Month: January 2024

Well, after I read Surely You Can’t Be Serious and watched Kentucky Fried Movie, of course I was going to watch this again (even though I just watched it in spring 2021).

I watched it without my boys this time. So I didn’t watch it with the will they get this? double-effect viewer.

And, as I said in reviewing Kentucky Fried Movie, these films do sort of represent a sea-change in what you could do with a comedy film. I mean, we’ve always had romps like Casino Royale, but the jump cut gag in there almost just for the purpose of the gag seemed to start with Airplane!. Or perhaps Airplane! had the benefit of being fresh when the home video market took off, which gave it more reliable playback and availability for cult-movie worship than you would get with a film relegated to repeated but widely scheduled showings on television or cable (whose existence predates the home video revolution, but whose widespread adoption occurred about the same time), which would lead it to being a more dominant memory than other films with similar pacing and philosophy.

It was a pleasure to rewatch it with Surely You Can’t Be Serious in mind. The book certainly explained the presence of the character played by Stephen Stucker, the wacky control tower guy, who was wacky when everyone else was playing it straight–he was an important member of the Kentucky Fried Theater troupe, and they generally just let him go nuts with improv on stage, so they sort of recreated that here.

You know, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Airplane! 2: The Sequel. It must have been on Showtime or something as I’ve seen it several times and don’t seem to have it in the Nogglestead library. Perhaps I should organize the Nogglestead video library. Certainly that would be a less daunting task than to organize the record library, the CD library, or, heaven forbid, the book library which was briefly almost organized–at least the reference and read books shelves were–about 1,200 read books ago. A project for anever day.

This film came out the year after I was born, but I was aware of it and of the presence of “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin in it (I eventually learned it) and because I had a Cracked magazine parody of it at one time, which must have somehow meant I obtained an older copy of the magazine or that they were still parodying the film in the early 1980s when I would have been buying Cracked magazine at the little drug store next to the neighborhood grocery store. A neighborhood grocery store? How old am I? In one of my local newspapers, I read about a woman retiring from the local grocer after forty-three years, and she talked about having to memorize sale prices in the paper because they didn’t have scanners. You know, I came to work in a grocery store, a small almost neighborhood grocery store, in 1990, and we were just at the tail end of the scanners–we still had price sticker guns in the produce department for some applications–which means, mein Gott, I am getting old, and I can only tell you of the way things were in the last century. Younger people will hear, but not understand.

In the film, a couple of small grifters in Joilet, Illinois, roll a man using a scam to swap his money for a bundle of paper. They think they’ve made the big score, but they only got so much because it was a mob courier they scammed. When the heat comes down and his partner is killed, Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) goes to Chicago to learn the “big con” from his former partner’s contact Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), who is hiding from the FBI. They target the mob figure responsible for Hooker’s partner’s death, and the film details how they build a story that Gondorff runs an off-track betting parlor (betting on horse races), and Hooker is his disaffected henchman. Gondorff out-cheats Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) at cards on a train ride and sends Hooker to collect his winnings at Lonnegan’s, and Hooker indicates he’s willing to turn on Gondorff if Lonnegan will give him a good role. So he, Hooker, indicates that he has a connection who can give horse race results before they become available–an elaborate setup of having a fake announcer at the betting parlor holding race results for a couple of minutes so they can tip Lonnegan which way to bet. When they ultimately clean him out, they stage a fake FBI raid on the parlor and Hooker and Gondorff are shot during the raid. After a crooked cop leads Lonnegan off, Hooker and Gondorff walk off into the Casablanca fog extolling the beginning of their beautiful friendship (although I might be confusing that with the ending of another film).

It’s a period piece, a costume drama, and it features title cards and “bumper” music between acts for a little extra throwback flavor. Additionally, it’s clever in the heist’s execution and the dialog rings true. And one gets a bit of a sense who the characters are beyond their spoken lines. My goodness, gentle reader, was this the anachronism of depth in acting? I believe so. Of course, perhaps the modern shallow acting technique merely mirrors the expressive but brief and shallow emotions modern people, bred, educated, and conditioned by small screens, feel (citation needed).

I understand there’s a sequel, but I am not sure I’ve ever seen it in the wild. The copy I have is on VHS, which I presume means it was bought by a consumer before DVDs were popular. Most of the DVDs one finds in the wild come from films from the years after, what, 1986 (along with some earlier blockbusters/classics/Disney reissues)? So a 1983 lesser facsimile of a smash from 1973 might fall into that dead zone of eras. I suppose I could do some research on it and publish a paper, but to what end? I’d never become president of a major university based on my scholarship in twee and unimportant, impractical matters.

It took me three nights to get through this film which I have seen before and think might be Kevin Smith’s best film. I popped it in on an evening where my resolve to watch a film was wavery, and I only got a couple of minutes into it before deciding I wanted to do something else. The next night, I watched another couple of minutes of it before thinking that some of the sexual talk was a little more frank than I’d like my boys to see if they passed through the room while I was watching it. But on the third try, I gutted through and watched the whole thing. And I still think it’s Kevin Smith’s best film, or perhaps it’s the one that spoke and speaks most to me. But I guess we’ll get to that by and by.

The film deals with a comic book writer/artist named Holden (obvious, and played by Ben Affleck) who has a successful indie comic Bluntman and Chronic based on the adventures of Jay and Silent Bob. He works with his lifelong friend Banky, played by Jason Lee, and he meets an attractive fellow comic book artist played by Joey Lauren Adams. He thinks it’s going well, until he discovers that she’s a lesbian. So they become good friends, which strains the relationship with Banky (who might have homoerotic feelings for his friend). The relationship between Holden and Alyssa does blossom into love, and they become a couple, but his discomfort with her sexual history leads to the end. And maybe he learns something at the end of the film.

Yeah, brother, in 1997, I was steeped in the sexual culture of the 1990s, where anything went. I mean, I came out of a university’s English program, where the young ladies were often, erm, tarts. I was friends with Mike, and his exploits were then-legendary and then-fresh. But I was not an active participant in that culture because I guess I was the original “Yes, m’lady” fedora-wearing chump. So it was pretty much a given that anyone whom I met coming out of the English-degree or coffee house millieu that I wanted to get serious about would have more of a history than I did, and I would score myself against those previous lovers whose prowess I could only imagine. So, it hit me then right in the sexual insecurity spot.

But, twenty-six years later, it can still hit one in the generalized insecurity spot.

I don’t know if kids these days would understand–they’re relationships and world view are so much altered by the instanet, and Boomers had their own intra-personal courtship rituals from which we in Shampoo Planet Generation X (isn’t it funny that I’ve read one or the both of them, and I cannot remember their plots much but they’ve named a whole generation) were rebelling, sort of, in our slacker way. So maybe this movie only can appeal to Generation X, or as we can be thought of now, those eligible or about-to-be-eligible for the senior discount. I dunno. All I know is that I’ll rewatch Mallrats sometime, and Clerks. But not likely Dogma. And I haven’t seen anything from Smith since. No, wait, I saw Jersey Girl in the theaters, and it wasn’t bad. So I might rewatch it sometime. And I will probably pick up Zack and Miri Make a Porno sometime (although I could have had it this year for fifty cents). So maybe my relationship with Kevin Smith movies is complicated.