WTF?
Who decided it was a good idea to make an entire movie about people saying inappropriate (or gratuitously hurtful, or both) things to family members and operating at the emotional level of toddlers?
Was I supposed to notice character development somewhere in the snide comments and accusatory remarks? Was I supposed to identify with even one of the characters?
Based on Googling, this quote has been used for political snark regarding the Big Three auto companies and regarding military stop-loss orders, but -- to my surprise -- nothing recent (at least nothing that would get a high Page Rank).
Without further ado (watch to the end, of course).
Feel free to make suggestions that might jog my memory (or win me over) - better yet turn the disjointed mess that is the Extended Entry into something vaguely resembling structure and order!
On at least one social network my favorite movie is listed as Major League because that's what popped into my head.
Nearly every plausible choice that comes to mind leaves me feeling a bit let-down: "That's THE #1 MOVIE on your all-time favorites??!" And then I start wondering what total gems I just couldn't think of at the time.
For many years I claimed that my favorite movie was The Gods Must Be Crazy. That's got two opposite problems at once: It was a very pretentious claim to make, AND YET when I re-watched the movie a couple years ago I was bitterly disappointed. Maybe the slapstick parts are a lot funnier to a precocious 10-year-old.
Given my genre tastes my "favorite movie" is more likely to be a comedy than anything else. There's also a fighting chance it would be a baseball movie. Major League is the best baseball comedy out there (Bull Durham is good, but have I ever told you how overrated it is? - I've watched it a few times yet always felt a bit disappointed by the difference between remembered quality and actual quality).
Some random possibilities that occur to me:
Better Off Dead? Grosse Point Blank? Both are surely in my top 10.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off? This just feels like the sort of movie one outgrows, and honestly I'd rank Major League above it.
Midnight Madness? I really need to watch soon to see how well it's held up over time.
Is it one of the Pixar blockbusters? But how does one rank those? Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles would both contend (I think Toy Story got massively overplayed). Finding Nemo was also run into the ground but might be so good that it withstands the hype. When I finally get a chance to see WALL*E will I ask "where have you been all my life?"
My favorite Kevin Smith movie is Dogma, for what it's worth (I'm weird that way).
My favorite Will Ferrell movie is Stranger Than Fiction. (Sort of along those lines: I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, hated Fight Club, loved both of the M. Night Shyamalan movies I've seen.)
I wonder how well the Airplane! franchise has aged. (Surprisingly I've never seen any of the "[Adjective] Movie" hybrid spoofs.)
Romantic comedies with Adam Sandler are all far better than they have any business being (sort of the opposite of romantic comedies with Tom Hanks).
I love Christopher Guest across the board but it's impossible to privilege any one mockumentary over another, except maybe Spinal Tap as the ur-example.
Steve Martin's best movies (in my opinion) were HouseSitter and My Blue Heaven, both of which have quite a lower profile than (say) Roxanne or Father of the Bride.
Is Bill Murray's best movie really Lost in Translation? (Or for that matter The Royal Tenenbaums?) I wonder how Meatballs has held up over time. If it hasn't then my favorite 20th century Bill Murray movie might be Groundhog Day, which really really doesn't feel like anybody's all-time #1. (I should love Caddyshack but emphatically... it's not that I dislike it, but that Caddyshack is arguably THE MOST OVERRATED movie of all-time.)
So I already mentioned loving Eternal Sunshine, and the same goes for Bruce Almighty. The Ace Ventura movies are underrated (but still nothing special); I've still never seen Dumb & Dumber because I never forgave the Farrelly brothers for There's Something About Mary (which might give Caddyshack a run for its "Most Overrated" money!).
Oh hey, I just remembered One Night At McCool's! I inordinately enjoyed that movie! But it faded so far into my memory that for a split second I mistakenly thought the title was Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrells. (Sort of but not really along those lines: Julia rented Memento for me while under the mistaken impression that "Memento" was the name of the movie that turned out to be "Unbreakable." But once I finally completely solved Memento it was less than met the eye.)
High Fidelity won't come close to my #1 but I wonder where it ranks. Little Miss Sunshine of all movies might have a fighting chance.
(Wow, second straight post that combines our recent Netflix viewing habits with this column!)
Baby Mama! Far worse than Boat Trip, though not nearly as bad as Just Married.
My wife has had very bad luck with mainstream comedy rentals over the years. This has nothing to do with her taste, which I generally find impeccable, and very little to do her ability to predict movie quality. Rather, everything you know about a movie coming into it will set a reasonable quality expectation, within which there might still be some variance. The variance here has been her enemy. A lot.
Now sometimes she'll rent a movie and I can see a mile away how bad it would be, and I'll ask: "You saw that coming, right?"
And in fairness, there have been times where I was dead certain she'd chosen a terrible movie, yet the movie turned out to be quite good. Off the top of my head that includes Failure To Launch, Guess Who?, and especially High School Musical.
But the out-of-nowhere atrocities are what stick in one's head.
Unrelated to the main topic of this post, but wrapping up the commentary on our recent Netflix viewing: What do we think of Shadows and Fog? I'd file it under "OK, I guess," though I honestly wonder how many people my age (or a couple years older) ought to have become big Woody Allen fans yet had that process delayed quite a bit from being exposed to one of his "just humor him" movies before they had a chance to see Love and Death or Annie Hall or such.
Take your favorite narration-heavy Morgan Freeman movie and imagine that his voice-over work was replaced by the same lines coming from Jenna Fischer (Pam from The Office (U.S. version)).
(A reference in this column, plus our recent Netflix viewing, made me think of this.)
A Wedding: I think our mistake here was assuming that this would be the kind of movie Christopher Guest might make about a wedding, rather than remembering that this was late '70s Robert Altman (or, as one IMDBer put it, "What he did to the military in M*A*S*H he does to marriage."). Julia grew to hate it more and more (despite having Carol Burnett and Desi Arnaz Jr.), while I settled for the "it is what it is" cliche.
Wordplay (wow, the IMDB "Plot" line for this is hideously misleading!): Speaking of Christopher Guest, if you watch enough mockumentaries about hardcore activity people, it's refreshing to the kind of documentary that inspired Guest, yet about genuinely likable people. Julia was deeply impressed to learn that Jason Z. has been teammates with Will Shortz at the world Sudoku championship. Anyway this is exactly the sort of movie that will one day be made about quiz-bowl.
Undeclared: The Complete Series. Very nicely done! (What else is there to say?)
Have you ever been the only person (or only people, if you went together) in a movie theater? Julia and I were the sole audience for last night's 10 p.m. Jack London Square showing of Leatherheads.
Previews: Al Pacino has a couple of cop/legal thrillers coming out. Mama Mia! should have stuck to the stage.
The Hulk franchise has conspicuously airbrushed Ang Lee out of its cultural history. Not that I blame them -- this film was a crime against humanity -- but wow, what a slap in the face to an otherwise good director. (Along those lines I can only wait and hope and pray for someone to finally bury this piece of garbage and do saturation marketing for "the Hitchhiker's Guide movie you've always wanted to see.")
The movie itself: The first 3/4 of it were fantastic! Like a sports movie, only better; like an "old movie" (say, Cary Grant's finest) but recent.
Then all it took was one ridiculously stupid, anti-historical, incomprehensibly slapdash plot development for me to lose interest almost instantly. The plot twist in question may have set a record for being just wrong on so many levels at the same time.
Then again, sports movies are surprisingly bad about sporting veracity, and from what we know of George Clooney in real life it's probably too much to expect civic veracity from him. (For a quick 10 points, which constitutional amendment would effectively prevent an athletic commissioner -- regardless of how he was appointed -- from punishing a reporter who had no business connection to the league in question?)
(Wikipedia doesn't shed much light, but I did read a little bit about this guy and this guy. (This guy needs no introduction.))
Oh, while we're here: Is John Krasinski going to make an entire career out of characters who look crestfallen because everything went to hell because they didn't speak up? If only he'd just admitted he wasn't a real war hero, why, he could be dating Pam!
As best I can tell, Michael Clayton was a box office bomb, yet for some reason everyone and his dog has written a review timed to the DVD release. Slate has one, for example.
I always find it galling when people draw conclusions about real people and real professions based on elements of a vaguely plausibly authentic (the hit men notwithstanding) work of fiction that happens to fit their prejudices.
(You already know I'm about as pro-drug as any non-drug-using (caffeine addiction aside) person could be, so obviously you understand that this is about culture, and cynically derivative efforts, rather than anything personal or political.)
So was Weeds just the gateway TV series?
At this point wouldn't the obvious next step be a Will Farrell movie in which he sells heroin, yet in the style of all his sports movies?
Awhile back I mentioned watching This Film is Not Yet Rated and being appalled by just how wildly the makers overplayed their hand.
But just because they made a terrible movie doesn't mean the original filmmakers weren't dead right about the absurd things the MPAA will sometimes do.
...but easily the two weakest links in the Hairspray remake are the two biggest names (i.e. Tracy's parents).
It's too bad there's so much focus on Mrs. Turnblad's self-image, since without that angle this is crying out to be the show that demonstrates to the High School Musical demographic how to be twice as good as HSM.
My Son the Fanatic: Julia read the short story that inspired this movie; it wasn't what she'd call comedy. Nor was the movie (except in some very subtle indie flick sense), despite every genre classification we've seen. Still well worth watching.
Unbreakable: Julia strongly recommended this to me, having liked it (way back when it came out) despite not expecting to like it. In fact, earlier she'd rented Memento on my behalf even though Unbreakable was the movie she had in mind.
This is how tired I was (and how ignorant I am): Bruce Willis. Emotional distance plus foreboding. The city of Philadelphia. And yet it didn't register until the obligatory M. Night cameo itself who was behind this movie. So far we're 2-for-2 on my deeply enjoying M. Night movies that star Bruce Willis and are set in Philadelphia.
(I don't know if there's a way to put this without spoilers, but I disagree with the claim that this needed to be a trilogy instead of one movie. That is, I disagree with both the implied praise and the implied criticism. The movie is just right in itself.)
(Football, movies, AND politics?)
"The number of current box-office stars who have portrayed hired killers in major-studio films probably exceeds the number of actual professional assassins in the real world. You don't have to be Dr. Freud to speculate that cinema stars, steeped in a Hollywood culture obsessed with personal power, subconsciously fantasize about actually being able to kill whomever they please. But doesn't it strike you as strange that so many big-name stars are willing to portray characters who commit murder without compunction? Can it be coincidence the public is becoming turned off to the movies at the very time so many stars revel in morally vacant roles?"
--Tuesday Morning Quarterback
Easterbrook gave a long list of actors who have played hit men. To his credit, he did not impugn the religious beliefs of any of them.
Politics below the fold.
Anger Management and License to Wed are built on the same premise, that any given everyman will be better off if some psychopath is given official sanction to mess with him, supposedly for his own good.
I still refuse to watch Anger Management; I learned yesterday that we'd be watching License to Wed. (I could have opted out but didn't feel strongly enough to do so.)
Life is not rocket science. Playing well with others does not require elaborate schemes, nor does learning how to play well with others require some sort of contrived adversity.
(Who in their right mind would contrive adversity? Life has enough real adversity to deal with.)
Respect each other. Communicate. Plan ahead, where appropriate. Cope. Repeat over the course of several decades.
I learned three particular things from Reason today: One is that Mike Huckabee is arguably the most frightening plausible president. If he and Hillary (or he and Obama) won their respective nominations, I would volunteer several hours a week to the campaign of the Democratic candidate.
The next is that Britain won't let some fat people immigrate because they would pose too much of a strain on the national health care system. As you might imagine, this wouldn't be a problem if people paid for their own medicine.
The third is that some sheriff's deputies are not only too incompetent to avoid raiding the wrong house, but also too incompetent to avoid shooting an innocent person's dog. "The deputy says he feared for his life."
Do I need to explain how the movie rants relate to the political rants?
(Post-script: How can I be so dogmatic about the right to be left alone, yet willing to support what Brian Doherty calls endless international policing and adventurism? For one thing, I don't privilege Americans over the rest of the world. For another, I do believe that many (most?) regimes are inherently illegitimate, especially the non-democracies. So compared to real libertarians I have a much higher tolerance threshold for international intervention. I'll admit that it's not always clear whether the actual people involved are better off in a war zone than they were under tyranny.)
It's not immediately clear the last movie I watched (off the top of my head, last theater trip was the more recent of The Simpsons and HP5; last Netflix rental was Sophie's Choice(?)).
We've been working our way through the entire Get Smart series, with Family Guy thrown in there as change of pace (both the latest DVD set and random earlier episodes).
This list that The Onion AV Club includes two of my most despised movie-watching experiences ever. I'd completely forgotten my seething resentment towards both of the movies in question. (Only one of the two was from a book I'd read; you might be able to find the other in the archives of this blog.)
Oh, I've also seen The Human Stain (with no strong opinion of it) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (liked Audrey Hepburn, tolerated the rest). The other 16 I haven't seen and probably won't.
Apparently YouTube has three kinds of recut trailer (other than the one for The Shining, which is greatness all its own):
1. Comedies recut to horror movies
2. Dramas recut to gay love stories
3. 300
Wedding Crashers version
I was probably the last person to get into these, via YouTube:
The Lion King: the horror movie
American Pie as a medical thriller
The Lion King set to Linkin Park
The Office: Michael & Dwight are bringing Sexy Back
Documentaries made under false pretenses: now the Intelligent Design people are in on the fun!
Ben Stein may have been deceived. Then again it's possible they offered him lots of money, perhaps even five thou-sand dol-lars!
Screw you and your fabled "fault."
No, seriously, I understand the marketing gimmick associated with only making movies available once every N years. However, sometimes this can seriously backfire when it fails to account for events that might increase a specific title's popularity.
Take Tiger Town. Surprisingly, this might be the best baseball movie ever made. I say might, because I haven't seen it since I was young enough probably to have romanticized it too much.
(I was eight when it first aired. I was 13 when Bull Durham came out, 14 for Field of Dreams. Until this very blog post I'd been dead certain in my "memory" of Bull Durham coming out second, as a "drop the sepia tones and understand how life really works" counterpoint.)
Anyway, Tiger Town. "Go get 'em, Detroit Tigers! Go get 'em, Tigers!" Billy Young (Roy Scheider), fading star, only the kid whose mom died still believes in him.
DVD release date: 2004. As you may recall, in real life the 2003 and 2004 Detroit Tigers were very bad.
("Go get 'em, Alan Trammell! Go get 'em, Trammell!")
But in 2006 guess who reached the World Series? What a perfect time for a marketing tie-in, no? Of course, the way I imagine things work at Disney, somebody's great idea from 2006 becomes reality by... 2010?
Mind, they got rather lucky with the timing of the original TV airing: The 1984 Tigers were excellent, and if I remember right the movie was still in rotation.
Shortly after they won the World Series, Lance Parrish et al made a guest appearance on Diff'rent Strokes, arguably the second-most-memorable moment in that show (most memorable other than "very special" cautionary tales of Gordon Jump as a bike shop owner).
I get my entertainment gossip from Kausfiles.
(So, ironically, I'm informed at all only because the LA Times is so bad that Mickey Kaus keeps ranting about it.)
I hate to make light of the dead but for the longest time I thought this guy and this guy were the same person.
Yesterday one of my wife's theater kids hosted a High School Musical 2 premiere party. No boys were allowed, but apparently I don't count: I was the only guy there other than the hostess's baby brother (her father was at work). Otherwise it was 9- and 10-year-olds, with two Little Caesars, i.e. one slice per person.
I suppose even High School Musical 2 should get spoiler space. (It was very good at being what it was. It didn't blow me away like the original (which I'd expected to hate) but I can think of quite a few musicals that aren't nearly as good.)
OMFG: Vanessa Anne Hudgens was in Thirteen (not quite as mind-blowing as if it were Kids -- I confuse those two films sometimes -- but still!). I pity the misguided parent who noticed this but didn't realize what Thirteen was about and rented it for... I suppose this isn't quite Vampire Chicks With Chainsaws, though.
You know you're not quite an adult yet when going your own way entails stepping into the front passenger seat of a mini-van.
Contrary to what I'd assumed, Corbin Bleu is not the name of the lead actor (Troy is played by Zac Efron, who doesn't seem to have [much of] a solo career) but rather his friend with the weird hair.
"Wildcats are a team" ...of ungrateful pricks who are awfully quick to turn on the guy who singlehandedly got them country club jobs in the first place. (This isn't quite spelled out but it seems that when Troy gets the job offer he's crazy enough to ask for jobs for his friends and Fulton is crazy enough to grant that request.)
Where is the love for the piano player? No seriously, literally where? Both HSM installments end with a big dance scene with people paired off, obviously Troy & Gabrielle front & center. At the end of the sequel, both Sharpay and Kelsi are with boys that I don't remember seeing at any earlier point in the movie. Are these just random spur-of-the-moment hookups? For all we know Kelsi could have tons of back-story, but I don't think Sharpay had time to romance a guy while she was so busy scheming after Troy.
Olesya Rulin was born in Moscow. She's 21 years old already (c.f. 20 in October, 19 in December, 22!, 23 in November!!, and "just" 18) and according to IMDB "She's a trained ballet dance and model." Even before knowing anything about her (not even her name) I thought she was prettier than Sharpay and on par with Gabrielle.
(Mixed emotions: Vanessa Anne Hudgens has an incredibly expressive face but how much of that is makeup?)
Everyone is well aware that Troy practicing with those college guys was almost certainly some sort of NCAA violation, right? And if he's that good to begin with, wouldn't he already know it in the form of recruiters making initial contact? Why limit his horizons to the team in his home town?
Would Troy and Gabrielle have any conversations not actually captured in the film sequence? If they don't then their communication is terrible enough that breaking up was the right thing to do; but if they do, wouldn't Troy just tell her what's going on in his life (none of which he should feel the least bit embarrassed about: he's like the antithesis of an Ayn Rand hero)?
And what led her to change her mind about him? She dumps him but then decides "oh I want you back" (and somehow already have the same necklace I returned to you back around my neck) and the one song makes everything right?
In the interstitial sequences where we see the actors lounging around the pool and self-promoting, Kenny Ortega (director) tells the cast "thank you for helping me make a great movie." What a megalomaniac! I don't think there's a single member of High School Musical's core audience who swoons over Kenny Ortega. A normal human being, i.e. one not deluded by years in Hollywood, would've said "thank you for MAKING a great movie."
You must see this movie if you haven't already. I almost bailed after 40 minutes: That would've been a terrible mistake.
Spoiler(s) follow.
I wonder how well this plot would work in a L&O:SVU episode. The Chinatown-ish climactic spoiler surprised me but I felt less-than-brilliant for not seeing it coming.
I can't remember the last time a movie was so painfully obviously about to suck as bad as the Underdog movie will painfully obviously suck.
Oh wait, yes I can: Garfield. Shame on you Bill Murray.
The first time I saw a billboard promoting the movie Music and Lyrics, I did a double-take because I thought it was an ad for some web site. I thought, "did we get scooped?"
Then I wondered if Yahoo! would do some cheesy tie-in with its lyrics product. (This was at least two changes of release date ago.)
We finally got around to renting it. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore are both the gold standard for their respective roles in this type of movie. It's just what Julia's been looking for, what she myopically mistakenly thought other movies would accomplish: Witty banter plus saccharine-sweet.
Two thumbs up, to say the least.
If you know both the movies I'm indirectly alluding to, we watched them in one setting just now. The original was MUCH better. That the American version resulted in a particular Oscar is bitter irony on many levels.
I'm glad Julia rented Click: I mistakenly believed it would be saccharine slapstick, in the style of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Quite on the contrary!
The obvious comparison is Bruce Almighty, yet there are also some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind overtones.
There's no right answer to the titular comparison. You might even add Ed Norton to the mix: In hindsight The 25th Hour was overrated but Fight Club is an interesting contrast to these movies and even The Illusionist isn't entirely unrelated.
In general I like the fantasy movies that boil down to "You control your life" a lot better than the ones that boil down to "oops, no you don't control your life, so feel free to hold a pity party."
If remote technology had progressed faster (or Rod Serling lived longer) the Serling version of Click would not have ended happily (I can tell you exactly where it would have ended) -- though he'd have definitely condensed it to half an hour.
"For this is a place where real dogs woo fake ducks, where swim coaches wear speedos, and bad architecture documentaries produce bad architecture..."
A partial list of then-topical references in For What It's Worth (Chappelle's live stand-up at The Fillmore in SF):
Kobe Bryant's rape trial
Michael Jackson's molestation trial
R. Kelly
Elizabeth Smart
Usher
1. Despite my very high regard for The Family Guy, I found Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story to be disappointing. (We got it from Netflix a couple months ago and then recently it was on the indie broadcast station that the A's any time they have a TV game that isn't on cable.) Maybe it was a more precious commodity during that dry period after the show was canceled but before it was revived.
2. Despite my conviction that she's deeply overrated on multiple levels, Jennifer Aniston has co-starred in at least two outstanding movies. (Which two I'm thinking of is an exercise for you the reader.)
Name the movie. Degree of difficulty: No search engine usage.
This is Julia's most recent rental. Before that was The Last Kiss, which is beyond awful. She keeps being surprised that these movies turn out to be so bad.
(Actually in this particular case I'm enjoying it in spite of myself.)
Very different from the book. After all, why present empirical evidence when you can spin a good yarn instead?
(Not that I doubt any of the veracity. It's all sadly plausible, to the point that more people should be cognizant, but the people who claim that something like this "changed their lives" frighten me with their prior ignorance.)
Anyhow, none of this changes my outlook on food, but I'm more than willing to reconsider how I feel about open immigration. Even at that, some points you don't need a feature film to get across when two paragraphs will work just fine.
UPDATE 1: My only point of vehement fundamental disagreement was the rancher's anti-machine rant. After all, it was the conveyor belts who hired illegals, showed them a safety video in a language they don't speak, violated all kinds of health standards, and so on.
UPDATE 2: Bruce Willis! Nice. I hope he wasn't meant to be a straw-man, since everything he says is right-on. Well, not quite, but you get the idea: I actually deeply appreciate that they let a character make those particular points semi-convincingly instead of just being an over-the-top straw-man.
UPDATE 3: "Right now I can think of nothing more patriotic than to violate the Patriot Act."
Well, not that Eric Schlosser would necessarily object to the sentiment, but I don't think the Patriot Act was ever mentioned in the book (I looked in the index under both "P" and "U"), and I wasn't paying close enough attention to the argument at the enviro group meeting to really understand how they managed to work that in. This has devolved into Straw-Man All-Stars.
UPDATE 4: Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. "C'mon, don't you wanna be free?"
Amber (whom Julia correctly pegged as the former Chrissy from Growing Pains, on voice timbre alone) learns a life lesson about what you can('t) get cows to do.
I have no idea what it's like to seduce a woman who turns out to be a man, but a reasonable equivalent has to be thoroughly enjoying Punch-Drunk Love (even as uncomfortable as it made me) only to notice at the end that P.T. Anderson was responsible for it.
One of these things must be true:
1. Maybe I was wrong about Magnolia (but I highly doubt it)
2. Maybe I overrated PDL just now (I doubt that even more)
3. Maybe Magnolia was just a one-time misstep (I'm willing to believe that, though some of you also hated Boogie Nights and/or Coffee & Cigarettes, no?)
4. Maybe PDL was a blind squirrel finding a nut
Speaking of relevant things I've never seen, I've never seen Monk, though I know the basic premise. The crazy ways Monk's mind works aren't really how my mind works, yet the crazy ways Barry Egan's (Adam Sandler) mind works are just alarmingly similar to how my mind works. (So clearly I don't have OCD, yet might have whatever combination of autism, paranoia, etc. ... ?)
Oh yeah: I'd known all about this, my all-time favorite Snopes entry, though if I ever internalized the PDL tie-in, that had slipped my mind by the time we rented it.
And another update: Speaking of late-period Adam Sandler comedies, I've still never seen Anger Management (and probably never will) because the entire premise just freaks me out too much to cope with the whole movie.
Adam Sandler plays "me" remarkably often (but NOT in any of those early Sandler movies where he's always the same idiot man-child).
Watch with English subtitles/captions. ([gasping intensifies] is my favorite)
Watch with French audio.
Pretend Eminem is Derek Jeter. (They're both from Michigan, they both claim to have dated Mariah Carey...)
Pretend Eminem is Chad Kroeger.
I'd already seen it when it came out but Julia had not. I liked it better in the theater.
HouseSitter: Brilliant. I usually hate comedies of deception, where social conventions and the path of least resistance require the hapless hero to pretend to be something that results in his undoing. Julia expected me not to like this at all, but really the opposite was true. Kate Hudson Goldie Hawn (okay, this feigned mistake was an affectation) makes a good wife, at least her character does.
The Best of Prime Time Glick: I idly wonder how many times people ask themselves "WTF was Martin Short thinking?" Maybe I'd have appreciated this more if I had an opinion either way about Regis Philbin.
Jack Valenti makes one hell of a lobbyist, especially given how terrible he comes off as a talking head when edited by a hostile documentarian.
Two particular Los Angeles private investigators are among the most bumbling, idiotic PI's imaginable. But the fact that they both discuss their lesbianism at length just shines a completely different light on the movie.
At least one man identified as a "First Amendment Attorney" seems unable to tell the difference between censorship and freedom of contract.
MPAA raters tend to go too hard on sexually explicit scenes and too easy on violent scenes, at least compared to the values I share with most of the people on the movie. (I don't know what public opinion research says about how other Americans feel.) They also tend to go too hard on offbeat sex. Fair enough.
Most of the controversy seems to be between R movies and NC-17 movies because of how studios choose what to promote. Seven particular corporations have a 93% film market share. Their corporate parents have a 90% market share in U.S. communications, though it's unclear how Kirby Dick chose to define that market. (If anything I'm surprised both numbers are that low.)
The general consensus among participants in the movie seems to be that MPAA ratings should reflect more like majority rule. (After all, something that only 49% of the audience finds offensive can't be that offensive...)
Am I a bad libertarian for failing to be offended by MPAA ratings? They seem to serve their target audience pretty well, and as someone who enjoys indie films I can't quite sympathize with the plight of people who think that an unfair rating hurt their film's distribution. I mean, sure, people who are fervent about the quality of their work want to evangelize it, to spread their films as widely as possible.
The irony about this is that TFINYR itself makes basically zero effort to evangelize its own message. It's a feature-length act of begging the question, and if you're not already part of the choir then the sermon doesn't do much.
According to Netflix we're about to get Housesitter. I'd never heard of that movie until that notice. I hope it's good.
(I remember when I ran my Netflix queue with an iron fist. Then one day I finally gave my wife the right password, and at some point I stopped wasting brain cells on being aware of the queue order. Generally she's done right by us.)
For what it's worth I liked Mixed Nuts even more than my wife did, so the chances of enjoyment seem pretty good.
Must-see movie that we finally got around to seeing, within a year (barely: we watched it Friday) of its failure to win a Best Picture Oscar.
(I love Crash as much as anyone, but now that I've seen both movies, the fact that I could go either way probably means that anyone who didn't like Crash as much as I did (which is probably most people) sees this as a bad choice. I can't blame them.)
For the movie watching experience the best part is the scenery (now that I know it was actually filmed in Alberta, I have a some sightseeing to do before I die). In a theater, the worst part would probably be the slow-as-molasses pace of the dialog. (Yes, I grew up in Oklahoma. But yes, I've been in either Boston or San Francisco for the last 15 years; why do you ask?) We watched it at 1.35 speed, which made the dialog pace seem exactly normal (as opposed to the Sorkin/Mamet style that a speedup usually generates) but the words themselves quite rapid, though still not enough to require subtitles.
Ennis is not necessary gay. He loves Jack, of course, and of course Jack is gay, but Ennis is a cold, reserved man who's lived a hard life and really doesn't connect much to anyone, male or female.
We actually know someone whose visceral revulsion from this movie was to the idea that otherwise straight Ennis could be successfully seduced, or to the idea that once that person's young son were in college, he could get the idea that it doesn't matter whether he dates men or women and could happen to choose to date a few men.
(N.B. To which my response would be, well, it doesn't matter whether he dates men or women. If he's biologically straight, then with 99.99% probability any given date he goes on will be with a woman. Geez, more people should watch -- and understand -- Kissing Jessica Stein.)
Anyhow: Sad movie. Very moving. Best of both worlds in that it had a chick-flick plot but without the maddening irrationality of a stereotypical "chick" protagonist. (Quite the opposite, given how both Ennis and Jack are such "guys.")
What do you think:
"First Super Bowl win for Martin Scorcese" or "first Best Director Oscar for Peyton Manning"?
Same joke either way I suppose.
It's certainly a step up from mainstream-formulaic film. Good Slate article here defending Little Miss Sunshine, a movie that I'm surprised would ever actually need a defense.
I thoroughly enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine, ditto The Royal Tenenbaums. On the other hand Garden State is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Since this is a movie post: We rented Fight Club earlier this week, years after my sister began urging me that I needed to see it. This is a fantastic movie but one would have no idea why until actually watching it. (Remember, "the first rule about Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club.")
Two off-the-wall ideas that would have improved Fight Club in my opinion (but probably nobody else's opinion):
1. Replace Ed Norton with Zach Braff.
2. Go back in time 20 years further and replace Ed Norton with Woody Allen.
Best movie I've ever seen?
You'd think every good movie ought to leave that impression in the immediate afterglow, yet that's not quite the case. The best counterexample I can think of is any Christopher Guest movie. They're all well worth your time to watch, superbly put together, immensely enjoyable, yet by a week later it won't be terribly relevant that you saw it.
Not that a movie needs lasting impact to be good, in fact I think some of the worst movies ever made (quick crash course for new readers: the two worst movies ever made are in fact Magnolia and Donnie Darko, and it's not even close) are painfully obviously shooting for that. But still.
We can cop out and say this is the best movie I've ever seen not involving Bill Murray, Harry Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Steve Martin. I'll have to sleep on whether that's still true, or which of those modifiers one can get rid of (apples and oranges, really). Oh, or Christopher Guest.
With apologies to Woody Allen, if he's ever made a better movie than Stranger Than Fiction, I haven't seen it and it (unlike other Woody Allen movies) certainly hasn't gotten the hype. In fact Woody Allen did make Melinda & Melinda, the other work-of-fiction-within-a-movie "is it comedy or tragedy?" involving Will Farrell. That wasn't nearly as good as this, if only because ever scene with those pompous asses sitting at the table talking (the overarching conceit of the movie) was a waste of our time.
Choose your opinion (all from posts 234-235 of this comic strip thread):
(Various minor typos fixed.)
A. Woody Allen is lost. Has been for 20 years. He’s a terrible analogy for Lynn Johnston. He sucks because he’s lost his moral center.
B. Woody never had a moral center - his early work was always about the amoral man. His best serious work (Crimes and Misedemeanors) is about getting away Scot free. I mean, did a Woody Allen character ever learn a lesson or become a better person? Even in a comedy, a genre in which the hero always goes through the cliche of becoming a better person at the end?
Woody sucks now because he’s totally unconnected to his time and place. He always was, but what’s charming and endearing in a younger man is bizarre, off-putting and repellent in an old man. You want a comics equivalent to Woody Allen? Look no further than Johnny Hart.
C. Really? I think he had a moral world. It was an existentialist morality pinned in intellect and philosophy, rather than metaphysics, but Woody Allen heroes used to get away with shit and neurotically tear themselves up. Since C&M, it’s been like “I’m too old to worry about anything catching up with me in this lifetime and I don’t sweat any possibility of any other, so what’s the point?”
Which is a valid view, but life is too short to watch films full of douchebags.
We saw Christopher Guest's latest at the Parkway last night. Very well done, though it's the kind of movie that by a month from now I'll have probably forgotten we went to see.
(Julia didn't remember that we had rented A Mighty Wind together but for my part I couldn't pull out the exact title until just now anyway.)
Good detox after so much residual spouse-mortality fears brought on by the previous movie we watched together.
Our Netflix queue ought to be loaded with movies similar to For Your Consideration. Instead, Thursday we're getting The Usual Suspects because it's apparently way too good a movie for me to continue having never seen it, even though it might be days before we're of the right mindset to watch it (and also have time to).
(By the way, responding to M.S.'s comment on the Sixth Sense thread, I've never seen Boogie Nights and don't plan to.)
My favorite sentence clause from that bio might be "Part of Anderson's artistic DNA comes from his father [...]"
You don't say. Tell me more about how this DNA inheritance thing works.
For a quick 10 points name the minor character from The Sixth Sense whom I would beat to death in righteous anger, were this character real rather than fictional.
You won't be able to get that unless you've seen the movie, but if you have I'd be shocked if you managed to get it wrong.
I liked it even more than my wife (who'd already seen it long ago) did. She scoffed when I speculated whether it would make an all-time top ten list of "you need to see this" movies (note that the top N "you need to see this" movies may be very different from the N best movies: does this distinction make sense?). Given time to sleep on it I don't think it makes a top 10 but it easily makes a top 100, probably makes a top 50, and might make a top 25.
Julia claims that there are much better psychological thrillers. That may well be true but I didn't process The Sixth Sense as a psychological thriller. Instead I saw it taking on subject matter similar to Magnolia yet with exact opposite results: Magnolia tried to be a drama but utterly failed (in my opinion: as covered here awhile back, I think Magnolia is one of the worst movies ever made, and of course your mileage may vary). Even if it was trying to be a psychological thriller, and regardless of whether it succeeded at that (given the buzz it generated, apparently it wildly succeeded), I found it to be a far superior drama to 99.[some number of 9's]% of the self-described "dramas" out there.
As for the "spoiler," even though I can't read M. Night's mind I'd like to think that he didn't intend for the ending to be a twist.
I'd like to think that he assumed audiences would realize what was going on the whole time, but then when people in a test screening didn't get the point until the very end, the powers that be took the "surprise" as an inadvertent feature (in the "not a bug but a feature" sense).
I already knew too much to about the plot to be plausibly surprised, but I claim I would have figured it out no later than the compulsive viewing and re-viewing of the wedding video.
Julia and I watched it on December 24, just as we did last year and probably will for years to come. I don't think I included anything here that one could easily Google or IMDB-search, but you never know.
Bit parts include a karaoke proprietor named Don, a security guard named T-Bone, an Indian (South Asian) who runs an Irish pub, and a guy who keeps having sex in his office. That last guy and the protagonist who peeps at him are played by a real-life husband and wife.
The film opens with one of the protagonists on a bender, lamenting unrequited love a unique humiliation that resulted from his identity and his unrequited love. A climactic late scene shows a different protagonist taking drastic measures to get the attention of that same love interest.
Two well-known directors can also be seen in the movie, one with a bit part, the other as the groom seen in old wedding photos. (His real-life wife shows the photos. I just now learned something ironic (in reverse) about that marriage as it relates to the plot of this movie.) Conversely, this film was directed by one of its stars. It is that star's only directorial credit at the moment, though he's also directing (and starring in) a film currently in production.
Outstanding movie.
Also apparently a perfect storm of indie flickdom, since none of the major players seem to have done much either before or afterward. I hope Woody Allen likes this movie, given how much of it is an homage to his style. Julia and I also thought of Kevin Smith*, but in hindsight really not.
My two biggest nitpicks are that (at first) Jessica Stein comes off as a rather annoying person (the way she takes her job and her supposed intelligence so seriously, though I assume we're meant to take both her and Helen less than 100% seriously), and that plot points are resolved so quickly/breezily sometimes, as if "oh yeah... but it turned out like this." (They overuse the "Three Months Later" narration card.)
Even so, probably better to resolve things too breezily than to drama queen it all and club the audience over the head on various points.
It's a sweet movie, a flawed movie whose flaws are all the more endearing, about two human beings and their sweet relationship (with a lower-case "r"). The more I think about it better this works as a Woody Allen movie, where the Woody character happens to be female.
*- Julia mistakenly believed she'd already seen Kissing Jessica Stein. The movie to which she'd incorrectly associated that title is actually Chasing Amy, which we've both seen. I saw it in a Boston movie theater with a guy friend. Just about everyone in the theater arrived as same-sex twosomes. I might have been the only straight guy in the theater.
(Yes, my friend realized I was straight. We liked each other's company all the same. Now I wish I remembered better who attended the housewarming party at my Boston studio. This guy Scott was either 1/3 or 1/5 of my guest list. There was also Peter and Ashlie, and as I was typing this I became 90% sure of who my other two guests were: two Harvard guys who were dating at the time of the housewarming but broke up shortly after that. So a guy-guy couple, a guy-gal couple, a single gay guy, and a single straight guy, and the latter two saw Chasing Amy together a few weeks later.)
We watched What's Cooking? just after 24: Season 2 and just before the movie in the post right below this. I think it was on our queue because of Dennis Haysbert.
I liked it, despite almost the entire film consisting of quick-cut scenes where it was unclear whether any plot or character development would take place.
The general plot is Thanksgiving dinner with four different Los Angeles families: One each black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Jewish (with lesbian daughter & de facto daughter-in-law).
This movie has a distinct spoiler -- the great thing about indie flicks is that spoilers don't get so widely spoiled (compare to the other movie in our current Netflix trio, "The Sixth Sense"...) -- and even though it's nothing Earth-shattering, suddenly I liked the movie a whole lot more than I previously had.
(By contrast Julia didn't like it at all. We've seen a few one-thumb-up, one-thumb-down movies in 2006.)
Oddly (given that I liked the movie and she didn't), I think large-group Thanksgiving dinners are profoundly overrated. There's just so much stress, and it's all so avoidable.
[And yet I think of myself as part of a relatively functional family, really not prone to stereotypical Thanksgiving dinner table outbursts.]
Freshman year of college, I took a midterm Wednesday morning then flew home for Thanksgiving. The rest of Wednesday was travel, all of Sunday was travel, all crowded airports and related nastiness, 1.8 travel days spent to enjoy three days in Tulsa. From that point on, with apologies to my parents, going home for Thanksgiving was just never worthwhile to me, and they accepted that.
I eventually came around to at least not hating it, though I still didn't like it. I seem to be in a distinct minority on that point.
As I watched it, my first point of comparison was The Big Chill. The film didn't further that parallel at all (what would my generation's equivalent be of the Big Chill soundtrack? - '80s anthems? certainly nothing like the band featured in this movie's soundtrack) but I'm glad it at least went SOMEWHERE. The first half hour at least was painfully pointless.
If I'd paid any attention at all to the Netflix sleeve blurb or any media coverage of this movie, I'd have picked up on a comparison to Donnie Darko a lot sooner. Thankfully this isn't nearly as bad as Donnie Darko was.
Once scene late in the movie reminded me of The Life Aquatic. After the fact, the main couple in this movie reminded me of the main couple from Good Will Hunting (I also realized in hindsight that I don't like GWH, though maybe when I watched it I liked it).
Julia compared it unfavorably to Punch Drunk Love, a movie I've never seen. As for this movie itself, Julia lost a whole lot of respect for its director/star.
Oh, this is seemingly completely unrelated but when we watched it last year I liked Harold & Kumar a lot more than she did. She didn't like it per se, just appreciate it as the sort of lowbrow comedy one finds in I Love Lucy or Dude Where's My Car.
I should check when I get home on whether the Netflix sleeve hyphenates the title correctly. When it was in theaters the official title was ungrammatical, as seen on the main title of this IMDB page.
"Do you know how I know you're gay?" is:
A. Homophobic
B. Homoerotic
C. Offensive
D. Hilarious
E. evocative of Kevin Smith movies
F. some combination of all of those
I never had a car in Boston. The other day I found an old journal: I'd forgotten how frequently I went on first or second dates in 1998-1999 (the very beginning of the on-line personals era).
In the poker scene everyone is holding five cards. I predict that this is the last major movie poker scene to depict draw poker rather than hold em. (The Casino Royale remake -- which I haven't seen -- apparently used hold em in plcae of baccarat.)
How much time passes between the scene in which the 16-year-old claims that the protagonists are always having sex, to the scene in which she tells Andy that she can tell he's a virgin?
Two hours, thirteen minutes seems too long, and yet I could see myself watching three straight hours of Dateapalooza, even (especially?) as improv comedy.
I will save the two most interesting observations for actual conversation with my wife, but probably add them here later this week.
One link from The Australian leads to another.
Indian film star appears very scantily-clad at London event, likely derailing her Bollywood career.
This reminds me of an SF Chronicle review of the touring High School Musical. The reviewer contrasted HSM to Grease, pointing out just how sanitized it is, but made the bizarre claim that HSM lacks sexual tension. We live in a sad world if people have become so desensitized that they don't notice sexual tension absent lewd behavior.
(Hint: I don't think he puts his basketball career in so much jeopardy just because he happens to be fond of his new friend. I suppose there's the claim that he's just that enamored of his previously unknown musical gift, but if that were the whole story then it wouldn't matter who his duet partner was.)
I came really really close to shoving spoilers down your throat (for your own good). Instead I'll urge you to click through, if only because that's 100 minutes of your life you'd never get back.
(Maybe the novel isn't craptacular, though I suspect it's garbage in, garbage out.)
First off (though this is mostly unrelated to why the movie is so awful): Spelling bees are the most overrated pseudo-academic pursuit imaginable. Never mind that they're a cheap advertising ploy by the monopolists at Scripps Howard News Service (the more I know about the newspaper business the less respect I have for the people who run it). What possible utility is there from memorizing sequences of letters of words you'll probably never use in a sentence in real life? Even forensic competition (i.e. debate) demonstates a highly useful skill.
Onto the film: My fantasy is that the makers of Little Miss Sunshine saw a sneak preview of Bee Season, realized OH MY GOODNESS THIS BLOWS, and asked themselves "What would it have taken to improve this movie?" If you think of Little Miss Sunshine as partly a parody of Bee Season then it's beyond brilliant.
Okay, spoilers:
Her mom's a klepto. Her brother hates her dad so much that he becomes a hare krishna.
Her dad teaches her the kabbalah so well that she achieves enlightment the night before the national final. (If she were older it'd be a lot like an orgasm.)
She makes the final two, then gets "origami" for the championship but tanks because she somehow knows that choking on purpose will magically bring her family back together. (I wonder how frequently that approach works in real life.)
After all, if she'd won the whole shebang, her mom would still be a klepto, her brother would still be a hare krishna, and her dad would still be the self-centered know-it-all that I sense the filmmakers want us to blame.
(Incidentally, if a movie is described as "coming of age" then shouldn't at least one character actually come of age rather than the entire family just stagnating until the final seconds of the movie when suddenly we're supposed to accept that everything became okay on its own?)
This was by far the best movie in the Disney Channel rotation of the 1980s. (It's been in the "Saved" portion of my Netflix queue for months now.)
If you want to get into even more obscure baseball movies, Blue Skies Again was surprisingly hard to find given that I couldn't remember the exact title. Finally had to search for "Denver Devils" and happen upon this NY Times movie review.
...but, again, could easily look up (and may have already known if you're in Julia's family):
My brother-in-law is a producer/animator. His most recent project was Everyone's Hero . Even apart from being required to see it, I'm honestly looking forward to it.
Anyhow, IMDB (correctly, my wife confirms) gives him exactly one acting credit -- random movie in which he was an extra. But his first production credit lists him as production coordinator for -- for 10 points -- which TV special?
Hmm. Come to think of it I bet someone really does get this right without looking it up. We'll see.
The Pink Panther: Classic Cartoon Collection
These are brilliant. (They also bring back fond childhood memories.) I'd mention to mention this in the post below (Kid-related musings) but briefly forgot.
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Couldn't make it through the whole thing. The Spinal Tap-style unintentional comedy didn't quite make up for these being dyfunctional self-centered brats (maybe brat singular (Hetfield)) whose massive success resulted in their never having to grow up.
The Royal Tenenbaums
Richly deserves its one-of-the-best-ever reputation.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
Very good; I liked it.
(The value judgment in the subject line is literally true, no exaggeration.)
In no particular order:
1. Use a combination of urban legends and crim law hypotheticals as a framing device.
2. Cast the biggest star of the movie as a quirky anti-hero with an obscene tag line that a good chunk of the audience will go on to quote into the ground.
3. Present quiz-bowl style competition as a form of child abuse.
4. Speaking of child abuse, run the gamut of dysfunctional child-parent relationships, all of which are nothing compared to the main plot element:
5. CANCER SUCKS. (This was a completely novel concept to anyone watching this film, of course.) Oh, and hating your immediate family sucks. But what sucks most of all is THE PAIN THE PAIN THE PAIN THE PAIN.
6. Seeing people that profoundly hurt is entertainment in itself(?!), but if six or more cast members can deliver overwrought lines in "I'm angling for an Oscar" form then it's a guaranteed classic.
7. Even though everything else about the movie is straight-up drama, why not introduce exactly two satircal themes (well, three counting "respect/tame"), one involving urine and the other involving incongruous COPS-style police officer narration, so that a hipster audience segment will think to themselfs "ooh, just like COPS" and chuckle to themselves smugly.
8. If you can't figure out how the heck you're going to end this thing, why not a deus ex machina? Nobody's done "animals fall from the sky" since the Old Testament, and the allegory even suggest itself (without necessarily having any one particular meaning).
9. The moral of the story? Everyone should be more communicative (Dr. Phil style) and less inhibited (juvenile fiction style). After all, if the apex of literature are those novels that reach out to alienated 10th grade boys then the apex of cinema should be obvious enough.
10. And how could you possibly cram a story this involved into just three hours? C'mon, they could've easily made it five.
NOTE: The previous movie we saw was Match Point. Therefore I can say pretty confidently that "bad/sad things keep happening to people" isn't what makes this movie so bad.
Spoilers...
1. What on Earth do they both see in Maxine? She's a self-centered, amoral twit, which I assume isn't in itself her appeal. I realize there are movie characters whose physical attractiveness overcomes their character flaws, but to accomplish that don't you actually need to be attractive?
2. How did two people who seem to despise each other so much (or if not despise then at least abjectly fail to care for, identify with, or respect) get married in the first place?
3. The movie pacing suggests that when Lotte confronts Dr. Lester about Malkovich and meets his compadres, she ends up staying with them permanently until the big event. Does she just abandon all those animals?
4. The more I think about this movie the less regard I have for it -- but if the reasons I hate it are eerily similar to the reasons I hate Donnie Darko then does that make me an anti-intellectual or just an anti-pseudo-intellectual?
Oh, some more:
5. Was the fictional Malkovich born on the 44th birthday of one of his parents, who in turn was born in the 44th birthday [etc.], or is the fact that the successor vessel is his own daughter a remarkable coincidences that equally remarkably isn't treated as at all coincidental?
6. How on Earth does the pan-Malkovich scene make sense? If the porthole followed strict procedures then wouldn't he simply end up watching himself watching himself [ad infinitum] in the corridor, just suspended in the white light for 15 minutes until he hit the ground? (And wouldn't the previous client hit the ground a few minutes before he himself did?)
7. On the other hand, if you assume the portal just does whatever it feels like doing (a much safer assumption if you ask me), then isn't it strange that Craig et al assumed/asserted so confidently (after a sample size of just one) that the portal always took you to Malkovich and always left you on the NJ Turnpike, rather than e.g. {Bev Johnson of Peabody / Foxwoods parking lot} or some other combo?
...or do I have a valid beef?
The extended entry spoils Fever Pitch (the movie, not the book).
CLAIM: No movie should ever involve a sympathetic character running out onto the field in the middle of the game as a plot element, no matter how contrived the plot point is or how high the stakes seem to be.
In real life, those who run out onto the field are cut off at the pass, arrested, and (probably) savagely beaten -- and to some extent they... "deserve" is the wrong word, but what's the word for when you shouldn't be the least bit surprised by your fate?
Running out onto the field is comparable to anything this guy did, and yes it's a real security problem.
Getting back to the movie in question: Call me an O. Henry fan, but it would have been a much better movie had this particular gambit barely failed to be timely.
Oh also: I know they had to do something analogous to the book (and they couldn't luck into everything happening in real life the way it had to) but seven runs in the ninth is nothing compared to three goals in the final minutes.
Meet Tracy Enid Flick (17 years old, Female, OMAHA, Nebraska)
(Great movie, of course; I'll comment about it some other time.)
Sadly no Tammy Metzler page, even though that would be much more interesting for stereotypical MySpace content.
I've never seen The Big Lebowski.
I've never seen the original American Pie.
I saw American Pie 2 and American Wedding. From the former, both Michelle and Heather stood out, certainly not Vicky.
Danni Sullivan ("Scrubs") is one of the most disturbing minor characters in any TV show story arc. I'm embarrassed to admit I briefly found her attractive, and long after losing that notion I still found her compelling enough to do the research that led to this weblog entry.
Last but not least, I've definitely never seen (and will never see) "Taradise."
A partial list; feel free to add your own, assuming the theme makes sense:
Annie (real musicals)
California rolls at Star Market (real sushi)
Over the Hedge (Pearls Before Swine)
Post inspired when I learned (to my horror) that OtH was made into a Disney movie.
I bailed after the first half-hour. Will my life be any worse from missing the rest?
Maybe the real-life Capote really was like this but P.S. Hoffman's over-the-top queeniness became unwatchable. Also, at the risk of underrating a 20th century lit classic, I'm not convinced that In Cold Blood has more merit than the best of the post-O.J. books or what a non-hack writer may have done with the JonBennet case.
From the sleeve synposis apparently this vaguely similar to a Columbo episode, with Capote's mannerisms substituted for Peter Falk's. I still don't buy the idea of a media guy out-investigating the cops on a case this big. (If Capote did indeed "crack the case" then I'll apologize to him for my historical ignorance.)
Again, Crash was NOT (primarily) about race relations, no moreso than it was about the criminal justice system. One of the best scenes to support this involves a spoiler.
Apropos of nothing I should mention the soundtrack was awful. This would have been quite a different movie with justicious remix and reuse of the best of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. (Julia said this movie owed a lot to Spike Lee; I say it owes at least as much to Tarantino.)
Also, did you notice that (aside from Shaniqua) the women in this movie pretty much look alike regardless of ethnic background? I found the four main black men more visually distinctive than the four main women.
But you know what they say: All women look alike. Oh, don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are women. My mom, my sister, my future wife -- all female.
So anyway, the spoiler: When Officer Matt Dillon molests the director's wife, what adjective(s) best apply to his act? I don't think "racist" would even make the top 100 (certainly dwarfed by "sexist"), and yet somehow when Ryan Philippe was talking to his supervisor they'd both let it morph into a racial thing?!
No sir, it's not that this closet racist has been on the force for N years, it's that a guy in uniform abused his position to cop a feel. Not accceptable under any circumstances and completely independent of race. (The act itself; I'll admit there were racial overtones to the power structure in the traffic stop.)
That's a one-and-done, not only a no-brainer that the guy gets reassigned but also an act that internal affairs should prosecute. Making it racial deprived her of justice.
Read the review here: I still think it's complete and utter pabulum. I'm most offended by the parts that were probably designed to give offense, yet not for the direct reasons you might expect. Rather, I found my intelligence insulted by attempts at parody that were neither clever nor insightful.
Mock me at length here if you were one of those who actually liked this piece of...
(As always, spoilers after the jump. I don't think I spoil anything in the main part but I'll reread just in case.)
Although this is a silly thing to say without watching the other contenders (we also have Capote on hand and I'll make a point to queue Brokeback after all), in absolute terms at least Crash richly deserved its Best Picture Oscar.
Julia and I haven't disagreed this much about a work of art since we saw Christopher Durang's play Laughing Wild. (Think of the woman in the supermarket who decked a guy for standing in the way of her tuna.) She liked it; I thought it was a load of crap and disparaged her taste. We saw it way up in Sonoma; had a long ride home because admittedly my critique got too snobby and maybe even too personal.
Anyhow, this time it's the exact opposite. She saw a movie about "a bunch of racist a'holes" (contraction added) almost none of whom have any redeeming virtue. I disagree with her about the redeeming virtues, and more importantly I saw this as a movie about a bunch of a'holes, period. Even though race relations are such an important plot element, viewing the movie and the characters through that lense takes you further away from what's really going on here.
I can completely see the frustration involved in watching this movie, and the exasperation that I'm sure we all felt with almost everyone. It's astounding to me the extent to which, exactly when they need to let go and keep things in perspective, people will still be rude little f's: Selfish, petty, and imbecilic. That said, the worst things happened to the people who had nobody to trust.
If you were to draw conclusions from this movie about how to live your life (which is a bad idea for most movies and not at all the intended purpose of any given movie), the race relations part tells you nothing. Rather, get the chip(s) off your shoulder; learn to let go; trust people, and most importantly, behave in such a way that you're worthy of other people's trust.
Julia asked me what the point of this movie was -- not the moral (despite the previous paragraph, I don't think the movie has a "moral" as such) but rather the purpose. Well, just like any other movie, it was made for audiences to enjoy it. I happened to enjoy it (a lot going on, some interesting ambiguity), she very much didn't. I happened to find almost all of the characters interesting; she, rather, found them appalling.
I'll readily admit that some of the coincidences in the movie were a little too convenient, though people who act as though the movie was beneath them need to just come off it. You can be upfront and say it just wasn't your cup of tea (tearjerkers and/or "serious drama" usually does nothing for me), but:
"There are racial problems in LA?!? How shocking!" Whether or not the snark is justified, if you leave it at that then you've flat-out missed most of the movie.
Best scene in the movie, by far: Off-duty cop picks up hitchhiker. You know the scene. They're just about to discover how much they have in common, but a silly misunderstanding combined with a cycle of belligerence... for all I know if I'd been in a different mood I'd despise this scene (and this movie) out of frustration. But it illustrates really nicely the for god's sake just LET GO part of the moral I took from the movie.
Second-best is either the confrontation between the convenience store owner and the locksmith [and his daughter] (I thought this was amazing; I'm sure many erudite viewers just found it all hokey but it's their loss), or the rescue-from-a-burning-car scene. I presume it goes without saying why "behave so that you're worthy of other people's trust" is the operative lesson here.
(Yes, Officer Matt Dillon did a really brave thing. But just doing his job neither excuses nor makes up for his violating someone. Admittedly saving someone's life in some sense is more good than violating her is bad, but violating her is still inexcusable and you can't just pretend he didn't.)
Honorable mention to the entire sequence that included the filmmaker-carjacker confrontation .
...but the parallels are striking.
Fiddler on the Roof (the movie).
Think of the start of the "Main Theme" from Star Wars: Two long notes, three short, two long.
The three short notes fall on what beat of the measure? I suspect most people get this wrong, at least I always used to growing up.
(First beat of the second measure. Two half notes, triplet, half note quarter note. I always used to think of the triplet as being the fourth beat of the first measure, getting ahead of things.)
Fatuous, tendentious, and trite.
Perhaps I'd have liked it more without the pretentious dinner party framework. That is, Woody didn't need to clobber the audience over the head with a 2-by-4 to drive home the premise of the movie. He certainly didn't used to. Apparently in his effort to expand his audience he's taken to making Woody Allen for Dummies movies.
I think nearly every early-to-mid Woody Allen movie would be fantastic, indeed likely better than the original, if it were remade with Allen's part itself played by Will Ferrell. Julia strenuously disagrees, at least in the case of Annie Hall. I stand by this assertion, though, with the caveat that this says more about the (counterintuitive) nature of Allen's best movies than it does about the (counterintuitive) nature of Farrell's best performances.
This isn't something you'd know cold but you might randomly guess it.
The latest in a new genre of Turkish popular culture that vilifies the United States, a Turkish movie shows American soldiers in Iraq crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.
They randomly machine-gun dozens of people to death, shoot the groom in the head and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison -- where a Jewish-American doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv. (from an AP report, quoted by Jesse Walker at Reason's "Hit and Run" weblog)
For a quick 10 points, what American actor plays the doctor?
Headline that doesn't mean at all what you would have expected it to mean had you come across it completely free of recent context:
"U.S. Condemns Cartoon Violence."
By the way, Julie Kavner is excellent in Radio Days. Was the megasuccess of The Simpsons a good thing or a bad thing for her career output? (Obviously a great thing for her pocketbook.)
I think I'm on one of those piano lesson days.
If you're on either stage of wining and dining Andie McDowell, I'll wish you luck.
So last year (two years ago?) everyone and his dog was raving about Million Dollar Baby. This was supposed to have shattered the scale of good movies. All the buzz had a contrarian effect on me, and I never did see the movie, though the big plot twist (one of the big plot twists?) has long since been spoiled for me.
Maybe Million Dollar Baby is really as good as the hype, but I doubt it, if only because they hype went so far.
This year... I just hope Brokeback Mountain is anywhere near as good as the buzz suggests, since the buzz sets a standard that may actually be impossible to live up to.
This article describes what sounds (to me) like a terrible business decision. That said, the columnist seems to be advocating (ironically) the same kind of peer pressure and social ostracism that homophobes have so long applied to gay people in the first place.
(With obvious differences that go without saying. First person to cite literal gay bashing loses.)
I was warned once that movies from the 1960s are almost uniformly bad. Everything wrong with this movie reminded me of the archetypical bad 1960s movie as I'd imagined it in my head.
In the "if you can't say something nice" department: The "everyone spikes her drink" scene is so perfect for Lucille Ball that the idea of a remake just seems wrong.
Also, this movie has the best "birds and the bees" scene ever. If you're trying to tell a teenage girl what she needs to know about sex, hard to beat having her own (step?)mother go into labor at the same time.
Owes a lot to The Wedding Singer. (Compare Owen Wilson's depressed wedding crashing with Adam Sandler's depressed wedding singing.)
I liked it much more than Julia apparently did. It may be a stupid movie but it's decidedly not a bad one. I'm disappointed in the filmmakers for using a truly despicable antagonist as a crutch: If this were a better movie, it wouldn't have been necessary for Sack to be so totally without redemption. But if you're already suspending enough disbelief then that's a minor quibble.
Chaz was a perfectly cast cameo, so much so that I actually hope he was uncredited. I've never seen a movie reduce its own premise to absurdity so effectively.
I idly wonder about the archetypical Netflix inventory-chain employee, whether the closest match is to food service, retail sales, or Barnes & Noble. I'd like to think the latter, or better yet the aspiring filmmakers with whose stints in short-term data entry I'm familiar.
Anyhow, whoever those Netflix inventory-chain employess are, I hope the notes brighten their lives rather than serving as an annoyance. (Yeah, I realize that the idea behind note-leaving is for a note to slip past to whoever rent the disc next. Somehow I don't think that happens much.)
(It's hard to explain succinctly where the atrocity lies, since there's more to it than cuteness as such or "breaking the wall" as such, but read on.)
Whoever produced the DVD for March of the Penguins completely ruined it by putting a computer-generated dancing penguin at the start of the unavoidable set of trailers.
Note that the movie itself features real live penguins and that the whole reason it's so awesome, the whole point of the movie is how breathtaking their actual behavior is.
This is the second-most-appalling thing I've ever seen in this vein. The most appalling thing of all-time that I've seen in this vein is the video they play (or played, as of December 2003) when you go up the elevator to the Sears Tower observation deck. The conceit was that a computer with the personality of a young eager boy was navigating, only it screwed things up and shot the elevator into space, with the contrived drama of reintering the atmosphere and "landing" on the 96th floor.
I assume that even the least English-cognizant tourists realized this was all fake, so there wasn't much of a "likelihood of confusion" issue. Even so, I wanted to hunt down whoever created and approved this abomination and beat some good taste into them.
The mistake made in both cases is similar to the mistake that some sportscasters make when they insist on talking over the immediate aftermath of dramatic moments rather than letting the play on the field (and the sustained crowd noise) speak for itself.
Why ever settle for appreciating the splendid things reality gives us, when we can also pat ourselves on the back over the hackneyed artifices we graft onto it?
(Speaking of things clumsily grafted onto other things, now is as good a time as any to rail against the sins against theater committed by this genre. I'd been reluctant to comment on this earlier, given my second-hand association with the theater in question and also some of the performers (all of whom are fantastic actors), but there's still a major audience-exclusion problem here: Any time you have a deluge of knock-knock jokes (literally knock-knock jokes) but also snarky references to (say) the size of a magician's "wand," in some sense you have a show that's inappropriate for all ages. And even if a specific theater in a specific locale commissions your script, there's no need for your throwaway lines to be as gratuitously local as e.g. making fun of the 2005 San Francisco 49ers. All that said, I should note that turning "Baby It's Cold Outside" into "Baby There's Gold Inside" is pretty clever, if not Hasty Pudding clever then at least close.)
It was hard for me to watch Polar Express without constantly thinking of The Ladykillers. (Tom Hanks needs to work on diversifying his portfolio of regional accents.)
I understand now why so many Protestant churches were screening this last December, though: As his friends got older, they all stopped hearing the bell, but not him. Analogously, as all your friends reach adulthood, go through mid-life crises, or whatever, even if they happen to slip into agnosticism you still hold onto your particular faith apparently just for the sake of believing ("Believe") in something.
(Pascal's Wager can be refuted when it comes to salvation and eternal life, but for getting presents from Santa an analog to it seems to hold.)
Spiritual flippancy aside, Polar Express works best as a poor man's Big Fish. (Polar Express is to Big Fish as the Children's Sermon is to the regular homily.)
For what it's worth, I "believe" in Santa Claus inasumch as I believe I'll make a great Santa for as-yet-unborn children. I believe (no scare quotes) that God is more-or-less as described in the Bible and that Jesus is who he claimed to be, neither for some great reasons nor even as a "have to believe in something" belief but just at face value that I happen to think it's true, while realizing that this is an irrational thing to think.
I intend never ever to see Pretty Woman, not for any moralistic objection but just because it sounds impossibly saccharine and stars the most appalling actress in film history.
As it happens, though, twice in the past 72 hours we've seen other movies that fit the title theme of this post. Mighty Aphrodite is fantastic. I will claim even without seeing Pretty Woman that Mighty Aphrodite is at least 10,000 times as good.
By the time I'm 40, I probably will have seen every Woody Allen movie ever made. Some of them will no doubt stink, but films like Mighty Aphrodite will make it all worthwhile.
On the other hand The Wedding Date was staggeringly awful, to my complete lack of surprise but to Julia's inexplicable shock. (That is, I'm surprised by how surprised she was.) More than anything else it's the triteness that erodes one's will to live while watching that movie. Apparently the funniest they can do is ten minutes worth of demonstrating OMG how nervous she is, or busting her chops for listening to Air Supply.
Representatively atrocious lines from that movie:
"Is that an old ballet exercise or are you just so used to walking on eggshells around your family?" (Dermot Mulroney apparently isn't a male prostitute so much as a male avatar of Oprah.)
"Everybody have a drink for my hoo-hah." (That nasty older woman.)
Oh, and they overuse everybody's favorite trite-movie crutch: Drown out milestone-but-otherwise-mundane (in that they happen to everyone at some point) events with catchy soundtrack tunes so that all the 14-year-old girls in the theater will ooh and aww and feel like part of the experience.
These two men are so amazingly funny (I've been a Murray fan as long as I can remember; I have Julia to thank for discovering the full extent of Martin's brilliance), yet if they made a movie together, say sometime in 2006, I bet people would leave the theaters almost suicidally depressed if the subject matter were anywhere near as heavy as (at least) Murray's most recent offerings.
For a quick 10 points (I had to do an IMDB search; you may have to as well, though if you know off the top of your head more power to you): Name the only movie they appeared in together (so obviously not SNL or other TV stuff).
Martin was a supporting character; Murray had just a bit part, appearing only in scenes with Martin, in which he supposedly ad-libbed all his lines.
In one particular nude scene of Shopgirl, I wonder whether during the filming Claire Danes thought to herself, "Bite this, Scarlet J..."
Random superficial similarities between Shopgirl (the movie, as opposed to the novella) and Lost in Translation:
Leading man is a 50-something comic star who broke out in the really old-school SNL, then made a bunch of cornball family comedies in the 1980s and 1990s compared to which his role in this movie is strikingly poignant/heavy.
Leading lady is a beautiful redhead who's attractive (the character moreso than the actress, though the actress as well) in spite of or perhaps even because of being so introverted and contemplative.
Despite being so much older than her, the leading man becomes close to the leading lady on a hard to define level where they're seemingly more than friends yet a true relationship is off limits.
The cinematography focuses at length on the leading lady's legs and/or butt.
The leading lady has another guy in her life, though Jeremy from ShopGirl gets fleshed out way more than that dippy Yale guy from LiT ever did.
All major characters feel isolation and loneliness, in part because of what they do for a living and in part because of the difficulties presented by the big, faceless city/culture they're in (Tokyo; Los Angeles). The sense of isolation is conveyed even further by the recurring haunting themes in the instrumental pieces on the movie's soundtrack.
So if all you knew about Shopgirl were the 25-words-or-less basic plot, you could be forgiven for expecting (fearing?) that it would feel a lot like a Woody Allen movie. Thank goodness it came nowhere near that look & feel.
Emma Watson has aged well, of course.
More important -- and bear in mind how straight I am, or claim to be -- this is the most handsome man to appear on the big screen in quite some time. Where did they find him? (In Sofia, based on his IMDB bio...)
Wow. Were he American, he'd be perfect for those ads for the Marines. Even as it stands he'd be perfect for those ads.
Quick: What do these movies have in common? (See extended entry.)
Kids
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
American Pie
The Breakfast Club
Animal House
Better Off Dead
Porky's
(That seems like about the right order. Your mileage may vary, including what belongs on that list and what doesn't.)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High reminds me in turns of each of those movies, though with the notable exception of The Breakfast Club each of them is demonstrably superior to Fast Times.
(By the way, apologizes to Julia for blogging this in lieu of a more in-depth conversation in person, though her general reaction seemed to be that it was a dumb movie exactly because it's set in an era of stupidity, with no compelling reason to discuss further.)
Let's get The Breakfast Club out of the way: It and Fast Times are on opposite ends of the "show versus tell" spectrum. John Hughes makes Judd Hirsch Nelson et al talk and talk and TALK to no end about how crappy their lives supposedly are; Cameron Crowe just gives you a series of almost random events with well-chosen musical accompaniment.
There's one hideous exception to that "show don't tell" trend, involving perhaps the worst line of dialogue in the movie:
"I don't need sex. I don't want sex. I want a relationship. I want romance." (IMDB has only the last two sentences of this but I believe the first two are right.)
My appalled reaction to this line stepped on Phoebe Cates's response (which is actually a good line) but two immediate reactions:
1. YA THINK?!? I mean, it's not like the last guy you were with spent about 10 seconds inside you and GOT YOU PREGNANT or anything.
2. What you really want (though you don't even realize what you're missing) is foreplay. We get to see Jennifer Jason Leigh (by the way, Greg(?) is right that the truly memorable nudity here isn't Cates but Leigh -- I don't know why Fast Times came up on this weblog before or why I happened to remember it coming up but there you go) twice in intimiate situations, plus sitting on her bed with Rat at the end of their date. So help me Rat did more to stimulate her (without meaning to) than Damone and the guy who took her to the Point combined.
Anyhow, the comparison to Kids should be obvious enough. There might be other similar dramas that I'm not thinking of, though Fast Times certainly has a lighter tone. (I would write that it tries to be both a comedy and a drama, except that as explained more below, a distinctive feature of Fast Times is that in general it doesn't try, it's just there.)
For high school comedy that plays on one-dimensional characters, Ferris Bueller is better hands-down. (Spicoli is painfully bad. It's tempting to claim that Sean Penn has come a long way, but come to think of it Sean Penn himself is painfully bad.)
Just as Fast Times and The Breakfast Club are on opposite ends of "show vs. tell," Fast Times and American Pie are on opposite ends of "explicit vs. suggested." The former is very explicit of course. Aside from Leigh's doe-eyed expressions of anticipation and/or frustration (her expression as she lies there naked after Damone's premature climax is deeply moving, though so is her naked body itself), one get no sense in Fast Times of WHY those youthful sexual discoveries are so urgent, so wonderful, so risque, etc.
Think long and hard about this: Is there any actual nudity (among the more attractive cast members) in the American Pie franchise? Unless I'm missing something (ignore director's cuts for now), I believe there isn't. They push the envelope so much that you wind up thinking the movie is a lot more explicit than it is.
(That's not 100% good or 100% bad. In general it's to American Pie's advantage, but contrast the topless Phoebe Cates scene itself ("Doesn't anybody knock anymore?!") to how over-the-top the Weitz brothers would have been with that same scene.)
To the extent that Fast Times is an ensemble movie (i.e. moving away from the main storyline of Stacy's love life), it's very much like Animal House in the series of wacky hijinx that don't seem to bear much connection to each other. The most obvious tie-in is the "Where are they now?" subtitles at the end of the movie. WOULD IT HAVE KILLED CAMERON CROWE TO GET SOMEONE TO PROOFREAD THESE?! Everything I hated about the lack of effort put into Fast Times, I hated ten times more when I saw those barely literate subtitles in the ugly color scheme they chose.
Oh, and as bizarrely pointless as is the escalating mayhem of the climactic scene of Animal House, at least it's not a complete right turn from the rest of the movie. So yes, the end of Fast Times is moderately enjoyable in its own right. ("Dude, no towels...") But THAT's how you get closure?
Exercise for the reader: Think of other movies and what their ending would have been like if tacked onto their actual ending were a convenience store robbery scene.
Last but not least: Fast Times accomplishes something very hard to accomplish in that it's a worse movie than Porky's but with better nudity.
(Depressing post-script: Jennifer Jason Leigh is 43 years old now. (She was 20 when this was made.) If you were fantasizing about her Stacy character, thinking of her in Road to Perdition would ruin the moment completely. Phoebe Cates hasn't been in anything in awhile.)
Better Off Dead is a parody of a lot of things, but I never realized until now the extent to which Fast Times might be among the things sent up. If that's by design, Fast Times is a deserving target.
My would-be filmmaker colleague has a visceral hatred of the acting of Zach Braff. This despite (because of?) their mild resemblance in looks and mannerisms.
As a recent viewer of Scrubs on DVD, I like Braff up to a point. I think he loses me on Chicken Little. (I've also been told that Garden State is atrocious specifically because of him.)
One of the most hilarious movies I've ever seen.
I'm sure it was meant seriously -- and 38 years ago I imagine it was scandalous -- but goodness what a ridiculous film. Certainly quite enjoyable.
Now I absolutely must rewatch both "Mrs. Bouvier's Lover" (The Simpsons) and "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" (Family Guy), the more fully to appreciate the references.
Apparently Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is really, really, really bad.
This doesn't surprise me at all given who's behind it, though I suppose the true surprise is his finally making something so bad that people other than me realized how bad it was.
I blame Albert Brooks for my taking so long to get into Woody Allen. Thanks to some unfortunate assumptions, I inferred that if I couldn't stand the former's movies, the latter were probably the same to an nth degree. Not even close to the truth though.
(See also the post right below this.)
1. If I call this the most nihilistic movie I've ever seen, am I using the term nihilism correctly?
2. Very little plot or character development takes place; rather, stuff just happens. Scenes/themes that I'd have assumed recurred over time, instead are about five minutes apart. You could watch any given chapter of this movie and lose nothing compared to seeing it in context.
3. Disappointing if my expectation threshold were set to the movie's iconic status; not so disappointing once I'd braced myself for the possibility that it would be dated, suck, or both. It is the giant 6'2" dude on whose shoulders movies like Old School stand.
Am I turning into an old fuddy-duddy or was Anchorman not quite all that its fans tout it to be?
It's the Bill Simmons curse, I tell you, though at least columns like this make a whole lot more sense if you watched the movie in question within the previous 24 hours.
Simmons would make a great bizarro-world movie reviewer, between all the movies he's touted that I've subsequently been disappointed in and his hatred of unsung masterpieces like Dodgeball.
But "disappointed in" puts it too strongly. Anchorman was a satisfactory movie for what it was. Just not great. Maybe good, though that stretches the definition of the word a bit.
To the surprise of no one, he gave this movie a bad review.
(Siskel was unavailable for comment.)
Along these lines, this Onion commentary is priceless. Given just how stupendously bad this summer's other movies look, I'm gratified that the Penguins movie is the runaway hit.
Saw the former over the weekend, the latter awhile back. It's no contest, Novocaine being hands-down superior.
Remarkably similar movies, though, right down to the unexpected topless scenes (Helena Bonham Carter looks better than Amanda Peet, though Peet has the better scene).
(I saved something like this as a draft on Tuesday then never posted it. Here goes, with extensive revisions.)
This is without a doubt the most vulgar movie I've seen. (Yes, topping Fockers.) I gave up on it after an hour.
There's a frightening correlation between movies I haven't seen that Bill Simmons describes as classics, and movies that turn out to be horrendous once I finally do get around to seeing them. (An ill portent for Anchorman, both my latest Netflix arrival and the source of the quotes from Simmons's latest column.)
Apparently the Hanson brothers by being young and cheerful and goofy and cute are sympathetic characters, goonsmanship aside. Apparently there's a big dramatic buildup as to whether "gooning it up" to attract fans is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
All I know is that the most depressing thing about Slap Shot is how much of the worst of the '70s it exudes. That and when "Hey Hanrahan, your wife s'ks p'y!" is the best line of [the first hour of] the movie, it's just not any good.
The trickier question is how to distinguish Slap Shot from Major League, which I really enjoyed when I saw it. Possibilities:
1. I was a lot younger when I first saw Major League; maybe the next time will be a let-down.
2. Baseball pleases me more than hockey? But if anything I judge pop cultural depictions of baseball more harshly (as a nit-picker).
3. Major League is neither nearly as depressing nor nearly as sleazy. There's something paradoxically innocent about the pace of stripping the clothes off the cardboard cutout of that owner lady; there's a whole lot of the opposite of innocence in Slap Shot.
(Despite being such blatant goons, perhaps what makes the Hanson brothers stick out so much is their trappings of innocence/childhood in a very bleak, very "damaged goods" adult world.)
I'll readily admit that the happy-go-lucky eccentric sappiness of the characters from Major League isn't for everyone (though how could you not love Jobu?). Even so, the kind of atmosphere I want from a sports comedy is surely something other than the Taxi Driver effect.
Come to think of it, I just had a chilling thought: I know that subsequently there were special minor league hockey promotions wherein "the Hanson brothers" (not sure if it's the same actors or facsimiles) would make an appearance. I picture some nine-year-old boy becoming enamored of them, and learning about the existence of this movie, and persuading parents to rent it. Carnage ensues, with a lot of awkward questions to answer and explanations to give.
UPDATE: Then again, "Taxi Slap Shot" really would be hilarious. Can you imagine the Hanson brothers "cleaning up" late-1970s NYC with a few well-placed high sticks? C'mere, Iris Steensma, no we don't wanna f'k you, we just want you to fix our cars, they're broken."