Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I think of this movie as coming after Ben Stiller’s peak period, but to be honest, something happened in 2006 that killed our cinema-going days for a while (before the insipidity of modern movies completely killed it). My oldest was born in 2006, so I missed a lot of movies between then and forever except for those I’m catching up on via home media (whose reach is already waning as streaming takes over). Looking at his IMDB listing, Stiller has remained active, although mostly on sequels to things that came out before 2006. So I guess we don’t have to pen a “Where Are They Now?” entry about him just yet.

At any rate, in this film, Stiller plays Eddie, a sporting goods shop owner in San Francisco who feels pressure to get married because his long-time fiance is getting married and because his best friend (played by Rob Corddry, who also was in How To Be A Latin Lover and the Hot Tub Time Machine movies–so I’ve seen him often enough to learn his name), because his friend (he repeated because that other parenthetical grew long) who extols the virtues of marriage whilst being a henpecked husband, and because he, Eddie, is forty. So when he attempts to help a woman getting mugged on the streets of San Francisco, he meets an attractive woman who seems perfect. After a montage of them snogging in various locations over a couple of months, they marry and go to Cabo for their honeymoon.

During the trip, though, she starts to annoy him, and starts slipping things about her past (cocaine addiction and apparently a lot of varied sexual adventures, along with the fact that the “mugging” was an ex-boyfriend trying to reclaim his wallet which she stole from him). They don’t agree much on what to do, and on the first day, a beach day, she gets sunburned terribly and refuses to leave the room. So Eddie goes out to dinner and meets a woman in Cabo with her family, and then meets her family, and has a montage of pleasant trips with her whilst his new wife is laid up. So much so that she falls for him, too, but when she discovers he has a living wife (not a murdered wife, which is part of a story he told to kids at the wedding in scene 1 who also happen to be in Cabo at the same time), it’s over. Eddie has a montage of him trying to cross the border without papers as his wife burned all his belongings before returning to the U.S. When he arrives in Oxford, Mississippi, he finds that Miranda (played by Michelle Monaghan) has married an ex-boyfriend and is happy. Eddie reflects on his life and decamps from San Francisco, having lost his sporting goods store in the divorce, moving to Cabo and opening a business on the beach. Some time later, Miranda returns to Cabo separated from her husband and looking to rekindle her romance with Eddie, but the very last scene is Eddie telling his new Mexican wife the same lies he told his first wife when he was going to sneak off with Miranda.

So, basically, the whole thing is a deconstruction of marriage. I mean, he rushed into his marriage after a couple of months, only to discover some things about his new wife that he didn’t learn in those months when they were together all the time, apparently snogging but not shagging. And, in the end, he has not learned anything and is in the same place, with the same shortcomings.

This is a remake of an earlier film starring Charles Grodin. I haven’t seen it, but the Wikipedia entry makes it sound like Eddie was a less sympathetic figure. A cad, but in the end he marries the girl (and ends up at the kids’ table, which is where Eddie begins in this film). So there is some recognition of the value of marriage and that Eddie is outside the bounds of the mainstream or the “good.” But Ben Stiller plays, well, Ben Stiller, so the character comes of as sympathetic, it could happen to anybody, even as he plies deception and continues the deception to the end of the film and beyond. So I didn’t like the film and ultimately found it morally repugnant.

I bought this film late last month and popped it in as I’m more in the mood for films than reading these days, perhaps spurred by the realization that even though I know I will not finish reading all my books, I have a shot at watching all my unread videocassettes and DVDs if I put my back into it. So I have been a bit.

In this ultimately forgettable comedy from the 1980s, Chevy Chase is a sportswriter who quits his job in the city and moves with his wife (no children) to a…. Well, a hobby farm sized parcel way out in the country. Hijinks ensue as they deal with movers who get lost and are days late (with only a truckload of furniture, but I guess they are moving from an apartment to a home), the eccentric locals, the wildlife, and so on. Chevy Chase wants to write a book, and he starts on it. When he shares the beginning of it with his wife on their anniversary, their romantic mood is ruined when she says it’s not good. So their marriage founders, especially when she writes a children’s book that she sells and starts working on others. They plan to sell the house, hiring the townsfolk to act Norman Rockwellish for a couple who is interested in the property, but they decide to reconcile and stay. And finis!

You know, the 80s brimmed with “New Yorkers Move To The Suburbs/Rural Areas” comedies. Well, okay, maybe I’m only also thinking of The Money Pit just because I watched it earlier this year. But these fish-out-of-water tales really miss the proper zeitgeist of rural areas (and adding meth to them a la Winter’s Bone and whatnot does not correct this flaw).

I didn’t care for the film, as it was kind of shallow and hollow at the same time. The characters are underdeveloped, even for a comedy–in the best of movies, you get the sense that the characters have some sort of life off screen, but the characters here are just ciphers for cinematic manipulation. And it wasn’t that funny.

Although it did speak to me a bit: 1) When I first met my beautiful wife, I brought a manuscript of The Courtship of Barbara Holt and watched her while she read it at a coffee shop called The Grind in the fashionable Central West End. And 2) Something about the marriage rankled me–both participants showed some selfish tendencies, and the husband’s poisonous envy of the wife’s success was off-putting. I don’t know. Maybe I thought it would be too easy for me to become that person.

So I have seen it, and although I asked my boys, including the Chevy Chase fan, if they wanted to watch it, I ended up telling him (the fan) that he made a good decision as the film was insipid.

You know Chevy Chase made a fair number of films in the 1980s, but he’s mostly remembered for the National Lampoon’s Vacation films. And fittingly so. They were family-oriented films, which made the adults adults and not childish. Well, not completely childish. Which is often lacking from modern comedies.

This film also came out when I was in college (although I guess Don Juan DeMarco was shortly after). I would not have been the target audience back then. No matter how grumpy I was, and I was a curmudgeon before I graduated, this film is about grumpy old men. So although I might have caught glimpses of it on television from time to time in the intervening years, this marks my first viewing of the film now that I’ve grown into closer to being an old man.

In the film, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau play John and Max, neighbors who live alone next door to each other and who spend their days ice fishing and insulting each other. John’s hiding from the IRS which is about to foreclose on his house. When an attractive English professor played by Ann-Margaret moves in across the street, they both watch her and hope to court her, with John eventually emerging victorious at winning her heart, enraging Max. But John breaks it off when Max learns of John’s debt to the IRS and how he can offer her nothing. During the exchange the two have, we learn that their feud stems from when they were young friends, but John stole Max’s love and married her–a marriage that proved to be unhappy, while Max married another woman and was happy. But they eventually reconcile, partially because their children, played by Daryl Hannah and Kevin Pollak, are attracted to one another.

The film has a great supporting cast, including Burgess Meredith as John’s 94-year-old father and Ossie Davis as the local bait shop owner.

It includes several scenes on a lake while ice fishing, which I would have found helpful for our Trunk or Treat “Trunk” this year where my youngest son and I dressed like we were ice fishing. Because, you see, in years past, the night of Trunk or Treat has been cold, and we’ve been outside for almost three hours in nothing but costumes. So, this year, planning ahead, I lit upon costumes where we could wear coats, hats, and gloves–ice fishing! Unfortunately, the night was so cold that the church ended up moving the event indoors, so we were indoors bundled up for several hours. But I’ve never been ice fishing, so although I had us bundled up, a nice metal bait bucket to use for the candy we were to pass out, ensafened fishing rods, and a flopping fish cat toy, we did not have a ladle to use to dip into the open water and pour it onto the edges of the hole to keep the ice open. I don’t think the Trunk or Treat attendees suffered from the lack of verisimilitude. But we were amongst the most frightening trunks for the little children, who were nonplussed by the monsters and other Halloween things but demurred at the sight of two men with northern accents, one spot-on and the other mixed with Southern and Indian accents, and more likely the squirming fish which looked real until its USB-charged battery gave out.

At any rate, you know, I enjoyed the film more than I enjoy more recent fare. And I’m hoping to find the sequel somewhere. Because when it comes down to the debate our forefathers had and never resolved, between Ann-Margaret and Sophia Loren, I am definitely on Team Sophia.

Last-in, first-out (LIFO) appears to be my film watching philosophy, gentle reader, but that’s partly because the results of my most recent trips to book sales or antique malls end up jumbled atop the cabinets beside my entertainment equipment, so of course I watch them first. This is not holding true for the Marvel movies I have been accumulating for some time now–perhaps I’m going to put them together and watch them in order sometime. But it took me only a couple of days from purchase to watch this film.

I watched Not Another Teen Movie relatively recently, but perhaps before I started doing movie reports, and it was silly but not odious. So I expected something similar from this film, even though apparently it was not from the same people–this is from the people who wrote Scary Movie. Perhaps that was an early 2000s trend, to just give a generic Movie name for a parody. I’ll have to think on whether other unrelated examples exist. With or without National Lampoon Presents above the title.

At any rate, Alyson Hannigan in a fat suit starts out deciding she will not give up and will find a man. So she consults Hitch who gives gets guys a la Pimp My Ride to give her a makeover, and like Nia Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, she becomes pretty. Well, she becomes Alyson Hannigan, which is several steps above pretty. She meets the man of her dreams, who has quirky parents (played by Fred Willard, who made every movie he was in better, and Jennifer Coolidge). When they are engaged and planning their wedding, she discovers he wants Andy to be his best man–and Andy is an attractive woman who wants him back. Hijinks ensue.

Amusing in spots, although I am pretty sure I would have written something similar in high school. There are spot hits/gags based on Michael Jackson trying to prey upon a child, a brief spot from the frame of Mr. and Mrs. Smith which I would not have gotten two months ago, a not-necessary-to-the-plot Napoleon Dynamite gag, and just a bunch of other things machine-gunned in. It’s similar to the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films, but the characters in the film do not play it as though they were in a serious film.

And since Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker have been out of the game for a while now, if anyone is going to make a Samurai Cat movie, it’s these guys. Wait a minute. This movie is almost 20 years old now. Perhaps they, too, are out, and we will never get the Samurai Cat movie we deserve. Because we have been very, very bad.

It’s been a while since I’ve read Bendigo Shafter, but based on that reading and A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, when I saw this two-videocassette set at the Friends of the Library book sale in April, I picked it up. And given the long Thanksgiving weekend coming up, I figured I could make it through the whole miniseries. To be honest, I was not sure whether it was a major two-night or four-night event when it aired when I was seven years old. The videocassettes themselves said the running time was 198 minutes, but I was not sure whether that was each or total. When I got to the end of the first part, the end titles played, but they used the same stock western footage as the beginning titles, so I thought two episodes per videocassette. But, no, it turns out this was a two night movie event. Maybe it was a couple years before miniseries stretched to four or five nights.

The story is based on two L’Amour novels, The Daybreakers and Sackett featuring basically two stories that tangentally intersect–one can almost see the stitching lines. Sam Elliot plays Tell Sackett who is working in a mining camp when he shoots a card sharp cheating at a camp poker game. He has to leave before the Bigelow brothers come to avenge their brother. He ends up discovering a gold mine and a woman who has been hiding from the Indians who slaughtered her family. Meanwhile, his brothers Orrin (Tom Selleck) and Tyrell (Jeff Osterhage) run from a Tennessee feud, join a cattle drive, gather their own cattle, and then make their way to Santa Fe where Orrin gets elected sheriff just as an Anglo cattle baron (John Vernon) is preparing to square off against the Mexican natives.

The stories continue independently except for a couple crossovers ending in a climactic shootout where the brothers dispatch the Bigelow brothers and their hired hands. The brothers reuinte only after a frantic cable to Santa Fe summons Orrin and Tyrell who ride out and arrive just in time and not tired at all.

I am sure that the books cover most of the threads in greater detail. Orrin’s romance with the cattle baron’s daughter probably encompasses more pages than the couple minutes of screen time we get. One of their friends from the cattle drive and business partner develops a grudge against Orrin that leads to a shootout, but it happens in a couple of short scenes. Tyrell also has a fellow cowpuncher from the cattle drive that for some reason decides he’s an enemy, and they have a near-shootout where Orrin spares but humilates the man; one wonders if he would return later. But if you’re going to make a miniseries out of two whole books, you’re going to chop a lot.

Still, it’s Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, and Jeff Osterhage as brothers in a western. It worked so well that they later did another L’Amour book together, The Shadow Riders (which I had previously seen). If you’re a fan of the western genre, you could do worse. However, I’m not sure if I’m quite the western fan. After all, the genre often relies on minutes and minutes of stockish footage of men riding horses in Western expanses, rivers, deserts, and so on. I guess my favored genre might be noir as I’ll take black and white shots of dark streets, alleys, and rooms over horses and farms.

Well, after watching Don Juan DeMarco, I thought watching this film (bought in my massive haul in September) would fit in thematically. Well, sorta, but not really.

This is an independent comedy, which means it has a large number of name actors working in what turned out to be an overlooked film. Maximo, a Mexican whose father was a hard worker but who died comically in the intro flashback, decides he wants to be a trophy husband as a career. So he charms and seduces an older widow who visits a resort where he’s working. The bulk of the film takes place twenty-five years later where Maximo, played by Eugenio Derbez (not a recognized name actor here in the U.S.), checks every morning to see if his elderly wife has died. He leads a pampered, spoiled life, but he finds that he has been cuckholded and supplanted by a McLaren dealer (played by Michael Cera). He’s thrown out without a penny. He turns to his fellow trophy husband Rick (played by Rob Lowe), but Rick does not have room to help as he has to satisfy his wife Millicent (Linda Lavin) who likes a lot of role-play sex. So Maximo goes to his estranged sister Sara (Salma Hayek) and moves in with her. When he finds that his niece nephew attends an expensive school on a scholarship, he vows to help the boy win his crush whose grandmother (played by Raquel Welch) is loaded and single. It all goes awry, of course, comically.

So I laughed a couple of times–the Weird Al cameo was unexpected and very welcome.

Did I say Salma Hayek? I did, and not Salma Hayek Paz Vega.
Continue reading “Movie Report: How To Be A Latin Lover (2017)” →

I was vaguely aware of this film when it came out. I was just about a year out of college, and either my friend Mike mentioned it, or perhaps the premise reminded me of Mike. But I did not see it in the cinema, nor had I seen it any time before now.

Johnny Depp, fairly fresh from 21 Jump Street, plays Don Juan DeMarco, a man who dresses in black and wears a mask like Zorro. He is a great seducer, but he has decided to end his life. So after one last conquest, he scales a billboard and plans to end it all in a duel with his greatest adversary. However, the responding police send up a psychiatrist played by Marlon Brando who plays along with Don Juan to get him into the bucket of a bucket truck and from thence to a mental hospital on a ten-day hold for evaluation.

Dr. Mickler, Brando’s psychiatrist, goes against the wishes of his colleagues and does not drug DeMarco but instead listens to his fanciful story of his life. The child of an American and a Mexican property owner who falls in love with his tutor but the affair leads to his father’s death in a duel and DeMarco’s running away and his mother’s entering a convent. He then has a variety of adventures told in flashback, including being in the harem of a shiek and then meeting a beautiful woman on a beach after a shipwreck who would go on, after their parting, a centerfold.

The authorities locate his grandmother, who tells a different story. The father died in an automobile accident, which might have been a suicide based on his wife’s affairs, and the mother did enter a convent. The fanciful stories that DeMarco tells have enough touchpoints with the grandmother’s story to introduce some ambiguity as to whether his stories, although fantastic, have some truth to them, or if he is really deluded.

Meanwhile, Mickler is learning from the stories to alter his outlook on life to be more romantic and legendary even in the everyday. This helps him to rekindle his marriage with his wife, played by Faye Dunaway.

So I liked the film more than I expected. Thematically, it questions our every day epistemology and outlook. How do the stories we make of our everyday life make our lives better? How did I save the planet today by defeating the invading mildew in my bathrooms? I guess the movie did not cover the last case explicitly, but it’s implied.

I’m surprised that this film is not more fondly remembered today. Perhaps its fanciful nature limits its Seriousness, so it is not thought of as meaningful as, say, Girl, Interrupted. Which I am not inclined to watch twenty-five years after its release because it was so serious and probably more a product of its time.