News You Can Bruise for 2013 February 1

Fri Feb 01 2013 10:13 Video Roundup: January 2013: Gonna put one of these up every month, so as to avoid the big bolus of reviews that happened last time. There are only three films here, all from a Paul Williams retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image.

• Phantom of the Paradise: A flop on its initial release, Phantom has seen a resurgence as a cult classic. A very uneven movie that does over-the-top comedy very well but everything else is kind of a mishmash taken from other films. Well, a lot of the comedy is also taken from other films: there's a great scene that uses the car-bomb scene from Touch of Evil by way of killing off the Beach Boys. But that scene is great because it doesn't just blindly reference another movie, It adds a layer of complexity onto the original (using a split screen to show an "onstage" view and a "backstage" view which are united by the explosion) that creates suspense even if you've seen the referent.

  But for me, the character of Beef stole the show. Beef, the flaming metalhead, progenitor of both Rocky from Rocky Horror and Vyvyan from The Young Ones. Good times. Rocky Horror has better songs, though.

• The Muppet Movie: It's The Muppet Movie. We all know how it goes. People in the theater were pre-laughing when we saw Miss Piggy and Kermit in the restaurant, because we knew Steve Martin was gonna show up, and then he showed up and life was good.
• Ishtar: This film has a really bad reputation and a horribly low IMDB rating, but I was looking forward to it because I loved Elaine May's A New Leaf. And I was right to look forward to it! This is a great movie. It's really funny and the plot comes together nicely. It's not perfect, but it doesn't deserve a 3.9 rating.

  To illustrate my point, I've brought back The MST3K-IMDB Effect for a return engagement. Here, the part of "a movie being (or not being) on MST3K" will be played by "a movie being (or not being) Ishtar."

  Director	Normalm	Normalstd	Normaln	MSTm	MSTstd	MSTn	Effect1	Effect2	MSTed Films
  May, Elaine	7.1	0.14	3	3.9	-	1	3.2	22.9	Ishtar

  That's right, Elaine May's MST3K-IMDB effect is 22.9 standard deviations, sixty percent higher than the previous highest MST_m of 14.1, which was itself highly suspect. It's not impossible that a director would hammer out three movies that cluster very tightly around an IMDB rating of 7.1, and then deliver a movie that's 23 standard deviations worse, but I'm not seeing it. Instead, I would rate Ishtar a little lower than A New Leaf. The Onion agrees.

  So what explains the low rating? The obvious reason is sabotage. The movie cost too much to make, May took way too long to edit her films, and the studio head had some kind of feud with Warren Beatty which he took out on Ishtar in public. Once the movie had become a punchline (specifically, the punchline to the Far Side "Hell's video store" cartoon), it was too late to change anyone's mind.

  But I have two other explanations. First, during the Reagan years, during Iran-Contra, the moviegoing public was probably not in the mood for Ishtar's ham-fisted satire of America's foreign policy. Let alone one that climaxes with two Americans firing rockets at a CIA gunship that's trying to take them out. But now it seems pretty light by comparison with real life.

  Second, Ishtar is a film about idiots who are really bad at something creative. Any time you write an infrafictional work that's supposed to be bad (and the songs in Ishtar are hilariously bad), you're inviting people to skip a step and believe that you have written something simply bad. Spinal Tap are idiots, but they have good songs.

  Anyway, Elaine May was actually at this showing, and she took a couple questions, but she seemed really shy so we didn't bombard her with our fandom. Especially because other people were bombarding her with their fandom, and we saw how awkward it was.