picture. I have a feeling they might have liked it, seeing as it takes place is the same general milieu as their own Miller's Crossing. Roman Moronie, meanwhile, is basically a one-note character, but what a highly-amusing note! Moronie's schtick is that he talks as if his dialogue has been redubbed for television, using ridiculous euphemisms for profanities like "icehole," "bastage," and (my favorite) "corksucker." He is also the inspiration for one of the film's wildest, left-field touches: a tommy-gun-toting robot in Moronie's image.

  • Johnny Dangerously has some clever fun with the hoary conventions of The Late Late Show: those wavy lines that indicate flashbacks, the on-screen captions which tell us the year a story is taking place, the radio that provides convenient plot exposition on demand, etc. Best of all, when the film drags out the same old B&W stock footage of turn-of-the-century New York we've seen in dozens of other gangster flicks, Johnny uses it as an opportunity to explain an obscure law called the McCoy Act of 1909: "Immigrants who wanted citizenship had to stay out of their apartments at least four hours a day and walk around in the streets with hats on."

  • More than anything, Johnny Dangerously wants to be the Mel Brooks mob movie that Mel never made. The cast prominently includes at least three Brooks vets: Peter Boyle, Ron Carey, and Dom DeLuise. Plus, the score is by Brooks' resident composer John Morris, and the script includes contributions from two of Brooks' veteran jokemeisters, the aforementioned Norman Steinberg and the ubiquitous Pat Proft, the latter mysteriously credited as "special medical consultant." (Perhaps Proft and his writing partner Neal Israel, Heckerling's then-husband, crafted the "Your Testicles and You" bit?) For good measure, the film even lifts one gag wholesale (or retail) from Young Frankenstein. I won't spoil it for you, but it involves the depositing of evidence.

  • Speaking of comedic plagiarism, the film contains a couple of variations on the reporters-running-to-the-phones gag from Airplane! But even more remarkable is a sequence in which a priest recites Latin gibberish while leading a man to the electric chair. It is astonishingly similar to a scene from Top Secret!, but since the two films were released so close together, I will have to chalk it up to an amazing coincidence.

  • Cinematic clairvoyance! A full decade before Pulp Fiction, Johnny Dangerously features a gangster who miraculously survives an attempt on his life and decides right there and then to give up his life of crime.

  • The supposed composite sketch of Johnny that appears in a newspaper in no way resembles Michael Keaton. In fact, it looks uncannily like either Steve Guttenberg or Rocky III-era Stallone. The camera lingers on this sketch so long I started to wonder whether this was an intentional joke.

  • The first indications that Johnny Dangerously will not be a trail-blazing comedy classic come early. There's a sequence in which Johnny runs up flight after flight of stairs to get to his tenement apartment, passing along the way two men who have paused to gasp for air as if the oxygen were getting thin. I get what the film is trying to do, but Heckerling fails to sell the joke. Something about the rhythm of the editing or the choice of shots is off somehow. Not too much later, there's a moment when young Johnny is at a crossroads: a doctor tells him Ma Kelly needs money for an operation and the only way for Johnny to get it is to work for mobster Jocko Dundee. Anyway, the kid pauses outside the door of his apartment and the faces of various characters -- the mother, the doctor, the mobster -- appear over his head in thought-balloon form. This is a classic opportunity for a joke. Had this been a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker flick, there definitely would have been one wild-card element in there, some thought balloon that definitely didn't belong. Or the characters in the various thought balloons would start arguing amongst themselves. Or something. But nothing comedic whatsoever happens. Sigh.

  • MGM once boasted of having "More Stars Than There Are in the Heavens," but not even Louis B. Mayer himself could have conceived of the Bizarro World all-star cast that graces this flick (sometimes unbilled): Ray Walston, Vincent Schiavelli, Taylor Negron, Joe Flaherty, Jack Nance, Dick Butkus, Alan Hale, Jr., and -- perhaps most deliciously of all -- Bob Eubanks, who like me is from Flint, Michigan, and who would probably prefer that you remember his appearance in this film and not the one in Roger & Me a few years later. Special kudos to Dick Butkus for not only inspiring Johnny's awesome nom de crime but also for his hilarious outrage at Roman Moronie's non-profanities. ("Whatta mouth on that guy!")

  • Comedy historians! This film contains an example of a "Chinese whisper" joke. See if you can find it!

  • While the film largely has a charming out-of-time quality to it, there are some timely references scattered throughout the proceedings, including jokes about 1980s food (quiche, salad bars), 1980s culture (break-dancing, punk rock, ghetto blasters), and, somewhat regrettably, 1980s advertising (a major, major gag built around a now-semi-forgotten malt liquor TV spot).

  • Despite those random '80s touches, the film mainly serves as a video grab bag of fabulous 1930s clothing, music, and architecture. I cherished the appearances of standards like "Let's Misbehave" and "Embraceable You" on the soundtrack as well as neat-o design flourishes like those doors where the doorknob is in the center. (Why'd we get rid of those?) And then there's the clothing! This was an era when men could wear pinstriped suits and fedoras and not look like complete tools. Not to mention the outstanding collar pins worn by many of the actors, especially Johnny himself. In fact, the DVD should have a featurette entitled "The Great Collar Pins of Johnny Dangerously. We had paradise within our grasp, and we threw it away.

  • Probably the most enduring thing to come out of Johnny Dangerously is "Weird Al" Yankovic's delightfully witty and catchy title song, "This Is the Life," which has been missing from some TV and VHS versions of the film but has happily been restored to the DVD. On YouTube, the video for Al's song has over a million hits. No other Johnny Dangerously-related clip comes close, so it looks like Al had the last laugh. The video, in fact, is a much better showcase for the song than the movie itself, where it simply plays over some ugly (but authentic-looking) painted backdrops. Had this been an actual Mel Brooks movie, "This Is the Life" might have been incorporated into the film itself as a full-fledged song-and-dance sequence, since Mel is known for using elaborate production numbers to boost the energy level of his films, especially at the three-quarters mark when the audience's interest might be waning. Dangerously could've used something like that. There is one big musical number, "Dangerously," sung by Marilu Henner as token love interest Lil Sheridan, and while it's a nice moment -- sort of presaging The Fabulous Baker Boys -- I think something more along the lines of "I'm Tired" from Blazing Saddles was needed here.
Conclusion: Ultimately, there's no real take-home lesson to be learned by studying Johnny Dangerously. I can understand why its fans now cherish it and quote it habitually to one another, but I can also see why it died a quick death back in '84. Considering what must have been a thrift-conscious budget and a quick shooting schedule, the film looks pretty good, and there are enough eccentric touches to reward the audience for sticking with it to the end. Sure, some of the running gags are not to my liking -- I could've done without that wisecracking parrot, for example -- but overall, the film is a highly enjoyable viewing experience. A lot of that has to do with the cast, who appear as if they're having a great time. (Marilu Henner really was. According to the book Hailing Taxi, when she was filming her scenes with Michael Keaton, she could hardly get through a sentence without laughing.) Their obvious enthusiasm for the material helps make up for the occasional deficiencies in the script. And it's tough to hate a film that has the chutzpah to admit that crime actually does pay a little.

Back when we were trying to settle on which '80s film with which to inaugurate this feature, Joe gave me a choice between Johnny Dangerously and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, both of which he had recently seen. I went with the latter because I believed it had more potential (and, frankly, a somewhat higher profile), but he evidently kept the former in the back of his mind because when I suggested "comedies that I thought were hysterical before I reached puberty" as the theme for July, he dusted it off and offered it up again. I admit I was somewhat apprehensive about re-approaching the film after all these years because I've come a long way as a movie aficionado in the two and a half decades since it first hit pay cable, but a theme is a theme is, as far as I can tell, a theme. And so, as I near the end of my 37th year on this planet, I had to find out whether I still thought Johnny Dangerously was the cat's pajamas. (Help me out here, Joe. They used the phrase "cat's pajamas" is in the '30s, right? Anyway...)

Well, the film gets off to good start with "Weird Al" Yankovic's exceedingly clever Tin Pan Alley pastiche "This Is the Life" -- even if, as Joe says, the credit sequence it plays over is kinda blah. Thanks to the frequency with which his videos appeared on MTV in its early days, I was already a committed "Weird Al" fan by the time his contribution to Johnny Dangerously came along and the video was probably a better trailer for the film than its actual trailer was. It even makes good use of the film's incongruous breakdancing scene, marrying it to the song's equally incongruous record-scratching breakdown (which, along with the blistering guitar solo, is one of its few nods to contemporary music -- in this case, Malcolm McLaren's rap culture co-opting Duck Rock album). Incidentally, the next time "Weird Al" contributed the opening theme to a major motion picture it was for 1996's Spy Hard, a latter-day Leslie Nielsen-anchored James Bond parody that just so happened to mark the screenwriting debuts of "____ Movie" dynamos Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. By most accounts, Yankovic's self-directed credit sequence is by far the funniest thing in the film, but that's not too surprising considering its pedigree. (To date, I have yet to see any film that Friedberg and Seltzer have had anything to do with, and I don't see that changing any time soon. I have no love for the Twilight franchise, but I'm sure it deserves better than the duo's latest "effort," Vampires Suck, which is due out next month.)

But getting back to Johnny Dangerously, apart from an extended flashback to 1910, the film is set squarely during the Great Depression, but no one ever seems to mention it, much less be affected by it. (Prohibition gets a nod at one point, but that's about it.) The present day is 1935, when Johnny Kelly (Michael Keaton) is a well-respected pet shop owner who catches a tough-talking kid trying to make off with a puppy and, instead of calling the cops, sits the lad down and tells him all about his exploits as the notorious criminal Johnny Dangerously. He literally starts small, as a 12-year-old paperboy who is enlisted for a one-time job by crime boss Peter Boyle (whose car has a bumper sticker that reads "I'D RATHER BE STEALING") when his ailing mother (Maureen Stapleton) needs an expensive operation. One thing leads to another, though, and Keaton eventually needs to go to work for Boyle full-time, which not only helps keep his mother ambulatory, but also puts his bookish younger brother (Griffin Dunne) through law school.

Things pick up in 1930, a date that appears to have been chosen specifically so torch singer Marilu Henner can plausibly sing "Embraceable You" when she auditions for a job at Boyle's club. Keaton is immediately smitten with her and gives up his womanizing ways soon after she arrives on the scene, but Henner plays hard to get for about a scene and a half before reciprocating. As it turns out, 1930 is a pretty busy year for Keaton since he not only successfully woos Henner, but also becomes reacquainted with his childhood nemesis (Joe Piscopo), with whom he battles for control of Boyle's gang, they go to fargin' war with rival crime boss Richard Dimitri, he talks his brother out of quitting law school, and he attends his brother's graduation from law school. (I guess he was closer to finishing than he thought.) For his part, Dunne goes to work for the district attorney's office and becomes a tireless crusader against crime and injustice, an ironic turn of events that isn't lost on the brother who paid for his education. When Dunne refuses to play ball with crooked D.A. Danny DeVito (who, unlike his Taxi co-star Henner, was making a more successful transition to film), he almost gets bumped off, but Keaton has DeVito eliminated instead.

Keaton's next step is to go legit (le what?), which doesn't sit well with Piscopo and the rest of the gang, and he is framed for the murder of the crime commissioner and, having been prosecuted by an overzealous Dunne, sent to death row to await the chair. Meanwhile, the hunt is on to prove his innocence and Keaton has to break out of prison to prevent Piscopo from gunning Dunne down at the premiere of the James Cagney gangster movie The Roaring Twenties, which must have fallen into some kind of a time warp because it wasn't actually made until 1939. (I've always wondered about this subplot since Piscopo seems to be very knowledgeable about a film that he's never seen before, but that's probably just another temporal anomaly.) All works out in the end and Keaton gets a pardon from the governor, which allows him to marry Henner and open his pet shop, which brings us back to where we started. Then, having taught one wayward youth the value of staying on the straight and narrow, Keaton rewards him with a kitten and sends him on his way. The end.

Throughout its running time, Johnny Dangerously tries just about every trick in the book to get laughs, often relying on old standbys like funny signs (the "HENCHMEN" and "HENCHWOMEN" rooms at Club Moronie) and wacky newspaper headlines ("MORONIE DEPORTED TO SWEDEN -- CLAIMS HE'S NOT FROM THERE"). In addition to the ever-growing list of things that have only been done to Piscopo's character once, there's also a funny running gag about a hapless news agent (Ray Walston, who brought down the house as Mr. Hand in Amy Heckerling's previous film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) who keeps getting hit in the head with bundles of newspapers and gaining or losing different handicaps with each concussion. The best one, though, is Alan Hale, Jr.'s turn as the desk sergeant, whose delivery of the "duckies and bunnies" line never fails to crack me up. I only wish there were more moments that worked as well for me. As it stands, Johnny Dangerously is a film that I can look back on fondly -- because otherwise how am I going to justify the number of hours I've spent watching it over the years -- but in the here and now it's just too scattershot to really work. It's a film that aspires to Airplane!-like heights of lunacy, but winds up at the same cruising altitude as Airplane II: The Sequel. They're funny enough, but no one's going to mistake them for the real thing.

Up Next: The real thing. Well, one of them, at any rate. I'd tell you which one, but that's strictly confidential.

]]> Weird Science and The Witches of Eastwick, reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.632 2010-06-24T10:45:10Z 2010-06-25T00:34:28Z "Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created woman?" - DARYL VAN HORNE (not pictured) When one thinks of '80s movies, one name that comes to mind almost immediately is John Hughes. A former writer... Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=45
"Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created woman?" - DARYL VAN HORNE (not pictured)

When one thinks of '80s movies, one name that comes to mind almost immediately is John Hughes. A former writer for National Lampoon who parlayed his work on the humor magazine into film gigs like 1982's National Lampoon's Class Reunion (his screenwriting debut and an unmitigated disaster), Mr. Mom and the first of the long-running Vacation series, Hughes moved into the director's chair with 1984's Sixteen Candles, a seminal teen comedy and cultural touchstone for just about anybody who came of age in the '80s. Its success led to a string of films set in and around the fictional Chicago suburb of Shermer, Illinois, some of which (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) Hughes directed and others (Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful) for which he merely wrote the screenplay. And smack dab in the middle of them all was the totally bonkers Weird Science, which is far from Hughes's best work as a writer or a director, but it stretched him in ways that his more ordinary fare did not.

Briefly, the story revolves around a pair of scrawny outcasts (Hughes regular Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who use a computer to create supermodel Kelly LeBrock out of thin air and proceed to have a wild, wild weekend with her. As we noted in our Superman III article, most people who lived in the '80s didn't know what computers were actually capable of, so a film like Weird Science could posit a scenario where a couple of geeks -- inspired by a late-night viewing of the Universal classic Frankenstein (which, incidentally, has suffered the indignity of being colorized) -- could make a working computer simulation of a woman on a 5" floppy disk by scanning a bunch of photographs into a device that looks suspiciously like a printer. Furthermore, when Hall decides they need more power, all they have to do is tap into a local military installation's network (using a primitive phone receiver modem) and it's there at their fingertips. (The sequence where Smith uses his hacking skills to get past the mainframe's security system features some Tron-like CGI and even a Twilight Zone reference.) Of course, simply scanning in a photo of Albert Einstein shouldn't be able to give their simulation Einstein's IQ, nor should hooking up a Barbie doll allow them to transfer it into the body of a real live woman, but there are certain allowances that one simply has to make with a fantasy film, otherwise you might as well just stay home.

]]> If there's any doubt that we're in the world of adolescent wish fulfillment, LeBrock can create just about anything she wants (from snazzy clothing to fancy cars) and has the ability to detect Hall and Smith's deepest desires without them even having to verbalize them. (This is, of course, not to forget the opening sequence -- before their ritual humiliation in front of a gym class full of girls, that is -- where Hall does spell out their shared fantasy of instant popularity, essentially mapping out the plot of the film.) Thus, after taking a shower with them (their first wish, as it were), she drives them in a pink convertible to The Kandy Bar, a blues club populated by threatening urban types (if you catch my drift) and throws them in at the deep end. (It probably goes without saying that their entrance is accompanied by the requisite record scratch, but it's worth noting nonetheless.) This leads to the most embarrassingly tone-deaf sequence in the whole film where, following some elided carousing, we find an inebriated Hall holding court -- and keeping a table full of tough guys in thrall to his tale of being kicked in the nuts by the love of his life. The fact that he does so while talking in jive and somehow not getting his honky ass beaten to a pulp is the most unbelievable thing about it. Instead, the threat of violence comes from Smith's older brother Chet, an overbearing vulgarian of the highest order fearlessly portrayed by Bill Paxton.

Before I continue with the plot, a few words about Smith's family are probably in order. For starters, the Donnelly clan is extremely well-off, as evidenced by the fact that they live in an enormous house and are in the habit of giving home computers as birthday presents (see also: Ferris Bueller's Day Off). They also have a maid, but she won't be in until Monday, which is a lucky break for her considering how much the place gets trashed in the space of a day and a half. His parents are also away for the weekend on some pretext, but Smith and Hall (who is sleeping over) aren't entirely without supervision since Paxton is home from college (which is apparently a military school based on his buzz cut and fatigues) to make sure they don't get into trouble. Paxton also has quite the extortion racket going since he extracts ever-mounting sums of money out of a cowed Smith for every infraction, major and minor. He doesn't care about keeping too close tabs on them, though, since he takes off early Saturday morning to go duck hunting and doesn't return until the following day. That leaves Smith's grandparents to pick up the slack, but I'll get to them in due time.

After breakfast -- and the realization that the night before wasn't just a crazy dream -- the next order of business is a trip to the mall, the purpose of which is unclear since LeBrock can get anything she wants just by thinking about it. I suppose Hall and Smith want to impress their classmates by being seen out in public with her, but if that's the case why don't they stick together? Instead, the boys go to a department store to buy some perfume for her and she spends time in a lingerie shop. Also, the boys are publicly humiliated by their own personal bullies (Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Rusler -- we never see anyone else pick on them), who dump a cherry Icee on them from the upper floor, making painfully literal the concept that they're always getting dumped on. The other thing the trip to the mall does is it allows LeBrock to get the word out about the wild party she is throwing for them -- and to which the entire student body is apparently invited.

Before we can get to the party, though, LeBrock has to meet Hall's less well-off parents (Britt Leach and Barbara Lang) in a scene that devolves into a screaming match and is only resolved when LeBrock pulls a gun on them. This is an object lesson that will come in handy later. As for the party itself, the boys spend most of it sequestered in the bathroom, unable to face their peers, but they do manage to make contact with the two girls (Suzanne Snyder and Judie Aronson) they were lusting after in the opening scene. Meanwhile, having discovered that LeBrock was created artificially, Downey and Rusler get our heroes to go through the motions of making a girl for them (which involves the ceremonial wearing of a bra on the head), but all hell breaks loose instead and, among other things, a tactical nuclear missile appears in the bedroom. Oops. Another thing that throws a damper on the party is the unexpected arrival of Smith's blue-blooded grandparents (Ivor Barry and Ann Coyle) who get some priceless hoity-toity dialogue ("Something's going on here, Carmen." "I have a feeling we're not going to approve, Henry.") before LeBrock literally puts them away. They're nothing compared to the quartet of Road Warrior-style marauders (including Michael Berryman from The Hills Have Eyes and Vernon Wells from The Road Warrior) who appear out of nowhere, having been called into existence by LeBrock specifically to challenge the boys. At first they're petrified, but all Hall has to do is threaten the intruders with a gun (which he pulls out of nowhere) and they meekly withdraw. "That's my boys," LeBrock says wistfully, proud of them for learning the valuable lesson that violence solves everything.

Naturally, this macho display is enough for Snyder and Aronson to toss aside their boyfriends (Downey and Rusler, who disappear around the time the mutant bikers show up and are never heard from again) and hook up with Hall and Smith. Other ways to impress the ladies: reckless endangerment (Hall drives like a maniac while taking Snyder home the next morning, even getting into a car chase) and sexual harassment (Smith grabs Aronson's ass during their goodbye kiss, which initially shocks her, but then she relaxes into it). Oh, yes. And being true to yourself. (Aww, I guess they learned something of value after all.) Meanwhile, LeBrock has a Sunday morning confrontation with Paxton that ends with the latter being turned into a squat, brown monster who is so contrite he promises to never bother Smith and Hall again. With her work done, she then takes leave of the boys and everything goes back to normal thanks to magic of reversing film. Of course, it occurs to me that everything that gets trashed actually had to be doubled since the destruction scene takes place at night and the restoration is in the morning. That's what having a large budget will do for you, I guess. If you want to drop two grand pianos on two gazebos, then you can do it.

Before I leave Weird Science behind, there's one thing I need to discuss that's integral to all John Hughes movies of the period and that is its pop soundtrack. The most enduring song it spawned was, of course, Oingo Boingo's title track (which the band itself never liked and hardly ever played in concert, even giving it a pass when they came to do their farewell show), but the soundtrack also features contributions by '80s mainstays like Kim Wilde, Wall of Voodoo, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Van Halen, Ratt, Los Lobos, the Lords of the New Church, Killing Joke and General Public (whose hit single "Tenderness" plays faintly in the background while the boys are taking leave of their new girlfriends). The Boingo song also served as the opening theme for the inevitable sitcom version, which was rather late on the scene since it didn't come along until 1994. And, unlike the Ferris Bueller series, which ran for a mere 13 episodes in 1990, Weird Science somehow managed to stick around for five seasons despite the fact that it watered down the premise of the film tremendously (that is, if the pilot is anything to go by). If there's one thing it has over the film, though, it's that the clips it lifts from Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are in black and white. I guess there's something to be said for respecting your source material.

By most accounts, respecting the source material was the last thing on the minds of Hollywood power brokers Peter Guber and Jon Peters when they bought the rights to John Updike's 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. They just wanted a splashy star vehicle for Jack Nicholson, who got one in the role of Daryl Van Horne, "your average horny little devil," who swoops down on the quiet New England town of Eastwick and raises some hell. In contrast to Weird Science, though, in which the protagonists' genie-like dream girl is created through the use of technology, Van Horne is called into existence the old-fashioned way by a trio of single women (widowed sculptress Cher, newly minted divorcee Susan Sarandon, abandoned mother hen Michelle Pfeiffer) whose latent magical powers turn out to be quite potent once properly harnessed.

In the opening scenes of the film we're introduced to our three heroines in the all-important context of the children around them: Cher has a teenage daughter who looks kind of like a miniature version of her; Pfeiffer is mother to a brood of six girls, which somehow doesn't interfere with her job as a reporter for the local newspaper; Sarandon is the childless teacher of the ramshackle grade school band. Sarandon is the only one who has a man show any interest in her, but this is nothing to brag about because it's her married boss, principal Keith Jochim (as Walter Neff, which was also the name of Fred MacMurray's character in Double Indemnity), and he shows his interest by brazenly grabbing her butt in front of her students. (Perhaps he's been taking lessons from Ilan Mitchell-Smith.) The other prominent townspeople are self-righteous selectwoman Veronica Cartwright and her henpecked husband, newspaper editor Richard Jenkins (who would eventually become one of the Coen Brothers' go-to utility players). Everyone else is pretty much reduced to the status of glorified walk-on, all the better to highlight the stars.

The plot kicks in when Cher, Sarandon and Pfeiffer gather for their weekly girls' night in, during which they pool their ideas of what the ideal man would be like. "If we're going to have it," Cher says, "let's have it all." Enter Nicholson, who comes out of nowhere, buys the Lenox Estate -- a huge mansion on the historical register -- and installs himself in it. Soon the whole town is abuzz about the newcomer in their midst (who claims to be from New York, but we know otherwise), but nobody can seem to remember what his name is. (Even writing it down doesn't help.) The first time we get a good look at the mystery man is when he's discovered loudly snoring his way through a string quartet recital, which shouldn't endear himself to anybody, especially Sarandon (an accomplished, if reserved, cellist). Indeed, his presence in town raises Cartwright's hackles almost immediately. It's unclear how she knows right off the bat that something diabolical is afoot, but over the course of the film she pays dearly for her clarity of vision.

From there, Nicholson proceeds to seduce each of the would-be witches in turn, starting with Cher, who professes to be unimpressed with the opulence with which he surrounds himself. "You have to take care of yourself," he says. "No one's going to gonna do that for you, are they?" Those words might have had more impact if they weren't spoken by a man being helped into his robe by his absurdly tall manservant (a mute Carel Struycken, whose stature was put to good use as Lerch in the Addams Family films). Cher even attempts to call him on his bullshit, but Nicholson wins her over in the end and then moves on to his next mark, arriving on Sarandon's doorstep with a violin under her arm. After unleashing her passion, he then has all three women over for a game of doubles tennis, which takes a supernatural turn before he completes the hat trick. Meanwhile, Cartwright begins speaking out against Nicholson and, as owner of the newspaper, forces Jenkins to print an article condemning him and, by extension, Cher, Sarandon and Pfeiffer. This is followed by perhaps the most notorious scene in the film, in which Cartwright is silenced, first by a particularly nasty spell and then by her own husband, who's clearly been pushed beyond the breaking point.

Realizing that things have gone too far, the women try to shut Nicholson out of their lives, but he isn't going without a fight and while watching a videotape he made of them in happier times, the demon begins to come out (without the attention of his harem, he really lets himself go) and he proceeds to use their own fears against them. Making nice with him, at least in the short term, the three of them then try to send him away using a spell from his own grimoire, which leads to a hastily-cobbled-together effects sequence that was more or less forced on director George Miller over his objections. (According to Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Gubers Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood by Nancy Griffin & Kim Masters, Miller favored a "witty ending [over] a special-effects tour de force," but he was clearly overruled.) This may rid them of Van Horne temporarily, but in the denouement we learn that he managed to impregnate all three women (even Sarandon). Furthermore, all three of the babies are boys, making them the first male offspring any of the women have produced. I wonder who they're going to take after.

In spite of the occasional lapses in taste (most of which, it appears, were the direct result of Jon Peters's meddling), The Witches of Eastwick has plenty to recommend it, starting with Polly Platt's impeccable production design work and Vilmos Zsigmond's fluid cinematography. Its most enduring contribution to the culture at large, though, is probably John Williams's score, especially "The Dance of the Witches," which appeared in countless trailers thereafter. Long out of print (and extremely hard to come by as a result), the soundtrack has since been re-released on the Collector's Choice label, which is good news for anybody who watches the film and can't get the music out of their head. In contrast, the soundtrack to Weird Science has never been released on CD, which makes me wonder how its stars would react to that revelation...

One of Craig's stated objectives at the start of this 1980s movie-reviewing project was that it should not be an exercise in mere nostalgia. That will be extremely easy for me this week, as I have not an ounce of residual childhood fondness for either 1987's The Witches of Eastwick or 1985's Weird Science. Oh, sure, I was quite familiar with both. Over the years, I must have seen 75% or more of Weird Science through its many, many television airings, enough to be thoroughly schooled in the film's basic high-concept premise. Eastwick, meanwhile, I mainly remember as the movie version of a book that middle-aged suburban women read in paperback form while lounging poolside. Until this project, neither one was exactly calling out to me. But that's the great thing about an endeavor like this: it forces you to look deep into the eyes of a movie you otherwise would've happily shunned for the rest of your life.

What we have here are two supernatural stories about idle characters conjuring up idealized sex partners as a way to stave off the boredom and frustration of their own lives. The women of Eastwick want a dark, cursed prince with a flair for conversation and a functioning penis of indeterminate size. They wind up with Jack Nicholson. The boys of Science want an aerobicizing centerfold with the IQ of Einstein and an ample yet manageable chest. They wind up with Kelly LeBrock. Since Nicholson and LeBrock are easily the smartest, most interesting people in their respective movies, perhaps they should have ditched their conjurers and wound up with each other. As it happens, both films end up heavily favoring noisy, special-FX-laden chaos over actual on-screen sex. My fascination with both films lies mainly in what they do wrong, despite the fleeting pleasures offered by each.

Let's start with Weird Science, as it was the first of the two to stagger into (and out of) our nation's multiplexes. This is possibly writer-director John Hughes's most out-there creation -- and may just be the least-loved of the flicks he made during his 1984-1986 apex -- but it's absolutely crawling with Hughes's pet themes and best-known motifs. Remember Auto Bingo, that traveling game you might've played on a family road trip while you were confined to the backseat of the family station wagon? Well, Weird Science would be a perfect movie to use should you ever want to play a variation on that game called John Hughes Bingo. (Please do keep in mind that the rules of John Hughes Bingo cover not only Hughes's directorial efforts but also those films which he merely scripted. After all, Home Alone and National Lampoon's Vacation can be every bit as rich in quintessential Hughes-ian themes as, say, Sixteen Candles.) You can use bingo chips or pennies to mark each of the following items as they appear in Weird Science:

  • Upper-middle-class teenage angst.
  • Shermer, Illinois setting.
  • Worry-wart character teamed with more confident, swaggering friend.
  • A shiny red sports car.
  • Disputes with siblings, particularly tyrannical big brothers.
  • Bumbling authority figures.
  • Clueless parents.
  • Seemingly unattainable lust object suddenly becoming available.
  • Lots of Top 40 music blaring on the soundtrack.
  • Bedroom as mad science lab with kid as Thomas Edison/Rube Goldberg.
  • Suburban honkies out of their comfort zone.
  • Humor that seems uncomfortably racist today. (See above.)
  • Pesky older relatives.
  • The participation of Mr. Anthony Michael Hall.

Yes, you'll find all these and much, much more in Weird Science. Smart-mouthed Gary and the more reserved Wyatt really do seem like Ferris Bueller and Cameron Frye, version 1.0. (Note how it's always the worrywart whose family's property gets trashed.) Wyatt's thuggish older brother, Chet, seems like the prototype for Buzz in Home Alone. And LeBrock's character, Lisa, could be the British version of Christie Brinkley's dreamgirl from Vacation. Hughes, of course, first came to prominence as a writer for National Lampoon and wrote a few Lampoon-branded films as well as several episodes of Delta House, the TV version of Animal House. Appropriately, Weird Science contains a few elements imported from Animal House, too, like having a buzzcut-wearing, quasi-military-type as a comical villain (Bill Paxton subbing for Mark Metcalf), motorcycles being ridden indoors during a party, and a prominent scene in which the nervous white heroes go to a black music club and encounter some glowering Negroes.

What sets Weird Science apart from the rest of the Hughes canon is its frequent side trips into Crazytown -- frozen grandparents, mutant bikers, a monster Bill Paxton puppet thing! It's pandemonium! While these wild-card elements are often funny, I found myself wishing they'd been incorporated into a more orderly, coherent screenplay. We've already covered a couple of fantasy films involving suburban kids, Explorers and E.T., but in each of those stories the filmmakers made sure to contrast the supernatural element with a believable, real-world setting. In Weird Science, there is very little effort to establish that Wyatt and Gary live in any version of the same world you and I inhabit. The boys do get "pantsed" by Robert Downey, Jr. (just a few months away from joining Hall as part of SNL's infamous 1985-1986 cast) in an early scene, but this moment seems to have little or no real effect on anyone involved. Contrast this with the actually plausible schoolyard fight that kicks off Explorers or the sad, uncomfortable family dinner near the beginning of E.T.. Compared to the characters in those films, Wyatt and Gary don't seem to have any actual problems. To me, the emotional stakes are much lower in Weird Science at its outset, so I had a tougher time caring what happened after that. Then, once Lisa shows up, the movie completely gives into random zaniness, and the film no longer even tries to make any sense whatsoever. It's just goofy vignette after goofy vignette until, like Down and Out in Beverly Hills, the movie just decides to solve everything all at once with a big party scene. The way I see it, creating a living, flesh-and-blood woman out of a Barbie doll and some magazine photos is amazing enough. We don't need the whole universe to be wacky, too. Besides, if the movie keeps introducing crazy new elements every few minutes, then Lisa herself doesn't seem so special.

Ideally, the movie should focus on the interaction between Lisa and the boys, but I think the difference in their ages made this problematic for Hughes. We all know what real 16-year-old boys would do if they had a gorgeous, 25-year-old woman at their command, but that story isn't appropriate for a mainstream Hollywood comedy. There's one scene in which Lisa and Wyatt kiss, and as I was watching it, all I could think about was Mary Kay Letourneau. So like Wyatt and Gary themselves, the movie doesn't really know what to do with Lisa. It's telling that she and the boys spend a considerable amount of time apart during the film. When they're actually in the same room as Lisa, the boys -- especially Wyatt -- seem a little sheepish and depressed. Leonard Maltin's review takes the movie to task for not following through on its premise, but how could it? Hughes may have thought he had the ultimate wish-fulfillment premise here, but maybe he didn't think it through.

More troubling than even the potentially creepy central premise are several unforgivable, cringe-inducing sequences Hughes includes in the film. I have already mentioned the scene with the boys at a Chicago blues club. The decision to have Gary "win over" the club's black regulars by speaking in a faux-Dolemite ghetto patois is embarrassing enough, but Hughes rubs it in by having Gary keep up the accent for several further scenes and then bringing back one of the black characters as a gruff bartender during the climactic party. The "ghetto" scene from National Lampoon's Vacation is not that film's proudest moment, but there is a certain ugly truth to the way it depicts white anxiety and racial paranoia. Weird Science, though, veers uncomfortably close to being a happy-faced minstrel show for several long minutes of screen-time. Practically as bad is a scene in which one of Gary and Wyatt's (conveniently anonymous) female party guests has her clothing ripped off by a powerful, unseen force before she is magically sucked up into a fireplace and then ejaculated through the top of the chimney. This moment felt like a sexual assault played for laughs. And, for the love of all that is decent and holy, did we actually need that totally unmotivated, late-in-the-game car chase scene in which Anthony Michael Hall evades a Dukes of Hazzard-type police officer by driving over railroad tracks as a train approaches rapidly? Each weekday, I take a commuter train from the suburbs to downtown Chicago, and one of our regular conductors has a habit of reciting the following warning:

Once again, we'd like to remind you that going around or under railroad gates or crossings is not only unsafe and against the law, it is also a bad example to set for the children. We would appreciate it if you would not set that bad example for the children or anyone else. Thank you.
Now imagine all that being said with a thick Chicago accent and you have an idea of what was rattling around in my brain during that scene. Please, readers, do not follow the bad example set by Anthony Michael Hall.

Weird Science is not entirely a washout. The dialogue between Wyatt and Gary occasionally feels authentic, and I bought their friendship. Kelly LeBrock manages to make Lisa something more than just a sexed-up Mary Poppins. And Bill Paxton, bless his heart, is downright hilarious as Chet. The film's pace is so frantic that my attention never flagged. But the film has too many major problems -- both in its overall conception and in individual scenes -- for me to recommend it.

I'm not prepared to sign off on The Witches of Easwick either, although in this case some of the fault lies with me. You see, readers, with this movie I violated one of my own rules. When a movie is adapted from a novel, I always try to see the movie version first. Now, I know that conventional wisdom says to read the novel first, but this is just one of those many occasions when "conventional wisdom" is just so much hooey. I could explain at length why it's always better to see the movie first, but that would take another essay. It will have to suffice to say that reading a novel very frequently prejudices me against a film adaptation, but the reverse is rarely true. In any event, when Craig nominated The Witches of Eastwick for this project, I felt I just had to read John Updike's original 1984 novel. I was so eager, in fact, that I read the book before ever screening the film. And that's where I tripped up. I would not have loved George Miller's ungainly film of Eastwick under any circumstances, but I wouldn't have rolled my eyes at it so many times if I hadn't read Updike's book.

Not that the novel is any great shakes, mind you. It's mediocre at best, slight and a little too pleased with its own cleverness without actually expressing anything profound. Updike's, shall we say, idiosyncratic writing style occasionally makes reading The Witches of Eastwick quite a chore. The book is very slow-paced, light on plot (until its pitch-black conclusion), and extremely heavy on description. A routine exchange of dialogue might take several pages because Updike interrupts the flow of conversation with lengthy passages detailing the surroundings, the physical appearance of the speakers, and the general ambiance of the scene. Not to rely on puns, but the author describes the holy hell out Eastwick, RI, the three witches, and mysterious stranger Daryl Van Horne. (In the novel, Van Horne's status as the Devil incarnate is ambiguous, verging on dubious. The movie removes all doubt.) At first, I wondered how the book could ever be adapted into a movie, since the bulk of its pages are devoted to documenting the complex, ever-shifting interpersonal dynamics of the four main characters and the texture of day-to-day life in oddball Eastwick. The novel, interestingly enough, is set during the Vietnam War, and Updike makes a point of including numerous references to the politics, popular culture, and social/sexual upheaval of that era. (None of that made it to the movie.) Even though I found the story fairly un-cinematic, I saw that the four main characters definitely had potential, especially considering who played them. The three ladies were perfectly cast: Cher as earthy, take-charge sculptress Alexandra; Susan Sarandon as smart, severe musician Jane; and Michelle Pfeiffer as tender-hearted, somewhat flaky gossip columnist Sukie. As for the crucial character of Van Horne, while the large, hairy, "bear-like" man in Updike's book may not actually resemble Jack Nicholson physically, he often talks and behaves as if he were Jack Nicholson. Updike's Van Horne is an intelligent, opinionated, somewhat smart-alecky motormouth who carries himself with a great deal of confidence, makes himself comfortable wherever he goes, and has little regard for the "social niceties" which keep us from saying what we really mean. Van Horne is much more upfront about his emotions than the witches, who tend to gossip about their fellow Eastwickians in private. For those reasons, I could definitely see why the producers hired Jack Nicholson to play that part. In fact, one of the things that kept me going during the novel was imagining the interesting, unusual, possibly provocative movie which could be made from it.

Now that I have seen George Miller's film of The Witches of Eastwick, I must say that it delivered very little of what I was anticipating. Craig has already pointed out the two best elements: Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography and John Williams' score, both of which complement each other nicely and give the film a lush, sensual feel. But Michael Cristofer's script is a mess which never settles on a tone, a point of view, or an approach to the source material. What little survives from Updike's book has been horribly mangled. Take, for instance, the subplot about the sad-sack newspaper editor Richard Jenkins (who hadn't quite found his essential Richard Jeknins-ness at this point in his career but was clearly off to a good start) and his nagging, hysterical wife Veronica Cartwright. Now, the saga of the editor and his wife and what leads them to a grisly murder-suicide is one of the most compelling elements in Updike's novel. With actors as fine as Jenkins and Cartwright in the roles, I felt sure that this would be a home-run. But no. The couple's tragic story feels rushed, like an afterthought, and is so garbled as to be incomprehensible. Basically, Cartwright throws a few hissy fits (some public, some private) and vomits up a lot of cherries (thanks to the mischievous witches) while Jenkins mainly skulks around in the background looking nervous. Then -- insanely -- whatever ultimately happens to them occurs offscreen and is never adequately explained, depriving the audience of the opportunity to make an informed judgment. The crucial part of this story, that Jenkins's character is having an affair with Sukie, is not once mentioned. Why bother even including this material if you're not going to handle it in a meaningful way? I'm sorry to say that, in retrospect, the cherry-vomiting scene was the whole point of this storyline. Wouldn't it be awesome, thought the filmmakers, to show some snooty, small-town busybody upchucking cherries all over her pristine, light-colored carpet? So enamored were they of the cherry-puking routine -- a sizable hit in its day, I should point out -- that they had Nicholson himself reprise it near the end. By that point in the film, Miller and crew had not only given up on Updike's plot but any plot, opting instead for shock-value dream sequences like the one in which snakes crawl over Cher's body while she's in bed. What does it mean? Who cares?

That "snake" scene, frustratingly, is about the most exciting bedroom action Cher -- or anyone -- will see in this picture. Why were the witches' sex lives all but written out of this film? Didn't sex sell in 1987? In the novel, all three witches carry on affairs with married men. They've essentially slept their way through the adult male population of Eastwick, but you'd never guess that from the movie. Here, the three women seem to be in an unlikely sexual dry spell before Uncle Jack's arival. When MAD parodied the film as "The Wretches of Ecchflick" (issue #276), writer Frank Jacobs included an incisive bit of dialogue between Cher and Susan Sarandon on this very topic:

CHER: How about if we use our occult powers, invoke a mystical spell and create a Galahad or Prince Charming?

SARANDON: No one will believe it!

CHER: That we can really do it?

SARANDON: No, that three babes with our bodies and looks are hard up for dates on a Saturday night!
The witches' impressive sexual track record is important to the story because it's one of the key reasons why they're such pariahs in the town. In the book, the local ladies have a good reason for hating the witches. If you're a woman living in Eastwick, there's roughly an 80% chance your husband has slept with Sukie, Alex, or Jane. (Possibly all three.) Not to mention the fact that the witches themselves are fairly negligent parents and every bit as judgmental, gossipy, and prejudiced as anyone else in town. In short, they are not heroines. In fairness to the film, I can understand why the witches were made much more innocent and sympathetic when they made the transition from page to screen. Movie audiences all but demand a "rooting interest" in every story. Still, I couldn't help but be disappointed by how tame the scenes inside the Lenox mansion actually were. In the book, it's not a swimming pool the four main characters share but rather an eight-foot tub. I don't think I need to diagram this for you, but things get a lot cozier in the book. Once you've read what happens during the characters' frequent post-tennis-match "baths," you will probably not be sated by the comparatively wimpy pool scenes in this film.

But setting that all aside, what does this movie have to offer beyond pretty cinematography and catchy background music? Well, for one, it's a great opportunity to gaze upon four genuine movie stars, at least three of whom get ample opportunities to strut their stuff. Poor Michelle Pfeiffer is the odd witch out here, unfortunately, as Sukie. As I mentioned before, the most compelling aspect of Sukie's storyline never reached the screen, and the script instead saddles her with a "scared victim" role in a newly-minted subplot wherein Sukie begins to show signs of illness, is rushed to a doctor, and even has some sort of cold sore for a few scenes. Why hire an actress like Pfieffer and then attach gross-looking scabs to her beautiful lips? In a movie supposedly devoted to female empowerment, moreover, why include these sub-Lifetime-Channel scare tactics? Susan Sarandon fares better as intense cellist/music teacher Jane, though an early scene in which she seems to be sexually harassed by the provincial putz Walter Neff -- and reacts passively to said harassment -- does a disservice to the character. At least we are allowed several scenes of Jane intensely sawing away at her cello, both alone and accompanied by fellow musician Daryl, and there are a few crackling dialogue scenes between Nicholson and Sarandon, as when Daryl bluntly critiques Jane's bowing technique. Speaking of crackling dialogue scenes, the best ones this movie has to offer occur between Nicholson and Cher, who have excellent chemistry together onscreen. If this movie has a brush with near-perfection, it comes during the sequence in which Daryl seduces Alexandra over the course of a long, improbable afternoon. This is the one time when the movie seems to be firing on all cylinders. The two characters -- wary but curious Alex and blatantly on-the-make Daryl -- meet on a path near Daryl's newly-purchased home, the imposing Lenox mansion, and immediately slip into quick, witty repartee. Soon, Daryl has lured her to his home, where he tries to dazzle her with opulence and clever talk before steering her into the bedroom. This whole sequence points to the kind of movie Eastwick could've been. It's not true to the very letter of Updike's book. That's fine... more than fine, really. I'm not a purist, and I'm well aware of how stories have to be changed when they move from one medium to another. Chemically speaking, Daryl's brash "courtship" of Alex shows how this movie can take some promising atoms from Updike's novel and fashion them into worthwhile cinematic molecules. An Eastwick movie should be sexy, funny, and smart, and there are a few moments like this when Miller and Co. come tantalizingly close to reaching that goal.

Unfortunately, most of the good stuff in The Witches of Eastwick occurs in the first half. That's when we get most of the nice character interactions between Nicholson and his three leading ladies, as well as charming little details about the individual characters' lives, i.e. Sukie's overabundance of zucchini, Daryl's encroachment on the local "snowy egrets," and Alex's penchant for making Rubenesque "bubbie" figurines, etc. (Daryl pronounces "bubbie" as "boobie" here, but maybe that was a personal choice by Jack Nicholson.) Somewhere around the middle, however, The Witches of Eastwick ramps up the supernatural elements and the horror movie ambiance. This seems to have been at the behest of the blockbuster-hungry producers rather than the director or the screenwriter, and it's a darned shame because the film really suffers for it. Eastwick stops being an incisive satire about small town life and sexual politics and becomes a silly, overheated combination of The Exorcist and 9 to 5. The resemblance to the latter is truly striking, as Daryl Van Horne loses any trace of complexity or ambiguity and simply comes to embody the stereotypical role of Male Chauvinist Pig (just like Dabney Coleman did), while the three righteous ladies carry out their elaborate revenge on him (just like Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton did). Before the effects-heavy, completely invented climax, Nicholson has a big showcase scene in a church where he lectures the parishioners about God and women. This should be a comedic/dramatic highlight, but somehow even this fell flat for me. (Al Pacino's somewhat similar turn in The Devil's Advocate is much more fun and entertaining than this, and Al is even given better speeches to deliver.) As for Eastwick's cutesy coda, I will only say that it is too stupid and insulting to merit further comment.

So this was a tough week for me, I must say. Neither Weird Science nor The Witches of Eastwick made a strong positive impression on me, although there are things to recommend about both of them: a moment here, a performance there. Strangely, if I had been around to offer guidance to either John Hughes or George Miller at the time, my advice to both men would have largely been the same: give back at least a third of your budget. That way, you'll be forced to cut back on silly, meaningless spectacle and focus on your characters, dialogue, and plot. You know, the stuff people generally liked and remembered about your other movies. Above all, fellas, trust your audiences. They've been good to you in the past and will be good to you in the future. Neither of you got anywhere by underestimating the viewer's intelligence, which sadly is just what Witches and Weird too often do.

Up Next: Seeing as how we now find ourselves in the middle of the summer movie season, the time seems right for a month devoted to films which are of a humorous nature but do not tax the intellect overmuch. One might be tempted to call it Dumb Comedy Month, but that seems reductive. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that we will be approaching this topic dangerously.

]]> Free Wood Chips tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.631 2010-06-17T21:22:07Z 2010-06-17T21:24:34Z As I was driving to work this morning, I found myself behind a pair of identical yellow trucks. They looked like moving trucks, but with an opening in the back and a tailgate like on a pickup. I couldn't see... Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=18 As I was driving to work this morning, I found myself behind a pair of identical yellow trucks. They looked like moving trucks, but with an opening in the back and a tailgate like on a pickup. I couldn't see inside, so I had no idea what they were transporting, but the sign on the tailgate of the one directly in front of me caught my eye, which was unusual because I normally don't concern myself with messages slapped on the backs of trucks. For the most part, trucks either want you to tell them how they're being driven or they want you to become a truck driver yourself. Occasionally you'll find one that wants to be washed. This one was different, though. It had a sign that simply read, "FREE WOOD CHIPS."

I drove behind the truck for a couple of miles, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate what that might mean. By the time it turned off the road (along with its twin, which I noticed didn't have a "FREE WOOD CHIPS" sign on it), I had come to the only conclusion possible: Wood Chips was either the name of a political prisoner like Mumia or a righteous cause like Tibet. The first thing I did when I arrived at work was to flip a coin to determine which one it was. The quarter came up heads, so that meant Wood Chips was a political prisoner. I decided to find out everything I could about him and do whatever I could to help free him.

Shockingly, there was precious little information about Mr. Chips to be found on the Internet. I figured if he was important enough to have a professional-looking sign made up about him, then there would be at least one web site devoted to his cause. After several hours of searching, though, I couldn't even find out where he was incarcerated or on what trumped-up charges he was being held. Was he an accused cop-killer? Was he some sort of radical left over from the Sixties? I had no way of knowing. I did, however, learn more about mulching than I previously imagined -- not that I ever spent much time thinking about mulching before today.

Eventually I had to give up on my impromptu research project -- my work was piling up and my supervisor was none too pleased to find me poring over websites dedicated to tree mulchers -- but I vowed that one day I would uncover the identity of the mysterious Wood Chips and very soon thereafter he would be free. Yes, indeed, he would be free.

]]> Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People, reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.630 2010-06-10T22:00:38Z 2010-06-14T21:35:28Z "And you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it." -- THOMAS GUTHRIE (1865) Disney's making dirty movies! Well, no. Not really. But that was the consensus... Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=44
"And you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it." -- THOMAS GUTHRIE (1865)

Disney's making dirty movies!

Well, no. Not really. But that was the consensus among prudes, alarmists, and moral watchdogs alike in the mid-1980s when the Walt Disney Company began financing a series of R-rated movies through a then-fairly-new subsidiary of theirs called Touchstone Pictures. Never mind that the hallowed "D" word never appeared anywhere in these films' credits or advertising. The evidence was clear: a bastion of good, clean, wholesome family entertainment was now up to its mouse ears in the smut racket. Won't someone please think of the children?

I can still remember then-also-newish Disney CEO Michael Eisner appearing on ABC's 20/20 and squirming genially as a reporter showed him a particularly risque clip from of one of Touchstone's latest offerings, Down and Out in Beverly Hills and asked him if this sort of thing was appropriate for Disney to be releasing. The clip involved Richard Dreyfuss as a wealthy married man having adulterous sex with his maid while the family dog watches through a window. To make matters worse, the maid was actually on top during said fornication, a clear breach of missionary-position-only sexual protocol. (NOTE: This was long before Disney actually owned ABC. Wonder if the same kind of story would air on 20/20 today?) Eisner's answer, as you might guess, was political. Down and Out, he faux-cheerfully explained, was not really a Disney movie per se, at least not in the Bambi/Snow White sense. It was just an adult-oriented comedy which happened to be financed by the Walt Disney Company. That's all.

Disney, you must remember, had spent much of the 1960s and all of the 1970s flooding the film market with gimmick-laden, low-ambition "family comedies" aimed at the notoriously undiscriminating kiddie audience. Think: lots and lots of Herbie sequels and cute-animal flicks. As a result, the term "live-action Disney movie" was not exactly synonymous with "quality," and even that particular teat had run dry by the end of the Carter years. Disney continued to make live-action films in the 1980s, but these tended to be adventure and fantasy stories, like Tron and The Journey of Natty Gann. The only way for Disney to make live-action comedies and dramas that adults might actually pay money to see was to do so under another name. Ergo, Touchstone. And the gambit paid off beautifully with a string of well-received, financially-successful pictures. Today, the familiar circle-and-lightning-bolt insignia of Touchstone is just another meaningless corporate logo, imparting nothing of significance to the average moviegoer. But for a few years there in the mid-to-late 1980s, Touchstone Pictures was something of a brand name to critics and knowledgeable audiences alike, much as, say, Judd Apatow's name is today. A Touchstone comedy was generally expected to be a little sharper, a little fresher, a little funnier than the average multiplex offering. The company even had its own stable of stars, veteran film and TV performers who appealed more to parents than to kids: Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito, and of course the Queen of Touchstone herself, Miss Bette Midler, who vaulted back into stardom with her appearances in Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People, both released in 1986.

]]> Like Disney itself, Bette Midler was in sore need of a comeback by then. After battling with her director Don Siegel and co-star Ken Wahl on the set of 1982's megaflop Jinxed!, Midler -- fairly or unfairly -- acquired a reputation as being "difficult," which in Hollywood is often a career-ender. And keep in mind that back in the mid-1980s, Midler was still mainly known as a singer with a campy, somewhat vulgar stage act, beloved by gay men more than by suburban housewives. Who knows what caused Disney to decide it absolutely had to be in the Bette Midler business and sign her to a six-picture deal? But that's just what they did. Bravely, Bette did not shy away from her diva reputation in these films but instead capitalized upon it. In both Down and Out and Ruthless, she essentially plays The Wife From Hell. Her characters are pampered, spoiled, demanding women with loud voices, expensive tastes, and fed-up husbands. (Weirdly, both these women are named Barbara -- a possible reference to Barbra Streisand?) I was slightly too young to have seen either of these films theatrically, but they were easy enough to track down on home video. I remember basically liking both of them at the time (Ruthless a little more than Down), and I was eager to return to them in 2010 to see how they'd held up over the years and what they could tell us about the era in which they were made. What I found was rather astonishing.

Down and Out in Beverly Hills is truly one for the time capsules, a compendium not just of 1980s clothes, music, and architecture (though there's plenty of all three on display) but of quintessential '80s values, concerns, and hang-ups. If you want to know what the decade was all about, skip the phony recreations like The Wedding Singer and Hot Tub Time Machine and head straight for this movie. Appropriately, it was directed by Paul Mazursky, who had previously captured the ever-changing American zeitgeist with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and An Unmarried Woman. Down and Out is a textbook example of what's known as a comedy of manners, a comedy which seeks to parody the foibles and failings of the fashionable classes -- in this case, the free-spending nouveau riche of Beverly Hills. When we reviewed Superman III for this project, I wrote about how 1980s movies tend to focus on the clash of different cultures (often social classes) and our love-hate relationship with money. I can't think of a better illustration of that than Down and Out, which is all about money and culture-clash. (Heck, even the DVD menu has little dollar bills to indicate chapter numbers!) The plot -- borrowed from René Fauchois's play Boudu sauvé des eaux -- tells the story of Jerry Baskin (Nick Nolte), a bedraggled vagrant who, having been abandoned by his dog Kerouac, tries to drown himself in a swimming pool owned by clothes-hanger tycoon Dave Whiteman (Dreyfuss). Complications ensue, as they must, when Dave "rescues" the uncooperative and none-too-grateful Jerry and invites him to stay on as a houseguest until he gets back on his feet. A bum living in a fancy Beverly Hills mansion?!? Uh oh! You can practically hear those ol' cultures a-clashin' already, can't you? If all this sounds like the set-up for a situation comedy, you should know that Down and Out actually became a sitcom the very next year -- the very first series, in fact, to have the honor of being canceled by the Fox Network.

Anyway, Jerry adroitly improvises a sad but noble backstory to explain his slide into homelessness, and one by one he seduces (sometimes figuratively, often literally) each member of the skeptical Whiteman household: wife Barbara (Midler), daughter Jenny (Tracy Nelson), son Max (Evan Richard), Mexican maid Carmen (Elizabeth Peña), and family dog Matisse (Mike the Dog). Within the course of a few weeks (the plot unfolds between Thanksgiving and New Year's), Jerry manages to cure Barbara's sexual frigidity, Jenny's eating disorder, and Matisse's canine neurosis, while simultaneously introducing Carmen -- who had previously been having an affair with Dave but ditches him for Jerry -- to radical politics and helping androgynous, camera-toting Max come to terms with his homosexuality. This list of accomplishments is all the more impressive when you realize that Jerry mainly spends his days doing as little as possible, unless you consider sponging off Dave's resources to be an activity. Poor Dave, meanwhile, is first excited by the idea that a stranger is shaking things up and cutting through the family's usual sense of dysfunction and ennui, but soon our hapless hanger-maker begins to resent the fact that his family, right down to the dog, seems to prefer this interloper to him. (Dreyfuss had a similar dilemma in What About Bob? with Bill Murray.) Meanwhile, Little Richard turns up in the film now and again as the Whitemans' next-door neighbor, a record producer who looks, acts, and talks exactly like Little Richard. (Maybe this movie takes place in an alternate universe where there is no Little Richard, but then who's singing those oldies on the soundtrack?)

To the extent that any of this works, it is mainly due to the acting, especially that of Nick Nolte. It is somehow not surprising to learn that Nolte spent five weeks living as a homeless person in order to prepare for this role. Nolte is convincingly haggard and disheveled as Jerry Baskin, yet there is an undeniable charisma and magnetism to the character as well. (Though we now tend to associate him with that infamous mug shot, Nolte was crowned People's Sexiest Man Alive six years after this film!) A leftover from the 1960s generation, Jerry Baskin comes off as a cinematic first-cousin of Jeff Bridges's easygoing "Dude" from The Big Lebowski, only with an undercurrent of darkness and danger just beneath the calm surface. I must admit I was a little creeped out by what occurs between Jenny and Jerry. Jenny, you see, hasn't been eating -- though the term "anorexia" is never once mentioned (and this was after Karen Carpenter!) -- and Jerry "fixes" her in one night by having sex with her, despite a 20-year gap in their ages and the fact that he has to force himself on her during their first kiss. It's the kind of thinking you might see on display in a John Wayne movie: all the little filly ever needed was for a real man to take her by force. While we're at it, why is the word "gay" never actually uttered during the scenes with Max? His big "coming out" scene basically consists of him revealing to his father that he and his friends (a group which includes both boys and girls, I noted) like to dress up as Adam Ant occasionally. Didn't Dave already know that? I also cringed a little at how the movie handled the politicization of Carmen, reducing her radical awakening to a mere pose, just another silly fad for Mazursky to satirize. Oh, that silly Hispanic maid, thinking she can be more than a human sex toy!

Other than Nolte's performance as Jerry Baskin, the main reason to see Down and Out in Beverly Hills is to get a primer on how people's minds worked in the 1980s. Again, this was the time of Reagan, yuppies, and conspicuous consumerism. Our TV and movie screens were filled with fantasies of material wealth (from Dallas to Trading Places), and we had a seemingly boundless appetite for tales of lower-class characters who suddenly find themselves thrust into the world of class and privilege. But all this unchecked avarice must have aroused some guilt within us as well, because this was also the decade when the rich and famous were trying to prove how "concerned" and "responsible" they were by participating in showy charity events like USA for Africa, Live Aid, and Comic Relief. It is probably not a coincidence that a group of bums sings a sardonic parody of "We Are the World" in this movie, even though Bette Midler herself was one of the participants on that record. As America's satirists pointed out again and again in the 1980s, the wealthy weren't really concerned about anything other than themselves. They didn't care about the homeless or the whales or the rain forest. They just wanted to salve their own consciences and make themselves look good. In a way, the Whitemans' "adoption" of Jerry is a symptom of this phenomenon. What is Dave trying to prove by "helping" Jerry? Does Jerry even want Dave's help? If nothing else, Down and Out at least provides plenty of fodder for after-movie discussions. One more question to ponder: if the whole point of the movie is to show that there's more to life than money and material comfort, why is it a "happy" ending when the hero is rewarded with exactly those things? Imagine if the film had gone the other way, and the Whitemans had joined Jerry in living as bums on the street! Could Disney have signed off on that?

Unfortunately, I found Down and Out in Beverly Hills to be largely shrill and obvious, too often reducing its characters to cliches and stereotypes. When we are introduced to Dave, for instance, his dialogue consists of such tell-tale pronouncements as "Shut up, you putz!" and "My son, the filmmaker!" Then he goes into the bathroom and -- yuk, yuk -- his medicine cabinet is overstocked with stomachache and headache remedies. Gosh, I think the movie might be subtly trying to imply that Dave is Jewish! (I was reminded of that Onion article in which Woody Allen was accused of anti-Semitism for depicting all Jews as neurotic.) The best part of the movie is the middle, once Mazursky has established his characters and just shows them being themselves and behaving in at least a somewhat-believable way. I particularly enjoyed a post-coital scene between Midler and Nolte in which the former serenades the latter with a tender rendition of "You Belong To Me." And there's a good sequence in which Jerry convinces Dave to temporarily ditch his button-down routine and spend a day lazing around on the beach with the other bums. These moments feel noticeably less forced than the rest of the movie, because Mazursky is finally treating his characters as full-fledged human beings and not as grotesque puppets in his condescending satire.

Ruthless People is another 1986 Bette Midler comedy with money on its mind, but it isn't nearly as weighted down with conflicting messages and satirical baggage as Mazursky's film. Instead, this is simply an energetic, frequently tasteless romp whose only real goal is to be funny... and, brother, does it succeed in that respect. Oh, sure, the script pays occasional lip service to such dull, socially-respectable virtues as honesty, teamwork, and friendship. And, yes, the "good" characters in this movie do ultimately triumph over the "evil" ones. But let's not kid ourselves. Ruthless People exists mainly as a joyous tribute to the Seven Deadly Sins, an opportunity to revel in just how wonderfully rotten people can be, especially when money is involved. For such an assignment, there's no better actor to hire than Danny DeVito, and he's the (black) heart and (twisted) soul of this picture, giving a career-best performance as Sam Stone, a venal businessman who is delighted to learn that his rich-but-wretched wife, Barbara (Midler, natch), has been kidnapped because it saves him the trouble of having to kill her. Barbara's hapless captors are mild-mannered, definitely-not-cut-out-for-this-kind-of-thing couple Ken and Sandy Kessler (Judge Reinhold & Helen Slater), who want revenge on Sam because he stole Sandy's idea for the "spandex miniskirt." Meanwhile, Sam's sultry mistress Carol (Anita Morris) is scheming with her accomplice, a peroxided male bimbo named Earl Moss (Bill Pullman), to blackmail Sam with a videotape of Barbara's supposed murder. Only lunkhead Earl has accidentally videotaped the chief of police having noisy sex with a hooker instead. You see how a situation like this could quickly spiral out of control. Had all these people just stayed home and played bridge, imagine the trouble that could have been avoided!

So we've got all the ingredients here for a nicely nasty little dark comedy, and Ruthless People isn't about to let us down in that department. This film, whose ingenious Dale Lautner-penned screenplay owes a little something (but not that much) to O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," turned out to be the last project co-directed by the beloved ZAZ team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker. We may tend to think of those wacky ZAZ boys as a three-headed creature sharing one body, but in truth they only co-directed three flicks: this one, Airplane! and Top Secret. We also associate them with the parody film subgenre, and Ruthless People ain't that. If Down and Out was a textbook comedy of manners, Ruthless is a textbook farce. We've got all the elements: an increasingly wild and far-fetched plot which nimbly incorporates mistaken identities, double entendres, slapstick, innuendos, broadly exaggerated performances, lightning-fast repartee, and (as per the traditions of the genre) an elaborate climactic chase scene. What's more, like all the best farces, Ruthless People, deftly weaves in a variety of disparate (and often desperate) characters, settings, and plotlines into a cohesive, unified whole. There's not a hair out of place, so to speak. When a genuine homicidal maniac somehow staggers his way into the plot in the film's latter stages, for instance, it might initially strike the viewer as as an errant, discordant note. But the movie has a definite purpose for this character, bizarre as he is, and he serves a specific plot function. I admire the hell out of Dale Lautner's writing in this film, the way he keeps all these different plates spinning -- Sam Stone and the cops on the case, Barbara and her captors, Carol and Earl, etc. As someone who has taken a few stabs at comedic writing over the years, I know I simply do not possess the discipline and organizational skills necessary to craft this kind of intricate farce. I reacted to this movie the same way I reacted to A Confederacy of Dunces, Fawlty Towers and the best episodes of Seinfeld: I loved it so much I was jealous. I've been a musician for over 20 years now, too (nothing too terribly sexy, mind you, just the euphonium), and this combination of love and jealousy I get from great comedic writing is analogous to the emotions I experience when I hear true virtuosos play. I am both delighted and humbled. How do they do that? I could try and try for the rest of my life and never be able to duplicate that. I've been struggling these last few months to learn Dimitri Shostakovich's Festive Overture, and it's actually a little depressing to know that there are dozens of recordings in which professional musicians tear through the piece as if it were no more challenging than "Turkey in the Straw." Me, I start to get lightheaded somewhere around the top of page 2.

I feel I must single out the opening sequence of Ruthless People, because watching it is like sitting in an orchestra hall as a brilliant musician plays a marvelously tricky concerto -- hitting all the notes, of course, but also wringing every last drop of music out of the piece. The scene in question, set at a restaurant dubiously named the "Cafe Ruthless," has Sam explaining to his mistress Carol exactly why he wants to kill his wife. Carol's heard this story many times before, but Sam insists on telling it yet again. It immediately becomes clear that Sam indeed has told -- or, more accurately, performed -- this story over and over, because he really milks it with his inflection, pauses, and facial expressions. There are occasional interruptions both by the mistress and by a waiter during this scene, but this is really a monologue for Danny DeVito, and it's proof of what a sensational comic actor he is. (If you haven't caught any of DeVito's recent work on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, please do so.) I smile just thinking about the way DeVito delivers lines like "I hate the way she licks stamps!" and "My only regret is that the plan isn't more violent." Sam's monologue begins with a description of how his wealthy father-in-law somehow managed to live for years after his life support was unplugged, and there's wonderful music in the way DeVito angrily repeats the words "older and sicker." Of course, credit for this scene -- and the whole movie, really -- must also be shared with the "composer" (Lautner) and the three "conductors" (the ZAZ team). The music metaphor might be coughing and wheezing at this point, but it's the best way I know how to describe this film.

Before I leave Ruthless People, let me point out that this film belongs to a very noble cinematic tradition: the kidnapping comedy. Some of my favorite flicks of all time -- from The King of Comedy to The Big Lebowski -- have been built around what the professionals call K&R. (That's kidnap and ransom.) Recently, the radio show This American Life interviewed a man named Daniel Johnson who oversees "kidnapping response operations" for a company called ASI Global. That basically means he's in the kidnapping insurance business. During his interview with Ira Glass, Mr. Johnson gave a few pointers to remember if you are ever kidnapped. I thought it might be instructive to see how well this movie's kidnapping victim, Barbara Stone, played by the rules of the K&R game:

1. Keep your mind active. Don't sleep all day. -- So far, so good. Barbara starts out by lazing in bed all day, but during her captivity she becomes obsessed with physical fitness and even gets some workout montages set to Billy Joel's "Modern Woman."

2. Eat what they give you because it's probably what they're eating, too. -- Well, Barbara didn't do so hot on this one. She ate the food her captors offered, but not without loud and frequent complaints.

3. Don't try to escape. -- We're 1 for 3 here. Barbara does try to escape, and though she does not immediately succeed, she proves more than a physical match for her captors.

4. Don't look your captors in the eye. Don't be confrontational. -- As this is Bette Midler we're talking about here, I think you know the answer to this one. 1 for 4.

5. Don't try to negotiate for your release. Don't discuss finances with your captors. -- Yikes! I think finances are the #1 topic of conversation in virtually every scene between Barbara and the kidnappers. 1 for 5.

So Barbara didn't follow the rules very well. But she managed to survive anyway -- not only survive but become BFFs with the kidnappers! (The overly sugary nature of the kidnapper/victim relationship is one of my few major complaints about this movie. Well, that and the fact that Sandy's supposedly brilliant clothing designs are horrendous.) If you are ever kidnapped, reader, do not expect to end up frolicking on the beach with the same people who grabbed you, took you from your home, and threw you into the back of a VW van. That's probably not going to happen outside of a 1980s Touchstone movie. But strangely enough, the kidnapping in Ruthless People does conform to much of what Mr. Johnson said on the radio. A kidnapping for ransom, he explained, is just a business deal. The captors need to keep you alive to get their money. And, happily, you will most likely get out of a K&R situation alive. It's just a matter of coming to a price. That touchy subject of "price" is a major sticking point in this film and leads to several hilarious telephone exchanges between Judge Reinhold and Danny DeVito, not to mention Bette Midler's iconic line once she learns Reinhold has offered DeVito a discount on the ransom: "I've been kidnapped by Kmart!"

Most of all, Daniel Johnson tells us, you have two main responsibilities as a kidnapping victim: stay alive and don't panic. And Bette has both of those down cold.

"Let's face it, she's not Mother Theresa. Gandhi would've strangled her." - JUDGE REINHOLD, amateur kidnapper extraordinaire

Well, now that Joe has had his say, it's my turn, and let me tell you right up front, I'm going to have a lot more to write about Ruthless People than I will about Down and Out in Beverly Hills. This is not because Down and Out is a bad movie. (Roger Ebert even gave it four stars back in the day.) It's just that it pales in comparison with Ruthless, which is much more sprightly and inventive. Put it down to the generation gap, I guess. Director/co-writer Paul Mazursky was firmly in his mid-50s when he made Down and Out, whereas the ZAZ team ranged in age from 36 to 42 when they tackled Ruthless. (For some reason I always thought they were much closer in age, but I guess not.) Based on the evidence here, the daring filmmaker who had once scandalized Middle America with a bold comedy about partner-swapping clearly had lost some of his satirical bite in the ensuing years. Then again, that's probably why Disney came calling on him in the first place. For Touchstone's initial venture into R-rated territory (after PG-rated fare like Splash, Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend and My Science Project), no doubt they wanted to work with a reasonably known quantity.

For his part, Mazursky must have felt the same way since he based his script (written with frequent collaborator Leon Capetanos, who also co-wrote Tempest, Moscow on the Hudson and Moon Over Parador) on the same play as Jean Renoir's highly cynical 1932 masterpiece Boudu Saved from Drowning, which contains an indelible performance by Michel Simon as the title character. Instead of a Parisian bookseller fishing a tramp out of the Seine, though, Mazursky's update gives us a Beverly Hills hanger tycoon (Richard Dreyfuss) who feels some twinges of guilt over his success pulling a suicidal bum (Nick Nolte) out of his swimming pool. This act of charity makes Dreyfuss feel better about himself in the short run, but leads to unexpected consequences, most of which Joe detailed above. It must be said, though, that the member of the family Nolte has the most simpatico relationship with is the rather ubiquitous dog, Matisse, who is so neurotic that it's seeing a dog psychiatrist.

As one might expect, the film gets a lot of mileage out of detailing the excesses of the excessively rich. (For this reason, it would likely play very well on a double bill with Paul Bartel's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, and not just because both take place in the same area code.) In addition to the dog psychiatrist, there are gags about yogis sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with the family and Iranian expatriates living next door. Some of the most trenchant observations, though, are reserved for their other neighbor, record producer Little Richard, who complains vociferously about the disparity of service when a tripped alarm brings an immediate response to the Dreyfuss clan's residence. He doesn't get half as many reaction shots as the damned dog, though. I swear, Mazursky must have put it in every scene just so he could cut to it at will. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with cutting to a dog to get a laugh, but it does get old after a while.

To be fair, a dog also features into the mise-en-scène of Ruthless People, but Muffy, the yappy little poodle belonging to kidnapped heiress Bette Midler that makes life a living hell for unfaithful clothing tycoon Danny DeVito while he tries to string along both the kidnappers who have taken her and the police who think he's trying to get her back, is much more solidly integrated into the action. The same thing goes for the music, from Mick Jagger's theme song (which has largely been supplanted in my brain by "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody "Toothless People") on down to Billy Joel's "Modern Woman" and Bruce Springsteen's "Stand On It" (which is quite appropriately used to establish the trailer park where blue-collar blackmailer Bill Pullman lives). Then there's Michel Colombier's score, which fits the pattern of a lot of '80s comedies by playing it relatively straight and not overselling the wacky hijinks. That also goes for the music erstwhile Police guitarist Andy Summers contributed to Down and Out, which can be downright moody at times, but the song selections leave a bit more to be desired. For example, a snippet of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." is included during a driving scene, but it doesn't stick around long enough to get to the chorus. (The ZAZ team would correct this oversight by setting an entire montage in The Naked Gun to the same tune.) And Little Richard's "Great Gosh A'Mighty (It's A Matter Of Time)" -- a song written specifically for the film -- mostly serves as the soundtrack for the climactic party scene where Mazursky essentially throws up his hands in defeat and throws everything into the pool in order to bring all of his subplots to a head at once. Meanwhile, Little Richard keeps banging away at the piano and singing his heart out despite the fact that there's no longer anybody watching him. I suppose he could have stopped playing to find out what the ruckus was all about, but it's just as likely that he wasn't interested in what those crazy white people were up to anyway. Far better is the film's use of Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" over the opening and closing credits. For all of Nolte's platitudes about change and personal transformation, the refrain "Same as it ever was" turns out to be far more apt.

But getting back to Ruthless People, the tone of the film is set not only by the opening scene between DeVito and his mistress, but also by the ridiculous furnishings in the house he shares with Midler, who evidently did the decorating because the only normal-looking room is DeVito's home office, which I suspect was his inner sanctum. You simply can't sit anywhere else in the house and expect to be comfortable, which would be reason enough for anyone to want to kill their interior decorator. Eager to set his plan into motion, DeVito goes from room to room, chloroform-soaking handkerchief in hand, calling out his wife's name in vain. Finally he collapses into one of their impractical chairs and listlessly takes the phone call from Midler's kidnappers. As he does so, it's hard not to share DeVito's growing elation as he listens to Judge Reinhold's instructions, realizing that he won't have to do his own dirty work after all. This is soon followed by Midler's grand entrance and a humdinger of a first line -- "You've fucked with the wrong person!" -- which quickly confirms everything we've heard about her. Then comes one of the most well-timed edits I've ever seen in a comedy: Midler is railing against her captors, telling them that her husband "worships the ground I walk on. When he hears about this, he will explooooode!" Immediate shock-cut to DeVito popping the cork on a bottle of champagne, which spurts all over the place. The ejaculatory allusion is unmistakable, but in addition to getting a huge laugh it also speaks volumes about how self-deluded Midler's character is. No wonder she's apoplectic when, having had a few conversations with an increasingly uncooperative DeVito, Reinhold sits her down and asks point blank whether her husband loves her. How dare he?

Some of my favorite moments in the film detail DeVito's dealings with the cops on the case, who are headed up by the infinitely patient Art Evans and Clarence Felder. He gets so chummy with some of them, in fact, that a few policemen seem to take up permanent residence at his house, and one is genuinely disappointed when DeVito becomes a suspect and has to be arrested. (A terrific background detail is the shot where we see two uniformed cops playing tennis on DeVito's private court off in the distance. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker don't get a lot of credit for their subtle jokes, but they're there if you're willing to look hard enough for them.) I also like their lightning-quick response when a would-be mugger tries to make off with DeVito's briefcase during a fake ransom drop. ("This town has got some Neighborhood Watch," the overwhelmed mugger quips.) And one of the biggest laughs in the film comes in a rather unexpected place, when DeVito is brought down to the morgue to possibly identify his wife's body. ("That's not her," he matter-of-factly states when he's shown a middle-aged black man.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, there's nothing subtle at all about the way Midler deals with her desperate and increasingly frazzled captors. First she's verbally abusive, then she's physically abusive when she frees herself and nearly escapes their clutches. And finally she makes outrageous demands of Helen Slater (by far the meekest kidnapper in the history of K&R) and freaks her out by acting out various death penalties. (She tries out similar psychological warfare on Reinhold, but he evidently has thicker skin.) For his part, Reinhold illustrates his lack of a killer instinct (also known as a conscience) at his day job as an electronics salesman at Crazy Bob's. Sure, there's the scene where he unwittingly emasculates a potential customer's boyfriend by running down his choice of speaker, but Reinhold's defining moment comes later on (after DeVito has, out of exasperation, dared him to kill Midler) when he coaxes a metalhead into "The Big Room" and is on the verge of selling the kid a speaker so enormous (and so overpriced) that he'll be paying it off for years. He backs off immediately, though, when the kid is joined by his heavily pregnant girlfriend. Ruthlessness just isn't in the man's DNA.

Also meanwhile, there is the ever-evolving saga of DeVito's conniving mistress (Anita Morris, who actually played the Bette Midler role in the TV version of Down and Out) and her moron of an accomplice (Pullman), who uses a Dustbuster of all things for foreplay and names his goldfish after Miami Vice's Crockett and Tubbs. The sequence of events that starts with Pullman videotaping philandering chief of police William G. Schilling (who went on to play the principal on Head of the Class) and ends with Schilling hastily fleeing the country in the mistaken belief that he's about to exposed as a sex maniac could make a terrific short film in its own right. I'm especially fond of the split-screens used for Morris's increasingly outrageous phone calls with Schilling. (That's a device that definitely needs to be used more often, and not just by Brian De Palma.) That the payoff has Morris and Pullman commandeering a VCR in a home electronics store is the icing on the cake.

Finally, things come to a head and DeVito is forced to actually pay Midler's ransom so he can get her back and prove to the police that he hasn't killed her. (I find it amusing that when he's arraigned and the judge, who's played by the Zuckers' mother Charlotte, sets his bail at $700,000 -- a full $200,000 more than the kidnappers initially asked for -- he pays it without batting an eye.) As one might expect, the ransom drop goes far from smoothly -- DeVito for one is loath to part with what amounts to his total net worth -- but the police are present to make sure things go off in a relatively hitchless fashion. Even they have a little trouble, though, when the stupidest person on the face of the Earth (guess who) shows up and attempts to throw a monkey wrench into the works. (You know you're in trouble when you're having a discussion with a guy in a clown mask and you have to ask if you're the one that looks stupid.) In a lot of ways, the climax of Ruthless People is like the rest of the film in miniature, with the stakes being raised by the minute and everybody trying to come out on top. Sure, virtue wins out in the end and DeVito gets his comeuppance, but there's no reason to complain about such a tidy resolution as long as it's funny.

Up Next: Taking a cue from one of Bette Midler's more family-friendly Disney ventures, 1993's supernatural comedy Hocus Pocus, we tackle a pair of films about witchy women and the men who don't know what the hell to do with them, much like Bill Pullman probably doesn't know what to do with this gun:

]]> German Magazines and T-shirts tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.629 2010-06-08T03:45:15Z 2010-06-08T03:58:37Z Quick news/good news: German magazine Spoonfork has kindly featured my art in their latest issue's special guest section. Here it is! In other news, the T-shirt that is the product of my Artsprojekt Labz T-shirt contest victory has been produced... Chris Leavens http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=1 Quick news/good news:

spoonfork500.jpg

German magazine Spoonfork has kindly featured my art in their latest issue's special guest section. Here it is!

calling_the_sun-p248000266647439267fc0zx_325.jpg

In other news, the T-shirt that is the product of my Artsprojekt Labz T-shirt contest victory has been produced and is ready to buy, if you're interested. Click here for more info.

]]> The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.628 2010-05-27T22:30:40Z 2010-06-01T03:05:24Z "Cult films don't make money." - BILL LANGE, producer of Massacre at Central High "Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy." - DR. EMILIO LIZARDO, eccentric Italian physicist possessed by Lord John Whorphin, an evil Red Lectroid from Planet 10 When... Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=45
"Cult films don't make money." - BILL LANGE, producer of Massacre at Central High

"Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy." - DR. EMILIO LIZARDO, eccentric Italian physicist possessed by Lord John Whorphin, an evil Red Lectroid from Planet 10

When I suggested "Cult on Arrival" month I had but one film in mind and that was 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a fast-paced, effects-laden science fiction extravaganza that had the potential to kick off a franchise but fizzled at the box office. Made by a first-time producer-director (W.D. Richter, who cut his teeth as a screenwriter on films like Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, which he co-wrote with the director, and the late-'70s adaptations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dracula) and a relatively unknown screenwriter (Earl Mac Rauch, whose only prior credits were the little-loved urban thriller A Stranger is Watching and Martin Scorsese's sprawling musical New York, New York), Buckaroo Banzai was always going to be a hard sell, but you can tell that they made the film for the love of it, not because they thought they were going to get rich off it. (Of course, if it had been a runaway success, I don't believe they would have turned those riches down.)

The other group of people that Richter and Rauch arguably made the film for were the sci-fi, fantasy and comic book geeks who were in the habit of anointing whatever blockbusters Hollywood threw their way and could presumably be counted to spread the word about their film's idiosyncratic hero, a world-renowned neurosurgeon, rocket scientist and rock star who just so happened to also have his own comic book (at least in the world of the film). And so the studio went directly to the fans, showed them the trailer, handed out Buckaroo Banzai headbands (one of which I was given by a college friend) and did whatever they could to try to drum up interest in the film. These tactics drew the ire of notable crank Harlan Ellison, who used his January 1985 column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to decry the "billion dollars' worth of promotional hype such as Big Brother-style rallies at sf conventions" being used to sell what he called "this village idiot of a movie." Needless to say, he was not impressed with it.

Luckily, I was already an avowed fan of Buckaroo Banzai, having seen it many times on cable, by the time I read Ellison's withering four-paragraph dismissal of it in his 1989 collection Harlan Ellison's Watching, so I've never let it influence my opinion of the film. Then again, within its pages Ellison also derides Star Wars, John Carpenter's The Thing, Gremlins ("it is a corrupt thing, vicious at its core"), The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future, Robocop ("a film that struck me as being made by, and for, savages and ghouls") and Spaceballs -- all of which I have varying degrees of affection for -- so I know to take his criticisms with the proper amount of seasoning. Then again, he also has high praise for an obscure 1973 film called Slither, which just so happened to be Richter's screenwriting debut, calling it "the world's longest, funniest Polack joke." And he champions Big Trouble in Little China, which Richter also had a hand in, so it's clear he doesn't prejudge a film one way or the other based on who made it (although he never does seem to have a kind word for Brian De Palma).

]]> So, why does Ellison object so strenuously to the film and does it have anything to do with why it failed commercially? To answer the second question first, yes and no. According to Ellison, if you were to subject yourself to Buckaroo Banzai, "you might have to go back to see it three or four times more in an effort to unravel a storyline in which mindlessness reaches deification and in an effort to decode the garbled soundtrack." Now, while I concede that the story can be hard to follow the first time through, I don't attribute this to mindlessness, nor do I find it to be such an overwhelming obstacle to enjoying the film. Also, I didn't see it in a theater, so maybe it was difficult to make out some of the dialogue (he refers to an "inaudible sound mix") under those conditions. On video, though, you have the option to rewind if you think you've missed something important (or, thanks to DVD, all you have to do is turn the subtitling on). I think what really sticks in his craw, though, is his assertion that the filmmakers ripped off Doc Savage and his crew, the "Fabulous Five," and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories -- and if there's one thing Ellison can't abide it's plagiarism. (Case in point: Not long after this review was published, he got into an imbroglio over The Terminator, which he believed owed more than a little to his Outer Limits episodes "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand." He eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and retroactively received credit on the film.) That's not the sort of thing that would keep the average moviegoer away, though, which leaves us with...

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is confusing! Well, yes. Guilty as charged, your honor. This is, after all, a film that opens with its lead character (played to deadpan perfection by Peter Weller) engaged in a delicate brain operation (and bantering with fellow neurosurgeon Jeff Goldblum) at the same time he's supposed to be testing a jet car, which the military has a great amount of interest in. Before Buckaroo arrives at the test site we're introduced to the other members of his team -- Perfect Tommy (Lewis Smith), Reno Nevada (Pepe Serna) and Rawhide (Clancy Brown) -- without actually being told who they are or what their connection to our hero is. We also meet Banzai's mentor, Professor Hikita (Robert Ito), who we will soon learn has a history with Buckaroo's nemesis, the mad Dr. Emilio Lizardo (a scenery-chewing John Lithgow), who is being held at the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane (which, when you get right down to it, is far from a maximum security facility). Before we get to Lizardo, though, there's the jet car test, which also doubles as a test for Buckaroo's invention the Oscillation Overthruster, which allows him to break the dimensional barrier and drive straight into a mountain. Having crossed into the eighth dimension, Buckaroo then drives through some flashy special effects (which still look okay today because who really knows what the eight dimension looks like?) and out the other side of the mountain, whereupon he is hailed as a hero and a visionary. About the only person who doesn't think he's the bee's knees is Dr. Lizardo, who had his own brush with inter-dimensional travel in 1938 (with a young Professor Hikita in attendance). That trip didn't go quite so smoothly, though, since Lizardo wound up being possessed by Lord John Whorphin, leader of the rebellious Red Lectroids from Planet 10. (More on them anon.)

Having made a major scientific breakthrough, Buckaroo's next step, naturally, is to play a club date with his rock band the Hong Kong Cavaliers (Perfect Tommy, Reno, Rawhide and, on bass, Billy Vera as Blue Blaze Irregular Pinky Carruthers). Before they can even get through their first number, though, Buckaroo brings the show to a dead halt so he can talk to the audience. "Excuse me," he says, "is someone out there not having a good time?" As it turns out, there is somebody who fits that description: the teary-eyed Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), whose tale of woe moves Buckaroo to utter the film's most famous line: "Remember, no matter where you go, there you are." The audience takes this to heart, but it's cold comfort to Penny, and when Buckaroo dedicates his next song, the aptly titled piano ballad "Since I Don't Have You," to her, she tries to kill herself. This is mistaken for an assassination attempt and she is whisked off to jail at the same time Lizardo escapes from the mental hospital, killing his sarcastic orderly (the one he called a "monkey-boy") in the process.

Cut to the next morning as Buckaroo kills two birds with one stone by bailing Penny out of jail (he has a soft spot for her since she's the spitting image of his dead wife) and picking up Goldblum, who has been recruited for the team and given the nickname New Jersey (despite the fact that he's incongruously dressed in cowboy duds for their rendezvous). Their characters are useful as the audience's gateway into Buckaroo's inner circle since the Cavaliers all know each other (obviously) and everybody else has read the comic books detailing their exploits, so little time is spent on filling in their backstories. Then again, even newcomers like Penny and New Jersey are assimilated with tremendous speed, sitting in on Buckaroo's hastily arranged press conference trumpeting his fantastic new invention. This, incidentally, attracts the attention of ne'er-do-wells John Bigboote (Christopher Lloyd, who bristles whenever anyone mispronounces his name), John O'Connor (the late, great Vincent Schiavelli) and John Gomez (Dan Hedaya, who coincidentally enough went on to play Gomez Addams's shady lawyer in The Addams Family), all of whom turn out to be Red Lectroids in disguise. Luckily, Buckaroo also has his first contact with the Black Lectroids (who are in an oddly shaped spaceship in geosynchronous orbit above New Jersey [the state, not the surgeon]) who give him the ability to see through their disguises, revealing their hideous reptilian countenances. From there the story goes kind of haywire (no, really?) and, well, if I were to try to synopsize the rest of it we'd be here all day.

Suffice it to say, the Cavaliers regroup at Buckaroo's compound (where we find out he has groupies just like any other celebrity) and put the pieces together vis-à-vis the Red Lectroids and their connection with Dr. Lizardo and Orson Welles. When it appears the Red Lectroids have achieved their objective -- the theft of the Oscillation Overthruster -- and the world is on the brink of disaster, a call is put in to the president (Ronald Lacey, whose character is presumably named after actor Richard Widmark), who's for the most part indisposed but has the presence of mind to place the fate of the world in Buckaroo's hands. This means a direct assault on the Red Lectroids' business front, a military contractor named Yoyodyne Industries, and the recovery of both the Overthruster and Penny, who has fallen into their evil clutches (and has been revealed to be Buckaroo's dead wife's long-lost twin sister). Tagging along is secretary of defense Matt Clark, who gets them past security and, prefiguring Garry Shandling's role in Iron Man 2 by two and a half decades, wants to lay claim to the Overthruster in the name of national security.

If the action flags a little during the assault on Yoyodyne, it's only because things have moved at such a breakneck pace up to that point. Plus, it's the third major sequence with characters running around with guns (after the chaotic press conference and a Red Lectroid invasion of the Banzai compound), so just because it's happening in a new location, that doesn't make it any more exciting. What saves it are the background details (an alarm system that, when sounded, says "There are monkey-boys in the facility"; a sign on a door that reads "NOBUDY CUMZ IN HERE -- SEKRIT") and the fact that their opponents have names like John Ya Ya and John Small Berries. (It seems all Lectroids -- Red and Black, male and female -- are named John. The main difference between them is the good ones are disguised as Rastafarians and speak with Jamaican accents.)

In the end, the day is saved when Buckaroo shoots Dr. Lizardo's jerry-rigged craft out of the sky and miraculously revives Penny, who suffered mightily (and disgustingly) at the hands of the Red Lectroids. This happy ending is undercut somewhat by the Black Lectroid in the sky watching over them, who says, "So what? Big deal." And the title cards that follow, telling audiences to "WATCH FOR THE NEXT ADVENTURE OF BUCKAROO BANZAI -- BUCKAROO BANZAI AGAINST THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE," are undercut by the fact that said sequel never did get made (in much the same way that Doctor Detroit II: The Wrath of Mom failed to materialize). Still, the closing credit sequence, in which all of the good guys (even those who have fallen in the line of duty) come together and march in lockstep to the accompaniment of Michael Boddicker's excellent theme song, is a sight that would please any Blue Blaze Irregular. And even further screen adventures are out of the question, in recent years writer Earl Mac Rauch has revived the character in a comic book series, allowing him to burn off some of the stories he's been dying to tell for the past few decades. Who knows? Some day he might even get around to explaining what the deal with the watermelon is.

Watch the Magic Silver Punkin: A Newcomer's Guide to Coping with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

Hello, friends. Perhaps, like me, you have been avoiding the motion picture The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension since its release in 1984 because you have heard descriptions of the film by its fans, and in their enthusiasm they have inadvertently made it sound incomprehensible and unwatchable. Believe me, I know the feeling. I'm writing this article the very same weekend that ABC is airing the series finale of Lost, and I have made a point of dodging that series since my one attempt at watching an episode ended in total defeat. I tuned in one night to see what the fuss was about, and I noted that the network was running a little stock ticker at the bottom of the screen with various bits of background trivia about the series. My eyes darted back and forth between the scene being played and the little stock ticker, and I gave up after only a few minutes and took refuge in an infomercial on another channel. I wanted entertainment, not homework. When Craig said we were watching Buckaroo Banzai for this project, I felt that same sense of impending doom as I had experienced in approaching Lost. "Oh, God," I thought, "I'm not prepared! I haven't read the FAQ! I'm not on the fan club mailing list! I'll be totally adrift!" Fortunately, readers, I had a spiritual guide of sorts on the perilous journey through Banzai territory: Mr. Andy Griffith.

I'm not sure if Andy Griffith has ever actually seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It doesn't seem like his kind of picture, though he was in Spy Hard so you never know. Nevertheless, whether he's seen it or not, Mr. Griffith did indirectly assist me in understanding this potentially-vexing film.

Back in 1953, you see, "Deacon Andy Griffith" made a live comedy recording entitled "What It Was Was Football." This record, Griffith's variation on an ancient Vaudeville routine, is a monologue in which he plays the part of a naive and unworldly country preacher who stumbles upon a college football game and tries to make sense of what he sees, having never before witnessed such a contest. His guesses, though incorrect, are inspired. He identifies the referees as convicts, the field as a "pretty little green cow pasture," and the football itself as a pumpkin (or "punkin," in the Deacon's twangy vernacular). Once the coin toss (or "odd-manning") is over, Griffith describes the action thusly:

Well, after a while, I seen what it was that they was odd-manning for. It was that both bunches full of them men wanted this funny lookin' little punkin to play with. They did! And I know, friends, that they couldn't eat it because they kicked it the whole evenin' and it never busted. But, anyhow, what I was a-tellin' was, that both bunches full wanted that thing. And one bunch got it and it made the other bunch just as mad as they could be! And friends, I seen that evenin' the awfulest fight that I ever have seen in my life! I did! They would run at one another and kick one another and throw one another down and stomp on one another and griiiiiind their feet in one another and I don't know what-all, and just as fast as one of 'em would get hurt, they'd tote him off and run another one on!

While watching Buckaroo Banzai, I felt like Griffith's preacher must have felt at that football game. Here is a movie so wonderfully and terribly overstuffed with supporting characters, complicated exposition, and various visual distractions -- all jostling for 103 frantic minutes of screen time -- that it can be a challenge for the first-time viewer, like myself, to discern what the central plot actually is. It actually helped me to think of Buckaroo Banzai as sort of a football game, even though my understanding of football is sketchy at best. I can say that I understand the average football game and the plot of Buckaroo Banzai about equally. The finer points of both are lost on me, and the enthusiastic musings of hardcore Banzai fans (and they are legion) remain as mysterious to me as whatever the hell John Madden is saying. But I think I have a grasp on the basics of each. Let's see here. In this movie, the home team is the Hong Kong Cavaliers, and they are led onto the field of play by their lanky, steely-eyed quarterback, Mr. Buckaroo Banzai himself. Our hated rivals are the Red Lectroids, the visiting squad from Planet 10, led by the most unsportsmanlike Dr. Lizardo. Like the players in Griffith's monologue, the competitors in this film are squabbling for a "punkin to play with," but in this case the "punkin" is a gizmo called the Oscillation Overthruster, and with it you can travel to that hallowed end zone called the 8th Dimension. Eventually, after a hard-fought game, our plucky hometown boys ("hometown" meaning "Earth") are able to defeat the Red Lectroids in sudden death overtime. As Mr. Clark mentioned, the victorious Hong Kong Cavaliers were supposed to go on to meet the World Crime League in the finals, but then the whole sport went bankrupt. I suppose in retrospect that Buckaroo Banzai was the cinematic equivalent of the XFL. Except, of course, that people still remember Buckaroo Banzai fondly.

Having been forced to try and fail at a variety of athletics during my youth, I have never forgotten one bit of coaching advice common to every last sport: "Keep your eye on the ball." The ball, as I have mentioned, is a marvelous doo-dad called the Oscillation Overthruster. That name is pure Grade A science-fiction gibberish: official-sounding yet meaningless, eight mellifluous syllables which come tripping easily off the tongue. More importantly, it's the perfect MacGuffin: attractive, easily portable, and so powerful as to essentially be magical. I have dealt with this business of MacGuffins twice before in this project: once to describe the nuclear missile in Spies Like Us and again to describe the sports almanac in Back to the Future Part II. But the Oscillation Overthruster leaves those trinkets in the dust. It belongs, I daresay, in the MacGuffin Hall of Fame, alongside the ruby slippers, the Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca's letters of transit. In fact, the experience of watching Buckaroo Banzai sent me scrambling back to Francois Truffaut's famous interview with Alfred Hitchcock, wherein the Master of Suspense explained the concept of the MacGuffin:

"Well, it's the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers all the spies are after... It doesn't matter what it is, and the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it's beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture, the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters."

[Side Note: Upon reading this interview, I realized I'd been spelling "MacGuffin" incorrectly in the past by leaving out the "a." I apologize to the readers for any confusion.]

My advice to bewildered first-time viewers of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is to keep reminding yourself of the Oscillation Overthruster and its importance to the characters. Essentially: the good guys have it, the bad guys want it, and an awful struggle ensues. For villainous Dr. Lizardo, portrayed as a caricature of Mussolini by a sneering, preening John Lithgow, the 'thruster is the letter of transit which will get him the heck out of his own personal Casablanca (our dimension). For Penny Priddy, the film's sort-of love interest portrayed by a game Ellen Barkin, the 'thruster is like a ruby slipper, i.e. something she ends up possessing and cannot cede to the villains. There's a whole phase of Buckaroo Banzai which plays out pretty much like that section of The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy is locked up in the castle of the Wicked Witch, and her traveling companions have to retrieve her. (In his essay on Oz, Salman Rushdie called that part of the movie the "princess rescue story.") Extending this metaphor, if Barkin is Dorothy and the 'thruster is a ruby slipper, then Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems (the baddies' dank hangout) becomes the castle, Lithgow the Wicked Witch, and Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, and Vincent Schiavelli his Winged Monkeys. You see? Buckaroo Banzai is already becoming easier to understand!

Beyond the complexities of the plot, Buckaroo Banzai can be a tough movie for the newcomer to warm up to. For one thing, its title character, played with almost eerie reserve by Peter Weller, is markedly different from most sci-fi/action/comedy heroes. You won't mistake him for Indiana Jones, for instance, though I'm sure the film's financial backers would have liked you to. Supposedly due to his mixed Japanese and American heritage, Buckaroo has a Western appetite for action and an Eastern sense of calm, the latter typified by his gift for coming up with Zen-like aphorisms. (The DVD helpfully provides some more Banzai koans in a subtitle track.) But above all, he's a team player. Most action movies are about the hero -- Arnold, Bruce, Sly, etc. -- getting the job done, wiping out the bad guys, retrieving the MacGuffin, and winning the heart of the pretty girl in the process. Oh, the hero can have a comic sidekick or two, but there's no doubt who's in charge. This movie, though, is more about the group effort than individual achievement. Banzai really is more like the quarterback of a team rather than a standalone hero, which is probably why the single most memorable image of this film is that famous "group march" over the end credits. I'm not sure I agree with critic Danny Peary's assessment in the book Cult Movie Stars that "Banzai is less captivating than any of his buckaroos" or that Weller "fails to deliver" with this performance. I think it's that we're not generally used to seeing someone like this as the ostensible focal point of an action/fantasy film. Not for nothing was Weller cast as the lead in Robocop, after all. His cold, robotic demeanor and stone-faced handsomeness made him ideal for that role. But Buckaroo gives us a glimpse at Weller's sensitive side as well. Probably my favorite scene in the film is that chaotic Hong Kong Cavaliers nightclub gig wherein Buckaroo serenades the weeping, mascara-drenched Penny Priddy with that lovelorn oldie, "Since I Don't Have You." (Why Buckaroo thought this song would cheer her up is beyond me.) Weller's decision to play this part so straight -- no winking to the audience -- turns out to be a considerable asset to the film in the long run, as it becomes extra-funny to hear Weller say absurd lines like, "The deuce you say!"

It's clear from the supplemental materials on the DVD that the late, highly controversial and ultimately tragic film mogul David Begelman had his doubts about Buckaroo and its unconventional hero, apparently with good reason as this film bankrupted his company, Sherwood Productions. Although trying to put the best possible spin on things and insisting that he "won more battles than [he] lost," director W.D. Richter speaks with an unmistakable residual bitterness about his battles with Begelman over such trivialities as whether Buckaroo could wear red glasses or whether he could express doubt or indecision even for a moment during a pivotal action sequence. (Richter won the first battle and lost the second.)

In fact, the entire production smacks of compromise from its title down. The working title was simply Buckaroo Banzai, but the higher-ups insisted on the longer name, possibly to better conform to the mid-1980s action/fantasy template of "campy heroic name" + "exotic-sounding locale" established by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This was, let's not forget, the fecund era of such films as Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold and The Perils of Gewndoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. In fact, this was the probably the only time in film history when producers might reasonably ask, "Can you make this title longer and more old-fashioned-sounding?" or "Is it possible to make this sound more like a dime novel from the 1930s that only old people and nerds have ever heard of?" There was, of course, a great deal excised from the film in order to get it down to that 103-minute running time. The main casualty was a subplot involving Buckaroo's long-standing rivalry with a super-villain named Hanoi Xan, who had killed both Banzai's parents and his wife. Richter insists that he voluntarily cut out this material because he wanted the finished film to have a light adventure feel and didn't want Banzai to seem "haunted." But the decision to remove this material is a big factor, in my opinion, in making the film's plot difficult to follow. And the revelation of Banzai's traumatic past might have helped explain to the audience why his demeanor is so stoic. Richter may not have wanted Banzai to be haunted, but Peter Weller occasionally seems to be playing the role based on the earlier conception of the character. In our article on Superman III, I decried the darkness and depression that now are standard in all superhero films and wished the genre would lighten up a bit occasionally, if only for the sake of variety. I still feel that way, but Buckaroo Banzai is a film that very well could have benefited from this current trend toward emotional complexity. If the film were being made today, that backstory with Hanoi Xan would all but certainly have been left in the finished film.

But the happy news is that in the era of DVD, the viewer has the choice of which Buckaroo he or she wants to see: the more lighthearted theatrical version or the weightier extended cut. I sat through both, and while I cannot say I am an expert on all things Banzai quite yet, I no longer regard the film with trepidation and existential dread. I hope that this little primer will assist others in overcoming their hesitance to watch this beloved 1984 cult classic. Friends, Buckaroo Banzai is nothing to fear. Whenever the dialogue about Red Lectroids and Black Lectroids and Blue Blaze Irregulars and such starts to get you down, just keep in mind the wise words of Deacon Andy Griffith, who concluded his football monologue with these words:

And I don't know, friends, to this day, what it was that they was a doin' down there, but I have studied about it. And I think that it's some kindly of a contest where they see which bunch full of them men can take that punkin and run from one end of that cow pasture to the other 'un without either gettin' knocked down or steppin' in somethin'.

Final tally: Weller didn't get knocked down, and Lithgow stepped in something. Also Yakov Smirnoff is in this movie, so hooray! In Soviet Russia, overthruster oscillates you! Whatta country!

Up Next: We will bring you the first of two double features with a look at the halcyon days of Touchstone Pictures, when the Walt Disney Corporation bravely and foolishly allowed its good name to be associated with the absolute filth of Miss Bette Midler.

]]> The Gardener tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.627 2010-05-17T20:10:59Z 2010-05-18T18:14:41Z Dutifully irrigating the desert landscape. (Inspired by a recent backpacking trip to the lands of the Havasupai people). Vector art (Adobe Illustrator CS5), 2010. Prints available! (Detail images after the jump)... Chris Leavens http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=1 spread_v1w.png

Dutifully irrigating the desert landscape.

(Inspired by a recent backpacking trip to the lands of the Havasupai people).

Vector art (Adobe Illustrator CS5), 2010.
Prints available!

(Detail images after the jump)

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]]> Shock Treatment, reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.626 2010-05-13T10:30:20Z 2010-06-10T21:20:41Z "It was hoped that Shock Treatment would repeat the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I think in hindsight that what you realize is that you can't create a cult. Cults happen organically. An audience finds a... Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=44
"It was hoped that Shock Treatment would repeat the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I think in hindsight that what you realize is that you can't create a cult. Cults happen organically. An audience finds a movie, embraces it, and makes it into a cult." - JOHN GOLDSTONE, producer

When a Hollywood movie is released to popular acclaim and financial success, the next step is clear: give the audience more of the same, only with the volume turned up, as soon as possible. It helps, of course, if the first movie belongs to an easily-identifiable category (comedy, action, horror) and leaves its most popular characters alive and ready for further adventures at the end. But how do you follow up an unexpected, late-blooming hit like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a bizarre, cross-genre mishmash which ends with the death of its central and most popular character, the transvestite alien mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter (played by Tim Curry)? Such was the question plaguing the executives at 20th Century Fox back in 1979 in the wake of Rocky Horror's highly unlikely reversal of fortune. British writer/actor Richard O'Brien's oddball 1972 stage musical The Rocky Horror Show had been a hit in London and Los Angeles, but an attempt to bring the show to Broadway had flopped by the time Fox's film adaptation limped into theaters in the fall of 1975. It looked like another pop culture fad had come and gone, but amazingly the movie -- about a square American couple, Brad and Janet, who undergo a night of debauchery in the Gothic castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter -- somehow became the object of intense adulation among its hardcore fans, who used the film as the center of a truly unique multimedia phenomenon. Weekly showings of RHPS incorporated live performance, audience participation, and the filmed image. Complicating matters further, as far as a sequel was concerned, the film's following was at least partially ironic: the tradition of yelling "callbacks" at the screen started as a form of heckling during the many awkward pauses in the dialogue. But, still, the demand for more Rocky was definitely there, and so O'Brien got to work on a sequel to his famous/infamous creation.

The initial result of O'Brien's labors was a screenplay called Rocky Horror Shows His Heels, conceived as a direct sequel to the first film in which Dr. Frank-N-Furter rises from the grave, Janet gives birth to his half-alien baby, and Brad reveals himself to be homosexual. This script, accompanied by a demo tape of new songs, apparently did not instill much confidence in the Fox brass, so O'Brien set about reworking the project with Jim Sharman, the director and co-writer of the original Rocky Horror film. Eventually, through a series of rewrites, Heels mutated into something called The Brad & Janet Show, which in turn became what we now know as Shock Treatment. Along the way, all three principals from the first film -- Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, and Susan Sarandon -- either became unavailable or backed out, and the entire project had to be reconceived on a much-smaller budget following an actor's guild strike. What had been planned as a location shoot in Dallas, Texas would now be filmed entirely within a British soundstage. The resulting film came out in 1981, six long years after the first, and was quickly rejected by the Rocky Horror cultists, who felt they were being manipulated by the Fox publicity machine. An attempt to show the film at New York's Waverly Theater, birthplace of the Rocky Horror cult, proved disastrous and led to a scathing editorial in the Village Voice entitled "Mock Rocky," deriding this prefabricated attempt to create another Rocky Horror. Outsiders seemingly had no interest in the film either, and it vanished into home video obscurity. And that is pretty much where Shock Treatment's reputation lies today. When the film is mentioned at all nowadays, it is used as a cautionary example of why a studio should never, ever try to intentionally create a so-called "cult" movie. The history of Shock Treatment, one would be tempted to say, has been written. Its fate is sealed. The verdict is in, and it's guilty. Right?

Well, possibly. But every defendant is entitled to the benefit of counsel, right? That's where I step in.

]]> I came to this movie in a very roundabout way. In my high school and college years (mid-to-late 1990s), I was entranced by the Rocky Horror phenomenon. I had only recently discovered the whole "cult movies" movement, mainly thanks to books like Midnight Movies, and the audience participation rituals surrounding Rocky particularly fascinated me. I attended any nearby screenings I could find, which were rare, and eagerly wrote about the film on Internet message boards. Ultimately, a CD of Rocky Horror rarities called Songs from the Vault found its way into my music collection, and through that album I was able to hear three songs from the sequel: "Denton USA," "Little Black Dress," and the title tune. In retrospect, this was the best possible introduction to the film, i.e. through its three catchiest numbers: anthemic rock tunes which I felt rivaled those of the Rocky Horror soundtrack. Around this time, I was also assembling a collection of articles and books related to Rocky Horror, and these usually included at least a paragraph or two about Shock Treatment. I was intrigued enough to actually track down the film on VHS -- luckily it was still available for rent back then -- and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, though I'd been warned it was a difficult first watch. I special ordered my own copy for my permanent collection and watched it many times, eventually becoming nearly as obsessed with Shock as I had been with Rocky. Soon, I was writing about it on Usenet and composing detailed and loving parodies and quizzes related to the film. After a few years, my fervor for all things Rocky Horror cooled, but I have never entirely lost my affection for either film and revisit both occasionally, both by watching the DVDs and listening to the soundtracks on my iPod. When Craig suggested the theme of ready-made cult movies for this project, I thought it was a good opportunity to write about this film and how it's held up nearly 30 years after its original, ignominious release.

Shock Treatment has the sad, unalterable fate being forever known as the inferior follow-up to Rocky Horror -- the Wings to Rocky's Beatles, you might say -- but I think it deserves a little better than that. In fact, I'd like to think of it as the Rocky Horror equivalent of Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak. When critic Nathan Rabin reviewed that divisive album, he called it "a bittersweet sleeper that hovers somewhere between an interesting failure and a secret success. It seems destined to be the weird little orphan that fans single out as a favorite." Those words apply themselves manifestly to Shock Treatment, a film which actually has carved out a tiny niche of die-hard fans within the larger Rocky Horror community over the years, despite the scorn of critics and widespread indifference of the population at large. Still today, there are several super-detailed Shock fan sites on the net and even rare screenings of the film with full live shows, even though Fox has not shown much interest in promoting the film in almost three decades. It was fan demand alone which brought the soundtrack to CD back in the 1990s and the film itself to DVD just a few years ago.

To be fair, the film barely feels like a proper sequel to Rocky Horror, despite the return of several cast members: O'Brien himself, plus Patricia Quinn, (Little) Nell Campbell, Charles Gray, and Jeremy Newson, whose bland Ralph Hapschatt character is promoted from cameo status to supporting player. Behind the scenes are further Rocky alums: director/co-writer Jim Sharman, composer/arranger Richard Hartley, production designer Brian Thomson, and costumer Sue Blaine. With all these graduates of the first film on board, why does Shocky -- as fans have nicknamed it -- seem so different from its big brother? For one thing, as I mentioned previously, all three of the first film's principals -- Curry, plus Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon -- are AWOL for various reasons, namely money and scheduling. (If you had told people in 1975 that Rocky Horror's sequel would feature no appearance -- or even mention -- of Dr. Frank-N-Furter but would contain a whole lot more Ralph Hapschatt, who would have believed you?)

But more importantly, the two films are going for entirely different moods. Rocky Horror is essentially a nostalgia piece: a cluttered curio shop filled with pop culture wreckage of the middle decades of the last century, particularly the horror films of the 1930s and the rock music of the 1950s. At its core, Rocky Horror takes a 1950s-type couple (Brad and Janet), exposes them to the liberation and experimentation of the 1960s, and then deposits them, bewildered, into the cynicism and disillusionment of the 1970s. And all that in one night! Shock Treatment, on the other hand, is all about this new thing called the 1980s and how Brad and Janet fare in the new decade. It came out in 1981, Ronald Reagan's first year in office and a turning point for America. The failure of the Carter presidency represented the last gasp of the Woodstock generation's idealism, and the next decade would show a return to those dubious "traditional family values" of yore and an increased emphasis on unchecked avarice and mindless materialism. Remember in our article on Spies Like Us when I said that the 1980s were sort of a second 1950s, with "Dutch" Reagan as the new "Ike" Eisenhower? Interestingly, Shock Treatment actually contains a few references to Eisenhower himself. One character, Judge Wright (Charles Gray) says of Brad and Janet: "Ike would have been proud of them." Meanwhile, newcomer Cliff De Young, taking over the role of Brad Majors, modeled his performance on Ike's straight-arrow grandson, David Eisenhower (who along with Tricky Dick's daughter Julie Nixon formed a real life Brad-and-Janet-type uber-WASP couple). In Shock Treatment, the small town of Denton, USA has been turned into a Reaganite nightmare world: a giant television studio called DTV where the like-minded, polyester-clad suburbanites in the audience frequently stand up and sing about the joys of consumerism and conformity, while the on-air personalities are grinning, insincere monsters whose megawatt smiles vanish the second the cameras are turned off. This is the world Brad and Janet now inhabit -- a sterile, shiny environment that is a far cry from the dark and dusty castle of Rocky Horror. Having been plucked from the studio audience to appear on a game show called Marriage Maze, Brad is shipped off to a mental institution where he is straitjacketed, gagged, confined to a wheelchair, and imprisoned in what looks like a giant birdcage. Janet, meanwhile, is groomed for superstardom as a singer/actress and is fed a constant supply of Judy Garland-type "happy pills" to keep her docile and out-of-it. We soon learn that these bizarre events are being orchestrated by DTV's obscenely wealthy and mysterious new sponsor, fast food kingpin Farley Flavors, as part of an elaborate revenge scheme. (Ever notice how often the fast food industry is used as shorthand for "pure corporate evil" in the movies?) And all of these plot developments are used as fodder for a series of what we would now call "reality shows," with cameras and monitors everywhere and all the characters spying on one another. In hindsight, the sub-motif of cameras and monitors in Rocky Horror provided the seed for this facet of the film. This "reality show" aspect of Shock Treatment shows just how ahead-of-the-curve Richard O'Brien was. With this film, he was satirizing a genre which doesn't even exist yet!

Just as the early rock & roll provided a counterpoint to the enforced niceness of the 1950s, the punk and New Wave movements did what they could to undermine the straight-laced soullessness of Reagan's America. Appropriately, much of the music in Shock Treatment has a vaguely New Wave sound (the movement is even name-checked in the galloping title song), and there's even a sort-of-punk band here, Oscar Drill and the Bits, who perform a great number called "Breaking Out," which sounds like 1981's answer to Green Day. Interestingly, one recurring motif of punk music from the Ramones (who sang "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment") to Suicidal Tendencies (of "Institutionalized" fame), is a paranoid mistrust of the entire mental health industry, and that's one of the big motifs of this film as well. The punk view of the mental health industry, possibly supported by movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is that mental health is just The Man's way of dealing with rebels and malcontents, using insidious drugs and surgeries to make them cooperate and behave. Here, the running joke is that passive, utterly harmless Brad -- who seems to have suffered a stroke since Rocky Horror -- is treated like Jack Nicholson's rebellious McMurphy from Cuckoo's Nest. Weirdly, though, he does not undergo the title treatment, possibly because the institution to which he has been committed, Dentonvale, is run by "character actors" (O'Brien and Quinn) posing as real doctors.

In truth, the mental health theme in Shock Treatment is rather muddled and inconclusive, and this points to the film's structural weakness. Rocky Horror had a very definite template from which to work, that of the traditional "spooky old house"-type horror movie, and this helps guide the audience along even as the plot threatens to lapse into incoherence. Shock, however, does not have this advantage, and its defiance of traditional genres makes it a tough sell to newcomers. If anything, it's a satire -- and a somewhat snide and mean-spirited one at that -- of American values as seen from a British perspective. I've been re-watching Monty Python's Flying Circus recently, and it's amazing how consistent the British satirical view of America is. To them, we're fast-talking phonies with pasted-on smiles and aggressive handshakes, and it seems like we're always selling something or other. This film frequently plays like it was made by people who had heard third-hand descriptions of America but never actually been there themselves. The script, as I said, was hastily rewritten to take place entirely within a soundstage, and I don't think O'Brien and crew had quite worked out all the kinks in this idea. The studio audience are shown arriving at the beginning, for instance, but then are shown to spend all day and all night there as well, actually sleeping in their seats. Furthermore, the bad guys are always scheming in secrecy amongst themselves, but since there are cameras and monitors everywhere -- and the rooms have no ceilings anyway -- it's far too easy for the heroes to unravel the various conspiracies. And frankly, the closed-in, utterly artificial environment of DTV becomes tedious over the course of an entire film. All the walls in this place are padded like those of a "rubber room" in a mental ward, the floors are all polished to a high shine, and the lighting is of the bright, industrial variety. Given that many of the characters wear medical-type uniforms throughout the film, Shock Treatment has a cold oppressiveness that makes one long for the cluttered, cobwebbed look of Rocky Horror, which seemed to be taking place in a derelict cinema. The bright, primary colors of Shock Treatment's costumes and sets -- especially the forced red-white-and-blue motif (subtle, right?) -- also began to irritate my eyes after a while.

There are further obstacles for the viewer to overcome. While the movie is a satire of the television industry and takes place entirely within a TV studio, director Sharman aims his camera far too often at actual television monitors so we get that tapestry-like look with horizontal lines running through the picture. While re-watching the film for this project, that technique soon wore on my nerves. The "Dentonvale" scenes are intended as soap opera parodies, but the tinny organ music and voice-of-god narrator make these scenes feel more like a Muppet Show skit rather than a real soap. Furthermore, too many scenes end with characters making cryptic pronouncements and then either staring at another character or staring off into space. (Judge Wright and Farley Flavors are particularly guilty of this.) I guess it's another way of parodying soap operas, which often employ "scene-ending stares," but I got tired of it over the course of an hour and a half. Overall, the film has a charisma vacuum left by the absence of Tim Curry. Through the various rewrites, the Frank-N-Furter character was eventually supplanted by Farley Flavors, who like Brad is played by Cliff De Young, a capable singer and actor but not a terribly exciting screen presence. De Young modeled his portrayal of Farley Flavors on Jack Nicholson and does a fairly good impression of him, but perhaps only an actor of Nicholson's caliber could have made us truly care about this rather underwritten, though crucial, character. Meanwhile, Nell Campbell -- often a delightful presence in campy, offbeat films -- seems slightly underused in her role as cheerful, underwear-flaunting Nurse Ansalong. She is paired up here with British alternative comedian Rik Mayall, whose gifts for verbal and physical comedy are completely squandered, since his hospital-orderly character is mostly seen performing menial tasks in the backgrounds of scenes. It is amusing to think that a year before The Young Ones, Rik Mayall was spending his time learning his steps to numbers like "Look What I Did to My Id."

But for all the shortcomings of Shock Treatment, there is much to take delight in, too. I discovered this film around the same time as Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, and I developed an intense, long-lasting crush on Jessica Harper because of those movies. With her vaguely Karen Carpenter-esque singing voice and cartoon-chipmunk-cute looks, Jessica should have become a major star with dozens of hit films and maybe a long-lasting sitcom on her IMDb page. But instead of headlining major blockbusters, she usually found herself in oddball pictures like this one, gaining the adulation of her fans but probably not much money, and ultimately wound up as a performer of children's music. Sort of a shame, really, but in the long run it's "our" gain and "their" loss, as Jessica's fans can still enjoy her appearances in diverse and off-the-wall films like Inserts, Pennies From Heaven, Suspiria and Stardust Memories, and we don't have to suffer through lame, formulaic romantic comedies, which is probably what Hollywood would've given her had she become a bigger star. Harper's singing and acting contribute enormously to Shock Treatment, and she even manages to sell two of the film's less-catchy, somewhat dour numbers, "Looking For Trade" and "In My Own Way." Speaking of those songs, the conventional wisdom on Shocky is that its soundtrack is not up to par with the first film. But I maintain that the songs tend to grow on you with time, much as the film itself does. Those three tunes included on Songs from the Vaults are perhaps the film's catchiest and most-obvious would-be hits -- and hence provide the best "gateway" to enjoying the overall film -- but there are other musical gems in this film as well. The song "Lullaby," while not serving much of a thematic or plot purpose in the film, is nevertheless a gorgeous midtempo rock number. I've already praised the terrific punk raver, "Breaking Out," which absolutely deserves to be heard outside the context of this film. And then there's the film's most startling number, "Thank God I'm a Man," sung by Janet's super-conservative father, Harry, who dons an army helmet and golf clothes while he "mows" his fake Astroturf lawn. The song, a litany of proudly misogynistic and homophobic beliefs, is in some ways the Shock Treatment answer to "Sweet Transvestite." Like "Transvestite," "Thank God" gives sort of a weather report on the sexual climate of the day.

Boy did things change between 1975 and 1981!

When I suggested the theme for May, I must confess I had an inkling of which "Cult on Arrival" film Joe would choose for us. I figured, as a longstanding Rocky-ologist, he wouldn't be able to resist the siren call of that film's much-maligned sequel, Shock Treatment, and happily I was proved right. I say "happily" because until now I've only ever seen the film once and it wasn't under the most ideal conditions. For one thing, it was a second-generation VHS copy (probably dubbed from a rental), so the sound was hissy and the picture cropped. For another, I watched it in the company of a friend who is near and dear to me, but we were over his apartment and his son (who was very young at time) was constantly trying to get our attention, which was more than a little distracting. So while I was able to say that I had seen the film, it didn't feel like I had gotten the full Shock Treatment, well, treatment.

Of course, I had had a similar experience with The Rocky Horror Picture Show itself, starting in high school when a group of friends rented it from the video store to see what all the fuss was about. (This was in 1990 when, in celebration of its 15th anniversary, the film was given its first, long-delayed video release.) Unsurprisingly, the experience was somewhat underwhelming since none of us knew anything of the film's history or what to do or say at any given moment, which made the whole thing seem rather pointless. I changed my tune when I got to college and, early in my sophomore year, went to an outdoor screening on campus with a number of Rocky Horror veterans in attendance who were able to walk us through some of the audience participation antics and lobbed comments at the screen like the pros they were. They also encouraged us to come to the movie theater where they had their weekly screenings, but I wasn't ready for that kind of a commitment. As a matter of fact, it was another few years before I had my first full-fledged Rocky Horror-in-a-packed-theater-with-live-cast-miming-in-front-of-the-screen experience (at the invitation of the same friend who later showed me Shock Treatment) and I determined that once was enough. Sure, I had a good time, but I recognized that Rocky Horror was not something I needed to dedicate my life to.

Since then, I've read a great deal about it in various cult and midnight movie books, and learned all about its history from Rocky Horror: From Concept to Cult, which was published in 2002, but didn't watch the film itself again until just recently, in preparation for this article. If I was going to judge Shock Treatment on the basis of its attempt to become an overnight cult movie, it only made sense for me to reacquaint myself with the cult phenomenon it failed to replicate. Seeing the films back-to-back was instructive, especially since I came full circle with Rocky Horror, borrowing it from the library (on DVD this time) so I could watch it in the comfort of my own home. Happily, having spent the past two decades familiarizing myself with the kinds of movies Richard O'Brien rapturously sings about in "Science Fiction/Double Feature," I found I was able to appreciate the film on its own merits quite apart from the cult trappings that grew up around it. This is largely due to the combination of O'Brien's masterful book and lyrics, which affectionately sent up and fulfilled the requirements of the genre in equal measure, director Jim Sharman's translation of the play into a cinematic tour de force (aided in no small part by director of photography Peter Suschitzky, who shot films for Peter Watkins, John Boorman and Ken Russell, among others, before becoming David Cronenberg's cinematographer of choice starting with Dead Ringers), and Tim Curry's indelible performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. His total commitment to the role elevates the material in ways that can't be denied and his decision not to return for the follow-up -- even as a different character -- was a blow from which Shock Treatment never really recovered.

As Joe has said, Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon likewise declined to reprise their roles as Brad and Janet, which left Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper to fill their shoes -- not an easy task under any circumstances. De Young doesn't really get a chance to put his own stamp on Brad Majors since that character is sidelined fairly early on and spends most of the movie bound and gagged to boot, but Harper steps up to the plate and takes ownership of Janet, starting with the way she belts out her songs. I can't imagine Sarandon, whose only solo number in Rocky Horror is "Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me," being able to carry the songs in Shock Treatment the way Harper does. She even manages to sell her half of "Bitchin' in the Kitchen," which is the sort of song that encourages me to roll my eyes since De Young begins it by addressing a blender. Sure, as it develops it becomes clear that it's a song about rampant materialism, but Talking Heads tackled the subject with much better results with "Love for Sale" from their 1986 album and film True Stories (which, unlike Shock Treatment, was actually shot on location in Texas).

For his part, De Young makes more of an impression as fast food king Farley Flavors, who watches over the town of Denton (and its attendant television station, DTV) like a cross between the Wizard of Oz and Ted Turner, waiting for his moment to swoop down and claim his Jane(t). In the meantime, though, he uses his powers as DTV's primary sponsor to pry Brad and Janet apart (with the help of Marriage Maze host Barry Humphries, better known to the world as Dame Edge Everage) and keep them apart (with the help of Dentonvale's resident mental health specialists Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn, again playing at being incestuous siblings). He even enlists Janet's previously unseen parents (Darlene Johnson and Manning Redwood) and sets them up in Happy Homes so they can be monitored while they attempt to talk her into leaving Brad for good. "Thank God he was born an orphan," Redwood deadpans. "It would have killed his parents." Meanwhile, there's a fair bit of behind-the-scenes intrigue as Betty Hapschatt's public affairs show Denton Dossier is unceremoniously canceled to make way for Good Morning Denton, hosted by her philandering husband Ralph (Jeremy Newson, the only Rocky Horror actor reprising his role from the first film), who has since taken up his co-host, Macy Struthers (Wendy Raeback). For her part, Betty (Ruby Wax) teams up with Charles Gray's Judge Wright to get to the bottom of things, but I kind of wish the film had concentrated more on a few central characters rather than promoting so many others to supporting player status. In a way, Shock Treatment is kind of like a latter-day Christopher Guest film in this respect. Sure, it's great that Guest has so many funny people on his Rolodex, but he shouldn't feel obligated to put every single one of them in every single one of his films.

Near the end of the film, with his goal of usurping Brad in Janet's life almost within reach, Farley Flavors describes her thusly: "Innocence, decency, and the illusion of a happy ending." In a lot of ways, this could sum up Shock Treatment itself, since its happy ending is decidedly ambiguous. Sure, Brad, Janet, Betty Hapschatt and Judge Wright (along with Oscar Drill and the Bits) have managed to escape the confines of Denton's antiseptic studio, but will they remember how to act without the benefit of a viewing audience? I guess we'll never know since Shock Treatment's failure as a midnight movie attraction (which was the only way Fox promoted it) precluded any chance of a third film in the series. Still, it managed to secure a DVD release in time for its 25th anniversary, which may or may not help to raise its profile. At the very least, it's a lot easier to see now.

Up next: "Cult on Arrival" month concludes with a trek across the eighth dimension with a world-renowned brain surgeon, rocket scientist and bandleader all in one smoking package.

]]> The Muppets Take Manhattan, reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.625 2010-04-22T10:45:07Z 2010-04-22T11:09:51Z When we first started throwing out potential movie titles for this series, one of Joe's suggestions was The Great Muppet Caper, which would have made for a great case study, but I decided that I'd rather tackle the Muppets'... Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=45
When we first started throwing out potential movie titles for this series, one of Joe's suggestions was The Great Muppet Caper, which would have made for a great case study, but I decided that I'd rather tackle the Muppets' third cinematic outing, 1984's The Muppets Take Manhattan, since it represented something of an end of an era. It was also, for whatever reason, the only one of the three that I didn't see in theaters. (I guess I thought I had outgrown them or something, because I didn't lobby to see it the way I did with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the same year.) As for the first two, I have to take my mother's word for it that I was taken to see The Muppet Movie at the tender age of five (going on six) because I have no clear recollection of it, but I have no such problem with The Great Muppet Caper. In fact, one of my earliest memories of going to the movies was the mob scene at a kiddie matinee of that film in the summer of 1981. But even that didn't make as much of an impression on me as seeing the melting faces at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released just two weeks earlier. As I recall, my mother was beside herself when that scene came up, but I thought it was just dandy (which probably explains why I was chomping at the bit to see Temple of Doom three years later).

Looking back on it now, it's hard to believe how much I was at the mercy of my parents when it came to going to the movies, yet that clearly was the case. In general, the Clarks went as a family unit to all the big "event" films like E.T., Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which -- along with the Superman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future series -- made up the bulk of our movie-going diet. If there were children's films to be seen, though, our father opted out of them, which was how he managed to escape the ravages of Annie, Supergirl, The Goonies, Howard the Duck or anything that was even vaguely animated. (Not that there were many animated films of note in the early '80s. I don't even think we saw The Fox and the Hound.) That policy also extended to the Muppet movies, which may explain why my mother decided to give The Muppets Takes Manhattan a pass. Having run the gauntlet on The Great Muppet Caper, she may have simply declined to do so again.

As a result, I didn't see The Muppets Take Manhattan (hereafter TMTM) until about a decade later when I was in college and experienced a resurgence of interest in the work of Jim Henson. The main catalyst for this was a 1994 PBS documentary called The World of Jim Henson, which -- in tandem with the book Jim Henson: The Works -- The Art, the Magic, the Imagination by Christopher Finch -- opened my eyes up to the man's artistry in a way that was entirely unexpected. Both were filled with detailed accounts of his career before the creation of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show (another mainstay of my youth) and his attempts to branch out into more adult fare like his 1965 short Time Piece (which was nominated for an Academy Award for best live-action short feature) and an experimental TV film from 1969 called The Cube. Then there were later efforts like the ill-fitting "Dregs and Vestiges" sketches from the first season of Saturday Night Live and 1982's The Dark Crystal, which was such an ambitious undertaking that Henson (who had helmed The Great Muppet Caper by himself) co-directed it with Frank Oz. Eager to build on its success with a project all his own, he decided to turn the reins of TMTM entirely over to Oz, who even took a screenplay credit on what was to be Henson's last big-screen outing with his signature characters.

]]> The film starts on an aerial shot of the Manhattan skyline and a relatively sedate opening credit sequence (at least compared to the one in The Great Muppet Caper). Through a series of dissolves, it works its way out into the hinterlands, landing in upstate New York at the fictional Danhurst College, which is played by Poughkeepsie's own Vassar College. There the student body is bearing witness to the senior variety show, "Manhattan Melodies," which has been written by Kermit the Frog and stars Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Scooter, Gonzo and Camilla the Chicken, with musical accompaniment by Rowlf the Dog and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. We only get to see the closing number -- entitled, appropriately enough, "Together Again," since audiences hadn't seen anything new out of the Muppets since 1981 -- which the college crowd goes gaga over, and the assumption is that the company will be taking the show to Broadway, which Kermit hadn't really considered (for one thing, he thinks the script still needs some work) but the others convince him to give it a whirl.

Unlike The Muppet Movie, which charts Kermit's arduous journey from his home in the swamp to Hollywood, California (picking up the other characters along the way), TMTM deposits the gang in downtown New York in the very next shot. This allows the film to jump right into the business of following Kermit and company as they shop their show around to all of the Broadway producers they can find, eagerly singing and dancing for whomever will answer the door. They nearly strike paydirt with their first contact, a smooth operator played by Dabney Coleman, who overhears the enthusiastic number they're doing for his receptionist. ("What's going on out there?" he asks over the intercom. "Just a frog with a musical," she replies.) To their chagrin, however, he seems fixated on shootings (what would a trip to New York be without them?) and, worse yet, asks for a hefty outlay of money up front. Finally he's revealed to be a fraud and, when the cops show up to arrest him, he takes Camilla hostage. (Coleman: "Get back or the chicken gets it!" Cop: "That's a threat?") Animal saves the day, but the gang has to go right back to pounding the pavement, and as the months pass they endure a series of rejections set to Dr. Teeth's "You Can't Take No for an Answer," which gets my vote for the best song in the film, but then again I'm a sucker for anything involving Dr. Teeth.

Thoroughly demoralized and down to their last few dollars (the gang has been renting lockers at the bus station to save money), our heroes appear to be on the verge of giving up and Kermit, who is at the end of his rope, has a blow-up much like Steve Buscemi's at the end of the first part of Living in Oblivion (albeit without the copious profanity). Out of desperation more than anything else, he ushers them into a nearby restaurant with the intention of ordering food for all of them, which he plans to work off. The owner, a seemingly gruff man of Greek extraction named Pete (Louis Zorich), senses that he's down on his luck and offers this sage advice:

Hey, I tell you what is. Big city. Hmm? Live. Work. Huh? But, not city open. Only peoples. Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, uh? Is peoples. Is dancing. Is music. Is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples, okay?

Remarkably, this fails to inspire Kermit, but he does strike up a friendship with Pete's daughter Jenny (Juliana Donald), which is as innocent as can be but still stokes Miss Piggy's ever-present jealousy. (Kermit's exchange with Jenny contains one of my favorite lines in the whole film after they introduce themselves and Kermit waits a beat before declaring, "I'm a frog.") The gang, meanwhile, has decided that they can't be a burden on Kermit anymore and, to the tune of "It's Time for Saying Goodbye," take their leave of the city that apparently has no use for an upbeat musical starring frogs and pigs and bears and chickens and whatevers.

Kermit stays on, though, determined to sell the show and bring his friends back. To do this, he concocts a plan that involves dressing up like a Hollywood big shot and schmoozing his way into the office of agent John Landis (apparently returning the favor to Frank Oz since he cast Oz in key supporting roles in The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London), who is largely unimpressed. When he reports back to Jenny, we discover that Miss Piggy has stayed in town and is spying on them from afar -- and like most women in New York is not immune to being hit on by boorish construction workers. She then returns to the department store where she works the perfume counter with Joan Rivers, who gets the single most annoying celebrity cameo I've ever seen in a Muppet movie. (When she decides to give Miss Piggy a makeover to cheer her up, she goes more than a little nutzoid with the makeup.)

Meanwhile, Kermit has started to get mail from the gang, who all try to make their situations (Scooter is working at a movie house in Cleveland that's showing Attack of the Killer Fish in 3-D; Fozzie is attempting to hibernate with other bears in Maine -- "How they do they do it?" he asks, bewildered; Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem are the house band at a bingo hall in Pittsburgh) sound better than they really are. Then he embarks on the second part of his plan, which involves dressing up again and initiating a whispering campaign at Sardi's with the help of the rats that work at Pete's restaurant. Unfortunately, Liza Minnelli objects to her portrait being replaced and the rats cause a panic, leading to Kermit's expulsion and, he believes, the end of his dream. This is followed by his discovery that Miss Piggy is still in town when she tails him to the park and catches him in the act of giving Jenny the dreaded huggies. Before she can confront them, though, she has to deal with a thief who snatches her purse and borrows a pair of roller skates from Gregory Hines in order to run him down. (When Hines catches up with her to reclaim his skates and finds her having it out with Kermit over his supposed infidelity, he gets the movie's fourth- or fifth-funniest line: "You gave Jenny the huggies?") Naturally Kermit and Miss Piggy make up and take a romantic carriage ride together, which leads to the movie's most famous sequence as Miss Piggy imagines what it would have been like if she and Kermit had known each other as toddlers. Or babies, even. But who would want to watch a musical number (set to the insanely catchy "I'm Gonna Always Love You"), let alone an animated TV show starring the Muppets as babies? Only the millions of children who watched Jim Henson's Muppet Babies (a title that lent itself to countless Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffs) from 1984 to 1992, that's who.

Back at the restaurant, the ever-flexible Pete gives Miss Piggy a job as a waitress, which she shows her suitability for by blowing off her first customer, Brooke Shields. (For his part, Rizzo the Rat is bold enough to ask her if she believes in inter-species dating, which is about as racy as the Muppets ever got on Henson's watch.) With the mail comes word from Gonzo, who's working as a daredevil at a water park in Michigan, and Rowlf, who's the desk clerk at a kennel in Delaware (where he has to deal with snooty customers like James Coco), as well as a legitimate offer to put Kermit's show on Broadway. The one problem is on his way back from meeting the producer Kermit is hit by a cab and gets amnesia, which somehow leads doctor Linda Lavin to believe that he is Mr. Enrico Tortellini of Passaic, New Jersey. Not very likely since he doesn't feel Italian, but Kermit does fall in with a trio of unimaginative frogs (named Bill, Gil and Jill) whose marketing firm, Mad Ave. Advertising, is having trouble coming up with a good slogan for their one account, Ocean Breeze soap. ("It's just like taking an ocean cruise only there's no boat and you don't actually go anywhere" clearly isn't cutting it.) Kermit's novel concept -- simply stating what a product does -- is a sensation and he dubs himself "Phil" to fit in with his amphibious compatriots. Meanwhile, everyone converges on Pete's restaurant and the search is on to find Kermit before opening night, which is a mere two weeks away.

Not to ruin the suspense or anything, but Kermit is found, his amnesia is cured, the show does go on, and he and Miss Piggy do tie the knot in the lavish closing number, which is witnessed by every character from both The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. Then, in an echo of The Muppet Movie, which ended with Animal telling the audience to "go home" (prefiguring Ferris Bueller and Tracey Ullman by close to a decade), the excitable drummer closes the film with a series of "bye-byes" followed by a hearty "hasta luego." One can easily imagine that both Frank Oz, who played Animal, and Jim Henson were both eager to move to other things (Henson already had Labyrinth in the works and Oz's next project was the film adaptation of the Broadway show Little Shop of Horrors).

Tellingly, the next time the Muppets appeared on the big screen was in 1992's A Muppet Christmas Carol, which was two years after Henson's death, and was the first Muppet film not to be based on an original script. It was also a film that I didn't see for many years, believing that it somehow violated the spirit of what Jim Henson's creations were all about. In fact, it wasn't until Muppets from Space came out in 1999 that I felt the company that he founded (and which continued to crank out Muppet-related projects at an alarming rate) had made a worthy follow-up to TMTM. Along with the regrettably short-lived TV series Muppets Tonight, Muppets from Space showed that the best way to handle the characters was to treat them as characters in their own right, not as actors filling roles in pre-existing stories like A Christmas Carol or Treasure Island. If only somebody had told them that before they tackled 2002's It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (a woefully dispiriting riff on It's a Wonderful Life) or The Muppets' Wizard of Oz in 2005 (which I couldn't even bring myself to watch), that could have saved a great deal of heartache all around.

In retrospect, The Muppets Take Manhattan feels like the last gasp of classic Muppetdom. By the time the movie was released in the summer of 1984, the famous puppet troupe's syndicated TV series had been off the air three years, and there were no further Muppet feature films during the lifetime of Jim Henson, who died in 1990. During the last years of Henson's life, both he and and his first lieutenant, Frank Oz, had moved on other TV and film projects, leaving the animated Saturday morning series Jim Henson's Muppet Babies (itself a spin-off from TMTM) and the unstoppable Sesame Street as the major placeholders of the Muppet legacy in the late 1980s. Ironically, Henson's death seemed to be the catalyst for a Muppet revival, and a new series of films began in 1992 with The Muppet Christmas Carol, this time with Henson's son Brian at the helm. Unfortunately, that was also the same year another prominent Muppeteer, Richard Hunt (Statler, Janice, Scooter) passed away. In recent years, Frank Oz has concentrated on his live-action, non-puppet-related directing career and has intentionally distanced himself from his Muppet legacy. The roles once played by Henson, Oz, and Hunt have been assigned to other actors with varying degrees of success. At the very end of this film, as Craig mentioned, Frank Oz can be heard (as Animal) saying, "Bye bye! Hasta luego!" and it's surprisingly poignant. Maybe they knew somehow this was it.

So all that leaves The Muppets Take Manhattan as the Muppet equivalent of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Whether it was intended as such or not, the film is the original Muppet franchise's final, big, hail-hail-the-gang's-all-here, enjoy-it-while-it-lasts, motion picture spectacular. Returning to the film 26 years later, I found it to be a largely enjoyable and satisfying sendoff for some familiar childhood friends, especially Kermit. It's tough to say whether the film seems dated today because it probably seemed intentionally dated when it was brand new. The basic plotline of The Muppets Take Manhattan -- in which the Muppets encounter various setbacks, economic and otherwise, in transforming their college variety show Manhattan Melodies into a Broadway hit -- seems less like a product of the 1980s and more like a product of the 1930s. In fact, funnily enough, while I was originally screening the film for this project, I was interrupted by a phone call from my father who wanted me to help him identify a film he'd seen on Turner Classic Movies. Through the plot and cast clues he gave me, I was able to piece together that the film he'd seen was Broadway Melody of 1938 with Robert Taylor, Buddy Ebsen, and Judy Garland. While researching that film online, I couldn't help but notice how similar its basic plotline (young hero desperately struggles to get a show on Broadway) was to the Muppet film I'd just been watching. In his 1984 review of The Muppets Take Manhattan, Roger Ebert compared to Kermit the Frog to Mickey Rooney, who of course also made a string of cornball let's-put-on-a-show musicals with Judy Garland in the 1930s. Judy herself was long gone by 1984, but TMTM manages to wrangle a cameo -- first in caricature form, then in the flesh -- from Judy's daughter, Liza Minnelli, who appears in her natural habitat, Sardi's Restaurant.

The old-fashionedness of The Muppets Take Manhattan does not stop at the plot outline. No, sir. It goes marrow-deep. The Broadway show the Muppets are supposedly producing bears no resemblance whatsoever to the garish, post-Cats rock musicals of the 1980s. As far as I can tell, the exceedingly gentle Manhattan Melodies has little to no conflict whatsoever. It tells the story of a nice young couple (played by Kermit and Miss Piggy) who go to New York to get married and then -- in a twist ending -- get married. Some plot, eh? What makes TMTM seem so sweetly quaint today is that there is nothing even slightly subversive about its Depression-era trappings. First-time solo director Frank Oz also rewrote the script because he found the first draft by Tom Prachett and Jay Tarses to be "too broad" and "not affectionate," and the result is the most straight-laced, sincere film of the original Muppet trilogy, the only one in which the characters never break the fourth wall and acknowledge that they're in a movie. (If you think about it, the plot of The Muppet Movie could technically be described as: the Muppets go to a theater and watch a movie about themselves. The end.) The Muppets Take Manhattan is less a parody of 1930s movie-making than an evocation of it. There's a struggling-to-make-it-in-the-big-city montage early in the film complete with pages being flipped on a calendar and the Muppets pretending to walk by shifting their weight from one side to the other while standing in front of a changing backdrop of neon signs. When that kind of thing is done on The Simpsons (and they've done it several times over the years), it's a slyly ironic, in-on-the-joke spoof. When the Muppets do this, it feels absolutely genuine, i.e. we're doing this because... well, because that's how it's done! The Muppets are nothing if not die-hard traditionalists. They know, for instance, that the best way to introduce your Very Special Guest Stars is to have them stand with their backs to the camera so that it's a big deal when we finally see them from the front. First, it's "Hey, it's Joan Rivers!" then "Hey, it's Gregory Hines!" and finally "Hey, it's Linda Lavin!" Ms. Lavin, incidentally, makes her film debut here, though she was already very familiar to audiences due to the long-running weekly sitcom, Alice. I never knew she was anything great until I heard the cast recordings of The MAD Show and It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman! Trust me, she's great. For a movie ostensibly about the magic of stagecraft, it's appropriate that many of the cameos this time around are from seasoned theatrical performers. Besides Minnelli, Hines, and Lavin, we also have Art Carney, who -- let's not forget -- originated the role of Felix Unger onstage before Jack Lemmon or Tony Randall gave us their interpretations of the character. It would've been nice to have Randall in this film, too, but at least you can spot a caricature of him in the aforementioned Sardi's scene. (While I'm on the subject of wished-for guest stars, it seems inconceivable that Phil Silvers never worked with the Muppets. Hell, he did an episode of CHiPs.)

With no tricky plot or postmodern subversion to distract the audience, the film's main purpose is to serve as a forum for the Muppets to display their various dramatic, comedic, and musical talents. On that level, the film is mainly a success. Jeff Moss' agreeable if slight song score does not contain anything on the order of "The Rainbow Connection" or "Movin' Right Along" from the first film or "Happiness Hotel" from the second, but at least two of the songs are standouts: the ever-building opening number, "Together Again," and the 1950s-styled novelty rocker, "I'm Gonna Always Love You." The Muppets, as expected, handle these tunes with aplomb. Frank Oz is not generally thought of as a singer (his Wikipedia page lists him as "Actor, Director, Puppeteer"), but of course he and all the main Muppet performers have sung dozens of songs over the years -- in character, no less! Oz handles the role of Miss Piggy (a drag part) entirely in falsetto, and his range, both vocal and emotional, is astonishing. At the climax of "I'm Gonna Always Love You," Oz hits an incredibly high G -- not just hits it, but belts it and holds it for several seconds! This is a talented man! It is often Miss Piggy's burden to sing each film's soppiest love ballad, too, and Oz again rises to the challenge with "He'll Make Me Happy," which certainly does not sound like it's being sung by a bald, mustachioed man.

For the most part, The Muppets Take Manhattan splits up the gang and gives them individual story threads. Fozzie, Rowlf, Scooter, Gonzo, and the Electric Mayhem all get little vignettes to themselves, which range from pretty funny (Fozzie nervously interacts with some non-showbiz bears; the Mayhem play polka music in a beer hall) to quite funny indeed (Rowlf works at a dog kennel; Gonzo's water-skiing act goes horribly awry). As expected, the movie lavishes most of its time on Kermit and Piggy. I am aware that some critics -- Roger Ebert and Ken Tucker among them -- have very little tolerance for Piggy and find her grating and overbearing, but I can't imagine the Muppets without her. Like Frank Oz's other big Muppet character, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy is terribly insecure and hungry for the approval of others, especially Kermit. But unlike Fozzie and the other Muppets, who generally try to be ingratiating and humble, Piggy can be vain, manipulative, egomaniacal, pretentious, delusional, paranoid, and violent. She has a flair for drama and seems to relish any opportunity to cause a scene in public. Attention is attention, after all. At one point in this film, she loudly argues with Kermit in Central Park because she thinks he's been carrying on a romance with a human waitress named Jenny, who in truth is just a friend and has been helping him to land a job and get his show produced. As always, Piggy is staggeringly mercurial throughout this scene. When she is first approached by Jenny and Kermit (who have been jogging nearby), Piggy first feigns casualness and claims merely to be "sightseeing," but quickly turns haughty. "I do not wish to discuss it in present company," she states with Jenny only a few feet away. Jenny meekly excuses herself, but the bickering couple is soon joined by fellow park-goer (and fabulous guest star) Gregory Hines, who tries to mediate. After dramatically confronting Kermit with her suspicions of his infidelity, Piggy plays the role of martyr: "Maybe, Kermit, maybe it would have been better if we never had met. Then you and Jenny would not be tormented by my presence!" Only Piggy could work a phrase like "tormented by my presence" into a conversation this way and have it seem par for the course. Her mood changes so frequently that even Hines does not know how to react to her, at one point trying to comfort her with a hug and then just as suddenly backing away from her suspiciously. Piggy is one complex pig.

But above all, this movie is Kermit's showcase. Freed from the responsibility of directing, Jim Henson is allowed to fully concentrate on his acting, and The Muppets Take Manhattan gives Kermit the opportunity to be much more than a mere straight man to the zanier members of the Muppet troupe. At his lowest ebb in this film -- his friends scattered, the show going nowhere -- Kermit delivers a heartfelt soliloquy from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, and his mood is half-defiant, half-desperate:

Look at all those people down there. Lots of people. But my friends... my friends are all gone. Well, I'm gonna get 'em back. I'm gonna get 'em back! Because the show's not dead as long as I believe in it. And I'm gonna sell that show, and we're all gonna be on Broadway. YOU HEAR ME. NEW YORK? WE'RE GONNA BE ON BROADWAY! BECAUSE... BECAUSE I'M NOT GIVIN' UP! I'M STILL HERE, AND I'M STAYIN'! YOU HEAR THAT, NEW YORK? I'M STAYIN' HERE! THE FROG IS STAYIN'!!

Among his many pitiful gambits to get Manhattan Melodies produced, Kermit first impersonates a fast-talking, sleazy salesman, barging into a bewildered John Landis's office uninvited and issuing forth a nonstop stream of gibberish ("It's totally today yet tremendously timeless"), and later assumes the role of a fat cat producer complete with a waxed mustache and talk of a "reservation secretary." But by far, my favorite permutation of Kermit's character comes when Kermit acquires amnesia, loses his identity, and casts his lot with a group of frog advertising executives, all of whose names rhyme. (Kermit dubs himself "Phil," while the others are Gil, Jill, and Bill.) I like the way Kermit almost immediately acquires the other frogs' odd speech pattern: kind of sing-song-y and slow, punctuated with lots of "Hmmmm"s and "Ahhhh"s. The subplot about the advertising executives is one of the film's few nods to contemporary times ("contemporary" meaning "post-FDR"), and these scenes have a different rhythm than the rest of the movie.

Alas, TMTM falters a bit in the final stages, when Kermit is reunited with the gang and they successfully stage Manhattan Melodies on Broadway. I've already mentioned the film's two best songs, and neither of them are a part of this finale, which is the film's longest musical sequence. The filmmakers are clearly relying on spectacle here rather than memorable music or funny jokes. Having wisely opted to take "the first train out of town," beloved hecklers Statler and Waldorf are not on hand to provide the necessary backtalk that would've helped cut through the considerable treacle as Kermit and Piggy are married in a lavish ceremony (ostensibly part of the Muppets' Broadway revue, but the movie kind of abandons the show-within-a-movie conceit once the wedding actually begins) attended by just about every other Muppet in existence, including many from Sesame Street. I remember that much of the publicity surrounding the film during its initial run focused on this wedding, and Oz and his cast and crew do everything possible to make it a visual smorgasbord. At one point, we see an entire church full of Muppets swaying to the music, and it's an impressive sight. But I didn't really find any of this particularly engrossing or moving, and the whole sequence exacerbates the Muppets' worst trait: a tendency towards shameless mawkishness. A Muppet production should be constantly on the verge of chaos, both onstage and off. Yet Manhattan Melodies goes off all too smoothly. The sequence seems to drag on and on, and the only real point of interest is Kermit's genuine trepidation before saying, "I do."

There are other flaws, too. While the celebrity cameos are generally fun (I have not yet mentioned Dabney Coleman or James Coco, both superb), none of them have the impact of Steve Martin from the first film or John Cleese from the second. The songs, as I've mentioned before, are slightly weak. (This is the only Muppet feature film whose soundtrack didn't make it to CD.) And in the lead human female role, Juliana Donald is only barely adequate as Jenny the waitress. Donald gets quite a bit of screen time here, yet she seems like the understudy for someone more compelling. The most interesting thing about Jenny, at least from a 2010 perspective, is her hairdo, specifically the bangs that anticipate those of current indie darling Zooey Deschanel. I am not surprised Juliana Donald never landed another starring role in a film, though she did carve out a long career in television for herself.

By and large, though, I'm glad this movie exists as a fitting conclusion to the original era of Muppet history. Each Muppet project is a study in problem-solving -- how do we get a Muppet to ride a bike? how do we get one to rollerskate? -- and The Muppets Take Manhattan is a dazzling display of puppeteering skill, with the Muppet performers making the characters so expressive and versatile that it's easy for us in the audience to accept them as the equals of their human costars and to get involved in the various triumphs and tragedies of their felt-and-plastic lives.

Then again, maybe the greatest joy afforded us by The Muppets Take Manhattan is simply the chance to see the Muppets playing against the backdrop of the real live New York City as it looked during the era of Mayor Ed Koch (who engages in a little repartee with Gonzo here). In a vintage interview included on the DVD, Jim Henson sums it up: "I always loved the look of the characters outdoors. I think they always look a little bit more believable out in sunlight." And he's right, of course. The gang has never looked better.

Up next: Can you intentionally make a "cult movie," or do they just have to happen naturally? We'll ponder that question with our "Cult On Arrival" month, starting with a review of 1981's Shock Treatment.

]]> E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.624 2010-04-08T21:30:30Z 2010-04-22T21:47:43Z Dear E.T., I hope there is going to be a E.T., 2. I loved the movie E.T., it was exciting. I liked when you were riding on the bike, and thanks for not dying. Your friend, Jonah P.S. Next... Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=44
Dear E.T.,

I hope there is going to be a E.T., 2. I loved the movie E.T., it was exciting. I liked when you were riding on the bike, and thanks for not dying.

Your friend,

Jonah

P.S. Next time your in the neiborhood, E.T., phone me.

That awkwardly written yet undoubtedly sincere missive comes from a book called Letters to E.T. (Putnam, 1983), a slim volume which I was fortunate enough to locate in a dusty, cluttered second-hand bookshop in Chicago last May. The book, a somewhat hastily assembled collection of fan mail and fan art, is a quaint souvenir of the E.T.-mania of 1982 and 1983. I remember that mania well, as I was swept up in it like most kids my age at the time. You can bet that there were some E.T. toys under the Christmas tree in the Blevins household back in December '82. I had the leather-skinned E.T. doll (now an eBay item) and a little plastic replica of the film's young hero, Elliott, riding on a bicycle with his alien friend, E.T., wrapped up in a blanket in the bike basket.

It's hard to say what place E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial holds in pop culture today. The film currently rates a 7.9 at the Internet Movie Database and does not appear on that site's Top 250 list, though it does occasionally merit dutiful inclusion on those meaningless G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) lists released by Entertainment Weekly or the American Film Institute. It did reign for several years as the all-time box office champion, but such records do not and cannot last. (And then there are always those people who want to bring up inflation and rising ticket costs.) Perhaps because it was not the beginning of a multi-film/multi-media franchise and does not afford nostalgic adults the opportunity for elaborate dress-up games (as does Star Wars), E.T. now occupies an ever-shrinking space in the public's imagination. If anything, the movie might seem to be just another corny relic of the fad-happy 1980s, the cinematic equivalent of moonwalking or the Rubik's Cube -- fun at the time but something we've outgrown as a society.

]]> My first intention, in fact, when I found Letters to E.T. was to use the book as the basis for a satirical piece for Unloosen. I was going to take on the role of an embittered, washed-up E.T. and finally answer those quarter-century-old fan letters in the most depressing, cynical, and alcohol-fueled way possible. Essentially, I was going to write E.T. as if he were William Holden. That idea struck me as funny, but the article never got written. As Craig will attest, I work very slowly and procrastinate whenever possible if there is no self-or-otherwise-imposed deadline weighing on me. The book stayed on the desk next to my bed for months, and during that time I must've spent several accumulated hours poring over its pages as I drowsed off. Not that the letters were particularly eloquent or moving, mind you -- that one above from Jonah is one of the stronger examples -- but the book held some intangible fascination for me nevertheless. Maybe it was because the letters were addressed directly to the film's title character, which seemed to suggest that the film held some kind of special power over its young viewers. Intrigued by the book, I decided to return to the movie itself and was quite surprised at what I found. Once I had revisited E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, I no longer wanted to write the satire but I did want to write about the film in some way. This project seemed as good an excuse as any.

(Please note that my comments from here on refer to the original 1982 version of the film and not the tampered-with 2002 reissue.)

E.T. caught me off guard from its opening seconds. The main title sequence is exceedingly stark: just unadorned text against a plain backdrop, practically as sober as an Ingmar Bergman film. (Side note: Notice how Bergman, by keeping his opening credits ultra-plain, inadvertently created some of the most stylish title sequences of all time, memorable enough to have been copied by Woody Allen and parodied by Monty Python.) Although E.T. is remembered for its cuteness and sentimentality, John Williams' title music -- part of a score which does not get enough credit for its variety -- is not cute or sentimental at all. In fact, it's decidedly eerie and a little foreboding. An audience seeing this film for the first time and having no advance knowledge of its plot might reasonably think they were about to see something scary, perhaps a sci-fi horror tale.

From its very first scene, E.T. skillfully demonstrates how to tell a story through moving pictures, and I think the film would be comprehensible even if viewed with the sound off. The film proper begins with a dialogue-free sequence that serves as a master class in visual storytelling. I have to congratulate director Steven Spielberg, his cinematographer Allen Daviau, and perhaps most of all his editor Carol Littleton, for the job they have done here. There's a quietly brilliant series of shots that completely drew me into the film's world and its storyline. First, we see the night sky. Then a stand of trees. And then, suddenly, we cut to a spaceship, a huge glowing orb parked serenely in the forest like it's supposed to be there. The nonchalant, matter-of-fact introduction of that spaceship is an early indication that E.T. will deviate from the standard mold of sci-fi fantasy films. I was taken aback by the film's low-key intimacy. "Low-key" and "intimate" are not adjectives normally applied to films on the "all-time blockbusters" list, especially PG-rated sci-fi fantasies aimed at the widest-possible audience. In contrast, think of Star Wars, the movie that E.T. temporarily displaced as the #1 moneymaker in history. (The Star Wars franchise is affectionately referenced throughout E.T.. I particularly enjoyed the very true-to-life detail of how the young hero's Star Wars action figure collection seemed to mostly contain the obscure Lucas characters -- Greedo, Hammerhead, Walrus-Man -- which for some reason were much more plentiful in toy stores than the main characters.)

As the story unfolded from there, I was reacquainted with the fact that E.T. is a surprisingly complex film that adroitly captures many moods. By turns, the film can be funny, playful, awe-inspiring, heroic, and deeply sad. To illustrate how well the film does all this, I will discuss the film's "Halloween night" sequence in some detail. To recap the plot to this point: a race of peaceful aliens have visited the planet Earth (specifically the Los Angeles of 1982) in order to study our plant life. But as they're collecting samples of the local flora, some government scientists (led by Peter Coyote) show up and scare them away. One alien, who will later be dubbed E.T., is left behind -- stranded on our planet with no home and no one of his own kind nearby. Cautiously venturing into the suburbs, the alien soon befriends a small boy, Elliott (Henry Thomas), with whom he quickly establishes a powerful psychic bond. Elliott allows the alien to live in his room and only divulges the alien's existence to his older brother, Mike (Robert MacNaughton), and his younger sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore). The three children manage to keep the alien a secret from their overtaxed mother, Mary (Dee Wallace), who is currently undergoing a painful separation from her husband, the children's father. The children teach the alien the rudiments of English, and Elliott figures out that E.T. wants to build a "phone" with which he can call his home planet. Eventually, rummaging through their own toys and whatever they find in the garage, the kids cobble together enough equipment to assemble the phone. E.T. now needs to travel back to the woods where he originally landed in order to set up the equipment. Elliott must accompany him, and the kids decide to use Halloween night as their opportunity. They will sneak E.T. out of the house by dressing him as a ghost and passing him off as Gertie. (The real Gertie will be waiting for them at an agreed-upon lookout spot.) Once safely away from the neighborhood, E.T. and Elliott will travel by bike to the woods to set up the phone.

Got all that?

The "Halloween" portion of the movie starts out as a natural and observational look at American family life. While carefully applying his costume's face paint, Elliott squabbles with Gertie over the specifics of their plan. Gertie, eager to be taken seriously, tells Elliott she's "not stupid" as children have been insisting to their siblings for generations now. In the background, Mary and Mike can be heard arguing about Mike's plan to trick-or-treat dressed as a terrorist. Once everyone is in costume and the plan is underway, the film turns lightly comic. The costumed E.T. -- a natural for physical comedy with his rotund physique and waddling walk -- has trouble staying upright when Mary takes a Polaroid picture of her "three" children. There is some suspense, too, as E.T. threatens to blow their cover by trying to magically "heal" Mike's fake knife wound. The humor continues as Mike and Elliott accompany E.T. through the local streets which are densely occupied by costumed trick-or-treaters (E.T. misidentifies a "Yoda" as a possible alien compatriot), but there is a touch of surrealism here, too. Allen Daviau takes full advantage of the uncanny orange dusk light of the hour, and that, combined with the device of showing the events from E.T.'s perspective (low to the ground and seen through the holes in his bed sheet), gives the trick-or-treat sequence an otherworldly, disorienting oddness heightened by John Williams' wry score. Halloween is such a normal American ritual that we may forget how elaborately odd it all is. Spielberg reminds us with this scene. Eventually, the kids do get to the meet-up spot, and Elliott puts E.T. in his bike basket and takes off through the woods. Here, the film turns into a more-serious adventure yarn: the quest or hero's journey. After a while, Elliott can go no further on his bike and insists that they must continue on foot. E.T. has other ideas and miraculously levitates the bike so that he and Elliott can fly through the sky. Of course, the image of Elliott and E.T. silhouetted against the moon is not only the emblem of this film but also of Spielberg's Amblin production company. It's a monumental moment in pop culture history. The alien had levitated objects previously in the film but nothing of this magnitude. Fittingly this is the first time we get to hear John Williams' famous E.T. theme in full. Up to this point, Williams had been doing a marvelously clever job of parceling that theme out a little at a time, so it's especially powerful when we finally hear the full-blown version.

But Spielberg contrasts this moment of triumph with glimpses of anguish, anxiety, and paranoia. While E.T. and Elliott are out in the woods, Elliott's mother Mary is home, worried sick about her missing child. Spielberg takes a moment here to watch Mary and she sadly extinguishes some Halloween candles and stares worriedly at the clock. Once she leaves the house to look for Elliott, the film takes another turn. The faceless, possibly threatening government agents turn up at the family's house and begin searching through it. Here, the film takes on the feel of a horror/suspense thriller, as the agents are seen only in menacing outlines. Meanwhile, their flashlights cast dreadful-looking shadows on the walls and give even Gertie's toys a menacing look. When the film rejoins Elliott and E.T out in the woods, the mood is briefly hopeful -- the homemade "phone" seems to be working -- before giving way to disappointment as there is no immediate response to the signal. The intense and moody Elliott is at his saddest and most vulnerable here, as he pleads with E.T. to remain on Earth. "We could grow up together!" Elliott desperately suggests. Henry Thomas' performance as Elliott is admirably nuanced, and Spielberg coaxes some shockingly honest and painful moments from him. And keep in mind, all of what I've described in this Halloween sequence occurs in a relatively short amount of screen time. The next part of the film deals with the decidedly gloomy aftermath of that night, as a bedraggled Elliott finally returns home while E.T. lies near death in the woods.

What struck me time and again about E.T. is, in contrast to most mega-blockbusters, how private and personal it all felt. And quiet, too. This is a remarkably quiet movie, mostly by necessity of the plot. This is a film that takes place largely within the secret, insular world of children, and much of the dialogue is spoken in hushed, muted tones. As I get older, quietness is one of the qualities I admire most in films, and it's especially wonderful when an audience allows a film to be quiet. I wanted to include E.T. in our "Family Films Month" partly to show that all-ages films do not necessarily have to be raucous and relentlessly zany for their entire running times. We seem to have forgotten that. Credit for the film's tone must largely go to its creator. Steven Spielberg has said that E.T. was his most personal film, the one closest to his heart, and revealed that the plot was inspired by his own parents' divorce. The film's fine, sensitively written screenplay is credited to Harrison Ford's then-wife Melissa Mathison. Spielberg dictated the plot to her while they were on location for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Another big factor contributing to the film's tone is the unique look achieved through lighting and cinematography. Just as I was surprised by how quiet the film often was, I was pleasantly surprised at how dark -- literally dark -- it is allowed to be. The movie mostly takes place within a suburban home, and it is a moody, shadowy, decidedly non-sitcom-y environment with almost noir-ish light coming through venetian blinds. Again, these days, a film aimed at kids would be almost blindingly bright and cheerful-looking.

The term "non-sitcom-y" could apply to the entire movie. The dialogue sounds off-the-cuff and authentic -- the kind of stuff that kids would really say and not the kind of contrived schtick a Hollywood screenwriter would normally write for them, packed with well-timed zingers and snarky pop culture references. (For a handy tutorial in how little kids talk in movies these days, watch Sandra Bullock's youngest son in The Blind Side.) E.T. is a very observational film with an almost documentary-like feel at times. Sometimes, it feels like we're spying on the characters or that we're being allowed to look in on something secretive and hidden. I appreciated how the movie took its time to establish the characters and let the plot build and progress naturally. It does not feel like the movie is going out of its way to "wow" us with something spectacular every 5 to 10 seconds. The characters are just allowed to be themselves, and the movie lets us observe them at moments which do not necessarily advance the plot. Among many examples (such as the aforementioned scene with Mary and the candles), I will cite a brief scene in which Elliott's older brother, Mike, retreats to an upstairs closet full of toys, curls up in the fetal position, and falls asleep. He does all this while his brother and E.T. are both being observed by a team of doctors and scientists downstairs, and I think it's his way of coping with the stress and insanity of the situation by retreating to the safety and security of early childhood.

Returning to E.T. in 2010 was eye-opening. The film is not campy or kitschy and does not feel dated. Within the framework of a familiar fish-out-of-water story, Spielberg manages to give us a portrait of a sad, intense kid -- who seems to have no other friends besides his own siblings -- struggling with the dissolution of his parents' marriage. I think the one thing that made me want to write about the film for this project is the film's final shot. Spielberg shot the film largely in order so that the young actors' reactions would be genuine during E.T.'s departure. The proof that his plan worked is right there on screen. The next time you happen to watch this movie, check out the expression on Henry Thomas' face in that very last shot. You can't make this stuff up.

If there's one thing that Hollywood has proven time and time again, it is that there is no film so perfect that it can't be improved upon at a later date when special effects technology has caught up with what its filmmakers originally intended. And if there's one thing that critics and audiences have proven, it is that they will unquestioningly lap up anything that puts a new spin on a beloved classic. This is why Lucasfilm's enhanced version of the original Star Wars trilogy was universally acclaimed when it was released in theaters and came to DVD, effectively supplanting the older editions, and Ted Turner was hailed as a visionary genius when he announced that he would be colorizing all of the black and white films in his vast movie library. After all, what good is a masterpiece if nobody wants to watch it because the effects are kinda hokey or it was shot before color film was the standard? (Never mind that many early silents were actually tinted. In fact, never mind silents, period. Who wants to watch a movie starring a bunch of mutes anyway?)

This brings us to Steven Spielberg's classic family film E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, the blockbuster that won the hearts of millions in 1982 and which Spielberg decided needed a digital overhaul for its 20th anniversary re-release. (Of course, this was not the first time Spielberg had tinkered with one of his creations after the fact. 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind begat 1980's Special Edition and a 1998 Director's Cut that split the difference between the two.) Unlike Joe, however, I have no choice but to comment on the 2002 reissue of E.T. since that was only version that was readily available to me. While my local library has nine copies of the film in its collection, every single one of them is the one-disc version with the distracting digital effects and an E.T. that is far more mobile and expressive than he was when he first lumbered across movie screens in 1982. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is quite literally not the film I saw when I was eight, going on nine.

Before the opening credits started, I noted that the film was rated PG "for language and mild thematic elements." As far as the language is concerned, there's one "douche bag" early on, someone gets called "penis-breath" and there's even one "shit" that managed to slip through the net. (Why Spielberg would digitally remove all the guns from the film but leave the profanity intact is puzzling to me.) On the "mild thematic elements" front, I imagine that refers to the scene where E.T., left to his own devices, gets drunk on beer and Elliott, who is at school at the time, feels the effects because of the psychic bond they share. That's the first time the connection between them is made explicit in the film and Elliott's acceptance of their Corsican Brothers-like predicament comes to a head later on when E.T. is ailing and he says, "We're sick. I think we're dying." I don't care what age you are when you see this film; like the divorce trauma percolating under the surface of the story, that's a pretty heavy thing to lay on an audience expecting a lighthearted fantasy.

Then again, as Joe says, the film's opening is rather on the ominous side, especially when it comes to its treatment of the faceless government agents that are on E.T.'s trail once its ship has to take off without it. Of the dozen or so men in pursuit of their alien quarry, only one is given a calling card -- a jangling set of keys -- so we can identify him later on when he is revealed to be second-billed Peter Coyote, who plays E.T.'s equivalent of the Dick Miller role in Joe Dante's Explorers. In fact, in many ways E.T. is like the inverse of Explorers since it concerns itself with an alien stranded on Earth sending a message out into space so it can get picked up by its own people, as opposed to an alien broadcasting a message from space to get some Earthlings to come to it. (Curiously enough, both films feature scenes from This Island Earth that are shown on TV. I guess that must have been a seminal film for both Spielberg and Dante.)

The pop-culture cross-pollination doesn't stop there, either. For example, the scene where E.T. hides from Elliott's mother amongst a horde of stuffed animals is echoed in Gremlins in the scene where Stripe hides from Billy in the toy aisle of the department store -- and behind an E.T. doll. Then there are the Star Wars action figures and costumes that Joe mentioned, but I was more impressed by the Space Invaders T-shirt older brother Mike wears and the way he sings Elvis Costello's "Accidents Will Happen" when he arrives home from football practice. (There's even an Elvis Costello poster on the wall in the room he shares with his younger brother. Note the bunk beds in the scene where Elliott first shows E.T. to his siblings.) And it's impossible to ignore the parallels to Peter Pan (which Spielberg also explicitly invoked in A.I.) since their mother Mary (whose name could even be a Biblical reference -- is Elliott's absent father named Joseph?) is heard reading it aloud to Gertie. This sets up the beat right after E.T. dies when Gertie asks, "Can we wish for him to come back?" I'm sure most people in the audience are thinking the same exact thing at that exact moment.

I'm afraid I don't have as much to say about this film as Joe does. Maybe it's because I kept getting wrenched out of the story every time one of Spielberg's much-ballyhooed digital "improvements" showed up on screen, but it just didn't resonate with me the same way it did when I was a kid. At some point I'd like to get my hands on the two-disc edition that was released in 2002 (and which included the original vision of the film -- unlike George Lucas, Spielberg wasn't as intent on denying people the option if they wanted it) to see if it works any better for me. Then again, whenever I see a full moon nowadays, my thoughts turn to howling beasts in the forests, not benevolent aliens from the skies. Not sure what that says about me, but at least I haven't abandoned the realm of fantasy entirely. That's one way E.T.'s legacy endures.

Next up: Family Films Month continues with a movie featuring a bunch of Muppets, and I don't mean Return of the Jedi.

]]> Superman III, reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.623 2010-03-25T22:00:31Z 2010-03-25T21:59:05Z "Never underestimate the power of computers." - ROSS WEBSTER Superhero movies have been with us almost as long as there have been superhero comics. In the early days, they echoed the comic book format by being made in the... Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=45
"Never underestimate the power of computers." - ROSS WEBSTER

Superhero movies have been with us almost as long as there have been superhero comics. In the early days, they echoed the comic book format by being made in the form of serials which told the open-ended tales of heroes like Captain Marvel, Batman, Captain America and Superman, who incidentally was the subject of the first full-length superhero movie, Superman and the Mole Men, in 1951. Beyond that, stories about men in capes and costumes seemed better suited to the small screen, where the Adventures of Superman flourished in the '50s and a campy take on Batman did the same in the '60s, itself spawning a big-screen adaptation. Then came the '70s, which saw more TV series like Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk and insufficiently funded TV movies like The Amazing Spider-Man, a pilot that led to a short-lived series, and non-starters like Dr. Strange and Captain America which were decidedly underwhelming on the level of spectacle.

The main problem with these productions was, with their limited TV budgets, none of them could hope to duplicate the feats that their characters regularly did on the page -- at least not without looking totally ludicrous in the process. Then came 1978's Superman: The Movie, which showed that all you had to do was spend a little money (a little being roughly $55 million) and you could believe that a man could fly. In the wake of fantasy and science fiction blockbusters like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman showed that comic book heroes also had a place at the table, even if the man from Krypton was pretty much the only game in town for the next decade. In the meantime, there were sequels (and money) to be made and since original director Richard Donner was out of the picture, having burned his bridges with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind and Pierre Spengler, they needed to find a substitute and fast.

]]> Enter Richard Lester, who made a name for himself in the '60s as director of the first two Beatles films and had spent the '70s turning out historical swashbucklers and contemporary political thrillers. He had been brought into the production early on as an uncredited producer by the Salkinds (for whom he had previously made The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers) to act as a go-between after Donner stopped speaking to them and, after Donner's dismissal, was asked to complete the second film. (Donner had already completed a good portion of Superman II since both films had gone into production simultaneously -- shades of both the Musketeers and the Back of the Future sequels.) In order for him to receive full credit for Superman II, though, it was necessary for Lester to reshoot some of the scenes that Donner had already done -- a point on which there is a great deal of controversy. (In fact, Donner has since cobbled together his own version of Superman II, which was released on home video in 2006.) Still, the fact remains that Lester's version is the one that was released theatrically and, upon its success at the box office, he was given first crack at Superman III, which he would be able to develop from scratch, thus avoiding any claims that he trampling all over another filmmaker's vision. The prospect obviously appealed to Lester since he eventually went ahead with the project, but he still had some reservations about it. As he told fellow director Steven Soderbergh some years later, "The problem with all the films is that you have to make [Superman] destructible briefly, and then make him indestructible at the end. Now, three times, you're getting a bit bored with that." And, as it turned out, Lester wasn't the only one getting bored with the Man of Steel. (Superman III's domestic take was just under $60 million, compared to Superman II's $108 million. Furthermore, according to Rotten Tomatoes, Superman III has a freshness rating of 23%, a steep decline from Superman II's 87%.)

Just as Jack Nicholson's scene-stealing turn as the Joker overshadowed the title character in Tim Burton's Batman, Superman III is dominated by the comedic stylings of Richard Pryor as bumbling computer genius Gus Gorman, who even manages to snag the opening scene for himself. Of course, if his unemployment hadn't been cut off by a heartless social worker, then he wouldn't have discovered his aptitude for computer programming, he wouldn't have gone to work for Webscoe Industries and, well, there wouldn't have been a movie. (If things were that bad in 1983, one can only wonder how many Gus Gormans are being created by today's economic climate.) Before the plot is set in motion, though, we come to Richard Lester's main contribution to the film: the slapstick opening credits sequence.

Now, there are many out there who believe that slapstick has no place in a Superman movie, and to those people I say "Thbbft!" Not only do I love the Rube Goldberg-inspired credits sequence in Superman III, I even made a point of going back and re-watching it right after the film was over so I could fully appreciate its well-orchestrated chaos. I won't go into a blow-by-blow description of what happens in the scene, because that's the surest way to wring all the joy out of comedy, but I will say that one of the things I love most about it is the way it prominently features Graham Stark, an accomplished physical comedian best known for his various roles in the Pink Panther series, as a hapless blind man. Stark's history with Lester actually goes back even further, to his first short, 1960's The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, and his second feature, 1963's The Mouse on the Moon. The fact that Lester thought of him 20 years later while in the throes of making one of the biggest films of his career says a lot about him. I also find it quite telling that Lester's director credit appears over a close-up of a man who has just been pied in the face by an oblivious Clark Kent. Take that, Superman purists!

The unwitting catalyst for this chaotic street scene is the buxom Lorelei Ambrosia, played by Pamela Stephenson, a veteran of the English sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News and a future cast member of Saturday Night Live who makes the most of what could have been a typical "ditzy blond" role. (At one point we see here catching up on some light reading -- Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.) Turns out she's the paramour and "psychic nutritionist" of rich industrialist Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn), who's first seen being awarded Humanitarian of the Year, which pretty much means he's contractually obligated to be the film's villain, a role he shares with his mannish "baby sister" Vera (Annie Ross, whose performance always reminded me of Roz in 9 to 5).

But before we can establish the villains, there's business to be taken of in the office of the Daily Planet, where editor Perry White is being pestered by just about everybody. Clark wants permission to attend his high school class reunion ("It's practically an American institution," he says -- much like Superman), Jimmy Olsen wants to go along for some damned reason, and Lois Lane wants to take a vacation to Bermuda so the producers don't have to pay Margot Kidder a whole lot of money. Actually, Lois's part is downplayed so screenwriters David and Leslie Newman can introduce a new love interest, Lana Lang (Annette O'Toole), Clark's unrequited high school crush and former prom queen who is now an unfulfilled single mother marking time in Smallville while life passes her by. (As if we needed a reminder that Superman III takes place in bygone era, at one point Lana says her son Ricky is "the only kid in town without a father.")

Before we meet Lana, though, we find Gus gainfully employed at Webscoe Industries, where he feels shafted by his first paycheck and hatches an embezzlement scheme that funnels all the half-cents left over by payroll into his own pocket (a plan later put into effect by the disgruntled employees in Office Space, who reference this film specifically). And before Clark can find out if he can really go back to Middle America after becoming "a Metropolis sophisticate" (just watch Lois try to keep a straight face while he says this), Superman has to put out a dangerous chemical plant fire, during which Jimmy is injured while trying to get some action shots. (I guess that's one way to prevent him from bending Clark's ear the rest of the way there.)

When he makes it to the reunion, Clark reconnects with Lana, who appears to have organized the entire event herself and has to fend off the advances of former football hero Brad (Gavan O'Herlihy), who's into reliving past glories and drowning his sorrows in booze. (That's better than dwelling on his present, where he's a lowly security guard working the night shift -- why Lana doesn't consider him a catch, I'll never understand.) Clark and Lana eventually make it out onto the dance floor where they slow dance to "Earth Angel" by the Penguins (another Back to the Future connection) and he slowly insinuates himself into her life, much to Brad's dismay.

Meanwhile, in exchange for not having him thrown in jail, Ross talks Gus into using his nascent hacking skills to tap into a powerful weather satellite and rain down destruction on Columbia's coffee crop for refusing to play ball with him. This leads to the point, roughly a third of the way through the film, where our two stars first "meet," even if they cross paths only briefly. Gus's reason for coming to Smallville is so he can use the computer at one of Webscoe's subsidiaries to carry out Ross's scheme, which somehow requires him to get stinking drunk with the night watchman (who naturally turns out to be Brad). This scene goes on interminably (and it includes some shocking close-ups of Pryor's burn-damaged hands), but at least Gus's drunken crawl through cyberspace has some amusing payoffs: an ATM starts spontaneously spitting out wads of money, one woman's Bloomingdale's account balance is grossly inflated, inspiring her husband to reenact the grapefruit scene from The Public Enemy, and some traffic signals go awry, spurring the red and green men on a "Don't Walk" sign to start tussling.

When Superman flies to rescue and saves Columbia from ruin, Ross decides that before he can launch the next phase of his plan -- namely the monopolization of the world's oil supply -- the meddler in blue tights must be eliminated. To this end he has Gus synthesize some artificial Kryptonite (now with 0.57% tar!) which he delivers in person in the guise of a three-star general who blusters his way through a rambling speech, even echoing George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove at one point ("We cannot afford a chemical-plastics gap!") before handing off the tainted Kryptonite, which doesn't kill Superman so much as it turns him into an apathetic dick. This gives Christopher Reeve the chance to have a little fun with the role for once as he spontaneously decides to ruin Pisa's tourist trade by straightening out the Leaning Tower, thus inviting the U.N.'s censure (and a Time cover article with the foreboding headline "SUPERMAN: Goodness at the Crossroads"), and blows out the Olympic torch for shits and giggles. He also takes up drinking (Superman is a mean drunk) and lets himself go to seed, allowing his costume to become dingy and growing a permanent five o'clock shadow.

Things come to a head when, having caused an oil tanker spill at the behest of the alluring Lorelei, a weakened Superman touches down in a junkyard where he splits into two personalities -- evil Superman and virtuous Clark Kent -- leading to a brilliantly choreographed brawl. It's the kind of sustained action scene these movies were built for and Lester carries it off like a champ. It's just a pity that there's half an hour left to go in the film because that would have been a terrific climax. Still, what would Superman III be without his protracted duel with The Ultimate Computer? (If you said "a good movie," the answer would probably still have to be a "maybe.") Even as a ten-year-old kid I recognized how slapdash and over-the-top the finale is (graphics by Atari? cyborg Vera? a computer that can be powered down by simply removing one screw?), but I have to admit the film almost redeems itself with the coal-into-diamond trick and a callback to the outraged Pisa vendor (played by Lester crony John Bluthal), who is none too pleased when Superman returns the tower to its rightful position. That just goes to show, even when Superman restores the status quo, somebody's still mad at him.

This week's movie, Superman III, originally came out in June of '83, the summer before I entered the third grade. I was seven years old at the time, and I still distinctly remember it as one of the formative movie-going experiences of my young life. For one thing, my parents allowed several of my friends to see it with us in the theater, and I felt a sort of proud ownership of the whole affair. This was my movie and my event and my day, and I could not have been happier at how the movie entertained my guests. So impressed was I that I pored over the promotional tie-in magazine, The Great Superman Movie Book, for months afterward, carefully cutting out the pictures and affixing them with Scotch tape to places of honor on the walls and door of my room. Revisiting the film in its entirety for the first time in over 26 years, I was startled by how much of the film had stuck with me. This is a movie jam-packed with memorably insane setpieces, the kind that might make a strong impression on a kid: a villain with an artificial ski slope on the top of a skyscraper, a bowling ball hurtling down an alley with such velocity that it shatters the pins, a woman who gets sucked into a giant evil computer and emerges as a terrifying cyborg (who somewhat resembles Medusa from the original Clash of the Titans), and -- of course -- that memorable scene in which Clark Kent inadvertently eats dog food. Only years later did I discover how poor Superman III's reputation actually was. It certainly seemed like a hit to me at the time.

For the last 20 years or so, superhero movies have generally been expected to deliver all the fun and frivolity of, say, Sophie's Choice or Schindler's List. Take the average summer blockbuster about a costumed crimefighter, and it will generally play like it was written by a relapsing heroin addict, directed by a suicidal glue sniffer, and edited by a paranoid schizophrenic. Nowadays, your typical movie superhero is a critically flawed masochist who spends a good percentage of the running time whining about his personal life in between occasional incoherent action scenes set against a bleak urbanightmare-scape. This is what passes for entertainment in 2010. Audiences apparently now go to superhero movies to see their own anxieties reflected grotesquely back at them. Against that backdrop, a supremely goofy movie like Superman III makes no sense at all to the contemporary viewer. Shouldn't Superman be using that laser vision of his to heat up a spoon in a filthy back alley somewhere? Why hasn't he raped Lois yet? Shouldn't he be stabbing Jimmy Olsen in the face? And why, dear lord, are the action scenes filmed and edited in a way which makes it clear what is actually happening? Isn't the whole point of an action sequence to make us feel dizzy and disoriented, like we just spent an hour in a tumble dryer? Why do I not feel the urge to huff glitter paint and throw myself into traffic? What is going on here?

Relax, dear reader. Superman III is an artifact from a bygone era. That's all. No reason to panic. To understand this movie, you first have to understand that strange, hopelessly backward time in American history: the early 1980s, during the reign of the man they called "The Gipper." It's important to know, for example, that the primitives of that time thought computers to be "magic," even though your waffle iron probably has more memory than all the computers in this movie combined. The idea of a satellite which actually controls the weather -- instead of just reporting it (which is what weather satellites actually do) -- may seem far-fetched to us. But to the people of 1983, you could explain such a logical fallacy by simply stating that "computers did it," and they'd just nod in passive agreement. We had no idea what computers actually did back then. Heck, we didn't even have any video games in which you could stalk through the halls of an elementary school picking off toddlers with an assault rifle, experiencing the bloodshed and mayhem through the eyes of the killer. The closest thing the supposedly "evil" mega-computer in this movie can come up with is a tame third-person shooter in which you can fire some crummy missiles at Superman in the Grand Canyon. Nice try, 1983, but we're trying to raise a generation of sociopaths here!

We certainly had an ambivalent relationship with money back in 1983. The only thing we can agree on is that we were all obsessed with it, even more so than today. The 1980s are rightly remembered as a time of go-go consumerism, avarice, and ruthless ambition. Yuppies were riding high back then, and it seemed like everybody's goal was to become a wealthy son-of-a-bitch with slicked-back hair, a very expensive and unreliable imported sports car, and a closet of fancy suits to be accessorized with ridiculous suspenders and power ties. Countless 1980s movies end with the heroes being rewarded with just such a lifestyle. But movies from this time are just as likely to make old rich white dudes the villains, and comedies frequently mined laughs from taking an individual from the lower rungs of society and catapulting him into the world of wealth and privilege to expose the phoniness of that milieu. "Culture clash" was a major theme of the era, and movies frequently added in a racial underpinning as well. Trading Places with Eddie Murphy is the perhaps definitive artifact of this phenomenon, but Richard Pryor made a couple of stabs at it himself with The Toy and Brewster's Millions. Superman III is essentially a 1980s racial/culture clash comedy somewhat clumsily retrofitted into a superhero movie. What surprised me when I revisited the film is that -- apart from a couple of scenes -- the Richard Pryor part of the movie and the Superman part of the movie do not really intersect that often. Fascinatingly, there's an alternate fan edit of Superman III floating around out there which supposedly excises much of the Pryor material.

Frankly, the Pryor storyline does not really work that well in Superman III, and it drags the whole production down -- a shame, too, because there is some very fine material elsewhere in the film which deserves to be seen. What is Richard Pryor even doing in a Superman movie? The DVD supplements give a little insight into that. Apparently, shortly after the release of the first film, Richard Pryor appeared on The Tonight Show and did a routine in which he acted out the entire plot of the film, much to the delight of the host and his audience. I have not seen that particular clip, but there's an apparent attempt in Superman III to recreate it, as Pryor dons a tablecloth as a cape and proceeds to act out Superman's heroics to the non-amusement of his boss, Robert Vaughn. (Side note: It's amusing to me that Vaughn serves the same basic function in Superman III as he does in Pootie Tang, i.e. to be the ultimate corrupt honky, trying to lead the black hero astray.) The producers of the Superman films were so impressed by Pryor's enthusiasm for the character that they apparently decided this film should be scripted around him. Pryor's stand-up act included a lot of role-playing -- fans may remember his in-character monologues as "Mudbone," for instance -- so in addition to playing jittery computer whiz Gus Gorman, Pryor gets to play dress-up and try out some funny voices now and again. I remembered his big scene as a three-star general, channeling two of George C. Scott's characters: George S. Patton and Buck Turgidson. But there is an earlier scene which has Pryor donning a ridiculous plaid suit and impersonating a fast-talking salesman, which leads to a very broadly-played "drunk" scene later on. This material may actually play better in isolation, but in the context of Superman III it has the effect of stopping the movie dead. "Hey, gang, let's put the plot on hold for a few minutes so Richard Pryor can do some schtick." The DVD commentary reveals that even the producers had some reservations about this, particularly the fact that the "George C. Scott" scene essentially requires Superman to be on-camera but motionless for a good chunk of screen time. The producers might also have asked why Superman is not suspicious when he is given a piece of unidentified green rock by a stranger, but maybe this didn't come up in story conferences. In any event, it's telling that the original poster for Superman III featured that iconic image of Superman flying with a terrified Pryor in his arms (a moment film historian Donald Bogle possibly overreads as racist) but that the current DVD version does not even mention Pryor on its cover. To give the comedian his due, there are a few moments from his performance worth praising. I enjoyed, for instance, the film's relatively low-key opening scene with a down-and-out Pryor trying in vain to bargain with a highly unsympathetic employee at the unemployment office. Similarly amusing was Gus Gorman's exit scene at a remote coal mine, where he tries to impress the workers by boasting of his friendship with Superman and -- when that fails -- summons a mock-casual demeanor as he begins a nine-mile walk to the nearest bus station.

Somewhat forgotten in the fallout of the Richard Pryor debacle is the fact that Superman III features a very good performance from Christopher Reeve in a triple role that gives him plenty to do. Let's start with the basics: Reeve is the only actor -- and I say this without hesitation -- to properly play the character of Superman. No one else, in any medium, has gotten it quite right. Not Dean Cain or George Reeves or Danny Dark or Bud Collyer or Brandon Routh or Tim Daly or any of them. The first Superman movie was famously advertised with the phrase "You Will Believe a Man Can Fly!" (a phrase which Pryor memorably parodies in Superman III), but the posters might as well have used "You Will Sort of Believe That Superman and Clark Kent Are Two Different People!" Because that's always been a sticking point, hasn't it? Apart from those glasses, Superman and his alter ego are transparently the same man. Christopher Reeve is the only actor who seems to have approached Superman and Clark Kent as separate assignments. Superman, as Jerry Seinfeld once wisely noted, is "the man." The costume looks great on him, and he seems at ease in any situation, be it romantic or perilous or both. He is confident without being arrogant, commanding without being stiff or stentorian (a common pitfall for voice actors essaying the role), playful without being silly. He has a sense of gravitas but is not somber. There is a softness to his voice and an old-school elegance in his manner. He is uncommonly graceful; while watching this movie, please take note of Reeve's almost balletic takeoffs and landings. In the "making of" documentary on the DVD, Reeve sums it up: Superman, he says, is a "gentleman." On the other hand, you have Clark -- that poor, sweet, hopeless bastard who at the beginning of this movie is still hungry for the approval of Lois Lane and Perry White. Unlike Superman, who always seems "just right" for any given environment, Clark Kent always looks too big for his surroundings, and he has terrible trouble in this movie holding up his end of a conversation. The filmmakers have toned down some of Clark's slapstick buffoonery, running into doors and such, but he still manages to come off as a shy nerd who has no chance with Lois. I'm sure the costume department was instructed to make all of Clark's outfits a size too small, making him look uncomfortable at all times. And beneath it all, Clark harbors something of a grudge against Superman. He's understandably a little tired of Superman and wishes people could just like Clark for a change. One of the most interesting aspects of Superman III is that it gives Clark Kent a viable, non-Lois romantic option: his high school classmate, Lana Lang (nicely played by the lovely Annette O'Toole), a now-divorced single mother on whom Clark had quite a crush back in his Smallville days. Personality-wise, the guileless and uncomplicated Lana is the opposite of savvy, snarky Lois, and -- miraculously -- she seems to genuinely like Clark almost as well as Superman! Towards the end of this movie, there's a moment which suggests that Lana's interest in Clark may be sparking some jealousy in Lois. Had Superman III been as big a hit as its predecessors, it's likely that Superman IV would have explored this romantic triangle. But it was not to be.

The tension between Superman and Clark Kent is at the heart of the storyline in which Superman, supposedly under the influence of synthetic quasi-Kryptonite, ditches his predictable superheroics and starts acting like -- in the words of the villains -- a "normal" person. He starts drinking, stops shaving, and in one remarkable sequence, even cuckolds Robert Vaughn by sleeping with Vaughn's mistress. Speaking of that mistress -- Lorelei Ambrosia (Pamela Stephenson) -- a feminist film critic could write one hell of an essay deconstructing the female paradigms on display in Superman III. Let's see here. We have two "good" women and two "evil" ones. On the good side, we have take-charge, career-minded Lois Lane (who is sexually threatening) and sweet homemaker Lana Lang (who is sexually inviting). On the evil side, we have Vaughn's mistress, Lorelei, and his sister/henchwoman Vera. While the sexy Lorelei must hide her intelligence behind a faux-Marilyn-Monroe ditziness, the vaguely dyke-y Vera is allowed to be smart and commanding, but at the price of her femininity. (There are several jokes in the film about Vera's mannishness.) Are Vera and Lorelei intended as parodies of, respectively, Lois and Lana? It's something to ponder. Props to Annie Ross, a legendary and innovative jazz singer, for fearlessly playing the unflattering role of Vera. (To see Ms. Ross in a more natural environment, please watch the ensemble drama Short Cuts by Robert Altman.)

The character of Superman is so pure and so wholesome that writers are naturally going to want to pervert him in various ways. The urge is irresistible. We are fallible, and want to project our insecurities onto Superman, the symbol of all that we wish we were but cannot be. Besides the misshapen clone Bizarro, there have been countless storylines over the years about Superman being brainwashed or somehow duplicated or degraded. (Hell, they even killed him once or twice. Remember that?) In the very first episode of the much-remembered 1978 cartoon series, Challenge of the Superfriends, Superman becomes a criminal under the sway of Lex Luthor's "dream machine" and is committing crimes only a few minutes into the show. Superman III was the film series' inevitable exploration of this theme, and they handle it very well, making the storyline just dark enough without being too grim or self-serious. It helps that "evil Superman" mainly just pulls childish pranks (snuffing the Olympic torch, for instance) and that Christopher Reeve makes even "evil Superman" appealing on some level. During the commentary for the film's famous junkyard duel -- a bracingly feral and urgent sequence -- producer Ilya Salkind correctly points out how sexy and cool Reeve is here, playing the bad guy. For once, he gets to swagger onscreen!

Superman III is a movie of contradictions. It's a mess. It's hard to believe one movie could contain that brutal junkyard battle and yet also find time to have Richard Pryor don a giant foam cowboy hat and booze it up with a security guard while a twangy country song blares on the soundtrack. And both of these scenes must co-exist with the gentle, nostalgic sequence in which Clark Kent returns to his hometown of Smallville to attend a high school reunion. (The reunion scene, for me, played a lot like a harbinger of Back to the Future.) And then you have Robert Vaughn as a typical 1980s James Bond villain, a power-mad industrialist with one of those big light-up maps of the world in his impossibly fancy office. But it's all there, somehow, in this one movie! And, ultimately, I was glad of that. This is a movie that manages to take the Superman mythos to some strange, potentially disturbing places but never really feels self-consciously heavy or even approaches pretension. Blockbuster filmmakers should not necessarily use Superman III as a textbook, but there are a few things to learn from it.

Next up: The project takes a turn for the squeaky clean with "Family Movie Month," starting with a look at E.T. But before the cleanliness can begin, let's take another look at the way Superman III subverts American iconography with this sublime shot of "evil Superman" and Lorelei atop the Statue of Liberty:

]]> Back to the Future Part II, reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.622 2010-03-11T11:45:09Z 2010-03-11T11:55:27Z "There's something very familiar about all this." - BIFF TANNEN, AGED 77 Roger Ebert defined a sequel as "a filmed deal," and it's amazing how accurately the truly odd Back to the Future Part II reflects that definition. The... Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=44
"There's something very familiar about all this." - BIFF TANNEN, AGED 77

Roger Ebert defined a sequel as "a filmed deal," and it's amazing how accurately the truly odd Back to the Future Part II reflects that definition. The supplemental materials on the movie's DVD are surprisingly candid in laying out why the movie exists and why it took the form that it did. When the first Back to the Future was released in 1985, it was anything but a sure thing. The film's star, Michael J. Fox, was not a household name yet, and the film's co-creators (Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale) had failed to attain mainstream success with their two previous films, I Want to Hold Your Hand and Used Cars. Worse yet, the Zemeckis/Gale-scripted 1941, directed by Steven Spielberg, had been a financial disaster for Universal Pictures. So another Zemeckis/Gale comedy with Spielberg as producer was a risky proposition. In fact, the film could easily have turned out to be another embarrassing boondoggle for Universal.

But, of course, the first film was a massive worldwide hit, the top-grossing American film of 1985. A sequel was inevitable, and Universal informed Zemeckis and Gale that one would happen whether they were involved or not. So they were now "locked in," so to speak, as were most of the members of the first film's cast. Strangely, though, it was the holdout of one of the supporting players, Crispin Glover, that provided the catalyst for the sequel's plot in which his character (loveable nerd George McFly) is mysteriously killed off, creating another "time travel" problem for the heroes, Doc and Marty, to solve.

]]> Back to the Future, it should be noted, was not designed as the first film in a franchise. The original film's ending, with Doc Brown taking Marty and Jennifer to the future in his flying car as a "TO BE CONTINUED" caption flashes on the screen, was written strictly as a joke. In fact, it's one of my favorite ways to end a comedy -- the classic "here we go again!" bit. It's a very satisfying way to conclude a comedy/fantasy film, knowing that the heroes are not going to rest but are going to embark upon yet another madcap adventure. There was really no need, other than financial, to revisit these characters or the Hill Valley setting. But if you're contractually obligated to revisit them, what the heck do you do with them? To their credit, Zemeckis and Gale came up with three different, potentially intriguing answers to that question and devote roughly one act of the final film to each of them.

1. Put Doc and Marty in the actual future. Despite that pesky word "future" in the title, the Back to the Future trilogy is mainly about the past. The success of the first film all but single-handedly revived the "rock & roll nostalgia" sub-genre - which had been on the decline seven years after Grease - and soon the multiplexes and video stores were again teeming with oldies-laden films set during the 1950s and 1960s. But that same trend was again on the wane in 1989... or should I say the Bruce Wayne, because that was the year Tim Burton's designed-to-be-dark Batman definitively, perhaps permanently changed what a "blockbuster fantasy movie" was supposed to be. Gentle whimsy -- the original Future's stock in trade -- was definitely out that year, which is perhaps why this sequel mainly plays as a harder-edged, more frantic action picture which barely takes time to pause and revel in its surroundings and instead zips from one calamity to the next. In any event, BTTF2 devotes its first third to a thoroughly bizarre and somewhat off-putting sequence set in the Hill Valley of 2015. In the DVD supplements, Zemeckis admits that predicting the future is always a losing proposition -- even Stanley Kubrick was always wrong - so he and Gale mainly give this part of the film over to a variety of bizarre sight gags (hoverboards, self-lacing sneakers, double neckties, a 3D Jaws ad). This is also where the film begins to reveal itself as an almost surrealist parody of its predecessor, giving us grotesque and/or upsetting parodies of familiar scenes from the first film. Example: remember that funny, old-timey Texaco station from the previous movie? Well, now it's staffed by sleek, vaguely threatening-looking robots! Zing! And remember that classic showdown with Biff in the diner? Well, now the diner is a gaudy 1980s-nostalgia-themed cafe where the "waiters" are Max-Headroom-ized versions of Ronald Reagan and Michael Jackson! And Biff has a grandson, Griff, who looks and talks just like him, only much louder! Nutty, right? Overall, though, I was glad that the movie's version of the future is ostensibly cheerful, closer to Futurama than Blade Runner.

Unfortunately, the "future" part of the movie also spends some time at the depressing homestead of Marty and his family, where everybody mainly mills around in ugly and unconvincing old-age makeup amidst the various items of blatant product placement. The dialogue here is actually some of the movie's worst, as the characters work overtime to squeeze in crucial bits of plot exposition for us to overhear so we know what the hell is going on. The main point of all this is gimmickry for its own sake: the filmmakers have cast Michael J. Fox in multiple roles so that we can watch him interact with various versions of himself on-camera. It's not surprising that some of this sequence, expensive and complicated as it is, wound up on the cutting room floor. Weirdly, the only thing I really enjoyed in this part of the film was the way Fox played the older Marty as a hoarse-voiced, washed-up loser who whimpers pathetically as he is fired from his job via a big-screen TV while the news of his dismissal spews from several gadgets at once. It's like the whole house is ganging up on Marty at that point.

Oh, and before we leave this part of the film, I want to give the movie some credit for taking baby steps toward gender equality. Like his ancestors, Griff has a gang of sycophantic thugs around him, but this time one of them is a girl. I liked that. But, anyway, on to the next section of the film.

2. Give us a nightmare version of the Hill Valley setting. Again being surprisingly candid, Bob Gale admits on the BTTF2 DVD that taking the story into the future was a logical and narrative mistake. You don't have to travel into the future to change it. Our destinies are ostensibly under our control, so we just have to try to live our lives so that those terrible outcomes never come true. If one of the real underlying problems is Marty's insecurity -- he can't stand being called "chicken" -- maybe he should just get some counseling or something instead of scampering willy-nilly through history , diddling with the space-time continuum to fix his and his relatives' various screw-ups. One could imagine an increasingly-lazy Marty relying on the DeLorean every time he goofed up. ("Damn, forgot to DVR America's Next Top Model. Better fire up the Flux Capacitor.")

The middle of BTTF2 shows us the negative fallout of Doc and (especially) Marty's impetuousness. They return to 1985, only to find themselves in a hellish alternate reality (called "1985-A" by the filmmakers) in which Biff is a multi-millionaire mogul married to Marty's mother, Lorraine, while Marty's father, George, is dead, having been murdered in 1973. This entire section of the film plays out like an extrapolation of the "Pottersville" sequence from It's a Wonderful Life. (Wow. That's the second time in this project I've had to reference It's a Wonderful Life.) Like George Bailey, Marty has inadvertently created a dark parallel timeline in which a charming small town has basically been turned into a dystopian Las Vegas (Hill Valley instead of Bedford Falls), the corrupt villain is in charge and wields unlimited power (Biff instead of Mr. Potter), and the sweet but kooky sidekick guy has been committed (Doc Brown instead of Uncle Billy). Weirdly, Zemeckis even films Michael J. Fox the way Frank Capra filmed Jimmy Stewart. Both Stewart and Fox have a tendency to walk right up to the camera at crucial moments as they register how badly they've messed things up. Again, the filmmakers use this sequence to give us weird parodies of scenes from the first film. Remember when Marty was waking up and heard his mother Lorraine's voice and thought he was back "home" again? Well, now Lorraine has huge fake breasts and looks like a beat-up old whore, and they all live in a place which looks like it was decorated personally by Tony Montana! Pow!

This second section of the film must've come as a shock to fans of the first film, as it more or less takes everything that was endearing about the original and vomits on it, but I admired it for its audacity and willingness to risk being offensive and alienating. There are some very funny things going on in the edges of the film as well. I enjoyed, for example, how Biff's gang from the 1950s have become his entourage in the 1980s, and how one of them (Billy Zane) has taken to wearing a cowboy hat as an affectation. And I laughed aloud -- for the only time during what is essentially a comedy -- during a scene which revisits Marty's old principal, Mr. Strickland, and finds him as a Rambo-like urban warrior taking on his hated "slackers" with a machine gun.

Getting back to the plot, Marty and Doc eventually realize the problems of "1985-A" can be traced back to the movie's #1 McGuffin -- Gray's Sports Almanac, a book of sports statistics which fell into Biff's clutches and allowed him to become rich and powerful, thus destroying the future. So the film enters its final -- and, to its credit, best -- stage.

3. Revisit the first film from another angle. During this portion of the film, Doc and Marty travel back to 1955 to prevent the 2015 Biff from giving the sports almanac to the 1955 Biff. If you could parse that previous sentence at all, it's a cinch that you've seen the first Back to the Future. It should be mentioned that BTTF2 is a sequel which demands that its audience be thoroughly familiar with the plot of the original, not just the basic premise but the scenes and characters, too, down to fairly minute detail. Some sequels are completely comprehensible to newcomers; one needn't see every James Bond film to get the gist of the character. But a movie like BTTF2 relies very heavily on what the experts call "inter-textual dialogue," and never is this more true than in the third act, in which Doc and Marty are basically creeping around in the margins of the first film, trying to remain just out of sight while alternate versions of themselves are just a few feet away, wrapped up in what they think is the real storyline. I'm getting a bit dizzy just thinking about all of this.

On the DVD, Zemeckis said it was this aspect of the story which interested him the most, and frankly it's what interested me the most as well. For one thing, it allows the film to ditch the horrendous makeup prosthetics of the first two acts, and it gives us a chance to see some more of the 1955 Hill Valley that we hadn't seen before. I liked getting a glimpse of Biff's home life, where he lives with his truly awful grandmother and menaces the small children in his neighborhood. (God bless the filmmakers for not dressing Thomas F. Wilson up in drag and having him play "Grandma Biff.") As noted previously, I'm always on board for more material with the mean principal, Mr. Strickland, so I was glad to have a scene of him drinking alone in his office during the famous Enchantment of the Sea Dance, secretly drowning his misery in the sauce and oblivious to the fact that rock & roll is being invented right next door. Above all, I loved the way this section of the film reached its mysterious and almost spooky apex, with Doc Brown seemingly obliterated by a lightning bolt and a stranded Marty -- alone on a rainy night in the middle of nowhere -- being suddenly visited by a trenchcoat-wearing Joe Flaherty, a very odd deus ex machina indeed. Of course, the film kind of fumbles the ball in the last few minutes by including a trailer for Part III before the closing credits, but even here I appreciated the opportunity to watch the members of ZZ Top do that thing where they spin their instruments around in perfect synchronicity. Damn, that always looks cool.

I have to say that revisiting Back to the Future Part II for this project was generally a rewarding experience. The film is certainly one of the more idiosyncratic sequels ever made, and though it's not always appealing -- and, indeed is often deliberately appalling -- I was not bored by it. I was actually surprised at how frantic it was and how much there is actually going on in this film. I'd like to file BTTF2 alongside Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey in the small but noble category of meta-fictional parodies masquerading as sequels.

All right, you can do that, Joe. Me, I haven't been tempted to re-watch Bogus Journey since it was in theaters (although I have read the comic book adaptation since it was written and drawn by Evan Dorkin, creator of Milk and Cheese and freelance writer on Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Yo Gabba Gabba), and I probably wouldn't have given this film a second look, either, if you hadn't suggested it for this series. This is partially due to how unpleasant the middle section is (and it sure hasn't aged well, as you've pointed out), but it mostly stems from the feeling that one can't watch Back to the Future Part II without immediately following it with Part III so that the story can actual resolve itself. And if I can't seem to block out the four hours required to watch Gone With the Wind (a film that continues to elude me after all these years), I'm sure as heck not going to do that for two-thirds of the trilogy that practically defined the concept of diminishing returns for my 16-year-old self. This is not to say that the Back to the Future series ended on a bad note -- Part III went a long way toward washing away the bad taste that Part II had left in my mouth -- but neither of the sequels ever struck me as really necessary. I dutifully saw them as part of family outings, but between this film and Ghostbusters 2, 1989 was the year of the mercenary sequel that almost but didn't quite taint the sanctity of the original in my mind.

Speaking of having things contaminated, I'd like to say a few words about DVD menus and the people who create them. Now, I realize the perception is that most people who purchase catalog titles like the Back to the Future trilogy on DVD have already seen the movies in question, but is it really a good idea to include a montage of scenes from the film, including some major plot points, including the ending of the film, on the main menu? Surely it crossed their minds that people who were completely new to the series would sit down one day to watch it, presumably right after watching the first film for the first time. Did they really think these people wanted to have major plot points, including the ending of the film, spoiled for them? I guess they must have.

Anyway, getting back to the film, it hits an unavoidable speed bump right out of the gate owing to the replacement of Claudia Wells, who played Marty McFly's girlfriend in the first film, with Elisabeth Shue. This required Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd to replay the original ending verbatim with the new Jennifer, but Lloyd's performance is so erratic (his delivery of the iconic line "Something's gotta be done about your kids" is especially off) that it's a major distraction. Now, I understand that actors aren't necessarily going to use the same exact inflections from take to take (especially ones that are done four years apart), but VCRs were so ubiquitous in the latter half of the '80s that the filmmakers must have realized that people would have re-watched the original multiple times over and thus committed the scene to memory. (As a matter of fact, as Joe points out, they were pretty much banking on that.) It's not like Pulp Fiction, in which Amanda Plummer's Honey Bunny delivers her "Nobody move" line differently at the beginning and end of the film. So much happens in between that you probably won't notice until the second or third time you watch it. With this film, though, if you're as much of a Back to the Future nut as Gale and Zemeckis hoped you would be, you can't help but pick up on it right off the bat, which means instead of wondering what's going to happen when Doc takes Marty and Jennifer to the year 2015, you're thinking, "What's wrong with Christopher Lloyd? Doesn't he know how to say his own lines?"

Moving on, the movie plops us down in 2015 (which, it should be said, is only five years away, or as Roland Emmerich has clearly shown us, three years after the world comes to an end) and immediately Gale and Zemeckis have Doc Brown knock Jennifer out for asking too many questions about her own future. Because when you're a scientist with a time machine the last thing you have time for is to pull over somewhere and take 15-20 minutes to explain things to your assistant's girlfriend. What it really comes down to, I think, is that Gale and Zemeckis were stuck with Jennifer in the DeLorean because she was there at the end of the first film and when they started working on the sequel they realized they had no idea what to do with her in the future. Pretty inconvenient, right? Zap! Problem solved!

With Jennifer out of the way, Doc fills Marty in on his plan (he's to impersonate his doofus of a son, Marty McFly Jr., and refuse to take part in a robbery) and sends him off into the bustling town square of the future Hill Valley with the admonition that he shouldn't look at anything or interact with anybody. Of course, movies are all about looking at things, so Marty ignores the Doc's instructions and marvels at the electronic billboards, including the extremely interactive one for Jaws 19 at the Holomax. Now, anybody who saw Jaws the Revenge in 1987 knew there was no chance of a Jaws 5, let alone a 19, but with the proliferation of IMAX theaters and the recent resurgence of 3-D movies, the idea of a hologrammatic film experience isn't so much of a stretch these days. Marty's also drawn to the window of an antique shop which, in addition to highlighting the pivotal sports almanac, also features a Roger Rabbit doll (a neat in-joke since that was Zemeckis's previous film) and a quaint-looking Macintosh "biege toaster." He then has his proscribed run-in with Griff (whose entire role can be summed up by the way he says, "Since when did you become the physical type?") and one McFly family disaster is avoided only for another to be waiting in the wings.

This second disaster comes in form of a "like father, like son" moment where Marty McFly Sr. (who is the fourth Michael J. Fox we see in the film -- I guess he was trying to one-up Eddie Murphy after Coming to America) fails to back down from an illegal business deal dangled in front of him by a colleague named Needles (a character played by an unrecognizable Flea whose importance to the story isn't revealed until the closing moments of the next film) and is subsequently terminated by his unforgiving Japanese employer, who tells him to "Read my fax." Yes, it's 2015 and people still send faxes, but this is easy to forgive because it's actually important for events in the Back to the Future movies to have a paper trail. After all, how else will we and the characters know that history has been changed if newspaper headlines, matchbooks and other printed media don't magically change in front of our eyes? (Of course, the payoff for the fax likewise doesn't come until the end of Part III, but that was released in the spring of 1990 so it's out of our purview.)

Since both sequels were written and produced simultaneously (a practice that was later repeated with The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean movies), there are a number of other things that are set up in Part II that don't pay off until Part III. One is Doc's declaration that the Old West is his favorite time period and that he wants to give up time travel and explore that other great mystery, women. Another is a passing reference to Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen, gunslinging ancestor to Biff in a video Marty sees upon his return to the 1985 that has been corrupted by Biff's evil influence. And finally there's the scene from A Fistful of Dollars that Biff watches with much amusement, little realizing that his forebear had a similar encounter with somebody posing as "Clint Eastwood" (just as Marty passed himself off as "Calvin Klein" in the first movie).

I tend to agree with Joe that the film picks up considerably when Doc and Marty return to 1955 to set things right and prevent all sorts of calamities that will befall them and their loved ones. Accordingly, there isn't a whole lot for me to say about it that Joe hasn't already covered, but I do want to point out the Travel Service sign in the background of some of the shots that trumpets "10 Days in Cuba!" (This neatly echoes the billboard in 2015 that invites travelers to "Surf Vietnam!" -- itself a clear reference to Apocalypse Now, which had been co-written by Zemeckis and Gale's 1941 co-writer John Milius.). And I quite like Joe Flaherty's walk-on as the ominous Western Union man, which he reprised almost word-for-word at the end of Family Guy's second extended Star Wars parody, Something Something Dark Side, a take-off on The Empire Strikes Back, the gold standard for middle sequels that end on a cliffhanger. Which reminds me...

Next up: The third part of a blockbuster franchise that's not this one.

]]> Spies Like Us, reviewed by Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.621 2010-02-25T22:15:07Z 2010-02-25T22:18:25Z I don't think I'm making any kind of an Earth-shattering revelation when I say that I was a comedy junkie for most of the '80s. I didn't distinguish between good comedy or bad comedy, high or low humor; if... Craig J. Clark and Joe Blevins http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=45
I don't think I'm making any kind of an Earth-shattering revelation when I say that I was a comedy junkie for most of the '80s. I didn't distinguish between good comedy or bad comedy, high or low humor; if it meant to be funny, I would watch it. This is why, in addition to the collective works of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, I've also seen movies like Morgan Stewart's Coming Home multiple times and Johnny Dangerously was considered must-see viewing in the Clark household whenever it came on television, which was often. ("You shouldn't hang me on a hook, Johnny. My father hung me on a hook once. Once!") The holy grail for me, though (until I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that is), was just about any film that starred an alumnus of Saturday Night Live -- despite the fact that I was too young to stay up and actually watch Saturday Night Live at the time. The ones that I gravitated to the most were Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, the breakout stars of the original cast who had gone on to great success (individually or in various pairings) in films like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, Stripes, National Lampoon's Vacation, Trading Places and Ghostbusters. Sure, not all the movies they made were gems (Modern Problems, anyone? If not, would you prefer a house call from Doctor Detroit?), but I watched them regardless. As long as they made me laugh once or twice, I wasn't too particular.

If I respected any one of them more than the other four, it was definitely Dan Aykroyd, largely because he had a hand in writing many of the films he was in, which I felt gave him a leg up over the likes of Chevy Chase, who seemed to be content to do whatever happened to come his way. (This is how a misfire like Under the Rainbow happens.) When the two of them teamed up for 1985's Spies Like Us (which Aykroyd conceived with the original intention of co-starring with Belushi), I was delighted to finally see how they would play off each other. (I didn't get to see any of their work together on Saturday Night Live until years later, so as far as my 12-year-old mind was concerned, Spies Like Us was the first meeting of their comedic minds.) And while I had yet to become a full-blown auteurist, I was aware that the director, John Landis, had also been the guiding force behind Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places and the first segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (the prologue for which had featured Aykroyd). In short, I was ready-made to love Spies Like Us and love it I did. I even bought the 45 of Paul McCartney's theme song, which in all fairness shouldn't be considered an indication of its quality. After all, for a time I was also the proud owner of the single "City of Crime" from the movie Dragnet. (I'm sure that's something Tom Hanks would like to wish out of existence.)

]]> Anyway, like a surprising number of '80s comedies -- in particular those spoofing the spy business -- Spies Like Us starts off with a very, very, very, very, very, very, very serious scene that sets the plot in motion before we're introduced to our would-be heroes. In this case, high-level intelligence operatives Bruce Davison and William Prince -- along with General Ripper-ish military men Steve Forrest and Tom Hatten -- are sent secret satellite photos of the Soviet ICBM site that they plan on hijacking for their own underhanded purposes. (There's a nifty comic touch where the hapless courier carrying the print-outs has to be locked in a closet before they will open the briefcase that's handcuffed to his wrist, but apart from that the scene is played more or less straight.) Then and only then do we get to meet our stars: the wisecracking slacker (Chase) goofing off at the State Department and the uber-geek (Aykroyd) toiling away in the bowels of the Pentagon. Watched over by then-president Ronald Reagan (who actually receives a screen credit at the end of the film), both are informed that they are due to take the foreign service examination the next day, which puts them on a collision course with wackiness as they both arrive late for the test, which is overseen by humorless monitor Frank Oz. After Chase is caught flagrantly cheating and the two of them cause a major disturbance, they're hand-picked by Davison and Prince to receive training as GLG-20's and be sent out into the field as soon as possible.

If I had to pick one reel that encapsulates the essence of the big-budget comedies of the mid-'80s, it would have to be Spies Like Us's training sequence, in which Chase and Aykroyd are put through their paces by a stone-faced Bernie Casey while a tight-lipped Matt Frewer (post-Crimson Permanent Assurance, pre-Max Headroom) looks on. As long as it's content to force them to jump into a pool of muck to avoid getting machine-gunned to death, test their G-force threshold, or strap them into a wingless glider that immediately plummets off its perch and crashes to the ground, Spies Like Us is a joy to behold and the obscene amount of money that it took to make (just look at all the extras doing their exercises in the background of every shot or try to count the number of explosions that go off during the obstacle course scene) seems utterly worth it. Once the two of them are dropped into the Pakistani desert, though, the movie becomes a lot less sprightly, even if this is the part of the film that features Terry Gilliam's juicy cameo (as a Swiss doctor working for the U.N.) and introduces the main love interest, Donna Dixon (who was soon to be Mrs. Dan Aykroyd). This is also the point where the film makes its debt to the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "Road" pictures of the '40s plain by having a golf ball land in the middle of their tent, followed by Hope who asks if he can play though and gets one parting shot ("Doctor, doctor... Glad I'm not sick.") on his way out.

The main problem with this stretch of the film (apart from the fact that it takes place in a part of the world that has much different associations for viewers today than it did a quarter century ago) is that it isn't long before the story gets bogged down in the serious plot again when it turns out that Dixon and her partner (played by Brazil co-writer and supporting player Charles McKeown) are the real GLG-20's that Chase and Aykroyd are supposed to be decoys for. After they completely botch a simple appendix operation while trying to pass themselves off as surgeons, they get in touch with their superiors who send them across the border into Russia, where they're weighed down by cumbersome (but funny-looking) winter outfits and things pick back up when Chase is captured by KGB and Aykroyd has no choice but to rescue him. (My favorite moment: a live grenade lands in Chase's lap and he asks what it is. Aykroyd cries out, "You don't want it!" and miraculously the gunfire ceases long enough for Chase to casually stand up and toss the grenade away. This, of course, results in a building blowing up four times in succession. I guess Landis felt the standard three explosions wasn't explody enough.)

Once Chase has been freed from the KGB's clutches (with all of his fingers intact), he and Aykroyd help Dixon carry out her now-solo mission (since McKeown has violently bit the dust -- anybody who complained about Pineapple Express's body count obviously forgot that it was far from the first mainstream comedy with a death toll), which involves commandeering and launching the Soviet missile so the men behind the scenes (who, it must be said, are safe and secure in an underground bunker) can test out their Star Wars defense system. (Its failure to connect with the target leads to one of my other favorite moments: when the errant laser beam destroys MTV's satellite, it causes the television set of two teenagers to blow up, after which they exclaim, "Wow!" and "Excellent!") After that it's up to our heroes to save the day, which they do just in the nick of time, leading to a happy ending for them and, having bonded over '50s rock 'n' roll, their new Soviet pals, who lead the disarmament talks between the two countries. Many people credit Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev with introducing the policies that lead to the end of the Cold War, but clearly the way was paved for him by the improbably named Emmett Fitz-Hume and Austin Millbarge.

Spies Like Us may not have single-handedly ended the Cold War, but it apparently provided some solace to those who were living under repressive Soviet rule. In a 2004 interview with the AV Club, director John Landis told an anecdote about a Czech film critic who acquired a bootleg tape of the film and would hold furtive screenings in his garage, taking delight in the mere fact that the movie was "making fun of the Russians and the Americans." Apparently, even political comedy as defanged as Spies Like Us may have had a liberating effect for those on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Dr. Strangelove must've blown that Czech critic's mind.

I was certainly aware of Spies Like Us and had probably caught a few minutes of the film on television over the years -- long enough to recognize what it was and then move on -- but before this project, I had never sat through the entire movie from beginning to end. As a relative newcomer to this film, I wanted the full Spies Like Us immersion experience, so in addition to watching the film twice, I also screened the recent Family Guy episode "Spies Reminiscent of Us" (which functions as an informal sequel to the film) and the music video for Paul McCartney's title song.

The 1980s were sort of a second 1950s. Reagan was essentially the second coming of Eisenhower -- a vaguely paternalistic and folksy populist-conservative -- and American popular culture had once again cycled around to lighthearted and frivolous fads. Most of all, the Cold War was again front and center, this time due to the escalating arms race, thus enshrining the "Russkies" once more as our feared and mocked national bogeymen. During this era, there was a pretty surefire winning formula for making hit movie comedies: (1) Hire John Landis or Ivan Reitman as a director. (2) Have one or more stars from Saturday Night Live -- or, in a pinch, SCTV -- in the cast. (3) Commission Elmer Bernstein to write an epic score. (4) Get various random celebrities to do cameos. There! Instant box office smash! It was a good system, and it provided moviegoers with many hours of diversion and entertainment.

Spies Like Us is one of the less-lauded products of that system, and it illustrates how no formula is actually "magic." Clearly, this is a technically well-made film (with a robust $22 million budget -- in 1985 dollars!) and it never grates on the nerves the way a truly incompetent comedy can, but by the same token, I found myself merely nodding agreeably at it and occasionally chuckling at a line every 5 minutes or so. I agree that the movie's strongest material comes near the beginning. Both Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase get showcase moments here before they're teamed up. In particular, I liked how Chevy's character bluffed his way through an uncomfortable press conference (involving America's covert actions in South America) with a mixture of vague doubletalk and silly distractions. Aykroyd, meanwhile, shines in a scene which has him confront a lazy and spiteful supervisor who aims to keep him slaving away in a dank basement. It's no Tom Hanks-and-Dan-Hedaya-in-Joe-Vs.-The-Volcano, mind you, but as office drone wish fulfillment, it gets the job done. The first big Chase/Aykroyd team-up scene -- the Foreign Service Board exam scene with test administrator Frank Oz -- is one of the film's few successful sustained comic sequences, as Chase tries ever-more-absurd strategies of cheating on the test and eventually ropes a reluctant Aykroyd into his nonsense. Throughout these early moments, we get to see Chase and Aykroyd doing what they do best. As in many of his movies, Aykroyd shows his skill at spitting out jargon-laden exposition with great verbal dexterity and enthusiasm. (No wonder he wound up playing Joe Friday a few years later.) And then there's Chevy, who was possibly the biggest comedy film star in the world in 1985, starring in no less of three of the top 20 movies that year. (Fletch and European Vacation were the other two.) His performance in Spies leans heavily on his strengths: the cheerfully misplaced confidence and swagger, the almost Groucho-like one-liners, the constant stream of outlandish boasts and feeble excuses, and the carefully cultivated ironic distance from the rest of the movie. (NOTE: Since Chase gets most of the movie's jokes, I was glad Aykroyd got the punchline in the renowned "dickfer" scene.)

Unfortunately, once Chase and Aykroyd are actually promoted to "GLG 20s" (the movie's oft-repeated term for high-ranking operatives), the film generally settles into the rhythm of a fairly generic 1980s action comedy. The film's basic training sequence feels cribbed from Stripes, and once the two ne'er-do-well spies are actually placed "in the field," the pace slackens a bit. Even here, the laughs do not entirely dissipate; they just become rarer. I was amused, for instance by the ridiculous pastel "preppie" outfits worn by two KGB agents trying to pass themselves off as ultra-whitebread Americans. These two characters are played by professional uber-honkies Jim Staahl (Nelson Flavor from Mork & Mindy) and James Daughton (Greg Marmalard from Landis's Animal House), and if Spies Like Us ever gets the semi-obligatory remake (with, say, Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn), one of these agents will have to be played by Jim Gaffigan. I also liked how the Russian soldiers guarding a Detroit-bound nuclear missile which functions as the movie's prime McGuffin turn out to be harmless knuckleheads who occasionally rock out to "Soul Finger" by the Bar-Kays and have all been secretly longing to get into each other's parkas. But for every amusing little touch like these, we have to sit through many uninspired chase scenes and endure some fairly lame gags, as when Aykroyd tells Chase a missile can be "recalled" and Chase responds, "Like a defective Pinto?" All in all, watching Spies Like Us in 2010 is valuable mostly for the unintentional insight it gives about the manners and mores of the mid-1980s. Note, please, that the Russians are eventually humanized but that the Pakistanis remain cartoonish monsters who engender no sympathy when they die or have their property destroyed through the antics of Chase and Aykroyd's bumblers.

So Spies Like Us does not have the pop cultural cache of Ghostbusters or Stripes, but as John Landis said in that 2004 interview, "You make a movie, and it goes out there and has a life of its own." Certainly, the biggest tribute to Spies Like Us came in 2009, when Family Guy devoted basically an entire episode to Landis' film. "Spies Reminiscent of Us" has Chase and Aykroyd, now actual spies, renting a house in suburban Quahog, RI. across from the Griffins and roping the Griffins' dog, Brian, and their baby, Stewie, into a plot involving brainwashed "sleeper agents," including the town's hapless mayor, Adam West. Eventually, all four heroes travel to Russia in pursuit of West, and the plot culminates with another missile being launched at the United States and then recalled at the last second. I have to say that the basic Spies Like Us plotline functions a little better at 22 minutes than 102 minutes, and the Family Guy writers came up with somewhat sharper jokes than those found in the original film, as when Russian premier Vladimir Putin seemingly threatens the heroes with a series of ominous-looking weapons, all of which turn out to have benign purposes. (One is a coat hanger, another a cigarette lighter, etc.) And little Stewie Griffin finally calls out Chase on his mock-innocent schtick: "Aw, come on, Chevy, you should've known what he was talking about!" Still in all, the moments I enjoyed most in this episode were part of the B plot, in which Peter Griffin -- stung by criticism from Chase and Aykroyd -- forms an ill-fated improv troupe with his buddies to prove he's funnier than those professional comedians.

Finally, as regards that Paul McCartney music video, I can only say that rock critic Tim Riley, assessing Paul's solo career in the flawed but worthwhile Beatles book Tell Me Why, was being generous when he said the song "sounds like a discarded Queen arena anthem." To me, the song sounded like Paul's attempt to sing the words "spies like us" as many times as possible over a catchy yet unmemorable beat. The video, shot in and around the Abbey Road studios, captures Paul during a truly dweebish stage of his career (feathered hair, dorky sweaters) as he, Chase, and Aykroyd make funny faces and try on various disguises. The whole sorry affair ends with the three men in a blasphemous recreation of the Abbey Road album cover. Truly, "Spies Like Us" is no "Live and Let Die."

Next up: The project kicks off Neglected Middle Sequels Month with a thorough investigation of Back to the Future Part II.

]]> The Elephant Man, reviewed by Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark tag:www.unloosen.com,2010:/thestuff//2.620 2010-02-11T23:45:11Z 2010-02-12T00:45:56Z (NOTE: I am going to kill the suspense immediately by telling you in the first sentence that I loved this film and watched it twice just in the process of preparing for this review.) In case you haven't figured... Joe Blevins and Craig J. Clark http://www.unloosen.com/control/?__mode=view&blog_id=2&id=44
(NOTE: I am going to kill the suspense immediately by telling you in the first sentence that I loved this film and watched it twice just in the process of preparing for this review.)

In case you haven't figured it out, Craig and I have been alternating movie picks for this project. (Yes, I am the one who selected Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Insisted on it, really. I don't remember why.) For my second pick, I wanted to choose something more prestigious because, after all, this is Oscar season. When I thought about respectable, award-caliber movies from the 1980s, my mind immediately went to David Lynch's The Elephant Man, a serious, fact-based 1980 drama whose DVD cover proudly announces the fact that it was "Nominated for 8 Academy Awards." It won none of those, but still... honor just to be nominated, right?

I was first introduced to this film -- no lie -- by Joe Bob Briggs, who showed The Elephant Man as part of his long-gone, much-missed TV series, MonsterVision, in the 1990s. Doesn't showing The Elephant Man on something called MonsterVision kind of miss the whole point? Not exactly. To me, The Elephant Man has the look and feel of one of the old Universal horror films. The ghosts of such Universal directors as James Whale and Tod Browning hover over The Elephant Man.

]]> It's worth noting that The Elephant Man shares some of its DNA with another retro-styled black-and-white paean to the golden days of Universal Studios: Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. Brooks was the (uncredited) executive producer of The Elephant Man, and both films have gorgeous, evocative scores by John Morris. (On the DVD commentary for Young Frankenstein, Brooks says that Morris' music for Frankenstein is second only to his score for Elephant.) Now, I'm not saying that The Elephant Man and Young Frankenstein are alike tonally. They're not. The latter is a raucous comedy, while the former is a sober drama. But they share a common theme: a gentle soul trapped in a "monstrous" body, a being who is treated as a monster because he looks like a monster and whose outwardly-normal tormentors reveal themselves as the real "monsters" through their behavior. In both of these films, the unfortunately deformed characters try to reinvent themselves in the image of the sophisticated, well-dressed man-about-town.

There was, of course, a real Elephant Man. His name was Joseph Merrick -- not "John Merrick," as this film has it. I was not surprised that this movie veers rather drastically from the historical record, even though its credits and trailer both boast that it is based on on a "true life story" and not on any other fictional accounts, such as the Broadway play. The real Merrick was a willing and active participant in his public exhibition as a human oddity and was treated well during his days in the traveling carnival circuit. Moreover, the film's time line -- with Merrick being kidnapped away from the hospital, being kept in a cage, then escaping and returning to the hospital -- simply did not happen. Does this matter? Not to me, really. The true story is interesting, certainly, but I believe Lynch's ultimate aim was to give the audience more of a parable or (forgive my use of this frivolous-sounding term) fairy tale. Consider the character of Mr. Bytes: the cruel, selfish man who keeps Merrick his prisoner and ruthlessly exploits him for money. The character is a highly fictionalized version of Merrick's real-life boss during the carnival days. That name -- Bytes (the invention of the screenwriters, by the way) -- is something right out of Dickens. File it along with "Scrooge," "Jaggers," and "Gradgrind" in the list of unflattering Dickensian aptonyms. (NOTE: I learned about the concept of "aptonyms" from the book Crazy English by Richard Lederer.) The character's behavior and his treatment of Merrick -- and Merrick's arduous struggle to escape from his tyranny -- seem firmly rooted in the world of fantastic make-believe rather than the world of rigorously-researched history. To put it bluntly, The Elephant Man is not a documentary or docudrama, and I would scarcely have it otherwise.

I have come all this way in the review without really telling you what it is that I liked so much about The Elephant Man. One of my internal, never-expressed-aloud tests for a movie is: does it provide us with extraordinary things to see and hear? The best directors know that movies are primarily Things To Look At and secondarily Things To Listen To, and few filmmakers understand that better than David Lynch. Lynch and his cinematographer, Freddie Francis, provide us with such an overabundance of beauty that I could hardly absorb it all. Lynch films in widescreen here, and Francis gives us so much in focus at once that our eyes may freely roam the screen and find sharp detail in every corner. I love the whole world in which this movie takes place: the nightmarish carnival, the gas-lit hospital, the cobblestone streets. God, I wish the world actually looked like this! And the sound, too! That crazy David Lynch sound! The low, ominous rumbles and repetitive mechanical rhythms -- who else but Lynch (working again in tandem with Alan Splet) would have put these wildly grotesque touches into a "serious" period piece costume drama?

None of this, though, would mean a damned thing if I hadn't gotten wrapped up in the storyline. But I did. Not just wrapped up but totally absorbed and devastated. I am telling you, readers, I do not generally cry during movies but I was bawling at several points during The Elephant Man. And not necessarily during the moments when Merrick was suffering the most either! One of the most insightful things the critic Danny Peary said about It's a Wonderful Life (he reviews it in the first Cult Movies books; go read it when you're done here) is that audience members watching that film tend to cry not when George Bailey is at his lowest points but rather at those moments when he is happiest or expressing gratitude for all that he has. It was the same for me during The Elephant Man. What moved me the most were the times of triumph and warmth, like when Merrick -- having just "flunked" his initial interview with John Gielgud -- astounds both Gielgud and Anthony Hopkins by reciting the 23rd Psalm from memory.

Anthony Hopkins! Jesus, I haven't even mentioned Anthony Hopkins! He's alarmingly good here -- and subtle. I like the way his character -- Dr. Frederick Treves, the London physician whose memoirs about his friendship with Merrick provided much of the basis of the screenplay -- is so calm and quiet for the most part, except for one big scene in which Treves loses his cool. It's through Treves that we also explore one of the trickier themes of The Elephant Man: is Merrick just being exploited all over again by a fancier class of people? Is David Lynch just exploiting the man a century later by making this movie? Do we feel real empathy for Merrick or just pity? Should we even be watching? Is it worse to look at Merrick or to look away? Which is the bigger insult?

The movie, to its credit, does not answer these questions in any kind of definitive way. Art should generally stick to raising questions rather than answering them. I will say only that watching The Elephant Man was a rare experience for me. I was left aghast, shocked, moved, wrung out. Goddamn, what a film.

Like Joe, while reviewing The Elephant Man for this series I was knocked out all over again, just like I was the first time I saw it back in college. Having grown up almost exclusively on a diet of sitcoms and Hollywood movies, I credit my four years of higher education with getting me to hunker down and explore some of the more obscure corners of popular culture. The process had already gotten underway to some degree while I was in high school since that was when I became aware of Monty Python and started to view PBS as a source of more than just children's television and stuffy costume dramas. My interest in all things cinematic, both foreign and domestic, though, can be traced to Trenton State's Cinemateque, which was programmed by one of the professors in the communications department (whose name sadly escapes me). It was through the Cinemateque that I saw my first silent film (Buster Keaton's The General), my first subtitled film (Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) and my first David Lynch film (The Elephant Man, natch). There are some who might balk at putting Lynch in his own category, but if anyone could be said to be a singular filmmaker, it would have to be he.

This was especially the case in the early '90s, when Lynch was at the peak of his mainstream success as the co-creator of Twin Peaks, which brought his obsessions -- along with Blue Velvet's depiction of small-town life as a hotbed of secret depravity -- to prime time. When he was handpicked by producer Mel Brooks to bring The Elephant Man to the screen in 1980, however, he was only known for the bizarro cult movie Eraserhead, which is about as uncommercial as a film can get. A surprise hit on the midnight-movie circuit, Eraserhead was Art with a Capital A-R-T, so it took an enormous leap on Brooks's part to imagine that Lynch could make a film set in the real world and based on the life of an actual person (even if, as Joe points out, a great many liberties were taken with it). Indeed, the film opens with an abstract sequence depicting the event that supposedly caused John Merrick's deformity -- his pregnant mother being knocked down by a wild elephant in her fourth month -- before settling in for the more straightforward and conventional story of the noble London surgeon (superbly played by Anthony Hopkins) who rescues him from the clutches of abusive carnival owner Freddie Jones, not realizing that there's a sensitive and articulate young man trapped inside the Terrible Elephant Man's misshapen body.

And what a body it is: whether seen in shadow or silhouette or even in the harsh light of day, it never fails to make an impression, even on one who has seen the film many times over. The first time Dr. Treves catches sight of Merrick -- having doggedly tracked him down after previously being denied access to him thanks to the inopportune intervention of the police -- he is actually brought to tears. And when Treves presents him to the London Pathological Society there are audible gasps and a great deal of consternation from the medical professionals present. But that's nothing compared to how women react to his grotesque countenance. Treves's wife manages to put on a brave face when he comes around to tea one afternoon, but eventually she breaks down sobbing, overcome by his plight. I suspect that has as much to do with how articulate and well-spoken he is as it does with his inescapably hideous appearance.

Much of the credit for making Merrick such an indelible character has to go to John Hurt, who does a yeoman's job of working under pounds of prosthetics and cumbersome makeup. "Can you imagine the kind of life he must have had?" asks hospital governor John Gielgud after he has learned that Merrick is not the imbecile everyone imagined him to be. He could have just as easily been talking about Hurt, who endured countless hours of pain and hardship to play the role. And it is a heartbreaking performance, whether he's desperately reciting the 23rd Psalm from memory or reading Romeo and Juliet out loud to a famous actress (Anne Bancroft) who has called on him or delivering the film's most famous line -- "I am not an animal! I am a human being!" -- to a bewildered crowd that has him cornered in a train station. No matter how many times it has been spoofed in the three decades since this film's release, it still grabs the viewer on a gut level. That's acting, folks.

In retrospect, The Elephant Man's industrialized England doesn't look or sound too far removed from the hellish, post-industrial (post-apocalyptic?) landscape of Eraserhead, a film I didn't catch up with until several years later. This was, of course, at the tail end of the VHS era when copies were apparently quite scarce and the only video store I could find that carried it -- TLA Video in Philadelphia -- required a $120 deposit before one was allowed to rent it. Now that Eraserhead -- like all of Lynch's work, including his early shorts -- is readily available on DVD and even gets shown on cable once in a while, it's arguable that it's lost some of its cachet (maybe if it could still be seen in a darkened theater at midnight, it would get some of it back), but no matter how one views The Elephant Man, it continues to have an undeniable power that hasn't diminished over time. If the studios were still in the habit of re-releasing their classics in theaters, this would be a prime candidate, especially as this year is its 30th anniversary. They could even put it out on a double bill with Raging Bull; I guarantee there would be lines around the block.

Next up: A comic tale of international espionage with a theme song by a former Beatle.

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