I Can't Get Laid in This Town

Best and Worst of 2011

2011-12-11T23:44:00.007-05:00

For a FULL LIST of winners, losers, and explanations, head on over to Criticize This! sometime around Christmas.

25 Best Films of 2011

25. Terri
24. Source Code
23. Senna
22. Monsieur Lazhar
21. The Guard
20. The Trip
19. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
18. Good Neighbours
17. Beauty Day
16. Captain America
15. Margaret
14. Mysteries of Lisbon
13. A Separation
12. The Descendants
11. The Adventures of Tintin
10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
9. Melancholia
8. Win Win
7. Cafe de Flore
6. Attack the Block
5. Take Shelter
4. The Artist
3. Meek's Cutoff
2. Tree of Life
1. Like Crazy

10 Worst Films of 2011

10. Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows
9. New Year's Eve
8. Creature
7. The Lincoln Lawyer
6. Red Riding Hood
5. Priest
4. The Hangover Part II
3. Wound
2. The Art of Getting By
1. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star

Hey, Remember That Movie #18: Bad Dreams

2011-11-08T19:13:00.007-05:00

I never wrote anything formal about the film Martha Marcy May Marlene, but those who follow me on Twitter or who talk to me in person know that despite the buzz and hype surrounding the film, I really think it’s just an okay movie. The story about a young woman (a pretty decent Elizabeth Olsen) leaving a backwoods cult behind and moving back in with her sister works thanks to writer-director Sean Durkin, who has a great visual eye and is able to balance the film’s off kilter plot structure. Outside of that and the performances, I struggle to think of any real reason to recommend the movie.

It left me absolutely cold. The story is told in the blandest of possible ways with very little real emotion to hold it together. The tone is distressingly monotonous almost to the point where it feels like I was watching a Sofia Coppola remounting of Helter Skelter. Now, I guess this is where film criticism comes down to personal preference, but if there is nothing that I can invest myself in or emotionally connect to, I start paying attention more to the craft than to the finished product. I like the technical mastery behind MMMM, but I can’t help but think there’s a better way to tell this story. All of the characters were so needlessly one-note that the story around them didn’t really matter.

About all that film did was make me wonder if other films about cults were all similarly afflicted with a dearth of emotion. I was actually able to think of one that also utilizes MMMM’s ability to move back and forward in time, and possibly even in and out of dreams that may or may not be reality. Of course, in terms of overall quality 1988’s Nightmare on Elm Street rip off Bad Dreams has nothing on the thoughtfully photographed landscapes of this year’s cult themed drama, but the film’s lead character is definitely going through something similar.

Bad Dreams might have been the first film that I ever personally recognized to be an abject rip off of a film I really enjoyed. Just look at that trailer!

I don’t know, Don LaFontaine, CAN I survive Bad Dreams?

If that was too subtle, this blubbering TV spot will send its obvious Freddy Krueger leanings right out the window.

Produced by a failed micro-division of 20^th Century Fox (similar to one that Paramount will be rolling out in January with The Devil Inside) called No Frills Films (headed by Terminator and Aliens producer Gale Anne Hurd) with the express purpose of churning out low budget genre fare, Bad Dreams served as the debut film for writer-director Andrew Fleming (Hamlet 2, Dick, The Craft), and was co-written by Steven E. de Souza, who would become a known Hollywood talent thanks to the success of Die Hard later that same year. In another parallel to MMMM, Bad Dreams is made by some undoubtedly talented people, but still isn’t very good.

The film opens sometime in the mid-70s on some Middle American farmland to the strains of The Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” On this land is the meeting house of the love cult known as Unity Fields, headed by the enigmatic Harris (Invasion U.S.A. villain Richard Lynch). The members of the cult have reached the end of their time on Earth and are about to embark on the ultimate “bonding between man and wife, parent and child” by dousing themselves in gasoline while Harris lights the match to send them home (or some shit like that).

The lone holdout on Harris’ plan is a young woman named Cynthia, who ends up surviving the Jim Jones’ style mass suicide when the house explodes and buries her under rubble. The ensuing injuries land Cynthia in a thirteen year coma.

When Cynthia awakes (played as an adult by Jennifer Rubin, returning to a hospital set film after playing Taryn in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), she has become a woman out of time trying to piece together the memories she had of the commune in much the same way that Martha does in her film. Also similar is the way Cynthia seems to be straddling the line between guilt (for leaving her brothers and sisters in spirit behind) and depression (the inability to comprehend the new, old world she has to become acclimated to all over again).

It’s this balance between survivor guilt and confusion that drives the admittedly hokey story of the film. Cynthia seems to be plagued by waking nightmares that may or may not be real that become integrated into the story. MMMM also does this, playing with the blurred lines between past, present, and perceived reality, but Bad Dreams uses it as the jumping off point for a slasher film.

Cynthia is admitted by hospital honcho Dr. Berrisford (character actor extraordinaire Harris Yulin) to the psychiatric ward for a perceived borderline personality disorder. She is placed in the direct care of Dr. Alex Karmen (Re-Animator’s Bruce Abbott), and forced to attend group therapy sessions despite having a personality so fractured that she feels out of place. In this group is the usual cast of misfits: the leering jokester who likes to cut himself (Summer School’s Dean Cameron), the mousy quiet girl (famed voiceover actress E.G Daily, probably best known as the voice of Tommy Pickles on TV’s Rugrats), a disgraced tabloid reporter, an older couple secretly hooking up with each other in the least subtle way possible, and a hipster looking Jesus freak.

Cynthia begins seeing visions of a sometimes horribly burned and disfigured Harris, who seems intent on bringing her over to the other side to join the rest of her “family.” When a confused Cynthia refuses the apparition’s (?) advances, Harris starts claiming the lives of the patients around her, sometimes in her own visions and sometimes driving the patients so mad that they kill themselves. Dr. Karmen suspects something is up, Dr. Berrisford seems like he couldn’t care less, and a police detective who witnessed the aftermath of Unity Fields (Sy Richardson) is on hand to constantly point the finger of blame at Cynthia.

For a first feature, Fleming’s film feels remarkably assured. (It might be because producer Hurd rounded out the production team with James Cameron’s technical cohorts who were patiently waiting for production delays on The Abyss to work themselves out.) The transitions between reality and the dream world are very well done, leading the film’s obvious gaps in logic and disregard for spatial relations to not be that noticeable on a first glance. Most first time filmmakers have a hard time telling the difference between a framing device and an excuse to let the story skip ahead to the good parts, but Fleming is particularly adept here when it comes to match cutting and the use of sound cues to transition in and out of Cynthia’s visions.

But much like I said earlier about this year’s awards bait, why am I paying such close attention to the craft here? Probably because much like how MMMM tries a rigidly minimalist approach to come across as being creepy, the story and performances are trying too hard in this film. It swings for the fences, but the ball drops in for a double and the bat is in the fucking parking lot.

Rubin is bad. Really, really bad, and with the exception of Cameron (who maniacally dances a tightrope between making his character sympathetic and loathsome), the rest of the victims don’t fare much better. They’re only on screen for occasionally bloody death sequences, but they really play up the crazy factor as if everyone is trying to one-up each other. Even on the doctor side of the equation, Abbot doesn’t seem to fully get the tone of the film, fluctuating between comically flabbergasted and almost painfully reflective to the point I thought he was trying to pass a kidney stone in the scene where he finally pieces together just what’s been going on.

At least the script does a good job of supplanting genre expectations for most of the film. No one dies in the “established order” that most 80s horror flicks rigidly adhered to, which is wise considering this film’s unenviable release just as the bottom was about to fall out of the market for slasher and “rubber reality” films. The ending offers a nifty twist that’s somehow logical from a plotting perspective (it does tie everything together), but inane from a common sense perspective. It also has the good sense to wrap everything up in 80 minutes (or the exact amount of time it takes for the inciting incident of MMMM to take place, because, you know, it’s artsy like that).

(There is an alternate ending to the film that was very wisely axed because it drags on forever and makes absolutely zero sense. It also forgoes the bitchin' choice to use Guns N Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine" as the film's closing credits music.)

While this really isn’t anything more than a quickie Wes Craven clone designed to cash in on an impending writer’s strike, it might be one of the best of its kind. It’s certainly a better movie than it has any right to be. Hence why it falls into that same middle ground that MMMM falls into for me with both being good, but not great. One film didn’t meet my expectations, while the other one surpassed them. Life is funny like that sometimes.

You Gave Your Love to Me Softly

2011-11-08T13:41:00.002-05:00

This is the point where the reader will start to realize they are dealing with a dreadfully unreliable narrator. Like most things associated with fading memories, certain details are obscured simply because they never really made much of an impact. All of the moments in the past two entries might seem frivolous, or even slight, but they are all things that will come back later in the story. Even the bits of occasionally recreated dialog (and more that a few direct quotes) will probably resurface at one point or another.

I call myself an unreliable narrator because I ended that last instalment on a bit of a false cliffhanger. There was something in that final exchange that was important and most readers over the age of twelve should be able to piece it all together with ease. The final bit about the party being thrown by the first person K ever slept with will turn out to be almost completely immaterial to the rest of the story. The character will never be referenced again since I don’t run into him but once in the rest of this general timeline and even then I almost forgot who he was. He was just this guy who was throwing this party. In the end, his backstory didn’t matter.

Maybe it’s the added benefit that I have knowing how this whole thing is going to end and to be able to convey only the key details relevant to get there. More likely than not it’s because I was pretty tipsy at the party. I wasn’t my usual awkward, stand-over-by-the-wall-and-wait-for-someone-to-talk-to-me self. I was the little social butterfly that night, flitting about from person to person with K not too far behind.

I wanted to make a good impression. I made all my own introductions to people I would never see again except for K’s friend Sasha who will show up in a later chapter of the story. The people were forgettable, the card games were forgettable, beer pong was beer pong, boys were boys and girls were girls. I was cognizant of the fact that I was also drinking to try and forget just how unpleasant the majority of my day had been.

K was being pretty touchy the entire night. Moreso than I would’ve expected, but I wasn’t minding any of it. It’s started with gentle leaning against each other, and progressed to mutual shoulder rubbing. There might have been some sly and subtle hand holding unseen by mostly everyone. I didn’t even really notice. Dancing involving arm wrapping around waists to hands moving up and down the smalls of each others back.

From there it was a drunken move to the pool. She brought clean clothes for such an occasion and simply took the keys and phone out of her pocket as she dove in. I kinda paced and ran my hands through my hair. I was hesitant to get in the pool, and not because I was pretty drunk by this point. She shoved a typhoon of water at me as if that would get me into the water any easier.

“I can’t swim.”

She bobbed her head beneath the water and resurfaced quickly. “Really.”

I took my now extremely dirty and wet socks off and sat on the edge of the pool to dip my feet in. “Yeah. When I was younger my dad was one of those types who just threw me in a lake to hope I would catch on. Problem is that when he threw me, I wasn’t even remotely prepared for it. All I remember is having my eyes wide open as I watched myself sink to the bottom of the lake. I hit my head on a huge rock and I freaked out. From that point on I stopped giving a crap about learning how to swim.”

She looked at me almost sorrowfully. The kind of drunken “that’s the saddest story I ever heard” look.

“Do you want me to teach you?”

“No, not right now. Not tonight.”

She swam over and hugged my lower leg. “You know, the water here isn’t deep at all if you stay on this side of the pool.”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t have a change of clothes. I didn’t know there was going to be…”

At that moment, she jerked on my leg and pulled me into the water. I quickly got my cell phone out of my pocket (which was miraculously saved despite the charger on the phone never quite working right after that). Under different circumstances, I probably would have been somewhat upset that she had taken that initiative, but the ear to ear smile on her face more than made up for it. The laughter of a few people who had been watching also helped to take the edge off. I couldn’t help but laugh, myself.

“Hold on to me.” She put my arms around her waist. “I’m just going to take you to the other side of the pool.”

“The deep end?!?” I said briefly freaking out.

“Calm down, I got you. I won’t let anything happen to you.” She paused as she started swimming to the other end. I held on tighter than I would have been holding her on dry land. “And if something goes wrong, I’m CPR certified.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled.

“Lean back against the edge of the pool and hold yourself up by your arms. I’ve got you.”

“So what exactly was the point of getting me all the way to this side of the pool?”

“Well, I kinda wanted to make out with you in the pool, but now that your in a spot where you can’t get away, I guess I could just have my way with you.”

We both laughed. She was trying to be smooth, but realized how ridiculous it all sounded. In the pool, on the far end of the deep, we had our first kiss. I was holding on for dear life with my arms until she wrapped her arms and legs around me.

“I’ve wanted to do something like this all week.” Said in unison.

Then I let go. We made out for a bit, occasionally bobbing up and down in the water. I had no clue what I was doing, but if I were about to die I was going to die happy. Her experience made up for my inability to stay afloat on my own. After a few moments we both agreed that this situation was incredibly awkward to pull off and we made our way out of the pool.

“So, now what am I going to do? I don’t exactly have any dry clothes on me.”

“Well, I could grab you something from (party guy’s name here despite being about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me) and we could go upstairs where it really wouldn’t matter what you were wearing.”

She went to go grab me some clothes and a towel as I stood by the edge of the pool, nodding and smiling at everyone who walked by. I didn’t know any of these people, but they almost all knew K. They didn’t know me by name, but by what I had just done with her in the pool. It was the first time I had ever really felt recognized and completely unknown to a crowd of people.

The drinking for the night stopped and the remainder of the night was a blur of making out in an upstairs bedroom. We were both mostly stripped down since I felt silly wearing the oversized Staind T-shirt. We kept the pants on, but the shirts were gone after about fifteen minutes. At some point someone started playing Weezer and we both stopped to sing along. It wasn’t even one of their better known songs. It led us to believe we had a lot more in common than we did.

After a while the action decreased and we ended up holding each other.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. I’m scared what you might think of me… you know… when I’m at my worst.” She buried her head into my shoulder as I pulled her as close as possible.

“Can’t be worse than me. I might never even tell you anything is wrong.”

“You don’t have to be like that with me. Tell me anything you want. If there is ever anything bothering you or something hurtful or troubling, you tell me.”

I teared up a little bit, but I still remained quiet. Would it ruin the moment if I just unleashed a torrent of all the unpleasant things in my life? I stayed silent, holding and kissing her until it was time to sober up and bring her home. And by bring her home, I mean park at the end of her grandparents’ driveway and make out and talk for another two hours.

I watched her walk into the house barefoot, with shoes in hand to not wake anyone up. I watched as she turned the light on in her bedroom. I backed out of the driveway not only wondering if I should have told her what happened earlier that day. I wondered briefly what she meant by seeing her at her worst. But mostly, I felt totally and completely alive. More than I had ever felt before. A feeling impossible to distil into words. It definitely wasn’t a side effect of the alcohol. I’m thinking it must have been something else entirely. I just wish I remembered better what that mental feeling was now instead of just the sense memory of it all.

The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows

2011-11-07T01:08:00.002-05:00

Our story begins here.

When we last left our hero he wasn’t speeding towards Capone’s vault, but instead in a dangerous sustained free fall since the last time he saw the woman that bewitched him so much he couldn’t stop thinking about her. All of the unpleasantness of the past week, the asshole father resurfacing after a lengthy absence (something our hero knew far too well), the broken down cars, rainstorms, and drug addled dying mothers, seemed to pale in comparison to the light he focused on as he was racing towards the ground.

Her voice over the phone for the past few days was like a choir of angels singing down from the perch he had just thrown himself off of. Her smile like the beam of light he focused on as he hurtled towards the Earth. Despite the fall he felt hopelessly weightless to the point where he might shoot back up into the sky and land amongst the stars, but it was far too late. He was falling. Hard. Besides, if he shot back up into the atmosphere the sun would probably pull him in due to the force of sheer gravity. He already felt too close to the sun as it was. He could smell the burning…

“Shit.”

I awoke from my daydreaming in the upstairs popcorn room to realize that I had left the batch I was watching to burn. Normally, such things wouldn’t have gotten past me, but I was listening to music and constantly looking at my watch. It was the rare Friday where I had the evening off. Other than daydreaming about the girl I had developed a rather large crush on, I had been popping corn for the past eight hours non-stop to get the theatre ready for the weekend. It was the last thirty minutes of my shift. My brain honestly checked out two hours ago when I fulfilled my quota of large yellow garbage bags full of salty snacks and instead spent the time joking with the projectionists, drinking Dr. Pepper, listening to Outkast, and hoping no one walked upstairs.

“Parker! What the fuck? You burning the place down again?” One of my bosses, and that day’s projectionist, Marc came peering from around the corner drinking from his enormous Pepsi mug.

“Don’t you have a movie to start?”

“Nah. Everything is threaded. If it’s late, fuck ‘em.”

It’s hard to believe that shortly after I would quit my job that Marc would become the man running the theatre. To this day, he still is. Marc was the ultimate in appearing professional to the outside world and then being a jokester as soon as everyone else dropped out of the picture.

“Besides, I know you’ve been done with your job for about three hours now. I sit around just as much as you do.”

He had me on that one.

“You want to walk and talk? I’m fuckin’ bored and I only have to hit start on two movies in the last hour I’m here.”

I did a half assed cleaning job on the popper since they had me inexplicably coming in the following afternoon to do the same thing. The only checking of my work when I was popping popcorn was looking to see that there was, in fact, popcorn. I wiped the kettles out with a paper towel and the inside down with a cloth and walked away. The leftover oil and grease residue gave off more of an impression that the popper was clean than if I followed proper cleaning procedures. That asshole Lippman (I’ll get to him in a moment) always managed to call me out whenever I bothered to follow the rules, even after demonstrating to him that I followed instructions. He demanded that it shined. Well, fuck him, then. It will shine from the grease. Dipshit.

I followed Marc around the projection booth, which was far more sanitized than the last one I worked in as a manager before my spectacular burn out. Hospital white and more brightly lit than probably healthy, it was older than the last theatre I worked at, but had better people taking care of it. Not Marc. He was just there because it was mandated by this company that every manager had to have one projection shift a week regardless of status or pay grade.

Marc always asked me why I never rose above being a supervisor and went for management. He was one of the few people (other than another manager named Ken, who used to work with my mother decades ago) who knew what my family was like and that I felt comfortable talking to. He was a grand conversationalist with a knack for discretion; a person that makes a great manager because the buck seems to start and stop with him when it comes to sensitive information. He knew I was pushing myself pretty hard in school, but he always thought I could have used the extra cash. I couldn’t have used the extra stress.

“You know, I know about you and K, right?” Marc said as he sipped from a molded blue straw far too big even for his oversized cup.

“Is it that obvious even though we aren’t going out?”

“Well, considering she has come by just to say hi to you while seeing movies three times this week, I would say yes. It’s pretty obvious.”

“I do like her.”

“You know I don’t give a shit what you do as long as you show up for work, but you know some of the other managers and supervisors – COUGH! LIPPY! COUGH! – they’ll try to get you bumped down if they find out.”

The theatre has always had a very strict non-fraternization policy dividing the staff and management. I had signed an agreement with the promise of a whopping dollar more an hour that I would never date, drink, or hang out with any of the employees. It was something widely know to exist and something to promptly be ignored except when Richard (the GM) or Lippy were around. While Richard seemed content to simply let fraternizing go unabated provided that it didn’t lead to theft, injury, or death, Lippy was such a by the book pencil pusher that even saying hello to someone in a supermarket checkout line would be deemed to be grounds for immediate dismissal or demotion.

Lippy was a former bank manager, which would account for his anal retentive attention to all things anal retentive in nature, and he looked like a consummate douche. Even on his off days he wore three piece suits to really play on the fact that he’s dead serious about everything in his life. Slightly receding hairline at the age of 26 made up for with an immaculately trimmed goatee that made him look more like a guy going for his doctorate in film studies than a guy slinging nachos and prefab frozen Uno’s pizzas. Square framed glasses and shoes like those worn by Menachem Begin, he looked like Millhouse pushing thirty, or worse, what I would look like if I stayed in such thankless jobs and took them too seriously.

Lippy was always looking for an excuse to write me up because everyone looked to me on the floor for solutions to their problems instead of him. I would give answers and suggestions, while Lippy would throw up his hands, insist that he had to go count money in the office, not come out again for several hours, and then be pissed that the problem was never solved. The staff also knew that (to an extent) I was one of the few people willing to stand up to him

When I first became a supervisor there was an issue with an employee’s cash balance arising from a dispute with another employee who quit that same night. The two had been in an argument and when one went on a break, the other (shortly before leaving on break to never return) logged into this person’s register and rang in 47 large popcorns as a prank. When Lippy went to cash out at night, I was called into the office with the employee in question to account for the fact that the cash was a few hundred dollars off. Lippy called the police on the employee insisting that they were stealing. Marc (who was in the office at the time) and myself insisted that an itemized accounting of the evening’s sales would shed a light onto this discrepancy. Lippy flat out refused until the two of us took the issue to Richard, who was now on his way downstairs from doing real work to deal with the police, and said this wasn’t fair. Marc and I found the discrepancy, the police were sent home feeling pissed they got called down there in the first place, and Lippy never once apologized for what he did. That’s the kind of guy he was.

“Marc, I really don’t give a shit what Lippy thinks. I hate that guy, and if he wants to fire me, fine.”

“But that’s the thing! I know you’re valuable to this place. Those kids down there look up to you. All I’m saying is be careful.”

At that moment, Lippy made his way around the corner. He couldn’t have been listening in, but that didn’t stop him from being a full fledged asshole about seeing me talking to Marc.

“Why are you in the booth?”

Marc piped in before I could even say anything. “He’s helping me out for a bit. I needed him to help move some stuff.”

“He’s not supposed to be up here. You should have called me. Only management in the booth.” Lippy said as he made a smarmy hand gesture shooing me back to my popper room.

“You are the only manager scheduled to be working on the floor right now. You shouldn’t be up here now.”

“The shift switched over at four today, Marc. There are three other people downstairs right now and I need to speak with Mr. Parker about something that doesn’t concern you.”

Marc was pretty licked on this one. We obviously weren’t doing anything important. He had no play, and Lippy superseded him in the chain of command.

“Mr. Parker, come with me.”

Lippy walked me back to the stock room where no one would be able to walk in on us without knowing the door code (1-5-1-5, the building’s street address).

“I’ve been hearing some rumblings that you have been contacting and potentially flirting with K.L.L. Now while this is completely unsubstantiated, I felt it necessary to remind you about the fraternization policy we all had to sign when we accepted this job. You are not special or above the law in any way, and if Richard finds out that you two have begun fraternizing, he will have no choice but to demote you and possibly terminate the both of you. I hope you understand the actionable position that you are in right now.”

It killed me to have to start what I said next with “Mr. Lippman” because in this chain of theatres everyone in management is supposed to be referred to with a title rather than by their first name. I save titles for people I respect or doctors. Not for someone known for constantly needling others.

“I assure you, there is nothing going on, and if there was, I would most assuredly step down from my position. I know how much you would hate it if such a relationship were to arise.”

“I wouldn’t hate it. The company states…”

“The company or you, John?”

“You will refer to me as Mister and you will check your tone with me even when there is no one around, understood. You’re lucky the popcorn room is immaculate or I would write you up right now for insubordination.”

“What I am trying to say is, what difference does it really make what I do outside this building?”

“Your actions can be seen as conspiracy to defraud this corporation out of money. No one is above corporate policy.”

“No, no one is above the law and if I conspire to rob this place blind with anyone, I’ll be sure to answer to them once you’re done lecturing me on the employee handbook I’ve already read.”

“Do you really want to be flip with me about this? This is serious.”

“And I am serious when I say that I honestly don’t give a shit. You guys don’t pay me enough to give one, either.”

“That’s it. You watch yourself. Your write-up will be downstairs and waiting for you…”

“What about that roll of complementary passes that disappeared so you could make the payment on your nice new car out there?”

Lippy stopped for a moment, but only briefly. If he was going to turn to the rumour mill for his information, I would stoop just as low.

“I didn’t do that.”

“Word on the floor is you did. You think the other members of management are airtight and not prone to starting rumours?”

“Just like I have no proof of your relationships outside of work, you have no proof of anything I do outside of work.” He put his hand on the door handle and quite literally pushed me out the door. “You come to the office before you leave.”

I followed behind him down the hallway making various obscene gestures before going back into the popcorn room to sit down on a used up can of coconut oil. The guilt of violating the fraternization policy was nothing compared to the nerves I was feeling on the night of my first date with K. I was a ball of nervous energy, but one that felt like he could take on the world. I never would have told Lippy otherwise.

The nerves were compounded by the fact that our first date was going to be at a party amongst her friends, none of whom I had ever met before, and not a one on one encounter. Does that even really make it a date? It’s more of a gathering, really. But she called it a date when we talked about doing it. My mind was cluttered with a million different things.

We had been talking ever night since the first night we were thrust together, often for hours on end, never while I was at my house for fear my mother would chew me out for not going to get her beer and spending more time with someone other than her. I would call her from the car or on my break from work. She would also keep things somewhat secret from the grandparents that she lived with, not because they would necessarily disapprove of me, but because they are generally more speculative about any kin of theirs dating after K’s father turned out to be such a raging asshole.

She had a talk with her grandparents once about some guy she liked and they immediately freaked out and called this poor kids house and started asking him all sorts of uncomfortable questions about his grades, his parents, his family’s income. These are things she wanted to shield me from. If it wasn’t for her grandparents, we probably would have hung out even longer that early morning that I dropped her off back home. Apparently they were waiting up for her, and they were ready to ask me why I was so keen to help her out.

Plus, you know, both of our jobs relied heavily on not saying anything if we were going on a date. Unfortunately, you tell one of your colleagues there anything and the rumour mill starts up, leading to that unfortunate confrontation that led to me getting my first ever write up at work.

After Lippy went downstairs, Marc and I played soccer in the projection booth until our shifts were done and we made our way downstairs. It was one of the few times I didn’t bother to change out of my work uniform and into street clothes since I was just going to go home and look as nice as possible for the party later that evening.

I said my goodbyes to Marc in a brief manor because I knew K would be coming in to work any moment now. I hoped to see her if only for a moment before I left. You know, just to say hi.

When I enter the lobby, I am stopped by Richard who tells me I need to sign my write-up before I leave.

“What did you say to Mr. Lippman? What’s this I hear about you dating one of the employees?”

Before I can answer, out of the corner of my eye I see Lippy leading K into the office, and she seems to be on the verge of tears. What did he say to her? Even worse, am I going to have to confront Lippy and Richard at the same time about this with her in the room?

“Richard, I’ll be honest and say that I was upset by the accusations made by Mr. Lippman, but I assure you that if I had been dating someone this whole time or was thinking about it, you would know it.”

“And are you thinking about it?” He noticed me watching the office door intently.

“Yes. And all you had to do was ask.”

“Well, just be careful. That’s all I’m going to say and I am going to put that out of mind. Don’t let it affect your job or else this talk will be more serious. Also, when you sign your write-up, I want you to apologize to Mr. Lippman.”

We made our way to the office after I silently nodded in response to Richard. Inside, K was crying as Lippy was handing her a write-up. Richard seemed to be out of the loop on this bit of disciplinary action.

“What seems to be the trouble here?”

“She forgot to bring in her visor to work behind the concession stand, her socks aren’t black, and her shoes are not all black.” He said pointing to a dark grey stripe that ran around the sole of her shoes. “Furthermore, she doesn’t have the ten dollars necessary to buy a new visor, and she must be sent home.”

Richard picked up on what was really going on. “This is only her third scheduled shift. Don’t you think a verbal warning would’ve sufficed? She could borrow a visor from someone or I would be willing to write a note stating to take the ten dollars out of her cheque next week.”

“I don’t feel comfortable discussing this with another employee in the room.”

I didn’t say anything, but I handed K my visor and handed it to her.

Lippy gritted his teeth. “That doesn’t change the shoes.”

“I’d loan them but her feet are smaller than mine. I could give her my socks, though if that would make everyone here feel better.”

Richard could see Lippy about to burst a blood vessel, and quickly interceded. “I think that will be all Ms. L. I think for now we just need to give you a verbal warning, but know that you have been issued this warning. I will have something for you to sign tonight.”

K thanked me and quietly left to not arouse any sort of suspicion.

“Why didn’t you ask her if you would see her later tonight, Andy?”

“Enough!” Richard piped up. “I’ve just about had it with this. John, you need to calm down and stop jumping down everyone’s throats or we won’t have any employees left. Discrection, John. Christ.”

Lippy slumped back into his chair, almost petulantly. He wasn’t about to fight his own boss no matter how wrong he thought he was.

“And you…” Richard pointed to me and pushed my written warning to me on the table in front of him. “Sign this. I don’t want to lose you, but you need to understand that it takes all different kinds to make this place work. Just because John here is a bit harsher than most, doesn’t mean you can mouth off to him because you disagree. He has a valid point, but I make the final decisions around here. Keep your nose clean and I don’t want to hear of this ever happening again.”

I signed, left, and made my way to the parking lot thinking about what Richard said. Maybe if he was more of an actual presence as a GM the rest of the floor managers wouldn’t be so insufferable. There was no consistency and Lippy was the only real disciplinarian of the bunch, which would be fine if he didn’t instil abject fear in the hearts of the staff.. I felt a certain moral victory back there, but I knew it wouldn’t be the last run in I would have with him about this.

I reclined the front seat of the car, rolled the windows down, and breathed in the summer air. The theatre was in the middle of a former industrial park and down the street from an industrial dry cleaner that always left a hint of fresh laundry in the air. I thought back to that night I chauffeured her around town to take her mind off a rotten day. I remembered holding her and breathing her in. A very typical and seemingly ordinary scent, some sort of Bath and Body Works lotion I couldn’t place, but I would resolve to ask about at a later time. I thought about all of our texts and phone calls over the past week where we exchanged stories about our lives and complained about work, school, and parents. I thought about the few nights at work she brightened my day by coming in to see movies, sometimes by herself.

On the two occasions she wasn’t with friends, I sat next to her for thirty minutes during my breaks. The theatres were relatively empty, but the room always felt positively electric, like I wanted to put my arm around her or kiss her, but I never felt that a thirty minute work break would be a prudent time to do it.

I went over the mental itinerary in my mind. Go home, avoid mother as best as possible, shower, procure booze through neighbours (vodka, rum, Smirnoff Ice for the lady), drive to previous engagement that I had forgotten about until just that second, pick K up from work, drive to the outskirts of Leominster thirty minutes away, party, and don’t fuck this up. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, jerked the lever to put the seat up, put the keys in the ignition and set about my evening.

Everything went more or less swimmingly that evening except for the whole avoiding my mother part. When I went to make dinner, she drunkenly insisted on helping. I certainly didn’t give her the money for the beers she bought and the credit cards I had co-signed for her were maxed out. It would be a few days before I noticed she had stolen a bunch of my DVDs and had my Uncle Billy pawn them for her drinks and his heroin. Her idea of helping with dinner was insisting on making me a frozen chicken pot pie after I had already made pasta.

“You look nice.” She was smoking in the kitchen since my aunt was out for the evening.

I grunted and nodded. “Thanks.”

“You have a date tonight?”

“No. I don’t have time for those things. Just a party. Nothing special.”

“Whatever happened to Sara?”

“We broke up two years ago, mom.”

“Oh… Well, you never tell me these things. How am I supposed to know? I’m just mom, you know?”

I walked away from the dinner table without saying anything. I had one battle today that I would’ve rather avoided.

“Your father called today. Wanted to know if you were still going to see him tonight.”

“Yeah, I almost forgot about it, but I said I’d go.”

“Is that who you’re looking so nice for? So you can prove him wrong? Tell me that’s what you’re really doing.”

I kissed my mother on the forehead. “Good night, mom.”

“Aren’t you going to eat that pot pie?” I was already on my way out the door. “I’m not gonna eat it!” The door shut, but I could still faintly hear her. “I don’t even like pot pies.”

The only Denny’s in town, my father’s de facto hangout, is located in the worst possible neighbourhood on the outskirts of Attack the Block style tenements known simply as The Valley. The kind of neighbourhood where one wouldn’t go in after dark with anything less than a SWAT van if you didn’t want to get jumped. It was the perfect place for a homeless man like my father to hide out and lie low because no one would ask him any questions and he wouldn’t give police any answers.

I hid the liquor under my seat even thought it was still light outside and made my way inside. Even though gentrification had found its way to the neighbourhood in the form of a Target taking over the empty lot where a movie theatre used to be, it was still a far way from safe. A news report earlier in the week marked that Target’s parking lot as a major hub for car thefts in the city.

I found my father outside, sleeping in the Oldsmobile Cutlass he had been living out of for the past two years. It was an upgrade over the Subaru he had been living in prior to that. This car had room for all his stuff. What that stuff was, I had no idea. I knew he had his fishing poles in there. A bunch of paperwork in bankers boxes. A case of Coca-Cola to make up for the fact that he somehow astoundingly stopped drinking in the midst of being homeless.

I knocked on the window of the car. He woke with a start and reached over to unlock the passenger side door. I sat down in his small mobile apartment that reeked of stale cigarette smoke and sweat.

“Hey, buddy.” He mustered the same sheepish smile he had whenever he had some money in his pocket. If he wanted money, he wouldn’t have bothered asking to meet me anywhere. He would have come and found me to borrow whatever he could get.

“Hey dad. How goes it?”

“Well, you know…” He trailed off not knowing how to finish the sentence. “You want to go get something to eat?”

“I’m not that hungry, but if you want to go in and grab a coffee or something, we could do that.”

“Nah, I’ve had my fill of that today. All I do all day these days is drink coffee.”

“So what did you want to talk about?”

“Your mother. That fucking…” He got an angry look on his face. “She calls me up, drunk, asking me to give her a ride to the hospital. And I go over there, because fuck it, you know? I’m not doing anything and I have no fucking clue why I’m being nice to her. And I can’t fucking see her not sober and I get over there and I gotta wait four fucking hours talking to that asshole Billy who can’t speak anything but fucking gibberish because he’s high all the fucking time.” He calmed down and stared off into space for a moment. “You gotta tell her I can’t give her any fucking rides anywhere anymore. I’m fucking done. It just can’t happen.”

“Where does she need rides to? Why is she calling you?”

“I dunno. Hospitals mostly. I dunno I think she might be taking drugs or some shit. Does she seem more fucked up to you than normal? I know every time I pick her up, late as shit again, she makes me take her to the fucking package store.” (For those who don’t speak Bostonian, that means liquor store.)

“Did she ever tell you what was going on?”

“Ahhh, she tried to, but I didn’t give a fuck.” I was furious, but he ended his pause before I could fully unleash my fury upon him. “You gotta car, why don’t you take her places.”

“Why don’t I take her places? Fuck you. You don’t have a fucking clue, do you, dad? I’m out there working my ass off every day so I don’t turn into either one of you assholes. The homeless wonder who blows his social security cheque on his car and the woman who gets so drunk she forgets how to use her bowels. Yeah, I feel pretty prized to have you guys as fucking parents.”

“Remember who raised you…”

“Oh, fuck you, neither of you fucking raised me. Mom didn’t do shit and you just fucking yelled and beat the crap out of me all the time. Great fucking parenting.”

“You wouldn’t be in college right now if it wasn’t for me, you little shit. You’d’ve been fucking nothing without me.”

“No! I wouldn’t be in college right now if I wasn’t fucking out there working and paying my own way. I got to a point where I realized it wasn’t about either of you around ninth grade when I realized if I didn’t get my shit together I would become you two. So fuck you very much for nothing.”

“Just like your fucking mother. I don’t know why I fucking talk to you. Get the fuck outta my car.”

“She’s dying you fuck. She’s fucking dying. Eat shit.”

I got up with great fury, slammed the door, and kicked it shut so hard I thought I broke me foot. The last I saw looking back at him, he seemed stunned. He really didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t tell him or maybe he really didn’t care. Neither of them was ever terribly honest with each other.

I drove off just as the night was getting sort of dusky. I was a bit ahead of schedule, but then again it’s impossible to tell just how well things are going to go with my dad. I should’ve learned that no real good would have come from visiting him. He was a bastard to me, but when my mother started hitting the bottle heavily and we lost our apartment in my senior year of high school, my dad was the only one who really gave a shit. He became the one helping me out with extra money at the expense of his own well being. He wouldn’t shy away from talking about the situation with me. He almost became an actual father to me. Maybe I was the reason he was living out of that car and I brought this all on myself.

I pulled over into a nearby high school parking lot and just sat there to kill time. I almost couldn’t move. I was shaking from what had just happened. I had to clear it all from my head. I broke up with my last girlfriend in the worst way possible because I felt the need to shield her from my family. There were other reasons, too, but primarily that one. Was I in the right frame of mind to be dealing with a potential relationship? Don’t even think about it. Just put it out of sight and out of mind. Put the car into drive and move to another parking lot to wait.

I didn’t want to go inside the theatre. It looked pretty busy in there. Pearl Harbor and Shrek were still doing considerably well, and Moulin Rouge had come to town tonight and was apparently selling out shows hours in advance. Memento was continuing to do strong business despite having been at the theatre for close to a month now. It sure wasn’t The Animal or What’s the Worst That Could Happen? that was packing them in. I paced the rear exit starting at about ten when her shift was supposed to end.

About ten minutes past ten, K came bounding out the door of the theatre and running towards me. Her hug was so heartfelt that I had to brace myself from keeling over. The kind of hug where someone latches on and warps their legs around a person.

“That. Was. Hell.” She buried her head into my shoulder and dropped her work clothes on the ground in bid to not let go of me.

I chuckled. “Wow. You haven’t even seen the worst this place has to offer yet.”

“Good thing I’m only here temporarily, then.” She dropped down to her feet and picked up the mess. “I don’t think I could deal with that kind of crowd year round.”

“Well, it’s not like that year round. Just during the summer. The time when you’ll most likely be here.”

“Um… yay?”

We walked back to the car. I thought I saw my dad’s car in the rear lot. It was definitely similar from a distance. I briefly got a worried look on my face.

K looked over her shoulder to try and see what I was looking at. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

K knew something wasn’t quite right. On the drive to her friend Jacob’s house she asked several times about my day. Prodding for me to give up any sort of information about what transpired at work earlier in the day or what I was trying to see when we left the theatre. I didn’t think she needed to know just then, if at all. I wasn’t about to ask her how things had gone since she had last seen her father.

She decided the topic of discussion was due for a change.

“Andy?... You know I like you, right?”

I was taken aback at first, but the need to play it cool took over. “Yeah, I kinda gathered that.” Stupid answer brain! Think of a better one. “You know I like you, too?”

She smiled “Yeah, I was pretty sure of that. No one else probably would have done as much for me that night considering… you know.”

I nodded.

“I just want you to know something before we get there. I do like you. But no matter what happens tonight I’m not sure if I can do anything, you know, serious.”

“Serious like what… how serious, you mean like sex?”

She laughed. “No, that wasn’t really what I was getting at, but now that you mention it, there is one other thing. This party that we’re going to is being thrown by the first guy I ever slept with. I hope that’s not weird or anything.”

Red State

2011-09-29T13:09:00.002-04:00

Red State screens at Cineplex Theatres across Canada tonight, Thursday, September 29^th, at 7pm. Visit www.cineplex.com for participating theatres.

For all of the hemming and hawing that has been done over writer-director Kevin Smith’s latest self-aggrandizing opus, it’s a bit heartening to say that the hype has been somewhat justified. I should also point out that I don’t necessarily mean “self-aggrandizing” in a bad way. I see Smith as the kind of showman and personality that the film world almost needs at this point. In world where so many filmmakers are so bland that they almost don’t warrant talking about, there is something refreshing about a man who both tries so desperately to be adored and at the same time could give a fuck less what anyone thinks of him. Smith pushes himself to make what is essentially a Coen Brothers-lite film with Red State, a sprawling and intermittently ungainly look at a fundamentalist Christian church involved in some unconscionable dealings with locals in nearby towns.

The film is actually three films in one. It starts with three horny high schoolers as they attempt to get laid by a horny housewife (Melissa Leo) living in a trailer that they met online. Faster than you can say Hostel (but without all the icky connotations that film seems to represent with regard to American culture), the three young men are captured by the people of Cooper’s Dell, a group of true believers lead by the loquacious Abel Cooper (Michael Parks), and are subsequently punished for their potential transgressions.

The second part of the movie deals with the church trying to keep their dirty dealings under wraps as the one remaining teen (Michael Angarano) attempts to escape the compound. Things go horribly awry, which leads into the third film, involving a siege at the compound between Cooper’s followers and an ATF task force headed up by John Goodman.

Smith the director seems reenergized by the chance to do something different than he is usually known for, but as a writer he is on uneasy footing. He eases his faithful followers into the coming changes by opening the film with some typical Smith style dick and pussy jokes before abandoning them entirely about 20 minutes in (before shoehorning in an entirely unnecessary Clerks reference). That is when the obvious Coen Brothers influence takes over since every starts talking like they are in Miller’s Crossing or Fargo. He tries, but he just can’t get the rhythms of the dialog right. He made the smart move of casting Goodman as the person who has to deliver the preponderance of backstory the film has (which is usually what the Coens hire him for in the first place), but he lacks the ability to be succinct. A lot of the film is all talk and no show, especially the film’s conclusion, which only barely works because Goodman is front and centre for the entirety.

Visually, this might be Smith’s most accomplished film, but it is marred by Smith’s editing which could stand to be a bit tighter and more focused. Like so many other filmmakers who have given in to the digital revolution, Smith has freed himself to do projects that he wants to do that he might not have had a chance to make otherwise. The RED camera shot footage has a bleached out quality that is nothing new to behold, but it serves the story here quite well.

Smith also shows that he really does have a way with actors, and his cast commits to the project fully. Parks is given a chance to shine with a lengthy speech that Smith lets drag out to over five minutes in length. The aforementioned Goodman is the person who really steals the show here, though, while Oscar winner Melissa Leo attacks a role that is essentially the inverse of the near trailer trash roles she played in Frozen River and The Fighter with great tenacity and fervour.

It’s all wonky and a bit overly ambitious, but for what it’s worth Red State isn’t all that bad. The film works for what it is trying to do and it has an amiable Grindhouse style quality that would have made it an oddly better pairing with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror than Tarantino’s dreadful Death Proof. In the end, however, the only person really breaking any new ground here is Smith and it’s really only on a personal level. It’s pretty mediocre, but at least it isn’t inherently forgettable.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

Skinny, Mean Man

2011-09-23T00:49:00.003-04:00

The first time I saw her I was putting together a standee for the film Legally Blonde. I was on the floor near one of the exits of the multiplex I was working at. It was opening day of Michael Bay’s opus Pearl Harbour. She wasn’t yet assigned her soul sucking white polo shirt and she arrived wearing a tight fitting Gloomy Bear Care Bears shirt.

Her hazel eyes sparkled from behind her thick rimmed glasses in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Her natural red hair fell in a near perfect bob that ended right at the base of her neck. I was mesmerized by just how attractive she was before we had even said two words to each other. I stopped paying attention to what I was doing and accidentally cut the palm of my hand trying to insert Reese Witherspoon’s slot A into the slot B of the background.

Brian was the only other supervisor on duty that night, and despite the fact that he was a 30 year old ex-Marine who was a dead ringer for Stone Cold Steve Austin, I actually outranked him. In his typical fashion of barking out orders he brought her over to me to say that I was supposed to train her tonight and that he couldn’t because “I got about 14 fahcking theatahs to clean and I got no fahckin’ stahf.” In a flash he was gone, leaving me alone with K.L. for the first time.

We were going to start her off easy tonight since it was supposed to be busy. I was tasked with training her on how to work the bulk candy section and to make bag after bag of cotton candy (the most popular snack item at the theatre thanks to its rock bottom $2 price tag). Manning the bulk candy section of the theatre was the second best job involving food service at the theatre. The only job better was popping popcorn, since our popper was located upstairs off of the projection booth and the popper never once had to come downstairs to deal with customers.

The bulk candy room was far removed from the “theatre in the round” that was the concession stand. It was located between the crappy arcade where I learned to master the Star Wars Trilogy game and the room that housed all the syrup for the soda fountains, which was prime make-out real estate for dating employees. You were within the line of sight of the concession stand, but far away from earshot. The only reason it was even a manned position was to make sure that no one was stealing anything. Few people were crazy enough to buy candy in bulk at a movie theatre.

On what was earmarked as being one of the busiest nights in the history of forever by an agitated management staff (it wasn’t), I was “burdened” by not being able to help out with anything and was “arm twisted” into training one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen.

Most of our night was spent talking and getting to know one another. She lived in Webster with her grandparents and younger brother. Her mother was a bit of a deadbeat who lived in a trailer about ten minutes from her. She didn’t want to talk about her father. I didn’t necessarily ask about him, but I was careful not to bring him up for the remainder of the evening.

She was going to school at Franklin Pearce University, a school in small town New Hampshire named after the long since forgotten 14^th president of the United States. She was studying psychology and neuroscience and was in desperate need of a summer job because her course fees for the following year were about to go through the roof. Not that she really needed the money for school, per say. She was poor enough that much like me she was getting a free ride to anywhere she wanted to go.

It wasn’t as one sided a conversation as I am making it out to be, but she was far more forthcoming about frank details than I was. I told her I was going to Boston University as a film major and I was utterly miserable by the creative block I felt. I told her my father wasn’t around (a clear lie since he was, but not in a way I wanted to talk about) and that my mother was quite ill.

We bonded, as many young people do, over music. We spoke lovingly of Blink 182 and Chantal Kreviazuk. We debated whether or not Jimmy Eat World had sold out by signing to a major label. We both begrudgingly admitted having a soft spot for the band Lifehouse who had been all over the radio with their hit “Hanging by a Moment.” We spoke of being bored at parties that didn’t play just an equal amount of “fun” songs and “party” songs.

When it came time to take our break – together since I had to take her through an entire average day of work – I showed her how to steal nachos by hiding them beneath a veneer of popcorn that would go undetected to the human eye. I showed her the blind spots of the security cameras to steal the bulk candy. I informed her that while it was frowned upon to take it that it was impossible to inventory the cotton candy. I told her when she gets more stealthy I would teach her how to steal from the Yogen Fruz and how to get around the chicken finger inventory. When you work at a movie theatre, one of the first things you need to learn is how to beat the system since the system will find new ways to take your fun away at a relentless pace.

Her honesty made me trust her with sharing my utter contempt for the job she had just signed up for. I might have been a bit cynical after what happened at the last theatre I worked at, and I knew that I wasn’t getting any reprieve at home. Her candour made it very easy to open up to her on a professional level, if not necessarily a personal one.

We were the only people in the break room and she took her polo shirt in the middle of the break room to reveal not the T-shirt that she walked in wearing, but instead a tank top that showcased even more just how stunning she looked. She had a tattoo on her left shoulder or a crescent moon with the words “I don’t want to live on the moon” in the centre.

I recognized it immediately. The personal barrier I had erected was about to fall.

“Is that a Sesame Street reference?”

“It’s one of my favourite songs. It really means a lot to me.”

She immediately started singing the song I was referring to. The same tune that pulled me out of a really dark point in my childhood. I started singing along. We never made it to the end of the song as two people managed to walk in to kill the mood entirely with loud talk of the killer kegger they were going to later that night.

We finished the remainder of our break in relative silence, but neither of us could stop smiling. I wanted to tell her the significance of what that song meant to me, but it definitely wasn’t the time or the place. Instead we mocked the girls across the room and their vapid quest to get laid later that evening.

When we went back downstairs, we didn’t stay very long before being sent home at 9pm. I don’t think we sold a single piece of candy all night, and as is wont to happen in such a movie theatre, payroll needed to be cut. I was ready to go before she was, and I felt the need to stick around to walk her out. After talking to her and feeling a connection, I didn’t simply want to walk away without at least saying “goodbye” or “you did a great job doing nothing tonight.” I had to say something endearing without flat out asking her out on a date. Because that would be, you know, crazy.

She emerged from the women’s changing room and we made our way to the lobby. Turning the corner from the entrance to the staff area she turned bone white. She saw something that clearly upset her, freaked out, apologized for what she was about to do, and ran back upstairs saying she would see me the next time she was working.

I was confused as to whether or not I should go to the lobby to investigate or to go back upstairs. I thought over just how little I knew about her and opted for the lobby. It didn’t seem like the time or the place to pry into what made her so upset. I felt something for her earlier in the evening, but I felt the need to play it cool on this one.

I walked over to the customer service desk to ask one of my eight managers a question before leaving. The man I spoke with, a portly older man who looked like a cross between Jimmy Corrigan and The Penguin, asked if I had seen her upstairs or if she had already left. I thought carefully about how to answer. There was something in the room that she simply didn’t want to deal with.

I said I didn’t know. In truth, I really didn’t since there are numerous exits one could sneak out of to escape the building undetected. I knew she never would have known where any of them were on her first day, but I still had a sense of plausible deniability.

“Well, her dad is here and he wants to talk to her.”

“Yeah, I think she took off, but I honestly wouldn’t know.”

From a point just to the left of me, a tall, skinny man emerged. Early 40s, crappy biker tattoos from a foregone era of youthful rebellion, and track marks on his arm that suggest a chequered past. His nose looked to have been broken several times in the past and his moustache was of the stereotypical soup strainer variety; jet black model modified by a healthy dose of Just for Men hair colouring that he wasn’t using on his salt and pepper receding hair line.

“I just wanted to let her know that she left her keys locked in her car with the radio on. I mean, its still out there so if she isn’t at her car she has to be here. That battery has got to be close to dead by now.”

“Andy, could you go and check upstairs? Maybe see if she’s in the break room or something and ask her if she needs our jumper cables?”

“That won’t be necessary.” her father chimed in. “I have a set in my truck. Won’t be a problem.”

I agreed to look for her upstairs. My boss and her dad were going to check the lobby area. I bounded up the stairs thinking back to how hesitant she was to talk about her father earlier in the evening.

When I walked into the break room, she was in tears and screaming to her mother over the phone about his being there. From the side of the conversation I heard I was able to gather, more or less, that her mother let it slip to her father that she had a new job while she was drunk. Apparently, she had a restraining order against her father, who was for the most part estranged.

I mouthed the words “wait here” and ran back downstairs to tell someone, but it seems as if we had just been cut from the working roster just as things were starting to get extremely busy on the floor. My boss was nowhere to be found and flagging anyone down with enough time to deal with this would have been near impossible.

“Didja find her?” His voice now took a bit of an ominous tone. Not confrontational, necessarily, but the kind of tone one infers from someone they just aren’t too sure about.

“Nah, I really don’t know where she could be.”

“Think I could come upstairs and look for her? I mean, I wouldn’t take very long. I’d just be in and out. I really want to help her with her car.”

I stammered for a moment, not wanting to escalate the situation. “You know what, she might just be in the change room. I’ll go check again. I’d bring you up there, but I don’t want to get in trouble. I’ll go have a look again and I’ll be right back down.”

I think he knew I knew something when he uttered almost entirely under his breath a monosyllabic “ppreciateit” before rolling his head back and to the side to continue his annoyed look for his daughter in another quadrant of the same lobby he had been scanning for the past twenty minutes.

I made my way back upstairs yet again. She had her head in her hands and I had my hand on my phone ready to call the police. Having been a victim of similar circumstances as a child I knew this was a volatile situation to be placed in the middle of. I launched almost immediately into defensive mode.

“Do you want me to call the police?”

She looked up and shook her head to say no. “I just want to get out of here.”

“You know, you locked your keys in your car, right?”

She furiously searched her purse and ran back to the change room. She didn’t know about the keys. As soon as she exited the change room she dropped to the floor and began wailing. I knelt down in front of her to obstruct a potential scene from anyone who might have walked by.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call the police?”

She cried louder.

“Look, I can get you out of here. I can help, but know there is no way for me to help you get your car out of here right now without you dealing with your dad. It’s also really busy down there right now, so if you say or do anything it is going to cause a bit of a scene. I have a car. Do you want to leave? I can get us out of here without anyone noticing.”

Her “yes” was long and pained. I took her by the wrists in to help her up, but she squirmed and quickly moved my hands to hers and squeezed as tight as possible. She didn’t let go of my hand until we were safely out of the building. She was parked in the back lot where employees were supposed to park. When I arrived at work earlier, I was forced to park in the front of the building since the back was nearly full.

I led her to my crappy Chevy Cavalier while constantly looking over my shoulder. Once we were safely in the car, a small weight felt lifted, but it was almost like trying to escape the gaze of Cujo.

“Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere but here.”

And with that I began driving away as far as I could. I would take her for coffee (too young yet to drink in the U.S.) if she wasn’t such a wreck or I didn’t think it too presumptuous. I would take her someplace secluded, but that’s just creepy. I know when I am at the end of my rope it helps me to be where no one else is, but I couldn’t take her there in good conscience.

I had driven in the warm summer evening for about an hour with her almost in silence. All I really said to her is that she could talk to me whenever she wanted and that she could tune the radio to anything she wanted. She thanked me through her tears, but was mostly too wrecked to form coherent sentences.

I was driving her through the back country around where I used to work and through the old stomping grounds of M.S., with whom I was now on friendlier terms with than I had been the previous year. While rounding the corner from the apple orchard-slash-deli that I used to frequent after hanging out with M.S., she received a call from her mother.

Her dad had left in a pissed off rage from the theatre. Police weren’t involved, but he was back at his house 45 minutes away from the theatre and a good hour or so in the complete opposite direction from where we were. Her mother just wanted to know where she was and that she was okay. She apologized for telling her dad about her new job. Her mother didn’t have a car and couldn’t help her out with the dead battery, but she could call for a tow truck.

I interjected and suggested that we go back to the theatre where they have jumper cables and a blackjack that could get her keys out and get her back on the road. I didn’t tell her that I intended on filling the other staff in on the situation with her father, since I didn’t know how well that was going to go over. She agreed to go back with me. At least she did at first.

She didn’t want to go back right away. I asked where she wanted to go and she asked if there were any parks nearby. Being familiar with the area, I knew of plenty of parks, but none that got us closer back to the theatre or weren’t swarming with police and park rangers looking to bust kids that are drinking and making out past the 10pm curfew on park lands.

I took her instead to a far less regulated spot in my home town of Shrewsbury which put us closer to getting back to the theatre. We went to a hill behind a Borders bookstore from which one could see the entire town and the entire city of Worcester below. It was where all the local kids went sledding during the day and where teenagers staged Jackass style stunts over the long summer nights without ever getting caught by the police who preferred busting skater punks in front of Dunkin’ Donuts or jocks trying to test their mettle in front of their girlfriends at the local “haunted” mansion.

It was one of the places I liked to go to escape and definitely the most picturesque. My real quiet spot was in the same town, but in a valley so low that it wasn’t visible from the hill. It was a simple pond near my elementary school with woods on one side and an abandoned beach on the other. The pond was walking distance from where I grew up. This was more of a hike.

I parked the car in the lot of an abandoned rehab facility behind Borders and took her to the hill. I didn’t really even notice it at first, but she latched onto my arm and was using me to hold her up. I showed her the view and she perked up in awe of the lights and bustle of the towns and cities below. That’s one of the things I miss most about Massachusetts. The views were always spectacular.

I told her about how the sledding and how my one idiot friend decided to go down the hill once in a Rubbermaid garbage can. She sniffled and for the first time in two hours and some change was able to compose herself.

“This would be a great makeout spot.” She giggled.

I stammered. “Yeah, well, I actually wouldn’t know. I… I really just come up here to be alone sometimes.”

She smirked, “Uh-huh.”

Time for s subject change! “You know what else I like to do when I’m here?” was what I said as I propelled myself down the hill in a sort of rolling cartwheel-type, um, thing. The hill was a lot bigger than I remembered because making it to the bottom seemed to take an eternity as I began thinking about kissing her the entire way down the hill. I did it to make her laugh, which I saw briefly as my head came up and I saw her face illuminated by the nearby lights from the parking lot and a lot more clearly as I made my way back up the hill, falling twice.

“You want to try it?”

She laughed and balked at the idea. We sat down on the side of the hill and decided that given her evening it was time to open up to her a bit more than I had earlier in the evening. Ours was a friendship officially forged by fire, and she had earned an explanation as to why someone she had only met several hours earlier had shown her such kindness.

I told her that my mother was an alcoholic waitress that lost our house and that my father was too lazy and pride filled to either take a job that he felt was beneath him. I told her I had been abused by him and other family members as a child, both physically and verbally. I told her that my family embarrassed me and that I wished I had someone who understood what it was like. I told her that she didn’t need to tell me anything about who she was if she didn’t want to, but that if she wanted to talk about anything that I would be glad to lent an ear. As corny as it sounds “lend an ear” was a direct quote.

She began to pull closer to me, almost wordless except for a heartfelt and mournful “thank you,” but as she leaned against me the skies opened up and it began to rain heavily almost immediately.

We rushed back to the car almost immediately and sat down. I asked her if she was ready to go back to the theatre yet. It was almost one in the morning after my guts spilling session, and I still had to work a double shift the next day from 11 in the morning until midnight. (As penance for asking for Sunday of that week off to go to some event I have long since forgotten about. Beach with friends? Probably.) She also had to drive herself home, which was 45 minutes away and damn near the Connecticut border.

“I just need a few more minutes.” With that she leaned back into me as I turned the car on and put my arms around her. I put the radio on. “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. I swear the universe was getting a huge laugh out of this tragedy. She snuggled directly into the sweet spot between the neck and shoulder and breathed in deeply.

“You smell like deodorant and popcorn.”

“Is that bad?” I chuckled.

“It’s actually kinda nice. Kind of clean and edible.”

We both laughed at how ridiculous that sounded. A lot of the laugher was probably just from being physically and emotionally tired.

It was a passing summer storm and it was over in a matter of moments. As the last of the rain cascaded off the windshield and mirrors I suggested we go before everyone from the theatre leaves for the night. She agreed and we were on our way.

The conversation on the way home was a lot more jovial and silly as we poked fun at each others tastes and sang along as loudly as possible to Blink and Lifehouse on the way home. It was all smiles until we arrived at the theatre parking lot shortly after 2am.

We turned the radio down and scanned the parking lot for any signs of life or trouble. Luckily her father wasn’t there, but unfortunately no one else was, either. Despite the addition of late shows, everyone except the cleaning staff had taken off for the night. The tools that we needed to get her keys out and get her home were locked in the safe in the inner office, which none of us had access to.

She stood outside her car tearing up slightly, but somewhat mystified that the battery hadn’t died yet despite the radio still obviously playing. Her keys dangled from the ignition of her sad looking and painfully beige Ford Escort. With the amount of baubles dangling from the lanyard attached to those keys, I was slightly amazed that gravity didn’t take over and snap the steering column in half.

I immediately offered to call a tow truck for her, but neither of us had the cash to bring the car anywhere that late at night. I then offered her a ride home regardless of how long it was going to take. She said I didn’t have to and she could just call and wake up her grandparents to come get her.

I insisted and she hugged me in a way that I had never felt before. It was full of warmth and comfort the likes of which I had only dreamed of. Sure, I had dated a few girls prior and received my fair share of hugs for being “that really nice guy” in my day, but this was different. I was starting to crush on this girl harder by the second.

We drove to her house in Webster with the same joviality that marked our time at work and on the way back from the hill. Belting out pop hits on the radio in horrible off key fashion as we made fun of commercials for Apple Auto Glass and Bernie and Phyl’s (Quality, Comfort, and Price… That’s nice!) to stave off the silence.

We arrived at her house close to 3:30 and she kept talking to me until 4. She told me she would invite me in to crash at her place but her grandparents were really old fashioned and she didn’t want her younger brother to wake up and give her crap for having a boy in the house. She asked me if I was okay to make it home as I looked pretty tired. I told her I would be fine.

She hugged me a final time and asked me when I was working again. We realized we wouldn’t see each other again until Monday unless it was in passing. We were both clearly bummed out about it, but we accepted it. And like that she was gone. I pulled out of the driveway and back on down the road.

About five minutes after leaving her house in the middle of suburbia, the low fuel light came on in the car and I pulled over to the shoulder in a somewhat wooded area. Having learned my lesson the previous year in the middle of an ice storm, I began carrying a gas can in my trunk for such occasions.

While I was topping up the tank I realized that I was in the midst of feeling something I have never felt for someone before. This wasn’t like what I felt with M.S. or J.E. or S.S. This was far deeper and more satisfying. It was a feeling of being in the presence of a kindred spirit when they were at their worst, but still finding a way to look beyond a rotten situation to find humour and have some fun.

I looked up at the sky to see a plethora of stars I wasn’t going to see in the city. The roads were empty, so I decided to lie on the hood of the car and look up for a while. I questioned not asking her for her phone number or asking her on a date, but tonight was so intense that I didn’t want to push my luck or seem like an asshole. But, boy did I want to.

I thought about how I was going to ask her out and what we were going to do shortly before passing out and again after a police officer woke me up thirty minutes later and forced me to take sobriety test. I thought about it the entire way home and how I couldn’t wait to see her again, and how I hoped she never had to go through anything like that ever again.

No. I didn’t go directly home even after that. I stopped at a 24 hour pizza place around 5:30 and grabbed the greasiest slice of pizza I might have ever eaten. It tasted of olive oil, too much oregano in the sauce, and pure victory.

I stumbled home, sleep deprived, at 6 to find my mother waiting for me in my bedroom. I had moved back in with my aunt out of sheer necessity for the summer and not because I wanted to. On her own, my aunt was fine to deal with, but I was also dealing with her heroin and crack addicted son Billy and my mother who despite her recent diagnosis with cancer seemed determined to drink and smoke herself to the grave.

She was smoking in my bedroom since she couldn’t in her own room. My aunt, a lifelong smoker, now had an oxygen tank housed in my mother’s bedroom. Between puffs on her cigarette she would make her way to her portable inhaler. Every time I told her that what she was doing was counterproductive, she told me to fuck off. I stopped trying to talk sense into her long ago.

She never showered anymore despite my pleas and she stopped going to the doctor except to get pain pills and hear more bad news that she always kept from me. Her hair was so natted it was practically dreadlocked and she always wore the same two nightgowns around the house during the day. She never got formally dressed because she just didn’t see the point anymore. She didn’t just let herself go. She gave up entirely.

It is really hard to watch someone you love waste away before your very eyes despite your best efforts to help them. It is even worse when they place all of the blame on you for every ill that had befallen them.

“Andrew, why don’t you love me?” That was the first question she asked when I walked in the room. It was a common question that I had answered numerous times in the past month.

I loved her dearly, but she insisted that because I wouldn’t co-sign on a credit card for her she thought I hated her. Because I refused to buy her beer and cigarettes, she thought I hated her.

“I gave you everything you ever wanted in your life. What would you be without me? Why don’t you ever help me?”

“Mom, it is six in the morning. I want to go to sleep.”

“Where the fuck were you all night? Having fun? I remember that. People with money always have fun. You’re just selfish.”

She put out her cigarette in an ashtray next to the inhaler and shuffled out of the room. “Just once, I want to be appreciated. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

And with that I fell asleep in my street clothes and all the happiness I felt of my crush earlier in the evening was brought crashing back to Earth.

At 7am, I got a text message.

“Can’t sleep. U?”

“Trying to. Got a lot on my mind.”

“Thx 4 everything 2nite. It meant a lot.”

“Anytime ;)”

“U want 2 go 2 a party with me Sunday?”

“Sure! :D”

“Kewl.”

I fell soundly asleep with a smile on my face, waking up almost late for work to another missed text.

“Do U have a GF? Just curious.”

A Moment With Jack

2011-08-22T13:10:00.004-04:00

I have a had a lot of run ins with celebrities, politicians, and various dignitaries in the past. Some of these stories are fleeting anecdotes with simple punchlines. There was the time I accidentally stepped on Jon Stewart's foot and forgot to apologize. There was the time I mistook Whoopi Goldberg for a Whoopi Goldberg impressionist. There was the strange moment where I was with former US Presidential Candidate John Kerry when we both heard the verdict of the OJ Simpson trial. I once dated the girl who starred in Curly Sue (for about ten seconds) and I had a girlfriend who cheated on me with... well, the world isn't ready for that story yet.

I never knew former NDP leader Jack Layton and it pains me to even put "former" in front of his name. As a dual citizen who has only lived in Canada full time for less than a decade, it was easy for me to be drawn to someone as outwardly cheerful and passionate as he was. His demeanour was almost infectious and it led to me getting a better appreciation for the NDP platform.

I am not a political pundit in any way, but when someone as well liked as Mr. Layton passes away, it becomes a good time to talk about a moment that you shared with them. My Jack Layton story was one that I always liked to share with people over drinks or in private because it is the perfect blend of lunacy and warmth that makes a story worth telling.

One afternoon, several years ago, I don't remember which one exactly, I was walking past City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square. Just between the rows of greasy food trucks and the entrance to the parking garage sits a statue of a seated Winston Churchill. Thanks to the proximity of food, the statue is somewhat inappropriately becoming a pooping ground for local pigeons and seagulls.

I happened to be walking by the statue as Jack Layton was; that day sporting an NDP baseball cap and street clothes. We both stopped in front of the statue and looked at it just as a seagull took one of the largest dumps I think either of us had ever seen right on Churchill's face. Then we looked back at each other.

"That was a pretty huge dump" was the first phrase Jack Layton ever said to me in the only time we would ever meet face to face. He was with two other people, but from there he introduced himself to me and we proceeded to have a friendly conversation. We only once talked politics after he told me who he was.

I pointed at the statue and said, "In your line of work, you must be pretty used to that."

Jack smiled. "Well, it's like any other job. There are good days and there are bad days. Churchill had those days, too, but he rarely ever complained about them. You fight the good fight and sometimes it doesn't always work out. You just have to stay strong."

Never before has something that was said to me at a really awkward time held so much weight, especially in light of his passing today. I don't remember the rest of the conversation as it was mostly about innocuous things like summer heat and travelling (once he picked up on my slightly American accent). But that one thing has always stuck with me. It was pretty great advice and something that I will not soon forget.

I can't properly eulogize the man, nor would I want to. I just wanted to pass along the one thing Jack Layton imparted on me, and that was to constantly roll with the punches no matter what life throws at you.

RIP Jack. You will be missed by all.

The Change Up/The Help/The Whistleblower

2011-08-20T12:55:00.003-04:00

Time to clean out the stuff that I had seen, but didn't really write about. Here are three other films in major release that I just never got around to talking about.

The Change Up - Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman star in this crude (and proud of it) body swapping comedy where a pothead lothario (Reynolds) and a high strung family man (Bateman) have their wish to have each others lives come true after pissing in a magical fountain. The wish of course was totally facetious and brought on by too much booze, but both men realize that their jobs and lives both equally suck and that they are in need of a change. Director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) throws a whole lot of unnecessary bodily function jokes at the screen, but Reynolds and Bateman make the film work quite well. It's nice to see Bateman get to cut loose and play the Reynold possessed version of his character, and Reynolds once again shows his reliable comedic talents. The film doesn't have to try very hard to work, but a last minute stab at sincerity rings utterly false and comes in the shadow of a film that wasn't trying to be sincere for the first hour and a half.

Rating (out of five stars): ***

The Help - Without getting into arguments about how the film portrays and somehow celebrates white privilege and the art of racial and sexual subjugation (which is a longer and much more cyclical argument that I don't feel like rehashing on a Saturday afternoon), The Help is a passable bit of feel good pap that somewhat accurately portrays the lives of Mississippi women in the 1960s. Viola Davis and Jessica Chastain do great work eliciting sympathy and gravitas from archetypal characters, while Bryce Dallas Howard straddles the fine line between reality and going over the top as the film's most prominent racist. Emma Stone feels kind of wasted and left adrift as Skeeter, a budding journalist determined to make a grand statement about race relations as it pertains to working with "the help." In a way Stone is kind of a surrogate for writer/director Tate Taylor who is trying to make a statement in a heavy handed way, but it is a sentiment that has been done before that holds few surprises. It's not all that great and at nearly two and a half hours it is far too long, but the performances keep things moving along and earns a lot more good will than the film should probably have.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

The Whistleblower - Rachel Weisz gives a commanding performance as a former police officer on loan to a UN task force in Bosnia in the late 90s who uncovers a sex trafficking operation that implicates several of her superiors. In a summer of blockbusters aimed squarely at the teen crowd, it's nice to have a film come out that is aimed squarely at thinking adult audiences. Canadian director Larysa Kondracki has created a swift conspiracy thriller and a call to arms against a private contracting company that still gets work in peace keeping and security missions despite only caring about profits. Weisz heads up an incredibly stellar cast by giving a multilayered performance that can elicit comparisons to Jack Nicholson in Chinatown and Gene Hackman in The French Connection (even if the movie itself isn't on that level of excellence). Also standing out in the cast is Monica Bellucci as a bureaucrat who genuinely thinks she is helping the world by toeing a staid corporate line that hurts more than it helps. A conclusion that is somewhat more convoluted than it needs to be takes away from things slightly, but it doesn't take away from the fact that this is a really solid thriller.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

Terri

2011-08-18T14:36:00.003-04:00

Terri opens in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver on Friday, August 19th.

It might seem far too easy to herald a film as feeling almost painfully realistic, but there is no other way to describe the unconventional but emotionally charged Terri. A film that plays more like a series of real life moments than a straight narrative, Terri works harder than most any other film this year to create characters the audience can grow attached to rather than offering up a stock teen movie plot.

Terri Thompson (Jacob Wysocki) is an overweight 15 year old boy who both physically and mentally builds walls around him and who gets his only moments of true happiness when he is alone. He doesn't want to be noticed or have to explain himself to the world, but it is hard for people to not notice him when he wears pyjamas to school. His grades are falling and he doesn't participate in class. His chronic tardiness is the result of being the only person to look after his Uncle James (Creed Bratton), who is in the early stages of dementia. This brings him onto the radar of the assistant principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly) who begins setting up weekly appointments to monitor Terri's progress and moods. Eventually Terri befriends Chad (Bridger Zadina), a hair plucking, loose cannon, and Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), a girl that Terri saves from expulsion after some covert sexual activity in home economics.

The pace of Terri is purposefully slow and director Azazel Jacobs and cinematographer Tobias Datum dwell longingly on things both beautiful and awkward. The purpose of the film isn't to create a standard teen comedy or an outright indie melodrama about how hard it is being young and awkward. It is a movie about people struggling to define what makes them who they are. Just like real life it is painful to watch at times, especially a lengthy scene where the teens get drunk and take pills, but such is the nature of life. Patrick Dewitt's screenplay rings truer than any teen film in quite some time.

The performances born from Dewitt's characters are wonderfully subtle. Wysocki carries a certain world weariness that few other teen actors can match. Zadina and Crocicchia play opposite ends of the teen social hierarchy that find their worlds overlapping thanks to their relationship with another vastly different social outcast. Bratton, better known for his work on The Office, is quiet and reserved as a man who is mourning the loss of his intellect. A scene where James wanders into a bookstore and begins crying is one of the best, and simplest scenes in a film this year. Reilly delivers another great performance to add to his resume as a man who knows all too well what it is like to put on a show to the outside world to come across as successful. Fitzgerald isn't self-centred or egotistical, but he knows that his job demands that he be. He might be the best school principal in film history simply by being human and self aware instead of bombastic or needlessly inspirational.

Terri meanders a bit at times and the lack of any formal plot structure might be hard for some audiences to take. It also lacks any definitive ending, but as the film keeps saying in various ways, "life goes on." Terri isn't a film about closure. It is about getting by from moment to moment and taking the good with the bad. A deft blend of the amusing and the sad, Terri is an oddball that almost anyone can get behind.

Rating (out of five stars): ****1/2

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

2011-08-16T13:23:00.008-04:00

This is part two of an eight part series looking back at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The answers to trivia questions in the Toronto Underground Cinema's Dream Date With Freddy giveaway can be found here.

Only 14 days after the original Nightmare on Elm Street had been released, New Line Cinema had enough cash to go ahead and begin production on the follow-up. For the first time in their history, New Line chairman Bob Shaye had taken out ads in Variety to trumpet the business of their most successful film and vowed to have the sequel in theatres by October of the following year. Despite not being able to stick to that vow (the film opened the day after Halloween in 1985), the news of a sequel came as a shock to no one.

Series creator Wes Craven was a bit soured on the idea of making a sequel. Craven always intended for A Nightmare on Elm Street to be a story with a firm conclusion (no matter how ambiguous it might have been). A brewing dispute over a share of profits from the original film was also beginning to brew, which led to Bob Shaye commissioning a script from a different writer. The bringing on of a new talent didn't bother Craven all that much, and New Line still extended an offer to Craven to direct the new script, but the sequel was shaping up to be a much different film from the original and he ultimately passed on it.

Due to the fast turnaround and the general lack of interest from most of the actors and crew from the first film, only three principal people would return for the sequel. Robert Englund had previously signed to do two sequels in the contract for the original film, but even without that provision, he was more than happy to come back (a feeling he wouldn't always share as the series progressed). Production assistant Rachel Talalay would return this time to work in the art department and would continue to stay with the series to eventually become the director of Freddy's Dead. Cinematographer Jaques Haitkin would also return, but would only be available for half the shoot due to prior commitments. Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon were asked about their interest to return, but they both stated that they were uninterested unless Wes Craven was involved.

With Craven off to work on Deadly Friend, his first studio based horror film at Warner Brothers, writing duties fell first time writer David Chaskin and Jack Sholder was tapped to direct. Shoulder was a good friend of Bob Shaye's who had previously directed the only other film to be produced in-house by New Line Cinema. Alone in the Dark (from 1982) was another horror film starring Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and Donald Pleasance about a group of lunatics who have escaped from an insane asylum in the middle of a blackout. At one point in the film, one of the escapees is asked by a little girl what town he is from and the answer became the name of the previously unnamed town in the Elm Street franchise: Springwood.

Chaskin wanted to play around with horror franchise conventions and opted to make the lead character in his script male. The protagonist for Freddy's Revenge would be Jesse, played by actor Mark Patton. The film would see Jesse and his family (with parents played by television icons Hope Lange and Clu Gulager) moving into the house on Elm Street formerly owned by Nancy's mother. Freddy would use Jesse as a tool of destruction by trying to possess him and allow Freddy to move about in the real world.

The production on the second film was a lot more tightly regimented this time around despite a friendly relationship between Sholder and Shaye. For New Line Cinema, Freddy's Revenge had even higher stakes than the original film. If a sequel to their biggest success could be a hit, it would make the company a real contender. If it failed, the company could be finished.

Bob Shaye was on set for 31 of the 36 days of principal photography; almost unheard of for an executive producer or studio head. Shaye would often be giving orders to people that the director should have been giving. Shaye was responsible for the hiring of make-up effects artist Kevin Yagher who would end up crafting the Freddy make-up that would be used for most of the sequels to follow. He was constantly calling Chaskin back to the set to rewrite the script on the fly; not because the script wasn't very good, but because he kept trimming scenes to lower the budget and decrease the shooting schedule. The iconic scene where Freddy and Jesse square off for the first time, wasn't actually in any of Chaskin's draft. It was constructed on the day of the shoot by Shaye and Kevin Yagher.

Shaye was also adamant that he act in the film. Described as a "frustrated actor" by Jack Sholder, Shaye heavily lobbied for the part of Mr. Grady, the father of Jesse's best friend Ron (played by Robert Rusler). When Sholder told Shaye that a trained actor was needed for that role, Shaye became incensed and demanded a part in the film. Bowing to his bosses demands, Sholder gave Bob the role of a bartender... in an S&M leather bar.

That brings me to the point that some people involved with the production like to dance around (Shaye, Shoulder) and that others openly embrace (Chaskin, Patton, Englund, anyone with a set of eyes): Freddy's Revenge may be the first openly gay horror sequel.

Jesse is being taken over by a force that he can't control. It is a force that scares him deeply. He has intimacy problems with his girlfriend Lisa (Kim Myers) that he can't explain. He awakens in the middle of the night and sleepwalks to a leather bar. Inside the leather bar, he is stopped by his sadistic gym teacher (Marshall Bell) who takes him back to the school after hours to make him run laps. Coach Snyder is killed by a possessed Jesse and Freddy by tying him up in the shower with a jump rope, whipping him with a towel, and slashing and burning him. (A scene that begins with all of the balls in the gym bouncing around and rolling every which way) Jesse doesn't want comfort from his girlfriend and instead seeks it from his best friend who responds with:

"Something is trying to get inside you and you want to sleep with me?"

Described as "the Top Gun of slasher films" by former New Line executive Jeff Katz, Freddy's Revenge is a sloppy, but not altogether uninteresting sequel. The gay subtext is actually quite exceptional and subversive, especially given how subtly feminine Mark Patton looks in the role. Patton, who is openly gay in real life, gives a genuinely good performance as the conflicted teenager who doesn't know what is happening to his body. Chaskin, who is also openly gay, admits that the subtext is entirely intentional, extending to his asking production designer Maggie Martin (who is openly bisexual and has a really incredible resume) to include little touches to heighten the material without Sholder's knowledge. In Jesse's closet there is a board game called Probe. On Jesse's door it very clearly says "No chicks allowed." Then there is the dance scene.

This doesn't necessarily make Freddy's Revenge a great film, and it is admittedly one of the lesser sequels. The main problem with the film is actually the biggest reason why Wes Craven opted to not come back. The sequel doesn't feel the need to follow the rules of the original film, and by the climax, it has thrown the original rules out almost entirely.

What made the original Nightmare so scary was that anything could have been a dream. In Freddy's Revenge, partially thanks to laziness and partially thanks to Shaye's desire to have a more profitable franchise, the killer is allowed to perpetrate random acts of violence in the real world when he previously was unable to. The death of the coach is satisfying in a "jerky guy getting his comeuppance" sort of way, but it doesn't fit the franchise. The final third of the film has Freddy attacking kids at a pool party by electrifying fences and setting fires when it is impossible that these powers have transferred over to the real world. It leads to a very cool sequence where Freddy stands in front of a wall of flames and says "You are all my children now," but the scene itself just isn't scary and it doesn't work. Then there are scenes where Freddy turns up the thermostat and blows up a parakeet. For absolutely no reason.

It's not without fun or charm, but it is in no way equal to the first film. Freddy's Revenge did, however, outperform the original by grossing almost $33 million on only just over 600 screens. Shaye officially had a franchise that could sustain his company and Englund was well on his way to becoming the icon of horror that he is today.

Next time we will take a look at Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the rise of the cult of Freddy.

Hey, Remember That Movie #17: Cool as Ice

2011-08-14T01:10:00.010-04:00

It might seem hard to believe but every few years, the world is graced with a sudden resurgence of relevance for Robert Van Winkle. Better known as Vanilla Ice, Mr. Van Winkle has seemingly dodged being chronically unemployed for the better part of two decades simply by being in the right place at the right/wrong time. It is quite an accomplishment for someone that most of the human population thinks is largely untalented.

Van Winkle wasn't always a punchline. In the mid-1980s he was actually a fairly celebrated motocross rider. In his racing career he won three Grand National championships before an ankle injury kept him out of active competition. From there, he turned his attention to beat-boxing and breakdancing. Eventually he became the rapper we all know and "love" today. You know, the one who stole a hook from a Queen song, dated Madonna, appeared in her Sex book, sang about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and got dangled off a balcony by Suge Knight? That guy.

Ice's popularity as a rapper (and he was extremely popular, becoming the first ever hip-hop artist to hit number one on the Billboard charts) flamed out about as quickly as, well, an ice cube in a fire. His unfortunately delayed second album tanked and despite reinventing himself twice as a Rastafarian and as a nu-metal screamer, Ice never regained his musical fame. He did, however, become a television mainstay.

Ice would appear on several reality TV shows and find any way possible to keep making headlines. In 1999, he infamously trashed an MTV set when the video from his biggest hit "Ice Ice Baby" was officially "retired." In 2007, he trashed the set of a spin off of the show The Surreal Life when he was voted off. He has his own show where he tells people how to buy real estate that is about to go into its second season (?!?) and he recently signed a deal with Insane Clown Posse's Psychopathic Records to release what is technically his fifth proper album. On top of all this, Mr. Ice has graced Canada with his presence by being a judge on the new reality based talent show Canada Sings.

Say what you will about the irony of the talentless judging a talent show, but (1) that's the way of the world and (2) the man has seemingly never met a craze he couldn't exploit for some sort of fun and profit. When flash and positivity were in style, he was there. When taking drugs and moping was cool, he was there. When it was time to be self reflexive and introspective about the evils of celebrity, he was there. Ice isn't stupid, in fact, he is far from it. There is almost something admirable in the way he is constantly able to grind out a paycheck.

The only problem with the Iceman's work ethic is that other than his debut album, nothing he has done has ever turned out to be a huge, game changing success. More often than not, it is something that blows up in his face. Take for instance today's subject, the 1991 film Cool as Ice, a cheaply made quickie production from Universal Pictures (brief owner of Ice's former label SBK) designed to cash in on the cool that was Ice. Coming out as the shine was wearing off from his first album and sadly well before his second (a live concert album not withstanding), Cool as Ice debuted to thundering silence in theatres across the United States (and none in Canada where it was never theatrically distributed as far as I could see). Debuting at number 14 on October 18th, Cool as Ice failed to make 1/8th of what the fourth place Ernest Scared Stupid made. That's how dire the situation was.

Ice would win another award that year to place next to his American Music Awards and People's Choice Awards. He took the Golden Raspberry at the Razzies for Worst New Star. The film itself would be nominated for 8 other dishonours that year, but only Ice would win. The film itself has now become synonymous with overexposure and exploitation of a celebrity image (on top of being fucking terrible), but I defy most people to turn down the kind of money Van Winkle was getting thrown his way to look like a fool on camera.

Cool as Ice opens with a five minute music video featuring Ice rapping in a warehouse of some sort while supermodel Naomi Campbell sings the hook. It is all just really standard montage type stuff set to a terrible song until you get one important credit that comes up on screen: Director of Photography: Janusz Kaminski. Cool as Ice was shot by a man who was just two years away from his first Academy Award for cinematography and his first collaboration with Stephen Spielberg with Schindler's List. If one nice thing can be said about Cool as Ice, its that it really is well shot.

Well shot and well edited are two entirely different things, as this movie takes a full seven and a half minutes for anything to happen. As soon as the musical number is over, Ice and his three black friends (because we really need to up his street cred to an urban audience that already knows he is a joke) leave the warehouse club and take off on their motorcycles to go... somewhere. The friends all seem in a hurry to leave, but the movie never explains why. There isn't another show they have to go to immediately. And why do they all have motorcycles? Was that a request from Ice or was it to make him look like an even more ridiculous version of James Dean.

Before we even know the name of Ice's character, one of his friends points out a pretty young woman riding a horse alongside them on the country road they find themselves on. So Ice goes about getting the girl's attention the best way he knows how: by jumping a fence on his bike and nearly killing her. He follows that up by giving her shit for being pissed off over that whole nearly killing her thing.

After that little run in, Ice inexplicably knows that this girl is in love with him, but without a plot contrivance there will be no way for the two of them to ever see each other again. Thankfully, the motorcycle of the fat friend breaks down and they need to tow the broken down bike into town. As they roll through the nearest suburban enclave the audience is treated to reaction shots from boy scouts, what looks to be the dancing Six Flags guy, and a guy on a lawnmower all stopped in their tracks and gaping slack jawed as if they have never seen three black people and a clown before.

They very randomly happen upon a "whack ass" house that looks like Pee Wee's garage sale. It also very randomly happens that the crazed proprietor and his wife know how to fix motorcycles. Or not. That's never made clear. It really just seems like a case of the blind leading the blind because they end up stripping the bike down entirely causing Ice and his posse to be inconvenienced for A FULL DAY! The passage of time is shown by several time eating montages of Ice and his homies dancing, making sandwiches, sleeping, wearing wacky headgear, watching television, dancing, using belt grinders, building houses made of cards, and dancing. Really riveting stuff.

I should probably pause for a moment and mention that the director of Cool as Ice is a man by the name of David Kellogg. A luminary in the world of making commercials and with an IMDB resume that includes no less than 12 Playboy video collections, Kellogg only made one other theatrical feature. That film was the similarly afflicted and somehow even worse live-action Inspector Gadget in 1999. Both films suffer from having no sense of pacing, no idea how to transition between scenes, horrible fight sequences, and almost universally terrible acting. Inspector Gadget might be the one of the worst things produced in the history of forever, but this is Cool as Ice. Astoundingly, Kellogg has actually disowned Cool as Ice because it wasn't true to his vision. I guess there weren't enough insert shots and random graphics for his liking.

Now in town with some time to kill, Ice (whose character is really named Johnny, but fuck that noise since he's just Vanilla Ice no matter what you call him) takes note that the girl he nearly paralyzed earlier with his wacky shenanigans is living across the street from Roald Dahl's house. So he goes to visit "dat chick who drive da horse" and finds out her name is Kathy, who is alternately called Katherine by her overly square parents and Kat by V. Ice, only to find out she is dating an uptight tool named Nick. Because, you see, Nick rhymes with Dick, and without a name for Ice to freestyle some rhymes off of there wouldn't be any wit in this film.

After uttering the iconic line "Drop that zero, get with the hero" and stealing Kathy's day planner (and after two more montages), the film cuts to her family gathering around the television to watch their daughter make the evening news just for being excellent. Kathy has a 4.0 and double 800s on her SATs. The sky seems to be the limit for this chronic overachiever and as Ice watches the same newscast, he falls deeper into what I think is love but comes across more as constipated.

Unfortunately, this slow news day is bad news for her father, who has apparently been in the witness protection program since before Kathy was born for double crossing a pair of crooked police officers. What exactly happened, I have no idea. I never wrote it down. It was just white noise. Needless to say, if her father doesn't pay them an arbitrary sum of money ($500,000. I did write that down) within the next 24 hours, they will do something nasty to his family. It is really lucky for the film that these two disgraced cops just happened to be in the same place at the same time or else there wouldn't be any dramatic tension.

Once the news is over, which Ice probably just watched for the comics section to come on, he tells his homies he is going to go "shling a shlong," which apparently means go across the street like he's The Fonz to try and see Kathy. Unfortunately Kathy has already left and Ice ends up talking to her mother and little brother. The little brother, named Tommy and is the only remotely likeable character in the film, immediately takes a shine to Ice because his hair is like a lighthouse and he is wearing the most ridiculous clothing known to man. Furthermore, I also like that several times when Tommy is on screen he is playing Nintendo and the sound effects from Super Mario Brothers 3 are so loud that they drown out the dialog.

It turns out Kathy has just left to meet Nick at the only club in town: The Sugar Shack. Of course the place is square as hell, with the club filled with nerds in thick rimmed glasses where Nick will look like a God of badassery since he is the only person drinking. (And he is drinking from his own bottle of cheap vodka!) The band is atrociously white and playing a cover of Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)" that might be played for laughs, but is still unlistenable. Which means it's time for Ice to turn the party out and drop some "funkay lhyriks."

This display of bravado and ego stroking gains the attention of Kathy who tells Ice to return her day planner by tomorrow or she calls the cops. She in turn steals his driver's license without him knowing it as an insurance policy. She didn't get double 800s for nothing.

Of course Nick gets jealous and his crew of friends that we never knew he had show up to trash what they think is Ice's bike, but turns out to be the bike of one of his friends. At the sight of this injustice to the property of one Mr. Sir D, Ice has to truly prove that he is "Down By Law" like his jacket says. He regulates like he's Warren G in a fight scene where absolutely no punches hit their mark and people just fall down rather than getting knocked out. Apparently the fight was bad enough to send Nick to the hospital, but I like to think Nick got whiplash from trying to sell all of the terrible stunts.

The next morning, Kathy wakes up and BAM! ice is in her mouth. Not literally. Well, actually, yes, literally. Ice is in her room shoving and ice cube into her mouth and telling her to be quiet and not wake her father up. All I can think is how long was he there just staring at her in bed and where he got the ice cube from. He seems pretty stupid so I envision he had been there for several hours and he kept creeping downstairs to get more ice cubes from the freezer.

After a chaste scene of sexual teasing that stopped just shy of putting a hot dog through a doughnut, Kathy and Ice have their first date at the site of a house that is under construction in the middle of what appears to be a salt flat. In between such rousing dialog as "So, what's it like having parents and stuff?" and "I'd like to do something wild because I never have." the audience is treated to what would appear to be some sort of fashion ad.

Ice and Kathy jump around and play on the skeletal house, but they are looking directly into the camera most of the time and making goofy faces. They don't appear to be playfully chasing each other since there really isn't anything to suggest that the camera is shooting from the point of view of the opposite person. It seems like something that inexplicably took two days to shoot and neither of them were there at the same time.

After the movie detours for another clothing ad and Ice's love ballad, the movie finally gets to the plot contrivance that is going to race the film to its conclusion. Kathy's dad mistakenly believes that Ice is in cahoots with the two crooked cops and uses the fact that he put Nick in the hospital to damn Ice eternally and forbids Kathy from ever seeing him again. Ice very astutely states that he has no idea what her father is talking about and that "whackhead was trying to play baseball with my homeboy's bike." Perfectly understandable since he is so clearly Down By Law. I know I would trust the guy with "Sex Me Up" on the sleeve of his leathers with my daughter.

The father levels with his daughter and we are treated to a couple more montages to pad out a respectable theatrical length. The idiotic and incompetent energy that the film had going in its favour suddenly flags and the film just gets boring to watch. There is one "good" scene where Ice takes a heartbroken Tommy for a ride on his motorcycle and we get to see a young boy flip the bird to Nick just as he is driving home from the hospital. It truly proves that a young child giving someone the middle finger is never, ever not funny.

Tommy is kidnapped mid-Tecmo Bowl and the kidnappers send an audio tape to his family to show they mean businesses. Kathy, instead of turning to the actual police or the FBI who put her father in witness protection in the first place, turns to Ice for help. Ice CSI's the shit out of that audio tape and deduces through the films incredibly overblown Foley Editing that her brother is being kept at the same construction site they playfully romped through the previous afternoon. The day is saved! The bike is fixed! Nothing happened!

And then the movie ends with another seven minute music video back at the club from the beginning. I honestly just shut the movie off at that point. Did I really need to sit through any more of it? No.

There really might not be any one person to fully blame for this film being this bad since it was a premise doomed from the start. Sure, Kellogg sucks as a director and Ice's face is constantly frozen in one expression except for being able to raise his eyebrow every once in a while, but this really is just another fad movie condemned to obscurity. It was a product of its time that will likely never see release on DVD or Blu-ray. And that, as we all like to say, is for the best.

You Used to be About the Music, Man.

2011-08-13T18:51:00.006-04:00

I never really intended it to be like this. In no way am I ungrateful, but the last thing I ever expected to achieve this year is a modicum of success. This year has been an incredibly wild experience between the Defending the Indefensible series, the writing of several books, getting published online and in print several times, and actually being oddly in demand for my talents as a film writer. Is it really bragging if I never expected it to end up this way? I am eternally humbled by the success of this blog, but most of it has admittedly been thanks to my film writing.

If one were to go back to the beginning of this blog they would find that the original intention of this blog was to write about personal experiences with the occasional film review. They would find a lot of promises and schedules I never followed through on. It was never a matter of me being bored with the previous blog format. Some of it was admittedly being lazy, but that almost seems natural to me at this point. When you write for a living about one certain thing and you spend all day doing it, by the time you find a moment to write all the things you wanted to write about, you just don't want to.

In essence, I have kind of unwittingly sold out and typecast myself. Watching films and reviewing them has become something that is very quickly starting to pay the bills. All the personal stuff that I get a lot of satisfaction writing about, doesn't pay for anything. There really isn't that much of a hook that could necessarily get people to care all that much about. Not yet, anyway.

The other day a friend stopped me and asked whatever happened to my "Open Letters to Ex-Girlfriends" series of blogs. I told her that I wasn't really sure what was going on with it. I never really abandoned it and the next entry has been half finished for close to five months now. I told her that I just never have time to get things to the point where I am comfortable releasing them. The same goes for the "Music/Movies and Memories" blogs. The day job doesn't take up all my time, but to keep it up takes a lot more work than one would think.

She was pretty disappointed and she wasn't the only one. I previously thought that no one really cared what they thought of my more personal work, but it shocks me how many people paid attention to those entries. She asked if the neglect of the blog was because I was scared of my public perception taking a beating for what I would write. I told her that was never the case. In fact, I am just as comfortable sharing personal details of my life now more than ever.

Let's go over a couple of things right now that are pretty personal in bullet point form:

-My most recent relationship took an astounding nose dive.
-My living situation, which previously sucked, is now a bit better, but not the most ideal.
-I am deathly worried about the next month or so because it is the ultimate "make or break" time for me as a writer.
-That Nightmare on Elm Street history that I wrote the other day I honestly thought was pure shit, but I finished it like a high schooler the night before it was due because I felt obligated to do it. (The good news is the next entries in that series will be better, and probably filled with more facts that people don't readily know.)

I just felt that a "state of the blog" address was in order for those who have been writing or talking to me and wondering just what the deal was. So regarding certain series that I said I would continue:

-The memory related section will resurface in late September when I have more time to figure stuff out. Same with the Ex-Girlfriends series.
-The "Hey, Remember That Movie?" series will return sooner than one would think. There were two entries that I had written that were scrapped but might be reworked. A new entry could appear within the next 48 hours or so, but don't take my word for it. The "Burnout Movie Club" (which has stayed pat since November) will be more or less absorbed into this category, with the more obscure titles being featured here at a later date.
-The Summer of 1989 series has actually been evolving into something a lot bigger. After the Ghostbusters II piece got over a hundred thousand hits (as opposed to the average of 450 hits that my personal blogs get), I realized that I had to step my game up. Those are going to continue and everything is still on, but that is going to become a book that I am working on. I want to keep the series sequential, but thanks to getting personal interviews with a lot of people involved with these films, I have been working on them out of order. The Batman entry is still admittedly an outline right now. That series will return and continue simply when I have time to finish Batman. I started in order and I want to keep it more or less the way it was.

The next month or so, this will almost exclusively be for film related purposes. Sorry. That's just the way the cards have fallen. I just wanted to give everyone a heads up as to what was going on.

And most importantly and above all else to thank all of you who helped get this blog recognized. Without each and every one of you I would not be doing a job that gives me as much joy as this does. It is incredibly humbling and absolutely amazing. You guys are the best and I applaud you. Hopefully I will have many more awesome things for you guys in the near future.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

2011-08-10T13:50:00.007-04:00

This is part one of a ten part series looking back at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Clues for potential trivia questions to the Toronto Underground Cinema's Scavenger Hunt can be found in these entries. The actual trivia questions will be posted at the Notes From the Toronto Underground blog.

A note from the author at 1:51am: If you are here just for the contest, you can skip right to the section of this entry where you see the video for the trailer. The answers to Freddy's trivia questions are in that section. I might have helped you. Don't tell Freddy. I'm already not sleeping because of him. Also, the whole first part is me explaining the rules, ticketing info for the event, and just how much I love the Nightmare series in general. I honestly don't think you will read all of this. This is a contest and an event for the fans like myself whom without Freddy, I wouldn't be here. And if you did read all of this admittedly less than tight rambling that I rushed to have out in time, consider yourselves my new best friends.

It was the first R-rated film I saw growing up. I remember it vividly mostly because of the pain involved. It wasn't pain from fear, but from a fever that was keeping me up at night. It was in the middle of the night during the week. Not on a weekend. I remember that little tidbit, as well. I simply couldn't sleep and I was feeling miserable.

I walked to the living room where my father, a notorious night owl, was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on HBO. It was about 2 in the morning and the movie had started about five minutes before I walked into the room. I was practically in tears telling my dad that I couldn't sleep and I asked him what he was watching. He told me, and not being one to censor anything I ever watched (except for Videodrome and Amazon Women on the Moon) he asked if I really wanted to watch it with him. He said it might give me nightmares. I told him I already couldn't sleep. Honestly, how much more miserable was I going to feel?

It might have been bad parenting to some, but the first time I saw Wes Craven's 1984 masterpiece I was hooked on movies. I wasn't really all that scared, but I remembered a genuine rush of excitement while watching the film. There was something decidedly naughty about watching a film of that nature in the middle of the night on what should have been a school night. I was relatively sure none of my friends were watching what I was. It was a blast of the fantastical and Gothic that my young mind couldn't entirely grasp, but just the experience of seeing it made me want to seek out more films like it.

From that night on I would prowl video store shelves looking for the next film I would love that I probably shouldn't be seeing. I would hang out in the horror section just to look at the box art. I didn't know at the time that A Nightmare on Elm Street was quite the box office success that it was, or that it already had a sequel by the time I had seen the original. To me it was this awesome little movie with a really scary bad ass at the heart of it that wanted to hurt children.

I actually didn't find it all that scary until I watched the film again when I was 13 in the basement of a friend's house. I had previously only watched such film on my own at home. I had never really watched a scary movie with other kids in the room. It was a battered VHS copy taped from TV, complete with commercial breaks, but the two girls and three guys in the room were genuinely scared by it. The film actually started to work its powers on me and I began to question every bump or noise in the basement. There was a girl I had a crush on who just about lost her shit when the boiler kicked in shortly after the scene where Johnny Depp's Glen dies. It was the first time a girl ever actively latched on to me for comfort, and I have Freddy Krueger and Robert Englund to thank for that. (Although, I should also thank the heating and air conditioning guy who was supposed to fix the boiler that week but never did.)

As I got older and my taste in film developed, my love for the original A Nightmare on Elm Street never flagged. If anything, my appreciation for the film strengthened. While my favourite films in other genres kept changing depending on my taste at the time, my favourite horror film has and probably always will be A Nightmare on Elm Street. I have studied the original endlessly and I have closely watched all of the sequels that came after (some of which I definitely like more than others, as you will all see in the coming weeks). I wrote not one, but two papers in University about the original film. One was on Regan era fears in American typified by the boogeyman character of Freddy and the other was a comparison of the works of Wes Craven and John Hughes (specifically comparing Elm Street's characters to those in The Breakfast Club).

Being able to help the Toronto Underground Cinema with their upcoming screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with Englund in attendance is better than Christmas for me and I know I am not alone. The event is very nearly sold out (you can purchase your tickets online at Brown Paper Tickets or in person at the Underground box office, Eyesore Cinema, Silver Snail, or Suspect Video. It warms my heart to see so many fans of the series coming out to have a great time.

Over the next few weeks leading up to the event, I will be taking a look at the entire franchise from the original to the reboot (with a special entry devoted to non-film related Freddy ephemera) and giving those who might not be as familiar with the franchise a bit of a history lesson on the films while sharing my own personal thoughts.

This all coincides with the upcoming contest and scavenger hunt designed by Mr. Kruger himself to help you guys win your way in to the screening on Friday, August 25th at 8pm (doors at 7pm). Mr. Kruger will be Tweeting clues from his handle FKUnderground and will be posting several trivia questions over at the Notes From the Toronto Underground blog. The answers to many of these trivia questions can be found in my entries (but not all of them).

Then on the day that one of these blogs is posted, Freddy will send me out into the world with a pair of passes for one lucky winner. If you find me at the location Freddy alludes to, I will ask you three of the eight posted trivia questions (you will have a few hours to do research and get all the answers before having to find me). Find me and answer the three questions correctly, and you are going to see Robert Englund himself talk about what may be the most entertaining horror movie sequel of all time.

But before I get ahead of myself, let's talk about the original film, shall we?

Wes Craven might seem like the most unlikely of people to be a horror movie icon. In fact, the famed master of horror never really saw many films until he was a college professor in the late 1960s. Craven's father was a preacher and he was raised as a fundamentalist baptist. Craven lost his father at the age of 6 in 1945, but Craven managed to only remember just how angry and scary his father could be at his angriest.

Craven's Baptist upbringing continued after the death of his father, and with the exception of classical books, he was never introduced to any real sort of popular culture. After graduating college Craven became an English professor who became enamoured with the European films being screened on campus. The first films Craven really remembered connecting to were Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Fellini's 8 1/2.

Only two years after taking the job as a professor, Craven quit his job in the early 1970s and moved to New York where he would become an assistant to film producer Sean S. Cunningham, better known as the man who would create the Friday the 13th franchise. Cunningham, impressed by Craven's work ethic as an electrician, cameraman, and editor, offered Craven a chance to direct his own film.

Using Cunningham's suggestion that horror was the best and most profitable genre to launch a career with, Craven sat down and wrote The Last House on the Left. The film was written by Craven in six days as a no nonsense, take no prisoners revenge film inspired by Bergman's film The Virgin Spring. The film was a grindhouse success that sparked fits of outrage from some members of the mainstream moviegoing public who were deeply offended by the film's graphic depiction of rape and murder. The film was constantly being recut and banned in certain markets, but this only enhanced the film's reputation.

Following Last House, Craven took five years off from filmmaking with hopes of making something other than a horror film. When nothing else was panning out, he made the slightly less controversial, but no less intense film The Hills Have Eyes, which essentially solidified Craven's reputation as a master of the macabre. Craven would then move on to working on several television films, the Amish country set Deadly Blessing (with Ernest Borgnine and Sharon Stone), the comic adaptation Swamp Thing, and a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that Craven never had any real interest in doing and essentially he has disowned (It also wasn't released until 1985 despite completing shooting before A Nightmare on Elm Street even started production).

After filming Swamp Thing and The Hills Have Eyes II back to back, Craven, who was unsatisfied with both films, decided to take six months off to work on something that he could be proud of. The film was to be inspired by a series of Los Angeles Times articles from 1981 that had caught his attention.

There was a series of three articles printed all centring on Hmong men formerly from Cambodia that were dying in their sleep. The common thread between all three men is that they were all survivors of relocation camps during the deadly Pol Pot regime who had told their families that they had been experiencing terrible nightmares before eventually dying of heartattacks in their sleep. The first two stories struck Craven as creepy coincidences, but the third story stuck out.

In the third article the young man had attempted to stay awake for four days. He had explicitly told his parents that there was something that was trying to get to him in his sleep and that if he fell asleep he was afraid he would die. He had been hoarding sleeping pills that his father was trying to get him to take. He had also rigged an extension cord to run from the hallway to his closet where he constantly had a pot of black coffee brewing. One night, the young man drifted off to sleep as the family was watching a movie. The parents brought the teenager upstairs to bed and several hours later were awakened by screaming. By the time the parents had reached the bedroom, it was too late. Their son was dead.

The idea that something could kill you in your sleep from sheer terror was something that Craven knew he wanted to work with for his next film. The idea of terror personified came in the form of Freddy Krueger, a deceased child molester out for revenge against the vigilante parents that burned him alive. Krueger would go into the very personal world of their children's dreams to use their own psyches against them and kill them without leaving any evidence and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

The idea for Krueger came from Craven's own psyche. Fred was the name of the schoolyard bully that used to beat him up everyday. Krueger was the chosen surname because it sounded vaguely German and was a variation on the name Krug, which was the name of the main villain in Last House on the Left. Freddy's sweater was compromised of two colours that Craven remembered from a Scientific American article as being the two harshest colours for the human retina to identify at the same time. The idea of Freddy being a burn victim was a nod to the masked slasher movie killers at the time (Jason, Michael Meyers) as being a natural, but still marketable mask; something that could let the humanity of the actor wearing it show through. Freddy's signature fedora was based on a drunk that Craven had seen growing up that looked into his room and "scared the shit out of" him.

With the script in place, Craven began to shop his work around. By this point, his earnings had dried up. Craven lost his house, his first marriage had ended, he maxed out his savings, and he even had to ask to borrow money from Sean Cunningham just to pay his back taxes and stay out of prison. None of this made Craven think he had anything less than a sure thing in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Major studios declined almost across the board. Paramount, where his friend Cunningham had his Friday the 13th series based, turned Craven down on the basis that it was too close to another film they had in development called Dreamscape, starring Dennis Quaid. In a strange turn of events, Dreamscape was written by Nightmare 3's eventual director Chuck Russell and would be released four months prior to the original Nightmare, but would ultimately be released by 20th Century Fox.

The one major studio that showed any interest in the film was actually Disney. The house that Mickey built thought that the film could be drastically toned down and given a minor theatrical release before being something they could show every year on their newly launched Disney Channel at Halloween. For the better of humanity and the worse of Craven's wallet, that deal never materialized.

The only film company that showed a real interest and a real grasp of the material wasn't even really a studio. New Line Cinema was only a distribution company at the time of the original Nightmare on Elm Street, specializing mostly in owning the 16mm screening rights to classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and Reefer Madness. New Line president Robert Shaye knew that Wes' film could make a decent return on investment, but he didn't have the money to finance the film on his own.

Shaye approached and secured one million dollars of a $1.3 million budget (which was three times less of a budget than Craven had been working with on all his films after Last House on the Left) from the Smart Egg Pictures company. Then at almost the last second (about two months before shooting), Smart Egg pulled out. Shaye and the film's crew were on standby and began to put up a lot of their own money to get the film started. Shaye reached an agreement with Media Home Entertainment for almost a full million dollars with a huge catch. Media had it written into their contract that they could take full control of the production away from Shaye if it went over schedule or over budget. Shaye scraped up the remaining few hundred thousand from private investors and from going back to Smart Egg who gave $200,000 but demanded that their name be on the production credits for this film and any possible sequels. It killed Shaye to acquiesce to this, but he was just glad to have the movie at all by this point.

With the film now a go, a crew was firmly assembled. Craven hired cinematographer Jaques Haitkin to work behind the camera on what was sure to be an ambitious and effects heavy project. Haitkin vowed to Craven that he would make sure every dollar of the film's budget made it to the screen and he would often be the person most critical of his work when dailes of the film were screened. He was also the only cameraman that Craven approached that didn't balk at his desire to film two sequences in the film with a rotating room.

For Freddy's make-up effects, Craven hired effects wizard David Miller, who had just finished work (ironically enough) on Dreamscape and was ostensibly the main make-up consultant for the band KISS. Miller created what would be a somewhat enduring template for the make-up for years to come: an 11 piece mask that would take about four hours to apply that would allow for the actor playing Freddy to have a full range of facial motion. Unfortunately, the make-up would prove one of the most costly day to day items of the film costing almost $20,000 by the end of the shoot.

For Freddy's iconic glove and almost all of the film's practical effects (which we will get into later), Craven turned to mechanical effects wizard Jim Doyle (who had also worked on Dreamscape, but also on Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart and WarGames). Freddy's glove was something that Doyle sketched out numerous times before perfecting. The only real instruction given to him by Craven and the script was that the glove had to be made from items one would find in a boiler room: the place where Krueger would have most likely had his office.

If finding money and a crew was hard, casting the film proved to be comparatively easier. For the lead role of heroine Nancy Thompson, Craven decided upon Heather Langenkamp, a Stanford student whose biggest claim to fame up to that point was that she was an extra in Coppola's The Outsiders and had been cut from the follow-up Rumble Fish. Craven wanted Nancy to be someone who was pretty, but could also be seen as extremely intelligent.

Veteran actor John Saxon was brought in to play the role of Nancy's estranged police officer father. Saxon was the name New Line so desperately needed to sell the movie overseas. A former television teen heartthrob, Saxon would go on to make his name in the US mostly in B-grade horror and crime thrillers like Black Christmas and The Glove. Overseas, Saxon wouldn't be doing films that were all that different, but he had been working with iconic European directors like Umberto Lenzi and Dario Argento and it brought him more respectability with foreign distributors.

For the role of Nancy's boyfriend Glen, Craven had three actors that he had tested in mind, but his daughter made his mind up for him. The man that caught the eye of Craven's daughter was a then unknown who had never acted before named Johnny Depp. The man who would go on to become one of the most bankable and most interesting actors in Hollywood today was talked into being an actor by a good friend of his. That good friend was the equally bankable and enigmatic Nicolas Cage, who set up a meeting between Depp and his agent when he suggested that Johnny try acting. The first reading Depp ever did was for A Nightmare on Elm Street and he got the part on his first attempt. The rest of that story is pretty much history.

If casting for a role like Glen was easy, the casting of Freddy would prove to be much harder. Craven had originally wanted to go with an older man and was keen on hiring British actor David Warner for the role. Warner, who had previously played the villain in Time After Time and Time Bandits, wasn't keen on playing another villain so soon and was even less happy that on a film with a budget as low as this one that he wouldn't have adequate time off to rest.

Robert Englund, a classically trained actor and television veteran, was brought in for a reading with Wes Craven as a favour from an agent who failed to get Englund a part in the John Hughes scripted dud National Lampoon's Class Reunion. Englund nailed the reading, but Craven had to be convinced by Englund and the make-up department that casting someone as young as Englund would make sense in the role. It didn't hurt that Englund was on a break from production on the successful television miniseries V. Englund would also add another (admittedly minor) name to the film.

Production on the film went as smoothly as any seat of the pants venture could go. The main obstacle to Craven and his crew wasn't so much an issue of money anymore, but an issue of time. The shoot could go no longer than 32 days or else Shaye and New Line would have lost everything they had invested to Media and all of his own personally sleepless nights of trying to bankroll the film would have been for naught. In the end, it all came together and the process itself isn't as exciting to talk about as one would believe.

The effects were what ended up making the biggest impact on the production, as well as the audience who would eventually see the film. For the death scenes of the film's Janet Leigh-in-Psycho style character Tina (played by Amanda Wyss) and for Johnny Depp's Glen, Jim Doyle created a rotating room that would give the illusion of Freddy mysteriously dragging Tina across the ceiling and to show 110 gallons of blood shooting up from the bed Freddy dragged young Glen down into. The most iconic shots of the film were obtained by way of Craven and Jaques Haitkin being literally buckled into two car seats from an old Datsun that were bolted to the set as crew members rotated the room slowly.

To recoup some of the production costs, Doyle and Shaye agreed to sell the rotating room set to Cannon Films for them to use in their upcoming sequel to Breakin', Electric Boogaloo. In Breakin' 2, one can see the picture of Freddy's glove on the wall as one of the leads dances around the vastly redecorated room and on the ceiling. All of this is actually quite fitting since Craven and Doyle got the idea to use a rotating room from old Fred Astaire films.

For the nightmarish effect of Freddy's arms stretching across an alleyway to a great length, Doyle positioned two men with fishing poles on the roofs of garages across the alley from one another and simply had them walk with Englund's stunt double (who had just gotten done playing the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters) chased Tina down the alleyway. For an equally stretchy scene where Freddy almost bursts through the wall over Nancy's bed, Doyle replaced the wall with an incredible new material known as spandex. The face that actually appears over the bed in the film is not that of Englund or his stunt double, but of Doyle himself.

The final battle sequence between Nancy and Freddy included a scenes that actually came from the nightmares of producer Bob Shaye. It comes when Nancy attempts to run up the stairs of her house to safety only to be sinking into them as if they were made of quicksand (an effect achieved by mixing chopped up bits of carpeting and Bisquick pancake mix). The scene was almost cut due to time restrictions, but Shaye fought to keep it in the film. Shaye fought so strenuously that an increasingly burnt out Craven let Shaye direct the entire sequence.

The only real controversy of the actual production was the battle between Craven and Shaye over how the film should have ended. Craven always wanted the film to be a stand alone entity, with Nancy finally turning her back on the evil man who she unconsciously gave power to and walking ambiguously away from him. Shaye asked only for one thing specific from the production, and that was a hook to hang a sequel onto. Six different ending for the film were shot with varying degrees of ambiguity, but Wes somewhat grudgingly agreed since Shaye had honestly been really great to him and because without his attempts at financing the film, he would be out of a job.

Once the film was completed and released, New Line started on the road to being known as "The House That Freddy Built." Theatrically in the US alone, A Nightmare on Elm Street opened to generally favourable reviews that lauded it as being a step above the slasher films that were flooding the genre marketplace at the time. It would make almost $30 million and the first sequel was bankrolled by investors one week into the run of the first film. It would also ride the crest of the VHS wave and would position Media as a major player in the video market. On home video, the film would spend 50 weeks on the Billboard rental charts and would bring in another $22 million. It would be the VHS market that would largely make the sequels increasingly more popular in theatres as they rolled out.

The success of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is one of legend, but it isn't very had to see why. Horror films are by themselves extremely profitable, but they are also largely products of their time and a reflection of societal fears. Craven himself said that nightmares are the horror movies of the psyche and that horror movies are essentially nightmares of the society. In his positive review of the film, Paul Attansio of The Washington Post remarked that horror movies are essentially nothing more than organized nightmares.

In a 1988 poll conducted by CBS to ask who the most notable figure of the decade was, Freddy finished second only to then president Ronald Regan. Freddy was a perfect personification of the Ronald Regan era and the largely youthful rebellion against the "silent majority" and their fears of not having a future. Freddy was a spectre that thrived on collecting his pound of flesh from the parents of those who wronged him by killing their children. In the 1980s, with deficit spending out of control, the cold war, a compromised environment, and an industrial war complex out of control, there really might not have been much of a future to have. In film as in real life, the sins of the parents would have doomed the children no matter what they did wrong.

Englund's performance is undoubtedly key to the success of the first film and the ensuing franchise. No one else could have played this role in the same way that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were inseparable from the characters they made famous. We will get more into Englund as this series goes on, I promise. I would simply be remiss by not giving the man his due here.

It is quite telling that in an scene around the halfway point of the film, a teacher in Nancy's class (played by the always lovely to see Lin Shaye) is teaching Hamlet. Much like Hamlet, Nancy has to stamp out the lies told to her by her mother (a raging alcoholic) and she isn't respected by her absentee father. Nancy has had her eyes opened to the truth of the suburban, bucolic nightmare, and this search for the truth is ultimately both a blessing and a curse. Such a touch from a former English professor like Craven is surely intentional, but gives a real literary grounding to a fantastical story.

In fact, Craven's original film serves as a curiously leftist counterpoint to the typically right wing politics of the slasher films it so wrongfully gets lumped in with. Films in the Halloween and the Friday the 13th series mostly award outwardly virtuous behaviour and condemn such sinful behaviour as taking drugs and having premarital sex. Craven doesn't really care about the personal lives of the kids on screen. They are all well rounded characters, but none of them are treated differently from the rest. To Freddy they are all guilty and in need of punishment. It is a very level field of judgment instead of subscribing to the usual "final girl" school of filmmaking that dictates that the most virginal character survives to the end of the film. The audience in this film doesn't know if Nancy is a pure soul or not, nor does it matter.

A Nightmare on Elm Street would give rise to a new type of horror experience known as "rubber reality." While the idea of a film taking place within a dream world is nothing new (and was admittedly done first and possibly best by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), few films took making distinctions between the dream world and the real world as intensely as this one did. The film is at its best when it makes the audience afraid to trust their own perception. Craven plunges the audience into 8 separate dream sequences that grow progressively disorienting as the film goes on and as the characters get less and less sleep. This idea of waking nightmares has been done to death and lampooned at great length today, but in 1984 this concept was still fresh. If imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, Craven and company were the belles of the 1980s horror ball.

Tune in next time for a look at the first sequel, Freddy's Revenge, where the idea of waking nightmares gets a bit muddled, but the film is no less subversive or daring.

Winnie the Pooh (2011)

2011-07-15T10:22:00.003-04:00

Winnie the Pooh opens in theatres everywhere Friday, July 15th.

What a real shame it is that Disney is opening their re-boot of the Winnie the Pooh franchise opposite the cultural juggernaut that is the final Harry Potter film. In theory, it isn't a terrible idea to offer the film as a bit of counterprogramming for children too young to handle the later Potter films, but it seems to be a sadly foregone conclusion that everyone and their pets will be seeing if Voldemort finally gets his (despite most of them already knowing well in advance how the whole thing will end already). Actually, people in North America seem to be lucky that they are getting a theatrical release of Winnie the Pooh at all. In many overseas markets it is going straight to DVD at the end of August.

I haven't seen Harry Potter Part 7, Part 2: The Final Chapter yet, but I have seen Winnie the Pooh, an even more literary adaptation of a classic children's book that is a consistently fun an charming film for children of all ages. I wasn't even originally going to write about it in this blog, given the title and the way my blog's demographic tends to skew, but I am here to say that this film is most assuredly worth your time.

It is the rare adaptation that manages to get almost everything right about the books of A.A. Milne right from the opening frames. It is also shown in gloriously detailed, old school hand drawn animation devoid of any obvious computer tampering (there had to be some, though) or annoying 3-D. The worst special effect the film offers is having Zooey Deschanel sing most of the soundtrack in a stab at cultural relevancy, and while some may see this as being out of place, it really isn't all that distracting. That is, unless you really hate Zooey Deschanel singing.

The plot of the film is very simplistic for the little ones and full of wit and whimsy that will keep the elders entertained. There are essentially 3 separate plot strands that all need to come together by the end of the film. Pooh wakes up and is extremely hungry, but finds himself out of honey and tries in vain to find any. Meanwhile, his good friend Eeyore has lost his tail and the Hundred Acre Wood gang band together to try and find either the original or a suitable replacement. The gang gets sidetracked after their young charge Christopher Robin disappears and leaves a misinterpreted note that makes his stuffed animal friends think he has been kidnepped by a mysterious creature known as The Backson.

The film doesn't waste any time and is very knowlegable of the audience the film is made for. At just over an hour in length (and preceeded by a lovely short about the Loch Ness monster being driven out of her home by a Donald Trump style tycoon), Winnie the Pooh feels like a perfect way to kick back on a weekend afternoon with the family or just by yourself if you need a brief pick me up. There really aren't any demerits against it because it does exactly what it needs to do to appeal to all audiences. For adults, it also has one of the funniest scenes of any film this summer involving the gang falling into a pit and trying to get out. It is a lengthy scene of inspired comedic lunacy funnier than anything in Cars 2.

Look, I am just going to leave you with some clips from the film. If you giggle or audibly say "awwwwww" just go see the film. I dare say it is impossible to watch this film without a smile on your face for at least part of it.

Rating (out of five stars): ****1/2

Horrible Bosses

2011-07-08T10:37:00.006-04:00

Horrible Bosses opens everywhere on Friday, July 8th

Sometimes the best compliment I can pay any film, especially any comedy, is that it is so good it makes me stop taking notes. Generally, if I am taking notes on a film, it's a mixed blessing. I am either writing down something about the movie that I found profound or engaging in the best of cases. In the worst of cases, it means that I am writing down things that absolutely don't work and that I need to look into in greater detail when I write my review. I stopped taking notes about 20 minutes into Horrible Bosses for very good reasons. I simply could not stop laughing and the film worked so wonderfully that I just couldn't be bothered to keep taking notation on what was going on. I resolved that if the film did anything truly wrong that I would pick up the notebook again and make a note of it. That moment thankfully never came as Horrible Bosses is easily the funniest film of the summer movie season. The fact that I didn't take notes doesn't mean the film itself isn't memorable. In fact, it is probably destined to be the film most likely to be quoted amongst friends at get togethers and around the water cooler at work.

The somewhat uninspired title is at least very accurate. The film centres on three friends, all of whom have horrible bosses that make their working lives a living hell. White collar worker Nick (Jason Bateman) has just been screwed out of a promotion by his egotistical and constantly mistrusting boss Dale Harken (Kevin Spacey). Sweet and caring dental assistant Dale (Charlie Day) is constantly being sexually harassed by his conniving and blackmailing boss (Jennifer Aniston) despite being engaged and very much in love with his own fiance. Chemical plant accountant Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) used to have a good job with a great boss until he passed away and left the company to his cokehead son (Colin Farrell) who is determined to use the company as his own personal piggy bank and discotheque. Realizing that their lives would be better off without their bosses, they come to the conclusion that to avoid getting pinched by their own personal motives, they will kill each others bosses. Naturally, nothing goes as planned since Nick (arguably the brains of the trio) is perpetually hesitant about going through with it, Kurt is always sidetracked by his penis, and Dale is just simply a screw-up who is always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Horrible Bosses is the third major film from director Seth Gordon, who previously made the entertaining documentary King of Kong: A Fistfull of Quarters and the dreadfully unfunny and inert Four Christmases, and he showcases a real sense of comedic talent by stuffing the film with as many jokes as humanly possible. Horrible Bosses is almost entirely made up of wall to wall one liners, awkward conversations, and snappy conversations. It is a real testament to Gordon and his team of former television writers that they are able to keep the film's momentum going at a consistent pace. This is also one of only two problems that the film has. It moves almost too fast at times and not once does it slow down enough for the audience to catch all of the overlapping jokes. It can be a bit overwhelming. Then again, I almost wish every comedy had this problem instead of going long stretches without even offering so much as a chuckle.

The cast brings their A-game all around and functions as a dream team of comedic talent. Bateman and Spacey deliver typically strong performances in their respective roles. Sudeikis, who I normally don't find all that funny, is spot on here. Jamie Foxx shows up to remind everyone that he started as a comedian in a small role as the "murder consultant" to the trio of friends, sporting a ridiculous name (Motherfucker Jones), a ridiculous scalp tattoo, and an even more ridiculous reason as to why he went to prison in the first place. Farrell is having a blast as an sleazy windbag with a horrid prosthetic comb-over and a cocaine habit that would look out of place in Medellin. Aniston is also having a blast being as foul mouthed and dirty as possible in a shedding of her "good girl" image, but her character arguably gets the shaft (no pun intended) in a role that curiously goes nowhere special and seems to be forgotten about around the halfway point of the film when a more important plot twist is introduced. (The film seems curiously cut up as evidenced by some outtakes in the credits that showcase scenes that didn't make the final cut, which could account for the pacing problems.) The real MVP here is Charlie Day, who doesn't simply steal scenes, but steals the entire film as the nervous and jittery screw-up who couldn't be shut up if his life depended on it. Day gives an absolute star making performance that audiences will remember for years.

It should almost go without saying that the R-rated Horrible Bosses is very mean and in very bad taste. Recently I have caught a lot of flack from people for saying that I don't like films that feel mean. My hatred of The Hangover Part II and my dislike of the politics at work in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, led some people to believe that I am overly sensitive. This isn't true. Horrible Bosses is as mean and nasty as they come, but here it actually works and has a point. Gordon's film is misanthropy with an actual plot, not something rehashed or something that ratchets up the nastiness just for the sake of being a sequel. It is anchored by characters that someone can actually feel for and by actors who aren't sleepwalking through the material. I like people being jerks on film just fine, and someone like Todd Phillips (who is quickly becoming the Antichrist of comedy) could learn something from Gordon and company.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

Summer of '89 Part 3: The Hundred Million Dollar Disappointment

2011-07-03T15:29:00.025-04:00

When last we left the summer of 1989, which I am admittedly behind on talking about at the moment, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was proving to be untouchable in terms of its box office success. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier had just debuted at number one, but was quickly fading en route what would be a record setting drop in business between a film's opening weekend and its second week of release. It was a dubious record that the William Shatner helmed film almost only hung on to for a single week.

No one ever would have expected this week's subject, Ghostbusters II, to fall so quickly. It all seemed like a very safe bet on paper. The sequel to what was the highest grossing comedy in history (until the release of The Hangover) was a modestly budgeted summer tent pole for a studio with an almost unlimited source of funds that were coming from a very generous parent company. It was a project where everyone involved simply wanted to create a sequel that captured some amount of the original film's joy and good will. In the crowded summer of 1989, it ended up becoming a warning shot for major studios that all the marketing and calculating in the world wasn't going to guarantee a blockbuster. In recent years, Ghostbusters II has become a small firestorm of debate over whether the film was a failure or not. In 1989, it became the first ever film to gross over a hundred million dollars and still be considered a disappointment. It wasn't a failure on an artistic level, per-say, but for a film that was designed by people who thought it would be the biggest box office draw of the year, it was a gross case of overestimation.

As always, an examination of the studio that made it and the genesis of the project is necessary for a better understanding of the curious situation of Ghostbusters II.

The Torch Bearers

On June 21st, 1982, Columbia Pictures became the first major motion picture studio to be bought by a megacorporation that had absolutely no ties to the production of any medium of entertainment whatsoever. Coca-Cola, the brand that was then controlling 85% of the soft drink market, shelled out $692 million in hopes that they could increase their profit margin by 10% with a stab at corporate synergy. Coke saw something valuable in owning a film studio because they believed that the studios were on the cutting edge of new media and Columbia brought a lot to the table in this respect.

At the time of Coke's purchase of the studio, Columbia wasn't exactly hurting for cash or on the verge of bankruptcy. They just weren't producing very many movies. Columbia had been making a majority of their profits in television. In 1980, bolstered by daytime soaps and the rights to numerous syndicated favourites, television programming accounted for $314 million of the $803 million dollars they made. Columbia produced such hits as Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless in house at the height of their popularity. Through their Screen Gems subdivision (which stands as a theatrical distributor today, as well) they controlled four of the top five syndicated television titles: Charlie's Angels, WKRP in Cincinnati, Bewitched, and The Flintstones.

While they were very comfortable with network television, their hesitance to embrace cable and home video was leaving them behind. Unlike their rivals at Paramount, Fox, Disney, and Universal, Columbia didn't have their own cable network. Instead of embracing home video as a new frontier, Columbia became the first major studio to dip their toe into the world of Pay-Per-View programming with the Premiere Channel, which lasted a little over a year and was axed after operating at a near $50 million loss.

Of main interest to Coca-Cola was the fact that next to television revenues, the second highest source of income for Columbia Pictures (at $288 million and change) came from the in house production of television commercials. Columbia, since the late 1970s, had been exclusively cutting together all the commercials for General Motors, Sears, and NBC. Coke knew that of all the major studios, Columbia would be the cheapest and most marketable one to go after. It was on stable financial ground and no other major studio had seemingly mastered the visual art of selling a product.

Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Roberto Goizueta loved to talk about the purchase of Columbia by using beverage related analogies:

"You can't be a national force in soft drinks without a syrup plant and in entertainment, you need a movie company."

"We believe the thirst we quench with our drinks is no greater than the thirst for entertainment."

Such seeming ignorance and outright incongruity for the business brings to light a key problem with the Coca-Cola purchase of Columbia. Coca-Cola was clearly not a media outlet. The distribution of a beverage was not equal to music licensing, publishing, or pay TV. But one thing that worked to Columbia's advantage was that Coca-Cola, one of the biggest corporations of any kind in the world, had very deep pockets and a lot of expendable income.

As soon as Coca-Cola took over, production on the film side of Columbia nearly quadrupled. In 1982 and 1985, Columbia released 21 films. Not combined. In each year. And that was just Columbia PROPER. Those numbers don't even include films produced by the Columbia subdivision of Tri-Star or their distribution of films made through a partnership with the still independent New Line Cinema.

In 1983, Columbia entered into a partnership with CBS and HBO to create Tri-Star Pictures. Posited as its own company and poised to become the 8th major studio at the time, Tri-Star was not merely a genre subdivision of a larger company. Unfortunately for Columbia and everyone else involved, Tri-Star only had three of its first twelve releases turn profits (The Natural, The Muppets Take Manhattan, and Places in the Heart). CBS got cold feet and backed out, but HBO stuck around... somewhat.

In a somewhat historic deal in late 1984, the same year the original Ghostbusters debuted, HBO sold back their stake in Tri-Star to Columbia in exchange for something unprecedented. One full year after a Columbia or Tri-Star release debuted in theatres, it would debut exclusively on HBO. No other studio up until that point had ever agreed to such an agreement with a pay cable network. Retroactive to their releases, all of the formerly failed Tri-Star releases became profitable through the HBO agreement. No film released by Tri-Star would be a financial loser until the release of Rambo III in 1988. The beauty of that being that Columbia barely even put up any of the money for the actual production of what was then the most expensive motion picture ever made. Most of Rambo III was privately funded by Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar's Carolco production company.

The relationship between Coca-Cola and Columbia was working quite well for the first couple of years, but things would turn considerably more bitter and acrimonious just past the halfway point of the decade. For what it's worth, Coca-Cola would give Columbia Pictures the biggest blockbuster they ever had, and in 1984 they proved they could be actual contenders in an ever changing marketplace.

Who You Gonna Call?

The making of the original Ghostbusters film is a topic that has been covered in tremendous detail in numerous forms of media before this piece. Many of the sources for the making of Ghostbusters come directly from the mouths of the people involved in the making of it. I offer up what is essentially the Cliff Notes version, but I urge anyone who is interested to look into any of the sources I used for this piece or the fairly comprehensive special features on the Blu-ray for the film. Since there is information that is pertinent to an understanding of the crafting of the sequel, I am going to give you all the "five cent tour."

The original script for Ghostbusters was drafted by actor Dan Aykroyd, a noted and avid enthusiast of all things paranormal in nature, shortly after his work on The Blues Brothers. It was written as a megabudget outer space set action-comedy-thriller that would co-star his friend and frequent collaborator John Belushi. The pair would play paranormal bounty hunters with the ability to transcend time and space. It would take place on different astral planes with the Ghostbusters almost acting like the Green Lantern corps (only if the interplanetary police force was made up of private contractors that all hated each other).

Blues Brothers director John Landis passed on the project as he thought it was simply unfilmable. Up and coming director Joe Dante would also pass for similar reasons. Universal wanted nothing to do with Aykroyd's script because The Blues Brothers was already one big budget nightmare they had been through. Ghostbusters was going to cost at least three times what Blues Brothers did, and that was one of the most expensive films ever made.

Sadly, Belushi would pass away from a drug overdose while Aykroyd was shopping the script around to potential studios. The first person to show an interest in the project as it stood was actor Bill Murray. The former Saturday Night Live alum read his old castmate's script and thought the whole idea was crazy enough to work. Murray was more than willing to step into the sidekick role and was particularly taken by two things from Aykroyd's pitch that would become iconographic: the Ghostbusters corporate logo and the design of the Ghostbusters' uniforms.

Aykroyd brought his script to producer and director Ivan Reitman at the suggestion of Murray. Reitman, whom Aykroyd had known only in passing and by reputation through actors and comics working in Toronto, was on a bit of a hot streak after having produced National Lampoon's Animal House and having directed Murray in the sleeper hit Meatballs. Reitman saw the germ of a good idea in Aykroyd's script, but agreed with previous assessments that it was patently unfilmable as is.

Reitman would make many of the key decisions that would turn Ghostbusters into a marketable property. Reitman suggested first and foremost that the action be toned down for budgetary reasons. By many accounts, Aykroyd's original draft called for an effects laden action sequence every four or five pages out of a 129 page draft. Instead of having ghostbusting be an already established profession like it was in the original draft, Reitman thought the film should be an origin story about the nature of the job. The film would be much more accepted if it took place on Earth in a single North American city and with real people doing real things that audiences could relate to. Reitman encouraged Aykroyd to leave in all the heady paranormal concepts that he deeply believed in, but he needed to make it all more accessible to studios and average audiences.

Reitman also suggested that Aykroyd collaborate on the impending rewrite with SCTV and fellow Second City alum Harold Ramis, the director of Caddyshack (which he also wrote) and National Lampoon's Vacation and the writer of Stripes and Animal House. While both men knew comedy, Ramis would bring the reality to a script that really needed it.

Murray was still on board should the film get made thanks to his previous work with Ramis and Reitman. Of the four principals of the series, Murray was the only person with no say in the writing process. He was actually off filming his first dramatic role in The Razor's Edge, a passion project of Murray's, when the final draft was submitted. Not that it really made any difference. Reitman, Aykroyd, and Ramis all knew that Murray was one of the most talented improvisationalists working. If Murray thought it would be funny to make something up on the spot, no one was really going to stop him.

Reitman first approached Frank Mancuso Sr. at Paramount with the completed script, but was turned down. He then took the script to a very enthusiastic Frank Price, then CEO and chairman of Columbia Pictures, who loved what he read so much that he essentially pressed the panic button and sent the film into almost immediate production. Flush with Coca-Cola money, Price didn't balk at Reitman's $25 million budget and essentially let Reitman and company do whatever they wanted with one important caveat. Ghostbusters, which was greenlit in March of 1983, had to be ready for release by the summer of 1984. Price was already in danger of losing his job. Coke wanted a hit and Columbia had nothing scheduled that would ever be able to compete with Paramount's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Warner Brothers' Gremlins. Price wouldn't stick around long enough at Columbia to see the release of Ghostbusters, but his instincts were spot on.

Ghostbusters helped give Columbia its best market share of any year in the 1980s. In 1984, they finished second only to Paramount, but the cultural relevancy of Ghostbusters led to an even bigger windfall in terms of ancillary sales. Worldwide Ghostbusters took in close to $400 million at the box office alone and in some markets beat out Temple of Doom as the biggest film of the year. No one was technically under contract for a sequel, but as early as Ghostbusters' opening weekend people were talking about it. Financially it all made perfect sense, and while the majority of the cast and crew didn't fully object to a sequel, no one was more hesitant and hateful towards the idea of a Ghostbusters sequel than the man who would replace Frank Price as the head of Columbia.

The Killing Fields

"Artists and those who work for them have a high moral responsibility to the audience." - David Puttnam, Columbia chairman and CEO at a 1986 British Press luncheon

In late 1984, British film producer David Puttnam was brought in to replace Frank Price as the chairman of Columbia Pictures. By September 1986, he would add CEO to his job title. Puttnam had gained numerous critical notices and awards for his work on The Killing Fields, Local Hero, and Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire. Puttnam saw himself as an "artist" in the truest sense of the word and felt that no matter the circumstances, films should always be about quality first and never about the money. Needless to say, Puttnam didn't last very long at Columbia and he was seen by his corporate overlords at Coca-Cola as being antagonistic, impossible to work with, and with harbouring an anachronistic view of how Hollywood works. Why Puttnam was hired is still anyone's guess as no one has ever gone on record to fully take credit or spell out why a "prestige" filmmaker was given the reigns to a major studio in the first place.

From the moment Puttnam entered Columbia, the sequel hating CEO never caved to pressure to make follow-ups to the three biggest hits in the Columbia library: Jagged Edge, The Karate Kid, and Ghostbusters. Ultimately, a sequel to Karate Kid was out of his hands as the agreement to make a follow-up was finalized a scant six hours before Puttnam was hired. It didn't stop Puttnam from firing everyone who bankrolled the film. It didn't stop Puttnam from openly bashing his studio's own film in the press. It also didn't stop Karate Kid II from outgrossing the original film and from putting pressure on Puttnam to make a third entry.

Puttnam's undying hatred of sequels even extended to films over on the Tri-Star side which were usually funded largely by outside interests, especially the Rambo sequel, First Blood Part II. Puttnam started a nasty war of words with Sylvester Stallone and Carolco by saying that if he knew the film was going to be profitable, Columbia never would have released it.

Along with his aversion to sequels, Puttnam had a hatred for "star packages," films that were brought to a studio by an agent with a star and director already attatched. The most notorious star package Puttnam passed on was the Norman Jewison/Cher vehicle Moonstruck, which would ultimately revive a fledgling MGM and win numerous awards. The awards didn't matter to Puttnam. It was all "big budget hokum." He was never repentant in his ways, and as a result, Columbia rarely landed any truly big films during his tenure.

A major thorn in the side of Puttnam was the $45 million, four years in production albatross that was Ishtar. Production on the Elaine May directed desert based road film with Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman was too costly to pull the plug on before a single frame of film was even shot thanks to play or pay agreements with the three primary participants. The failure of Ishtar would become synonymous with Hollywood greed and excess, but Puttnam was entirely blameless. Ishtar, which did debut at number one when released but only by a scant $5,000 over Canadian horror import The Gate in the closest margin of victory in box office history, started production before he took the job, and it proved Puttnam's point that star vehicles were evil.

To some degree, Puttnam saw a Ghostbusters sequel as something that was sadly a foregone conclusion, but it would never go forward unless his personal demands were met. Puttnam insisted that the film be made cheaper than the original and with an all new cast or the film would not be made at all. Ghostbusters II in his eyes had become a star vehicle thanks to Hollywood super agent Michael Ovitz.

Ovitz, the head of the Creative Artists Agency, wasn't quite the king of the world in 1986, but he was well on his way. Ovitz and his agency laid claim to most of the biggest talents in Hollywood. Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Spielberg. All Ovitz clients. Going into the first Ghostbusters film Ovitz already claimed Reitman, Murray, and Ramis as clients. Aykroyd became an Ovitz client in the writing stages. Sigourney Weaver joined CAA during the production. Ovitz laid claim to fourth Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson and Rick Moranis shortly after the release of the film. Ovitz had the full Ghostbusters play set and Puttnam wouldn't let him do anything fun with it.

The underlying irony in all this is that Puttnam, in conjunction with parent company Coca-Cola, created one of the biggest, most ego driven failures of all time with no help from any agents. Puttnam greenlit the largely, and VERY obviously Coke funded Bill Cosby debacle Leonard Part 6. Coca-Cola saw the film as a great piece of corporate synergy that would team the film side of their empire with the biggest corporate spokesperson their primary product had.

Puttnam could never distance himself from just how terrible Leonard Part 6 turned out because he was personally invested in the project every step of the way. As written on the page, Puttnam thought the film was a bit of a kindred spirit. It was a "farce" of a big budget spy film (Puttnam was, as you might have guessed, and outspoken opponent of the James Bond franchise while in the UK) that "spoofed" franchise filmmaking by creating a sequel to a film that never existed in the first place. In a further bit of personal involvement that smacks of cronyism, Puttnam hand picked British TV director Paul Weiland to direct because he thought a British sensibility would suit the film well and play well alongside the work of Cosby.

What Puttnam ended up with was an astoundingly unfunny film with no sensibility whatsoever that managed to alienate the film's star to a great degree. Cosby hated it so much that he directly and knowingly took a page out of Puttnam's own playbook and openly trashed the film on late night talk shows and in the press, begging people not to go to his movie. When the film cleaned up at the Razzie awards for 1987, Cosby showed up and was certain to thank David Puttnam for all his help.

Puttnam had only one film during his entire tenure that was both a critical and financial success. The Last Emperor was a Best Picture winner and the highest grossing film in the career of director Bernardo Bertolucci. Actually, that wasn't even his success. Columbia was merely the distributor of the film and there was really no risk or huge profit involved. In fact, the very prestige films that might have led to Coca-Cola hiring Puttnam in the first place proved to be his downfall.

During his tenure, Puttnam turned Columbia from a company that was making a $700 million profit to one that lost nearly $300 million. Putnam was fired in December of 1987 and replaced by Dawn Steel, but Puttnam's increased production of artsier fare hurt Columbia all the way through the end of 1989. The Beast, Me and Him (which was about a talking penis), Little Nikita, True Believer, and Hope and Glory were all costly failures Puttnam was responsible for that weren't completed or released until after his departure. Another troubled Puttnam production was also on its way to becoming the biggest box office money loser of all time: Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Charles Kipps of Variety, in a piece written shortly after Puttnam's ouster, effectively breaks down what Puttnam did to Coca-Cola:

"At twenty-five cents a pop on the wholesale market - about twelve cents profit - the soft drink maker would have to sell over two billion bottles of Coke to offset a $270,000,000 loss. Add a requisite couple hundred million for prints and advertising and Coke might have to increase that to four billion units."

Frank Price, Puttnam's predecessor, chimed in during the same piece:

"A 20 million dollar picture with names has less risk than a 10 million dollar picture without names. You have tangible aspects - video, foreign sales, and so on - with major actors and directors. Without them there is a huge risk and you can lose all the money. In fact, you probably will."

Almost the very second that Puttnam was out the door, the multiyear wait for a Ghostbusters sequel (as well as a third Karate Kid film) was over, but the spectre of Puttnam would loom large over the production of what was supposed to be a sure thing, and by the time we reach the conclusion, it will be apparent that it still hangs over the entire potential franchise today.

I Guess We're Gonna Have to Take Control

At the same luncheon that gave us the David Puttnam quote that started the last section, Puttnam was expressly asked about Ghostbusters and an offhanded remark was made about how much he didn't appreciate the film's biggest star, Bill Murray.

"[He is] an actor who makes millions off his movies, but gives nothing back to his art. He's a taker."

Murray honestly couldn't have given a fuck less since he was already planning on holding out on any sort of Ghostbusters sequel for his own more personal reasons. The combination of not being prepared for superstardom and the failure of his personal passion, The Razor's Edge, made Murray take an extended break from acting. For four years, Murray lived just outside of Paris and was perfectly content to not work.

Murray returned to the screen to film the Christmas themed black comedy Scrooged, written by his friend and former SNL writer Mitch Glazer. What was originally supposed to be a pitch black anti-Christmas comedy, ended up being a film that Murray would loudly badmouth after the release of the film. Murray blames Paramount and director Richard Donner for softening the more horrific elements of Glazer's script in favour of the kind of effects laden blockbuster that he was trying to get away from. In an interview conducted shortly before shooting began on Ghostbusters II, a thoroughly exhausted Murray was asked if he would ever work with Richard Donner again, to which he replied "Over my dead, lifeless body." He may or may not have been joking. Such is the enigma that is Bill Murray.

During production on the physically demanding Scrooged (another aspect of that production that Murray wasn't prepared to deal with), Murray received a phone call from Dan Aykroyd. The story for Ghostbusters II was ready and Michael Ovitz wanted to bring everyone together for lunch to discuss the next step. Murray audibly sighed into the phone and said: "Well, fuck it. I'm here now, anyway."

Murray's flippancy and slight annoyance did mask a certain happiness to be working with familiar faces again. The experience of making the first Ghostbusters never soured him on the idea of a sequel. Plus, anything was going to be better than Scrooged which Murray went on record saying he "carried" by himself.

Aykroyd had the plot of Ghostbusters II hashed out since the spring of 1985, but Putnam refused to read anything. Ramis was busy on other projects and Aykroyd was hesitant to bring him on if there was a chance the film would never be made. Since Columbia owned the rights to all Ghostbusters films in perpetuity, Aykroyd couldn't exactly shop the idea around, either.

Ovitz lined the hotel conference room in Santa Barbara with various merchandise and memorabilia from the first film to emphasize nostalgia and drive home the point that Ghostbusters II was going to mean an enormous pay day for everyone involved. Ovitz had known the financial implications of a sequel for years. The CAA had commissioned numerous focus groups and telephone surveys aimed at average filmgoers. Over the past several years, if Ovitz and his number crunchers were correct, a Ghostbusters sequel would make upwards of $280 million in the United States alone.

What was supposed to be a simple lunch turned into a seven hour marathon where a lot of dirty financial laundry needed to be aired. Ramis and Aykroyd were put off by the large back end (profit sharing) deals that Ovitz got for Murray and Reitman on the first film. (We will explore back end deals in far more detail with Batman next time.) Murray simply wanted more money. Reitman, in addition to wanting more money, wanted an entirely new contract to ensure that someone like David Puttnam could never interfere with his potential franchise ever again.

Not present at the meeting, but still in need of appeasement were the other three main faces from the original film. Ernie Hudson didn't want more money (necessarily), but he did want a bigger part as his character was now implied to be a full fledged member of the Ghostbuster team. Rick Moranis needed a much smaller role that could be largely filmed separately from the leads since he was already in production on two other films slated for release in the summer of 1989: Disney's tent pole Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (opening a week after Ghostbusters and alongside Batman, causing Moranis to back out of any press for Ghostbusters II) and Universal's Parenthood. Sigourney Weaver, who never really got along famously with Murray on set, was also due for a more naturally occurring pay raise thanks to the Oscar buzz surrounding her nomination for Aliens and the upcoming nod for Gorillas in the Mist.

The financials all worked themselves out relatively easily and in a way that the now cash strapped Columbia could bring the film in at a slightly bigger budget than the original. Pretty much everyone got what they wanted. Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis all agreed to appear in the film for scale with huge back end deals. Aykroyd and Ramis, in addition to writing fees, would receive 6.4% of Ghostbusters II profits. Murray would see 15% of the profits and no other paycheck other than scale rate. Weaver, Moranis, and Hudson all got increased pay, but no back end deals. Reitman cut his salary in half and got the same 6.4% as Ramis and Aykroyd, and got his new contract, arguably coming out of the meeting as the biggest victor. Thanks to these deals, the budget of Ghostbusters II was set at a reasonable $30 million, only $5 million more than the original.

So much time was spent discussing financials that no one really wanted to talk about Aykroyd's story, which had once again remained unchecked by anyone. The plot of the film remained mainly intact. The Ghostbusters became shells of their former selves, reduced to hosting public television shows and dressing up for children's birthday parties. They are called back into action by a wave of literal negativity that had been oozing under the streets of New York City. The character of Vigo the Carpathian, an evil painting that wants to come to life, was originally supposed to possess Dan Aykroyd's character of Ray for a large chunk of the film, causing Ray to sabotage the Ghostbusters and terrorize the city. Aykroyd had envisioned the character of art gallery owner Janosz (played by Peter MacNicol) as being Dana's ex-husband and father of her newborn child. He also saw Rick Moranis' character of Louis Tully as being trained by the remaining Ghostbusters as Ray's replacement.

Reitman wasn't entirely keen on the story. He preferred seeing the Ghostbusters as a unit and not divided. He also thought Aykroyd's take was too heady and dark, and it often became preachy regarding areas where religion and the paranormal intersect. The abundance of action sequences in Aykroyd's draft again detracted from the pacing and comedy of the film. Ramis and Reitman reworked the script with Aykroyd with all of them agreeing to keep things as simple as possible and similar in tone to the original. Many of Aykroyd's original ideas still made the final film, but most of them are at the very beginning or shoehorned into the final act.

Dana's husband was also changed at the behest of studio chair Dawn Steel who thought the film needed more comedic relief in the wake of the suddenly largely unavailable Moranis. The result being an often maddeningly inconsistent backstory for Weaver's character that no one really had time to go back and fix before a writer's strike hit and the film had to go into production.

The other major thing that Steel and Columbia wanted was more action. Steel actually quite preferred Aykroyd's original treatment and wanted a lot of the action sequences that Reitman and Ramis jettisoned put back into the film. Knowing that the summer of 1989 was shaping up to be the summer of sequels and spectacles, the studio heads wanted more action and more special effects in their films almost across the board. Reitman caved mostly because he knew that unlike the original film, which was largely a quickie production, he would have an extra six months to pull everything together.

The shooting on the film itself was largely boring and uneventful for everyone except Reitman and the effects department. The cast got along as well as they did before with no huge conflicts. The jokes on paper and in dailies seemed as funny as the original. Ghostbusters II was most assuredly going to be a return to a winning formula, but in on set interviews, the cast didn't seem to be particularly engaged with Ramis and Murray in particular knowing that they were making a film that was more of a product than a piece of original entertainment.

"The only real fun is the acting part of it. The rest has so many negatives to it." - Bill Murray in Rolling Stone, 1 June 1989

"Some comedies satisfy the requirements of art and some are gratuitous pandering. We're somewhere in between." - Harold Ramis, Rolling Stone, 1 June 1989

"To make another Ghostbusters just to make money, you just wouldn't feel good about it. You'd feel creepy. You can exploit the ghostbusters because you've got a sort of built-in powerhouse going, as long as you think of it not as a way to make more money and sell more toys or cereal or whatever the hell, but as a framework to work within. You know you've got an interest built in. There are people who want to see this thing and we have some ideas that will fit in. You can see how it can work." - Bill Murray, Marquee Magazine, May 1989

While the cast was going through the paces in a largely autonomous fashion, Reitman had his hands full. With much of the special effects team from the first film hard at work on other 1989 projects like Indiana Jones (on the digital side) and Batman (on the practical side), many of the big, new set pieces Columbia wanted just weren't working out as well as Reitman had hoped. The new scenes just weren't scary enough or funny enough. Many of these sequences were cut after only being partially filmed or were worked into smaller montages.

The cuts largely didn't matter to Columbia as they knew they were going to get what they paid for. They had their Ghostbusters sequel that they waited almost five year to get off the ground and they felt as if they could genuinely defeat the more iconic brand names of Indiana Jones and Batman. Indy was losing steam and Batman was a high risk gamble for Warner Brothers. The summer plan for Columbia was simple: release Ghostbusters II and the low risk Karate Kid III in June in the weeks around Batman and not to worry about coming up with anything else.

Warner Brothers and Batman had already staked out all the best places for billboard and print advertising for the summer and two Prince songs from the Batman soundtrack were already in heavy radio rotation as early as late April. Columbia tapped a then fresh faced Bobby Brown to counter the Batman soundtrack with a new single titled "On Our Own," but Brown was no Prince and the single underperformed.

The biggest promotional edge that Columbia had over Batman was the Ghostbusters cast; a crew of comedians who would charm television talk show viewers and newspaper and magazine readers alike. From Johnny Carson to Oprah Winfrey, theme shows were built around the Ghostbusters cast and crew. The onslaught of promotion was inescapable on television. Cover stories about Ghostbusters II ran in almost every major industry publication from Rolling Stone to Cinefex. If Batman's backers, John Peters and Peter Guber, were going to dominate the line of sight in everyday America, Columbia was going to give the public infotainment.

While Columbia was worried about Batman dominating Ghostbusters' second week of release, they thought their film would have legs, or the ability to drum up consistent, if slightly diminishing business. Their increased production schedule had yielded nothing but losses for the past three years. Ghostbusters II was Columbia's last chance to prove to Coke that they were on the front lines of the new media wave.

The content of the film was never Columbia's biggest concern. The biggest concern for them was that no one was sure if nostalgia for the first film was going to be enough to sell the sequel. Except Weaver, who was undoubtedly a second banana here but to this day remains the only actress other than Angelina Jolie who could sell an action film to a largely male audience, none of the leads had a hit in years. Coming off his four year sabbatical, Murray's Scrooged did well, but not THAT well. Aykroyd proved time and again that he couldn't open a film with failures like Spies Like Us and Doctor Detroit. Ramis had only gotten story credit on one flop and directed another one (Armed and Dangerous and Club Paradise, respectively) since Ghostbusters. Nostalgia for the old was going to have to sell a film that was promising audiences more of the same. The actual star power Ovitz had espoused to the studio was suddenly a cause for concern.

The Business

Budget: $30 million
Opening Weekend: $29.5 million, largest non-holiday opening weekend in history (at the time)
Percent drop in business in second week: 53%, second largest weekend drop in history (at the time, set the previous week by Star Trek V: The Final Frontier's 56% drop)
Final Domestic Box Office Gross: $112 million
Total Back End Profits (made by cast, director, producers, and agents): $46 million
Total Advertising and Marketing Costs: $35 million
Total Domestic Profit: $1 million
Screened in Toronto at York (THX), Market Square, Showcase, Fairview (THX), Humber

What the Critics Said

"The marketing boys have been at the script somewhere along the line, and the curious stab at sincerity in the finale rings utterly false... There are sequels which can overcome the taint of commercial calculation that hangs over them. This is not among those films." - John Harkness, NOW Toronto

"Ghostbusters 2 has a goofy, silly innocence, a perfect summery giddiness as frail and lovely as gossamer." - Bruce Blackadar, Toronto Star

What Bill Murray Said

"I made a sequel, and it's hard, it's really hard to make a sequel, no matter how sincere you are, how much you want to try. Somehow the directors take over from the writers and the comedians, and the thing ends up being a lot more action than comedy. Action is a lot easier to direct than comedy. It used to be that if a movie opened up and did a couple of million on its opening weekend, that was a big deal. It's not like that anymore. They do these big TV buys now. They spend so much money, it's really scary. We're going to spend $3 million on Monday. It's like an army invasion. And when the movies open, all the papers print charts showing which movie grossed the most that weekend. I don't know why, because in theory only a couple of studios are going to profit from releasing that kind of information. And I don't know why they print it -- if they think it's news, or they think it makes people interested in movies." - interview with Roger Ebert dated 13 July 1990

Matt Brown Remembers

Ghostbusters 2, though, was probably the key point of my education. I remember coming home after seeing that movie – probably at one of the two theatres that no longer exist at St. Clair and Yonge – and when my parents asked me if it was good, saying “Yeah” with such unenthusiasm that no one was fooled, even myself. Ghostbusters 2 is a grim, grimy, utterly unfunny, utterly unenthusiastic sequel. It just isn’t fun to watch, introducing uncomfortable complications like the between-films dissolution of Peter and Dana’s relationship, and Dana’s bastard son Oscar, for reasons I now know to be clumsy-headed plot-building, but which at the time just felt like scenes from a completely different movie airlifted into something I was supposed to enjoy. Likewise, the Ghostbusters had been drummed out of New York City for having saved it in Ghostbusters 1, a note of dark comedy which I can appreciate as an adult but which is utterly lost on a 12-year-old boy. It was, and is, a thoroughly depressing movie. And the film ends with a duplication of the original film’s climax so precise that even at that age, I knew I was being spoon-fed warmed-over oatmeal. What a stupid film.

Ghostbusters 2, like many of the sequels that summer, was a product of studio arrogance, and a bygone time. When a movie didn’t have enormous tentpole competition and could count on a platform release keeping it in theatres for four to six months instead of four to six weeks, maybe it seemed like a safer bet to make weak-ass sequel property and shovel it into the multiplexes for every single customer of the original film to purportedly enjoy. And compared to a lot of other bombs in the history of the world, Ghostbusters 2 did pretty well, all things considered, at the box office. But boy, it is such an exceptionally shame-faced film that it has actually stopped the recent development of Ghostbusters 3 dead in a very personal, very honest way: Bill Murray is so particularly ashamed of the phoning-it-in-ness of Ghostbusters 2 that he has, as of yet, refused to even read the script for the new film.

But there was that horrible lesson in it, for me: the lesson that movies could be not good. I guess it took me a surprisingly long time to come around to this fact, but I just loved movies so much when I was a kid that coming upon one that I knew, instinctively, didn’t work, was something I was actually unequipped to articulate. I didn’t know movies had a “not good” option on the polling machine, until I saw Ghostbusters 2 (or later that year, Back to the Future 2). It took a while before I could admit to others, or even to myself, that something that was part of my family of movie heroes could be disappointing or even poor. Ghostbusters 2 kicked off my disillusionment.

CinemaScope's Adam Nayman Doesn't Remember

"There was a Ghostbusters 2?" - joking email response to me when asking local critics their thoughts about doing a Defending the Indefensible screening of Ghostbusters II

Reactions from the Toronto Underground Cinema staff when I said I am officially choosing Ghostbusters II as a Defending the Indefensible title

"No fucking way. That movie's just as good as the first. It's not indefensible if it made $112 million in 1989 money!" - Alex Woodside, manager

"There are scenes in Ghostbusters II that outdo scenes from the first film. The courtroom scene in the second film is better than almost any of the effects pieces in the first film. It's an 80s sequel. What more do you want?" - Charlie Lawton, manager

"It doesn't belong. You're out of your fucking mind." - Morgan White, dirctor/creator The Rep

What commentors on Twitter stated back in October when the Underground screened a double bill of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II (names omitted)

"I'm definitely taking the fuck off after the first one."

"OMG. I can't wait! Never saw GB2 on the big screen, but it has a bad rep."

"Ghostbusters 2 SUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKSSSS."

"You couldn't have found a better Bill Murray movie to run after the original?"
"Does it still have Peter Venkman in it? Then we are all good. Ghostbusters 2 rocks."

"Well, it's not the first film, but at least it's funny."

"This movie sucks ass. Same with Men In Black II and Star Wars Episode 1. How could they fuck it so badly?!?"

"Ghostbusters 2 just gets shit because the original was so good that nothing could really surpass it. It's not a bad movie."

Andy Says

I genuinely like Ghostbusters II. I really do. It certainly isn't as original as its predecessor, but it is funny and it doesn't make the audience hate itself for liking it. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Look at the numbers and some of the nastier comments and reviews and tell me again that Ghostbusters II wasn't a failure. Logically there is no way you can make me believe that this film was as big of a success as some of the film's most ardent defenders seem to think it is. Ovitz couldn't have been further off in his estimations and the deals made to get the film into production in the first place let to a "profit" of one million dollars before taking into account print costs and shipping. The deal that Columbia made with HBO and home video put Ghostbusters II firmly in the black (overseas the film tanked and made less than $20 million, getting destroyed by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), but that in no way undercuts what a critical and financial misfire the film was on its theatrical release.

(While on the topic, many people have suggested that Ghostbusters II made a profit based on licensing fees and toy sales. It is a well documented, but not very often discussed fact that no Ghostbusters spin off product ever turned a large profit. The backlog of Ghostbusters merchandise was so bad that Columbia commissioned the animated television series The Real Ghostbusters, simply as a way to re-purpose and sell off backstock. The cartoon was such a hit that it spawned its own vastly more successful toy line. The animated toy line outsold proper Ghostbusters II toys in 1989 by a rate of 3 to 1.)

Ghostbusters II was a film literally made by committee with the goal of generating the most money possible, and they failed in every conceivable way.

I included that litany of quotes to illustrate the somewhat visceral reactions that people seem to have when it comes to this film. This is what I have been dealing with every single time the film is brought up in conversation. Many people love the film. Heck, I don't love the film, but I really enjoy watching it. Several friends were downright offended that I would ever think of choosing Ghostbusters II as a candidate for my Defending the Indefensible series.

On the other side of the equation, a lot of people, including fans of the first film, detest Ghostbusters II. They decried the film as a piece of crap upon its release in much the same way that people were up in arms about the more recent sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers. They are just seen as lazy retreads of the same film simply designed to take money away from the viewer.

The biggest parallel between 1989 and today can be found when comparing Ghostbusters II to The Hangover Part II. It seems only fitting that Ghostbusters be compared to the film that bested it as the highest grossing comedy of all time. Both films are easily distilled pieces of high concept filmmaking. They both keep the plot structure of the original film and simply change a handful of key details. Both films are lauded and hated in the same ways. For as many people who thought the films gave them what they wanted, just as many seem to think of them as lazy cash-ins. (Although, unlike Ghostbusters II, I hate The Hangover Part II far more than the original, but that is a story for another time.)

Take this as an official announcment:

The July 28th Defending the Indefensible screening of Jennfer's Body is now postponed until later in the fall. Instead, following Equilibrium, at 7pm, will be Ghostbusters II at 9:15pm. The film will include a discussion between myself, Matt Brown (who will be attacking the film), and Torontoist's John Semley (who will be defending it, and was the only critic other than NOW's Norman Wilner with anything nice to say about the film) discussing the merits of such a sequel.

It is being paired with Equilibrium for a very good reason. Both films were failures upon their release and are loved and hated with an equal amount of energy. Both films are ones that I was cheered for selecting by some and vilified by others who have no clue why these films are "indefensible." One film I happen to like and the other film I happen to detest. And on July 28th, the day after my birthday, I look forward to never having to talk about either of them ever again.

Conclusion

By November of 1989, Coca-Cola was officially done with their experiment with film production. They sold Columbia Pictures to electronics giant Sony for $3.4 billion. At their year end shareholders meeting the very next month, Columbia Pictures was never mentioned. Not a single word.

Sony wasted no time imprinting their own style of corporate synergy by incorporating a nice bit of product placement in the 1990 Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro film Awakenings. A scene in the film finds Williams' character looking at the first ever High Definition television, a Sony Trinitron. The scene that features the television was also the first ever sequence in a major motion picture to be filmed in HD video. Unlike their partnership with Coca-Cola, at least Sony could provide Columbia with the tools necessary to move closer to "the cutting edge" Coke could never bring them to with a mere soft drink and a lot of cash.

In 1991, Coca-Cola would cross paths with an increasingly powerful Michael Ovitz in a historic deal. Ovitz became the agent for the entire Coca-Cola brand. It was the first time a major corporation was represented by a single agent for all matters regarding product placement and commercials.

Ovitz continued as the head of the CAA until 1995 when he was offered the job of president at Disney. He lasted there until January 1997 following a lack of productivity that Ovitz blamed on a poor outlining of his duties. He hasn't held a position of great power in Hollywood since, but in the case of ever seeing another Ghostbusters sequel, his shadow still looms large.

Many people seem to believe that the increasingly mercurial Bill Murray is the reason that a Ghostbusters sequel hasn't happened yet. While it is true that the sequel left a bad taste in Murray's mouth and a multi year fall out with Harold Ramis didn't help matters, he has actually been more receptive and excited by the idea of a sequel in recent years (albeit, only if his participation in a third film is diminished in capacity). He, in his usual fashion, goes back and forth as to whether or not the film will actually happen, In truth, there is a much bigger stumbling block to overcome than Murray.

There is a very good reason why Columbia only has two releases this summer with Bad Teacher and Zookeeper. (Attack the Block and Friends With Benefits come courtesy of their Screen Gems subdivision and even then they are only the distributor of the former.) Ghostbusters III seemed like a done deal and Sony cleared the release schedule accordingly. The film was set to take the aging Ghostbusters and have them train a new cast of comedic actors to that their place. 500 Days of Summer director Marc Webb was attached to direct and everything seemed to be in place until someone other than Murray played their trump card and Webb was assigned to helm next year's Spider-man reboot.

Ivan Reitman is the main reason we may never see another Ghostbusters film. The new contract alluded to from the Ghostbusters II negotiations included a clause that someone like David Putnam couldn't make a cheaper Ghostbusters film with a different cast. In his Ghostbusters II contract it states that no one other than Reitman is allowed to direct a Ghostbusters film. Furthermore, the contract states that Reitman will not make another Ghostbusters film if Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis are not directly involved. This would be fine if Columbia were to just make one final film, but they are adamant on reviving the entire franchise for a new generation. Reitman has effectively taken away Sony's ability to rebrand the Ghostbusters. For better, or worse.

At the Bell

There are a lot of key questions to think about here that everyone will have different answers to. Was David Puttnam right to hold off on a sequel? Do you agree with his ethics or think he was an egotistical madman? Was it possible that Columbia waited too long as a result to follow through on a Ghostbusters sequel? Is it really better to keep a sequel simple instead of upping the stakes, or does it breed contempt with the audience? What constitutes a good deal for a studio when making such a film? Are star packages and back end deals inherently evil or do they work for a greater good? How does all of this tie into the summer we currently find ourselves in with the proliferation of sequels? I can't answer these questions for you. Much like the film, you simply have to puzzle it out in your own mind with your own logic.

Prizes Added to the Prize Cache

A set of original Ghostbusters II lobby cards from 1989.

Next Week

Where does he get those wonderful toys. Batman gets released. Shit gets real.

Sources

Books

Block, Alex Ben, ed., Blockbusting, Harper Collins, 2010

Carter, Bill, The Late Shift, Hyperion, 1994

Litwak, Mark, Reel Power, Silman-James Press, 1986

McDonald, Paul, ed., The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, Blackwell Press, 2008

Prince, Stephen, American Cinema of the 1980s, Rutgers University Press, 2007

Prince, Stephen, History of the American Cinema Volume 10: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000

Puttnam, David, Movies and Money, Knopf, 1998

Shay, Don, ed., Making Ghostbusters, Zoetrope, 1985

Singular, Stephen, Power to Burn, Carol Publishing Group, 1996

Slater, Robert, Ovitz, McGraw Hill, 1997

Squire, Jason E. ed., The Movie Business Book, Third Edition, Simon & Schuster, 2004

Yule, Andrew, Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood, Delta, 1989

TV Shows and Films

The Oprah Winfrey Show - Airdate: 9 June 1989

The Tonight Show - Airdate: 12 June 1989

Ghostbusters 2 Electronic Press Kit

Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters 2

Leonard Part 6

Scrooged

Awakenings

Magazines and Newspapers

Bart, Peter, "The Ride and Demise of David the Didactic", Variety, 22 June 1997

Bernard, Jami, "Prime Slime With Ghostbusters", Fangoria, Issue #84, July 1989

Collins, Keith, "A Tale of Two Chairs", Variety, 28 August 2005

Ebert, Roger, "Bill Murray Makes a Quick Change", Chicago Sun-Times, 13 July 1990

Eisenberg, Adam, "Ghostbusters Revisited", Cinefex, Issue #40

Goldstein, Patrick, "Return of the Money Making Slime", Rolling Stone, 1 June 1989

Morrison, Adam, "Ghostbusters Return the Call", Marquee, May 1989

Spelling, Ian, "Bill Murray Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts!", Starlog, Issue #140, March 1989

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-06-27T23:38:00.004-04:00

Transformers: Dark of the Moon opens in theatres everywhere on Wednesday, June 29th. Special advance preview screenings start at selected theatres on Tuesday, June 28th.

It's time for some "real talk", guys. I can't think of any other way to approach this review. I will keep it brief since Transformers: Dark of the Moon director Michael Bay can't seem to do it himself. Do you just want to see some shit blow up? Then you will probably greatly enjoy this film a whole lot more than the second entry in the franchise since you will actually be able to SEE what is happening for a change. Everyone else looking for anything more than that can look elsewhere because that is all you are going to get from this astoundingly pretty, but astoundingly empty, incoherent, nonsensical and excessive film.

I know, Michael Bay made an excessive film? The hell, you say with all the incredulity in the world. It isn't exactly a good thing or a bad thing. In fact, I am struggling at the moment with what I even thought of the film. Quite frankly, this film might have broken my brain entirely. Again, that isn't a good or a bad thing. While there is some undeniable entertainment value in the third film of the Transformers franchise, there is so much about it that I detested and made me want to gnaw my own hands off. One moment I openly wanted to stab myself in the chest with my pen, and then the next moment I was just in awe with the sheer spectacle of what I was seeing. Uneven doesn't begin to cover this film, nor does any synonym for it.

The story at the heart of Dark of the Moon really isn't a bad one in theory, but it is botched in terms of practice and common sense. It turns out that the Apollo 11 mission was actually a cover by the United States government to retrieve pieces of an alien craft that crashed into the moon. On this ship was Sentinel Prime (voiced by Leonard Nimoy), one of the good guy Autobots, who was protecting a bunch of pillars that could resurrect the home planet of these robots in disguise. Or something like that. I can't fully distill the plot of this movie into words (and writer Ehren Kruger seems to have a Joe Eszterhas like level of not caring to deliver a coherent story or even a single line of believable dialog), but apparently something really terrible will happen if the evil Decepticons get their hands on them. Like, something that could destroy the Earth by letting them land their planet on top of ours and could lead to the enslavement of the human race. All of this really puts a dent into the life of the unassuming hero of the series, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) who is just trying to get a post-university job, gain some respect for saving the world twice before, and is trying to keep his new girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, an actual big step down from Megan Fox, but at least a different character) from running away with her sleazy car collector boss (Patrick Dempsey, who is having more fun on screen being a jerk than should be legally allowed).

Lets start with the negatives first. This movie is stupid. Absolutely 1,010% brainless with not a single thing that makes a lick of sense even in a fantasy realm. The plot is so nonsensical and illogical that it's almost a work of art. The film continues with Bay's need to fetishize right wing American gung-ho ideals (Hi there, Bill O'Reilly cameo!) while pontificating endlessly about the true nature of freedom and how the military is the only hope the Western world has. Bay still hasn't lost the knack for filming a woman's ass with a tight close up, and the violence on display here is pretty depressing if one stops to think of the mechanics behind it. It doesn't matter if a robot or a human is being taken out, but they are almost undoubtedly beheaded or killed with a point blank head shot after being tortured first. It doesn't help that the film's first hour (of it's completely unnecessary two hour and forty minute running time) is deathly dull and largely devoid of anything special. Oh, and the racism that many people claim marred the second film is still largely on display, but this time instead of jive talking robots, they all have European accents, so that makes it, you know, all good, right? Oh, and there is an astoundingly unfunny gay panic scene with cinema's current favourite gay panic Asian Ken Jeong (playing a guy named Wang!), who needs to stop taking roles like this before he loses what little of the Community based good will that I have for him.

Lets move on to the positives. This film is stupid. It is absolutely in love with how incredibly stupid it is and it revels in knowing that the audience just wants to see robots fighting, buildings crumbling, and things just blowing up all over the place. Bay, who is actually an auteur when it comes to this kind of film, is back in full on Bad Boys 2 mode when it comes to the action set pieces, and his filmmaking has astoundingly improved. A lot of Bay's newfound technical prowess actually comes from the fact that he was working with 3D cameras this time around. While it is debatable if this film really even needs the 3D, it forced the director to not adopt his usual quick cutting style. The end result is a Transformers film where one can actually see the robots in great detail for longer takes that don't cut away immediately. Some of the fight sequences are still a blur of metal and blood-like oil spraying about, but for the most part, the action is top notch. The effects department and the stunt guys seem to have worked overtime to avoid the visual pandemonium of the previous film. The story is patently ridiculous, but it still manages a few clever twists along the way that up the stakes considerably. It helps that the cast all seem to know exactly what kind of film they are in. In addition to returning faces like LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, and John Turturro (who goes even further off the deep end with his character here, complete with a bodyguard played by an underutilized Alan Tudyk), there are some great supporting performances from series newcomers Frances McDormand (as a CIA operative) and John Malkovich (as Sam's new boss). The film also ends on a resolute note that is refreshing despite the chuckle worthy speech at the end of the film.

On one hand, the hand that controls my sense of logic and good taste, Dark of the Moon is one of the absolute worst things I have seen in years that simultaneously offended and saddened me. On the other hand, the one that absolutely loves cheesy action films and deep down gets some sort of sick pleasure out of seeing Michael Bay bring his A-game, Dark of the Moon is one of the most entertaining films of the summer. Looking for anything remotely resembling "good" would be asking a lot of this film. Don't go in expecting anything close to "quality." If you are looking for something that is "fun" or are looking for something to watch while on a sugar high, in the middle of an alcoholic bender, or while doing peyote, this is the greatest movie ever made.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

Green Lantern / Super 8

2011-06-17T13:31:00.003-04:00

Since there have been requests from several people, here are my thoughts on Green Lantern and Super 8 since I wasn't planning on covering them originally. You can check out the bulk of my reviews, including ones for this week's releases of Beginners, True Legend, The Art of Getting By, and Mr. Popper's Penguins over at CriticizeThis.ca.

Green Lantern

Saying that Green Lantern isn't the worst film to come out this week doesn't say very much in it's defense. It is quite handily one of the biggest disappointments of the summer season with very little to like about it. It's not particularly Elektra or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen "bad". It's more like "Daredevil" bad. It is the kind of bad movie that can only be made by really talented people that you almost want to give a mulligan to.

Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a maverick test pilot who just lost his job and put hundreds of people out of work, has just inducted into the interplanetary police corp, The Green Lanterns. His training goes less than smoothly and his first task is to take on a scientist who is literally possessed by fear (Peter Sarsgaard) and is working to bring about the end of the world alongside the amalgamation of all fear known as Parallax.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) is not a bad director and Reynolds is comfortable and assured in his lead role, toning down the smart ass routine for a bit and delivering something that the rest of the cast can't be asked to give, which is a performance. Sarsgaard should never again be asked to be in a film where he has to chew the scenery as much as he does here (it doesn't help that his character looks and is written like the idiosyncratic brother of Jennings from Howard the Duck). Blake Lively is given nothing to do as the love interest and Tim Robbins and Angela Bassett are completely wasted in throwaway roles where they can barely contain just how little they give a fuck about being in this film. Even future baddie-slash-current Lantern Sinestro (Mark Strong) really has nothing of substance to do.

Green Lantern will really only appeal to die hard fans of the comic as casual viewers will be utterly lost after the first two minutes of the film by just how hard the film tries to cram 40 years worth of backstory into the first 8 minutes of the film. It does a poor job explaining the basic mechanics of the Lantern world (one very brief, fleeting line of dialog does not make for an explanation), and the visual effects are so cut rate that it is just an ugly film to look at. Even worse, the film's climax betrays the logic the rest of the film has already tried to put in place. Just a maddening experience from start to finish, but there is definitely a decent film hiding in there somewhere.

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

Super 8

There isn't very much that can be said about J.J. Abrams' Super 8 without giving away any of the film's super secretive plot, but in truth, there is nothing about this straightforward and entertaining homage to the sci-fi films of the director's youth that needs to remain secret. It's a bunch of kids in the late 70s trying to make a zombie film who stumble upon a government cover-up that threatens to destroy the entire town. All the hemming and hawing that the film is simply worshiping at the altar of producer Steven Spielberg misses the point of the film, which is a love letter to all Earthbound science fiction spectacles that have been made since the 1950s. It contains elements of all films from Red Menace bug flicks to the current socially conscious films of today like Avatar and District 9. Having said that, the film is entertaining, but at times it plays a bit too much like a populist Quentin Tarantino film instead of an original idea. It is dizzying and overwhelming the number of references that Super 8 is able to cram into two hours. The finale is also beyond cheeseball and points out a lot of plotholes and contrivances that almost sour the entire experience. It's good, but not great.

Rating (out of five stars): ***

Summer of '89 Part 2: One Pole Sinks, Another Rises

2011-06-13T11:28:00.006-04:00

I remember saying that I was going to do a "tutorial" on Pink Cadillac during our last "class", but due to time constraints, that "tutorial" was cancelled, so it is where we will start today since we are going to be touching upon not one, but five movies today and none of them in as great of detail as we covered Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or we will be covering Batman or Ghostbusters 2 in the next few editions.

Pink Cadillac

There was another movie to be released alongside Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at the end of May, but very few would be keen on remembering it. Especially the film's star: Clint Eastwood.

Much like Spielberg, Clint Eastwood was in a bit of a slump at the box office and he was also, like Spielberg, about to enter into one of the more interesting eras in his long career. Pink Cadillac, however, is definitely from the chapter of the book that Eastwood would want to forget.

After Sudden Impact in 1983, Eastwood was largely hitless. Tightrope under performed. City Heat was an abject failure. Pale Rider and Heartbreak Ridge garnered some good critical notices, but the films could translate those reviews into boffo box office and both fell only slightly in line with Warner Brothers' expectations. In 1987, Dirty Harry Callahan got his send off in The Dead Pool, which yielded modest gains despite being the least in the series and not exactly setting the world on fire at the box office, and was probably better known for showcasing smaller roles from future megastars and the uncanny use of Guns N Roses' Welcome to the Jungle.

Eastwood's personal life was also a shambles in this period. His then wife Sandra Locke was about to file a $70 million palimony suit against him, claiming infidelity with numerous women, including his soon to be Pink Cadillac co-star Frances Fisher. It was a long, drawn out battle that was fought in a very public forum. The saddest moment of the whole affair probably came when Locke publicly admitted to having two abortions while married to Eastwood.

Eastwood wanted to do something light before pursuing what was then his labour of love, the thinly veiled John Houston "biopic" White Hunter, Black Heart. Pink Cadillac was a script that had been pushed on him for years with little interest, but now that Dead Pool director Buddy Van Horn was on board, Eastwood felt the familiarity would do him well if he were to take on the project. That's probably a good thing because Clint was about to be very much out of his element.

Pink Cadillac was intended to be a silly sort of throwback to the kind of films Eastwood made with Clyde the orangutan, only instead of a primate, the audience gets stage legend Bernadette Peters. Clint plays Tommy Nowack, a bounty hunter hired to hunt down Lou Ann McGuinn (Peters), who is on the run from her counterfeiter husband, in the titular stolen vehicle, who has managed to run afoul of a gang of white supremacists known as The Brotherhood.

How is any of this funny, one might ask? Because Tommy is a mater of disguise. Throughout the course of the film Eastwood adopts silly voices (with his already very distinct rasp) and even sillier costumes to play everything from a shock jock DJ to a casino high roller to a racist redneck (no Gran Torino jokes, please). Not relying too heavily on comedy, the second half of the film feels like more of a throw back to Clint's previous film The Gauntlet and becomes a typical shoot-'em up. That has to count for something, right?

Having such a can't miss premise means Warner Brothers had nothing to worry about with Pink Cadillac and could have focused on the vastly more troubled Lethal Weapon 2 and Batman.

Yeah, that was sarcasm.

Business (all figures unadjusted)

Opening Weekend: $6 million
Total Domestic Gross: $12 million
Screened in Toronto at Hollywood and Uptown

What the Critics Said

"Pink Cadillac is a mess and not for fans who prefer Clint Eastwood straight up. Though overlong (122 minutes) and tonally uneven, never quite getting its tonal shifts quite right, it is not unentertaining, and Eastwood is relaxed, even attempting comedy." - John Harkness, Now Toronto

"It is the laziest sort of action comedy, with lumbering chase scenes, a dull witted script, and the charmless pairing of Mr. Eastwood and Bernadette Peters." - Caryn James, The New York Times

"As a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster... interesting and unpredictable throughout." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Andy Says:

I remember last month, a friend of mine bought the huge Clint Eastwood Warner Brothers collection chronicling 35 of the films he made for them. I remember remarking how the set came with a free coaster since City Heat and Pink Cadillac were housed on the same disc. While neither is the worst film he has done (that's still Paint Your Wagon), they are really worthless.

The tone of the film is all off. Eastwood, for what it's worth, is having fun playing the clown, but it often feels like your crazy uncle has infiltrated your family barbecue and is off his meds again. Peters is clearly a stage actress and ever so barely stays afloat here. The subplot involving the white supremacists is as insipid as it sounds and the climax is far too dark for such lightweight material. Also, this in no way needed to be 122 minutes long.

It should be noted that this film features an actor who could have pulled off the role of Tommy better than Clint. Fellow Dead Pool co-star Jim Carrey, who made a very positive impression on Eastwood, has a bit part here. The script would still need work, but Carrey as a wisecracking master of disguise? That is something with potential to be a summer blockbuster.

I wonder if Martin Davis and Paramount CEO Frank Mancuso Sr., at the height of their animosity with Warner Brothers, shot up and said "Fuck yeah! Indy killed Pink Cadillac! In your face, bitches!" He might of, but I am almost positive Warner Brothers could have given a shit less either way. This was a film that seemed never destined to succeed.

Conclusion

There is no real explanation as to why Warner Brothers chose to counterprogram an Indiana Jones film with this. Was it in hopes of luring in the older crowd. Sometimes there just is no reason. That is a perfect example of counterprograming that doesn't work.

Clint would get his wish to make White Hunter, Black Heart, but after that film and Pink Cadillac, he would never take any big risks as an actor again. Whether the roles in his films were good or bad is up for debate, but all the roles he took post 1989 were safe bets. He would eventually take more chances as a director, but a huge part of Eastwood the actor died with Pink Cadillac.

To make matters worse, Cadillac made six times what the costlier White Hunter, Black Heart would make, forcing Eastwood to atone by directing and starring opposite Charlie Sheen in the buddy cop picture, The Rookie. His settlement with Locke would eventually come from the profits he made from his true comeback with Unforgiven in 1992.

The Also Rans

The week after Last Crusade and Pink Cadillac was a quiet week with two new releases that did very little to set the market on fire. The New Line Cinema (who was then still a fledgling independent biding their time until Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child dropped at the end of the summer), Columbia Pictures, World Wrestling Federation co-production No Holds Barred debuted at number two behind Last Crusade. If you ask Vince McMahon or Hulk Hogan, they will tell you they almost beat Indy for the top spot (if by almost, you mean made $18 million less in second place). The film quickly sank. Universal also released the buddy cop action film Renegades, starring Keifer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips to thunderous silence and a fourth place debut. Neither are entirely worth mentioning except out of curiosity and the need to be a completist.

Star Trek V: Where Few Men Have Gone Before

Let me start by saying that on a personal level, I have only a passing interest in the Star Trek series. I have done my research (and I could have done far, far more, but many texts involving the making of the films can not be easily accessed on short notice), but if I say anything that grossly contradicts something you have heard in terms of series canon (which I have no interest in discussing at the moment), please feel free to tell me or to, you know, keep it to yourselves. Matt Brown will be along later in this segment to nerd out with you guys. I'm just here to present the facts and context.

The Star Trek series of films seemed to defy the law of diminishing sequel returns. The fourth film in the franchise, The Voyage Home, was the first film in the series to cross the hundred million dollar mark domestically in 1986. The notion of a fifth film wasn't much of a stretch, but getting it made proved harder than originally forecast by Paramount. The again, thanks to the heel dragging of Star Trek's captain James T. Kirk, the making of the fourth film wasn't the easiest thing, either.

Leonard Nimoy was tapped to direct Star Trek IV based on his success helming the third film in the franchise. Depending on who you believe and who is actually telling the truth, William Shatner held up the filming of the fourth film due to extended contract negotiations. Ask anyone at Paramount and they will tell you that Shatner was jealous of Nimoy always getting what he wanted despite the fact that without Kirk you can't have a Star Trek film. Ask Shatner, and he will say that he was fighting alongside his fellow cast members in a battle for a greater cut of profits and residuals. Ask Nimoy, and he will tell you that he blasted Shatner in the press before the start of production on The Voyage Home. Ask Shatner about that and he will say Nimoy was in on the fix the entire time.

One thing about the whole "he said, she said" affair that is true is that in his Star Trek contract, Shatner had what is known as a "favoured notion clause." Essentially, that just means that whatever any of his fellow cast members get as perks, he also has to get. Apparently since Nimoy had now directed two films in the series, this now somehow entitled Shatner to ask to direct his own film in the series. Getting Paramount to agree to his request to write and direct a fifth film was surprisingly easy. Shatner cornered Paramount CEO Frank Mancuso Sr. at the premiere party for The Voyage Home and simply asked. Mancuso said yes on the spot, probably thinking that it would appease Shatner and that keeping the franchise largely in-house was the best idea.

Shatner, influenced by the rise of televangelists Jimmy and Tammy Fay Baker, set about to create a story about the crew of the Enterprise running afoul of a holy man named Sybok who claims to be the Messiah. Shatner and long time series producer Harve Bennett (who almost quit after having to deal with an increasingly demanding Nimoy on the fourth film) hashed out a story that went through the wringer more than several times. The actual scripting duties fell to David Loughery (Dreamscape, Flashback) who had to rush his job several times due to an ongoing writer's strike. By the end of the writing process, little remained of Shatner's original ideas (including the film's title which was changed from An Act of Love to The Final Frontier), and the story now centred on Sybok taking Federation hostages to a "holy land" known as Sha Ke Ree and hoping to find God. Oh, and Sybok also turned out to be Spock's brother. Late spoiler alert.

The production of the film itself was not only troubled because of the writer's strike, but because of a Teamsters strike just as the film was to start shooting. Scabs were used to make sure things got going on schedule, but when a production truck blew up on the Paramount lot the day before shooting was to commence, people seemed to take notice. The shoot began with tough exterior shooting at Yosemite National Park where everything that could go wrong did, from heat to trucks that were constantly breaking down. When the shoot switched to sound stages, it didn't go any easier thanks to cut rate practical effects courtesy of the notoriously tight fisted Mancuso, who was sinking most of his production budget into Last Crusade. It didn't help that Shatner was a bit of a hard ass on his cast and crew, constantly pushing them to the breaking point, especially in the early days of production.

The troubled production saw no solace in post production, either. The film was in need of heavy editing that Shatner could not bring himself to objectively oversee himself. Most of the film ended up being recut by Bennett to bring it down to a studio mandated running time of two hours or less. Making matters worse, the preferred special effects house for the past two Star Trek films, Industrial Light and Magic, was unable to accommodate the film. The ILM A-squad was busy on Last Crusade, while the B-team was heavily invested in Ghostbusters 2. The effects rendering was sent off to a much smaller company in Hoboken, New Jersey that had never attempted anything on this scale before.

Despite all the grumblings and the final push (meaning, rush) to complete the film, Paramount positioned Star Trek V with a pretty enviable release date between the juggernauts of Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters 2 with hopes that the film would do great business in it's important opening weekend and then clean up with overflow from the larger releases over the next few weeks. Who cares if the film tested poorly when it was put before test audiences? A brand name has to count for something, right?

Business

Opening Weekend: $17.4 million for first place
Final Domestic Box Office (at the end of the summer): $50.5 million
Screened in Toronto at The Uptown (70mm, which it was actually shot in for the most part), Hollywood (70mm), Sheraton Centre

What the Critics Said

"There is a large amount of alcohol being consumed on screen. Everybody seems to be getting sloshed. Maybe they read the script." - Gene Siskel, Siskel & Ebert

"Star Trek V: Shatner's Folly (the subtitle is mine) handily takes the hollow crown as worst in the series. It's bloated, bombastic, and maddeningly pretentious." - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"Mediocre at best, but possessing some odd gay subtexts. Very strange, extremely laboured, and William Shatner is no director." - John Harkness, Now Toronto

Matt Brown Remembers

The destruction of Star Trek V at the box office is the most credible example of how the Summer of the Sequels could spell the death of crap movies. Star Trek V was, bear in mind, the direct successor to the most successful film in the franchise right up until the release of the 2009 reboot, 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Nowadays audiences tend to be a film behind – look at the ludicrous box office on Hangover 2 – but they caught up a lot quicker back in 1989. I was pretty new to Star Trek that summer, having only come aboard with The Voyage Home and the tail end of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I plainly remember Star Trek V being a bizarre, offputting experience from nearly start to finish. Remember, I was twelve years old, and me and my best friend (also a Trek geek) were sneaking Playboys into his back yard for thorough perusal that summer… but nothing was more necrotic to our burgeoning interest in naked ladies than that horrific sequence of Uhura dancing nude on the sand dunes of Nimbus III. Lookit – don’t get me wrong – as an adult, I think Nichelle Nichols to this day is one of the three or four most beautiful women alive. But mixed into the creepy, creaky mire of Star Trek V, she was part of an outright flabbergasting failure of a film to do any of the things I wanted it to do.

Andy Says

I'm really not the person to get into a pissing contest with over Star Trek minutiae. In truth, other than the films, I have very little to say about the series as a whole. Some of the films work and are very entertaining. Some of them don't. Star Trek V really doesn't work, but I can see some idea of what could have been an interesting topic for a film. It is a film that ultimately feels out of touch with its core audience and seems to be reaching at themes that its novice director just couldn't pull off.

I have always had a theory as to why Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was the biggest box office success of the franchise. It has nothing to do, as some might think with the impending start of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which was already in its second season when Final Frontier was released). From the works of directors like Cronenberg (with Videodrome and The Fly), Cameron (with The Terminator and Aliens), and Verhoeven (with Robocop), science fiction films of the 1980s were very much films about the horrors of technology rather than the wonder that can come from advancement. Sci-fi enthusiasts who didn't want to feel bad about themselves at the end of the day really had no place to turn other than to the more genial adventures of the Starship Enterprise. Combined with a decidedly left wing environmental message that also resonated with the crowd that would appreciate the darker sci-fi of the era, was both something different for audiences and a return to familiarity.

For a series that seemed to pride itself on being light and thoughtful entertainment, maybe making a film about the nature of God wasn't the way to go. I have a feeling few people were clamouring to have their science fiction and religious speculation played out on screen with some of their favourite characters. Shatner's inexperience as a writer and director shines through at every turn as he is trying desperately to seem erudite, but cram in as much of the off beat humour that made the previous entry a success. This film hold fast to my belief that any film that features a sequence where character sing "Row, row, row, your boat" is a bad one.

Conclusion

It might not have been just the content that killed Star Trek V. It was more likely than not the release date, as well. The series had previously been released for Thanksgiving and with the change in date, more of the familiarity with the series went away. The film did do better on home video and led to another ancillary gain for Paramount. The film ended up becoming profitable thanks to series and canon completists, but one would be hard pressed to find many defenders of this film.

Dead Poets Society: Carpe Diem

In 1985, Disney was no longer considered a major studio. It might seem hard to believe, but when Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg came over from Paramount in the early part of that year, the House of the Mouse was on life support. The company had been largely spinning its wheels, making almost all their money off the home video market (from catalogue titles, not new releases) and their theme park. The theme park was eating up so much money there almost wasn't anything left over for film production. With parks in Europe and Japan on the way and an $800 million investment to finish Epcot Centre, film wasn't exactly a high priority for the once mighty family film distributor.

Disney's market share had dipped to an all time low of just 2.8% by 1983, behind the bankrupt MGM and the soon to be bankrupt mini-major Orion. Large amounts of money were lost on costly failures like Tron and The Fox and the Hound (which to date is the lowest grossing "proper" Disney animated feature). Disney was also partly responsible, alongside Paramount, for the costly Robert Altman bomb, Popeye. Their long in gestation and deeply troubled animated epic The Black Cauldron was about to be released to confusion, mild outrage over its violent content, and almost deafening indifference by audiences. Even their television branch was fledgling, with their newly launched Disney Channel operating at an average loss of $28 million a year for the first five years it was on the air. There was, however, one inspired angle on the side of Disney's production side.

In 1984, then Disney CEO Ron Miller created the subdivision Touchstone Pictures (pretty much as he was on his way out the door). The goal of Touchstone was to start creating more adult based fare that could not be released under than corporate figurehead's name. The first film released by Touchstone was the only hit Disney had in 1984, the Tom Hanks comedy Splash. When Katzenberg (president of film and television) and Eisner (Chairman and CEO) came on board, they saw increased production on the Touchstone side as a way to turn the company around. Their short term goal was to make about 10 to 12 films a year under the Touchstone banner and 3 or 4 family films under the Disney brand, which had become tarnished by the bland and dull output from the past few years. The biggest obstacle for this plan to work was that Disney had so much money tied up in their theme parks that there was no money left to produce that many films.

Katzenberg and Eisner raised the money almost on their own through limited partnerships they called Silver Screen Partners. By 1988, these partnerships were raising almost $300 million a year for film production. By as early as 1986, things were turning around, and by 1988, Disney became the comeback story of the decade by claiming the highest percentage of market share for the year on the strength of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Good Morning, Vietnam, Cocktail, and the late 1987 holdover Three Men and a Baby. The common element of all those films? All of them were Touchstone productions.

Tom Schulman's script for Dead Poet's Society would reach the desk of Katzenberg in 1986 and was optioned almost immediately. The script was loosely based on the first time screenwriter's experiences with a teacher who inspired him growing up in Nashville and included some pretty hefty literary references that Eisner was always concerned about. Eisner gave Schulman two options to leave the script in development at Touchstone, either cut all the references or move the action to a Northern private school where audiences would be more likely to believe students talking about mythology and transcendentalism. Schulman changed the setting without much arm twisting and the process of finding a star and director began.

Shortly after his success with the film Academy Award nominated box office smash Witness, Peter Weir was approached by Touchstone to make what was to only be his second major studio picture. Many critics who were more familiar with Weir's early work in Australia (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously) thought the subject material was beneath the director, but in truth it was a film that Weir could deeply relate to. Weir grew up going to such an academy and he put a lot of his own personal experience into the film.

At various points Dustin Hoffman, Liam Neeson, Sean Connery (who back out due to Indiana Jones and was also approached for the role of Cybok in Star Trek V), and Bill Murray (who had to drop out due to production overruns on Ghostbusters 2) were all attached at one point to play the lead role of inspiring teacher John Keating. Touchstone then turned to the Julliard trained actor who gave them one of their biggest hits of the past few years, Robin Williams. Good Morning, Vietnam was the first film to make audiences take not of Williams' dramatic abilities while giving the audience the same kind of wackiness that they wanted. The film was a box office smash despite being rated R, and while the studio always pushed for Williams to take the role of Keating, it was Weir who was hesitant to cast him out of fear that he would ad lib and riff far too much for his liking.

Production on the film was not without its troubles, despite being an ostensibly modest production. Filming took place over Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks in late 1988 at several all boys academies in Middletown, Delaware. Weir was able to reign in Williams considerably and the two got along well enough that towards the end of the shoot, Weir gave Williams the ability to go back and add his own touch on certain sequences. The biggest trouble was that Disney has miscalculated the amount of time and money it would take to shoot the film. Weir, who wanted to make a good impression on the studio, was often trying to shoot 15 to 20 set ups a day towards the end of the shoot, nearly hospitalizing himself in the process. He never wanted to ask for help, so Disney simply gave it to him by increasing the budget by $5 million and giving him an extra 15 days to shoot and edit the film.

Disney knew very well what was on the line for the summer of 1989 and they had a different release strategy for all three of their major releases. Disney was also the only major studio to not have a sequel on their release slate (unless you count Orion's tepid offerings of UHF and Great Balls of Fire). With most of the film production budget sunk into the previous year's Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the upcoming animated film The Little Mermaid (which despite it's November release was already being heralded a return to form for Disney animation), Disney turned to Dead Poets Society and Turner and Hooch on the Touchstone side to bookend the summer, and the Disney produced Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to provide a family friendly option in a summer that was largely devoid of family friendly options.

Dead Poets Society was to get a platformed release in the summer in much the same way Academy Award contenders were released in the winter. The film would open on 6 screens on June 3rd and then expand gradually from there. The gamble was designed to appeal to people who would think that by this point, such a release was a sign of prestige. The gamble would ultimately pay off in what was to be the biggest sleeper hit of the summer.

Business

Budget: $18 million
Opening weekends: June 3rd weekend, on 6 screens: $1.6 million. June 9th weekend, on 687 screens, $7.5 million for third place behind Star Trek V (2,202 screens) and Last Crusade (2,320 screens)
Per screen average for June 9th weekend: $10, 976
Opened exclusively in Toronto at Hudson Bay Centre Plaza on June 3rd.

What the Critics Said

"Dead Poets Society is a trivial manipulative film hiding in the body of a serious one." - John Harkness, Now Toronto

"For all its formula, Dead Poets Society sure does feel like it comes from a sincere place" - Scott E. Weinberg, DVDTalk.com

"The movie deserves attention, respect, and finally graditude. Especially at the start of a sequel laden summer." - Richard Schickel, Time

Andy Says

I will come back to Dead Poets Society later this summer when we talk more in depth about programming for adult audiences while maintaining youth appeal, but I will give my own brief personal impressions of the film. While expertly crafted and well meaning, the film is at times overly dark and melodramatic, bordering on painfully obvious sentiment and featuring a bunch of subplots that don't entirely gel. The concept of a teacher as a performer was nothing new by this point and Schulman's love of Goodbye Mr. Chips shows through despite all of Weir's well thought out art direction and cinematography. It's not that the film isn't entertaining, it's just that it is a well worn and familiar concept. Having said that, there was something incredibly ballsy about releasing a film that heavily references Thoreau, Emerson, and Keats in the middle of the "summer of the sequel."

Conclusion

Remember in the introduction when I said that only one summer blockbuster was able to translate its success into Academy Awards nominations? This was that blockbuster, garnering nominations for Williams and Weir, the film, and winning for Schulman's screenplay. The film would continue to play well throughout the summer and saw a spike in business again towards the end of the season, just in time for school to start.

Prizes added to the prize cache:
1 DVD copy of Dead Poets Society
1 Blu-Ray Star Trek films box set

Next Time:

Too hot to handle, too cold to hold, they're called the Ghostbusters and they're in control. Briefly.

Sources forthcoming, but available upon request.

Summer of '89 Part 1: The Four Day Phenomenon

2011-06-09T11:25:00.005-04:00

While the first film to kick off my retrospective on the summer of 1989 is technically a film that was released on May 25th of that year, I deliberately decided to hold off on posting this entry until now for two reasons. The first, and perhaps most obvious, reason being that this weekend sees the release of Super 8, a film produced by the man often credited with the invention of the summer blockbuster. There may be no better director or producer who understands the power of a summer release than Stephen Spielberg, and for reasons that will be explained shortly.

The other reason being that June was not only the biggest month in an already huge year, but because it is still to this day the most profitable month that Hollywood had ever seen. In unadjusted dollars from 1989, June releases accounted for nearly two billion dollars. While Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had a jump on it's two biggest competitors, Columbia's hotly anticipated Ghostbusters 2 on June 16th and Warner Brothers' high risk, highly promoted gamble Batman on June 23rd, it stayed atop the U.S. box office for the first two weeks of the biggest moviegoing month that year. Things in 1989 didn't get very interesting until June, but the building blocks were in place for "the summer of the sequel" were actually in place as far back as 1975.

Jaws, George, and Jones

Back in 1975, a then relatively inexperienced Stephen Spielberg was about to see his much beleaguered and stress filled project Jaws get a release from Universal Pictures with a great deal of fanfare. The film was originally due to debut in theatres the previous year during the then (and arguably now) more prestegious Christmas season. Unfortunately, due to numerous production problems and budget overruns (the film rose in budget to the tune of $12 million and ran a whopping 104 days over schedule) the film was to receive a June release that was neither desired, nor admirable.

Summer was a largely untested season for releasing films. December was usually when Hollywood made most of its revenue with awards bait and blockbusters. Previous summer hits like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and American Graffiti (1973) were seen as anomalies that were programmed almost on accident despite the very obvious hindsight that all these films had a certain youth appeal. It didn't help Jaws' case when just one year prior Columbia mounted a then unheard of $400,000 advertising blitz to herald the July release of the Charles Bronson vehicle Breakout to no discernible return.

Once Jaws was put before test audiences who loved it, Universal cooked up a way to salvage their troubled baby. They would spend an even more unheard of $700,000 on marketing and release the film over the summer to try and court the youth and beach going crowd. The film was to be released in limited exhibition on June 20th, 1975 before going wide. The film caused a sensation well before it was released on a then ultrawide 490 screens on July 25th. Jaws broke the holy ceiling that was the $200 million mark at the box office. From there, major studios took notice of the money that could be made from devoting an entire season to a youthful audience.

The month of May, however, remained a month studios had reservations towards. That is, until two years later, when 20th Century Fox released George Lucas' Star Wars, a film as equally seminal to the 1970s as Jaws and the Godfather films. Much like Jaws, Star Wars saw its Christmas release scuttled by a production lag. In fact, Star Wars was a release that exhibitors were bullied into taking on as a booking if they wanted to screen Fox's intended major release of the summer, The Other Side of Midnight.

Based on a popular novel from Sidney Sheldon, The Other Side of Midnight starred Marie-France Pisier, John Beck, and Susan Sarandon in a two hour and forty five minute bore that sank quickly while Star Wars became the cultural juggernaut it is today. If Jaws proved that summer was profitable, Star Wars proved that May, and particularly the long Memorial Day weekend, was a new battleground.

The same week that Star Wars was released, Spielberg was vacationing in Hawaii with Lucas, partially on business and partially out of celebration for his friend's new success. At the time, Speilberg was working on a pitch he was planning to make to Albert Broccoli in hopes of landing directorial duties on a James Bond film. Lucas told his friend not to bother with that because he had something better in mind.

Lucas pitched a bare bones, but complexly plotted story to Spielberg about an archaeologist who searched the world for religious and supernatural antiques. Accompanying his pitch, Lucas showed Speilberg an artist's rendering of the titular Indiana Jones with the trademark leather jacket, hat, and whip all in place. Speilberg, who much like Lucas was an enormous fan of the Republic Pictures serial cliffhangers of the 40s and 50s, was sold and immediately joined up. They quite literally made a handshake agreement in Hawaii as they began work on Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was also here that Speilberg agreed to build a trilogy around the character.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Star Wars familiar face and burgeoning megastar Harrison Ford, was the biggest film of 1981 and a huge boost to its distributor, Paramount. While Raiders was released on June 12th, it was Lucas and Fox that would continue to exploit a late May release date with The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Jedi in 1983. Paramount got wise to this strategy, and the decision was made to release the sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in May of 1984.

While Temple of Doom was undeniably a success that firmly proved beyond a doubt the viability of a Memorial Day weekend release, something strange happened. A definite change in tone from Raiders, Temple didn't hold the same family appeal as the original. The box office numbers were still very strong and the end of its run, but if one were to graph the difference between Raiders and Temple they would see something that looked oddly like a free fall.

Many cited the decidedly darker and vastly more violent nature of Dr. Jones' second outing as being the reason for such diminished returns. Temple of Doom is cited alongside two other Speilberg productions (Gremlins and Poltergeist) as the genesis for the Spielberg suggested PG-13 rating. The outrage over Temple's violent content ended up leaving a bad taste in Speilberg's mouth, and it ultimately led to a very interesting era in Spielberg's career.

A Return to Form

In 1986, Spielberg was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The award, named after the late head of production for MGM, is awarded periodically to producers "whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production." At the awards ceremony, Spielberg shocked many of his contemporaries by saying that contemporary cinema was poorly written and he pleaded with writers to be more literate. The remarks confused many, mostly because his films up until that point weren't largely seen as "literate" in nature. It didn't help that as a director, Spielberg was in a bit of a slump.

Shortly before the violence of Temple of Doom, which many attribute to both Lucas and Spielberg going through simultaneous divorces, Spielberg produced and directed a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie,a film he would soon disown following the deaths of three people (including actor Vic Morrow) in a tragic accident on the set of the short being filmed by John Landis. Spielberg thought Landis was neglectful and such a tragedy could have been easily avoided. The bad taste and relative disappointment of Temple and Twilight Zone (where he had arguably the weakest of the four shorts) would lead to Spielberg directing his first two "prestige pictures."

The Color Purple, based on a novel from Alice Walker, was a huge step forward for the artistic credibility of Spielberg, but despite a plethora of Oscar nominations (where it was shut out entirely) and being named the best in his craft by the Directors Guild of America, many critics still insisted he was wrong for the material. Spielberg was definitely still finding his ways to deal with actors and the film occasionally lapses into some of the worst black, male stereotypes possible.

Spielberg followed The Color Purple in 1987 with the equally prestigious, but far more bombastic Empire of the Sun. The film surrounds a young boy (played by a then very young Christian Bale) fighting for his life in World War II era England. The two and a half hour film was suggested to Spielberg by David Lean, who had originally intended to direct but had little useful experience dealing with children. The film, which time and reexamination had looked kindly upon, was a costly, critical failure. many detractors suggest that the more emotional first half of the film is undone by typical "Spielbergian" theatrics in the second half.

The fact that Spielberg had been given an award for being a producer in the same year as one of his biggest failures seemed oddly appropriate. His track record leading up to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was far more successful as far as his Amblin Entertainment production banner was concerned. Spielberg was not only responsible for the aforementioned Gremlins and Poltergeist, but also for The Goonies, Innerspace, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Back to the Future (the sequel to which was due for a summer release, but was pushed to November to avoid competition). Spielberg had somewhat willingly and somewhat begrudgingly looked towards ending the decade with two films, the end of the Indiana Jones trilogy and the more personal Always. One of these films was a return to form and made a lot of money. The other film was Always.

"I wasn't happy with the second film at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I wanted to apologize for the second one and make a film I could stand naked on top of" - Spielberg in an interview conducted on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

While Spielberg was generally uninterested with getting back into Indiana Jones right away, Lucas had been working with writers on the third installment since 1985. The first script for Last Crusade was submitted by Romancing the Stone screenwriter Diane Thomas with only two caveats from Spielberg and Lucas. Lucas wanted Indiana Jones to search for the Holy Grail (which Spielberg was never very keen on, as he found it too esoteric and hard to connect to unless you make a film about self examination) and Spielberg wanted the film to be a father and son story.

The script by Thomas was more of a haunted house type film that Spielberg nixed as being too thematically close to Poltergeist. A rewrite from Thomas was sadly not possible as she would pass away in a car accident in late 1985. One thing did, however, survive from Thomas' draft: the now iconic opening with a young Indiana Jones (played in the film by the late River Phoenix).

Writing duties then fell to Gremlins scribe Chris Columbus who turned in a script surrounding the Chinese legend of the Monkey King. The oddly set in South Africa film was seen as simply too silly and costly to commit to, but the crowd pleasing tank chase in Last Crusade is a leftover from Columbus' work.

Spielberg and Lucas brought in Color Purple screenwriter Menno Meyjes to help hammer out what would be the actual story for the film, while Innerspace writer Jeffrey Boam would flesh out the actual script and dialog. Boam's script sufficiently pleased Spielberg enough to go forward, but one final battle was to be waged between the director and Lucas before production could go forward.

For the pivotal role of Henry Jones, Spielberg and Lucas had vastly different ideas. The ultimately inspired casting of Sean Connery as Indiana's father was a Speilberg idea that Lucas was uniformly against. Lucas would have preferred a softer, more refined British actor to convey a more scholarly, doting, and less powerful presence. Speilberg (who had already brought Connery on board and was pissing him off by not giving him the script) was adamant that Indy's father had to be played by someone strong or Ford, and the very character of Indy, would have blown the father off the screen and made him a nonentity. In the end, Spielberg won, and the father and son relationship would be what audiences would remember most fondly about the film.

After Lucas' heel dragging, Connery formally signed on, but he demanded a hand in all rewrites. Spielberg was accommodating and Connery would later say almost to a fault because the still "young" (his words) director didn't know how to deal with actors. Thanks to Connery's input, his character ended up appearing 30 pages earlier in the final draft. His last second inputs would also occasionally run afoul of Harrison Ford's "lets just shoot this" style. Not surprisingly, this give and take probably aided Ford and Connery's father/son performances.

No matter how long it took to get to fruition, Indiana Jones combined with a Memorial Day release seemed like a license to print money to Paramout who could smell the blood in the water of the summer of 1989. They were leading a slate of more high profile sequels than any previous summer with their own sequel. The year was shaping up to be a three horse race. Columbia had already started production on Ghostbusters 2 before Indy started rolling, and the buzz surrounding Batman, helmed by a largely untested Tim Burton, was massive and getting bigger by the day. No one at Paramount was particularly worried, however. They had a plan, and no one knew the benefits of a May release better than they did.

Of Paramount Importance

At the start of 1989, Paramount chariman Martin Davis was almost finished selling off all the companies' previous Gulf and Western acquisitions and placed the focus of the company squarely on the entertainment side of the business. The newly rebranded Paramount Communications (which included ownership of the Canadian Famous Players chain of theatres with 386 screens across 266 theatres, in addition to owning numerous chains in the States) started the year by ousting production heads Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and then tried to block the merger of Time and Warner Brothers by way of a failed hostile bid. To say that Paramount was an aggressive company to run afoul of is an appropriate statement.

Paramount had led in market share in 3 of the years of the 1980s, second only to Warner Brothers in terms of success. 1984 was buffered by Temple of Doom, Beverly Hills Cop, and Terms of Endearment. 1986 saw Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, and huge ancillary returns on investment that continued into 1987 with Beverly Hills Cop 2 and Fatal Attraction.

One of the aces in the hole for Paramount was their firm grasp on corporate synergy in the home video market. For the video release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1983, Paramount tapped into the viability of the sell through video market in an era when most home videos were priced around a hundred dollars for purchase by rental outlets. For the low, low price of $39.95, not only could people own one of the biggest blockbusters of all time, but Paramount was savvy enough to sweeten the deal for video buyers. The Raiders video cassette was the only way audiences could get a first look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The video for Raiders brought in $30 million on it's own.

Such integrated marketing was not new to someone like Spielberg who previously enjoyed massive ancillary product sales with E.T. and Gremlins, but the year before the release of Last Crusade, Paramount took corporate synergy even further with the Top Gun VHS release. Priced also for sell through, the biggest film of 1986 would have been successful no matter what. It would go on to be named the video of the decade by the American Video Association. But even more interesting than the film itself is what a viewer sees as soon as they press play: an advertisement for Diet Pepsi with fighter jets that is virtually indistinguishable from the film to follow. The precursor to pre-show advertising started here with Paramount.

Not only did Paramount have forward thinking marketing savvy, but since Temple of Doom, no studio had ever used a May release date as effectively as Paramount. Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, and Beverly Hills Cop were all early summer releases, and all of them cleaned up at the box office. The return of Dr. Jones and the early summer was a no brainer and competition was light between Indy and Ghostbusters 2 on the 16th of June. Indy's opening weekend saw only the release of Clint Eastwood's comedy Pink Cadillac and holdover competition from the fading films Field of Dreams and Road House.

The plan for Paramount was to release their next major release, Star Trek V, the week before Ghostbusters since it was largely believed the film was a stinker and would get its best opening weekend once Indy had dies down. Beyond that, Paramount had a fairly light summer, and it looked to yet another sequel to bat clean-up at the end of the season. The low cost, high profit Friday the 13th series was sending Jason to Manhattan at the end of July. Star Trek and Friday the 13th were to be the icing on the Indiana Jones cake. In reality, Paramount was making so much off of television and home video that had all three films failed, they may very well have still turned a profit by year's end. Unfortunately for Martin Davis, the summer of 1989 was like the proverbial boulder that only Indy was able to get away from.

The Business (all figures unadjusted)

Budget: $55 million
Opening Weekend: $29.4 million, $36.2 million if counting Monday. Set record for highest grossing opening day of all time. On a Wednesday.
Final Total Gross: $197.2 million, domestic. $794.4 million. worldwide.
Screened in Toronto at the Eglinton (70mm, THX), Sheraton Centre (70mm), Cumberland, various suburban theatres

What the Critics Said

"(Lucas and Spielberg's) treatment of father figures in light of the bare psychologizing of the character, resembles something out of mediocre 40's noir... As entertainment, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is successful. It is vastly superior to the lugubrious second film... It's not as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark." - John Harkness, Now Toronto

"As I watched it, I felt a real delight, because recent Hollywood escapist movies have become too jaded and cynical, and they have lost the feeling that you can stumble over astounding adventures just by going on a hike with your scout troop." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

"The fast pace and force-fed wisecracks are as seamless as ever, but rarely has audience laughter ever sounded as hollow." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Recollections from Matt Brown

There comes a time in a young man’s life when he comes to understand the fickle quality of sequels. I grew up on The Empire Strikes Back and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – and in the decade that produced The Godfather, part II – so believe it or not, it took me quite a while to catch up to the fact that just because I liked the first film in a series did not necessarily guarantee that its follow-up would work on the same level. In fact, if you’d told me that when I was ten, I wouldn’t have understood. Why not? How could a film made by the same people, starring the same people, existing in the same world, not be as good as its predecessor? The summer of ’89 finally taught me the lesson.

The summer of ’89 was hawked far and wide as the Summer of the Sequels. Many such summers would follow (including at least one, ’95 I think, which was actually tagged Summer II: The Sequel) but 1989 put the first feet in the wet cement. It was the summer in which Hollywood learned about the “tentpole” strategy of film releasing, in which high-value property could be rolled into the marketplace bowling balls out of the ball return, one after another after another, and people would go to see them. A lot of studios learned lessons that summer, too – in a tentpole summer, weaker property tends to die a grisly death. And given that 1989 took place way back when film releasing was still largely “platformed,” allowing A-grade pictures to stay on major screens for months instead of weeks, the tentpole effect had the ability to really kill some shitty movies dead. There was always something better to see, just around the corner.

The biggest release in ’89, for me, was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I was a sensitive kid and the melting nazi at the end of Raiders had sent me screaming out of the room on more than one occasion – to say nothing of Mola Ram’s illegal heart surgery in Temple of Doom – but I was looking forward to the thrills and chills of Last Crusade with near-ecclesiastical fervour. A kid on my baseball team saw the film before I did – because evidently there was a time when I didn’t rush out to see a film on the day it opened –and I remember furiously pumping him for information at our next game – how was the movie? Who were the bad guys? What was the scariest part?

(I was assured, quite accurately as it turned out, that Donovan’s fast-forward aging into decrepitude and dust was nowhere near as freaky as Toht going the full Carrie in front of the Ark of the Covenant.)

The most important thing about Last Crusade for me, though, had nothing to do with the first time I saw it – which I don’t even remember – but with the second. When I turned 13 that fall, Last Crusade was still ticking along just fine – five months after its release, mind you – and my grandmother wanted to take me to see it for my birthday. I remember being profoundly unsettled by this, fearing that she would hate it, or not understand it, or something else in direct response to being a 70-year-old Italian woman watching a movie made for, and marketed to, kids. But she could not be dissuaded, and so we went to the movie theatre at the Centrepoint mall – actually, it might still have been called Towne & Country back then – and I then watched amazed as that selfsame 70-year-old Italian grandmother proceeded to have, moment by moment, probably a better time watching Last Crusade than I did. And I loved the film, don’t get me wrong; but Last Crusade was a member of that dying breed of genuine, dyed-in-the-wool all-ages movies. (Ironically, it had been slapped with the PG-13 rating never awarded Temple of Doom – but really, Last Crusade is on a side of PG so soft it might as well be a G.) A film like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was built from the ground up by all involved to be accessible to viewers “from ages 8 to 80,” as the old carnival barkers might have put it, and that simple reality bore out. It was a kind-hearted, family-oriented, summer adventure movie. We need more of those. - Matt Brown

Andy Says

I personally find all the kerfuffle, to-do, and ballyhoo around people complaining about how films like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and The Hangover II are the result of audiences asking for regurgitated plot lines devoid of anything new. I assume this is just a built up level of hatred towards crappy movies, but in all seriousness, this practice has been around for ages. Serials and television sitcoms and dramas are simply sequels in short form. The market has and will always dictate what the people see. Spielberg's plea at the Thalberg award presentation, even though he never fully followed through on it all the time, holds true to the degree that at the time writing, especially sequel writing, was a very lazy business. The sequels of 1989 were largely from long in the tooth series that no one really asked for. The few that succeeded gave the audiences exactly what they wanted.

Those who say that Pirates 4 and Hangover II are unnecessary have a point, but to call them out for a lack of originality is to not have a grip on history and in the cases of many critics on their own sense of nostalgia. These two films have made a killing at the box office this year because they gave audiences exactly what they were expecting. This is exactly what Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade does.

I'm about to drop a bomb on the elephant in the room that no one likes to think about when fawning over the admittedly entertaining Last Crusade. Beat for beat, Last Crusade is exactly the same movie as Raiders of the Lost Ark with the addition of one new character (and a very good one, at that) and a change in artifact. When looked at through the lens of nostalgia or the iconography of a character like Indiana Jones, it is easy to lose sight of objectivity. Last Crusade really is the kind of prepackaged blockbuster so many people seem to be railing against today. For better or worse, the darkness of Temple of Doom is entirely gone from here. Does that make this film bland or more fun? It's an interesting question to puzzle over.

It seems like Crusade succeeded where Doom failed because a carbon copy of the original was what the market really wanted. This also extends to the distaste left in the mouths of fans by Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was also not a carbon copy of Raiders. No fans wanted to see old Indy. They didn't want to see progression of the character to the 1950s. They wanted more of Spielberg's World War II fetishism (which found its way into The Color Purple and Always in the late 1980s, as well). They didn't want a Red Menace thriller. They wanted the original film.

I like all the films in the Indiana Jones series to varying degrees. Raiders is a classic and I actually appreciate the darkness of Doom. While they should have stopped after Last Crusade, Crystal Skull was, I believe, probably a decent story when you take out the aliens. At least with the setting and the characters it felt like something different. Last Crusade is a lot of fun with the banter between Ford and Connery, but without them it could have very easily been seen by a viewer today as being the kind of bland trash everyone seems to be up in arms over lately within the film community.

Conclusion

Phase one of Paramount's plan to rule the summer was complete. In fact, they actually won. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade helped Paramount best their Warner Brothers rivals since it ended up having a higher worldwide gross than Batman. Also, it turned an actual profit. When we get into Batman, we will talk about the dirty little secret behind how that film never made a "profit."

Indiana Jones opened on a then record 2,300 screens and by the end of the summer it was still showing on close to 1,000 and was the number 11 film the first week of September.

This was a title that would continue Paramount's love of corporate synergy in 1991. Last Crusade, Top Gun, and, of all things, the R-rated John Hughes comedy Planes, Trains, and Automobiles were being sold in McDonald's restaurants for $5 with the purchase of any extra value meal. These special VHS tapes, which were pure profit for Paramount, opened with four minutes of commercials from Coca-Cola and McDonald's.

This Weeks Addition to the Prize Cache

Every week leading up to the "final exam" a new prize will be added to the "Prize Cache" to be won at the end of the "semester."

This week's prize is An Indiana Jones box DVD box set.

Sources

Box office reports courtesy Box Office Mojo and thenumbers.com
Critic responses courtesy Now Archives and various aggregate sites.

Block, Alex Ben ed., Blockbusting, Harper Collins, 2010
Emery, Robert, The Directors: Take Three, Allworth Press, 2003
Freer, Robert, The Complete Spielberg, Virgin Publishing, 2001
Prince, Stephen, American Cinema of the 1980s, Rutgers University Press, 2007
Prince, Stephen, History of the American Cinema Volume 10: A New Pot of Gold, 1980-1989, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000
Yule, Andrew, Sean Connery, Genral Publishing Company, 1992

Final Remarks before the bell

I am honestly out of time for today. Come back this weekend for a brief "tutorial" on the other major release for this 1989 weekend, Pink Cadillac. It will be about a tenth of the size of this.

The Summer of '89

2011-06-06T03:40:00.004-04:00

There have been many rumblings amongst critics and bloggers that when it comes to summer multiplex entertainment audiences largely get what they asked for. By giving in to marketing and the Hollywood hype machine, audiences largely dictate what is available in the marketplace. It seems like only in recent years have audiences began to turn against the pre-packaged summer blockbuster and the glitzy packaging that largely belies a hollow centre.

Summers weren't always like this. In fact, summer releases were traditionally crap shoots for studios. It wasn't until the late 70s and early 80s that the summer season started to yield some of the biggest blockbusters of the fiscal year. Jaws beget Star Wars, which beget E.T., and so on and so forth. In order to properly understand the current Hollywood business model, one need not look any further than the summer of 1989, looked back fondly by nostalgia junkies as the first real "tentpole" summer.

Studios laid everything they had on the table. Unfortunately for most studios, what they had were a lot of sequels. More sequels were released in the summer of 1989 than any season prior. Many of them failed, and led to the deaths of five franchises in total. The first ever "summer of the sequel" was also the year that led to studios leaving numbers of the names of sequel titles out of fear and embarrassment.

In addition to the unavoidable topic of sequelization, there are many other interesting topics touched upon in the summer of 1989. There was the rise of the superhero film to previously unrealized heights. The proliferation of integrated marketing reached a fever pitch. Studios first began to see average moviegoers paying active attention to box office receipts. Towards the end of the season "counter-programming" became a buzz word on the tongues of many. The value of appealing to young children and families instead of always catering to teenagers was never more apparent. The spectre of the shady form of "Hollywood accounting" led to some of the highest grossing films of the year and the decade to post losses instead of profits. The slasher craze died in spectacular fashion. Some of the most culturally relevant films of recent memory held their own this summer against some of the biggest high profile failures in film history.

In hopes of taking a closer look at current Hollywood business practices, starting on Thursday of this week, I will begin taking a look back at the films of the summer of 1989 and slightly beyond to the end of that year. This series will combine historical research, critical analysis (including from critics of the time), and personal reflections from my colleague Matt Brown, a fellow film writer and 1989 enthusiast who lived through the year and has some pretty vivid memories of the summer that proved to young Matt that not every film was great and started him on the path to becoming a critic.

The examination of the summer will take place mostly in the chronological order in which films were released that year with two exceptions. Matt and I welcome you to follow along with us as we take a trip to the past to better add context to the present. Join the discussion and ask questions to Matt and I and we will do our best to answer them.

Class starts this Thursday. Why call it a class? Because at the end of this "unit" there will be prizes given away for those who pass the "final exam." Each week a new part of the grand prize will be revealed. So have some fun with us this summer. Here is the schedule of classes and when they will be covered.

Thursday, June 9th - The Four Day Phenomenon

Movies Covered: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Pink Cadillac

Monday, June 13th - One Pole Sinks, Another Rises

Movies Covered: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Dead Poets Society

Thurday, June 16th - The Hundred Million Dollar Disappointment

Movie Covered: Ghostbusters 2

Thursday, June 23rd - The End is the Beginning is the End

Movie Covered: Batman

Monday, June 27th - Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Movie Covered: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Thursday, June 30th - The Case for Cultural Relevance

Movies Covered: The Karate Kid Part III, Do the Right Thing

Thursday, July 7th - Let Them Eat Cake

Films Covered: Lethal Weapon 2, Weekend at Bernie's

Thursday, July 14th - Something is Seriously Wrong Here

Film Covered: License to Kill

Thursday, July 21st - The Adult Factor

Films Covered: Turner and Hooch, When Harry Met Sally, Parenthood

Thursday, July 28th - ALWAYS Give the Audience What They Want

Films Covered: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Thursday, August 4th - Late Summer Legs

Films Covered: The Abyss, Uncle Buck

Thursday, August 18th - Final Lessons Learned

Films Covered (extra credit): Look Who's Talking, Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Meyers, The Little Mermaid, Back to the Future II, Born on the Fourth of July

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011-05-19T15:15:00.004-04:00

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides opens everywhere on Friday, May 20th.

As the curator of the Defending the Indefensible series (which goes on this Friday and Sunday, hint hint plug plug), I can not give a film a pass simply because it is fun to watch. There are plenty of really bad films that are fun to watch, but that doesn't make them good films. Ask my colleague Sasha James about how I give her no quarter or chance for parlay when it comes to her liking of Equilibrium. She can tell you that sometimes it just isn't enough (although her defence of that film is much stronger than that). Which is why to some degree it pains me to give the latest entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise a modestly negative review. It almost gets everything I like about the series right, and I must admit a certain affinity while watching it, but much like everything dealing with movies, sometimes once you leave the theatre it dawns on you that what you saw isn't all that great at all.

At this point, I would normally get into the plot of the film, but instead I feel the need to take a detour to explain my thoughts on the other films in the series for my threadbare defence of this film to make any sense. I generally like the first film in the series which, while a bit overlong, is a fun popcorn flick that few people seem to want to make anymore. I detest the second film in the series, Dead Man's Chest, with quite a lot of vitriol and the third film, At World's End is deeply flawed but still manages a few moments of fun. The sequels to the original Pirates of the Caribbean are examples of the absolute worst in "epic" filmmaking and created a plot line that managed to become even more labyrinthine than Brian DePalma's original Mission: Impossible and even harder to follow. I honestly can't tell you what happened in Dead Man's Chest other than the Kraken coming to lay waste to everything, and I really don't care. I remember individual scenes from At World's End, but if asked to recite the plot to you, I wouldn't be able to. Quite simply, they were as unmemorable to me as the first film was oddly revolutionary.

What works, for the first two thirds of On Stranger Tides, is that the screenplay from series scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio is going for a simpler tone. The story is, to be certain, crammed with elements that don't necessarily need to be there for the film to work. The pointless subplot between missionary Phillip (Sam Claflin) and mermaid Syrena (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) is a halfhearted attempt to recreate the romantic void left by the franchises departed stars Orlando Bloom and Keira Knighley that never takes hold, but by placing the focus on former supporting character Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), the writers actually stick with what they know best. The best parts of On Stranger Tides feels almost like a bedtime story being told to a child. There are coincidences aplenty and not a lot of it could really happen in any sort of space time continuum, but there is an ambling affability to the film that fits the series newly minted main character. Unfortunately, the writers manage to screw the proverbial helper monkey and succumb to the same ludicrous plotting of the sequels and director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine) does the movie no favours by botching nearly every action sequence in the film.

On Stranger Tides picks up some time after the events at the end of At World's End with intrepid drunken pirate Captain Jack Sparrow on a search for the lost treasures of Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. It isn't long before Jack finds himself caught between the British and the Spanish in a bid to find the fountain first. Sparrow's uneasy ally and often rival Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) is now working on His Majesty's not-so-secret service as an emissary for the crown. In addition to being forced into helping the country that wants to see him hang, a jilted lover has (Penelope Cruz) has resurfaced and also wants to find the fountain to grant longer life to her father, the famed pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane, who is astoundingly the weakest link of the cast, giving a performance that is strange at best and disinterested at worst) who has heard of a prophecy that he will soon be killed.

If the film had enough smarts it would have stopped adding elements to the story there. That is enough story to sustain any average film, but then the film gets really silly when it adds a bunch of maguffins for Jack and company to find in order to perform a ritual for the powers of the fountain to work. By the end, the film has become just as convoluted as the films that preceded it. It is still coherent in terms of following a linear progression, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense and by the end everything I thought was right has been contradicted without explanation and some plot threads are simply dropped for the sake of wrapping things up. None of these films ever needed to be any longer than two hours, but this film continues with the ridiculously long precedent set by the sequels, and at two hours and 18 minutes, this entry is still the shortest by about 20 minutes.

The biggest problem with the film, however, is director Rob Marshall, who is clearly in over his head here. Outside of musicals that play to his "strengths" as a director (despite Chicago being largely a triumph of screenwriter Bill Condon and Nine just being terrible all around), Marshall should stick to his former day job as a choreographer. In fact, in most of the action sequences it is very apparent to the audience that Marshall is a choreographer. When people are jumping between horse drawn carriages or sword fighting, the audience isn't supposed to hear or see the director giving the old "1-2-3, 1-2-3" for direction. As a result, a lot of the action sequences feel oddly shot in slow motion. Making matters worse, the fact that most action sequences take place in low light or darkness and are shot in colour draining 3-D. This, combined with sometimes necessary frenetic editing, makes Marshall's hack work seem even more incompetent. The big climax at the Fountain of Youth is also devoid of almost any visual flair and amounts to a massive letdown that despite the film's length feels rushed.

I would be lying if I said I did not have a good time while watching On Stranger Tides, but that doesn't mean it is a good film. There are things about it that are just bothersome on a very basic level. Going back to the bedtime story analogy, I felt like a young child constantly asking "why" when faced with something that doesn't make sense and then being told to just go to sleep. Even when I was younger that would have bothered me and kept me up longer than I should have.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

Thor

2011-05-04T11:23:00.004-04:00

Thor opens in theatres everywhere on May 6th.

It is understandable, at least among those familiar with the Marvel Comics universe, that in order for a film to be made of the team of superheroes known as The Avengers, a film about almost all of the individual characters would be necessary. Thor, one of the lesser character in the Marvel canon, has finally arrived on the big screen with just as much pomp and circumstance as Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk have before him and how Captain America will arrive in theatres later this summer. There isn't really any sort of necessary or urgent need for a film about the son of the Norse deity Odin, but at least the film isn't a complete waste of time that is devoid of any sort of fun despite Kenneth Branagh being the absolute wrong director for this assignment.

On the evening he is about to ascend to his father's position on the throne, Thor (Chris Hemsworth, father played by Anthony Hopkins) attempts to avenge the breaking of a truce between the residents of the far off land of Asgard and their enemies known as the Frost Giants (lead by an unrecognizable Colm Feore). For showing a complete lack of diplomacy and nearly starting an all out war, Thor is banished by his father (much to the delight of Thor's brother Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston) to the realm of Earth and is stripped of his superhuman strength (mostly, I guess, the film isn't entirely clear on this one) and of his trusty hammer of rebuilding and ass kicking. Once on Earth, Thor is caught up in a bit of intrigue because his hammer has become of interest to the shadowy government agency known as SHEILD (which the film flat out assumes the audience will understand since Iron Man made about a bazillion dollars two times over) and it threatens to destroy the research of a group of scientists (Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, and Kat Denning) who are studying, um, something. I really don't remember. Something about astronomy. Or physics. Astrophysics? I can't say that I cared all that much either way.

Thor has some guts on a very basic screenwriting level because while it functions quite well as an entertaining stand alone film, it takes great liberties by assuming the audience has seen the past few films that Marvel studios have put out. That's fine since that is the way comics were originally produced. The problem is that right off the bat, the film assumes that the audience is automatically familiar with Thor as a character and that the viewer has an intimate understanding of the comics going in. This leads to a real disconnect between the scenes that take place on Asgard and the scenes that take place on Earth. Fans of the comics will probably get more mileage out of the Asgard sequences, but I honestly at times had no clue what was going on there or why I should have remotely cared. The opening twenty minutes of the film felt deathly slow and incoherent with some really suspect production design, baffling costumes, and overacting that would have been out of place in Anchorman. Fans of the comics will probably like the scenes on Earth considerably less because they are played mostly for laughs in a typical "fish out of water" fashion. I got more mileage out of these sequences because it actually followed a plot arc that I could actually follow and understand.

One of the best things that can be said about Thor other than having some great action sequences (the best involving Thor and friends facing a behemoth sent by Loki to Earth), fight scenes, and special effects that most audiences will likely eat up, is that the performances are almost all fully realized and played by the right people for their respective jobs. Hemsworth imbues Thor with perfect amounts machismo and humility and while I have misgivings about some aspects of the film I would jump at the chance to see him play the character again in another film. On Earth, Portman and Skarsgard turn in their almost always solid work and Dennings steals almost every scene she is in despite her character being completely useless in every conceivable way. Hopkins strikes a good balance between gravitas and scenery chewing and Rene Russo shows up as his mother and reminds the audience that she is indeed still alive. Sadly, the film's weakest link comes in the form of the villain. Hiddleston plays Loki as bland and nonthreatening as possible. Sure, Loki knows magic but his motivation makes no sense at all, the audience already knows the outcome of the film, and he amounts to nothing more than a crybaby. There may not be a weaker comic book villain in film history as he is portrayed here.

The film does have some great entertainment value despite my initial complaints and I have come to give most films that have been written by committee a bit of leeway since it would be impossible to blame any one person for the problems within a certain script. The praise for the performances is well earned and part of that has to belong to Branagh who clearly used his Shakespearean background to some degree here. That does not in any way change the fact that no studio should ever let him near another big budget summer blockbuster ever again. His directorial style is absolutely maddening. Action sequences at times are poorly edited, certain scenes and jokes are cut short before there is any pay off or punch line, and almost every scene is filmed partially on an angle. In some cases where people are simply talking EVERYTHING is on an angle. The last film to use "artful" camera angles this poorly was Battlefield Earth, and we all know how well that turned out. It was so maddeningly amateurish that I half expected Branagh to start using star wipes to transition between scenes.

Thor is very typical summer blockbuster fodder. It is entertaining enough as you watch it, but it won't really stick with you on any sort of emotional level after leaving the theatre. Some scenes are memorable, but they will always be taken out of context because they are better than the larger whole. It delivers everything Marvel fans will probably be expecting, but doesn't really add anything more to the equation. It's not a boring film and most filmgoers have probably resigned themselves to seeing it some point. It is, however, somewhat boring to write about. Just how many ways can I say something is good, but not great? Not very many.

Rating (out of four stars): ***

Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

2011-05-04T10:38:00.003-04:00

Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Story Ever Sold opens in Toronto on May 6th. It will expand in the coming weeks and is also currently showing in selected theatres in the US.

It is somewhat strange that someone like Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) should go to see someone to talk about his own "brand image" as seen in his latest piece of stunt journalism, Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (which has to be referred to by it's full title every time it is written in the press). Spurlock visits a man who tells him that the image that he puts forth is one that is both mindful and playful at the same time. These feelings often bump against one another, but can make for some good entertainment. PWP:TGMES is filled with entertaining moments and is a bit light on the more mindful aspects, but at least Spurlock attempts to show why that is.

In an effort to pull back the curtain on the world of integrated marketing, also known more commonly as product placement, Spurlock sets out to create the first ever "docbuster;" a film financed entirely through corporate synergy and branding. Realizing that he can't exactly get larger companies to talk to him, he instead settles for partnering with mostly smaller companies like Pom Wonderful, Ban deodorant, and Mini Cooper. Despite working with smaller brands, the film (which was always intended to be plotless to begin with) becomes harder to make since even the smaller companies have high demands on how their product should be viewed in the film.

Spurlock is a charismatic entertainer and a showman who could come across as glib but is really only doing the only thing he knows how to do. He is great about talking about a subject that bothers him and as a sort of defence mechanism he sets out to have fun with it. It is never exactly hard hitting stuff and it isn't always funny, but this particular film seems to play to his strengths and vulnerabilities.

There is an interesting disconnect going on between Spurlock's business acumen and his own naivete. In his dealings with the various corporations he visits he manages to be very bottom line oriented and carries on as a straight shooter that gives executives exactly what they want to hear. He is pretty much up front with everyone that he is just going to end up laughing about them behind their backs, and it is easy to see just why such an attitude is a refreshing change of pace in a corporate environment. The film picks up even more once Morgan finally gets to see the actual contracts he has to sign and everything he has to agree to do before seeing any of the money. It almost seems at times that if the film were to fail, he would actually lose money on the enterprise (and oddly enough still might).

The most interesting insights that the film offers, and there are a few, deal more with the psychology of advertising and the new techniques being used to determine how best to sell a product. Noam Chomsky is on hand briefly to discuss the role of linguistics. There is some really creepy stuff about how movie trailers (including the one for this film) are created with "neuromarketing." Spurlock also delights in having the incongruity to shill products to consumer advocates in the middle of their interviews. For film buffs there are also interviews with Peter Berg, Brett Ratner, and Quentin Tarantino who all have vastly different views on how product placement affects the industry. Most people can probably guess which one of them shrugs it off the easiest.

Very few people who watch Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold will really be very ignorant to what Spurlock is trying to say. The joke that he just made the audience watch a 90 minute ad reel is a good one, but it is a pretty easy joke to make. It doesn't exactly feel like Spurlock is even really trying all that hard to preach to any one person in particular. It is a fully fleshed out concept of a film that no one really asked for and probably didn't need to get made. The people who see big budget blockbusters and think nothing of them probably won't actively seek out a documentary to watch, but at least if they did they would probably be entertained while watching it.

Rating (out of four stars): ***

The Beaver

2011-05-04T09:18:00.004-04:00

The Beaver opens in Toronto on Friday, May 6th. It expands to other locations on May 20th.

It has now been one full week since I have seen Jodie Foster's latest directorial effort, The Beaver, and it is a real testament to the film that I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I don't really mean that in a bad way. Wait. Maybe I kind of mean it in a bad way. The Beaver is pretty terrible in many respects but in others it is so incredibly awesome that one has to respect that the film was ever even made at all. I guess the best thing that could be said is that the film is incredibly original and unlike anything ever seen on screen. For some audience members this may be enough to give it a pass, while others might simply scratch their heads and wonder just what the heck it was they watched.

Walter Black (Mel Gibson) is a man thoroughly going through a crisis. His marriage to roller-coaster designer Meridith (Foster) is at the point where he has finally been kicked out of the house. His youngest son (Riley Thomas Stewart) is so shy he is nearly mute. His eldest son, Porter (Anton Yelchin, essentially playing an emo variation on his role in Charlie Bartlett), is running a profitable paper writing service for other students, in an effort to save money for a road trip where he plans to let go all of the things he detests about his father (which he manifests by smashing his head into the wall repeatedly as hard as humanly possible and by keeping a wall full of post-its where he writes down everything he hates about Walter). Add to this a failing toy business and burgeoning alcoholism, and you have a portrait of a man at the end of his rope.

One night while trying to clear room in his car trunk for more liquor bottles, Walter finds a hand puppet of a beaver. After getting drunk in a hotel room while watching Kung Fu, two botched suicide attempts, and getting hit on the head with a television set, Walter awakens talking like Ray Winstone and using the puppet to do all of his talking for him. The puppet leads to a major creative awakening in the once dormant Walter. Walter is still socially awkward and the puppet doesn't help, but at least he has reconnected with his wife and his youngest son, and is starting to turn his business around (with a toy that no parent in this day and age would ever let their child near, but just go with it). Porter, however, is still having none of it and is distracted by his puppy dog crush on the class valedictorian (recent Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence) who has hired him to write her graduation speech.

It is hard to say where to begin with this one. The Beaver isn't a film that so much lends itself to a review as it is a film that should have books and thesis papers written about it. For better or worse, The Beaver is a film that will probably be spoken of in hushed tones and will be analyzed endlessly from any number of perspectives. It is the perfect example of a film that is expertly acted and directed (despite Foster's proclivities for obvious symbolism that is sometimes quite grating) by people who have fully committed to a project with all their hearts. On the other hand, the hand with the giant beaver puppet on it, the film is just flat out insane and patently ludicrous. Kyle Killen's script feels like a rejected Hal Hartley vehicle for the American Beauty generation. That last sentence is to be read with just the amount of skepticism as it sounds in your head.

Gibson is great as a severely damaged man and the scenes where he doesn't have the puppet to fall back on are some of the best of his career. For those worried about not being able to disconnect what they think of Gibson as a person and Gibson as an actor playing a character, worry not. The final third of the film is so insane and so far out there that people just might forget that Gibson ever remotely did anything wrong in his life. It truly is that crazed and utterly wrongheaded. But in a way, that kind of craziness fits the film. I could honestly say that not once could I ever tell which direction the film was going to go in. The Beaver will definitely keep viewers on their toes, but man is it weird and uncomfortable at times.

As for the rest of the cast, they are great across the board, but the script seems to forget about them for long patches of the film, especially in the cases of Foster (which is strange since she directed the film) and Stewart. The subplot with Yelchin and Lawrence is pleasant enough, but as a character Porter is thoroughly unlikable and hardly ever seems to do anything that makes much sense. These two have some great chemistry together, but they both feel like characters that have been brought in from another movie entirely.

To the film's credit, however, even it's worst scenes are oddly watchable and it has some genuinely great terrible movie moments. Like the part when Walter and his puppet end up on the Today show and the camera is constantly circling around them during one of the preachiest speeches in film history. Or the fact that this film has more montages than Rocky IV. Or Foster's need to cram every frame with squares to symbolize that we are all just living in boxes that we need to get out of (which we know because the movie pretty much tells us that in the Today show speech). And the entire final act of the film which makes almost no sense at all, but is still incredibly well done by everyone involved.

I am going to actually give passing marks to The Beaver despite my better judgment. Even at it's worst, it is eminently enthralling to see just how it all unfolds. I can't say that I was not entertained by what I saw on screen or that I didn't have a good time watching it. I'm not even quite sure how I feel about the film was actually what Foster intended for people to feel. It is a must see that no one should ever sit through and quite possibly the most glorious train-wreck committed to celluloid in recent memory. And as the film says, everyone loves a train-wreck provided that it's not happening to them.

Rating (out of four stars): ***

HotDocs 2011 Reviews!

2011-04-28T15:33:00.002-04:00

For the past two weeks, I have been eyeballs deep in docs. Big sweaty docs and little docs alike. You can read all my reviews and interviews over at Criticize This!, but if you are looking for a specific title, here is a breakdown for you what is in each part. You should read them all, but consider this a cross reference. Follow the links for full reviews. All star ratings out of five stars

HotDocs Part 1
The Chocolate Farmer (**)
Uprooted (short) (***)
The Lumberfros (***1/2)
Wiebo's War (*****)

HotDocs Part 2
Becoming Chaz (**1/2)
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (*1/2)
Fightville (****)
Beauty Day (*****)
The Burton Cycle Part 1, Fahrenheit 7-Eleven (short) (****)
Magic Trip (***) Bonus: Interview with Magic Trip co-director Alex Gibney

HotDocs Part 3-D
Hell and Back Again (*****)
Hot Coffee (****)
Grinders (*)
Chance Encounters (short) (***)
Family Instinct (****)
Recessionize! For Fun and Profit! (**)

HotDocs: The Final Chapter
Bury the Hatchet (****1/2)
The Interrupters (***1/2)
No Entry No Exit (***)
Beats, Rhymes, and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest (****)

HotDocs Part V: A New Beginning
Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (***1/2)
Superheroes (****)
Ola Svensson Superstar (**1/2)
Bobby Fischer Against the World (****1/2)
Boy Cheerleaders (****)

HotDocs Part VI: Andy Lives!
Buck (****1/2)
Limelight (**)
Becoming Santa (****)
The Team (**1/2)
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey (****)
The Bully Project (***)

HotDocs Part VII: The New Blood
The National Parks Project (****)
Who Took the Bomp?: Le Tigre on Tour (***)
Family Portrait in Black and White (*****)
The Pirate Tapes (Zero Stars)
Battle for Brooklyn (****)

HotDocs Part VIII: Andy Takes Manhattan
My Reincarnation (***1/2)
Eco Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson (****)
The Redemption of General Butt Naked (****1/2)
Grande Hotel (***)

Andy Goes to Hell: The Final HotDocs (written by Brian McKechnie, head of Criticize This!)
Mighty Jerome (****)
El Bulli - Cooking in Progress (*)
Inside Lara Roxx (****)

Andy X
Bob and the Monster (****)
The Guantanomo Trap (****)
The Good Life (****)
Highway Gospel (***)

HotDocs: The Inevitable Reboot (coming soon)
Open Secret (****)
Wild Horse, Wild Ride (***1/2)
The Castle (**1/2)
The Advocate for Fagdom (**)

The Earth Day Spectacular!

2011-04-21T22:18:00.003-04:00

When I was younger and didn’t know any better, I was considerably more excited by Earth Day’s pseudo-holiday status. I guess now they have this thing called Earth Week, which in all seriousness and with all redundancy set aside should be every week and not just a one week cram session for people who feel guilty. This year, I had no clue what day of the week Earth Day fell on. Apparently it was Thursday. Or Wednesday. Or maybe sometime in May. Who the fuck knows? Oh, it's the same day as Good Friday? That's a great day to get the environment noticed.

Sorry if I come across as being a little bitter. When I was much younger I had no problem remembering when Earth Day was. I don’t remember now what the exact date was, but I remember it being a weekday in fifth grade. Back then, thanks to a very generically titled book fair purchase (Save the Earth!), I was far more eco-minded. Save the Earth! was a very elementary read, but I guess all future Greenpeace members need to start somewhere. It espoused the virtues of reducing, reusing, and recycling. It gave you addresses of people to write so you could better voice your outrage. My mind vaguely mumbles that it said something in great length about saving the rainforests (which was in vogue at the time, before we had to start saving everything). As I recall, it's cover was a strange Noah’s Ark type homage with a boy and a girl looking way too excited to be on a wooden ship with exotic animals (giraffe, elephant, rhinoceros, velociraptor) all set amongst a sky of blue with wispy white clouds and a rainbow to nowhere over their heads. Oh, and there was a palm tree in the background. Now that I try to remember the cover, maybe I am slightly delusional, but I digress. I wrote that while listening to “Tiny Dancer” played at maximum volume.

One of the suggestions in the book was to start a club to encourage people to take notice of their environment (a word that in grade five I had to continuously write on the blackboard five times at the insistence of my English teacher, Mrs. Avery, for chronically misspelling it despite the fact that I was always right and she was always wrong in her marking. It took my father coming to school and practically shoving a dictionary in her face to show her that there was indeed an “n” in the word. I never had any of my tests re-graded retroactive to her stupidity. I did however make a battle rap about how she had a “fat, fat ass” on my tape recorder. That, despite being a digression, I am quite sadly not delusional about.). Don’t ask me how or why we even decided to do it, but we did. We meaning myself and maybe ten other students teamed up with my social studies teacher Ms. Desy (pronounced De-cee, who also taught me that New Brunswick was actually a part of Canada and not Maine or even its own independent nation) as our official advisor.

The one big event we managed to pull off, other than implementing a half-heartedly embraced recycling programme, was a mass tree planting. Mass meaning five. The club’s only concern was a lack of money. I approached our principal, Mr. Shaw, about planting trees on school property, and while he was immediately intrigued at the possibility of getting the dying bushes removed from the front of the property through good, old-fashioned child labour, he said that the school would in no way fund the planting or provide the materials for it. They would hold an assembly for the planting, but they wouldn’t front a single cent. We were also not permitted to raise funds from the student body as a whole because the school board did not recognize us as a legitimate club and we couldn’t become accredited until after the school year was over.

We also wanted to place a bench in front of the trees we planted. One of the club members had parents who had an almost brand new park bench they wanted to get rid of, and we all figured that if we couldn’t plant as many trees as we wanted, we might as well have a monument for the one that we did plant. The bench idea was once again vetoed by administration since having a bench in front of the building “encouraged loitering.” Apparently Mr. Shaw neglected to remember that the entire front of the building acted as a bus stop.

Amongst ourselves we raised about $120, or enough for one very nice tree to go in the front of the school. After much searching we settled on a rather beautiful dogwood that flowered in beautiful pink and white. Still, we weren’t entirely content with just the one tree. My friend Jeff, who's parents owned the park bench and was quickly becoming my second in command, came to me with an interesting, sugar coated idea: we eat a shitload of Trix. Now while eating mass amounts of sugar laden, slightly fruit based cereal created by a giant corporation seems to have nothing to do with tree planting, it turned out that General Mills had gotten on the eco-bandwagon. With every 4 UPC-barcodes you sent in (plus a $1 check or money order for shipping and handling) they would send you a sapling and planting kit.

At that moment it was our solemn duty to go on a strict Trix diet. It was a lot less fun than it sounded. After days and days of eating them for breakfast they really do become gross. After that I had to take a six year break from eating Trix with its sub-Skittle flavouring and the chalky aftertaste it always left on the back of my teeth and tongue no matter how hard or how many time I brushed.

We managed to collect enough barcodes to get four saplings and just hoped we all didn’t become diabetic for them. The saplings arrived quite promptly and it was for the best since the planting was going to happen the following week. It was decided that these saplings would be planted within the woods behind the school where there were bare patches that no one could really explain. It was almost as if these sections of the woods for cut down just for the heck of it and then never developed or had anything replanted in any way. This planting was not going to be a part of the assembly as no one felt like having to move the entire crowd from the front of the school to the middle of the woods, or vice-versa. The assembly would focus on only the planting of the dogwood in the front.

I really wish I remembered more about the planting. One of the local news anchors, Lester Strong, would stop by to say some words and film the planting for a spot to run over the weekend. Much later in life what almost amounted to my first one-night stand would be with his daughter. Mr. Shaw said something. I said something. We all cheered and had a great time. It was a wonderful moment, that sadly I remember very little of to this day. I do remember years later nearly sleeping with Lester Strong's daughter. Or at least I think I could have slept with her had I not frozen and just ignored the fact that I was practically getting a hand-job from her on her couchwhile watching Demolition Man. .

The trees! Oh yes, the trees! Sorry for that.

The saplings were sadly not long for this earth. Someone had kicked two of them over and the other two appeared to have been lit on fire. They were in the ground less than a week before they were victims of bullying. The dogwood, however, survived and bloomed beautifully. It remained consistent and beautiful.

A year after graduating high school I went back to visit a few teachers and give them my best wishes. I went to the adjacent Junior High School to visit my tree that I hadn’t given as much love to over the years as I probably should have. The tree had grown quite mightily and branched out into a very shady canopy for people to sit beneath.

Only this time there was a bench.

And a plaque.

I took off my sunglasses like Horatio Caine and inspected the plaque that resided next to the brand new bench.

“This bench and tree is presented to the students of Shrewsbury Middle School in memory of Brian Maloney. Beloved son, student, and friend. 1978-1996. Presented in partnership from MADD and Laidlaw.” The plaque has the bronzed signatures of Dr. Preston Shaw and Catherine Mehne, president of MADD, and wife of the school board president, Christopher. Their son was always my arch enemy (and cause of years of psychological abuse that I will get into at another point), and as such, a final screwing from their family is no huge surprise.

Other than being an outright lie, a fraud, and hypocrisy, I was even more upset because of who they were memorializing in the first place. Brian Maloney didn’t even die in a drunk driving accident and was a bully to begin with. It was even suggested at first that he was amongst the group who destroyed the saplings in the middle of the woods. Brian Maloney was a special needs student, but really was a psychopath. He would make off colour and often needlessly graphic sexual jokes in the middle of classes. He shit on his teacher’s desk in grade one. He would take kids by the backs of their heads and slam them to the concrete just for the fuck of it. He drunkenly showed up at my friend Ali's house while he was in grade seven because he thought Ali had purchased Wrestlemania on pay per view. This was six months before Wrestlemania was even supposed to happen. He then punched Ali's dad in the face for trying to throw his drunk ass out. He was hospitalized for siphoning gas and swallowing it. He didn't even bring a gas can or the car to put it in. His plan was literally to spit it into the gas tank. He broke more safety glass in high school than anyone else imaginable. All around class act.

Brian never actually bullied me, but I knew people who had been. His bullying wasn’t even that original. He would sucker-punch you and run away so fast you would have thought that Vanilla Ice, whom Brian resembled in dress and mannerisms, had just beaten you up and you didn’t even know it. He was the typical picture of someone who never made it off being a benchwarmer on the junior varsity football team despite being a senior in high school twice.

Brian died drunkenly, but not from an automobile accident. He was at a party where he got the wise idea to lie face down in Lake Quinsigamond; in less than an inch of water and with a red plastic cup still in his hand as if he were looking for a refill before he ultimately drowned. Needless to say, he is the perfect candidate for a plaque and accompanying bench beneath a tree he had nothing to do with and probably carved the “A.D.I.D.A.S” that now ran down the side of it.

I went into the school and realized that the administration had changed. Mr. Hochstein, who used to be the Vice-Principal and was the coach of the High School basketball team. He was in charge now. I asked for a brief meeting with him that I was granted as soon as he returned to the office. Hochstein, much like his son Matt, was much nicer and easier to get along with than Shaw. No one was exactly sad to see Shaw go, but apparently according to Hochstein, the plaque and bench were one of the last things that Shaw agreed to before he left the previous year.

Hochstein called Mrs. Mehne on the phone while I was in the office and put it on speaker so I could conference and because he didn't remember the full story himself. Hochstein knew that the plaque in front of his school was bullshit and he didn't know the reason why she would take credit for something involving a kid that only the five students who attended his funeral were actually sad passed away.

She told me that she had no idea that we had planted the tree, but since the Save the Earth! Club wasn’t recognized as an official club that year and only lasted for the one year, the tree was essentially public domain and could be dedicated to anyone. She maintained that my work was completely irrelevant at this point and if I had a problem with the plaque, my gripe lies not with MADD but their corporate partner, the Laidlaw bus corporation. I asked about the bench and she said they did have trouble convincing Shaw to let them put a bench in, but she was quick to remind him that a person had just died and needed to be remembered properly with disregard for such a silly no bench policy.

Her tone of voice was so haughty and disingenuous. I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle her, her entire family, and rip their ovaries and prostates out so they could never reproduce. I despised that family when I was in school and they have made quite the living off of making the lives of the little people in the town completely miserable. I asked her if she even attended Brian’s funeral and if she wasn’t just making him a figurehead for an empty, hollow sentiment. She answered with a simple no to both counts and hung up. Our conversation was over.

I let it go. I was moving soon, anyway. It is a great town and generally a good school system with the exception of the board itself. Besides, if I went to take my tree back, I wouldn’t know where to put it, and if I tried to overturn the bench or plaque, everyone would know right away who did it.

The point, somewhat, of this long rambling entry is that sentimentality in the form of symbolic gestures is complete bullshit. I did what I did for no real reason, which is slightly bullshit, but to have it stolen from me in the name of cheap, hollow sentiment really grind my gears; especially when it came at the hands of a family who have never once done something for someone else that didn’t also reflect nicely on them.

Final Note: Laidlaw, however, was surprisingly accommodating. They said they would replace the plaque and maintain that they had nothing to do with the tree, and just the bench was in memory. I don't know if they were got around to it, but if they did, I have no problem with it.

American: The Bill Hicks Story

2011-04-14T07:36:00.004-04:00

American: The Bill Hicks Story opens at The Royal in Toronto in Friday, April 15th.

In every medium of art there is always at least one icon that departed the world too soon. The world quite possibly never got a chance to see the best that Plath, Basquiat, and Cobain had to offer, amongst many others. In the world of stand-up comedy, there was probably no greater wealth of untapped potential than Houston native Bill Hicks who passed away from cancer at age 32.

The new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story chronicles the remarkably packed life of a man who some consider to be one of the best stand-up comics to ever come out of the US. While this film tells the story of Hicks' life very linearly and matter of factly (from interviews of those who knew him best), directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas have created an unnecessarily flashy film that sometimes dampens the impact of the film overall, especially in the film's first half.

American follows the intensely motivated Hicks from working as a high schooler performing sketches between classes to stand-up clubs. Hicks lived and breathed stand-up and would settle for nothing less than success. The film chronicles his early days when he thought he needed hallucinogenics and alcohol to bring out the bitterness a comedian needs to succeed to his later career when he sobered up and became a politically outspoken cult icon. The film does do a great job of fully illustrating just how a comedian works their personal lives into their act by giving reference points for some of his most famous routines.

Bill Hicks is a larger than life character who really did live life to the fullest, but the second half of the film which relies on footage from Hicks' act is the part that really cooks. The first half of the film, however, relies far too heavily on some pretty ugly and unconvincing motion graphics that incorporate archival photographs of the young Hicks. The people being interviewed have some genuinely interesting insights into Hicks' life, but visually the film nearly takes the viewer out of the story. Granted, the events being depicted and talked about were never filmed, but there was probably a better way of handling Hicks' early days than is done here. Despite it all, the man shines through, and in the end, that's all that really matters.

Rating (out of four stars): ***