Beer League (2006)

They must have hid the funny in those additional 145 minutes.

For all the hype and self-promotion this film received on The Howard Stern show, there is really nothing here worth talking about. What feels more like a self-indulgent venture amongst friends, fails to be a comedy or a sports film. Perhaps, Beer League should be filed under Mystery. The big question being, what exactly is so wrong with this film?

Artie Lange is no leading man. His quips and interjections make good banter on a radio show, but here all of his dialogue sounds like non sequiturs mixed with exposition. While a few lines produced chuckles, i might as well have just read the script and saved myself from suffering through a roster of retched performances. Everyone’s timing is off the mark, no one is reacting to one another, and the direction is scattered. Frank Sebastiano has a ton of writing and producing credits to his name, but both his resume and this film express a severe lack of inability to think visually. The montages of baseball and physical comedy eclipse the excruciating verbal humor in this film. Still, most painful of all is watching Seymour Cassel deliver some of the most vulgar lines in a manner that leaves me wondering if he even knows what he’s saying.

The Unholy Three (1925)

Watching The Unholy Three reminds me of Bad Santa. It also leaves me wanting more films that have the audience rooting for less than likeable characters.

Halloween (2007)

Keep It Simple Stupid

Rob Zombie’s Halloween evokes but one phrase – “Did you have to?”

Repeatedly, I asked this question of Rob Zombie as I watched a remake that just did not need to be made. The original is both a classic slasher film and example of the ingenuity that comes with low-budget independence.

Whereas Carpenter ’s original felt bare-bones and driven by suspenseful builds to shocking bursts of action, Zombie’s Halloween wastes no time getting right to the violence. Acts of brutality are only interspersed with vulgar obscenities, that sound like children just learning to swear, and gratuitous innuendo and nudity.

Zombie had too much money and too little talent to create anything more than gore, and he doesn’t even do that well. While not completely insufferable, this film might have been forced to think more creatively about its construct if it did not feel like most of Rob Zombies whims where answered with a blank check. Zombie’s soundtrack probably cost more in clearance rights than the budget of the original Halloween and one only has to look at the songs he chooses to evoke feeling or responses from the audience to see where his priorities lie. They are not in creating something new, but in taking something somone else created and reusing it to meet his own desires.

There is one new aspect to the Halloeen franchise that Zombie offers up. Zombie spends the first third of the film attempting to explain the psychology behind Michael Meyers. Sadly, this is just the first in a series of horrible decisions that Zombie can never complete. Our killer’s childhood is depicted as an abusive, trashy dead-end, preparing him for a life of misery or murder. That or he’s the devil incarnate. Zombie can’t seem to decide.

Even the simple act of build suspense seems outside of Zombie’s abilities. I recall very little killing in the first Halloween. Yes, many people died, but their deaths were quick. What I do recall is a far greater sense of dread that is absent from Zombie’s remake. There are few false scares, maybe none. Instead, what you will find in Zombie’s version is a high level of trashiness, especially in the beginning of the film. It’s so over the top it seems farcical. For instance, Michael’s mom is a stripper. I get it, you established that with an advertisement in a newspaper. Did you really have to show her dancing in the club? Especially while you intercut between her and a young, dejected Michael Meyers sitting on the curb with “Love Hurts” playing over the soundtrack? Seriously, did you have to?”

As the picture progresses from Michael Meyer’s past to the present, the story takes on a more familiar structure. Hell, with a few rather wrongheaded exceptions the latter part of the re-make plays just like the original. There are some heavy nods to the original source, but most of the time I felt as if Rob Zombie was simply uglify a corspe. He took someone else’s ingenuity and added his own vile finger prints.

This is the problem of so many re-makes. They merely ratch up the sex, violence, and action to make an old story ‘more palpatable’ to our modern eyes. How did it come to this? When was it determined that we crave an excess of action and vulgarity to feel up to date? Did Rob Zombie have to make his Halloween with these excesses to meet our demands. Did he have to?

The Quare Fellow (1967)

Quite the pleasant surprise. Patrick McGoohan is subdued, but always interesting, as a young, idealistic prison guard who gets involved with the wife of a quare fellow, or condemned man. New evidence comes to light and McGoohan’s pro-death penalty stance begins to shift. The Quare Fellow is adapted from a Brendan Behan play, but loses much of its stage trappings in Peter Hennessy’s cinematography.

The Prisoner as warder

A Day in the Death of Donnie B (1969)

A Day in the Death of Donnie B is not perfect, but watching it right after screening the  stilted failure that is Lars and the Real Girls makes this 40 year old short feel vivacious and refreshing. The mixture of audio testimonies and visual re-enactment create a mixture of documentary and fiction that is nothing new, but it is inspiring. The film is quite dependent on its soundtrack to tie together a series of random actions, seemingly shot on a non-synch 16mm camera. I could easily describe this film as being like a student film, but that would leave me to wonder why so few student films I see feel this ambitious or relevant.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

I get it! Lars has a pervasive developmental disorder and that is funny. Lars and the Real Girl taps two rich, under-utilized comedic goldmines. Really, what is more hilarious than a socially awkward delusional guy and rural Northerners, what with their frumpy cloths and their simple living. Why, it’s Asperger’s Syndrome in the heart of Lake Woebegon.

Social impairment as schtick. Ha, ha!

Look, this film is cute and quirky. It puts a semi-original spin on the boy meets girl story. In this case it is boy orders fake plastic girl, boy loses fake plastic girl, boy gets real girl. Still, unless you are looking to land a real girl of your own, this movies is drivel best reserved for a date night.

Oh how great and rewarding it would have to to use this premise to force people to question the true meaning of love or caring for another. Oh how harrowing it could have been had at presented us with a troubled character, dealing with a crippling issue like Asperger’s. Instead, we get a dressed down dramedy, with good looking actors playing salt of the Earth characters pulled right from the frozen, offbeat soils that sprouted half the folk in Fargo.

Real love and real pervasive developmental disorders are not this simple or this quaint. To see the heart-shattering truth of this matter I would highly recommend Finally, Lillian and Dan or even James Mangold’s first feature film, Heavy, over Lars and the Real Girl.

The Grasshopper (1967)

Oh, what a tease!

Jacqueline Bisset can’t find the right man. She walked out on the one truly great guy in her life. He was a practical man, a working man, the kind of guy who has a job at a bank and is saving his money for a better tomorrow. She didn’t want to wait for tomorrow. So, she packs her bags and hops into bed with various men. In three short years she transforms herself from a nineteen year old girl to a burnt out and dejected prostitute.

Let’s this be a lesson to you ladies.

The Grasshopper has all the makings of a porno, but it lacks all the sex and nudity. It’s a hardcore story with less than soft-core titilation. There are a lot of pasties and many lecherous sleazeballs, but for a film with such a nasty spirit this is pretty tame fare.

The Grasshopper lacks all the humor and satire of Candy or the comic Phobe Zeitgeist. This just feels like misogyny. It makes me wonder why so many male directors are driven to tell stories about women who stumble into prostitution. It’s even more curious when the woman ends up a prostitute after refusing the help or advice of a man. The most suprising fact about The Grasshopper is that Gary Marshall had a large hand in its making. The film is a far cry from Laverne & Shirley. Though Laverne (Penny Marshall) does show up as a groupie for a band with tight pants. In fact one character proudly states, “You’ll love these guys, they have the tighetest pants.”

Feminists could have a field day with this picture.

Little Murders (1971)

New York's Alright If You Like Being Jaded

“Are you really so down on people, or are you just being fashionable?” asks Patsy, an eternal optimist. She refuses to let life in New York City beat the smile from her face. Alfred, on the other hand, has turned off his feelings. As a devout apathetist Alfred no longer feels pleasure or pain. Opposites attract, so of course, they fall in love…sort of.

Little Murders explores the ways we defend ourselves from madness, either through well recognized institutions and traditions or by developing our own system of procedures designed to protect us.  Before his world collapses into madness Alfred states, “It’s dangerous to challenge a system unless you’re completely at peace with the thought that you’re not going to miss it when it collapses.”

Prior to meeting Patsy, Alfred exists as an emotionally zombie, uncaring, unfeeling. She tries to change him and nearly succeeds, but when he opens up, he falls apart. I hate to think that either director Alan Arkin or writer Jules Feiffer truly believe the only way to survive in this world is to become jaded. Funny as he maybe, Albert’s character holds a deep sorrow. Whereas, Patsy and even her rather particular family, overflow with emotion. Her mother and father often start their statements with a hand clap or a knee-slap.  The percussive sound of hands slapping quickly call to attention the excitement of the speaker. It as if their joy can no longer be contained.

That hand-clap along with the exclamation “Terrific”, a phrase Patsy’s mom and dad both use, is a lively, animated gesture akin to what the characters in a Cassavetes film do. I find this just terrific. Yes, “Terrific!” It is not only a phrase you don’t seem to hear that often, but it is done with such a leave of energy that its strikes my ears in a strange yet comforting fashion. Today, most people live more reserved, like Alfred, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting to get socked with the next big disappointment.

I certainly don’t think this is anyway to live life, whether in New York or otherwise, but as a survival tactic it might do just fine. So the question is, do you risk it all for the heights of joy knowing that there might also be great pain or do you block it all out and save yourself from both joy and pain? Little Murders takes a satirical look at this troublesome paradox.

Bug (2007)

Conspiracy theories: I've got you underneath my skin.

Two confessions. I’m a sucker for a good government conspiracy. I’m paranoid about bugs that burrow under your skin. So admittedly Bug needed to do little to catch my attention.

Holding my attention, that is another matter. Any fool can spin a conspiracy yarn. Any fool can make a horror story about bugs. Many have tried. However, to make one in the same and to make them believable that takes some talent.

Scaled down to nearly one location, a seedy motel room, and with a limited cast of about 5 characters the film does exhibit some of its stage roots. Ashely Judd, who with the exception of Ruby in Paradise, I have previously found to be barely interesting, wonderfully plays the victim to Michael Shannon’s madness. Deceptively innocent, but utterly paranoid, Shannon is a Gulf War veteran on the lam. He comes across as an awkward man occassionally unloading tiny bits of conspiracy laden information only to pull back at the instance he feels he’s alarming or losing his victim. What follows is both terrifying and masterful and Shannon slyly carries the whole movie.

Playwrite Tracy Letts does a wonderful job of tossing out the right bait to weave together a grand conspiracy theory. UFO’s, the, Oklahoma City Bombings, the Gulf War, Bio-Terrorism, Letts does not create these things so much a collect redistribute them. Once the pieces have been laid out, the pace and tension of Bug accelerates to a destructive climax with the audience filling in the gaps as quickly as Ashely Judd’s character.

Director William Friedkin hasn’t been this masterful since The Exorcist and were you to stand these two films side by side, the similarities in pace and structure would be stricking. Yet, the films almost working as positive and negative of one another. The Exorcist creates a spiritual terror. Bug deals with science. The Catholic church is the institutional power represented in The Exorcist. In Bug it is the US government. The Exorcist rebuilds faith in the power of the divine. Bug attempts to destroy trust in the government.

Friedkin argues that Bug is not a horror film. He claims it could just as well be a romantic black comedy. I guess it depends on your sense of humor and just how paranoid of a person you are. In an age of speculation where all information can be perceived as misinformation, random bits of history and unsubstantiated facts can act as unnumbered dots to be connected in any order and form. The results become whatever you want to see.

The Big Mouth (1967)

Learning how to laugh

Not too long ago Cadillac ran an advertising campaign designed to reach out to more youthful car buyers. “This is not your father’s Cadillac” proclaimed the commercials. The hope was that younger buyers would stop seeing the Cadillac as a stuffy boat of car, the kind you transition into during your autumn years. For me, the ads just solidified my feelings of the Cadillac being a car for older people. Jerry Lewis comedies pose a similar problem. They feel both modern and dated; like a new Cadillac.

While I have giggled at many Lewis comedies I feel like I have to meet the films on their terms. They never rise to my hopes or expectations.

The Big Mouth looks and feels like an artifact from a bygone era. The humor is innocent, cartoonish, a tad racially insensative, but not vulgar. Jerry Lewis’ bumbling, good-hearted, love struck hero is not that far removed from Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumer or Adam Sandler in just about any of the roles that launched his career. Still, Lewis drops this man-child persona from time to time and there are glimpses of a suave straightman that show through. I cannot think of a time when I have felt like Sandler or Carey are mature grown men playing fools and not just grown boys foolishly trying to avoid adulthood. It is no wonder they have such trouble with serious roles.

Lewis’ character is an innocent, childlike creature in a sea of adults. The Big Mouth features an entire cast is of adults, not thirty-years olds, twenty-somethings, teens, or kids. Yet, the film carries none of the so-called ‘mature’ humor that makes up a genre known today as adult humor. I find it hard to imagine adults in 1967 enjoying this film or finding that it entertained their adult senses of humor. This is, after all, the work of a man who surely told filfthy jokes at Friar’s Club roasts.

For me the film, is a challenge. I feel as if I am watching an  film that has been neutred of all that makes things ‘adult’. I am not speaking of vulgarity or sex, but rather politics, personal and worldly. I cannot come to terms with its humor.

Then, I read an essay like the one linked to below and I realize how I’m not coming at th film from the right perspective and that maybe I’m asking a fish to be horse.

http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2009/03/big-mouth-1967.html

Right or wrong, this essay makes me re-think and value The Big Mouth slightly more. It also helps me feel less guilty about finding Twin Peaks laughable.