Hanover Street (1979)

HANOVER STREET (1979) One star

In a review of the Michael Bay cinematic bomb PEARL HARBOR, “one of the most insulting, most cloying excuses for mass entertainment ever made” I called that one, I mentioned HANOVER STREET and called it both possibly Harrison Ford’s worst movie and a weeper from Hell.

HANOVER STREET establishes a basic plot scenario that worked much better in films contemporaneous with World War II, films like WATERLOO BRIDGE, CASABLANCA, THE CLOCK, and BRIEF ENCOUNTER. Outside that immediate context, though, a film had better be very good because otherwise it will not get away with a period romance. In fact, played badly, we just might laugh it right off the screen. That’s what I did, for example, to survive PEARL HARBOR.

We have all seen HANOVER STREET many times before, even before seeing the film for the first time. Peter Hyams both directed and wrote HANOVER STREET, so he definitely has nobody but himself to blame for such ridiculous tripe.

David (Ford), American pilot.

Margaret (Lesley-Anne Down), English nurse.

She’s married.

He’s not.

Instant love / lust.

They start a love affair in the midst of a London blown up real good.

She keeps her husband a secret from her new lover.

He’s assigned to escort a British secret agent into France.

They’re shot down behind enemy lines.

David discovers that secret agent, you guessed it, is Margaret’s husband, Paul (Christopher Plummer).

David and Paul must work together to survive.

Enough is enough, because I think anybody with an IQ of at least 100 can finish the rest of the synopsis of HANOVER STREET.

With the staggering success of both ROCKY and STAR WARS in back-to-back years (1976 and 1977), both good old-fashioned popular entertainments, Hollywood began churning out light, feel good, escapist pictures by the dozens. It especially became even more pronounced in 1979 (and beyond), since 1978 releases GREASE, HEAVEN CAN WAIT, and SUPERMAN proved to be major hits in the ROCKY and STAR WARS mold.

Just take a look at the poster for HANOVER STREET.

The words at the top: LOVE HASN’T BEEN LIKE THIS SINCE 1943.

Below that an illustration of Harrison Ford and Lesley-Anne Down looking each other passionately in the eyes, foreshadowing or merely shadowing a key scene in the movie.

More text (hype): “It was a time of courage and honor – of passion and sacrifice. This is the story of two people swept up in that time – who met – and fell in love.”

There’s also a map and two planes on the poster.

Ford worked so effectively as both Han Solo and Indiana Jones in eight films partly because he found a way to work in humor that counterbalanced all the cornball surrounding him. There’s also that priceless scene in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK when Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) tells Han that she loves him and he merely says, “I know.”

In HANOVER STREET, Ford stumbles his way though dialogue like “Think of me when you drink tea,” “I love you enough to let you go, which is more than I’ve ever felt about anyone in my life,” and “You’ve got to go to him, and I’ve got to turn and walk away.” To be fair, everybody stumbles in HANOVER STREET and there’s no counterbalance to cornball.

Christopher Plummer legendarily disliked working on THE SOUND OF MUSIC (he called it “The Sound of Mucus”) and he said this about his co-star, “Working with Julie Andrews is like getting hit over the head with a valentine.” (Plummer and Andrews have remained friends.)

I just wonder what Plummer has to say about HANOVER STREET.

The Swarm (1978)

THE SWARM

THE SWARM (1978) One-half star

Many comedies wish they could make me laugh as hard as I do at the ridiculous disclaimer at the end of the 1978 Irwin Allen film THE SWARM: “The African killer bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no relationship to the industrious hard-working American honey bee to which we are indebted for pollinating vital crops that feed our nation.”

Were the folks at Warner Bros. seriously afraid of alienating the American honey bee?

I’ve read that the American Bee Association considered suing Allen for defaming the honey bee … and that must be why we ended up with that jive disclaimer right before the end credits. But, honestly, why stop there? The director, writer, and actor guilds should have sued Allen for defaming their respective trades, because this has to be the worst use ever of a $21 million production budget (reports vary on the $), seven Academy Award winning actors (Michael Caine, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Lee Grant, and Henry Fonda, but none of them earned for this movie), and 800,000 bees with their stingers removed.

I’ll never forget THE SWARM because it’s not easy forgetting one of the worst movies ever made. I caught it (not all of it, though) for the first time in either late 1997 or early 1998, home alone late afternoon during my freshman year of college. I returned from class and found this disaster pic flipping channels. It was somewhere in the middle and I watched the rest. The lousy special effects, the cornball everything (premise, plot, dialogue, acting, title), and that darn disclaimer stuck with me. …

I’ve caught up with THE SWARM a couple more times or I’ve watched it at an interval of once every 10 years. It still rates about the exact same as the first time watching it, though, but I guess I have watched it a couple more times after the first as a honest reminder of what a bad movie’s truly like.

Guess we should give a lot of blame for THE SWARM to Allen (1916-91). The Master of Disaster produced THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, THE TOWERING INFERNO, THE SWARM, BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, and WHEN TIME RAN OUT, the last three of which helped kill off the disaster films that were so popular in the 1970s. THE SWARM earned $7.7 million, BEYOND THE POSEIDON $2.1 million, and WHEN TIME RAN OUT $3.8 million.

Allen also directed THE SWARM and BEYOND THE POSEIDON. In THE SWARM, he kills two genres in one movie, combining disaster with the killer animal genre that became a dominant exploitation staple after the incredible success of Steven Spielberg’s JAWS in 1975.

It was David Hannum, not P.T. Barnum, who came up with the legendary quote, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Should have been Irwin Allen, though, because his films really take us for suckers one and all. Fortunately, we are better (smarter) than that.

Stirling Silliphant (1918-96) wrote the screenplay for THE SWARM and he wrote both of Allen’s biggest hits, THE POSEIDON and TOWERING INFERNO. He also won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Best Picture winner IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. (Silliphant’s erratic credits include VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, SHAFT IN AFRICA, and OVER THE TOP.)

Unfortunately, his work on THE SWARM will go down in infamy.

Helicopter pilot: “Oh my God! Bees! Bees! Millions of bees … (later on) Bees! Millions of bees!” Of course, it does not help matters that the bees sometimes look more like painted-on black dots.

There’s some dynamite exchanges in THE SWARM. I’ll highlight just one.

Dr. Crane (Caine): Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?

General Slater (Richard Widmark): I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence.

“No matter what he may bee,” maybe they should have stripped Silliphant of his Academy Award for writing that one.

There’s more howlers in THE SWARM: “Houston on fire. Will history blame me, or the bees?”; “I know people look at me and think that I’m just the man behind the aspirin counter, but inside I love you”; “They’re more virulent than the Australian Brown-Box Jellyfish”; “By tomorrow there will be no more Africans … at least not in the Houston sector.” This dialogue indicts inself.

THE SWARM is one time where calling a film a train wreck is literal.

A train wreck, by the way, that kills Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray, two of the film’s seven Academy Award winning actors. Johnson (1918-96) fared better later as the conductor in the horror film TERROR TRAIN. I really did not want to mention that de Havilland, Johnson, and MacMurray form a romantic triangle in THE SWARM. Let’s just get past that and move on immediately, unlike the movie.

Having such an all-star cast, by the way, backfires miserably for THE SWARM, because I start thinking about movies like ZULU (Caine), THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (de Havilland), THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (Johnson), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (MacMurray), THE MIRACLE WORKER (Duke), and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Fonda), for example, rather than what I am supposed to be watching.

Some of the stars have smaller roles than others. Yeah, and I almost forgot about Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, and Slim Pickens, though I mentioned the always skeptical, always boneheaded General Slater played by Widmark. How could I forget though about Mr. Pickens? According to Cinemorgue Wiki, Pickens died cinematic deaths in THE LAST COMMAND, A THUNDER OF DRUMS, DR. STRANGELOVE, MAJOR DUNDEE, ROUGH NIGHT IN JERICHO, PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, BEYOND THE POSEIDON, THE BLACK HOLE, and THE HOWLING. They missed an opportunity in not killing Pickens in THE SWARM. I mean, his death scenes in DR. STRANGELOVE and PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID are legendary.

I am rambling, just like THE SWARM itself.

When you watch THE SWARM, please try and keep in mind that Paul Zastupnevich received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Unbelievable, just unbelievable, like THE SWARM.

Park Row (1952)

PARK ROW (1952) Four stars

I finally watched for the first time PARK ROW, Samuel Fuller’s self-financed labor of love and love letter to newspapers, newspapermen, and the revolutionary concept of a free press.

Of course, Fuller produced his love letter decades before many newspapers became downsized, outsourced, strip-mined, gutted, and homogenized into bland soggy vanilla wafer cookie cutter clone drone carbon copies of all the other papers owned by the same media company. Fewer days printed, earlier and earlier deadlines, fewer pages (less content) because of declining ad revenue and increased printing costs, more delivery issues, and price increases at every level all factor into a worse product, more unhappy customers, and ultimately fewer subscribers, as well as fewer employees, in a vicious cycle. Less (newspaper) for more (money) will not cut it.

That once family-owned small town newspaper … once the beacon, pride and joy, and watchdog of a community (and possibly region) and once housed inside a buzzing building populated by wordsmiths and word slingers, photographers, editors of various persuasions, proof readers and fact checkers, pressmen, inserters, and many others in a diverse work environment … has been reduced over time to a skeleton crew of employees who hear the grief for the sad state of a formerly great paper. They hear the grief because the power players are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Good luck reaching them.

Not that journalism majors and college paper staff members are forewarned a million times before their graduation about newspapers being a dying industry. It’s not a natural death, though, and it’s both maddening and saddening for the lover of the printed word to see what’s happening to so many papers.

PARK ROW inspired thoughts, reactions, and reflections by the bushel.

People with a vision and the character and personality necessary to carry it out have been replaced by number-crunching, bean-counting, penny-pinching, character- and personality-deficient, machine-like men and women in many decision-making positions in the newspaper industry. Just like protagonist Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans) says in PARK ROW, “The press is good or evil according to the character of those who direct it.”
Remember that classic line from John Ford’s 1962 western THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE? Something like “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s just what we shall do with PARK ROW, written, directed, produced, and financed by Fuller. That’s right, Fuller himself put up every dollar spent on PARK ROW: $200,000 since the other $1,000 of his life’s savings went toward cigars and vodka.
Fuller (1912-97) became a copy boy at the age of 12 for the New York Evening Journal and a crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic at 17. He quit his newspaper gig three years later and hitchhiked the U.S.A. with the occasional freelance job. In 1934, Fuller took a temp crime reporter job for the San Francisco Chronicle and then editorial writer for the San Diego Sun. Fuller returned to New York in 1935 and published his first novel, “Burn, Baby, Burn.” Fuller wrote more novels and branched out into screenplays for Hollywood, including one from 1938 with a catchy title, GANGS OF NEW YORK, directed by James Cruze and starring Charles Bickford and Ann Dvorak. Fuller enlisted for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor and he served in the 26th Regiment, Third Battalion, Company K or the Big Red One for the rest of the war (his experiences inspired his 1980 movie THE BIG RED ONE). Two screenplays were filmed and his mystery novel “The Dark Page” was printed during World War II with Fuller overseas. Back stateside, Fuller directed his first film, I SHOT JESSE JAMES, in 1949 and his 26 films are informed by his background in newspapers and novels.
Fuller’s older brother Ving (1903-65) provided the editorial cartoons for PARK ROW. Ving worked as a newspaper cartoonist, among other gigs including animation and gag writing, and his best known work is the mad scientist comic strip “Doc Syke” from 1944 to 1960.
PARK ROW starts with a scroll through the names of the 1,772 daily newspapers in the United States circa 1952. Bold letters proclaim “ONE OF THEM IS THE PAPER YOU READ.” A few seconds later, “ALL OF THEM ARE THE STARS OF THIS STORY.” About one minute in, “DEDICATED TO AMERICAN JOURNALISM,” with “AMERICAN JOURNALISM” in much bigger letters just like a front page headline for a major news story. That sure as all get-out beats what we see and hear today, you know, all that “evil liberal media” and “fake news” hyperbole. Why, just a couple years ago Walmart sold online, through a third party seller, T-shirts featuring “Rope. Tree. Journalist.” Below that, “Some Assembly Required.” Walmart pulled the shirts after a complaint from the Radio Television Digital News Association.
As of 2016, the number of daily papers in the United States had dropped to 1,286.
After that scroll and a brief Samuel Fuller Productions fanfare, PARK ROW gives us voice-over narration, “This is Johannes Gutenberg, who invented movable type 500 years ago and printed the first Bible. Recognized as the father of modern printing, Gutenberg stands on Park Row, the most famous newspaper street in the world, where giants of journalism mixed blood and ink to make history across the front page of America. Our story takes place in the lusty days of the Golden 80s [1880s] when Park Row was the birth place and graveyard of great headlines, the street of America’s first world famous journalist, a printer’s devil who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers, Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of Park Row … and it is the street of Phineas Mitchell.” I’m already reeled in less than three minutes into the picture.
By the way, newspapers chose their location on Park Row because of the proximity to City Hall and the police department.
PARK ROW belongs right up there with CITIZEN KANE on the list of my favorite newspaper movies. I found myself inspired by Fuller’s depiction of media wars in 1886, of a small rogue newspaper started by an editor (Mitchell) warring against the very newspaper that fired him because he questioned their moral scruples. The Star’s cutthroat heiress publisher Charity Hackett (Mary Welch) does everything in her power to destroy the start-up Globe, a ragtag team put together on the spot in a saloon right after Mitchell’s firing and that succeeds through initiative and ingenuity, of course much to the chagrin of Hackett.
For example, The Globe prints its first edition on butchers’ paper.
Mitchell and Hackett, though, are strongly attracted to each other. The film’s poster shows them kissing with the caption “she had blood in her veins … he had ink … and guts.” Other hype on the poster: “Street of rogues … reporters … and romance!” and “The picture with the page one punch!”
PARK ROW wins for the best use of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a motion picture. Now, maybe, just maybe, I’ll go back and look at “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” although I prefer “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Both are on the nearby shelf.
I have a bias favoring newspapers, because, for one, I learned how to read from one. I love the reaction people have when I tell them I learned to read by the age of 4. Grandpa sat me on his lap and read me the paper. I picked it up from there and have been a passionate newspaper reader ever since.

Big (1988)

BIG (1988) Three-and-a-half stars

Twelve-year-old Joshua Baskin (David Moscow) cannot gain admittance on a roller coaster ride because he’s not tall enough, so the embarrassed young man finds a Zoltar Speaks machine and it grants his wish that he were big. Overnight, Joshua Baskin becomes 30 years old and he’s played by Tom Hanks for basically the rest of the movie.

BIG is by far the best of the body switch movies that were all the rave during the Reagan administration. Anybody sentient during that era can surely remember a body switch pic or two. Let’s see, we had OH! HEAVENLY DOG from 1980, whose July 11 release date predates Reagan and which gives us Chevy Chase trapped inside Benji … Chase provides voice-over for Benji in a rather dull murder mystery. Then, there’s LIKE FATHER LIKE SON from 1987 pairing Dudley Moore and Kirk Cameron, who just scream father and son, in one of the worst movies of all-time had it not come out during the same year as such cinematic landmarks as THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE, LEONARD PART 6, JAWS THE REVENGE, MANNEQUIN, and TEEN WOLF TOO. Never mind, it’s still one of the worst movies of all-time.

BIG streamlined and more or less perfected the body switch, because we stick with one character (Joshua Baskin) the whole time and there’s less of a suspension of disbelief required for the movie to work. For example, in LIKE FATHER LIKE SON, we have to picture Dudley Moore inside Kirk Cameron and vice-versa (pun and reference to another body switch movie intended), but it’s almost impossible since their speaking voices remain the same. Movies like LIKE FATHER LIKE SON are why the late Roger Ebert coined the phrase “The Idiot Plot.”

Hanks gives a strong performance, especially in conveying the whole child trapped inside a grown man’s body through body language, facial gestures, boyish enthusiasm, wide-eyed reactions. He works his predicament for laughs, for pathos, for drama, and there’s a compelling sequence during his first “big” day when he’s staying at this seedy New York City hotel and he’s scared by the real world. Hanks broke away from his poor man’s Bill Murray for the first time in his career and established his own niche that would culminate in playing Forrest Gump.

Elizabeth Perkins is just terrific in BIG and I don’t think she’s ever been either better or more beautiful than as Susan. Perkins matches Hanks every step of the way during their complicated romance and please go back and watch her during the farewell scene with Baskin. She kisses him on the forehead and strokes behind his ear, in a tender and more motherly fashion. She makes the scene work, as Hanks reverts back to Moscow as Baskin.

Robert Loggia (1930-2015) and John Heard (1946-2017) were two of the best character actors during their respective careers.

Loggia plays against type here as MacMillan, the owner of a toy company who takes a major liking to the way Baskin looks at toys; phooey to marketing reports, Baskin and MacMillan test toys the old-fashioned way by going straight to the biggest toy store. They pair together for a toy piano duet and create one of the most iconic movie scenes of the late 80s. It’s known quite simply as the “Big Piano Scene.”

There was often an edge to Heard during his performances and he taps into that edge a great deal in BIG. Heard creates a real jerk.

Penny Marshall became a name director after BIG and she and Hanks reunited for A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN. Anne Spielberg and Gary Ross wrote the script and Barry Sonnenfeld worked as cinematographer; Ross later directed PLEASANTVILLE and Sonnenfeld’s directorial credits include GET SHORTY and MEN IN BLACK.

There seems to be a certain nostalgia for BIG, just like at times it seems like that’s all true for anything (the good and the bad, and the ugly) from the 80s.

How far can that nostalgia go? Well, there’s the Nostalgic Zoltar Speaks machine for sale on the Zoltar site. One machine comes equipped with a $10,500 price tag and that’s not counting any customization like a wireless microphone to talk through Zoltar ($425 without remote control, $520 with), breathing movement for Zoltar ($625), motion activated attract ($75), custom fortune cards, custom audio messages, and traveling case ($1,500 plastic, $650 wood).

If you do buy that Nostalgic Zoltar Speaks machine for a major chunk of change, do you dare make a wish, “I wish I were big.” I say you better for that level of investment.

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM.jpg

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM (1987) Three-and-a-half stars

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM director Barry Levinson knew that Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” came out in 1967 and that his movie was set in 1965, but he overlooked that because Satchmo’s song fit the scene best.

Thus, Levinson created an anachronism or a chronological inconsistency.

Adrian Cronauer (1938-2018), played by Robin Williams (1951-2014) in GOOD MORNING, said that he liked the movie based on his time on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam well enough, as far as it went, but that it was more about Williams and what suited him than it was about Cronauer and what actually happened. File GOOD MORNING in the “loosely based” category.

Cronauer added that Levinson did not allow Cronauer and Williams to meet each other until after filming completed, because the director did not want Williams impersonating the former disc jockey.

GOOD MORNING is the first Robin Williams movie I ever watched and it’s one of the few I watched again in the immediate aftermath of his 2014 suicide. Just this last time I watched it, though, early in 2020, I paid less attention to Williams and more to a dynamite supporting cast surrounding Williams: Bruno Kirby (1949-2006), J.T. Walsh (1943-98), Noble Willingham (1931-2004), Forest Whitaker, Robert Wuhl, and Richard Edson, as well as the various Vietnamese actors and actresses. I know Williams received most of the acclaim for his performance, a Golden Globe victory and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, but it’s the work of that deep supporting cast that makes GOOD MORNING a very good movie rather than merely a good one or at least if nothing else a one-man show.

Kirby plays some of the same notes as he did seven years before in WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM with Bill Murray’s Hunter S. Thompson his adversary in that earlier film. In GOOD MORNING, Kirby plays Lt. Steven Hauk, who fails to see the humor in Cronauer and who finally bombs on the air when he replaces Cronauer for a brief spell. We patiently wait for that failure to happen, and we are rewarded. We laugh at Hauk’s failure, and the vast disconnect between his ego and his actual ability to make people laugh is the joke.

Walsh put together a decade of memorable supporting performances and he earned that memorability because he plays characters that we love to hate. Quite frankly, he played a dick better than most anybody in show business and thus, it’s no surprise that Walsh plays a character named Sgt. Major Dickerson in GOOD MORNING, because, yes, he’s a major dick. Many of us miss Walsh, a love to hate figure even after his death with both THE NEGOTIATOR and PLEASANTVILLE posthumously released.

Williams and Whitaker especially seem like they have genuine chemistry and their byplay from early in the movie all the way until the end rewards us with both laughter and emotions.

Cronauer teaches English to South Vietnamese students during some of his spare time, initially because he sets his sights on a pretty young woman. Cronauer’s friendship with her brother earns him a flight out of Vietnam, one that’s long overdue given all his trouble from the first time Cronauer shouted “Good morning, Vietnam” on the air.

In short, the soldiers love Cronauer and the brass, especially Dickerson, hate him.

Cronauer plays by his own rules, especially on-air, as he favors that Devil’s music rock and soul over that Easy Listening jive preferred by Hauk and Dickerson. That’s his first sin of many, but it all starts with that playing by one’s own rules.

Probably about half of the movie gives itself over to Williams’ manic free-form ad-libs and Cronauer is one of the few characters played by Williams where his patented comic anarchy fits and does not break away from the fabric of the movie to the point that we forget the character and only see Robin Williams being stand-up comedian Robin Williams. Williams’ anything-for-a-laugh shtick also worked for The Genie in ALADDIN.

In all honesty, I find more humor in Williams’ scenes with the supporting actors, both his fellow military men and his Vietnamese students, than I do his solo flights of fancy on his popular radio show.

GOOD MORNING is not all comedy, though, and it does thankfully give the Vietnamese more of a voice than we normally get in Hollywood films about Vietnam and the war. Cronauer’s friend Tuan (Tung Thanh Tran) expresses it during their confrontation scene late in the movie, “ENEMY? What is enemy? You killing my own people so many miles from your home. We not the enemy! You the enemy! … My mother is dead. And my older brother, who be 29 years old, he dead! Shot by Americans! My neighbor, dead! His wife, dead. WHY? Because we’re not human to them! We’re only Vietnamese.”

The film does lay it on a little too thick with sentimentality and showing that Cronauer’s a good guy at heart performing a noble service for the troops and humanity in general through humor. Critics have accused movie comedians of that weakness for sentimentality ever since the glory days of Charlie Chaplin. Williams definitely fell prey to sentimentality often throughout his career, and it works better in some films than others.

Finally, GOOD MORNING goes on a little too long and it could have been tightened, but I doubt that Levinson and gang wanted to lose any of Williams’ improvisation. Remember that moment in ANIMAL HOUSE when Tim Matheson’s Otter looks at Peter Riegert’s Boon and asks “Germans?” after Bluto says the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. Boon quite simply and beautifully says, “Forget it, he’s rolling.” Bet that’s what they said every day on the set of GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM about Robin Williams.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)

MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE (1983) Three stars

There’s a DVD bundle called “A Little Something to Offend Everybody” and it pairs Mel Brooks’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD PART I and MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE.

That’s fitting, because both films definitely fit that bill. For example, both have centerpiece musical numbers that flaunt their potential for controversy: “The Inquisition” in HISTORY OF THE WORLD and “Every Sperm is Sacred” in THE MEANING OF LIFE. Both films go highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, below the brow, and even more below the brow. Scatological and sexual jokes abound and Brooks and the Python troupe use just about every trick in the book for their assault on delicate sensibilities and community standards, and they especially indulge their willingness to go over the top in almost every single moment.

It seems like the Monty Python gang (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin) made THE MEANING OF LIFE as a reaction to the intense controversy around LIFE OF BRIAN. “If you thought that was bad, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” that’s what it seems like they’re saying for all 90 minutes of THE MEANING OF LIFE.

I can hear some of you asking, though, do you get the meaning of life from the movie? Just think about the ridiculousness of that question.

Lady Presenter: Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. …

The lady presenter (actually Palin in one of his almost 20 roles in the movie) then gets at the crux of the movie as she continues her speech: “And, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment? Bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during Tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats.”

If people truly want “filth,” THE MEANING OF LIFE delivers the goods.

The feature’s second sketch “The Third World” highlights a Catholic working class father (Palin) from Yorkshire, his wife (Jones), and their 63 children. He comes home and informs his family that he’s out of work because the local mill shut down, they are destitute, and that he must sell all 63 children for scientific experiments. He says, “Blame the Catholic Church for not letting me wear one of those little rubber things.”

The father eventually breaks into “Every Sperm is Sacred,” with the memorable chorus “Every sperm is sacred / Every sperm is great / If a sperm is wasted / God gets quite irate.” It turns into a production number straight out of an elaborate musical nominated for a multitude of awards, with even the children getting in on the act before they hit the streets.

The children obviously knew not what they were singing about at the time. Palin felt uncomfortable with one particular line and he originally delivered it “sock” in front of the children before “cock” was later dubbed in.

Beyond “Every Sperm is Sacred,” there’s “Penis Song” (I remember somebody once sang this crowd pleaser at karaoke) and “Christmas in Heaven.”

Quentin Tarantino said the Mr. Creosote sequence makes him nauseous and that says all there needs to be said about the explosive sequence.

I am not or have ever been offended by any of the content in THE MEANING OF LIFE. I think it’s an uneven grab bag of comedy, with hilarious bits, merely funny bits, and other bits where I admire the bits on an intellectual level but I do not laugh. That’s a bit too much of the word bit, but obviously THE MEANING OF LIFE deserves excess verbiage. It’s not as good (funny) as AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, THE HOLY GRAIL, and LIFE OF BRIAN.

Before THE MEANING OF LIFE officially starts, we get a bonus 17-minute pirate movie from Gilliam. The elderly British accountants of Crimson Permanent Assurance are fed up with corporate efficiency and they are not gonna take it anymore after the big corporation sacks one of the accountants. Their building turns into a pirate ship with filing cabinets for cannons, ceiling fans for broadswords, and paper spindles for short swords, and they attack The Very Big Corporation of America.

There were several pirate movies during the 1980s and I vote THE CRIMSON PERMANENT ASSURANCE one of the best, right alongside CASTLE IN THE SKY and THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

THE CRIMSON PERMANENT ASSURANCE (1983) Three-and-a-half stars

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY (1991) ***1/2

A great supporting character can elevate a movie.

Take, for example, the Grim Reaper from BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY. I mean, it’s not every day that a supposedly lowbrow comedy puts a novel spin on a character and plot thread from Ingmar Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL.

In that one, you might remember a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) plays a game of chess against a personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot) to prolong his life. The mere image of the knight and Death playing chess by the sea had become one of the most revered in movie history by the time BOGUS JOURNEY director Peter Hewitt, writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and Grim Reaper player William Sadler, as well as co-stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, got their grubby little mitts on it.

In BOGUS JOURNEY, our two most excellent dudes Bill S. Preston Esquire (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) find themselves in a most hellish predicament. They are killed by evil robot Bill & Teds, called the Evil Robot Usses by our poetic lead characters, and wind up in Hell. What else would happen to a pair of heavy metal fans? Bill & Ted, who quickly discover their album covers lied to them, man, are greeted by Granny Preston, an evil Easter Bunny, Colonel Oats, and eternal boot camp, a plight highlighted by infinity push-ups and verbal abuse, in their own personal Hell. Colonel Oats tells Bill & Ted they are silky boys and silk comes from the butts of Chinese worms.

Back to the Grim Reaper. “How’s it hanging, Death?” asks Ted.

Bill & Ted play The Reaper dude in a series of games, including Battleship, Clue, and Twister, because Death is a sore loser and Bill & Ted must win two out of three or was that three out of five. Nah, believe it’s best five out of seven. The Reaper finally relents, “I will take you back.”

Bill & Ted are the first to ever beat The Reaper, and before that the first to melvin him. “Ted, don’t fear the reaper.” Cue them celestial cowbells.

I love just about everything about the Grim Reaper in BOGUS JOURNEY and he contributes to BOGUS JOURNEY being a step up from EXCELLENT ADVENTURE.

Sadler should have been at least nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance here. No, instead, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saw fit to nominate Harvey Keitel and Ben Kingsley from BUGSY, Michael Lerner from BARTON FINK, Tommy Lee Jones from JFK, and winner Jack Palance from CITY SLICKERS. Keitel and Kingsley should have faced off against Sadler in a best-of-seven to see if we could get one less nomination for BUGSY. Colonel Oats would certainly have approved of Palance’s victory with his celebratory one-armed push-ups.

EXCELLENT ADVENTURE takes on time travel, historical figures, and historical fiction. Bill & Ted need to earn an A+ on their final report in history … and the future of the human race hangs in the balance. Literally, because in a mere 700 years in the future, humanity exists in an utopia built around the music of the Wyld Stallions, Bill & Ted’s most excellent rock band.

BOGUS JOURNEY adds depictions of the afterlife, Heaven, and Hell to the mix, and it gives us good and evil robot Bill & Teds in addition to living and dead Bill & Teds. Winter and Reeves compete with Michael J. Fox and Thomas F. Wilson for most permutations in a time travel comedy. Peter Sellers and Tony Randall would have been proud of all of them.

Additionally, the universe’s most brilliant scientific genius uses a single word vocabulary and that’s his name, Station. Station builds the “good robot usses” or “Station’s creations.”

I should not forget Joss Ackland as arch villain Chuck DeNomolos, who programs the evil robots to kill the good Bill & Ted because he hates their ideas and their insipid music. Don’t feel too bad for Chuck, because he gets a shot with Missy. Doesn’t just about everybody?

In the end, though, remember “You might be a king or a street sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the reaper.”

That and, of course, “Be excellent to each other.”

Hunger (1974)

HUNGER (1974) Four stars

Over a span of many decades, there have been several great dinner scenes in the movies.

The Wedding Feast in FREAKS, the cannibal family dinner in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and that famous plate throwing in AMERICAN BEAUTY are three that spring quickly to mind.

Oh, of course, there’s Mr. Creosote from MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE and Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER. (Perhaps, on the next episode, I’ll cover great diner scenes in the movies, everything from DINER to SUPERMAN II and SUDDEN IMPACT.)

In that Mr. Creosote spirit, we now turn our attention toward Peter Foldes’ historic computer animated short from 1974. We use historic not because of the appetite of the main character but historic works here because HUNGER broke ground in using computer animation. Please keep in perspective it was some two decades before TOY STORY and it took Foldes and his National Research Council’s Division of Radio and Engineering’s Data Systems Group well over a year to make this nearly 12-minute film.

This is essentially a silent film, with no dialogue, no narration, not even intertitles. Just instrumental music and images.

That makes HUNGER all the more effective as a cautionary tale about greed and gluttony in contemporary society. It does not get preachy because of the lack of words or tiresome because of the length of a short. The animation holds our interest and it also gives Foldes no limits (except for the limits of his own imagination) in showing this greed and gluttony. Images rapidly dissolve and their perpetually changing nature points out some striking differences.

In HUNGER, our main character evolves from a skinny office worker into a monster.

A couple minutes in, our main character grabs a bite from the delicatessen before dinner and then he goes through a pig, two fish, everything else on the menu, and the dinner table itself before he takes home the waitress who served him. He sits back down to eat and repeats his business from the restaurant in the privacy of his own home. He really likes swine and then he starts developing a multitude of mouths on his body, as well as more hands to fill all those hungry mouths. Of course, he grows bigger and bigger and even bigger, until finally he’s mobbed by a hungry horde of emaciated figures.

This short came out roughly a decade before the Ethiopian famine of 1983 through 1985 that claimed 1.2 million lives and brought images of starving children to living rooms around the world. How many of us now adults remember from our childhood when our parents, confronted by a plate with food left uneaten, usually something not favored by a child, scolded us by reminding us there’s starving children in Africa. Since it’s approximately 13,000 km between Kansas and Ethiopia, sadly I did not let this scolding affect me in the slightest and I wasted all that food. I’m still a stubborn, picky eater.

Both the images of starving children and the main character in HUNGER stick with me, though, and I am not alone in that respect.

HUNGER earned a nomination for the 1974 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and it competed against THE FAMILY THAT DWELT APART, VOYAGE TO NEXT, WINNIE THE POOH AND TIGGER TOO, and the winner CLOSED MONDAYS (co-directed by Will Vinton). It won a jury prize at Cannes in 1974, the Norman McLaren Award and the Silver Hugo at the 1974 Chicago International Film Festival, and the Best Animation Film at the 1975 British Academy of Film & Television Awards (BAFTA), according to its National Film Board of Canada bio.

FIVE MORE HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ANIMATED SHORT FILMS

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1971, Richard Williams)
THE DOT AND THE LINE: A ROMANCE IN LOWER MATHEMATICS (1965, Chuck Jones)
THE FLY (1980, Ferenc Rofusz)
THE OLD MILL (1937, Wilfred Jackson)
THUMB SNATCHERS FROM THE MOON COCOON (2012, Bradley Schaffer)

NOTE: All five shorts, as well as HUNGER, can be found through online sources.

Kingpin (1996)

KINGPIN (1996) Four stars

Over a period of a couple years in the late 1990s, there were two great bowling comedies released: The Farrelly Brothers’ KINGPIN and the Coen Brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI. Granted, there’s far more to both movies than bowling.

A few of my friends and I watched these movies time and time again. They both played a central role in nearly a decade of regular Friday or Saturday or Sunday night bowling adventures at the Holiday Lanes in Pittsburg, Kansas. Alcohol helped too, although when the bowling alley banned outside cups, college student attendance dramatically took a dip. Eventually, though, our group sucked it up and put the money down on the watered down bowling alley beer.

A couple times during my writing career, I have mentioned KINGPIN. I reviewed ZOMBIELAND for the college newspaper and reunited Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray gave me an opportunity to reference their dueling comb-overs in KINGPIN. I just laughed thinking about it. I named KINGPIN one of my 10 favorite sports movies for The Morning Sun.

Harrelson plays Roy Munson from Ocelot, Iowa, the 1979 Iowa state bowling champion who embarks on a professional bowling career early on during KINGPIN. He’s a promising young bowler, but, unfortunately, he runs afoul veteran bowler Ernie McCracken (Murray), who cons rather than mentors the younger bowler. McCracken hated the fact that Munson beat him in bowling and in a con gone tragically bad, a gang of amateur bowlers take it out on Munson after they find out both he and McCracken are pros. McCracken gets away, of course, and leaves Munson to reap the consequences. Munson loses his right hand in a scene that’s very, very, very rough for a PG-13 comedy. It plays like a scene from a Scorsese gangster pic.

Seventeen years later, Roy Munson’s a real born loser in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Man, talk about down on his luck. He’s got a prosthetic hand and a major drinking problem. He sales bowling supplies, rather unsuccessfully, since nobody wants novelty gags in the men’s room any more. Munson is perpetually behind on his rent and that means his creepy landlady harasses the former pro bowler. They work out a debt solution I do not recommend and work in a Mrs. Robinson parody for tremendous sport Lin Shaye.

Speaking of sports, KINGPIN parodies the genre. Munson takes on a managerial role for Amish bowler Ishmael (Randy Quaid) and they decide to work their way to Reno for a $1 million winner-takes-all tournament to save Ishmael’s farm. Along the way, they gain Claudia (Vanessa Angel) and Roy and Claudia assume the roles with Ishmael that Jack Nicholson and Otis Young did with Quaid in the 1973 film THE LAST DETAIL. Needless to say, Ishmael gets hurt on the eve of the tournament in Reno, Munson makes his bowling comeback, and Munson and McCracken eventually battle for $1 million and comb-over superiority.

I find myself laughing throughout most of KINGPIN. Like the comedies of the Z-A-Z boys and Mel Brooks, or for that matter the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, I laugh twice at some of these jokes, a second laugh at the fact that I laughed in the first place. For example, I am laughing right now just thinking about Roger Clemens’ cameo playing a redneck named “Skidmark” and I have already mentioned Harrelson’s and Murray’s comb-overs.

Harrelson, Quaid, and Murray all have no problem looking absolutely ridiculous on screen, something they demonstrate time and time again for nearly two hours in KINGPIN. The Farrelly Brothers and the actors will stoop just that low for a laugh.

Murray has made a parallel career for himself with supporting roles and cameos, ever since CADDYSHACK. He’s done it with TOOTSIE, ED WOOD, SPACE JAM, WILD THINGS, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, and, of course, KINGPIN, where he appears near the beginning and near the end of the picture. He just about walks away with the movie. Ernie McCracken is a real piece of work, crass, vile, womanizing, on down the line, but he seems to be a beloved figure within the movie. Of course. We love Murray and McCracken, and it’s the way he reads lines like “It’s a small world when you’ve got unbelievable tits, Roy.”

Of course, McCracken’s talking about Claudia, played by the lovely Angel. She is the discovery in KINGPIN, because we have seen Harrelson, Quaid, and Murray be funny before in several movies. At the same time, Angel could be seen on TV during her run on “Weird Science,” playing the character first essayed by Kelly LeBrock. She plays some of the same notes in both roles, with her delightful English accent and her sarcastic wit. It’s a joy watching her sock it to Munson and McCracken. It remains a mystery why Angel has never become a bigger star.

I recently talked about enjoying few comedies as much as NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE. Well, I just spent over 800 words on one of those few.

Shaft (1971)

SHAFT

SHAFT (1971) Three-and-a-half stars

A whole new generation of fans discovered Isaac Hayes (1942-2008) through his work for Trey Parker and Matt Stone on “South Park.”

I’m talking about Chef, Hayes’ animated alter ego, his songs like “Chocolate Salty Balls” and “Love Gravy,” his lines “Hello there, children” and “Damn, woman, I just gave you sweet loving five minutes ago” (oh, for just one game of South Park pinball right about now), and his overall cool until everything went all screwy there at the end between Mr. Hayes and the boys.

I went back in time and delved through Hayes’ previous work.

At some point in the late 20th or early 21st century, I watched Gordon Parks’ SHAFT for the first time, roughly the same time as I watched the John Singleton remake, er, sequel starring Samuel Jackson and featuring Christian Bale, Toni Collette, and Jeffrey Wright. It would have been nice if the suburban multiplex paired the ‘71 and ‘00 pictures together, but, no, of course not, and my ears still feel like they’re ringing from the 110-minute action spectacular. Nigel Tufner must have been the projectionist that day, because it was cranked up to 11 x 11.

(For crying out loud, why do we need three movies simply titled SHAFT? This is just as bad as HALLOWEEN.)

I vastly prefer the ‘71 SHAFT over any of the later SHAFT films (I, of course, have not seen the 2019 one) and there’s not one scene in either ‘70s sequel, BIG SCORE and GOES TO AFRICA, or the 2000 sequel or the rest of the first picture itself that even approaches the opening five minutes. Talk about iconic.

It all starts with the multifaceted sounds of the modern day big city rumble, then it moves on to the sights. Burt Lancaster and Telly Savalas in THE SCALPHUNTERS and George Peppard and Dean Martin in ROUGH NIGHT IN JERICHO. Robert Redford, Michael Pollard, and Lauren Hutton in LITTLE FAUSS … never mind, the first 42nd Street showing of HE AND SHE and second big hit THE ANIMAL. There’s more hype, then the first notes of Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft” hit us.

Nearly 45 seconds into the movie, we’re given our introduction to the title character with a close-up of the man coming out from the subway and we’re already interested. He walks across six lanes of traffic and flashes an obscene gesture and shouts “Up yours!” at somebody who had the audacity to honk their horn. We’re interested some more, as we observe what must be just another day in the life of this angry black man.

We see more commercialization and Shaft walks through a crowd of picketers. One sign: “I GOT MY JOB THROUGH THE New York Times.” Another: “WANT YOUR SEX LIFE PUBLISHED?” One more: “I LOST MY JOB THRU Fidelifacts.” Just before making his way through picketers, Shaft flashes his badge at a street peddler, who promptly skedaddles to somewhere else. “Theme from Shaft” has been playing this whole time and picking up momentum as the opening credits scroll and our title character strolls.

It’s been about 150 seconds into the number before Hayes matter-of-factly asks “Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?” Backing vocalists Pat Lewis, Rose Williams, Mitchell Butler, and Telma Hopkins answer “Shaft” and Hayes replies “Damn right.” We are hooked, that’s damn right for sure.

“Theme from Shaft” won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and it’s a stone cold classic especially in its single form. We can file the opening scene in SHAFT under “Great Opening Scenes.”

Hayes wrote the lyrics, handled lead vocals, made the arrangements, and played the keyboards. Lester Snell (electric piano), David Becker (viola), Charles Pitts (guitar), Michael Toles (guitar), Marc “Dr. Love” Davis (guitar solo), James Alexander (bass guitar), Richard “Johnny” Davis (trumpet), John Fonville (flute), Gary Jones (congas), and Willie Hall (drums) all played their parts masterfully.

Despite the fact that none of the remaining 90 or so minutes can measure up against the opening five, SHAFT affords one additional pleasures. That should be of little surprise, since this material puts a black spin on James Bond and Mike Hammer.

White author Ernest Tidyman (1928-84) adapted his own 1970 novel for the screen and Tidyman became a household name in Hollywood with SHAFT and THE FRENCH CONNECTION both major hits in 1971. Tidyman won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for THE FRENCH CONNECTION, a Best Picture winner.

Tidyman, who FRENCH CONNECTION producer Philip D’Antoni thought would be black, did not like the SHAFT rewrite by John D.F. Black, a writer hired by Parks. Despite his displeasure, Tidyman returned to write the sequel also directed by Parks (1912-2006). The former newspaperman wrote more Shaft novels, “Shaft Among the Jews” (1972), “Shaft’s Big Score” (1972), “Shaft Has a Ball” (1973), “Goodbye, Mr. Shaft” (1973), “Shaft’s Carnival of Killers” (1974), and “The Last Shaft” (1975). Tidyman also wrote HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and the early Chuck Norris pic A FORCE OF ONE.

Former model turned actor Richard Roundtree makes such a strong impression as Shaft that he’s been called the first black action hero. Not a bad screen debut. Hayes’ opening number greatly assists Roundtree, his character, and us audience members because it paints a portrait of Shaft’s basic personality and makes him a bit larger-than-life. We like this character a great deal already within the film’s first five minutes. We applaud him, especially when he sticks it to the man. Every now and then, all of us wish that we could stick it to the man, just like John Shaft.