I don't typically write much about TV, despite the fact that I watch an official metric fuck-ton of it. Easily the show I've been missing the most as of late is Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's incredible Adult Swim series Rick & Morty, which is a very loose riff on the Doc and Marty relationship from Back To The Future. It's weird and violent and sweet and twisted and, above all, fucking hilarious. If I had to point to a single episode to introduce the show, it would probably be "Meseeks And Destroy," but that's just one of many episodes that I'd be willing to watch on a loop forever.
The show returns July 26th and I can't goddamn wait. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with the video below, in which the folks at The Simpsons allowed Harmon and Roiland to step in and animate this coming week's couch gag, in which drunken mad scientist Rick and his sweet but ill-fated grandson Morty accidentally murder the Simpson family if horrific fashion. It's magnificent.
Seriously, I cannot recommend this show highly enough. Even if Community can't milk another season out of Yahoo, at least we have lots of Rick & Morty in our future.
There's something magical in those childhood moments when you discover a great movie totally on your own and not because a friend or an adult sat you down and told you, "This is a good movie." Those instances always seem few and far between and those films are the ones you will cherish forever, even if they don't exactly age well as you grow older. Those movies are special because you actually began to assert your own tastes. Those are YOUR movies.
Real Genius is my movie.
Young Val Kilmer is an eccentric young genius attending a Caltech-esque university and trying to build a powerful new type of laser for his dick professor, played by William Atherton in full on Walter Peck mode. Kilmer takes in shy young prodigy (Gabe Jarret) as his roommate and plenty of crazy campus hijinks ensue, including one scene where they turn the dorm hallway into a frozen skating rink that may also explode at any moment. Also there's a weird guy who lives in their closet. Kilmer and Jarret eventually finish their laser project only to discover that they've unwittingly been constructing a military funded assassination weapon, thus prompting a mission of hilarious sabotage and juvenile revenge.
It is perfect in every way.
NBC is now developing Real Genius as a single camera comedy. At first I was kind of excited at this prospect. This could be like Community but with super geniuses! That sounds amazing! But then I kept reading Deadline's story and saw that it's being shifted into a workplace comedy. So it's The Office with super geniuses? BOOOOO. The setting is one of the things that makes the film truly unique, along with the odd mingling of the military and the academic. Plus Kilmer's Chris Knight is pure lightning in a bottle.
The original film isn't exactly a widely beloved title in the first place, so if you're going to make that big of a departure from the source material, why bother even calling it Real Genius? Just because it's an existing property that will make it marginally easier to market? Fuck that noise.
When I was a kid, Chevy Chase was the definition of "not funny."
It's all a matter of timing. When I started to really become aware of individual actors in that way where their very presence influences your desire to see a particular movie, Chevy's career was in the doldrums. He was churning out unwatchable crap like Cops And Robbersons and Man Of The House. He really didn't turn it around until his memorable arc as a major villain on NBC's Chuck, which of course led to his fantastic work as Pierce Hawthorne on Community. In fact, the last time Chase was the lead in a truly great movie was 1989's Christmas Vacation, which means we're talking about roughly twenty years (a.k.a. most of my life) of appearing in wall to wall cinematic garbage.
Thankfully, at some point in high school or college I discovered Caddyshack. And Fletch. And Spies Like Us. And the first season of Saturday Night Live. And I remembered he was one of The Three Amigos.
It was like a slap to the face.
"Ohhhhhhh, this guy used to be HILARIOUS! What the hell happened?"
I never watched any of National Lampoon's Vacation movies growing up because, on the surface and in the context I understood Chevy Chase at the time, they sounded like more middle of the road, whitebread family comedies. (Again, this was before I had seen Animal House and really understood what to expect from the Lampoon.) I had absolutely no idea how subversive these movies really were. And even when I did finally get into the Vacation series, I did it all wrong. I think I saw Vegas Vacation first because it was the only one I actually remember coming out in theaters. That was followed by European Vacation, which I liked but didn't love, and eventually Christmas Vacation. In a lot of ways, Christmas feels like the safest one of the bunch; at the end of the day it's still a warm and fuzzy Christmas movie, but it's also flat out hilarious. And somehow, after all of that, I had still never gotten around to seeing the original Vacation...
To give a little viewing context, the day I watched this movie was the Friday of the "Boston Manhunt," when I woke up to discover that the entire city was on lockdown while police officers went door to door through Watertown searching for marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I was lacing up my shoes to go to work when I got an alert that the T (subway for you non-locals) was not running and I flipped on the TV to see what was going on. Jamie and I spent the next 12 hours essentially glued to the television, watching and waiting for some kind of development in the pursuit. Work was cancelled for the day, but I simply could not bring myself to turn off the local news in favor of my daily film, so I got a little writing done instead. Eventually my parents and my sister came over and we watched as police cornered Tsarnaev on that infamous boat and eventually took him into custody a little after 8:30 PM. At this point we were starving for dinner, so we all piled into the car and headed to Terry O'Reilly's pub in Newton, which is one town over from Watertown. (We could see the police lights as we pulled off the Mass Pike.) The crowd at the bar was small since they'd only been allowed to open after the lockdown was lifted, but we were boisterous and relieved, applauding the cops on the TV and raising our glasses while listening to every song from or about Boston on the jukebox.
We got home around midnight and Jamie and I were so exhausted that we immediately crawled into bed. I lay there for about three minutes, at which point I said, "Oh shit."
Jamie turned to me, already half asleep. "What's wrong?"
"I haven't watched a movie yet today."
And so I pulled myself out of bed and out into the living room in search of something to watch. I checked the DVR and remembered that I had recorded Vacation on HBO a few days prior. Humor seemed appropriate for the day, so I dove right in. There's simply no need for me to go through the plot at this point, but I will say that the movie lived up to it's reputation. It's a very sharp comedy, which is no surprise coming from director Harold Ramis and writer John Hughes in their respective primes. Honestly, if someone had told me that those two guys were largely responsible for this movie, I would have gone out of my way to see it a lot earlier. The strength of the family dynamic really holds the film together, so no matter how insane things get, you really believe in the bond that keeps these characters together.
The exception here is the subplot with Christie Brinkley as the hot blonde in the Ferrari. Make no mistake, all of Chevy's long distance silent flirting is wonderful, and I love the way that Clark Griswold can instantly transition from nerdy family man to charming rake. (Those oversized glasses really help.) I even buy it when, after fighting with Ellen and feeling like his family has turned on him, he struts into the hotel bar in those incredible white shoes and actually ends up having a drink with the mystery girl, which leads to some late night skinny dipping in the pool. It works because she's the instigator and Clark is largely following her lead, testing the boundaries of his fidelity and seeing how far he can go before his own morality kicks in. The way he gets caught is also very funny, but it's the aftermath I couldn't get on board with. Ellen sort of pouts for a few moments, and then turns on a dime and leads Clark back out to the pool for their own naked swim time. I'm sorry, but I can't think of any woman I know, (my wife chief among them) who would catch their boyfriend/husband naked with another woman and not only forgive him in under five minutes, but then basically suggest they go bone in the hotel pool.
Otherwise the movie is filled with excellent gags, especially the entire ordeal with Aunt Edna* and her poor, poor dog.** Considering how big a role he would come to play in all of the Vacation sequels, I was surprised that Randy Quaid's Uncle Eddie didn't make more of an impact. He's certainly one of the best things in Christmas Vacation, but he's also bugnuts crazy in that movie. Here Eddie seemed positively tame. (Oh, and hello young Jane Krakowski!) I'm always a sucker for outdated computer gags, so I loved the scene with the Atari at the beginning. The old west saloon is a well executed bit and I'm always happy to get a solid scene from Brian Doyle-Murray in a funny hat. The end at Wally World is pretty perfect, the kind of insanity that so typifies 80's comedy and simply can't be pulled off today. Plus John Candy just kills through that entire sequence.
I admit that after an emotional rollercoaster of a day, (see what I did there?) I fell asleep on the couch right as they got to Wally World and had to watch the ending three times before I got all the way through it, but I'm glad I finally checked this one off the list. Much like The Monster Squad, this feels like a movie that I probably would have enjoyed far more if I had first seen it when I was Rusty's age. There have been a few attempts to revive the Vacation franchise, most recently with Ed Helms playing a grown up Rusty Griswold and Christina Applegate as his wife taking their own family on vacation. The project seems to have been shelved for now, but I'm curious if the family road trip premise is something that can still strike a chord with audiences. Is that something that people still do? My parents certainly took us on plenty of trips, but we never spent days driving from state to state. It would be interesting to see how a reboot/remake would handle that aspect of the story. I'm guessing iPads would be heavily involved.
*Yes, I had an easier time believing they would strap a dead woman to the top of their car, then leave her in their cousin's backyard in the rain than I did believing in that pool scene.)
**This scene destroyed me.
--------------------------------------- Title: National Lampoon's Vacation Director: Harold Ramis Starring: Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Anthony Michael Hall, Dana Barron, Randy Quaid Year Of Release: 1983 Viewing Method: HBO HD
"You probably never gave it a thought, but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason. And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason."
I decided to dramatically change gears for my second movie, trading in a classic sci-fi adventure story for a modern, bugnuts absurdist film about a sentient car tire who makes people's heads explode.
In other words, today's entry is going to be much shorter than yesterday's.
We start with an accountant standing in the desert holding about a dozen pairs of binoculars as a car drives down a dirt road filled with chairs. The car swerves to knock down each individual chair, then pulls up in front of the camera, where a man in a sheriff's uniform emerges from the trunk and addresses the camera directly. He rattles off a list of trivial movie details that have no explanation, (Why is E.T. brown? Why does the couple in Love Story fall in love? Why do we never see the characters in Texas Chainsaw Massacre go to the bathroom?) and then tells us that the movie we are about to see is "an homage to the 'no reason' - that most powerful element of style." He then climbs back into the trunk and the car speeds away, leaving the accountant to hand out binoculars to the now revealed audience, a small group of people standing behind a velvet rope atop a desert outcropping. Turns out the "movie" is actually happening live, observed from a distance by this collection of strangers.
Then things get really weird.
A car tire lies discarded in the desert, half buried in sand. After a moment the tire stirs, spinning in place and pulling itself upright. While never spoken in the film, the tire is credited as "Robert," so for the sake of ease I will refer to it by name from here on out. After a few wobbly attempts, Robert gets himself rolling through the desert and quickly encounters a few obstacles. He's able to roll over and crush an empty plastic water bottle easily enough, but a glass beer bottle gives him a bit more trouble. As the music builds to a crescendo, Robert starts to tremble and pulsate until the bottle suddenly cracks into pieces. A few minutes later he encounters a rabbit and, in a further test of his newfound psychokinetic powers, Robert makes the rabbit explode, leaving a pile of blood, guts and fur. We then get an incredible music cue, with a soulful woman crooning out, "I don't want to be lonely anymore..."
Simply describing the plot beat-by-beat would do the film an incredible disservice so here's a quick summary: Robert encounters and falls in love with a beautiful French woman and follows her to a beat up roadside motel. Whenever someone gets in his way, he lets loose his lethal telekinetic powers and blows up their head. The action cuts back and forth between Robert's stalker-y killing spree and the reactions of the audience watching from far away.
Suffice it to say this movie is straight up WEIRD, but in the most wonderful way imaginable. It's both a psycho-killer genre film and a sharp commentary upon those films and particularly the audiences that they attract. It's also fucking gorgeously shot, which comes in handy when your main character is an inanimate object incapable of showing emotion. That doesn't mean Robert's not compelling though; the film clocks in at a little over an hour and twenty minutes, but I could have easily spent another half hour watching this lone tire stalk its prey across the dusty landscape. At one point Robert stumbles upon a huge pile of tires being burned in the desert. We then cut to three days later, after Robert has blazed a trail of revenge and left a number of headless bodies in his wake. It's a hilarious edit, but that's a sequence I would kill to watch. And by the way, every head explosion is a crowd pleaser. Each decapitation causes you to involuntarily tense up, then laugh in release at the pulpy celebration of blood, gore and carnage.
I also have to give serious kudos to the cast, all of whom totally commit to this gleefully bizarre reality. There are a number of familiar faces, including Community's Charley Koontz (aka Fat Neil), young Devin Brochu (Hesher), 90's staple David Bowe (Weird Al's partner from UHF), Tarantino alum James Parks and a wheelchair bound Wings Hauser, who easily gets the best line in the movie. ("Hey wait, it's not the end. He's been reincarnated as a tricycle!") Stephen Spinella is the standout as the sheriff who's desperately trying to maintain control of this "movie" when the action doesn't go quite according the plan and Jack Plotnick is also fabulously odd as the accountant. I'm really looking forward to seeing him take the lead in Quentin Dupieux's next film, Wrong.
Above all else, Dupieux emerges as a filmmaker to watch. While Rubber is hardly conventional (Dupieux's described it as similar to Friday The Thirteenth if it had been made by a nine year old) Dupieux's technique is absolutely flawless. He also has a singular voice and I'm excited to see him grow over the course of his second and third films, both of which I hope to cover later on down the road.
--------------------------------------- Title: Rubber Director: Quentin Dupieux Starring: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Charley Koontz, Devin Brochu Year Of Release: 2010 Viewing Method: Netflix Instant (TV)
