Freaky and Geeky: The 60 Year-Old Pee-vert

What do you get when you cross a fit of nostalgia with WTF? Judd Apatow producing the next Pee-Wee movie.

I've got strong opinions about that. Unfortunately, those opinions oppose each other, much like Pee-Wee and the Door-to-Door Salesman (though they both have hyphenated names). As fun as it is to make-believe and pretend, it's not that hard to forget 1991. The first thing that seemed wrong to me was that Pee-Wee's Playhouse, the staple of my Saturday mornings for much of my childhood, was canceled. Out of sheer embarrassment, I never really heard why from my parents. Then not long after that, my friends told me that Pee-Wee showed his privates in a movie theater in Florida and got arrested. Dang. Fast forward a few years...Jeffrey Jones, the principal from Ferris Bueller gets busted for kiddy porn. PORN! PORN! PORN! SCREAM!!!! (That was today's Secret Word, btw). Guess who gets busted with him? Pee-Wee!

As in real life, I'm not sure I'd wanna go to someone's playhouse that had been wrapped up in all that. Just not my speed.

Then, on lazy afternoons when I'm just flipping through movie channels, I see Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is on and I watch it. I laugh. I cry. I hide behind the couch when Pee-Wee has the dream about the clown doctors. I laugh again. I rock out to Danny Elfman's end credits. That's some entertainment, folks. It also makes me feel like a kid again. The kid that didn't know anything about the thing in Florida or the thing with Ed Rooney.

So I don't think I really care about how wrong Pee-Wee is. It's still fun. Say what you will about the innuendos, the bike and scooter were cool. The scooter helmet with the big eyeball was cool. Conky 2000 was cool. Having stop-motion food that played in the refrigerator was cool. The picturephone was years ahead of its time. The firehouse poll that dressed you was cool. Mr. T's cereal was cool. Talking breakfast was cool. The breakfast machine (that doesn't shoot you) was cool. Pee-Wee at the circus was---not that cool. But everything aside from that was cool. Where was I? Oh right...I don't care. Even if people said that it's suggestive and I watched it as a kid. Some people make it seem like it's wall-to-wall innuendo. I fail to see that. Maybe it's denial, ignorance, or just having too much damn fun connecting the dots after all these years.

Judd Apatow producing the next Pee-Wee movie is cool. I like this for two reasons...he probably will keep it fun and he'll bring the potty humor down to my level, so I can enjoy it as an overgrown kid and an immature adult. A lot of people are probably thinking Judd's lost his mind or he just treasures the old Pee-Wee too much to let Paul Reubens embarrass himself. I mean the Pee-Wee bit is 30 years old. Paul Reubens is pushing 60 and he's been out of the spotlight so long that people are afraid to see what he's been doing with himself lately. Hopefully Judd's brand of morality will clean up his image a little so we can enjoy the movie with a clear conscience...before we laugh at the potty jokes. Oh, the puerility!

The Cactus Flower (1969)

Just caught this movie on Turner Classic Movies. I'd never heard of it before I saw it was on. In fact, I started watching it somewhere in the middle. That was plenty, because this rom-com was pretty by-the-book. What was interesting about it, though, was that it was made more for the stars, not the audiences. Those stars were Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman.

Walter Matthau plays a middle-aged dentist, Dr. Julian Winston, looking for love. One day, he meets a young record store clerk, Toni Simmons (played by Goldie Hawn, during the prime of "Laugh In"), and gives her his usual story of how he's married and doesn't want to divorce his wife because of the kids. The only problem is that the good doctor doesn't have any kids or even a wife and it's all just an act. After deciding he wants to actually marry Toni, she wants to meet his wife before going through with everything. Julian's in a bind to find a wife and fast. He turns to his nurse, Miss Dickinson (Ingrid Bergman), and she agrees to play along as his wife. The plan falls apart, Miss Dickinson becomes jealous, and Julian realizes the futility of marrying a woman half his age. Of course we don't need to know what happens the next time Julian sees Miss Dickinson after coming to his senses or how much longer the movie lasts beyond that moment. It's a given.

The reason I felt like going to the trouble of composing a review is because, at that point, I knew I liked this movie. It's not a favorite and I wouldn't buy it, but it made me appreciate two great actors that I've almost nearly neglected. In the final scene, when they get together, it was magical. I.A.L. Diamond's script really shone through and created a wonderful exchange that is rarely seen these days. It was made better because these two actors actually knew what to do with dialogue like this and pulled it off like the couple of mature adults they were. The words were snappy, fresh, and natural. They were the exact things you'd expect to hear from those two. Back in the 60's, this was probably an average love scene. Compared to today, it's a masterpiece.

As for the rest of the movie, I could see why it's not more popular. It was very pedestrian and dull. Goldie Hawn's never really interested me, so I was pretty excited when Toni was done with the story. What bothered me the most was the way the movie tried to fit in with the times. Gene Saks (I'm assuming) seemed to have no grasp of what was going on in the country at the time or how to portray believable 20somethings. What we get, as a result, were a couple of airheaded, boring characters that, thankfully, serve their purpose and get the hell outta the movie. Another area that seemed to annoyingly reflect the times was the score, which was full of instrumental selections from the Top 40 of 1969, arranged by Quincy Jones. Rather than having a lush, mature score to fit the lead characters by someone like Henry Mancini, we get muzak. Bona fide muzak. For me, this kept the movie from being totally enjoyable. After the IAL Diamond script, Matthau and Bergman, it's like the rest of the movie was sloppily thrown together. So apparently they had their problems in the 60's too.

The Fortress of Solitude

My buddy at work has a couple of girls who are under the age of 6 and have barely seen Star Wars. While it's an intense movie to a young'n...it's also what sparked my imagination as a 3 or 4 year-old. Star Wars, Star Trek, and Superman all made very big impressions on me during the formative years.

Here it is a quarter of a century later, and I'm still stuck in a web where my mind bounces off the ideas and worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Superman. So before we really get carried away with the geekery, let's shed some light onto why one of these movies still resonates.

I'm grown up, out of school, but don't know my place in the world quite yet. This scene is very cathartic because it expresses the exact moods I feel right now. I feel like while I've got an earthly family that can provide for me and teach me how to be a good person, I need more guidance, just like Clark did. So he's called north by a mysterious green crystal. We don't know how it calls him or why it leads him north. It just seems like he's going on faith. FAITH! So he just wanders up to the North Pole, reaches the edge of a glacier and throws the green crystal because that's kinda the thing to do. Then this gigantic crystal fortress emerges from the frothy, frigid waters. It's beautiful and majestic. Surely, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Once inside, Clark meets his real father. He finds out who he really is and why he's so different from everyone else and why he's so special. His earthly parents loved him and always knew he'd grow up to do great things. But what great things? What's this power for? Through this wonderful sequence, he finds those answers. We don't see Clark Kent flying through the galaxy, finding answers. The fourth wall is broken, so we can be included in this search for purpose and meaning. We don't see the face of a fat Marlon Brando...we just see space and hear this very wise voice, guiding our journey through the universe. The music's very tranquil and optimistic. It sounds like a Father giving his Son the universe, as he explains it to him.

Until I really looked at this scene, I had no real frame of reference for what kind of relationship I should have with my Heavenly Father. My earthly dad's an awesome provider, awesome motivator, and a good friend, but he doesn't know why I'm really here or who I really am. Plus he doesn't love me the way God does.

When I listen to the score from this scene, it's really easy to just tune out the details of this being about Superman and fill in the blanks with my own life. The moods in the music really guide the reflection about just how much God loves me and what He's put me here for. I've got great, unique powers that I don't even know about. But He does. He knows how special I am and what I'm going to do. And He wants to show it all to me and give it to me. There comes a point where I can't explain anymore of it and I get choked up thinking about how beautiful and awesome it really is. To traverse the mundane into this extraordinary, unbelievable, yet true reality to which I belong. It's a fantasy that also exists in fact. God didn't create us to live day-to-day only seeing ourselves barely live out our potential. He's put so much on the line for us, just because He loves us and wants us to grow up and feel that love everyday we wake up.

Wow. That's all I can really say about it. This is far from coherent and I'm probably the only person I know who gets this wrapped up in Superman. To each their own, I guess. :)

The Legend of Drunken Master (1994)

The other night G4 aired this following Road Warrior. In my laziness, I neglected to turn the channel before this movie started, so I just left it. While there's thousands upon thousands of Chinese martial arts movies out there, I figured I need to acquaint myself with more of them. At most, I've seen five? The best being The Five Deadly Venoms...so far. The thing about martial arts movies is that it's a completely different take on conventional filmmaking. Sure, a lot of them still stick to the three-act formula that every movie has. However, some...like Five Deadly Venoms deviate from that and structure the story according to what's required of it.

Drunken Master wasn't one of those fancy, five-act deals. It pretty much had a beginning, middle, and end. Really, it was just a regular martial arts movie that just did everything right. Classic story of an anti-hero who's pulled out of his world and thrust into a larger one and is forced to take sides in a conflict that could cost his people their cultural identity. Jackie Chan plays the hero who's a real-life Chinese folk hero.

The plot was pretty standard...it was kind of like [i]Goonies[/i] set in 1900s China and instead of truffle shuffles, the characters did drunken boxing. While that kind of thing has been done to death in both the East and West, it still works when done right. Here, it was done right. The brevity of the movie kept the pacing going as fast as Jackie's moves and it never slowed down enough to become boring.

On the whole, I don't know that there's anything to really distinguish this movie from other martial arts or action movies, but it's still a fun ride. It's just one of the capstones of Chinese cinema and the martial arts genre. The agility and precision is executed behind the camera as well as in front. If it's ever on TV late at night or on a rainy afternoon, it's worth checking out. I'd watch it again.

1941 (1979)

Yep...this is the movie blog, since it'd be kind of dumb to include it on DBall or Soundiscovery. Anyway, I was pretty young when I first saw 1941. It was on Disney Channel or something and I'd seen in the Disney Channel TV guide that it had a whole bunch of famous people...John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty. I was in fourth grade and I was going through a "Hollywood" phase, where I was just interested in which actors were in which movies and who made them. When the Oscars were on in '94, I wrote down every winner. I don't know why I did that...it felt weird, but I was still really interested. Had no idea what that kind of knowledge would be good for. Then about four years later, I saw a little movie by a little director named Steven Spielberg that was called Raiders of the Lost Ark and from then on, I decided I wanted to be like Spielberg. This meant watching his movies...which meant revisiting 1941.

At the time it was released, 1941 was considered Spielberg's first flop. Sure, it's kind of an awkward movie, but I don't think people were ready for it. Even Spielberg himself. Up to that point, he'd made two huge epic movies about a shark and aliens, wowed everybody, and people thought he was unstoppable. Then he tried something just as ambitious, but it just didn't register with audiences. Looking back on it, I'm not quite sure why 1941 isn't as good as Jaws or Close Encounters. I suppose if I had to pick something, it was the multiple protagonists and their antics that took away from our relating to them and their quest to defeat the Japanese. In Spielberg's prior movies, each one was incredible because he knew how to really focus on the protagonist and their struggle to either defeat an unprovoked enemy or claim a missing part of themselves that had been taken from them. 1941 still had that collective focus/goal amongst the characters who wanted to reclaim their security, but cast members like John Belushi and Slim Pickens and a hilarious script from the Bobs (Gale and Zemeckis) stole the show from Spielberg. Even as a background player, though, his skill to made this movie work. While audiences may have expected more from him at the time, in hindsight, it's easy to appreciate the collaboration between so many of Hollywood's greatest talents alive in the late-'70s.

This collaboration would be a precursor to Back to the Future for USC classmates Steven Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis, and Bob Gale. For me, that makes me give this movie more of a chance, seeing as how that triumvirate created cinematic gold with Back to the Future. If you listen to the dialogue closely in both this movie and the Back to the Future films, you can tell a dead-on resemblence between the two. Most of the characters are zany, idiotic, and colorful buffoons that could keep you in stitches by just reading a cereal box. The casting of this film is also very hit or miss. There are two classes to the cast: the celebrities and the actors. The "celebrities" would be Belushi, Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, Robert Stack, Christopher Lee, Slim Pickens, and Toshirô Mifune (Mifune, for cripes sake!). Then, you've got your regular actors like Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, and Treat Williams, who merely fill roles and waste time. What's fun about the casting is picking out all the movies the major cast members have starred in together. Here's a list:

• John "Joliet Jake" Belushi & Dan "Elwood" Aykroyd...The Blues Brothers (which has a cameo by Spielberg and is directed by John Landis who has a cameo in 1941)
• Dan Aykroyd & John Candy...The Great Outdoors
• Murray Hamilton & Lorraine Gary & Susan Backlinie (the naked woman "attacked" by the U-boat at the beginning)...Jaws (by Spielberg)
• John Candy & Joe Flaherty & Tim Matheson...Speed Zone (okay, a lame movie, but Candy & Flaherty did do SCTV which was awesome)

Another thing that might attribute to the awkwardness of the movie is that this film was originally intended to be a musical, just like another ambitious-but-floppy Spielberg film, Hook. A few scenes are just short of breaking into song, but they don't really fall flat. They just get in the way of the comedy. The "Swing, Swing, Swing" number in 1941 could definitely be compared to "Johnny B. Goode" from Back to the Future, with the pacing and the tone, but "Swing, Swing, Swing" isn't as fun because it feels generic and the story's not woven into it like in Back to the Future.

In the end, you could call 1941 the poor man's Dr. Strangelove (both with Slim Pickens!). I would recommend this to anyone who rabidly loves Back to the Future, Steven Spielberg, SNL and SCTV, and/or Slim Pickens.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Yesterday, at work, I got this strange feeling...as if a worm, a slug, a parasite had burrowed itself under my skin, at the base of my spine, and was slowly working its way up to my brain. It started when I absent-mindedly started listening to the soundtrack from the movie. Then I began to think about how the movie was being released that day. All of this just gave "The Thing" on my spine energy to move. I knew there was only one way to keep it away from all that I hold dear: see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the soonest possible convenience.

That's precisely what I did. I went to Regal for the 1:45 showing. Going in, I expected that the opening shot would fade from the Paramount mountain into a mountain on-screen, just like the other three movies--and it did. It faded from the Paramount logo into a prairie dog hole/mound. From there, the movie pretty much rocked. It definitely played out like an Indy movie and it felt like an Indy movie...it's just that it didn't "pop" like an Indy movie. There was a lot that I liked about the movie: the acting, the casting (John Hurt and Jim Broadbent? Wow.) , the music, the action sequences, the dialogue, and maybe even the Maguffin (the crystal skull--or the "Ark/Holy Grail" of this movie). But when combined, all of that did create the same kind of legendary spectacle that the other three movies were. Why is that?

The easy thing to believe is that after the prequel trilogy, we know that George Lucas has lost it. I actually think he's been a bad director all along, but just got lucky one time and is only now having the chance to show his true colors as a bad director. Either that or he did have it, but quit using it to concentrate on other things and then he lost it. THX 1138 and American Graffiti are both really good movies. Star Wars followed his trend of "thinking outside the frame" and he really was on his way to re-inventing film. But then he lost it sometime after The Empire Strikes Back. Spielberg still has it, I'm convinced. Munich was awesome. The Terminal was awesome. Catch Me If You Can was awesome. Minority Report was awesome. AI was awesome. The only Spielberg movie that hasn't been awesome in this decade was War of the Worlds. The only movies that weren't awesome in the 90s were Hook, Jurassic Park, and The Lost World. Two of those movies have something in common--and it's not the dinosaurs. No, both the dinosaur movies were written by a guy named David Koepp. He also wrote the first Spider-Man movie. So I think there's a pattern here. With the exception of Hook, all the sub-par Spielberg movies of the past 20 years have been written by David Koepp. Any other time that Spielberg's directed from someone else's script, he's made a damn good movie.

Here's why I'm not a David Koepp fan: his films are shallow. By shallow, I mean they either have no emotional/dramatic depth, or they're just too simple. Crystal Skull suffers from both. What happens with Koepp is that there are a lot of great themes and ideas that are touched upon, but they're never fleshed out enough. There will be a scene where the characters start diving underneath the surface of their actions, expressing this real humdinger of internal conflict or arousing insight into themselves or a situation...but that's as far as it gets. The scene between Jim Broadbent and Indy at his home, talking about how life is starting to take more things away than it gives really got me excited, because it was philosophical, insightful, dramatic, and deeper than just a progression of the plot. Of course it was nothing more than a rehash of Indy's talks with Marcus, which were always good, introspective scenes that get the audience focused on the adventure they're about to embark upon. However, the scene with Jim Broadbent (I kept wanting him to say "He had a big, bushy BEARD!" for some reason) just kind of went nowhere. It stirred up excitement and interest like this was going to be a movie that'd offer a chance for a little introspection into my own heart, much like Last Crusade, but it never really did that again.

Spider-Man is the same way. The chats that Peter has with his Uncle Ben or Aunt Mae start to become really interesting, emotional, and deep but then they don't go anywhere beyond that to make any kind of conclusions to the moral questions they raise...if they even make it as far as to ask questions.

Koepp sucks. He's a hack and I always cringe when I see his name associated with a movie I'm eagerly awaiting. I mean when Crystal Skullwas being written, several exciting names were attached to the project. Frank Darabont was one. Yet, somehow, all these great writers were having their scripts shot down by Lucas. Then word comes that everyone was starting to get anxious to start production, so then they just got Koepp to crank out one of his hack jobs and that's the movie we got. To his credit, though, the movie isn't horrible. Neither were Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, or Secret Window. I mean it's one of those situations where "even a bad Indy movie is still better than most action movies". It was still a great popcorn movie...it's just that there were a lot of unpopped kernels left when it was over.