Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I have recently devised a methodology to determine one’s age based on the person one thinks of when one thinks of Spider-Man on screen.

Take this simple test for yourself.

Whom do you think of when you picture Spider-Man on screen?

Image:
Actor:	Nicholas Hammond	Tobey Maguire	Andrew Garfield	Tom Holland
Your age:	Okay, Boomer. Or old Generation X	Generation X	You have revealed yourself to be a Russian deep cover agent through your lack of understanding of American pop culture	Millenial

I mean, really, the government would use this test to ferret out dangerous moles if it were competent.

And, c’mon man, we all know there’s only one Mary Jane Watson.

Continue reading “The Spider-Man Age Check” →

All right, all right, all right, now I remember where I got the sense that 21st century comedies were all crass crap: not long after I joined a local video store, I rented a couple of recent comedies, including Ted (which, in reviewing my comments on it, I was already knocking 21st century comedies) and Hot Tub Time Machine which I did not dislike as much as Ted.

In the first Hot Tub Time Machine film from 2010, John Cusack and some of his early middle-aged buddies go back in time to 1986 and hope to take a chance to make some changes for the better–however, Chevy Chase appears and tells them to try not to change anything, as it can have great repercussions in the future–their present. So what happens then is sex and drugs, mostly, and the fellows return to 2010, where some changes have occurred–one of them stayed in the past and became a billionaire based on his knowledge of the future.

This sequel takes place in 2015; One of the now-Cusackless grooup is shot, and they rush him to the hot tub time machine to find his killer. Instead of going to the past, they end up ten years in the future (which is 2025, or three and a half years from now). Where drugs and sex occur as they try to discover who the killer that travels back in time might be. Shockingly, it turns out that sex and drugs lead to the motive. I don’t want to spoil a movie you’ll never see for you, but I don’t want to spend much more time on the mediocre plot.

It doesn’t hold up, the picture of the future that they have from 2015, although perhaps the wide availability of hallucinogens might be presaged by the marijuana shops on every block these days. But all of the humor within the film is pretty base and obvious, and the whole thing lacks the depth that John Cusack brought just by being.

It was widely panned, and deservedly so. And, as I said when I watched Ted, I am back to actioners. And probably old comedies, although I might take a flier on National Lampoon films from the 21st century since the nearly direct-to-video films watched recently pleasantly surprised me.

After watching the National Lampoon double feature (Adam and Eve and Dirty Movie) last week, I thought about watching this movie with my boys. It’s rated PG-13 instead of R, and I didn’t think it had any boobs in it (it doesn’t), so I queued it up.

It’s a send-up of buddy cop action movies, particularly the Lethal Weapon series although it has bits making mock of other contemporaneous films films as well. Emilio Estevez plays the rogue, gun-happy cop; Samuel L. Jackson, playing against type, is the straight-arrow partner Lugar who is getting too old for this stuff. Estevez’s Colt is mourning the disappearance of his K9 partner Claire when he gets assigned to a case where Lugar’s partner is murdered while trying to get microfilm to Lugar. The microfilm contains the recipe for turning cocaine into Wilderness Girls cookies for transit and distribution.

So that’s the story. The film includes appearances by Jon Lovitz as the stool pigeon; William Shatner as General Mortars, the bad guy; Tim Curry as his henchman; and Denis Leary, Phil Hartman, Corey Feldman, Frank McRae, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Lance Kinsey in small roles. Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox from CHiPs make cameos, as does Paul Gleason as an FBI agent. Charlie Sheen makes an appearance as a valet, and Jon Lovitz’s character has a meta gag where he says something like “Isn’t it funny that your brother is in Hot Shots! and you’re doing this?”

So a lot of the humor comes from then-contemporaneous (the then- is extraneous with contemporaneous, ainna?) understanding of movies and commercials, but some of the humor is not–enough that my oldest son liked it more than, say, Airplane! or the aforementioned Hot Shots!.

And, as for the judgment of the youngest: Well, when Colt and Kathy Ireland’s Destiny Demeanor (Allyce Beasley plays the same character, the head of the Wilderness Girls organization, before she lets her hair down) do the sharing of scars before lovemaking scene (riffing off a similar scene from Lethal Weapon 3), he declared he didn’t like ugly people because he is still scandalized by kissing in a movie.

What? Kathy Ireland ugly? Let’s review, shall we?

Continue reading “Film Watching: National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I (1993)” →

So while sitting in the vet’s parking lot yesterday, I had a chance to browse through the Springfield-Greene County Library’s current quarterly newsletter which generally includes a schedule of activities at the various branches. This quarter is pretty thin because semi-governmental and medical and psuedo-medical facilities are the last to give up on the late unpleasantness. Which explains why I was sitting in the parking lot of the vet’s office, killing time.

I guffawed (I am old enough, gentle reader, to be described as gruff instead of just an ass, and I can now guffaw) when I saw the virtual shared film discussions for this quarter.

July’s film is Hell Comes to Frogtown.

Pseudo Rowdy Roddy Piperaste will argue that They Live! is Piper’s masterpiece mainly because that’s the only film they’ve seen him in, but those of us raised on USA Network’s Up All Night in the 1980s know that Hell Comes to Frogtown is truly his pièce de résistance.

In it, Piper plays Sam Hell, who is a wanderer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland whom, the military medical corps discovers is virile–the apocalypse has left much of humanity incapable of bearing children, so the race is on to repopulate and have another go at the war. He gets drafted to impregnate some fertile females, but they’re kidnapped by a mutant warlord in Frogtown, so Sam Hell and two Army women have to go to rescue them.

I watched it once or twice on Up All Night and then I recorded it–so I watched it over and over during my college years. I eventually got it on videocassette, so I got to see that woman who played the psycho in the three part Hunter television series’s boobs–that scene with Rowdy Roddy Piper was cut from the USA Network version.

“Are you going?” my beautiful wife, also in the car in the veterinarian’s parking lot, asked.

Oh, but no.

I mean, what is there to talk about? That it’s a sterling example of the post-apocalyptic genre that we got fed a steady diet of in the 1980s (but not recently, though, even though a major national rival is currently threatening nuclear war with the United States if we don’t let it do whatever it wants). That the videocassette market and the new cable markets made for quite a collection of B, C, and D movies. Kind of like the streaming providers now are churning out, except they’re doing “series” instead which is more of a commitment of time.

Hey, I’ve just gotten used to having time to watch movies in my normal week, so I’m not about to start extending that to entire six- to thirty-hour blocks of time to watch series. Also, I’m skeptical of modern movies and television, and I have many, many fine films to go through in my newly rapidly growing again physical media library.

But Hell Comes To Frogtown? Perhaps I’ll revisit it sometime soon. And the virtual cineaste’s discussion is a month away. If I have nothing else going on that afternoon, maybe I will join the Zoom call.

Gentle reader, my wife and children are finding excuses to go to Silver Dollar City once or twice a week to get the most out of season passes, and as I am not an amusement park kind of guy–once a year is enough for me to walk around and maybe get onto the shoot-at-stuff ride (the Flooded Mine at Silver Dollar City), that means I get a chance to watch a couple of movies each week. Which is good, as I have a cabinet full of videocassettes, DVDs, and a Blu-Rays that I’ve been meaning to get to, and I’ve also started grabbing them with more frequency at garage sales and whatnot as I see their availability in such places coming to an end in a decade or so. Wow, that was quite a sentence.

Regardless, I bought and watched two National Lampoon-branded movies from the early part of the century this past week. I picked them up at a thrift store for a couple bucks each (the same trip where I bought My Cousin Vinny).

National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie (2011)

When I got back from the thrift store, I made sure to show my purchases to my beautiful wife just in case my youngest (he of the I thought I’d find you in the Adult section infamy) saw some of the titles and told his mother I bought a Dirty Movie.

So. The movie is not a movie about a porn film a la Zack and Miri Make A Porno. Instead, it’s a meta film about making a film comprising nothing but dirty jokes being acted out. The frame story is a polyester producer who wants to make this film working with the studio, the director, writers, and actors to make the film interspersed with dirty and offensive jokes acted out. You have a bunch of clips with doctor, give me the good news/bad news jokes, Dirty Johnny jokes (a favorite of my father’s) where a schoolboy responds to a normal question with an off-color remark or pun, and that sort of thing. The comedy is full of ethnic humor and jokes at the expense of homosexuals, too, including some in the acted-out-joke portions and in the meta portion, where the writers insinuate that the director is gay. AND an extended bit where the producer wants to insert the baddest word but the head of the studio won’t allow it–and every time the writers, producer, and head of the studio say the baddest word, they bleep it out even though they’re using all manner of other ethnic slurs throughout the movie and in this bit in comparison (“So a bleeped baddest word can call a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out, but a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out cannot call a bleeped baddest word a bleeped baddest word?”) So it’s poking fun at the then-orthodoxy which has only gotten worse.

So it was amusing for people of a certain age who were not raised snowflakes, but it’s also not for young people, so if I ever make a locked cabinet for films to keep them out of the hands of my boys, this one will go in it. Although they’re teens now, so I only would need a locked cabinet for a little while yet, so I will probably not and just rely on their predilections for just staring at their other electronic devices and finding setting up the entertainment center to watch a movie on physical media too much of a chore to bother with.

National Lampoon’s Adam and Eve (2005)

With the title Adam and Eve, one might expect some sort of Biblical story, and that’s not what this is at all. It has a standard setting for a National Lampoon film, a college, with main characters in a sorority and a fraternity (it says), and there’s a lot of drinking, sex, and drug use.

But at its core, this movie has a very, erm, conservative message. Adam introduces himself to the girl Eve, and they start dating, but she’s a virgin, and she’s not sure when she might want to go all the way. So most of the story deals with his frustration and her uncertainty, with pressure on Eve not only from Adam but also her sorority sisters. The gags are typical college movie fare, but the story isn’t about the gags. It’s about the tension and resolution in Adam and Eve’s relationship. Can they stay together without sex? They both declare their love for one another to each other and to others. An obvious plot twist and a satisfying conclusion.

So I was rather pleased with the film. But another one not for the boys.

In the film, Eve is played by Emmanuelle Chriqui, whom I recognized from You Don’t Mess with the Zohan but who also apparently has had a good career in television as well.

Continue reading “National Lampoon Movie Double Feature” →