joe-up: day one

queue de grâce lucky number seven kicks off today and we get off to a flying start with frank l. anderson and barry poltermann's the life of reilly (2006).

full disclosure: i love charles nelson reilly, so i was predisposed to enjoy this. it is the documenting of the final performance of reilly's one-man show, save it for the stage. it turned out to be the final public performance of reilly's life. it begins with him trading on the running joke that people were constantly surprised to find he was still alive and i was immediately struck by the fact that i am exactly at the other end of that spectrum - i am always sadly surprised to recall that he actually died in 2007. in my mind, he is one of those people that cannot die. the man's outsized joie de vivre was his stock-in-trade and it seems impossible to me that it could ever be snuffed out. case in point: as the credits were rolling, i caught myself saying out loud to myself, "that is a funny man". present tense. it is hard to tell how younger/uninitiated viewers might feel about this one, but i thought it was fantastic. for an hour and a half, reilly takes you on a guided tour of his personal history, replete with alcoholics, lobotomies, his mother's galloping racism, encountering homophobia in show business, acting classes and burt reynolds and makes it, by turns, poignant, insightful and hilarious. picture spalding gray with a more-than-academic appreciation for camp and you're on the right track. growing up in the seventies as i did, my first exposure to the man was watching him on game shows with my grandmother in the afternoons. i was aware of him as a personality first and i am sure it was the same for a lot of kids in my generation. to stop there, though, does the man a terrible disservice. he was incredibly witty, a generous performer and, in retrospect, probably the first person to make me at least vaguely aware of the idea of gay. as a little straight kid growing up in southwest oklahoma, that is a significant door being opened. those milestone moments when you learn that this person that is so different from you in some ways is not really so different in a lot of others can never be underestimated. it was never explicitly stated (and he took some flak from people who thought he should be more declamatory about it, but it's really none of their damn business). the cultural climate still truly didn't allow for it and i don't remember talking about it with anyone but it registered subconsciously. it registered that i had nothing to fear from it and i'd hang out with this guy any day because he is bananas. so he was much more than a personality. he was an unwitting ambassador, at least for me, a true actor and a magnificent storyteller. all of which is on full display in this endearing portrait. it's a potent reminder that it really is our stories that tie us together. thanks, joe. this was a great way to begin.

and then, just as we are getting things going, joe throws a computer-generated bucket of cold water all over the proceedings with stephen sommers' g.i. joe: the rise of cobra (2009).

certain elements of the plot aren't so outlandish. i am indeed convinced there is a shadowy cabal at work, their sinister machinations endangering us at every turn. it's just that they are out to destroy film, not steal advanced weapons technology. everyone involved in this project quite obviously hates movies and are working to see a world in which they are eradicated. simply put, this is one of the most simple-minded pieces of shit i have ever seen. from the opening titles informing me that this was made in association with hasbro, it is clear that this is a parade of checks being cashed and action figures being marketed. there are more ridiculous accents in it than ten tommy wiseau interviews. i could never quite get a fix on the reading level this was aimed at. nothing anyone said or did was too complicated for a third grader to understand and yet there were too many impalings and white-hot iron masks being applied to faces for it to be for children. i can only assume that it was made for grown men with the brains of a nine year-old. the plot is incidental - bad guys doing bad things, good guys trying to stop them. it's basically just an excuse to break glass, blow things up and employ more half-assed computer animation than a saturday night on the syfy channel. cgi joe: the rise of my blood pressure would have been a much more apt title. it was just one shopworn cliche after another. if you remove every stock camera movement, musical sting, plot device, piece of fight choreography, and hackneyed line of dialogue you would have been left with about four minutes of explosions and the eiffel tower being eaten by weaponized dust mites. lest you think i exaggerate, here is every word spoken, in sequence, during an explosion-punctuated five minute-long section near the end:

alright, keep tight boys.
all guns on that cannon.
torpedoes away!
i just lost my wingman!
retargeting joe submarine.
i've got a shot!
pulse cannon fault. pulse cannon fault.
cannon now offline.
the whole damn system's down!
i'm trying to bring it back online.
now you die.
launch immediately.
chart a course up to the ice pack.
yes sir.

take out the word "joe" and this could quite literally be any science fiction movie battle sequence, any time, anywhere. you could pick just about any five minute section and get a similar result. i have no idea how they got some of these actors to be in this thing. oh wait, yes i do. stinking fat checks, that's how. joseph gordon-levitt makes an appearance as a mad scientist that is half trent reznor, half darth vader, half freddy kruger (yes, the movie is 150% ridiculous). he wears an enormous face mask most of the time so to communicate the fact that he is speaking he looks like a bobblehead doll. channing tatum's acting "skills" and lack of charisma make it seem like someone put clothes on a football. never before have i found myself thinking i would rather be watching hayden christensen. yes, that bad. you know how voiceover artists go in and record about five hundred radio spots in three minutes? i swear that was the approach they took with every scene jonathan pryce was in. they must have only had him for an afternoon. this was supposed to be pure escapism but it failed miserably at that because all i could think for two hours was that i live in a world where this grossed 150 million dollars. horrible. i suspect joe only put this in the queue because the title has his name in it. what? was joe dirt (2001) not streaming?

can't get worse than that, can it? hmmm...let's see. how about a return trip to baz luhrmann's moulin rouge! (2001).

this is the first time it's happened in this experiment that i have been assigned to watch a film that i have already recently viewed. i decided to just go with it and see what came of it. you never know. i might find something altogether new. you can read what i said about it when jon originally assigned it to me here. beware of rick springfield's ass. unfortunately, i don't have a lot to add to that. i would like to mention that the title sequence with the fanfare, conductor and orchestra is a great idea and that ewan mcgregor is an easy guy to like. when he's not taking part in the overheated buffoonery of the piece he actually puts across a lot of genuine feeling with just a simple smile and an earnest gaze and it's easy to believe his chemistry with nicole kidman. it's still not enough to overcome the film's myriad, agitated faults.

ok, so day one was all about over the top, in one way or another. perhaps day two will tone it down a little bit and we will settle into a more subtle and dignified groove.

exactly.

jon: day two

"you're maudlin and full of self pity. you're magnificent."

and with that sentiment from all about eve (1950) as our jumping off point, day two begins our magical glimpse behind the curtain of this business we call show. you didn't seriously think i was going to suffer this indignity by myself? ladies and gentlemen, for your approval, the star of larry peerce's hard to hold (1984), rick springfield. feast your eyes, folks. i had to, as what you see there made no less than three separate appearances in this film. i am completely dumbfounded by this one. check me on this, but i thought the object of a vanity project was to make you look good. this is one of the most sub-television pieces of crap i have ever seen. as near as i can put together, the plot goes something like this: rick springfield is a bigtime rock star. he smashes into a girl's car and it's love at first sight, for him. he stalks her. her dad is a drunken longshoreman who may or may not have died some time during the movie. rick's band is populated by fat nerds from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and billy mumy from lost in space. his songwriting partner is his ex-wife, i think, who brandishes broken bottles at people. rick and the girl wander around san francisco falling in love to varying degrees. rick wears a sailor suit once. if it sounds disjointed that's because it is. i have never, and i mean never, seen a movie where it made less of a difference in what order the scenes occur. it's like a choose your own adventure in which, regardless of the page you turn to, you end up stuck in a synth-driven spider web, waiting to be consumed by rick springfield's bare ass. it's filled with scenes of rick and his girl inexplicably running from one meaningless, awkward scene to the next, him regularly pumping his fist in the air, celebrating some victory that exists only in his mind. every camera angle is the least flattering one you could have chosen. it's clumsy, stupid, not sexy and exists solely to sell us rick's hit single, which is the finale of the film. in case you missed it, they replay the exact same hit single forty-five seconds later, under the closing credits, during which they show a condensed version of the movie all over again in three minutes. it's a horror show. how would you like to open your window to find you're being serenaded by this gangly oaf and a tony bennett impersonator straight out of david lynch's worst nightmares?

queue de grâce is always a cornucopia of new experiences for me. i never thought i would ever be embarrassed for rick springfield and yet, here we are. it probably didn't help rick's cause that another musical vanity project came along a month later and kicked the living shit out of his.

sorry, rick. bad timing, buddy. also, next time you might want to leave the running gag about you having herpes out of your musical romantic comedy.

i wish joe jackson had gotten to make an early eighties musical vanity project movie.

from there we move into the most pleasant surprise of my day, bob fosse's all that jazz (1979).

i thoroughly enjoyed this. it's fosse having the last laugh way ahead of everyone else in the form of a hallucinatory, semi-autobiographical musical that is about as obsessed with death, the little and the large, as any picture this side of ingmar bergman. the damn thing is fascinating. roy scheider is a great, and far from obvious, choice to be fosse's surrogate in the film and it's pretty riveting to watch him push relentlessly through the days, the work and the sexual conquests, consuming little more than alka-seltzer, dexedrine and cigarettes. he's a completely unrepentant bastard whose lack of acknowledgment of boundaries jeopardizes every one of his relationships, enables him to create intricate works of mesmerizing art out of the human form and eventually kills him with a smile on his face. there are no limits. he even, literally, flirts with death. the fosse behind the camera is just as self-indulgent as the one on the screen, creating his own myth, eulogizing himself before someone less talented and less consumed by genius botches the job. he moves - sometimes fluidly, sometimes jarringly, always effectively - between past, present and fantasy and has the nerve to show you just how he gets away with it all. he just dares to. i am an avowed non-fan of most musical theatre, but even i can recognize unparalleled skill when i see it. the central segment where he transforms a banal song and dance into an erotically overcharged production number is simply astounding. not bad for a genuine son of a bitch. a lot of folks refer to this as fosse's 8½ (1963), but i think that's pushing it a bit. he's still no fellini. call it 6¼. thanks, jon. i might never have seen this otherwise. i'm glad i did.

can't say the same about this.

when i saw baz luhrmann's moulin rouge! (2001) on the list, i wasn't exactly thrilled. i enjoyed the scrappy upstart-ness of his strictly ballroom (1992) somewhat, but haven't really been a fan of anything since. the story here is unremarkable, kind of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama. boy meets girl, they fall madly in love against the odds, girl gets tuberculosis and dies. did nicholas sparks have a story credit somewhere that i missed? when you're this short on substance, you make up the difference with style, i guess. it definitely has style, it's just a shame it's not exactly stylish. it reads more like an infernal, candy-colored video game, as if i were playing a version of myst where they replaced the puzzles with medleys and mashups. just once, i wish redefining something for a generation - in this case, the musical - meant slowing it down and being more thoughtful about it. it shouldn't always have to equate to cramming in as much sensory overload as your imagination can conceive and cranking it up as fast and as loud as it will go. lacking story as it did, it really only needed to be about fifteen minutes long to get its point across. it would make an exceptional long-form music video. but, since it's over two hours long, you get a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. too often, it confuses being frantic with being funny, so john leguizamo probably felt right at home. in his defense, luhrmann can be awfully adept at weaving something new out of a lifetime of pop culture touchstones. from looney tunes to nirvana, and all points in between, he crafted something unique and never derivative. for his opposite number, i refer you to pastiche artist quentin tarantino. i give luhrmann credit for being bold, but i think i would rather talk to him about movies than watch one he made. next!

ending up the day we have michael hoffman's somewhat disappointing soapdish (1991). you had me at elisabeth shue. then you lost me. i had high hopes for this one. a nice ensemble comedy, perhaps? an interesting new take on the screwball tradition? andrew bergman, the man responsible for one of the funniest films i have ever seen, the in-laws (1979), wrote it, so it had pedigree on its side. it just didn't work out that way. it follows the machinations of the characters on a fictional daytime drama, both offscreen and on, and you would think that scenario is a potential comic goldmine. in fact, i still think so, as its potential remains untapped. there are a couple of amusing bits of business here and there but i think, for me, it lacked bite. this could, and should, have been savagely funny but wound up far too polite. kevin kline, as often happens in light comedy from this time period, is the real standout but even he isn't given much to do. oh well, as consolation - mostly to myself - here is another glimpse of elisabeth shue.

join me again tomorrow to see what surprises jon has in store for us. rumor has it, there's an underrated gem somewhere on the horizon.