The Screengrab : carl reiner

Summerfest '08: "Summer Rental"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Well, faithful Screengrab readers, we knew this day would come. When I first set myself the task of creating Summerfest '08 -- the season-long Screengrab movie festival of films with nothing in common except having the word "summer" in the title -- I knew it wouldn't be easy. I knew that, despite my humble goal of providing you with short, sassy reviews of movies just long enough to watch while your steaks were burning on the grill, I would eventually reach the dog days of August and, having suggested a movie every Wednesday for the last ten weeks, start running out of anything worth watching. With two weeks to go, Netflix can scarcely keep up with my bizarre demands, and while I'm doing my best to have this series go out with a bang, I'm afrad that by this point, I'm reduced to suggesting movies that are more or less the absolute dregs. And in terms of 1980s broad comedies, they don't come much dregsier than those movies with the following five words attached: 'a comedy featuring John Candy'. While the big man was an absolute ace on television (he was far and away our favorite part of SCTV) and could be a winning charmer in mainstream films (see Splash for evidence), his ability to pick good scripts was not honed to razor sharpness. This left us with a legacy, following his unfortunate demise, of very few characters like Johnny LaRue and Harry, the Guy with the Snake on His Face, and very many movies like Who's Harry Crumb?.

But we made a commitment here, damn it, and this is no time to flag. The final days are upon us! So screw your courage to the sticking-place, don a boater and a decades-out-of-date swimming costume, and join me for Summer Rental!

THE ACTION: In a sure sign we are watching a movie from the 1980s, John Candy plays a burnt-out air traffic controller who is forced to take a summer vacation before he completely flips out and starts steering 747s into one another. In an additional sure sign we are watching a movie from the 1980s, the whole movie is essentially a collection of gags that weren't quite good enough for a Rodney Dangerfield movie. The plot, such as it is, involves Candy and his family arriving at a summer beach house which unfortunately has been rezoned as public property, forcing them to contend with rude passers-by at whom they make threatening gestures and Smurf jokes -- yet a third sign that we are watching a movie from the 1980s, since the Smurf jokes are delivered with no apparent irony. After about an hour of these aimless, plotless jokes, the movie takes a new turn, delivering a brand new set of aimless, plotless jokes, this time revolving around a pointless combat between Candy and an old sea salt who runs a boating company and wants to make Candy's life miserable for no particular reason. Will the two ever become friends? Will Candy's kids drive him crazy? Will this movie seem like it will never end, despite being only 88 minutes long? Only you can decide, by renting this spectacularly pointless relic from a bygone age.

THE PLAYERS: Candy isn't exactly at his best here, but at least he retains elements of gregariousness and isn't entirely sleepwalking through the movie like he would the last few pictures he made prior to his untimely death. Unsurprisingly, his big-screen family gives him precious little to play off of, portrayed as they are by professional nonentity Karen Austin, never-was Kerri Green, and supremely irksome one-time heartthrob Joey "Whoa!" Lawrence. But later in the film, director Carl Reiner (yes, that Carl Reiner, several million years removed from his brilliant TV comedy days) brings in tons of good character actors for Candy to bounce off of, and the movie improves to a marked degree when he's trading lines with John Laroquette, Richard Crenna, and, as the film's main antagonist, Rip Torn, who was just then beginning to develop the hammy, over-the-top persona that would mark much of his best work in the 1990s and 2000s. Since the movie is little more than a collection of gags in search of a plot to bounce off of, it's better when those gags are bouncing off the likes of Torn, Crenna and Laroquette than the lives of Kerri Green.

SUMMER FUN: Almost the entire running time of Summer Rental takes place at the beach or on the ocean, and if it isn't fun for poor John Candy's long-suffering Jack Chester, at least everyone else is having fun at his expense. Fishing, sailing, surfing, and numerous semi-successful attempts at big-screen comedy jokes are all in abundance here, even if they're not always done right. At the very least, Candy does a lot of drinking, which is also our advice on how you should get through the movie.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: This being a good-time party movie of the 1980s, and its star being a big fat funster in the person of John Candy, Summer Rental has Hawaiian shirts everywhere you look. Crenna wears a Hawaiian shirt; Larroquette wears a Hawaiian shirt; and Rip Torn practically is a Hawaiian shirt. In addition, even when Candy isn't wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he's wearing something almost as good -- some of the few real laughs in the picture come from his outlandish wardrobe, including an outsized boater, hokey-looking Hollywood sunglasses, and a swimsuit that was made roughly during the Victorian era.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Once again, there are ways in which Summer Rental's being a cheap '80s comedy works against it -- for example, it's not very good, or very funny. But there are ways in which being a cheap '80s comedy works in its favor, and the greatest of these is its plethora of bikini babes. Unfortunately, one of them is Karen Austin, and another is Kerri Green, who, while not technically underage, will just bum you out about liking The Goonies. But another is the supermodel-turned-actress Lois Hamilton, who -- if you can forget that she, like Candy, died an unnatural death at a young age -- provides us with one of the movie's most memorable scenes. She pops up her bikini to reveal her, er, talents to Candy, and asks him, "How do they look?", to which he nervously replies "Similar?"

Summerfest '08: "Summer School"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's critics who look at the world through rose-colored glasses. The minute I hear someone gassing on about how movies used to be better back in the old days (always, coincidentally, when they were young), my eyes glaze over and my ears cotton up. Of course, the bitch of it all is that I do this myself. Everyone does. In fact, I'm about to do it right now, with the latest installment of Summerfest '08 -- the exciting new Screengrab feature where we randomly select movies from the past with the word 'summer' in the title and review them in order to let you know if it's worth watching for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the guy to show up and fix your margarita machine. Objectively, there's really nothing better about the crap movies they put out when I was a teenager in the 1980s and the crap movies they put out now; the new stuff may be a tad coarser, in keeping with the tenor of the times, but it sure ain't any stupider. And, of course, the fact that I must have watched the 1987 Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School a couple of dozen times in my misspent post-high-school doldrums doesn't mean it's actually any kind of a good movie. But I have good memories of it, and if you're looking for a near-perfect exemplar of a very particular type of feel-good comedy produced in that neon-colored decade, you could do a lot worse.

So let's hand-press our surfer shirts, bleach our teeth, and check out the latest entry into Summerfest '08: Summer School!

THE ACTION: Freddy Shoop, a proto-slacker gym teacher who was once a quarterback at UCLA and managed to avoid getting all his perfect teeth knocked out, is looking forward to taking summer off at Ocean Front High School and spending the next three months gaping slack-jawed at surfer girls. Unfortunately, he is assigned to take control of a remedial English class, made up of a wide selection of teen-movie stereotypes (the loser, the slut, the nerd, the foreign exchange student, the pregnant girl, and so on). If he doesn't succeed in getting them to pass, the Earth will be hit with a meteorite and all life will be forever extinguished, or something. Will he be able to somehow inspire this ragtag group of misfits to apply themselves to their studies? Will they manage to serve a healthy dose of comeuppance to the stuffed-shirt principal? Will the disdainful, straight-laced lady teacher somehow overcome her disdain for Freddy and fall in love? Will hilarity ensue? The answer to these questions depends on whether or not you have ever seen a movie before.

THE PLAYERS: The man behind the camera here is veteran TV funnyman Carl Reiner, which is probably why the whole thing plays more like a good-natured sitcom that's been stretched out to triple length than it does a movie. Mark Harmon plays the male lead; he was actually a big TV star in 1987, for reasons that are lost to the mists of time. Kirstie Alley, looking lovely in her pre-Fat Actress days, plays his love interest as the two gleefully cavort around on screen just as if their careers aren't about to completely vanish. One of the teen stereotypes (that would be the slut) is played by a nubile young Courtney Thorne-Smith, whose TV career had not yet begun; it's sort of entertaining to watch her goof around in that period when she had no TV career thanks to not yet having had a big break rather than thanks to her career having dried up. Dean Cameron is the real standout here, stealing the show as Chainsaw, as much as this is a show capable of being stolen.

SUMMER FUN: One thing you cannot fault this movie for is a lack of summer fun. This movie is all about summer fun. It is virtually a primer in summer fun as interpreted by Hollywood screenwriters of the 1980s. Wearing sunglasses, playing cheeseball rock music (including a handful of choice tracks from the likes of Blondie, Rick James, and Oingo Boingo), driving around in fast cars, going to beach, getting a tan, making fun of one-dimensional authority figures, and re-enacting scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: it's all here. There's even some extremely mild sex and a dog wearing a lei. Someday, when our civilization has crumbled to dust, aliens will land on our dead world, and they will use this movie as Exhibit A in an outer space museum of history exhibit about Calfornia.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: In previous installments of Summerfest '08, Hawaiian shirt action has been, I am sad to say, sorely lacking. No so with Summer School, my friends. Mark Harmon is not big and fat, but he certainly is a party animal, and his Freddy Shoop is almost always clad in a Hawaiian shirt. But not just any Hawaiian shirt, oh goodness no! This is a genuine Duke Kahanamoku model he's sporting, of the exact same sort worn by Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity. Harmon liked it so much he added it to his personal collection, and can be seen on his somewhat more haggard frame in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fifteen years later.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: One of the subplots of the movie involves Courtney Thorne-Smith becoming homeless and shacking up with Harmon's character. Of course, she is forever trying to lure him into the sack, and of course, he is a noble fellow who would never dream of taking advantage of his innocent young charge, but for those of us in the audience who aren't quite so noble, we are treated to a number of shots of the ripe Ms. Thorne-Smith bikinied like there's no tomorrow. Additionally, goofball losers Chainsaw and Dave hatch a school project that involves going to the beach for the express purpose of seeing foreign exchange student Anna-Maria Mazarelli (played by former Miss Teen Italy Fabiana Udenio) in the latest swimwear. Hey, folks, it ain't Shakespeare, but as a sort of Platonic ideal of '80s summer-fun movies, Summer School is as good as it gets.

Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

DANNY OCEAN

I vividly remember the day when my esteemed Screengrab colleague, Scott Von Doviak, told me I had to drop whatever I was doing and go check out Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. “You mean the movie with that guy from E.R.?” I replied, incredulous, thinking perhaps I’d misunderstood. "The guy from One Fine Day? Batman & Robin? That guy?” “Yes,” Mr. Von Doviak replied. “I’m afraid we have to start liking George Clooney now.” And, in fact, the statement was prescient, because soon The Cloon had established himself as the Sexiest Man Alive, the Last True Movie Star, the eternal bachelor, the guy with the pot-bellied pig, the sensible humanitarian do-gooder, and the guy my wife has informed me she’d run off with in a heartbeat...and I wouldn’t even blame her, because he’s just that fucking cool. But you know what? He’s still not as cool as Frank Sinatra in 1960. Advantage: Original.

THE ELEVEN

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Carl Reiner, Bernie Mac...these are all fairly cool people. Sammy and Dino? They're so cool I don’t even need to mention their last names (though I suppose it’s a toss-up whether Joey Bishop is cooler than Scott Caan or vice-versa). The big problem is that no matter how cool Sammy and Dino are, and as well as they wear suits and swill cocktails, they’re part of a gang that just doesn’t have many good scenes, good lines, or all that much to do. Advantage: Remake.

THE DAME

Not that she had all that much to work with in an underwritten role, but the best part of Julia Robert’s performance (as the art curator at the Bellagio?) is the meta gag of “introducing” her in the credits like a dewy fresh unknown. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better, despite an arguably better wardrobe, and this category would probably be a draw if not for the mitigating factor of Shirley Maclaine’s great cameo as “Tipsy Girl” in the original, giving what noted Rat Packologist John Mitchell calls “the only actual performance in the movie,” cementing her as “any reasonable drunk’s pin-up girl.” Advantage: Original.

THE HEIST

The original scores big points for its highball concept, cooked up by five writers, including Billy Wilder(!). Meanwhile, by plotting a heist where Sammy Davis, Jr.’s character masquerades as a tap-dancing garbage man, the film either criticizes 1960s racism or embodies it (depending who you ask). But the heist in the remake (scripted by Ted Griffin) is faster paced, requires more costumes and gadgets, and wraps up with a nice, lyrical moment by the Bellagio’s dancing waters (as opposed to the original’s surprisingly downbeat buzzkill pall of failure and mortality). Advantage: Remake.

THE SCORE

Even without the groovy remix of Elvis Presley’s lost classic “A Little Less Conversation,” the soundtrack to the 2001 edition of Ocean’s is worth a listen for the space age bachelor pad rhythms of David Holmes’ swingin’ retro score and classic cuts from Perry Como, Percy Faith, Quincy Jones and Claude DeBussy. But the original featured Sammy’s aforementioned sanitation song and dance “Ee-O-Leven” and Dean Martin performing a vibe-tastic version of “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”...and you really can’t argue with vibes. Advantage: Original

THE SEQUELS

This one is pretty close to a draw, but Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were marginally less dreadful than the original’s quasi-sequels Sergeants 3, 4 For Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods, so... Advantage: Remake.

And thus, in a tight race between style and substance, the winner is...REMAKE!

(Coming up next: the dueling Dawns of the Dead!)

Yesterday's Hits: Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne)

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Whenever I describe the idea of Yesterday’s Hits to someone who’s never read the column, I’m often asked, “why write about movies that aren’t popular anymore?” There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest has always been a kind of anthropological fascination with the movies to which earlier generations gravitated. In some cases, the reasons behind the films’ blockbuster status are simple- because they craved good special effects, or because the stars were popular at the time. But in some cases, it goes deeper than that, because the film taps into a certain zeitgeist that makes it a must see. Simply put, it’s the right film at the right time. One example of this is Fatal Attraction.

What made Fatal Attraction a hit?: The 1980s were a profitable period for R-rated movies, and one of the prime beneficiaries of this was the erotic thriller genre. But while most movies of this kind were fairly disreputable, Fatal Attraction was different- a classy project pairing bankable leading man Michael Douglas with three-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close. Because of its pedigree, Fatal Attraction was able to attract a bigger audience than most films of the kind, becoming the second-biggest hit of 1987.

However, the film’s success was bigger than box-office grosses, with its title entering the popular lexicon. This was due in no small part to the way its screenplay (penned by James Dearden) tapped into two major issues of the day. First, after the advent of feminism, there was a certain degree of anxiety among many men about these newly independent and sexually powerful women, exemplified in the film by Glenn Close’s Alex. But also important- although less explicit in the film- was the sudden fear of sex which was caused by the discovery of AIDS earlier in the decade. Suddenly, the casual sex of the sixties and seventies carried with it deadly consequences. These two factors combined to make Fatal Attraction a topic of national conversation, with the film garnering six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Not bad for a project that had repeatedly been dismissed as a ripoff of Play Misty for Me and passed on by almost twenty filmmakers, including Brian DePalma and John Carpenter.

What happened?: While Fatal Attraction transcended the genre to which it ostensibly belonged, its box-office performance paved the way for an explosion of erotic thrillers, few of which were remotely as good, and almost none of which were as respectable. Most of the films that were made in its wake were sleazy and shameless, with filmmakers like screenwriter Joe Eszterhas aiming to outdo each other for kinky sexuality and elaborate deaths. In addition, there was a rise in direct-to-video erotic thrillers at the end of the eighties, occasioned in part by the home-video success of Fatal Attraction. For both of these reasons, and others besides, the erotic thriller genre had largely become a parody of itself even before Carl Reiner made his dire spoof Fatal Instinct in 1993.

Does Fatal Attraction still work?: Mostly, yes. For a movie of this kind, Fatal Attraction is pretty low-key for most of its duration. Dearden and director Adrian Lyne take time to properly establish the film’s characters and story rather than simply barreling through to the sex and violence. From the beginning, the film portrays Dan Gallagher’s (Douglas) life in detail- his beautiful wife Beth (Anne Archer), his little girl, his job as a high-powered lawyer, and his close friendships. It’s not until after we see what his everyday life is like that the film throws Alex into the mix, which allows us to see what he has before he does something that could cause him to lose it.

It’s because of this that the casting of Douglas is crucial. Most big stars of the period specialized in uncomplicated heroes, but Douglas was the exception, often playing flawed yuppie types with a dark side. Fatal Attraction gave him the one of his best roles, as a decent man who is almost done in by his arrogance- he cheats on his wife because he knows he’ll have fun, and he figures he’ll never get caught anyway, so where’s the harm? But of course, he does.

Also important is Close’s performance as Alex, who’s crazy all right, but also says some things that make a good amount of sense. After Dan unceremoniously dumps her, she calls him on it, saying he treats her like “some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage.” After she finds out she’s pregnant, she seeks him out and demands that he “accept his responsibilities.” Alex has her share of problems- she’s suicidal, for one thing- but most of her actions in the film’s first half are actually pretty reasonable. She’s been wronged, she’s pissed, and now she will. Not. Be. Ignored.

The first hour or so of Fatal Attraction works so well as a morality play, with Dan trying to figure out how to shake off Alex while dealing with his own guilt and keeping the truth from his wife, that it’s sort of disappointing when it moves into more traditional thriller territory. Some of the film’s most famous sequences- the boiled bunny, the kidnapping- still pack a punch, but they don’t fit very well with what came before. Mostly though, it feels too easy to turn Alex into a psycho. By making her a villain, it provides an easy opportunity for Dan to emerge as a hero working in the interest of protecting his family and saving his marriage. Compared to what came before, it’s far too tidy.

Especially damaging is the film’s climactic scene, in which Alex brandishes a butcher knife and tries to murder Beth. In Dearden’s original ending, Alex committed suicide in a manner that made it appear Dan had killed her, which led to him being arrested for her murder. However, after disastrous test screenings, the studio shot the new ending, which tested much better. But while turning Alex into a knife-wielding slasher helped the film’s box office, it hurt it quality-wise. With its original ending, not only do all of the Madame Butterfly references suddenly make sense, but the film becomes far more about Dan having to deal with the consequences of his affair and less about providing clear-cut violent catharsis for the audience. Sadly, a move like this is all too typical of Hollywood- so short-sighted that they’ll gladly torpedo a future classic in the interest of making the movie more bankable today. Of course, this is what made Fatal Attraction so ideal for Yesterday’s Hits. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?