Hot Fuzz

November 11, 2018November 7, 2018 / andrewmisk / 1 Comment

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Dir. Edgar Wright

Written by: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton

I can remember the anticipation surrounding the second installment in Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy” (though I doubt it was referred to as such at the time) leading up to its release in the spring of 2007. The trilogy’s first entry, Shaun of the Dead had been a cult hit upon its release, and it had become a favorite of mine in the few years after its release. Of course my friends and I were eagerly awaiting the sequel, and Hot Fuzz definitely did not disappoint. The comedic team of Wright, Pegg, and Frost shift their sense of humor and aesthetic from the horror genre to the action blockbuster and they don’t miss a beat in the process. I don’t think I felt this way at the time, but I think that they managed to improve upon Shaun of the Dead in every way with Hot Fuzz. The film is bigger in every way, and Wright starts to really come into his own as a visual filmmaker as he attempts to ape the style of Michael Mann and Michael Bay. I love all three movies that make up this oddly-named trilogy, but Hot Fuzz has always been the standout for me. Despite that fact, it’s the entry in the trilogy that I had watched least recently, probably not having watched it since shortly after I purchased The World’s End. As always, it didn’t disappoint.

In Hot Fuzz, hotshot cop Nicholas Angel (Pegg) finds himself transferred from the London police department to Sandford, a sleepy, rural town in the English countryside. Upon arrival, Angel has trouble adjusting to the slower pace and lack of crime in Sandford, as well as to his slovenly, unskilled partner, Danny (Frost). The town elders, however, including Danny’s father, Frank (Broadbent), who is the chief of police, and the local grocer, Simon Skinner (Dalton), hope to keep Sandford quiet and crime free to boost their image in the upcoming Village of the Year competition. When villagers start dying in a series of unlikely freak accidents, Angel begins an investigation that threatens to damage Sandford’s reputation and standing in the competition. He and Danny continue their inquest into the deaths, despite the protestations of the village elders, and discover a secret that Sandford has been keeping under wraps for generations.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to pick a favorite out of the three films that make up Wright, Pegg, and Frost’s feature film collaborations. All three films feature a perfect blend of cheeky parody and reverent homage to the genres that they’re working in. All three films feature perfect casting, with a collection of characters that are both outlandish and utterly relatable. And, finally, all three films use the shield of adherence to genre sensibilities as a Trojan Horse for a heartfelt story about the development of a relationship, whether it be romantic or platonic. Shaun of the Dead laid out the template for the Cornetto Trilogy, and established its creative brain trust to worldwide audiences. The World’s End felt like something of a victory lap, with the whole gang getting back together for one last romp through the familiar landscape that had been established in the first two films. Hot Fuzz, the second entry in the trilogy, stands head and shoulders above those two as the crystallization of the Cornetto aesthetic and as Wright’s ultimate parodic achievement. It broadens the scope of Shaun of the Dead while maintaining its independent feel, and stops short of pulling out all of the narrative stops that The World’s End is determined to barrel right through. It introduces a more complex story with better and more interesting supporting characters that Shaun of the Dead, and the blockbuster milieu in which the film operates gives Wright full license to start branching out and developing as a visual filmmaker.

When I first saw Shaun of the Dead in 2005, it seemed like a perfect answer to the glut of studio comedies that had been clogging American theaters during the beginning of that decade. While I enjoyed, and still rather do enjoy, the comedic stylings of Judd Apatow, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, and Will Ferrell, I was quickly starting to age out of their more sophomoric movies, and discovering the offbeat humor of Pegg, Frost, and Wright felt like a breath of fresh air. That sense was only expanded upon when I saw Hot Fuzz, with the film packing in more memorable supporting roles for great British character actors, more reverent, humorous genre send ups, and more perfectly-timed asides and one-liners. Pegg playing against type as the uber-competent Nick Angel is a great wrinkle in Hot Fuzz that adds to its comedy quotient. Frost expands on his fairly dim everyman best friend character from Shaun of the Dead, ably providing both physical comedy and a broad foil for Pegg’s frustrated cop. The scenario that the three dreamed up for Hot Fuzz, involving a shadowy cabal of village elders who have been engaging in a decades-long covert war against petty crime in Sandford, is more involved and audacious than the simplistic narrative pleasures afforded by Shaun of the Dead. It’s a sublimely absurd conspiracy that’s played totally straight throughout the film, and the principal antagonists being a malicious group of Boomers dead set on maintaining their own standards of proper decorum rather than a gang or a drug cartel is a perfect send up that turns a foundational trope of the action genre on its head.

November will have to be a month of shorter posts by necessity for me, so I won’t get too much more involved with Hot Fuzz. It’s a movie that I think most people should have seen by this point because, while it hasn’t necessarily gained the cult following of its predecessor, it was more widely successful upon its release than the other two entries in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy. That success is well deserved and reflective of Hot Fuzz’s impact on a big screen. It deserves a spot in the canon of early 21^st century comedies, but it is every bit as entertaining and valuable as a meta-action movie. Wright, Frost, and Pegg have created a love letter to the genre more compelling, more thoughtful, and more nuanced than any Expendables sequel could hope to be. Though I haven’t had a cable subscription in about five years, I wonder if Hot Fuzz has ascended to the once-vaunted status of TBS weekend afternoon movie. I’ve written before about the existence of these movies in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I was a pre-teen and teen, that aired on cable on the weekends and gained an iconic, populist-classic status, despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of prestige trappings. Popcorn fare like Point Break, Con Air, Bad Boys, movies that if they were on, I’d more than likely just stop and watch through until the end if I didn’t have anything else to do. I think that Hot Fuzz is a better movie than all of those, but it would be in perfect company among their ilk, because those are exactly the movies that Hot Fuzz is celebrating. It’s a perfect, fun, funny, movie that can be just as satisfying for a mid-afternoon partial watch as it is to dissect for a tenth time, picking up on clues to the film’s central mystery and sly jokes along the way.

High Fidelity

October 14, 2018October 11, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

High Fidelity (2000)

Dir. Stephen Frears

Written by: D.V. DiVencintis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, Scott Rosenberg (From the novel by Nick Hornby)

Starring: John Cusack, Iben Hjejle, Lisa Bonet

“Which came first, the music or the misery?” This maudlin bit of dialogue opens High Fidelity, and it came to be something of a mantra for me in my teen years. I imagine that there were quite a few young, nerdy, socially maladjusted misanthropes who took Rob Gordon’s words and neuroses to heart after seeing High Fidelity. It seemed like the perfect movie for me at 15 or 16 years old, justifying my obsessive interest in music, movies, and pop culture ephemera. Though Rob is certainly meant to be seen as a shallow, narcissistic protagonist, one who can even identify those qualities in himself, I consistently misread the film’s message as a young person. By my late teens, I think that I started to understand the film’s third act, in which Rob starts to accept some responsibility for his own shortcomings and becomes a better person and partner, but I still saw more of myself in the Rob of the early film, who is so wrapped up in the minutiae of collectorship and curation that he fails to fully form a personality for himself. Watching High Fidelity in my thirties is almost cringe-worthy, as it reminds me of my early attempts at romance, of the person who I was nearly twenty years ago, but it’s also a powerfully nostalgic trip that does provide some wistful smiles and laughs.

The movie opens with Rob Gordon (Cusack), fresh on the heels of a break up with Laura (Hjejle), trying to take stock of his life and his failed relationships. On the cusp of middle age, Rob is more grown child than man, defining his personality and interpersonal relationships through his encyclopedic knowledge of music and pop culture. Rob has parlayed this knowledge into a job running his own record store, Championship Vinyl, where he spends his days trying to impress customers and one-up his fellow music-nerd employees, Dick (Todd Louiso) and Barry (Jack Black). Rob’s self-examination takes the form of an exhumation of his loves and losses, Top Five style, as is his wont throughout the film. We see Rob grow from an immature, elitist, young hipster, into an immature, cynical, older hipster and along the way meet some of the women who he blames for turning him into the self-loathing, but still self-obsessed, ball of neuroses and music trivia that he is. Eventually, Rob’s soul searching brings him back to Laura, and the two reconcile as she tries to rekindle not only the spark in their relationship but in Rob’s personal life, as well. High Fidelity finishes up with a conventionally happy ending, but its always struck me as fraught with uncertainty, much like the ending of The Graduate.

I’m probably being unfair to Rob as a protagonist, but that’s only because I can sometimes see so much of my younger self in his character. As I mentioned, High Fidelity was an early touchstone for myself, and I embraced its esoteric hipster-dom. It was the movie that made me feel ok to be as wrapped up in music and movies as I was as a 15-year-old kid, but I think that it also gave me a pass to become too maudlin and too self-involved for a while in that period of my life. There’s only so long that you can substitute depression, teenage alcoholism, and a record or movie collection for an actual personality. Rob is a prick when we meet him, a prick in his own remembrances, and he remains at least a bit of a prick until the movie’s end, when he does manage to, at least partially, redeem himself by embracing a more healthy, positive outlook on life. I think that I stopped watching High Fidelity almost entirely after my high school years simply because it was too difficult to stomach Rob’s elitism and moping. His attitude reminded me of a phase of development I was desperately trying, and often failing, to grow out of. Ironically, if anything, I probably became more of an ivory tower elitist in college than I had been in high school, although I couldn’t see that particular forest for the trees of academia that were surrounding me.

But still, uneasy self-revelations aside, I found a lot to enjoy about High Fidelity watching it for the first time in at least a dozen years. While Rob might not be an easy guy to root for or sympathize with, High Fidelity is an easy movie to settle into and enjoy. It’s light and funny, it has a fittingly great soundtrack, and the grand gestures of love depicted in the movie seem perfect to its target audiences of young people and hopelessly romantics. I’ve never been a big fan of traditional romantic comedies, but High Fidelity injects enough pessimism and cynicism into its saccharine core that it avoids turning my stomach. The movie walks the line between loathing and loving, and it depicts the balance between the two sentiments as existing within all of Rob’s relationships, including the one that he has with himself. That seems like a much more honest depiction of love to me than most romantic comedies of the early 2000s were peddling. By the film’s end, Rob and Laura are in love again, and, while it’s not difficult to envision a future where they really do share a fairytale happy ending, it’s more likely that their relationship will continue to be defined by the careful balance of their very different, but complimentary, personality types. Throughout the film, Rob’s relationship with Laura was shown as having elements of humor, affection, contention, and understanding, depths that clearly aren’t represented in any of the previous relationships that he posthumously examines for clues as to his failings. That depth is what builds a strong and lasting relationship. I like that High Fidelity depicts this sort of relationship as a continuous work in progress. It feels genuine and affirmational, especially when that work leads to an ecstatic moment such as the one depicted in the film’s musical finale where Rob proposes to Laura. It’s a really good scene and it feels like a great payoff for the cast of characters who have all grown in some way.

I’d also kind of forgotten what a pleasure the supporting cast of High Fidelity is to watch. Jack Black’s performance in the movie always sticks out in my head, and certain line deliveries of his tend to pop up in conversation for me still, but I had forgotten how much of his humor is drawn from the perfect interplay between his character, Barry, and Todd Louiso’s Dick. The two actors are perfectly paired, with Louiso embodying the introverted, nerdy stereotype of the record obsessive, while Black’s Barry is the brash, know-it-all music nerd. I’ve known several people who fit into both sides of this stereotype, and the actors chosen are perfect for their roles. Louiso lurks quietly in the background of scenes, mumbling lines both pithy and sincere, and, seemingly in compensation, Black’s mania is ratcheted up to 11, with the actor dancing and bouncing through the record store, while bursting into gleeful song. Both characters are genuine and fun, and it’s a pleasure to watch them grow a little bit throughout the movie, with Dick finally getting a date with his crush and Barry finally getting to sing in a band, by the film’s end.

On a similar note, Lisa Bonet deserves acclaim for her role as Marie de Salle, a musician whom Rob develops a crush on while he and Laura have split up. Bonet also feels genuine, tapping into her sensuality and performative streak when Marie is on stage, but revealing a natural, fun side to the character when she’s off it. Marie feels real in a way that none of Rob’s previous girlfriends have, and I attribute much of that to the inherent warmth in Bonet’s performance. She exudes coolness, but also caring, seeming to develop a real connection with Rob in just a short period of time. She also nails her performance scenes, and the cover of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way,” still sticks in my head sometimes. Overall, I think that High Fidelity shortchanges most of its female characters because they’re being imagined through the prism of Rob’s post-breakup mindset, but Marie de Salle is allowed to exist fully on her own terms as a character, and Bonet brings that character to life vibrantly.

I found this rewatch of High Fidelity to be something of a mixed bag, which is a fairly common theme among the movies in this project. Sometimes art that we love when we’re young doesn’t age so well, but High Fidelity is largely as I remember it, for better and for worse. I suppose that it’s fitting for me to have such a nostalgic affection for a movie that is so obviously steeped in nostalgia already. The laughs and the funny characters are just as I remember them from so long ago, but part of those characters being just as I remember them means that I’ve also largely outgrown them. A movie that I used to strongly identify with has become one that I merely enjoy, and even then I doubt that High Fidelity is a movie that I’ll be pulling off the shelf again any time soon. When it’s good it’s really good, and it still brings a big smile to my face, but the movie also feels incredibly dated, not just in its content but in its style, as well. High Fidelity has more in common with studio romantic comedies from earlier than it does with newer, more interesting movies like Her. This isn’t a terrible thing, because High Fidelity largely delivers on the promises of its genre, and, as I mentioned, I think it presents a realistic and relatable portrayal of romance, but it does mean that the movie was far less influential than I probably felt like it was, or should be, when I was 15 years old. That’s probably a good thing, though.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

September 9, 2018September 3, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Dir. Wes Anderson

Written by: Wes Anderson

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan

I think that Wes Anderson is one of the more polarizing filmmakers working today. He has achieved a distinct and instantly recognizable visual and narrative style over the course of his twenty-year career, and is often recognized by contemporary critics as a visionary and important filmmaker, but it seems to me that when I talk about his movies with people in the real world, they don’t share this universal admiration. Anderson’s films seem to engender a love it or hate it reaction, with many people I’ve met finding his aesthetic to be too twee, too precious, and too affected. To them, Anderson is the quintessential hipster director, making ironic and precocious art meant to be taken seriously by those for whom cultivating a perfect vinyl collection and sourcing the best knit fabrics for a sweater vest are matters of grave concern. Conversely, I’ve met an equal number of people who feel that Anderson’s humor and sensibilities reflect the sarcastic, wry, and ironic zeitgeist of the 21^st century, and that his vintage aesthetics and concern with evoking a sense of place in time through mise-en-scene and music are perfect for a digital age in which nostalgia is only a click away. I find myself firmly in the latter camp, having been a fan of Anderson since the late 1990s, but I suppose that I can see why some people can’t seem to penetrate his filmography and have trouble relating to his movies. One thing that I think shouldn’t be up for much debate, even among those Anderson detractors, is that The Grand Budapest Hotel is a great movie. It marks Anderson at the height of his powers, and seeing one of the last quarter century’s most important and recognizable auteurs turning in a masterpiece is what makes it one of the greatest movies of the young 21^st century.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a nesting doll of a caper that unfolds over several distinctive period settings, telling the history of the titular hotel and its staff and inhabitants. The tale is related by the hotel’s proprietor, the aged Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), and it centers on his arrival at the Grand Budapest Hotel where he gained employment as a lobby boy under the supervision of the hotel’s famed concierge, M. Gustave (Fiennes). The young Moustafa, whose first name is Zero (Revolori), shows promise as a lobby boy and Gustave takes him under his wing, teaching him the ins and outs of hospitality. Shortly after Zero begins his employment at the Grand Budapest, Gustave receives notice that Madame D. (Tilda Swinton), one of his many elderly paramours, has died under mysterious circumstances, and he and Zero travel by train to her estate to witness the reading of her will. Madame D. wills Gustave a priceless painting, enraging her family, particularly her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody). Though Zero and Gustave are able to safely return the painting to the Grand Budapest, Dmitri frames Gustave for his mother’s murder and he is subsequently jailed. Gustave manages to escape from prison with the help of his fellow inmates, and also Zero and his new fiancée, Agatha (Ronan), a baker’s apprentice with a birthmark in the shape of Mexico on her cheek. Zero and Gustave then set off to find the identity of Madame D.’s true killer, and, so doing, clear M. Gustave’s name.

The Grand Budapest Hotel takes many of Anderson’s directorial quirks and dials them up to 11. It’s certainly a treat for the initiated, but I think that it’s also a film that can be enjoyed by just about any fan of movies. While it features much of Anderson’s stock cast, and expands upon his visual and narrative style, Grand Budapest sticks out among Anderson’s filmography as somewhat less precious and precocious. Though the Grand Budapest Hotel is one of Anderson’s most exquisitely realized dollhouses come to life, the story that he tells about the hotel and its inhabitants is darker, more action-oriented, and more steeped in actual history than any of Anderson’s earlier films. In Grand Budapest it seems that Anderson has managed to adhere his style onto a skeleton of classical Hollywood references and a more traditional structure. Though he still utilizes familiar cutaways, intertitles, and meticulously crafted miniatures, Anderson eschews some of his other trademarks, such as his frequent use of 1960s and 1970s pop music for the soundtrack. This pairing of Anderson’s whimsical tendencies with more traditional, grounded influences is a marriage for success, and makes for Anderson’s richest, most cinematically rewarding film.

Another way that Anderson deviates from his established norms is by sidelining the majority of his stock cast of actors. While Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson all appear in The Grand Budapest Hotel, they, and many other Anderson regulars, take a backseat to a trio of actors who are making their first appearances in a Wes Anderson film, led by Ralph Fiennes as M. Gustave. I’m not overly familiar with Fiennes body of work as an actor, aside from some of the obvious roles that he’s most well-known for, but this is my favorite performance of his. He completely plays against his usual type, playing Gustave as a somewhat effete, surprisingly capable, and mildly authoritarian figure. He is the efficient center of power that propels the Grand Budapest Hotel, and Fiennes’s performance is the celestial body around which all of the other elements of the film’s universe orbit. He embodies the Old World elegance that is beginning to fade from existence in the time period Anderson depicts in the film. Fiennes’s clipped delivery and quick wit help to inform the film’s sense of humor and reflect the incredibly efficient pacing that the film adopts in its second half. Once The Grand Budapest Hotel goes into full caper mode, it’s propelled by the energy of Fiennes’s Gustave, and drops its mannered comedy for a full screwball turn. His performance is a delight to watch and the movie would likely wouldn’t work as well as it does with another actor in its most prominent role.

If Fiennes is the propulsive engine driving the plot of The Grand Budapest Hotel forward, then Tony Revolori and Saoirse Ronan give it its emotional depth, and the romance shared by their young characters, Zero and Agatha, provides its beating heart. I’m fairly certain that this movie was the first time I’d seen either actor in anything, and I can remember leaving the theater really impressed with both of them, but particularly with Revolori. His performance provides the film with much of its physical comedy, with his large eyes and expressive face often giving humorous counterpoint to the antics going on around Zero. Though the lobby boy is fairly meek, when the chips are down and his friends are threatened, Zero draws from a well of strength and comes through to protect them. Ronan provides a steadying presence in the film, balancing the energy of Fiennes and Revolori with her more grounded performance. Agatha is resourceful and smart, and Ronan imbues her with a natural goodness that makes it easy to see why Zero would fall head over heels for her. Though both characters are endowed with obvious Anderson-ian affectations – Zero’s penciled on mustache and Agatha’s birthmark in the shape of Mexico – the young actors’ performances shine through. They both radiate kindness and affection, and their characters’ dedication to one another, and to M. Gustave, is the glue holding the film together.

The Grand Budapest Hotel also marks a shift in Anderson’s sensibilities towards a slightly less cynical tone and point of view. Much like in Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson allows young actors to explore and express more genuine displays of affection and romantic love than are present in his first few films. Whereas in movies like Rushmore and The Life Aquatic, romantic love is viewed extremely suspiciously, and in nearly all of Anderson’s films up to and including The Darjeeling Limited, familial love is basically nonexistent, in The Grand Budapest Hotel, we see an example of a truly powerful love between Zero and Agatha, and a functioning surrogate family formed between the two of them and M. Gustave. This shift is likely a product of Anderson simply maturing and his views on love and life changing as he has evolved as a person and an artist. In Grand Budapest Hotel the romantic subplot and the film’s occasionally raw emotionality provide an inroad for viewers who might have trouble connecting with Anderson’s earlier, more ironic output. That being said, The Grand Budapest Hotel is still very much a “Wes Anderson movie,” and for all of the deviations from what might seem to be his stock pallet, Anderson hasn’t changed his formula, so much as enriched and perfected it. It’s a movie that checks off all of the requisite boxes for me, both as a fan of Wes Anderson and as a fan of cinema, in general. The world building here is typically rich, and that world is peopled by some of Anderson’s most memorable, relatable, and tragic characters to date. The stakes in the film seem high, and Anderson proves himself more capable of creating narrative tension and directing visual action scenes than he previously had in his career. The Grand Budapest Hotel represents a big step forward in artistry for one of my favorite, and, objectively, one of the best, filmmakers of the early 21^st century. It’s both a pleasant diversion and a film that rewards multiple viewings, and one that shouldn’t be missed by anyone who has an interest in cinema.

Ghostbusters

August 12, 2018July 22, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Ghostbusters (1984)

Dir. Ivan Reitman

Written by: Dan Aykroyd & Harold Ramis

Starring: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson

This is a big one for me. Ghostbusters has been a strong cinematic constant in my life. It’s definitely in my top ten favorite movies of all time, and, depending on the day, it vies for a spot as my personal favorite movie ever. Born in 1985, I emerged into a world in which Ghostbusters was already a phenomenon, with the movie becoming a big box office success, inspiring a cartoon spinoff, a line of toys and action figures, and a fervent fandom among young children and adults alike. I was all-in on Ghostbusters from the moment I first saw the cartoon, and soon after, the movie. I collected the toys, I had Ghostbusters clothing, and I obsessively quoted the movie to my family. Some of my earliest memories are Ghostbusters related, such as a Halloween when I was only three and I went trick-or-treating as Ray Stantz, complete with a homemade jumpsuit and a borrowed proton pack. It’s really the first, and probably only, piece of nostalgic fandom that I engage in, and I still can’t get enough of it, watching the movie at least a couple of times a year. For me, Ghostbusters represents a perfect intersection of actual cinematic quality and nostalgia. I can’t pretend that the way that I love Ghostbusters and its resultant media properties isn’t painted heavily in coats of nostalgia, but there’s also no denying that it represents a high-water mark for its brand of studio comedy in the mid-1980s. It’s a classic of American cinema and a cult of fandom wouldn’t have sprung up around it so readily were it not, simply put, an all-time great comedy.

I’ll provide a brief plot synopsis for anyone who might, for some unknown reason, be unfamiliar with Ghostbusters, but if you fall into the category I’d urge you to just go watch the movie and then come back to reading this. The titular Ghostbusters are Peter Venkman (Murray), Ray Stantz (Aykroyd), and Egon Spengler (Ramis), three out of work college professors with a special interest in paranormal phenomena. After they’ve lost their university jobs, the scientists decide to enter into the private sector, opening up an agency that specializes in the removal of supernatural and paranormal pests. Though business is initially slow, once the Ghostbusters break their first cases, they become a phenomenon themselves, and they’re joined by Winston Zeddmore (Hudson) to help them take on more cases. One of their notable early cases is for Dana Barrett (Weaver), who returns to her apartment one day to find a portal to another dimension opening up in her refrigerator, and whom Dr. Venkman falls head over heels for. As they pursue Dana’s case, the Ghostbusters discover that the portal is intended to welcome Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient God who travels through space and time destroying worlds, onto Earth. The Ghostbusters prepare to face off against Gozer and a host of otherworldly entities to save their city and the world.

There’s not a lot that I will write here that would do anything to affirm or deny the greatness of Ghostbusters. It’s an iconic movie, one that has earned its spot in the pantheon of great movies that will likely never be awarded by an Academy or earn a spot in the curriculum at a film school, but a movie that is widely acknowledged, nonetheless, as one of the best examples of brilliant, consumable, pop-culture entertainment. To me it’s every bit as important or meaningful as Citizen Kane or The Godfather. Though it doesn’t exist in a prestige genre, Ghostbusters stood for many as a gold standard for quality comedy in an era when competition was unbelievably stiff in that particular genre. I’m sure this is a biased opinion because of my age and having grown up watching all of these movies on cable television constantly, but the 1980s were the golden era for studio comedies as so many great and iconic film comedians started to emerge and find their voices, as well as finding writing and directing partners who understood how to harness their comedic energy. While Murray and Aykroyd were emerging as leading men, along with Eddie Murphy and Martin Short, as well as the prolonged great run of genius Steve Martin into the 1980s, directors such as Ivan Reitman and screenwriters such as Ramis were pushing the boundaries of the studio comedy in broad, unexplored directions. There’s a buzz surrounding classic comedies of this era that I just don’t feel in modern comedies. I think that it’s the slapdash feeling that comedies like Ghostbusters give me that I don’t feel in modern comedies, the knowledge that at least 50% of what made the final cut was improvised on the spot by gifted comedians so comfortable with riffing off of one another. There are plenty of comedies that have great chemistry, great scripted lines, and great adlibs, but Ghostbusters will always take the cake for me for the best and strongest comedic ensemble ever assembled.

The focus of that ensemble, of course, is Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman. Though the film features a balanced ensemble of co-leads, and a supporting cast that receives nearly equal billing and several memorable moments, it’s always Murray who stands out to me in Ghostbusters. Venkman was never my favorite Ghostbuster when I was a child, but even though I related more to Ray Stantz, I could easily recognize that Murray was the movie’s star. He displays the timing, wit, and charm that turned him into a bona fide superstar in the 1980s and a comedy legend ever since. Venkman’s character is equal parts sleaze, cynicism, and off-the-cuff observational wit, and that characterization has largely followed Murray around ever since. Of course Murray has expanded his range and his choice of roles throughout his career, and there are no shortage of wonderful roles and performances for any fan to latch onto, but when I think of Bill Murray it’s Peter Venkman who I picture. His performance in Ghostbusters encapsulates everything that Murray has come to represent in his career and in the public imagination. I’m not particularly a Murray fanboy, but there’s no denying that he deserves a place on the film comedy Mt. Rushmore and that his likeness should include a proton pack.

Of course, a single performance doesn’t an all-time comedy make, and Murray is backed up by a supporting cast that knocks it out of the park at every turn. Ramis is suitably understated as Egon, the straight man of the team, while Aykroyd brings a hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed character to Ray, the most put-upon Ghostbuster. He’s a great foil for Murray’s outsize confidence, and the dynamic between the two actors feels real, with Venkman taking every opportunity to belittle Stantz. Sigourney Weaver more than holds her own in her scenes with Murray, engaging in quick verbal sparring worthy of the best screwball comedies. She also does a great job creating two different characters when Dana is possessed late in the film and her entire demeanor changes. By far, though, my favorite supporting performance in Ghostbusters is Rick Moranis’s nerdy neighbor, Louis. Moranis is perfectly cast as the nebbish, love-struck Louis, whose only desire is to get his neighbor, Dana, to notice him and come to his party. Like Murray, Moranis proves himself to be a master improviser, and he’s adept at both verbal and physical comedy. After probably 100 viewings, Ghostbusters doesn’t always get as many belly laughs out of me as it used to, but Moranis’s party scene in which he rattles off the market prices of the food that he purchased and introduces his guests based on their jobs, salaries, and the remaining balance of their mortgages, never fails to leave me in stitches.

That’s the thing about Ghostbusters, for me. Sure I have an obviously strong nostalgic attachment to the movie and its related ephemera, but watching it today it still elicits genuine laughs from me every time. I know the movie inside and out, and I’ve been able to quote it, chapter and verse, basically since I learned to talk, but it never loses its humor for me. The simple brilliance of many of its punchlines, and the joy of watching master comedians riffing off of one another, never ceases to leave me in stitches. The day that I watched Ghostbusters to prepare to write this post, I was having a supremely bad start to the day, with my work encroaching onto the one day a week that I am supposed to get to myself, but as soon as I popped in the DVD and the film’s iconic opening shot of the lion statues in front of the New York Public Library filled my television screen, my concerns were all forgotten. Every time I watch Ghostbusters, I am able to fully submit myself to 105 minutes of pure, unadulterated comedy pleasure, and that’s why I still watch it two to three times a year. It’s a movie that can instantly change my mood, taking me back to a place in my life before jobs and social responsibilities and constant stress. Even though I know every punchline, I find myself laughing at a different joke every time. Ghostbusters provides me with a guaranteed respite and a trip down memory lane like no other movie I’ve ever encountered. I’ve had lots of favorite movies over the course of my life, but few, if any, have had the persistence of Ghostbusters. It’s always exactly what I need when I pull it off the shelf.

Ghostbusters is a perfect movie for this project, and it’s one that I’ve been eagerly anticipating getting to write about since I started doing this work in late 2016. I’ve written about tons of movies that I have various nostalgic attachments to for one reason or another so far, but I don’t think any encapsulate the idea of going back and digging through physical media that I’ve collected so perfectly as Ghostbusters. Last year, writing about Apocalypse Now, I briefly touched on the fact that Ghostbusters was the first movie I ever saw on DVD, and I think that’s interesting because my relationship with the movie has always been related to physical artifacts as much as the film itself. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I was an avid collector of the action figures associated with the animated series The Real Ghostbusters, and my early fandom of the movie was strongly associated with those toys. At that point, for me, Ghostbusters was as much about its ancillary properties as it was the original movie, and I think that the nostalgic bond that I have to the entire franchise extends as much from the toys that I played with, and the good memories that I associated with engaging in the fan discourse of the movie through play and dress up at Halloween, as it does to my early experience of watching the movie itself. I guess it’s fitting that a movie about ghosts would be so associated to me with memory and repetition, now for thirty years playing the movie over and over, engaging with it in so many different contexts and through so many different lenses at various points in my life. It’s a pleasant sort of haunting that I’ll probably never really grow out of.

Next Friday/Friday After Next

June 24, 2018June 16, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Next Friday (2000) / Friday After Next (2003)

Dir. Steve Carr / Marcus Raboy

Written by: Ice Cube

Starring: Ice Cube, Mike Epps, DC Curry, John Witherspoon

I decided, for the sake of brevity and completion, to include both Friday sequels in this post, rather than doing a full write up for Friday After Next and then coming back to Next Friday sometime next year when I get to its place in the alphabet. The movies are fairly similar, featuring some familiar faces from the original, as well as a few new characters, and I honestly don’t know that I would have had enough to write about each movie individually to warrant full posts on them. Both of these sequels have their moments, but neither can hold a candle to the original movie, and I don’t have a particular nostalgic attraction to either of them, despite having seen them both in the movie theater and having watched them each multiple times. I came to own the Friday sequels because it was less expensive for me to purchase a three-disc-set with all of the movies rather than buying Friday by itself. Since I now own the movies, I’ve watched them both, but I don’t return to either one with any regularity. The original Friday is a mainstay in my comedy rotation, but neither of its sequels have the comedic consistency and satisfaction to keep me coming back very often.

Next Friday sees Craig (Ice Cube), still unemployed, moving in with his Uncle Elroy (Curry) and cousin Day Day (Epps) in the suburbs after Deebo (Tiny Lister), the villain from the original film, breaks out of prison swearing revenge on Craig for getting the better of him in the previous film’s climactic fight. Though he leaves the hood, Craig’s problems seem to follow him, as he and Day Day run afoul of the Joker brothers, a family of Mexican gangsters who are Day Day’s neighbors. Meanwhile, Craig finds out that Day Day and Elroy’s million-dollar home, bought with their lottery winnings, is going to be sold at auction if the family can’t come up with money that they owe in back taxes. The cousins devise a plan to rob the Jokers, but things quickly go south, and soon the whole family, including Craig’s dad, Willie (Witherspoon), are involved in the heist. Unbeknownst to him, however, Willie has delivered a secret package to the suburbs, as Deebo has stowed away in the back of his dog catcher’s truck, hoping that Willie will deliver him to Craig so that he can finally get his revenge.

In Friday After Next, Craig and Day Day, along with the rest of their family are back in the hood, and getting ready to celebrate Christmas. The film opens with Craig and Day Day’s apartment being burglarized by a robber dressed like Santa Claus who steals all of their rent money. The movie primarily takes place in a strip mall where the cousins have gotten temporary jobs as security guards and where Willie and Elroy have opened up a barbeque restaurant. While Craig and Day Day patrol the strip mall, hoping to earn enough money to replace their stolen rent, they encounter a whole new cast of characters. However, their tenure as security guards doesn’t last long as they’re run off the job by some tough guys whose grandmothers Day Day kicked out of the strip mall for loitering. When they lose their jobs, the cousins decide to throw a rent party and their family, as well as all of the oddballs from the strip mall, attend, helping them raise enough money to pay the rent. In the end, the cousins are also able to catch the robber, reclaiming their Christmas presents and their money, and leaving him in his Santa suit, gagged and bound to a chimney.

The sequels are largely very similar to Friday, with all three films revolving around Craig’s need to acquire some small sum of money, getting dragged into schemes by his friends and family, and hooking up with a beautiful girl by the end of the movie. All three films also feature deep and talented casts of comic actors, both up-and-coming and established, but the biggest thing that the sequels lack in comparison to the original movie is the presence of Chris Tucker. Tucker didn’t sign on for the Friday sequels, so his character, Smokey, was conveniently sent off to rehab and Epps’s Day Day stepped into the role of Craig’s friend and sidekick in Next Friday. Tucker was the break out comedic star of Friday, and, as I wrote last week, he was the engine largely driving that film’s humor. Day Day is a funny character, and he certainly has scenes in both films that generate some good laughs, but Smokey was iconic, and the sequels suffer heavily without Tucker’s energy. Epps has a much more laconic comedic style and the dynamic between he and Ice Cube simply doesn’t carry the same charge that Tucker and Cube developed in the first movie. Though the Friday franchise turned Ice Cube into a media mogul, he never really developed much chemistry or timing as a comedic actor. He maintains a laid back delivery throughout, playing the straight man, but Epps doesn’t turn in an energetic enough performance to recreate the other half of the buddy dynamic successfully. The two actors both manage to have memorable scenes here and there throughout the sequels, but without Tucker’s humor tying the films together, the Friday sequels never become more than the sum of their parts, and often seem directionless, with the plots meandering from one contrived point to another.

This is particularly apparent in Next Friday, as the film is largely built around the relationship between Craig and Day Day and eschews some of the ensemble casting that was so successful in the original film. With Cube and Epps still feeling out their comedic partnership, Curry, Witherspoon, and others are asked to provide the lion’s share of the laughs, but they aren’t given nearly enough screen time to do so. Another problem is that most of the new characters who are introduced in the supporting cast are too one-note, and often they’re little more than racist caricatures. While no one would accuse Friday of being the most intellectually stimulating film ever made, Next Friday too often goes for low-hanging fruit, settling for offensive or tasteless jokes rather than trafficking in the well-established observational comedy style of the original movie. While Friday felt like a genuine slice of life, an opportunity to take a brief glimpse into one day in Craig’s life, Next Friday feels like a hastily penned series of comedy sketches, with Craig and Day Day being shoehorned into one implausible and unfunny scenario after another. The movie has a handful of moments, and a few lines here and there that for some reason are ingrained in my memory, such as Day Day trying to pass of his obviously small rims as 20s early in the film, but on the whole, I think that Next Friday is the weakest movie in the franchise. It fails to integrate its new characters into the universe gracefully or to continue the successful formula of the original, taking instead a more cartoonish approach to comedy.

Luckily, in Friday After Next, it seems that the creative team learned a few lessons from the failures of Next Friday and opted to steer the franchise back in a more familiar direction. The film returns the family dynamic that was missing from Next Friday (despite featuring more members of Craig’s extended family) by beefing up Witherspoon’s role, and by reintroducing the character of Craig’s mother, played again by Anna Maria Horsford. The strip mall also functions in a similar way to the block on Friday, giving the film a much more observational feel. Again, the audience is able to be a fly on the wall as Craig lives through another crazy Friday, and gets to meet a new set of eccentric characters in the process. Katt Williams headlines the supporting cast, playing a pimp named Magic Mike who is trying his hand at opening up a retail clothing store. Terry Crews is also a highlight, as he almost always is. Crews’s character, Damion, has recently been released from prison, where he picked up a taste for forced sodomy, and he and Williams share one of the funnier scenes late in the movie. Ice Cube and Epps seem to be more comfortable in their onscreen chemistry, and whether that’s the result of them having more experience working across from one another or from having a stronger ensemble cast to take some of the comedic burden off of their shoulders, the movie is better off for it. Friday After Next leans heavily on physical comedy, more so than even its predecessor, and it sometimes feels outdated and a bit offensive, but not nearly as much so as Next Friday. The movie largely feels like a Christmas-themed rehash of the original, and though it certainly doesn’t stack up favorably when compared to Friday, it’s a step in the right direction after Next Friday’s wrong turn.

Overall, I doubt that I’ll be checking out Next Friday anytime soon, but there’s a chance that I decide to dust off Friday After Next sometime later this year when I want to get in the holiday spirit. While it won’t ever be a go-to movie for me like Friday, the third installment in the trilogy is a serviceable enough studio comedy. Its laughs are mostly cheap, but at least they’re there, which is often more than I can say for Next Friday, which almost entirely fails to move the needle on the humor scale. The franchise probably shouldn’t have continued without Tucker, but it did move on without him, and after a bit of fumbling in its second installment, Ice Cube and the cast manage to nearly stick the landing with the current final installment.

There is a fourth Friday film currently in the works, with Tucker’s involvement reportedly not totally ruled out at this point, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t going to go see it, whether or not he ends up reprising his role as Smokey. I love the original movie so much that I’m willing to at least extend the benefit of the doubt to future installments of the franchise. If it ends up being made, the upcoming sequel might well end up being terrible, but even if it is, my fervor for the original won’t be quieted anytime soon. When it’s a Friday, and I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t got shit to do, I’ll likely just opt to pop in the original Friday, but having the option to watch Friday After Next once in a while isn’t bad, either.

Friday

June 17, 2018June 16, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Friday (1995)

Dir. F Gary Gray

Written by: Ice Cube and DJ Pooh

Starring: Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, Tiny Lister, John Witherspoon

Friday is one of those seminal comedies for me that I grew up watching, first on television in my parents’ home, then at sleepovers at friends’ houses, and finally into adulthood anytime I wanted to just throw on a funny movie and pay sparing attention to it while I have other tasks to accomplish. I’ve got every line of the movie memorized, and I’ve seen it enough times that I could probably replay its images perfectly on the back of my eyelids in my sleep. Somehow, though I know when my favorite lines and scenes will arrive, the movie never fails to disappoint me and it never gets old. It has the familiarity and comfort of an old sweater, enveloping and warming me with its humor, and making me feel like I’ve arrived in a place of serenity. Friday is one of my favorite chill-out movies, and I can’t be the only person who feels that way, because the movie has been an enduring success, helping to legitimize Ice Cube’s nascent film career, and preceding a pair of sequels. It’s another movie that I like to watch because it’s just fun and familiar and it takes me back to a place where I was just discovering a love of movies and humor, and I enjoy the nostalgic aspect of it.

The titular Friday refers to a day that Craig (Ice Cube) wakes up with no job and nothing to do except hang out on the front porch with his best friend Smokey (Tucker) and preside over the comings and goings of their block in Watts. Craig and Smokey spend the day getting high and cutting up on their neighbors while trying to avoid run-ins with neighborhood bully, Deebo (Lister), and Big Worm (Faizon Love), a drug dealer whom Smokey owes $200. The friends try to devise schemes to get Big Worm’s money, but when Craig’s family is unwilling to lend him any money, and Smokey continues to smoke all of his weed rather than sell it, they have to take desperate measures to try to get the money, with Smokey attempting to steal it from a sleeping Deebo. When Smokey is unsuccessful, he and Craig are forced to face the music, and Big Worm tries to shoot them in a drive by. While they successfully evade the gunfire, Craig finds himself walking right into a showdown with Deebo when he tries to defend his crush, Debbie (Nia Long), from Deebo’s attacks. The two fight in the street and though Deebo gets the better of Craig initially, Craig takes his beating and comes back at Deebo with a brick, knocking him the fuck out. In the end, Craig becomes a neighborhood hero for standing up to Deebo, manages to get the girl, and starts off his first weekend of unemployment on a high note.

One of the best, and most appealing, aspects of Friday to me is that the movie not only has great performances from Ice Cube and Chris Tucker in the lead roles, it also features a who’s who of prominent comedians in supporting roles. Craig and Smokey’s neighborhood is full of colorful characters and even the smallest roles are memorable thanks to the excellent and diverse comedic styles of the movie’s cast. Friday isn’t really an ensemble comedy, but Craig and Smokey almost fulfill the role of a Greek chorus, sitting on Craig’s porch and observing, and commenting on, their weird neighbors and family. John Witherspoon is a standout as Craig’s cantankerous father, a dog catcher who hates dogs and who disparages Craig for his joblessness and lackadaisical attitude. The veteran character actor is adept at physical comedy and provides many of the film’s memorable zingers and catch phrases, with his comedic energy contrasting with straight man Ice Cube’s laconic line delivery. Anna Maria Horsford matches Witherspoon’s performance, playing Craig’s mother as a strong, no-nonsense woman who also doesn’t shy away from the opportunity to crack jokes at her son’s expense. Bernie Mac and Ronn Riser are both funny in small appearances, as a preacher and as Craig’s fastidious, wealthy neighbor, Stanley, respectively. Cube’s co-writer, DJ Pooh, is memorable as Red, the sad-sack loser who Deebo repeatedly victimizes, and Lister is a proper villain, monstrous and physical. This depth and breadth in the cast lends Friday a broad, and unique, comedic sensibility, one that would come to be emulated by the film’s own sequels, and by mainstream stoner comedies throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The brief, scene-stealing appearances by now-famous comedians also gives Friday a high degree of rewatchability, because there are so many absurdly funny moments to relish in.

Of course, though, a buddy comedy like Friday is only as successful as its primary pairing, and Ice Cube and Chris Tucker make for a classic comedic duo. Cube lends the movie serious street cred with his cool, laid back line delivery, and thousand yard stare, while Tucker keeps the comedic energy sky high. The two actors are perfect foils for one another, and the movie wouldn’t work well without their performances at the core. Although Friday is supposed to be Craig’s story, Smokey is the breakout character, and Tucker’s manic energy gives the movie its life force. Tucker propels the story forward, with the movie often taking divergences from the narrative prompted by Smokey’s stories, or following Smokey into situations that Craig is absent from. Friday was an important movie for pushing both Cube and Tucker into mainstream movie stardom, and there’s little arguing that Cube has had the more successful career to date, but Tucker steals Friday in a way that makes one think the movie was written and conceived of as a vehicle to launch his career, specifically. He chews the scenery, mouth running a mile a minute, and steals every scene that he’s featured in, supplying the film’s most memorable moments and lines. I think that Tucker’s Smokey does need Cube’s Craig as a foil, but not nearly as much as Friday the movie depends on Tucker to provide the laughs that Cube isn’t fully able to. Ice Cube is a pretty fine actor, but he’s always playing some version of his own star persona, whereas Tucker’s star persona has largely become informed by his signature performance as Smokey. As the sequels would come to prove, without Tucker’s energy, the Friday formula doesn’t work nearly as well.

In a lot of ways, Friday and its comedy contemporaries laid out the blueprint for a specifically 1990s style of comedy. As hip hop was emerging as a dominant force in mainstream music and pop culture, Hollywood responded by greenlighting dramas and comedies that reflected a changing demographic and cultural landscape. In this film, Ice Cube found himself at the intersection of gangsta rap and mainstream film comedy, a move that would foretell his eventual status as a media mogul, headlining multiple huge film comedy franchises. Though Cube has sometimes become a punchline for appearing in Disney films and other family-oriented entertainment later in his career, there’s no denying the credibility and originality of Friday. It opened the doors for a new type of entertainment, and for other rappers to try their hands at acting and headlining movie franchises. The film’s run-away success dovetailed with a sea change in popular entertainment, and its sense of humor helped develop a new trope in comedy. I still love returning to this classic just as much as I did when I was a young person, and I probably will be watching Friday when I want a laugh and a pick-me-up for years to come.

Freddy Got Fingered

June 10, 2018June 10, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

Dir. Tom Green

Written by: Tom Green & Derek Harvie

Starring: Tom Green, Rip Torn, Marisa Coughlin

When I think back to the late 1990s, one of the strangest pop-cultural phenomena to me is the brief stint of massive popularity that Canadian shock comedian Tom Green enjoyed at that time. Green rose from obscurity in America in 1999 when MTV began airing The Tom Green Show, a continuation of a sketch/alternative comedy show that he had been hosting on Canadian public access television for five years. The show only continued production in America for about a year, ending its brief run due to Green’s diagnosis with testicular cancer, and culminating with a one-hour special in which Green and his family, who were the frequent targets of his anarchic pranks on the show, detail their reactions to, and attempts to cope with, the diagnosis. Despite its brief run, the show continued airing in syndication and Green continued to enjoy a modicum of celebrity into the early 2000s, including a short marriage to Drew Barrymore, a handful of post-cancer specials on MTV, and the release of Freddy Got Fingered, Green’s attempt at turning the madcap energy of his sketch show into a narrative feature film. Though he’s continued producing an internet show and making other small media appearances, Freddy Got Fingered, which garnered a cult following on DVD despite its box office failure and critical lambasting, remains Green’s most enduring work.

The movie, which echoes Green’s own relationship with his parents and struggle to break into the TV business, casts him as Gord, a 28-year-old slacker who still lives at home with his parents, Jim (Torn) and Julie (Julie Hagerty). The movie opens with Gord determined to leave their home in Oregon to chase his dream of being a successful cartoonist in Los Angeles. Gord arrives in L.A. and tracks down the head of an animation studio, Dave Davidson (Anthony Michael Hall), who rejects Gord’s drawings for their ridiculous premise, but tells him that he has skills as an illustrator. Gord returns home after being rejected, where his father belittles his attempts to chase his dreams and constantly harangues him to get a job. By chance, Gord meets a nurse, Betty (Coughlin), who is in a wheel chair, and who hopes to one day create a rocket-powered chair to help her overcome her limitations and achieve her dream of going fast, but their relationship starts to fall apart as the tensions between Gord and his father start to wear on all aspects of his life. After tearing his family apart by falsely accusing his father of molesting his little brother, Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Gord gives up on his dreams of becoming a cartoonist. He takes a job at a sandwich shop where he eventually sees a news report on Betty’s success building her rocket chair, and he is inspired to take up his pencil again and he returns to Hollywood to pitch a new idea to Davidson, a cartoon based on his relationship with his father. Davidson immediately picks up the cartoon and pays Gord a $1,000,000 advance, most of which he uses to relocate his family’s home to Pakistan, where he and his father are abducted and held as hostages, causing an international affair. The film ends with Gord and Jim’s safe return to the United States, where Gord’s cartoon has become a hit.

I summarized the entirety of Freddy Got Fingered’s plot as succinctly as I could, while leaving out some of the more bizarre and ancillary diversions, just to highlight the utter inanity of this movie. Freddy Got Fingered only follows the rules of narrative continuity in the most minimally applicable ways, basically functioning as one long, free-flowing non-sequitur. It’s a hallucinatory, challenging experience to watch, and I, personally, find it basically impossible to appreciate for any real “comedic” merit. Though I was a pretty big fan of The Tom Green Show on MTV, by the time Freddy Got Fingered came out, I had already moved on from Green’s style of provocative, gross out, anti-comedy. I know I saw the movie in the theater with my friends, but even at 16, I wasn’t a fan of Freddy Got Fingered. I found it to be excessive, gross, and unnecessary, and my feelings really haven’t changed very much after a decade and a half. I know that there has been a critical reevaluation of the film in the last few years, with several prominent critics categorizing the film as an interesting work of experimental cinema and performance art, and I think that there are likely grounds to examine the film in such a light, but I still have difficulty engaging with the movie in any way that doesn’t lead to frustration and slight disgust. Green insists on pushing the envelope throughout the film, daring his audience to laugh along with him as he lampoons all societal conventions, but anytime I watch Freddy Got Fingered, I just can’t find anything humorous about it. I’m not a prude, but Green’s attempts to shock throughout the movie, particularly his repeated insistence on showing graphic beastiality, whether real or simulated, are beyond the pale for me as a viewer. Rather than finding it funny, much of the film’s attempts at humor just strike me as gratuitous and sadly sophomoric. Of course, this is Green’s established brand, but having to endure his hijinks for a full 90-minute runtime is asking a lot of any viewers who aren’t fully on board with the act. I suppose that I can applaud Green for taking $15,000,000 from a huge movie studio and turning it into an aggressively unmarketable experimental “comedy,” perhaps even a satire on the tired formula of the gross-out studio comedy, but I can’t really forgive him for making a movie that isn’t even a touch funny or artful.

The DVD copy of Freddy Got Fingered that I have isn’t even mine, really. It got mixed in with my things when a roommate of mine moved out of our shared house about seven or eight years ago, and though I really don’t enjoy the movie, I’ve actually watched it a few times in the past several years in light of the aforementioned pieces written about it. I can absolutely see how the film can be seen as an influential piece of the puzzle for a neo-surrealist branch of comedy that has flourished, particularly on television, in the 21^st century. Freddy Got Fingered shares a challenging approach to comedy that is mirrored in several notable and beloved comedy shows such as Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Squidbillies, and other shows from the Adult Swim lineup. Its plot, its resistance to classical rules of storytelling, and insistence on incorporating non-narrative diversions into its structure for questionably comic value are all mirrored in one of my favorite recent(ish) comedies, Hot Rod. This movie, starring Andy Samberg as a wannabe stuntman who tries to raise money to save the life of his dying stepfather so that he can best him in a fight, was absolutely influenced by Green’s brand of outrageous comedy. The biggest difference between the two, I think, is that Samberg is able to craft a likable and genuinely relatable character in his lovable loser, while Green’s Gord is simply too weird and too off-putting to engage any real sympathy or audience identification. I will allow that that may be exactly the point, but I just find Green’s performance in Freddy Got Fingered to be too grating, and I can’t enjoy the movie as a result.

I really don’t like writing about movies that I dislike. I think that it’s much more difficult to find something of worth to say about a piece of art that I actively don’t like than it is to find adequate praise for something I find exceptional, but I still try to find silver linings in the movies that I’ve outgrown, or that I never liked in the first place that somehow ended up sticking around my collection. I try to take advantage of the opportunity of watching these movies freshly, and critically, to find some new appreciation for or understanding of them, but I really can’t say that I’m going to be looking at Freddy Got Fingered in a new light, or at all, in the future. I can understand what people might see in it, and I can even grant that it has some notoriety or import in its genre that should be respected, but I just don’t find it funny or satisfying in any way. It’s not the worst movie in history, as some might have speculated at its release, but I really don’t think that it has aged well, particularly in comparison to more modern surrealist comedies. Green’s act seems more stale and antiquated to me than provocative or darkly funny. If the movie works as fodder for a think piece, it doesn’t work for me as an actual viewing experience, and if it doesn’t make me laugh, I don’t really care that it represents an admirable dedication to a particular brand of meta-comedy.

Fargo

April 22, 2018April 21, 2018 / andrewmisk / 1 Comment

Fargo (1996)

Dir. Joel Coen

Written by: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Starring: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare

It’s been a while since I’ve written about a Coen Brothers movie for this project, and getting to another one feels a bit like finding an oasis in the middle of a desert. Certainly not because the quality of the films that I’ve been watching and writing about since I wrote about The Big Lebowski has been lacking, but because there is something comforting to me about immersing myself in the offbeat world in which these sibling auteurs choose to set their films. From an early age, I can remember the movies of the Coen Brothers being a background figure in my upbringing. Both of my parents had loved Raising Arizona and would regularly reference and quote the movie when I was young, though I don’t remember actually watching that movie until I was a little older. Instead, like many, Fargo was my introduction to the Coen Brothers. My parents rented the video when I was about 11, and I was allowed to stay up and watch the movie with them on a weekend night. I thought the Midwestern accents in the movie were hysterical, and even though I didn’t really understand it at the time, I sensed a darkness and a weirdness that existed on the fringes. Over the years, the movie would become an absolute favorite, and I would return to it time and time again. Fargo is still a favorite, and I think the older I get, the more I appreciate the film’s tale of small-time grift and murder born out of desperation, and its black sense of humor.

Fargo begins with Jerry Lundegaard (Macy), a sales manager at an Oldsmobile dealership who has gotten in over his head in a bad financing scheme, meeting with Gaer Grimsrud (Stormare) and Carl Showalter (Buscemi) at a bar in Fargo, North Dakota. Jerry has hatched a plan to hire Gaer and Carl to kidnap his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrud), and then extort a ransom out of his wealthy father-in-law, Wade (Harve Presnell). He plans to tell Wade that the ransom is $1,000,000, of which he will pay Carl and Gaer $80,000 and keep the rest to cover his debts and give him seed money for a new investment. Though Jerry begins to have second thoughts, the kidnapping takes place, and while the kidnappers are transporting Jean to their hideout to await the ransom, they are stopped by a state trooper. Gaer kills the state trooper, and later kills two witnesses who see him and Carl trying to hide the trooper’s body. The sloppy triple homicide obviously alerts the attention of the local police department, and Chief Margie Gunderson (McDormand) of Brainerd, Minnesota, takes the case. Margie’s initial investigation leads her to the discovery that the murdered trooper was ticketing a car with dealer plates, which eventually leads her investigation all the way to Jerry’s dealership in Minneapolis. What was supposed to be a simple staged kidnapping has spawned multiple homicides, and Jerry and Carl struggle to keep the lid on their scheme while Margie comes closer and closer to uncovering the truth and the connection between Jean’s kidnapping and the subsequent murders.

As I mentioned, Fargo is a movie that I grew up with, and in many ways, grew into. I think that it’s a perfect movie to introduce someone to the Coen Brothers, especially if they’re young. There are a couple of brief sex scenes, and a few instances of pretty graphic violence, but depending on a kid’s maturity level, there shouldn’t be anything too objectionable in Fargo, and even though it’s a darkly themed film, its sinister core is coated in a quirky, quaint veneer. When I was young, the overstated Midwestern accents and mannerisms of the characters were all I really picked up on in the film, but they stuck with me, making me want to rewatch the movie where they talked about the Golden Gophers and said, “Oh, you betcha!” There was something about the specificity of the movie that spoke to me, and, as I’ve written previously, the Coens are masters at nailing the specific feeling of a time or a place. Each of their films, though often set in wildly disparate universes, feels genuinely rooted in this sense of time and place, and Fargo is no exception. From the film’s outset, with its opening shots of Jerry Lundegaard driving across the snow-swept tundra of North Dakota in a stolen car to meet up with the men he will hire to kidnap his wife, there is no mistaking the setting for anywhere but the upper Midwest. When I was young, I latched onto this aesthetic. I know I didn’t see it more than once or twice on television in the intervening years between first seeing it when it was new and purchasing the movie on DVD several years later as a teenager, but I can distinctly remember being enamored with the hermetically sealed, snow globe world of Fargo.

When I got older, I went back to Fargo and I was surprised at the depth of the movie that I mostly remembered for its cartoonish depictions of Minnesota niceties and the coldness of its mise-en-scene. I found that the coldness of its setting was reflective of the cold brutality with which the characters treat one another in the movie. I had understood the movie’s plot when I was younger, of course, but I don’t think that I had quite picked up on the callousness behind much of it. When I initially watched the film, I think I viewed Jean’s kidnapping as a farcical flawed caper, rather than the horrifying act of desperation that it really is. Being young, I didn’t really understand the deep, adult nature of Jerry’s selfish desperation, or his willingness to sacrifice everything in a misguided effort to rectify his earlier financial blunders. William H. Macy would make his name playing these types of characters, down on their luck losers who emit a palpable air of sadness and shame, but Jerry Lundegaard still stands out as one of his best performances. Macy’s hangdog expression and “aw shucks,” line delivery are perfect here, as is the nervous energy that he plays Jerry with. It’s a backhanded compliment to say that Macy might be the best actor in Hollywood at playing a weasel, but he nails that quality of Jerry perfectly. Until he made the fateful decision to hire men to kidnap his wife, Jerry was simply a parasitic, small man, desperate for a little success and recognition, who got in a little over his head and made poor decisions. Unfortunately, as a result of those decisions, bodies start piling up like snow in January.

Another major thing that I never picked up on in Fargo is the film’s moments of immense strangeness. When I returned to the movie in my late teens, I noticed a distinct, almost Lynchian, undertone of surreality throughout the film. This plays out most regularly in the odd, clipped manner of conversation that the Coens employ often. Several times characters engage in brief conversations that seem to begin or end abruptly, or interject phrases that seem oddly out of place. When Margie is interviewing the two call girls who slept with Carl and Gaer, one of the women blurts out her high school and gives a small cheer when Margie asks her where she’s from. It’s a funny line that could easily be chalked up to the film’s specificity and the cultural pride of the Midwest, but it’s also a moment of dark absurdity. The interjection has no place in a murder investigation, and it marks a moment of darkness bubbling up from underneath the tranquil surface of small town Middle American normalcy.

Another moment in the film that has come to strike me as incredibly odd is Margie’s dinner with her former classmate, Mike Yanagita (Steve Park). They meet for lunch in Minneapolis while Margie is in town working her case, and before they’ve even had a chance to eat their meal, Mike breaks down, confessing that he’s always loved Margie and that his wife has recently died of leukemia. Only later does she find out that Mike’s wife was not dead, and in fact was never his wife, instead Mike had stalked their former classmate. Margie reflects on this information, as she had clearly pitied Mike during his breakdown, and the audience is also forced to view Mike’s previous pathetic desperation as a sinister attempt at manipulation. The interactions have always struck me as affected, and the nature of the revelation of Mike’s stalking and lying has always felt a bit out of place in the film. The scene is largely tangential to the rest of the plot, but it serves to reinforce the premise that there is a sinister sort of perversity underlying some of the character’s seemingly upstanding nature. I suppose that I connect these moments of ancillary strangeness with Lynch because I think that he explores very similar themes in Blue Velvet. Just like he explores the darkness underlying small town America in that film, in Fargo, the Coens explore the neuroses and sinister urges that can propel even the most normal seeming people.

Of course, there is one character in the film who seems to be truly guided by noble principles, and that is Chief Margie Gusterson. Frances McDormand won an Academy Award for her performance as the pregnant police chief, and I think that this role still stands out as her signature role among a deep body of work. I’ve written before that McDormand is one of my favorite working actors, and my affinity for her work began with seeing Fargo for the first time. McDormand is the source of much of the film’s humor, playing Margie with a natural sense of bemusement that helps the audience identify with her as a character. However she also gets to be strong and tough, giving Margie an innate knack for police work and investigation, while the other cops in the movie are shown to be bumbling and inadequate. More than anything, though, McDormand imbues Margie with a sense of goodness that shines through in spite of the ugly circumstances that the character finds herself in. This basic decency and goodness makes Margie a great foil for the sleazy and selfish characters, such as Carl and Jerry, who people Fargo. Her performance is the light at the end of a tunnel, a reassurance of the basic decency that drives most people.

The rest of the film’s performances are top notch, as well. The film’s characters are often paired against one another, and the casting is spot on. Harve Presnell is an apt foil for Macy’s Jerry. Where Jerry is timid and soft-spoken, Wade is bold and bellicose, and successful, to boot. Presnell is a perfect angry old man, and he delivers some great, memorable lines when he’s criticizing Jean and Jerry’s parenting. Buscemi and Stormare form a perfect pair, with Buscemi’s garrulous, frenzied acting style providing a complement for Stormare’s laconic, stoic delivery. The Coens also perfectly pit these characters against one another, utilizing Stormare’s physicality to turn Gaer into a classicly hulking villain, while Carl’s impatience and irritability come out in Buscemi’s characteristic verbal patter and his jittery screen presence. Both actors get their moments of comedy as well, with Stormare employing expert timing and a wry sense of humor to deliver blasé punch lines, while Buscemi adopts a more physical, frenzied comedy that plays like a very dark slapstick. John Lynch turns in an understated supporting performance as Norm, Margie’s devoted, loving husband. He and McDormand share several moments of genuine tenderness, and their relationship, and glowing anticipation of their unborn child, give the film its emotional heart. The two actors share an easy chemistry, helping to ground the otherwise chaotic, spiraling narrative of the film. It’s fitting that the film ends on a bedroom conversation between Norm and Margie, as it feels like their love is the good thing that is worth saving from the avaricious ambitions of Jerry, Carl, and Gaer.

I’m sure it’s obvious that I’m a huge fan of Fargo. It’s been one of the most consistent movies in my life, and I still return to it every couple of years, or so. One of the things that I’ve learned from working on this project is that any attempt to rank or order favorite movies, particularly within the body of work of my favorite filmmakers, isn’t really an exercise that I’m interested in. I’ve hung onto these movies, for the most part, because on any given day they could find themselves mentioned among my favorites of all time. Some, like Fargo, would find themselves in that discussion with more credence and more regularity than others. It’s accepted as a masterpiece, and I think many people would rank it as the Coen Brothers’ best film, which I wouldn’t have much quibble with. The movie’s reputation as a classic is well-earned, given the strength of its performances, its perfect balance of humor and suspenseful intrigue, and its iconic and memorable visual imagery. I know that many of the movies that I champion on this site are often somewhat esoteric, but Fargo is honestly a movie with something for everyone. It can be appreciated on many different levels, and it satisfies so many different things that I would want out of a go-to comfort movie. I can put it on in the background when I’m doing chores around the house, or I can sit down and watch it intently, appreciating its perfectly crafted script, and Roger Deakins’s coldly beautiful cinematography. It’s a movie that even though I’ve seen it over a dozen times, I never tire of going back for a repeat viewing. Chances are if you can’t find something to love about Fargo, you don’t really like movies at all.

Dogma

January 21, 2018January 21, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Dogma (1999)

Dir. Kevin Smith

Written by: Kevin Smith

Starring: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Linda Fiorentino, Chris Rock

Dogma was the most recently released film in Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse when my friends and I discovered the director. Coming on the heels of the critical success of Chasing Amy, Dogma represents a huge step forward for Smith and his brand of comedy. It is his first foray into bigger budget filmmaking, and it also shifts the focus largely away from the established world of his first three films, only tangentially tying back into them through the presence of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), this time cast as unlikely prophets. However, Dogma also represents a return to his past for Smith, as he wrote a draft of the screenplay before he filmed his debut Clerks, and only returned to the passion project when he felt that he had garnered enough technical know-how and industry clout to produce the film with the proper budget and production value. The final result is something of a mixed bag, not totally fitting in with Smith’s brand of lo-fi humor but also not divorcing itself enough from that milieu to be the successful action-comedy film that it wants to be. When reflected on in relation to the rest of Smith’s filmography, particularly his first five features and Clerks II, the movies that make up the accepted View Askewniverse, Dogma feels like an aborted foray down an unfamiliar, and possibly wrong, path.

Dogma opens with fallen angels Bartleby (Affleck) and Loki (Damon) plotting a way to return to their home in Heaven, which they may have discovered after they are tipped off to the planned rededication of a New Jersey church by Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) as part of his new, image-conscious marketing campaign for the Catholic Church, Catholicism Wow! Through a loophole in Catholic dogma, the angels can enter the church in Red Bank, New Jersey on the day of its rededication and be forgiven of their sins, allowing them to re-enter Heaven, thus proving God fallible, and rending the fabric of the Universe and all existence therein. In order to prevent this cataclysm, Heavenly forces recruit Bethany (Fiorentino), a reluctant Catholic who works at an abortion clinic, to travel to New Jersey and stop the angels from reentering the church. Assisting Bethany in her journey are two prophets, the aforementioned Jay and Silent Bob, who serve as her guides from Illinois to their native Jersey, Rufus (Rock), the 13^th apostle who was written out of the Bible, and who reveals to Bethany her true identity as a descendant of Jesus Christ’s family lineage, and several other Spiritual entities. They’re opposed by the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) and his trio of devilish hockey playing lackeys, who have secretly been guiding Bartleby and Loki all along for their own nefarious purposes. When all of the disparate parties arrive in Red Bank, a scene unfolds not unlike Armageddon and as the last scion of Christ, Bethany is the only one who has the power to save the Universe.

If the movie sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. As I mentioned, it was far and away the biggest project that Smith had tackled to that point in his career, with a larger cast, longer runtime, more locations, and more indirect approach to comedy than anything that had preceded it. However, rather than feeling like a culmination of everything that Smith had learned while working on his first three features, Dogma often feels like a rejection of those lessons. Smith has jettisoned his penchant for smaller indies in favor of action/comedy bombast, and the transition isn’t exactly smooth. Despite the personal nature of the project, and its lengthy gestation period, Dogma feels somewhat thrown together. It lacks the passion exhibited by the guerrilla filmmaking of Clerks and it doesn’t continue an exploration of the kinds of personal, emotional territory that Smith began to traverse with Chasing Amy. While that film found Smith beginning to peak as a screenwriter, with Dogma, he seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. There are too many characters involved in the film for the audience to become personally invested in any of them, and Smith doesn’t always do a great job of juggling the film’s multiple storylines and locations. Still though, I don’t think that tightening up the narrative would have improved Dogma, as it went through at least eight different variations before Smith settled on the final screenplay. The audacious scope of the film is part of its appeal, and it’s interesting to see the results of Smith’s first attempt to break out from his established niche. The fix for this film might have been in the works all along, however, as Smith reportedly shopped the film to other directors, including Robert Rodriguez, who turned it down citing Smith’s personal connection to the project as a reservation. I would be very interested in seeing what he would have done with this script, coming off of the schlocky, horror-action hybrid From Dusk Til Dawn.

As intriguing as the prospect of a director slightly more suited to delivering on the promise of Dogma’s complex narrative and genre hybridity, I don’t know that it would have made up for some of the other major flaws that the film has. Overall, my biggest gripe with Dogma is that its cast is star-studded, but the big names are rarely used to their full potential. It may be the fault of the material that they were given to work with, but very few members of the cast are doing anything close to their best work in Dogma. Fiorentino is solid as the doubting, searching Bethany, but her performance isn’t memorable or dynamic. She gets a few scenes that indicate some depth as an actor, but overall her emotional and psychological journey are overshadowed by the mugging and zaniness that surround her character. Rock’s character, Rufus, is underdeveloped and doesn’t rise much above the level of a token black character, and his performance carries about as much enthusiasm as you might expect from the last sketch of the night on an episode of SNL. Rock isn’t the greatest traditional actor, but he is a gifted comedian, and it’s disappointing to see him fall as flat as he does delivering Smith’s dialogue. Selma Hayek appears half way through the film as a muse, Serendipity, whose role is to help provide Bethany with important information about her true identity, but again, she falls victim to underdevelopment. Her character is introduced in a strip club, and she’s largely used as eye candy throughout her brief appearances in the film. Mewes and Smith have a bigger part to play in this film than in the earlier View Askewniverse movies, but they don’t really bring anything new to their trademark roles.

There are a few bright spots from a performance perspective. Alan Rickman is predictably great as the Metatron, God’s angelic messenger. His trademark sullen expression and exasperation are on full display as a condescending angel forced to deal with inferior humans. He brings a natural grace and poise to his performance that seems fitting for an angel. Conversely, Jason Lee is perfectly smarmy and calculating as the film’s primary villain, Azrael, a demon escaped from Hell with a penchant for central air and seer sucker suits. Lee again shows his ability to master Smith’s dialogue, and his performance as Azrael is my favorite in the film. He plays Azrael as sinister, but also charming, providing a much more nuanced character than do some of his more accomplished counterparts. This is one of the first films that I can remember seeing Lee in that really indicated he was able to craft a character, and that he would have a future as a mainstream actor outside of his collaborations with Smith. George Carlin’s Cardinal Glick is one of the film’s funniest characters, and even though Carlin isn’t stepping far afield from his stand-up routine, I could have used more of his character. Unfortunately, the most interesting characters in the film, including Azrael who should definitely be a more major presence, cede a great deal of screen time to the lesser developed and less dynamic characters. This imbalance is largely what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned that Smith has trouble juggling the film’s multiple storylines.

Affleck and Damon are enjoyable and multifaceted in their performances as the film’s main antagonists, but they’re both asked to do too much in carrying a film that just isn’t that good. I like Affleck a good deal in most of his performances, and he is pretty good here as Bartleby. Initially, Bartleby is the more level headed of the pair, attempting to reign in Loki’s murderous tendencies and keep him focuses on their mission. By film’s end though, the angels have switched moral positions, and Bartleby becomes obsessed with doling out lethal justice to sinning humans. Affleck handles this transition well, and his Bartleby is actually fearsome in the film’s climax, descending from the sky in golden armor, plucking up frightened humans and casually tossing them earthbound to an explosive and bloody end. Affleck had developed an edge to his performance style by this time, but unfortunately, Damon is less adept in the scenes that require him to play dark and villainous. Damon’s smirking visage is appropriate for Loki’s mischievous, trickster qualities, but when he actually follows through on the threats of his violence, the result is shocking but not quite believable. Still, the two have an obvious and natural chemistry, and their overall charm and ability to riff off of one another is a source of much of the film’s comedy.

Unfortunately, outside of the relationship between Bartleby and Loki, and a few other standout instances that hit the nail on the head in their humorous critique of religion, Dogma just isn’t a particularly funny movie. Despite the assemblage of talent, Smith’s script doesn’t deliver on the comedy end. He attempts to balance high-minded satire with his standard verbose, crass dialogical humor and situational comedy. The results are disastrous, with the film’s satirical elements often feeling over-serious and obvious, and its gross out comedy descending to the levels of actual toilet humor and simply missing the mark. The film suffers from an overreliance on dick and fart jokes, and Mewes is too heavily featured for the first time in the View Askewniverse. I don’t think that my opinions on Dogma’s humor are the results of my maturity since first enjoying it, because I don’t remember ever thinking that the movie was particularly funny, as I did and do about Smith’s other 1990s movies. What has changed is my inability to excuse the movie for not being as funny as it could be, simply because watching Dogma as an adult it isn’t nearly as insightful, profound, or sharply satirical as I thought that it was when I was younger. Smith would later prove himself capable of creating a darkly effective satire in Red State, but Dogma is clearly the work of a younger and less experienced filmmaker.

On the whole, I was disappointed that I didn’t find more to like about Dogma on this rewatch. It’s probably pretty obvious that it was never among my very favorite Smith movies, but I did like it a good bit when I was younger. It still walks a fine line between being critical and reverent of organized religion, and Catholicism, in particular, but as I’ve matured in my own opinions about religion, the film’s tone doesn’t work as well for me as it once did. The film does have its bright spots, but Smith wastes the assembled talent of the cast, and doesn’t have the wherewithal to properly helm a narrative of the scope of Dogma. It isn’t a bad movie, per se, but it’s one that I think might have benefitted from a bit more collaboration and editorial guidance. Though I’ve seen nearly all of Smith’s films, Dogma was really where I stopped being a true fan of the director, and while it used to be in the rotation with relative frequency, I never had the affinity for it that I held for Smith’s first three features. Unfortunately, Dogma’s flaws have only become more apparent with time, and it will likely be a good while before I decide to revisit it, if I do at all.

Dirty Work

December 31, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Dirty Work (1998)

Dir. Bob Saget

Written by: Frank Sebastiano, Norm Macdonald, Fred Wolf

Starring: Norm Macdonald, Artie Lange, Traylor Howard, Christopher McDonald

Early on in this project while writing about Belly, I called it “probably the worst movie, objectively speaking,” that I had reviewed to that point in this project. If you go back and read the review, however, you’ll find that Belly is actually a film that I genuinely enjoy and watch often, and that in spite of some of its cinematic shortcomings, I found some interesting things throughout the film to write about. While Belly looks more like an auspicious debut that hinted at great promise never really fulfilled by its director, Hype Williams, Dirty Work could be viewed more as the hacky, sophomoric comedy that it really is. It is definitely the worst movie that I’ve written about for this project, displaying none of the artistic flair of some of the other “bad” movies that I’ve reviewed. However, Dirty Work will always have a place in my heart. It is truly one of my favorite movies, and I don’t even classify it as a guilty pleasure, because I enjoy it fully, without irony, and without shame. Dirty Work is a bad movie, but, to me, it’s endlessly quotable and rewatchable. In a way, it’s the perfect movie to close out the first year of this project on, because I’m fairly certain that I’ll be one of a very select few to have written a gushing, unabashedly positive review of this much-maligned, oft-forgotten, footnote of cinematic comedy.

Dirty Work tells the story of Mitch (Macdonald) and Sam (Lange), two underachievers who have been friends since childhood. Growing up, the pair are taught by Sam’s father, Pops (Jack Warden), to not take crap off of anybody. Taking that lesson to heart, as children they make it their mission to serve comeuppance to anyone who wrongs them, child and adult alike. However, when they grow up, they find themselves too often on the receiving end of the comeuppance. Mitch in particular has a difficult time fitting into society, losing 14 jobs and his girlfriend in a matter of three months. Down and out, Mitch asks to move in with Sam and Pops, and shortly thereafter, Pops suffers a severe heart attack. When the two friends are faced with raising $50,000 to secure Pops a heart transplant, they first try their hands at a series of odd jobs, but soon realize that the key to raising the money to save Pops is by returning to their roots as revenge artists. They open up a revenge-for-hire business and offer to do other people’s dirty work for them, all the while saving up money to save Pops. Along the way, Mitch meets a woman whom he falls in love with, Kathy (Traylor), and ends up running afoul of the town’s most powerful citizen, Travis Cole (McDonald). Cole tries to trick Mitch and Sam into helping him condemn a build that he owns, but they eventually turn the tables on Cole and end up getting the last laugh. In the end of the film, Pops gets his heart transplant, Mitch gets the girl, and Cole is railroaded out of town after being exposed for the fraud that he is.

Dirty Work was added to my collection in the summer of 2002. That year, I spent about two weeks cooped up inside the house recovering from a bout of mononucleosis. As such, my mother picked up a few inexpensive DVDs to keep me occupied while I was homebound. One of these bargain bin finds was Dirty Work, and I probably watched the film a half dozen times in those two weeks. I had already seen it in the movie theater with some friends when I was about 13 years old, but it didn’t really stick out to me at that time. I was a latchkey kid back then, and I would often come home from elementary and middle school and watch reruns of “Saturday Night Live” on cable while I waiting for my parents to get home from work. I had gotten introduced to Norm Macdonald’s wry, dry sense of humor through these afternoon television watching sessions, and, as a result, I was a member of the small demographic that was actually interested in Dirty Work when it was released. The movie didn’t make a huge impression on me, but I can remember enjoying it a good bit. I loved the callbacks that Norm did to his Weekend Update persona, pulling out a Dictaphone and recording “notes to self,” and my friends and I were all fans of Chris Farley’s performance as Jimmy, Mitch and Sam’s bar buddy who had his nose bitten off by a Saigon whore, but overall the movie didn’t really stick with me after that initial viewing. Since receiving it on DVD, however, Dirty Work has been a staple of my viewing schedule for the past 15+ years. I don’t know if its offbeat, mocking style of humor needed some time to grow on me, or if part of the joy of the movie lies in repetition, but the older I get and the more times I watch Dirty Work, the more I want to watch and enjoy it again and again.

I think the common line of thought on Dirty Work, if the film is even thought of at all, is that it is a simple, sophomoric comedy, loosely and conveniently plotted, and filled with gross-out humor. On the surface, this is an absolutely accurate description of Dirty Work, but after nearly 100 viewings, I’ve come away with a much different reading of the film. Sure, Dirty Work is a “bad” movie, but I think that it is intentionally so. It’s a nudging, winking meta-film, poking fun at the cookie cutter studio comedies of the time, and standing as a prime example of anti-comedy, much like Saget’s and Macdonald’s other work. These are two master comedians, with a great understanding of and appreciation for the history of the medium, and the nature of humor, in general, and I simply find it hard to believe that they combined to create a movie that is crass for the sake of being crass. Though it features many alumni of the institution in cameo roles, Dirty Work is something of a send up of the morass that Saturday Night Live-inspired movies had become by the late 1990s. Similarly to an SNL film, the central conceit of a revenge-for-hire business feels like a sketch that has been pushed beyond its boundaries, but rather than relying on catch phrases or recurring oddball characters for a nostalgic sort of humor, Saget and Macdonald rely on escalating levels of absurdity, cringe-inducing anti-humor, and a defining performance from Macdonald, one of SNL’s most maligned cast members of the 90s. They combine these elements to create a chaotic comedic maelstrom that certainly isn’t for everyone, but which fully hits home with me.

Of course I realize that a viewer’s enjoyment of Dirty Work is going to be directly related to their enjoyment of Norm MacDonald’s particular brand of wry, winking humor. MacDonald, something of a “comedian’s comedian” and certainly an acquired taste when it comes to mainstream comedians, is essentially playing a version of himself in the film, imbuing Mitch’s character with all of his trademark quirks and mannerisms, familiar from his stint behind the anchor desk at SNL’s Weekend Update. MacDonald does try to act in the film, although he’s best when he isn’t trying to force himself into a character and is instead allowing Mitch and the film, in general, to be a vehicle for his comedic stylings. To say that Norm MacDonald is a bad actor isn’t a hot take or a novel idea, but his brand of monotone non-acting is perfect in this film that he co-wrote for himself. The film’s humor largely stems from MacDonald’s deadpan line delivery, and his presence as a straight man in a very zany world. He also proves himself adept at physical comedy, not something that he was normally associated with, through a very funny running gag that sees Mitch being physically tossed through a series of windows. I can understand that MacDonald’s presence in the film on its own might serve as a stumbling block for the uninitiated, but I can’t picture another comedian or actor delivering some of the lines that he wrote, much less with a completely straight face. He anchors the film, not necessarily with a great performance, but with a certain comedic sensibility that is necessary for the rest of the film’s antics to revolve around.

The rest of the stars orbiting MacDonald do so admirably. The film’s true supporting actors, Artie Lange as Sam and Traylor Howard as Kathy, don’t really stand out much, but Dirty Work is full of excellent cameos from some big name comedians. I mentioned him already, but Chris Farley’s role in Dirty Work is one of my favorite of his. He only has a few scenes, but he makes the most of them, and leaves a memorable impression in what would be the final film he worked on before his death. His character, Jimmy, is one note, a barfly who has sworn revenge on the Saigon whore who bit off his nose, but Farley brings his irrepressible physicality and charm to the role, playing against type as a somewhat villainous maniac. The scene, early in the film, where he confidently queues of the Rolling Stones classic, “Street Fighting Man,” on the bar jukebox before Mitch and Sam get in a brawl, only to push the wrong button and underscore the fight with Rupert Holmes’s “Pina Colada Song,” is one of my favorites in all of film comedy. Chevy Chase also shines as the degenerate gambler physician who offers to bump Pops’s transplant up on the list if Mitch and Sam can raise enough cash to help him pay off his bookies. Like Farley, Chase makes the most of his limited screen time, providing classic one-liners that feel improvised. His comedic timing is as excellent as always, and he has mastered the understated delivery that can drive a joke home before the audience even realizes it has been uttered. Don Rickles delivers some devastating insult comedy in a brief appearance that really served as my introduction to his brand of acerbic, vitriolic comedy. He debases Sam and Mitch, as well as the other employees at the movie theater where they are briefly employed, with such cutting quips. The scene leaves me laughing out loud no matter how many times I see it.

I could be wrong. Dirty Work could be just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill bad movie. It certainly seems to be that way on first blush. Saget’s direction in the film would be most generously described as competent. The script is both outlandish and simplistic, often settling for lowest common denominator punchlines and toilet humor. The film’s lead actor turns in a performance that seems almost determinedly wooden. However, despite all that, I honestly feel that the film is a twisted work of comedic genius. I really think that it was a movie ahead of its time, engaging in the type of anti-comedy that would become popular a decade later, at least in underground comedy scenes. It isn’t the type of movie that could ever become a classic, even of the cult variety, but I have rarely found a person who I’ve showed the film to or reminisced about it with who doesn’t find something about it to enjoy. I don’t know if my lionizing of the film is a sort of justification, but I also don’t feel that my outright admiration for Dirty Work is something that needs to really be justified. I’ve rarely subscribed to perceived dichotomies between high and low culture, and I’ve been even more reluctant to cast my lot with existing cultural values when it comes to art. I believe that, increasingly so, great art can come from any number of sources, and that beauty is often in the eye of the beholder. Writing about 50 different movies from my own personal collection this year has reminded that there’s really no accounting for personal taste. People should like what they like, and watch what they want to watch. If a movie makes you happy or gives you some relief or distraction from life’s many problems, even for just a couple of hours, enjoy the hell out of it. Happy New Year.

Drew's DVD Project

12 Monkeys to Zodiac

Comedy