News You Can Bruise for 2014 April

(1) Tue Apr 01 2014 13:21 March Film Roundup: April Fools! As part of an elaborate prank spanning over a year I have slowly turned NYCB into mostly a film review blog! Hahahahaha... ah...

Anyway, I'm trying out a new strategy for spending less time writing these film roundups. Instead of trying to analyze each movie in detail I'm going to write only as much about a movie as I feel like writing in the moment. Sometimes this will still be a lot, but most of the time I think a paragraph's worth of text will suffice.

• Life Without Zoe (1989): A big budget father-and-daughter Coppola short that's charming despite being about a super-spoiled Richie-Rich type teenager. I think the key is that Zoe is a teenager who acts like an adult, whose parents act like teenagers. This works even though an adult who acted like Zoe acts would also be insufferable, and without Zoe her parents would be insufferable. It's a strange alchemy.

  I was momentarily excited because the opening credits introduced everyone by given name ("Written by Francis and Sophie") and when the credits introduced "Giancarlo" I thought maybe Giancarlo Esposito was in this film. But no, it was just well-known Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini. Dammit!

• Lost in Translation (2003): O VER RA TED. In fact I'd go so far as to claim that this movie is the same as Meatballs (1979), with the Bill Murray part played by Scarlett Johansson and the Chris Makepeace part played by Bill Murray. Some good physical comedy from Murray.
• Last Action Hero (1993): Seen with Jake and Sukiko because Netflix didn't have Sukiko's favorite movie, The Terminator. To paraphraze jwz, this movie is good if your time has no value. There's forty minutes of really good, clever metahumor, an hour of obnoxious action movie parody, and half an hour that's just boring generic movie setup. So if you have nothing better to do, sure, go through this movie for that forty minutes. I don't regret seeing Last Action Hero. But being UN DER RA TED for years as people slowly gain an appreciation for its finer qualities is exactly what this movie deserves.
• Muppets Most Wanted (2014): Preview screening with Sumana! The Muppets, was a movie about the Muppets, and this is a movie with the Muppets. So it's got that going for it. Sumana likes it better than the first one, because it focuses on Kermit instead of Walter, who, let's face it, is kind of a nonentity. I... don't know. The movie flirts with how egregious an Idiot Plot can possibly get, but since most of the Muppets are well-established as idiots I guess it works.

  In general the moments I loved in this movie—and there were a lot of them—were in the interstices. It's always lampshading its ridiculous plot and escalating sight gags into absurdity. It's funny, and certainly in the keeping of the classic Muppet movies, but it betrays the sweaty hand of the punch-up gag screenwriter. I think the Muppets have a lot of the same problems The Simpsons has at this point.

  Misc notes: I loved the repurposing of Kermit's catchphrases into action-movie taglines. The songs are good, but nothing as catchy as "Life's A Happy Song" or "Man or Muppet". Sam the Eagle finally gets an entire movie subplot, and it's great. One misstep: the gulag? Maybe not the best idea? I don't think massive human rights violations are totally off-limits for humor, but maybe not in a PG Muppet movie?

  A while back we were talking Muppet with someone and I mentioned that I can't tell the difference between the Jim Henson Kermit voice and the Steve Whitmire Kermit voice. Well, now I can, and it's kind of sad.

  Prefaced with a fun Pixar short about Portal.

• The Playhouse (1921): Buster Keaton short. Watch it here, but only up to 4:30. The technical comedy achievement is marred by its conjunction with horrible blackface (blackface lasts from 2:10 to 3:00 and 4:30 to 4:45), and after the five-minute mark, there's no reason whatsoever to keep going. The technical wizardry ceases and for instead you get Keaton in apeface. That's right, he uses blackface makeup to impersonate a chimpanzee. the split-screen gimmick at the start is incredible, everything else is cringey, but give the man credit: he invented a new type of comedy capable of demeaning a whole different species.
• Seven Chances (1925): Also Buster Keaton, also watchable online. In stark contrast to The Playhouse, the whole thing is funny, and it gets better and better as it goes on. Not gonna say much more because the fun of this movie is seeing Keaton work out every possible permutation of its one basic joke.

  I don't like doing Silent Movie Racism Watch, but I feel like it's a service I must provide. There's one kinda-iffy joke in Seven Chances, but this movie also features the only non-racist race-based joke I've seen in a silent movie. The main problem here is sexism. The premise of the second half of the movie is pretty sexist, but you also have huge crowds of assertive women in the final chase sequence, sending policemen to flight, commandeering vehicles, a sight that surely had reactionaries of the time grumping "I told you this would happen if they got the vote!" So maybe it's a wash?

• Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957): It's a Mad Men kinda satire of gender roles and corporate status play, except it's actually from 1957. People in the past weren't dumb. They knew what was up, and films like this show it. I can only hope we get the same consideration fifty years from now.

  Starts with some fourth-wall breaking and then some zany fake MAD-style commercials. The movie is full of amazingly dirty innuendo-filled dialogue, and if you're not the intellectual sort, there's always Jayne Mansfield as "Mayne Jansfield." I think that was the character's name. Worth a watch, but not a must-see.

• 1941 (1979): Spielberg's Ishtar. A funny movie that went way over budget and, if things had gone a little differently, could have sunk the director's career. It's not as good as Ishtar, and it's been completely forgotten instead of becoming a punchline, but it has the same problems. Blockbuster comedies have trouble earning back their money, most people don't like to see super-convoluted movies about incompetent people, and Americans really don't like their government (at least, the parts of the government that carry guns) being satirized as incompetent.

  That said, I love seeing super-convoluted movies about incompetent people, and the variety of incompetences depicted in this movie is really inspiring. The obvious next step would be to see Stripes, a highly acclaimed film on a similar topic to 1941 that has a lot of cast overlap. Which I'm guessing has a very straightforward plot, and that's the secret to box-office success.

  I know Nathan Rabin's "Year of Flops" series did an entry on Ishtar, so I went to see if he did an entry on 1941 and, yes, he sure did. He did not like 1941 very much ("Fiasco"), but upon re-reading his Ishtar entry ("Secret Success") I now like Ishtar a little less, so he actually brought my opinions of 1941 and Ishtar closer together.

  I also gotta take issue with Spielberg being described as "straight-arrow". Sure, he is now, but up to 1941 his films (Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters) were all pretty far out there. It's not unreasonable for him to think he could pull this off. Maybe 1941 was the movie that taught him to start playing it safe.

  Two bonus appreciations: Dan Akroyd's inspirational troop-rallying speech, which is the same kind of jargony gibberish as the field manuals his character quotes the rest of the time. The Japanese sailor who's sad at the end of the movie for the same reason the other sailors are cheerful.

• Psych (2006-2014): I guess I'll do TV shows here when they end. I posted a brief appreciation of Psych when we started watching many years ago, back when it was just a silly mystery show. It never stopped being a silly mystery show, but over the years it suffered a bit of House syndrome as main character Shawn became more and more obnoxious while rarely suffering any consequences due to being the main character of a silly mystery show.

  I'm glad it stopped when it did; the last two seasons were pretty uneven. But they were uneven partly because Psych started ramping up the crazy film-nerd stuff, doing experimental things like remaking one of their previous episodes. The sort of thing Manny Coto did in the last season of Enterprise. A lot of experiments don't work out, but even when it was bad Psych never took itself seriously.

  Final note: I thought I said this on NYCB before, but it looks like not: Kurt Fuller is amazing as Woody the coroner. The story of the later seasons of Psych is the story of Woody becoming a major character. I feel so strongly about this I made a little chart charting his appearances since his debut in the 2009 Jaleel White vehicle "High Top Fade Out":

  

  This is good and bad. Woody is a great character, and the most Santa Barbara thing about Psych, but all too often I think when the writers needed to make a guest star seem creepy or quirky they would give the guest star a line they wrote for Woody. Anyway, Woody 4evah.

• The Ladies Man (1961): This was Jerry Lewis's follow-up audition for being someone whose movies I'll keep watching, and he almost passed. This is funnier than The Nutty Professor, but still not all that funny. So I'm done. If you have a suggestion as to some Jerry Lewis movie you think I'd like, let me know and I'll give it a shot.

  I was going to suggest that Jerry Lewis is like Mel Brooks in that as a comedian he's very creative, but not reliably funny. I was going to go further and say that his fatal flaw as a comedian is a Mel Brooks-like sentimentality: in this movie, the way he literally puts women on pedestals instead of letting them be funny. And then I go to IMDB trivia and see "During a 2008 interview, Mel Brooks noted that he wrote the original script for this movie, but since most of his work was excised from the final version asked that his name be removed from the credits." So I don't know what to think anymore.

  Charlie Chaplin has this problem too, so it's probably not a "fatal flaw" so much as a "school of comedy I don't like."

• M*A*S*H* (1970): No thanks. Uses really, really awful sexism as the lens to view the clash between draftees and regular Army. I gotta say, if all of Robert Altman's films are like this, I want nothing to do with him. The football bit is funny.
• Groundhog Day (1993): Sumana saw this movie (at a Harold Ramis tribute), not me, but I just want it on record that I love this movie.
• The Ice Harvest (2005): Maybe not a movie you want to pay to see in a first-run theater, but that ship has long since sailed, and we're left with an enjoyable neo-noir thriller that does a good job of exploring the dark side of the holidays without making it the focal point of the movie. Oliver Platt auditions well for his upcoming role in the Fargo TV show.