Movies for a Long Weekend

Over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, Rhias and I watched eight and a half movies, as far as I can remember. It might have been more, if any are slipping my mind.

The final score was: Three movies rented, four and a half off Tivo, and one in a theatre like normal people.

King Kong (1933)

In preparation for the Peter Jackson movie, we watched the original, which Turner Classic Movies had kindly provided for us. It's good fun. I find it odd that I've seen people complaining about the dinosaurs in the trailers for the new version; Skull Island has always been crawling with dinosaurs!

Broadway Melody of 1936

Also from TCM, the Broadway Melody of 1936 is pretty much as frothy as it comes. It stars Jack Benny as someone other than "Jack Benny", which is unusual. He's a sharpie newspaper writer who I could have sworn was in his twenties, but it turns out Benny was actually 41 when it was shot. No wonder he could claim to be 39 all the way into his eighties! It also had Buddy Ebsen as a tapdancer who may have had some kind of mental problem. It was cool to see him dance, because now I can actually picture him in Wizard of Oz (where he was cast as the Scarecrow, then switched roles with Ray Bolger, then got abad allergic reaction to the Tin Man makeup). The lady playing his sister was actually . . . his sister. That's how the Broadway Melody movies worked; they found people with An Act (in Buddy and his sister's case, a tapdancing act) and cast them as People with an act. For example, there was a gentlemen who appeared to have a "comedic lecture" about snoring. Or something. I bet he was a riot on the Ziegfeld circuit.

It was a lot of fun (written by Moss Hart, for some reason!) and the first Broadway Melody I've seen ( I very much want to see the one with Robert Benchley in it). I've also seen only one of the Big Broadcasts. I'm mostly at the mercy of Turner Classic Movies for this stuff.

Camp

This was one of three rentals on the weekend. I'd never seen it, and I can't imagine why. I never went to a performing arts camp, but I was in San Diego Junior Theatre for several years, and I am not unacquainted with the sort of person who was in drama club. And there was that time I was in The Mikado in second grade. So I identified with a lot of the movie.

Sadly for me, I picked my favorite character early on: the kid who said "We have a sports counselor?" And when that turned out to be like 60% of his dialogue, I felt let down. Although he was in most of the dance productions in the movie, and he did a really good job. In fact, most of the productions were better than you'd really expect given that the characters had only two weeks for each one.

Fame

After watching Camp, I wanted to watch its clear spiritual predecessor, especially since Rhias had never seen it. So we watched it, and I enjoyed it immensely as I always do.

We had an ulterior motive for watching Fame: there's a local . . . theatrical company? . . . that puts on staged readings (sort of) of movies, and they're doing Fame in a month or so. The current series is "Dancing" or something; they've just done Footloose and Flashdance, and I think the big season finale is Dirty Dancing. Don't get too excited; the performances are at a local bar that also hosts Seattle Semipro Wrestling. So it's got a certain level of sleaze that everyone enjoys.

The Road to Wellville

I can't imagine why I've never seen this. I love the history of quack medicine! And I like many of the actors! Plus, it's directed by Alan Parker, who did, um, Fame. And also The Commitments and The Wall. And Bugsy Malone and the Madonna Evita, but I don't hold that against him. During the movie, I could frequently guess where it was going, just based on my vast store of useless knowledge (Why do the Bulgarians live so long? Yogurt!).

Incidentally, we watched The Road to Wellville on Thanksgiving, so we were eating delicious steaks and mounds of mashed potatoes while Anthony Hopkins (overacting much more entertainingly than in Silence of the Lambs) lectured us on how horrible that was for our colons. It was even more delicious to think about how unhealthy it was!

Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical

Meh. I mean, it was neat to see Kristen Bell not acting like Veronica Mars (especially when she's waving around a whip in that one scene), and Alan Cumming is always fun, but I think I would have liked this much more if it hadn't been a musical. It seemed like the fun just drained away for me while the songs dragged on and on.

I do approve of the fact that they included the original Reefer Madness on the DVD, though. And I am convinced that Steven Weber was just imitating Joe Piscopo as Danny Vermin in Johnny Dangerously. Which means I liked his performance.

The Magnificent Dope

Don Ameche as a sharpie Dale Carnegie-type with a self-help course. Henry Fonda as a backwoods rube who is happy without working too hard. We only watched about half of this, because it was pretty obvious where it was going. It wasn't bad exactly, but it didn't grab us.

Captain Blood

Now this is classic pirate fun! Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, based on a classic novel by Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, the Black Swan), directed by Michael Curtiz (172 movies, including Casablanca). It's great.

One complaint is that most of the scenes on land were shot in big rooms with nothing on the walls, but I choose to believe that was because they wanted the shipboard scenes to feel more real. Or something. It's certainly more fun when you have people climbing in the rigging and whatnot. One guy actually swings on a rope with a cutlass in his mouth! Unfortunately, he drops it when he lands, but they kept the shot anyway.

Rent

Hey! A movie in an actual theatre!

Rent first opened in 1996, which was when I wasn't paying much attention to Broadway. Coincidentally, I probably would have really liked it at the time, because like the main characters, I was also broke. However, since I missed it, I've never even heard the songs.

So that means that Rent does not mean as much to me as it does to some people. I realize that it was a big revelatory experience among people of a certain stripe, but for people of my generation, that slot was reserved for, say, Fame. Or possibly Tron. Maybe Popeye. Don't judge me! Anyway, my point is that I experienced the movie on its own merits, such as they are.

When the movie started, I didn't really get into it, because it starts with the premise that people shouldn't have to pay rent to live in a fabulous loft in Manhattan. I mean, Mark and Roger have an incredible place (much larger than, for example, the place I live in now, and I work for a living) and they seem personally offended that they should pay any rent. Not just for the last year (for which they have lived rent-free) but any future years. Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of charming bohemians, but these guys seemed really demanding.

Also, there are very few actual artists in this movie. When Benjamin allowed everyone back into the building (which was nice of him, because I don't think the Squatting laws actually work the way Joanne said they did, especially when everyone keeps sneaking out to go to engagement parties), he was accused of trying to look good by being nice to "the four artists". I'm not sure who that was supposed to be, because Mark hadn't created anything at all (and his final movie reminded me a lot of Winona Ryder's in Reality Bites, which is not necessarily a compliment) and it apparently takes Roger a whole year to write a song. I guess Mimi counts, but I don't think "stripping" counts as an art form, even if she does it in the only strip club in New York where the dancers don't take their clothes off. And how come she couldn't pay her rent and heat in the first place? She seemed to be making money. I don't even know who the fourth "artist" was; it could have been Angel, I guess, who was a pretty good drummer.

Maybe it was Maureen, who at least put on performance art shows, which got bigger audiences than any performance art in history. I'm also not sure how her "protest" actually caused a riot, unless everyone hates cows for some reason. Seriously, for a show that was the focus of so much plot and worry, that thing was just gibberish.

Anyway, that's why I had trouble getting into things. And that meant I sort of nitpicked things. Like, exactly how dangerous is this neighborhood supposed to be? Because Collins (a large black man who, judging by his moves on the subway, has decent upper-body strength) gets mugged just crossing the street, but Mimi can skip down the middle of the road in a miniskirt and heels? I find that confusing. And at the end, the money problems are solved because Collins hacked an ATM? That's not charming! That's bank robbery! That would be a whole different movie!

Also, it seemed like Roger's trip to Santa Fe wasn't as dramatic as it could have been. I think it's because he went and came back in the course of one song.

Anyway, I did like bits of it. The singing and acting were very good, and I always enjoy seeing Sarah Silverman in a role where she's evil (I'm just assuming that Mark's whole plot is going to go the same way as Winona's in Reality Bites). There just wasn't really much of a plot and I got kind of bored by the fourth time I heard the "525,600 minutes" song. It's not a real opera; it doesn't need leitmotifs.

However, I can certainly see why some people are deeply in love with the story. I'm probably going to get the Broadway Cast Album to see what the songs sound like there.