[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on!]
By the Book
KINSEY
The biopic is one of the toughest genres to crack yet it is arguably the most popular film form right now, just as biographies are the bestselling books in publishing. The impediments are obvious: compression of long, ungainly life stories into minuscule time frames. The potential for distortion, bias, and reliance on standard story turns is atrocious, and rarely mastered. A life becomes a "life story" in defiance of the stops and starts that our actual lives evince.
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If the problem with the biopic is that it imposes artificial narrative structures on a complex life, the usual solution is to select one significant passage or turning point in a famous person's biography and dramatize it. Bill Condon (GODS AND MONSTERS) won't have any of that, however. He's not afraid. In KINSEY he takes on the sex researcher's whole existence. And, yes, Condon does fall for some of the typical biopic traps. Thus Kinsey's life must veer toward a crisis, precipitating a health breakdown and what appears to be a flirtation with psychosis. But in reality, a life has numerous ups and downs that don't necessarily follow an orderly narrative pattern. I suspect, though, that even Kinsey would not agree with that.
Kinsey is, of course, the University of Indiana biologist whose research into the sex lives of his fellow Americans made him a god to his staff and thousands of grateful readers and a monster to evangelists, grant giving bodies, customs officials, and the FBI.
As personified by Liam Neeson, Alfred Kinsey is a rather square, relatively inexperienced nature lover whose field of research is gall wasps. Driven and humorless, he is nevertheless admired by his students, who nickname him PROK (short for Professor Kinsey) and who come to him occasionally for sex advice.
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Gradually, thanks to their questions and his own difficult transition to married life, Kinsey grows concerned about the woefully inadequate sex education mid-century America offers its young, which inspires him to teach a frank course on the subject, which in turn leads to a national survey in which Kinsey and his assistants interviewed total strangers about their sex history. The books that summarized Kinsey's data, SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE (1948) and SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE (1953) became post-war bestsellers for wised-up readers who had just recently gone through a world war and now knew a thing or two about how life really worked. The books changed the way Americans viewed and talked about sex. The Sexual Revolution, gay liberation, and PLAYBOY magazine are direct descendants of Kinsey's pioneering work.
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Condon isn't completely enslaved by biopic conventions. He cleverly begins his film with Kinsey submitting to a practice sex history interview with his prospective staff, including a sensual Peter Sarsgaard, a stolid Chris O'Donnell, and a sleazy Timothy Hutton, whose mustache gives him a villainous Jack Nicholson aspect. This is a good entry point, because it introduces key members of Kinsey's team, and allows the film to summarize Kinsey's life, from his childhood under a repressive father, played by John Lithgow in FOOTLOOSE mode, to the difficult early days of his marriage to Clara, played by Laura Linney with perky sobriety. She doesn't talk so much as chirp.
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After that, however, Kinsey is straightforward biopic. The film summarizes quickly the good doctor's travails in getting funding, his growing awareness of his homosexual inclinations (Kinsey determines that he is a 3 on his own Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale: "Equally heterosexual and homosexual"), which he indulges with Sarsgaard's Clyde Martin. The film also tracks in shorthand code the occasionally orgy-like activities of Kinsey's Institute for Sexual Research, founded in 1947, his conflict with his son, which replicates his own with his father, the public reaction to the books, and Kinsey's failing health, before ending on a positive note, with Kinsey and his wife finding rejuvenation amid a forest of passionately erect sequoias.
There is a little bit of nudity in KINSEY, both male and female, and some sexual activity, but like some of the best sexual experiences you've ever had, KINSEY is mostly all talk. But what talk! Kinsey is like a Mr. Spock, making sober pronouncements about, and serene catalogs of, intimate activities — his own, his family's, and everyone else's. He shocks and yet liberates a packed class of students with a detailed explication of what goes where, accompanied by explicit photographs. His key insight, derived from the study of gall wasps, is that variety, global difference, is the norm, not bland uniformity, and this knowledge drives him to record, not judge, even when interviewing a salacious old man (William Sadler) who has notched up hundreds of underage boys and girls on his cock ring. People, Kinsey observes, are just "bigger, more complicated gall wasps."
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Unfortunately, thanks to the haste with which it must summarize a whole lifetime, KINSEY sometimes relies on easy plot points, such as Tim Curry as the stock villain of a skeptical colleague. This person really existed, but a scene in which we observe him teaching a racist sex ed course to a room of boys gives him the markings of a stick figure, despite the pivotal role of that scene in inspiring the university dean (Oliver Platt) to give Kinsey his chance to take over. Or, worse, having Neeson pull a "Schindler" by castigating himself over the hoards of people he wasn't able to help. Kinsey was the son of a preacher and there is something evangelical about the way he interpreted his findings. And the film's hectic pace at the end, in which Kinsey scrambles for new funding, leaves the impression that the Kinsey Institute no longer exists, which isn't true. But, again, the biopic is a tough form, and no filmmaker has really mastered it. KINSEY is a good movie, but if you go into it expecting a detailed account of the sexologist's life, you're screwed.
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Still, KINSEY is remarkably accurate, and there are three books out that confirm it. One is the biography that served as inspiration, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's KINSEY: SEX AND THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS (Indiana University Press, 513 pages, $18, ISBN 0 253 21726 1). It's the latest bio to tackle Kinsey, following James H. Jones's massive ALFRED C. KINSEY: A PUBLIC / PRIVATE LIFE (Norton, 937 pages, $39.95, ISBN 0 393 04086 0). And in support of the movie, Newmarket has published KINSEY: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE (351 pages, $19.95, ISBN 1 55704 647 6), the text of Condon's script along with a wealth of supplementary matter that ends up making the book a bibliographical version of a Collector's Edition DVD.
Second or third bios are often better than the pioneering effort because the respondents are usually motivated by anger at the first biographer and a need to defend their hero. Plus, new information comes out. Gathorne-Hardy's is most fruitfully read in tandem with Jones's brick. Jones's book, which came out in 1997, is authoritative, and was the first to reveal some of the controversial goings on at the Kinsey institute, including wife swapping, so I was curious as to why the filmmakers chose not to draw on it. The answer to the question came from Gathorne-Hardy's book, which attempts to refute several of Jones's charges, such as that Kinsey was primarily a homosexual. From my delighted perusal of the two books, Gathorne-Hardy takes issue with many of Jones's charges, but doesn't refute many of the ones I read about, such as Jones's discussion starting on page 609 that Kinsey liked to insert a tooth brush head-first up his urethra. Mostly Gathorne-Hardy's position is one of nuance: Jones believes in black and white (Kinsey was gay and masochistic), while Gathorne-Hardy is more "Kinseyian," seeing Kinsey's identity as expansive and exploratory. Gathorne-Hardy is quick to defend Kinsey from Jones, such as minimizing a claim by one of Jones's sources that she thought her husband's career at the Institute was in jeopardy if he didn't participate in orgies, with G-H affirming though other testimony that there was no such pressure, and that this speaker was probably a specific "Kinsey wife" who was especially prickly. Gathorne-Hardy isn't uncritical of Kinsey. He notes that Kinsey was intellectually resistant to making certain changes in his data gathering procedures. (It should be noted that his book is published by Indiana, the home of the Kinsey Institute.) But the fact of the matter is that I haven't had as much fun with a bio since reading Judith Thurman's book on Isak Dinesen. Nearly every page unveils some new and fascinating fact about Kinsey and his times. But what makes the book most enjoyable is G-H's editorializing. He abjures the standard historical "objectivity" to write what amounts really to a brief or a long essay on Kinsey. You can read it straight through or bounce around within it as I did.
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The Newmarket book is a good intro to the world of Kinsey. Besides the script it has a mini-bio of Kinsey by Linda Wolfe, which itself is laced with numerous sidebars, consisting both of new and contemporaneously commentary about Kinsey and his results. A middle section is an anthology of excerpts and illustrations, such as Kinsey on the cover of TIME, that further elucidate the times and the context that Kinsey's research emerged from, and changed.
Clueless
NATIONAL TREASURE
In its seven or eight days of screen life NATIONAL TREASURE has been getting an especially severe tanning from the mass media reviewers and I can see what they mean. It is a relatively thin film with bogusly linked elements of American history. It feels by-the-numbers in its succession of events, and offers suspense scenes that are not fully, nail-bitingly engaging.
Indeed an aspiring screenwriter might want to transcribe this movie or hunt down its script, as it seems to offer a template of what Hollywood, and Bruckheimer in particular, are offering the public (being a Disney movie, in the theater where I saw it the first reel was pre-loaded with trailers for all manner of kid movies and comedies, such as GUESS WHO, ELECTRA, SON OF THE MASK, making me think that all of moviedom has become infantilized and that audiences for these comedies are who they think will be coming to NT).
But I come to find something to praise in NATIONAL TREASURE, not throw more dirt on its funeral bier. Not exactly enjoying NATIONAL TREASURE, I still found a few "privileged moments" that were entertaining.
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For one thing, there were three clever moments in the film, credited to writers Jim Kouf, Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley. For example at one point Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) comes up with the password to the room holding the Declaration of Independence, unscrambling a bunch of letters he knows that Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) typed on a key pad — folarvyge. Cage beats the computer software by realizing that Abigail typed "l" twice: Valley Forge. In another moment, as they realize that there really is a map on the back of the Declaration, and that lemon juice and direct heat will reveal it, they look at each other and say, in order, "More heat." "More juice." I thought it was kind of clever, but it is a dangerous bit of dialogue, easily flung back at the film by reviewers thinking that NATIONAL TREASURE lacks both those elements. And later Cage makes a good joke about being bait for the FBI.
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Small moments, surely, and probably not described here adequately enough to portray how pleasing they felt in the theater. On a larger scale, there is an interesting sub-theme in the film about style. Gates, when he decides to steal the Declaration to protect it from a more ruthless opponent (Sean Bean as Ian Howe, a very agreeable, pleasing, even human villain), he engages a delicate, complex succession of sly intrusions, while Howe, coincidentally going in at the same time, basically just beats down the doors. It's the style of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, if you will, versus THE DIRTY DOZEN. There is not much point to this contrast thematically, but it was a more substantial referentiality than some of the other filmic references NATIONAL TREASURE makes.
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Of course the biggest citation is to the Indiana Jones movies, even to the extent of having Jon Voight stand in as a Sean Connery equivalent, and to have in Kruger as bland a heroine as appeared in most of the Jones films (Kruger is so ephemeral its as if she doesn't have any facial features).
When Gates and Co. finally find the treasure they've been looking for the film really fails to fulfill expectation. What should be a grand image, like the last shot of the first Jones film, or KANE for that matter, here seems dark and purposely obscured, as if to hide a lack of imagination. Plus the writers miss numerous chances to make intellectual gags about the kind of stuff that might be part of the treasure. Only Abigail identifies a few rolled up parchments as books from the library of Alexandria. Much more could have been squeezed out of the setting, and a director like, say, Joe Dante would have done it.
Director Jon Turteltaub's career had inauspicious beginnings, with THINK BIG, starring the Paul twins, and DRIVING ME CRAZY, His destiny appeared to be that of someone making movies with undescriptive titles and bland content.
Then with 3 NINJAs and COOL RUNNINGS, he seemed to be tagged as a "sports" director and might have ended up doing THE MIRACLE for Disney (the company he has been most associated with). Instead he latched onto the romantic comedy WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, which became another hit for star Sandra Bullock. Then he did a Travolta film (PHENOMENON), ROCKET MAN, an Anthony Hopkins movie (INSTINCT), and then a Bruce Willis film (THE KID), before a four year "break."
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What links all this disparate and mostly uninteresting movies is the running theme of some kind of underdog proving him or herself to have merit. As in Jim Thompson's novels, the main characters are individuals disparaged or overlooked by others, like a nice cute toll taker or a Jamaican bobsled team. In NATIONAL TREASURE, the Gates family has been obsessed with the wealth of the founding fathers for generations and are viewed as something of a joke by historians and archivists. The thrust of the film, like all Turteltaub's movies, is to vindicate them. With a resume like Turteltaub's, it's a rather autobiographical running theme to have.
Reading the Business
Finally caught up with the all film issue of GRANTA (No. 86, $14.95) and enjoyed quite a bit of it, especially the central section on the art of film directors, including sketches and storyboards by Kurosawa, Kitano, Scorsese, and others. The most interesting text was excerpts from John Fowles about the making of THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, experiences that surely went into his later novel, DANIEL MARTIN.
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Fowles is acerbic but observant, and not altogether hostile to the Hollywood types invading his novel writing time to show the upteenth script derived from his book. The diary excerpts cover events from January 1987 to December 1981, from the writing of the book to its participation in the awards season after its release. Among the things he observes is: "That is what is so distressing about these 'international ' film people. One feels that they are only really at home in a jet, or on a long-distance phone line. Or in the latest 'great' restaurant." That was in May of 1971. When Fred Zinnemann was attached to direct, the studio was after him to find an actor like Paul Newman to play the lead because the studio perceived that American audiences only responded to a "mid-Atlantic" accent (the movie at one point almost starred Kate Nelligan, Newman, and Orson Welles). In 1974 Fowles notes that, "the curse of the Americo-European cinema is its need to package, to sell something so that true aesthetic judgment becomes a valuation of whether the packaging is slickly enough done." Fowles attends a party for the star of the film, who had to fly in for only one day of late shooting, and "We all went on the ferry across the river to the Carvel Angel at Dartmouth and had a farewell dinner for [Streep]; very relaxed, jolly everyone relieved that the shooting is nearly over. This side of the film business is the nicest: the work done, the closeness built, the joshing." Two months later he stays up late to watch on television Ronald Reagan elected president: "There is no hope for the western world, it lies self-betrayed by its own stupidity and greed."
Who Watches the Incredibles?
Has anyone noticed how a key plot point in THE INCREDIBLES is obviously based on Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's masterpiece, WATCHMEN?
Well, actually, a lot of reviewers have.
It's just that apparently none of them are in the mainstream press, which, despite such innovations as reviews of graphic novels in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and the NEW YORK TIMES book review section, continues to disparage comics by ignoring them, much as they disparaged science fiction before Kubrick's 2001 and science friction (or science fiction war films) before STAR WARS.
Instead it is Ramzy Zeidan at NORTH TEXAS DAILY, Robert Wilonsky at RIVER FRONT TIMES, MaryAnn Johanson at fllickphilosopher.com, Anna Kaufman at THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN, Pete Vonder Haar at FILM THREAT, and a handful of other reviewers and bloggers who have had to point out the obvious fact that the situation in which the Parr family finds itself resembles the key premise in Moore's book, that in an alternative world superheroes are branded (by the Keene Act) as vigilantes and banned from participating in crime fighting. Both films follow a "contemporary" reuniting of former superheroes after some mysterious force goes after retired "masks." Even an island figures in THE INCREDIBLES's action.
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Meanwhile, the real WATCHMEN still languishes in pre-pre-pre-production. Lloyd Levin and Larry Gordon are producing it for Paramount and have gone through several directors, including Darren Aronofsky and the film's writer David Hayter, before recently settled on Paul Greengrass, according to VARIETY. Greengrass did the recent hit THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. This appointment comes after years of inaction, in which a script by Sam Hamm never reached the screen despite the labors of Terry Gilliam and producer Joel Silver.
But I can't say I mind. I stole a few hours from work a few weeks ago to re-read it yet again, which I do about once a year, and it still held up remarkable. It may very well be the perfect comic — except that you need a wide grounding in other comics, in the history of comics, to "get" it. It is the perfect expression of comic book artistry in and of itself. To try and compress it into a two-hour spectacle is to leave out too much in a work that depends on layers and layers of reference as to almost guarantee that the fan will have another LXG or FROM HELL on his hands. Even a 12-part series of 30-minute animated episodes on HBO or some other channel, which is really the best way to go, might not do it. I would love to be wrong.
Michael Bay's Oscar Watch
Over at CHUD.com, Michael Bay gives his view of the Oscar race. Of course, he hasn't had time to see the movies, but "I still have opinions any way."
Opinions such as this, on THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: "Mel Gibson understands something, and that’s that subtlety is a pretty useless tool in cinema. If you want people to understand pain and suffering, you really need to show that Christ had the living shit beaten out of him, and you need to show it repeatedly. You have to show that Christ was like a kung fu Zen master and could have killed all those dudes who were beating him up, but he was all like, “Nah, man, god’s got a plan for me, I’ve got save the world and shit.” Though I think it was pretty tacky of Gibson to steal his ending from my film, you know, ARMAGEDDON. He also understands that you should have hot bitches in any movie, so Monica Bellucci shows up. Unfortunately Hollywood leans to the left, and the sensible shoe and life partner crowd will keep people like me from giving Gibson his due."
The writer isn't really Michael Bay of course, even though that is his (or her) user name. Instead it is some disguised CHUD poster with a real knack for withering satire. There have been a bunch of these "Bay" postings in recent months, and have created quite a stir over at CHUD.
British Crime
The British are taking over the art of nuanced, gritty mystery stories, and it's no wonder given the long history of British crime writing. Thus it is a disappointment that when Mike Hodges returns to the genre yet again he offers only a vague rehash of his beloved GET CARTER.
In I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD (Paramount, 2003, $29.95, Tuesday, November 16) we have almost the same set-up: an older, veteran crook makes a trek to find out who killed his brother. In this case it is Will Graham (Clive Owen) who has been hiding in the woods like Bigfoot, growing a beard and living in a trailer. Malcolm McDowell and Charlotte Rampling pop up to help and obscure the case, and frankly I couldn't really figure out what was going on at times, given the cross cutting between activities that aren't related to each other, and in fact take place in wholly different locations.
Owen is a riveting performer (though I don't see him as Bond), but even his charisma couldn't elevate the film for me. Paramount offers a bare bones disc, with a nice transfer, but little else.
One of the longest running British crime shows is A TOUCH OF FROST (MPI, 1994, $49.95, Tuesday, November 23), now in its seventh season, and amounting to about 35 episodes. Season 4 opens with the irritable police inspector of Denton facing homelessness after his house burns down (he was widowed in a previous season). There is quite a bit of variety to Frost's cases, and he always seems to have a different partner, if this one season is any indication. Here he deals with a kidnapping case, investigates a military death that occurred during an exercise, looks into a crime of passion, follows the trail of a gigolo, and unearths a pattern in a series of campus crimes. Of Frost's partners, the most attractive is Colette Brown as WPC Claire Toms, who helps Frost with the kidnapping case.
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What's curious about the series is that Frost is a not particularly likable cop. He doesn't get along with his boss (of course), has a rather right wing attitude to criminals (which later bounces off a sharp attorney), is often crabby and unfair, and has a Dirty Harry level relish in putting crooks away. Worse, there is something kind of dry and ugly about the world of Denton, with most of the cast looking unsavory and the settings often crowded and rundown. And not all the mysteries are mysterious. We know who the kidnaper in the first episode is from the start. Not only that, but each episode demands about 45 minutes of severe concentration before you can get your bearings.
Still, David Jason has a certain charm as Frost (a character derived from the novels of R. D. Wingfield). Jason provides a commentary track to one of the five episodes in the season four set from MPI, the sole supplementary feature on the three disc set.
Of this batch the best offering is FOYLE'S WAR: BOX SET NO. 2 (AcornMedia , 2002, $59.95, Tuesday, July 20). It's a nifty series about a repressed investigator in the south coast of England in 1940, the crimes he takes on seemingly pallid in comparison with the looming war. Michael Kitchen has an Anthony Hopkins-like reticence as Christopher Foyle, as he chews his lip and ruminates quietly over small details. His team is fairly stable: Honeysuckle Weeks as his driver, and Anthony Howell as his partner. Like Frost, Foyle is widowed, but has a grown son in the RAF.
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The first season of four movie-length episodes aired starting in October of 2002. A third season of four shows recently completed broadcast. FOYLE'S WAR, which was conceived by Anthony Horowitz, beautifully recreates wartime England, is beautifully shot, and offers interesting points of information about the times and an unvarnished portrayal of differing British reactions to the conflict, including the looting of bombed out houses. For example two of the episodes in the second season reveal how some industrialists profited from the war. The series also reveals peculiarities of war time, such as "trekkers," people who sleep in their cars far outside urban areas in order to avoid being bombed, and a term that sounded to me like "funcourts" (the set isn't subtitled), which refers to well off Britishers who hide from the war in London by renting digs in B&Bs in obscure places. Curiously, the series has an interestingly bleak view of marriage, each episode portraying a particularly harsh or violent union of one kind or another.
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But what is best about FOYLE'S WAR is that the mysteries are damned clever. I didn't figure out a single one of them before the denouement, and found the narrative journey of getting there fascinating and entertaining. I eagerly await season three. This four disc set, each disc in its own container in the box, offers excellent transfers and good sound, plus a modicum of helpful extras, mainly an interview with Weeks and Howell on disc one, and two or three text production histories and stills galleries.
Three by Maddin
After experiencing a long hiatus it's great that Guy Maddin is finally making movies again. And it seems as if there has been a rush of films from him. Maddin made his "comeback" with the short film THE HEART OF THE WORLD, made for the Toronto Film Festival, and available on the Zeitgeist DVD for TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS. Thus lubricated for further endeavors, Maddin went on to film a ballet based on DRACULA for Canadian televisions, but in his own inimitable style, in the silent mode with intertitles, iris frames, and a quirky take on old standby characters such as Van Helsing (here a panty sniffer).
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The film is now out on DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY
(Zeitgeist, 2002, $29.99, Tuesday, May 18) and like all Maddin films (if you like his work in the first place) it is a delight. My only concern with this otherwise excellent disc is that Maddin's audio commentary track sounds as if it were recorded in a large auditorium and his voice rarely sounds out at a volume louder than the movie itself. More audible is a radio interview about the making of the movie, and in addition there is a photo gallery, a piece on the making of the sets, and a "making of" done for a Canadian news show.
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My enthusiasm for Maddin and THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (MGM, 2003, $29.95, Tuesday, November 16) is well known. Suffice it to say here that MGM offers the film in an excellent widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced), with DD 5.1, and with a passel of necessary supplements. Among them are three short films — A TRIP TO THE ORPHANAGE, SOMBRA DOLOROSA, SISSY BOY SLAP PARTY — and also aired on the IFC as part of a general celebration of Maddin.
Also on hard are two "making-ofs" "Teardrops in the Snow" (26:00) and "The Saddest Characters in the World" (22:00), from which we learn, among other things, that Maddin took as his stylistic "bible" for making MUSIC a film from 1972 called THE FAST KILL, a heist film directed by Lindsay Shonteff. Maddin the self-mythologizer claims that a videotape of the film was slipped to him anonymously. In addition there are nine teaser trailers, the theatrical trailer, and some bonus trailers for MGM "world cinema" product.
It's not out on DVD yet, but if you get a chance to see COWARDS BEND THE KNEE at, say, your local museum or rep house, do so. It is probably Maddin's most explicitly autobiographical film, while still having all the elements of a WIZARD OF OZ fantasia that most of his films enjoy.
Four by MST3K
Better writers than me, but especially Jonathan Rosenbaum at the NEW YORK OBSERVER, have sung the praises of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 more episodes of which now come to us via a BOX SET VOLUME 6 (Rhino, $59.95, Tuesday, September 21). I had been vaguely aware of the show back in the early 1990s, and had flashed on it occasionally while channel flipping. My response was like every other MST3K skeptic — who wants to hear the things in front talk? I just want to see the bad movie.
Then one weekend I had the flu. It was a Saturday, and I had just read a review of the show by a local writer who praised it for braininess, an unusual quality on TV even then. I flipped it on, and the first episode I formally watched was THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS. When Mike Nelson likened the monster in the movie to "Queen Lativah's hat," I fell in love with the show. In those days MST3K aired about three times a day so I was able to plunge in get completely addicted.
In Volume 6 Rhino releases three episodes from the early 1990s, and a bunch of what it calls "lost" shorts. The films are ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES (episode No. 77, the sixth episode of season 6, first aired on July 18, 1992), THE GUNSLINGER (show No. 107, the 11th episode of season 5, first aired on October 9, 1993), and TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE (show No. 75, the fourth episode of season 4, first aired on June 27, 1992), and the shorts MR. B NATURAL, X MARKS THE SPOT, HIRED PART 1, DESIGN FOR DREAMING, JOHNNY AT THE FAIR, and ARE YOU READY FOR MARRIAGE?
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I hadn't seen the show in a while and had forgotten just how vast and fast the references and in-jokes come. In the course of 10 minutes near the end of TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE, Joel and the robots make reference to RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT, Ingmar Bergman STARSKY AND HUTCH, Ebony and Ivory, The Crickets, "Rock Lobster," LIFE STINKS, Hooker Headers, THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO, "On the Bayou," "The Wichita Lineman," three quick references to CITIZEN KANE, "They're Coming to Take Me Away," Rush Limbaugh, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, GONE WITH THE WIND, JFK's inaugural speech, and CASABLANCA.
Seeing eight hours of the show in a row this time I was able to notice certain patterns in the humor. Joel and the robots do one of three things at any given time. They take what is said on the screen literally and respond ("My people are coming to take me away," says the alien in TEENAGERS, to which Tom Servo adds, "My people will call your people"). They make explicit cracks about how bad the film is (in TEENAGERS, a doctor exclaims, "I say, what is this," to which Joel adds, "And you say it rather woodenly"). And they make connections between what they see on the screen and the culture at large by "filling in" dialogue that the characters might have said. For example, when John Ireland in THE GUNSLINGER, says bleakly, "The good die first," Crow says, "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying pattern." There is also the occasional bad pun. When a car goes off a cliff and rolls down a hill, Tom Servo says, "Whaddaknow, valley parking."
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Given the high intensity of doing such a show, it is amazing that the writers did not repeat themselves more. I only caught a few replicated responses. Twice, someone says, "Mrs. Hathaway, Jethro wants to be a rock star," the second time in TEENAGERS. Singing "I have often walked down this street before," is a favorite trope, used in GUNSLINGER with a tabaccy spit at the end, and in TEENAGERS with the addition of the phrase, "But I've never done it packing heat before" (because the villain is carrying a gun). Also the phrase "Partridge Farms remembers" is used twice just in this set.
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But 12 years on, the endless citations are becoming more and more obscure, and soon the show will need annotations on the order of what James Joyce gets for ULYSSES, for the gags that weren't already obscure at the time. For example, during one break skit, they hum and dance to the General Cinema snack theme; either that is a really, really in joke, or I have just never heard the music, or seen a movie in a General Cinema theater.
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It's great to have the show back in my life, on DVD. That being said, I wish that Rhino would take a more scholarly approach to releasing the series. Maybe there is a rights issue, or maybe they don't exist, but it would be nice to have a set of the early cable access season of the show. There are 209 episodes from the 10 seasons of MST3K. Rhino has so far done 24 and a bunch of shorts, collected from different parts of different seasons. It's good that they maintain the quality of the transfer by confining one film per disc, and 15 or 24 disc sets of one season would be unwieldy and expensive. I'm not sure what the solution is, but if Rhino could at least release the series in order, however finely they have to chop it up to make selling it profitable, then sometime in the future we all would have complete, coherent collections of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000.
Letters
From Anonymous:
"I'm an avid reader of your column and someone who works in the distribution end of the business, so I'd like to thank you for turning me on to OPEN WIDE. As someone who's tried to explain the ins and outs of distribution and the various arguments between distributors and theaters, the book offers an insightful portrait of the business end of how a film gets to a theater, while also noting how marketing and playdates have dramatically changed in the last twenty years. Most film fans follow the numbers now, but few understand exactly what those numbers mean, or how they work, and what went on to boost or hamper them. Though the book can't cover everything, it gives a clear portrait of the schmoozing and inexact voodoo science that goes into playdates and the all-important "tracking." The fact that the films covered (T3, LEGALLY BLONDE 2, and SINBAD) are negligible adds to the book's texture; 99% of all films released are like them — forgotten months after the two disc DVD is released. If anyone wanted to get a clear view of why most films are marginal, or why so many sequels are released, and how much works goes into putting out crappy summer entertainment, this film offers a great portrait of the business end of modern filmmaking.
And good luck with mariepoopshoot.com."
Fortunately, the typo was changed between the advance reader I read and the finished product, which I checked recently.
NEXT TIME: THAT '70S SHOW, DAREDEVIL, numerous Asian action films, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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