July 27, 2010

Movies can be funny, even when they’re not funny movies. Sometimes we selectively remember certain films; a few scattered images and bits of dialogue here and there is all we really retain from them, but our minds like to tell us we have the whole enchilada lodged somewhere in our noggins.

This doesn’t hold true for all movies, of course, especially for someone like me. I was so immersed in watching and reading about great motion pictures during my young adult years I very nearly forgot to have a life. So I have films impacted in my brain the way many people have wisdom teeth impacted in their gums. That’s just how I’ve ended up, and a handful of my closest friends are just as bad as I am, at least on that count.

I could start typing right now and list scenes from movies like “The Godfather,” “The French Connection,” “Badlands,” and “The Last Detail,” to name just four, and construct about 80% of the narrative, with pivotal verbal exchanges thrown in for good measure. But even I can convince myself I’m familiar with a particular picture, only to re-watch it years later and discover I hardly recall anything about it.

This tends to happen with comedies more than dramas, for some reason. I think it’s because I find something almost mystical about comedy. I’m endlessly amazed that watching certain things happen, or hearing people say things in a certain way, can make you yelp out loud and bring tears to your eyes. What does that even mean? John Belushi crams an entire sandwich in his mouth while standing in line in the Faber College cafeteria, and I double over and shout, “Ha, ha, ha!” Really? Does that make any sense at all?

Once I’ve yelped hard enough, though, the mystical experience can stick with me and become something bigger than it was when I first experienced it.

                                                ***

Two 1980s pictures that I long felt were unrecognized pop masterpieces of sorts are the Steve Martin film noir parody, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” and a Bob Zemeckis satire on all-American consumerism and lust for political pull called “Used Cars.” If you haven’t seen these pictures before, don’t worry. I’m going to show them to you right now…or, at least, I’m going to show you scenes from each movie that struck me as so hilarious when I first saw them, I eventually started telling myself the films were total screams from beginning to end. Which, I finally discovered upon re-watching years later, they really aren’t.

But please don’t think I’m telling you not to watch “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “Used Cars.” In fact, I hope the clips I’m providing will convince you to do just that some rainy weekend. They’re both entertaining as hell, and you’re bound to shout “Ha, ha, ha!” several times before they’re over.

But they’re just solid comedies that each feature one absolute hit-it-out-of-the-park scene. In fact, they contain two of the funniest scenes I can think of, out of the hundreds that have staked out territory in that otherwise barren landscape known as Paul Tatara’s Subconscious.

“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” which was released when I was one year out of high school, back in 1982, was Martin’s second picture, after his initial world-famous comedian filmic cash-in, “The Jerk.” Given the utter genius of Martin’s stand-up, I was somewhat disappointed by “The Jerk”’s bouts of extended face-making. But “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” even today, strikes me as Martin and his co-conspirator, director Carl Reiner, consciously reaching for a classic. Along with “Pennies from Heaven,” it’s certainly the most ambitious film Martin has ever starred in, and its construction is certifiably brilliant.

As I’ve already noted, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” is a film noir parody, but Martin and Reiner, along with cinematographer Michael Chapman (he also shot “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” so he’s…um…pretty good) upped the comic ante by combining clips from old 1940s pictures starring such legends as Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney with newly-shot black & white footage of Martin as a cynical private detective named Rigby Reardon.

The story, which is full of McGuffins, dead ends, and red herrings, is intentionally pointless. The real draw is seeing Martin interact with now-deceased actors in their prime. Reardon’s Chandler-esque voiceover also contains a handful of legitimate gut-busters, but the idea, once you’ve gotten used to it, eventually just runs out of steam. You find yourself, during the final half hour, focusing more on the enormous technical achievement than you do the comedy.

And then there’s this scene. After discovering a note that leads him to the mysterious “Swede Anderson,” Reardon - who’s recently been shot in his upper left arm - makes a dramatic visit to a flophouse where Martin gets to interact with none other the young Burt Lancaster.

Every time I open up a new bag of coffee, I think of this dazzlingly idiotic gag and chuckle quietly, and that’s one more lifelong chuckle than I would have had otherwise. So, for one scene, anyway, maybe Reiner and Martin made a classic after all.

                                                ***

1980’s “Used Cars,” unlike “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” is anything but ambitious. In fact, the key reason I inflated its accomplishment over the years is that I feel it’s the only raunchy comedy to be released in the wake of “Animal House” that managed to also include “Animal House”’s often overlooked warmth and sweetness. The characters in “Used Cars,” even though they're stupid and self-serving, also care about each other, and their concern is the engine that drives portions of the plot, such as it is.

Kurt Russell is terrific as Rudy Russo, a slick, fast-talking used car salesman who has his eye on the "higher" calling of the U.S. Senate. He and his co-horts at the dealership, including Jack Warden - who plays two characters in the picture, one of whom delivers streams of hilariously profane dialogue – will do absolutely anything to sell cars and to get Rudy into the halls of power.

There’s a handful of truly warped one-liners in "Used Cars," pointless nudity, one amazing sight gag that takes place during a fight scene in a trailer, an hilarious supporting performance by character actor Frank McRae, and a memorably shrieking, eye-rolling turn from Gerrit Graham, who I never saw again after this movie (his IMDB resume shows that he’s kicked around on TV for years.) But the movie falls apart completely in the last half hour or so, to an even greater extent than “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid."

Once again, though, there’s this scene, in which Graham utilizes the gang’s mascot, a deadpan beagle named Toby, to sell a ratty station wagon to an unsuspecting customer and his horrendous family. Prepare yourself for this one, animal lovers.

I actually say, “All he wanted was for you to be happy in this car,” at random moments throughout the year, even when the situation doesn't really call for it. As long as the line is parked in the car port of my brain, I figure I might as well take it out for a drive once in a while.

Toby, unfortunately, was not nominated for the Oscar he so fully deserved.

Paul Tatara

July 23, 2010

"When I become a scientist, I'm gonna create a living time machine and let it die before me. Then when I die and go to heaven, I'm gonna get in the time machine and come back and tell everybody what the afterlife is like."

Paul Tatara

July 22, 2010

When Bruce Springsteen first signed with Columbia Records back in 1972, the label’s executives didn’t know what to do with him. A product of the heady rock & roll ferment of the 1960s - as a teenager, he was originally moved to perform by such monster British Invasion bands as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who - Springsteen’s actual “product” was a wide-ranging amalgam that was influenced by everything from Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” to stacks of scratched 45s by garage bands like the Standells and the Swingin’ Medallions. Throw in a sense of musical space and time that suggested an inebriated jazz buff who couldn’t figure out how to end a tune once he started playing, and this guy was virtually unclassifiable.

For lack of a better idea, Columbia forced Springsteen to record semi-acoustically on his first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ,” and the disc he delivered was even stranger than what he might have created without their meddling; the cheap studio and slightly out-of-tune piano probably didn’t help matters, either.

No one bought the record, even though Springsteen’s word-packed tracks were often outrageously inventive— funky, funny, full of stark imagery, heartfelt vocals, and out-of-nowhere metaphors. The problem was that the half-committed recording process made them sound like oddly muffled representations of the artist’s true spirit.

Cliché-flinging critics, who were just as stumped as Springsteen’s overlords, decided to label Bruce yet another “new Dylan,” which served as a virtual kiss of death at the time. By the mid-1970s, careful “Rolling Stone” readers were well aware you could fill a stadium with failed “new Dylans,” and the old Dylan still walked the earth.

Poor Bobby Zimmerman had simply grown weary of the Messiah trip everybody was laying on him, and was too ground-down by his previous decade’s amphetamine-charged physical and emotional output to keep it up at such an exalted level. And Springsteen was more than smart enough to know you can’t usurp the King just because the crown has grown tarnished and he’s put it in the closet for a while. His edicts still stood, and, in this case, could easily be played on any workable hi-fi.

Still, as a live act, Springsteen was tearing it up, to a degree that left even Dylan eating dust. Bruce wasn’t merely “popular” in the northeastern United States. A rabid fan base raved about his shows as if they were danceable religious experiences, and the small clubs he played were packed to bursting every night. Columbia was rightfully convinced they could break Springsteen on a national level if people could just see him onstage…and if Bruce and a sharp producer could figure out how to transfer the gist of that live experience to vinyl.

With that in mind, Columbia began presenting Springsteen to anyone who was willing to sit down and experience him in his natural habitat. Here, then, is 23 year-old Bruce Springsteen, giving a private performance for a group of radio and music industry types at a Los Angeles club in 1973.

Springsteen has certainly written more impassioned and impactful tunes than “Spirit in the Night” in the past 37 years, and you no longer have to convince people in Iowa, or anywhere else in the world, to attend his concerts. They line up in droves. But, like virtually every great rock & roller, it’s the first burst of his extraordinary talent that most rattles me when I look back on it. Where on earth did this kind of song come from? And how could a raggedy New Jersey boardwalk denizen find it tumbling out of him when he was a mere five years removed from Freehold Borough High School?

                                                ***

It’s often been said that rock & roll is a young man’s game, but I think it’s closer to the truth that it’s a hungry man’s game. Everybody from Dylan to the Stones to Lennon and McCartney made their best music when they were still hungry, and I don’t mean a hunger for something as ultimately empty as fame and fortune. I mean a desire to be heard, a desire to be discussed, a desire to be experienced and felt. This is ultimately what drives any artist in any field, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that motivation doesn’t necessarily flow unhindered into old age, since with age comes other responsibilities, and other, much more private forms of fulfillment.

Sure, the creative fire makes sporadic return appearances, particularly with Springsteen and Dylan, because these are monumentally talented people, and they can sometimes reach down far enough to rekindle the flame. But the real magic - the real mystery - almost always lies in the initial Big Bang. And we as fans are lucky to be able to return to that magic over and over again to help re-charge our own batteries.

That's why I've been listening to great rock & roll since I was 16 years-old, and it's why I'll go on listening to it until the day I die. I want it to spur me on through an unknowable journey full of hope and joy and sadness and despair; I want it to remind me of just how bottomless my emotions can be when I’m connected to the people and things that are most important to me.

We don’t know when our personal end will come. But we do know when we’re living, and, as Springsteen would eventually get around to saying, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” So surround yourself with the good stuff, however you may define it, and try to embrace it with genuine abandon.

Be glad you’re alive. And, because life itself is a work of art, celebrate your journey.

Paul Tatara

July 17, 2010

I’ve been on a bit of an Elvis Presley kick lately, so I’ve been digging through a copy of “The Rough Guide to Elvis,” a terrifically engaging series of writings on one of the three or four most important figures in rock & roll history. Broken down into eight sections (with titles like The Life, The Music, The Influences, and The Icon) “The Rough Guide” is as sharp and biting as anything I’ve ever read about the King, but still honors Presley at length for his achievements as both an unbelievably charismatic entertainer and as a simple-yet-towering presence in American life.

Regardless of what you think of him - or if, like me, you think his charisma eventually transformed into grotesque self-parody - Elvis is here, and he’s here to stay. Like war. And money.

The author, Paul Simpson, makes it clear that, before the isolation, the pills, and the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches overwhelmed him, Presley, who was somewhat mystified by the stir he caused, was responsible for unleashing the hounds of rhythm and sex on an unsuspecting mass culture— what had previously been cordoned off in juke joints in the “bad” (i.e. “black”) part of town was now available for your kids’ perusal on the radio and on national TV! No previous entertainer, including that skinny crooner from Hoboken, came close to rattling middle class mores the way Elvis did, and the narrative of the average American teenager was forever changed in the process.

Still, Simpson has no problem covering the banana sandwiches, and he shouldn't. He isn’t afraid to poke fun at Presley when it’s needed, only to grow breathless with enthusiasm over a rare B-side or a bootlegged live performance in the next paragraph. Understand, I’ve been reading about rock & roll for over 30 years now, and a lot of that reading has pertained to Elvis. But this is simply the best book I’ve ever found about Presley, including Peter Guralnick’s far more intellectually weighty tomes, “Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley” and “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley,” which are indispensible but somehow rather inert.

There’s a whole bunch of fizz in “The Rough Guide to Elvis,” and, after a while, you realize it’s pointless to make a distinction between the champagne and the Mountain Dew. As in so much popular culture of real distinction, the fizz itself counts for a lot.

                                                ***

Rather surprisingly, because I’m mortified by what they did to both his music and his spirit, I find myself fascinated by Simpson’s section on Elvis’ movies. It must be because I’ve never bothered to read up on them before— as a genuine film lover, why would I? But there’s a lot of interesting and often plain old entertaining information to be found here.

The whole movie thing didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to for Elvis, and it’s pretty obvious that the machinations of his carnival barker of a manager, Col. Tom Parker, and Presley’s own poverty-grown southern boy compliance, were largely to blame. It has also been suspected that Parker told Elvis it was easier to reach his fans in Europe through movies, as opposed to touring there, because Parker was an illegal Dutch immigrant and con man who would have been arrested had he set foot overseas. Okay, then. You can't blame him there. But the Colonel had absolutely horrifying taste in movies.

Elvis admitted in a 1956 interview that his greatest ambition was always to be an actor; his biggest hero wasn’t a singer, but that other icon of teenage cool, James Dean (Presley claimed to have seen “Rebel Without a Cause” 44 times, which is roughly 43 more times than I’ve seen it.) Even in the truly ugly years immediately preceding his death, Elvis often talked to friends about wanting to give up touring so he could try his hand at performing onscreen again, although I’m sure, by then, he would have known better than to appear in horse shit that was being squeezed out of a tube. Or at least one hopes he would have known better.

Elvis had surprisingly good taste in movies, actually. Some of his favorite, which were often played for him in private screenings at a local cinema, were “The Godfather,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Dr. Strangelove” (and anything else starring Peter Sellers), and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Can you imagine chortling over “Dr. Strangelove” and sharing popcorn with Elvis? Wow.

In the 1972 documentary, “Elvis on Tour,” Presley describes what he was up against once the wheels of Hollywood commerce started turning strongly in his favor and Col. Parker (in conjunction with producer Hal Wallis) saddled him with a seemingly never-ending string of cheaply-made quickies. “It was a job. That’s how I treated it,” Presley says. “But I cared so much I became physically ill. I didn’t have final approval on the script, which means that I couldn’t tell you, ‘This is not good for me.’ I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to harm me. It was just Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it, and couldn’t say anything about it, couldn’t do anything about it…they couldn’t have paid me no amount of money in the world to feel some sort of self-satisfaction inside.”

The knowledge that movies meant that much to Elvis makes the fact that the Colonel’s outlandish money demands scuttled Elvis’ chance to co-star in Barbra Streisand’s 1976 remake of “A Star is Born” that much sadder. “A Star is Born” was a bad movie, to be sure (Kris Kristofferson eventually played the role). But it’s certainly not as bad as “Harum Scarum” or “Kissin’ Cousins” or any one of about 25 other movies that Presley did star in. Streisand wasn’t Shelley Fabares or Donna Douglas, and no one was being forced to sing “Song of the Shrimp,” at any rate.

                                                ***

There are so many great movie tidbits in Simpson’s book, it’ll be easier to just list some of my favorites:

* Elvis was set to star with Robert Mitchum in the bootlegging melodrama, “Thunder Road,” but the Colonel nixed it for unknown reasons. It probably sounded too promising.

* Gene Kelly was on the set of “Jailhouse Rock” when they shot the famous dance sequence, and told Elvis he was very impressed with the choreography…which was concocted by Elvis himself.

* Elia Kazan wanted Elvis to star in a film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s “Walk on the Wild Side” but the Colonel once again shot it down because one of the characters was a - gulp - lesbian.

* Elvis had an affair with his co-star, Juliet Prowse, on the set of “G.I. Blues” at the same time Prowse was dating Frank Sinatra. Later, Prowse dumped both Sinatra and Elvis and started dating God (I made up that last part.)

* The famed playwright, Clifford Odets - see Odets lampooned in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” - was writing “Wild in the Country” for Elvis, but was fired two weeks before filming began!

* Angela Lansbury plays Elvis’ mother in “Blue Hawaii,” even though she was only three years older than her supposed son. What the hell? Were no actual old women available?

* The first cut of “Harum Scarum” was so obviously terrible, the Colonel suggested the movie be narrated by a talking camel, to make the audience think it was supposed to be ridiculous. So that’s what they did. And it worked.

* "King Creole" was co-written by Michael V. Gazzo, who played the doomed mobster, Frank "Frankie Five Fingers" Pentangeli, in "The Godfathr Part 2." "Bullshit," you say? No. Really.

* Sammy Davis, Jr. called Elvis and literally cried on the phone when the Colonel refused to let his meal ticket be chained to a mere negro in a remake of the prison escape picture, “The Defiant Ones.”

* The writing team that scripted “Tickle Me” previously wrote for The Three Stooges, which surely must have sounded like a good idea at the time.

* “Time” magazine said Elvis’ hair in “Spinout” looked like “a swatch of hot buttered yak wool,” which, frankly, sounds like something I would have said when I was writing reviews for CNN.

* There’s a shot in “Girls! Girls! Girls!” in which an erection can clearly be seen in Elvis’ extra-tight pants while he sings “The Walls Have Ears” to co-star Laurel Goodwin. Elvis saw it in the rushes and assumed they would cut the scene out. But no one did, and Little Elvis made his one and only big screen appearance.

* The dolphin in “Clambake” was played by Flipper. No one remembers who played the clam.

* Hal Wallis tried to get the Beatles to do a cameo in “Paradise, Hawaiian Style,” but couldn’t come to terms with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. Can you fucking imagine? At least “Help!” is supposed to be surreal.

* And finally, Elvis wanted to add backup singers to a song he sings while riding a motorcycle in “Roustabout.” When director John Rich didn’t want to do it, he asked Elvis, “So where would we put the backing singers?," to which Elvis replied “Same damn place you put the band.”

Touché, Elvis. Touché.

Paul Tatara