Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This 2004 film comes from a time where Tim Allen was at the height of his celebrity, returning to the genre where he saw his greatest success in films (the Christmas comedy, as The Santa Clause and its sequels were far better received than, say, Joe Somebody). It’s based on a book by John Grisham who was at about the beginning of the ebb of his bestselling dominance I presume–I can’t think of another book of his after Skipping Christmas, but that might be because not long after I stopped looking at the bestseller list to see how Robert B. Parker’s latest work was doing.

At any rate, Allen plays an accountant. His daughter leaves after Thanksgiving to travel to Peru in the Peace Corps, which will leave Allen’s Luther Krank and his wife Nora, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, alone for the holidays. Fearing being alone for the holidays, Luther accounts for the money that they spent on the previous Christmas and convinces Nora that they should not spend any money on Christmas and should take a cruise with the money instead.

So the first part of the story deals with how their co-workers and neighbors deal with them when they’re not decorating and whatnot. Dan Ackroyd plays the local neighborhood leader who tries to pressure them into decorating like all of the neighbors do. The Kranks cancel their annual Christmas Eve party, which upsets their friends who have been coming to the party for years. Co-workers start calling Luther “Scrooge.” Collectors for the police charity, played by Cheech and Jake Busey, don’t like being rebuffed in their collection efforts. But the Kranks soldier on, until their daughter Blair calls on Christmas Eve as they are packing for their trip: She has arrived in Miami with her Peruvian fiance, and she wants to show him how they celebrate Christmas.

So the second part of the film covers the Kranks who try to decorate and get something of a party together for Blair’s homecoming. When Ackroyd’s Frohmeyer sees them, he calls the neighbors to help out. Not to help out Luther, but to do it for Blair. So they try to decorate, find Blair’s favorite foodstuffs, and whatnot. And we get an ambiguous appearance of an umbrella salesman who seems to know everyone but whom nobody knows. Could it be… SANTA?

The film has its heart in the right place, but it falls a little short. I don’t know–somehow the film makes what must have been some long-term relationships with friends and family seem a little shallow. Maybe the film somehow misses a sense of Christmas in it–the film has the decorations and trappings of it, but not much of a sense of Christmas in spite of the change-of-heart gifting that sees Luther give the cruise tickets and package to a neighbors where the wife is suffering from cancer (the book was published in the Before Times, where tickets did not have names on them or something). Maybe that change was very subtle, because although Nora calls Luther selfish right before it, throughout the film, the character does not come across that way. Perhaps it’s shaded differently in the book. Perhaps I’m too fresh from viewing the hijinks in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that some scenes–icing his lawn so carolers cannot stand out there and sing to him–might have been more mean-spirited in the book. Or maybe Tim Allen has played too many nice guy characters in the past so that we put the best possible spin on his behavior. I expect the book differs.

It’s entirely possible that I’ll buy the book sometime to hide in my stacks as an annual Christmas novel. But I won’t be pulling this out of the Nogglestead video library around Christmas too often.

This film is also entitled National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Reunion which clarifies which holiday is involved, as I discovered when I watched it after Thanksgiving and totally ruined it.

Well, not really. This made-for-cable movie features Judge Reinhold as a California anaesthesiologist whose family is consumed by materialism and modern society who wants to have an old fashioned Thanksgiving, but he lacks family outside his immediate family–and has for a while, apparently, as eating out is the family’s general practice. But he receives a letter from a distant, forgotten cousin (played by pre-Walter White Bryan Cranston) inviting them to the old family homestead for Thanksgiving. So we have a fish out of water comedy as the spoiled and upper class family from southern California meet the hippie cousins in Idaho, where the Snider name has a bad reputation ever since the country cousin made an error in a state championship football game decades earlier.

So hijinks ensue, and the town Sniders discover that the country Sniders have invited them because they need some money as country Snider pere has had some bad luck with his businesses around his inventions and his washing machine repair services. So the town Sniders have to determine what to do, but their car disappears and then their daughter disappears–she’s discovered the joys of country boys and their hillbilly deluxe trucks. But all’s well that ends well when the country Sniders and town Sniders team up to save the day and reconcile the Snider family with the townsfolk.

So an amusing bit of clearly television fare. Not destined to be a holiday classic, but then who knows? Although the fragmentation of culture might mean that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is the last Christmas classic ever.

A couple of pieces of the film resounded with me: first, Bryan Cranston does battle with a washing machine at one point, and I know the feeling. November and December weekends here at Nogglestead has seen me inside both my washer and my dryer multiple times trying to keep the commodity-level things operating for another year or so. Or maybe just a couple of weeks. Second, the story line about the football championship took place whilst the local high school football team made it to the state championship ever. No game-losing errors, but they did lose to a Catholic school from the St. Louis area which, as a private school, can recruit football players. So no curses on my boys’ friends.

On the scale of “National Lampoon” branded movies, it’s not amongst the best, but still not a bad hour and a half.

Also, note this trivium: The DVD sold for $.99 at Vintage Stock at some point, but I bought it for a dollar at the antique mall. Which means it appreciated in value, but the person who had the booth at the mall probably paid fifty cents or less for it.

Alright, alright, alright, my film watching has not shifted to Christmas movies exclusively, gentle reader. So I picked up this film one quiet evening at Nogglestead.

You might recall the plot: In the near future, a crime syndicate from a farther future sends people back in time to be killed because the victims could easily be tracked in that future (but apparently time machines cannot). So the hitmen in the movie’s present wait at a certain time for someone in a hood to appear, and they kill that person and dispose of the body, keeping the silver that is secured to the victims’ bodies. When they find gold on the body, that indicates they’ve killed their future selves and “closed the loop.” I am not sure why that would be a thing, but it’s part of the movie’s lore, so….

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, one such killer in the future / past who starts having doubts about his job as his drug and alcohol intake increase. When a co-worker, Seth, lets his future self escape one such loop-closing, Joe tries to shelter him but eventually turns him over as the future Seth/old Seth tries to get to a particular location while suffering debilitating injuries inflicted on current Seth. How Seth would be able to conduct his hits or live to be old Seth who is uninjured at the outset but gets injured as young Seth is tortured…. Well, don’t overthink it, just go with the look and feel of the movie.

So when it’s time for old Joe to go (in the future) he (played by Bruce Willis) resists, leading to the death of his wife. He fights as the future bad men are throwing him into the past, so he’s loose and gets the drop on the younger version of himself. And we get some flashbacks from his point of view, and they’re a little different and are changing. But he learns that a kingpin in the future called Rainmaker is killing all the loopers, and Old Joe tries to kill the Rainmaker as a boy by doing the Herod thing (so is Looper actually a Christmas movie?) He goes child hunting while young Joe goes to a farm with a young boy to await old Joe’s arrival, and….

Well, like I said, just go along for the ride and don’t try to overthink it. Or think about it after all. The whole thing kind of comes off as a script based on the idea for a video game. I mean, shoot, loot the bodies, level up (although I guess they’re not leveling up, really). According to Wikipedia, the “thought-proviking” film appeared on a number of best film lists for 2012. Which is probably more a sad commentary on the quality of film and critic thought in the 21st century than any real philosophical or scientific (why does it sound right that one of those ends in al and the other ic? Now that’s thought-provoking) measure.

Given Bruce Willis’s later diagnosis, I can’t help but wonder if he was already in decline here as his performance is a bit wooden. I would rather re-watch Hudson Hawk, Blind Date, or The Color of Night than this film.

I am not sure that I have seen this film all the way through, but I probably have at some point and might even uncover another copy of it in the library (which happens slightly more for films than for books, fortunately, although the Nogglestead to-read stacks would be less daunting at times if I could like Thanos snap my fingers and half of them disappear–although I’d rather not give my beautiful wife the idea that that is an option). But as it is coming up on Christmas time, I thought I’d watch some Christmas movies, starting with this one.

I watched National Lampoon’s Vacation last year but skipped National Lampoon’s European Vacation because I haven’t seen the DVD or videocassette recently in the wild. It’s all right, though–of all the Vacation movies, I’ve probably seen European Vacation most as it was on Showtime in that brief interval where I was supposed to stay in the trailer, not have friends over, and not go outside while my sainted mother was working. Which meant a lot of Showtime.

At any rate, Clark Griswold invites both his and his wife’s parents along with some family members to stay for Christmas–even though they argue amongst themselves. He’s planning–and put a deposit on–a swimming pool in anticipation of a healthy Christmas bonus. Set pieces include getting the family Christmas tree, struggling with Christmas lights, Cousin Eddie’s arrival, and then the holiday dinner. Side plots include annoying the 80s-archetypical Yuppie neighbors.

You know, I suspect this only became a “Christmas classic” because of the time period it released–the end of Generation X’s youth where large families and family gatherings were more common, and when we became adults and left many of these things behind. Or perhaps I’m projecting a bit, although I am too old-souled to apply classic to a film from the 1980s, especially in the tradition of a Christmas classic.

I did want to note that, unlike more modern films (::cough, cough:: The Heartbreak Kid), this film does not deconstruct marriage or the family for the humor. It takes family and marriage seriously, presents them as a good thing, and the gags take place in that context. The Griswolds find themselves in some crazy situations, sometimes as a result of the father’s actions, but marriage and the family are not presented as an impediment to Griswold’s life (although he does think about the Lady in Red, this time it’s less serious than in Vacation).

The film was amusing, and it’s entirely possible I will watch it again this season with my boys or family. But in the recent search for a specific film I’ve seen before, I pulled out a number of actual Christmas classics to watch, so maybe not. I guess Christmas is only two weeks away, which is probably 10 movies tops.

The film featured Nicolette Scorsese in the aforementioned “Woman in Red” role that Christie Brinkley played in the first film–the woman whom Clark thinks about.

Continue reading “Movie Report: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)” →

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.