White Trash Families (don't laugh... you know you got some hiding in the closet!)

A Night of White Trash Hicks and Comedy

Movie #1:  Best in Show (2000, with Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Catherine O’Hara,

Fred Willard)

Jason and Kathy had both seen this movie.  I’d never seen it, and my co-worker had suggested both this movie and our second movie for one of our viewings.  What a hoot!  A “mock-umentary” of professional dog shows, the film follows several dog trainers on their journey to the Mayflower Dog Show.  You have the neurotic, tight-assed yuppies who take their dog to therapy, the suburban Florida “tacky neighbors”, the excessively gay couple, a redneck from Pinenut, North Carolina (our personal favorite), and a gold-digger wife to an ancient millionaire who’s having a lesbian affair with her dog handler.  All kinds of quirky and funny things happen to each of the couples during their ventures to achieve the highest pinnacle of dog-training celebrity.  The movie ends with a flash-forward to six months after the dog show and a kind of “Where Are They Now” montage that shows what happened after the blue ribbons were passed out.

What we liked:  1—Fred  Willard’s nonsensical and inappropriate commentary during the dog show.  He obviously has no idea what’s going on and is just trying to fill time—like ALL sports commentators!  He was great.  2—We loved that it appeared as though they were using real dog show judges in this.  If they weren’t actually show judges, then the casting was spot on.  3—The bloodhound from North Carolina and his simple, redneck owner.  They were the most genuine of the ensemble.  No craziness, no weirdness, just a man and his dog.

Odd Trivia:  From my research, there is no “Pinenut, NC”.  HOWEVER, there is a Pine Nut Lane in Apex, NC!

Ratings:  Jason 4;  Kathy and Me 3

Movie #2:  Sordid Lives (2000, with Delta Burke, Beth Grant, Beau Bridges, Bonnie Bedelia, Leslie

                Jordan, Olivia Newton-John)

“Jesus called……. Peggy answered.”

The tagline for this movie is “A black comedy about white trash”.  Boy, that’s the truth!  Peggy, family matriarch, has died in very….unusual…. circumstances.  (blogger leans forward to say in a loud stage whisper popular in Southern culture—“She was having an affair in a motel room… and when she got up to go to the bathroom….” Blogger scans room to avoid eavesdroppers—“she tripped over her lover’s wooden legs lying on the floor by the bed and DIED!”)  The film follows Peggy’s family as they grieve her loss and prepare for the funeral.  There’s Peggy’s sister (Beth Grant) who plays the only remotely sane person in the family.  Then you have Peggy’s two daughters, LaVonda and Latrelle, who violently argue over their mother’s old fox stole and whether their brother should come to the funeral.  Now here you have the brother—“Brother Boy” as the family calls him—a cross-dressing gay man who thinks he’s Tammy Wynette and is currently locked away in an insane asylum.  Then there’s the neighbor (Delta Burke) whose husband was the man Peggy was sleeping with and the cause of Peggy’s death!  Enter amongst all the family “dramedy”  a whole slew of eccentric townsfolk that just paint the picture of white trash life in Texas (or any Southern town, really).  Really—it’s just hilarious.  If you think your family is utterly dysfunctional and a complete mess—this one will make you feel a lot better about your kinfolk.

Odd Trivia:  Beth Grant is an East Carolina University alum.  GO PIRATES!

Ratings:  Kathy 5;  Jason and Me 4.5    (Really—watch it.)

Thanksgiving and Airplanes!

Thankful for turkeys, pumpkin pie, and airplanes—

Movie #1:  The Concorde…Airport 1979 (1979, with Robert Wagner, George Kennedy, Eddie Albert,   

                Susan Blakely)

The fourth of the Airport disaster movies that spanned the decade of the ‘70s, we all agreed that this one was the worst of the four.  This one actually had a plot—Robert Wagner is a traitor and a terrorist (by virtue of illegal arms sales to foreign terrorist regimes) and upon being discovered by his reporter girlfriend, he tries to blow up the plane, eliminating the evidence against him.  Obviously, they were pulling from the political landscape of the time.  The thing that makes the previous three Airport movies so great is the fact that they’re so outlandish—to the point of being science fiction at times with three-story airplanes, baby grand pianos, mile-wide aisles, and natural disasters that would never actually occur in nature.  This movie had none of that.  It was more a realistic snapshot of the political climate of the day and the dull, cramped, non-luxurious airplanes of real life.  SUCK.  These movies are all about being over-the-top.  This movie wasn’t even close.  The other problem with this movie is George Kennedy’s character—Joe Patroni (whom Kathy has consistently called “Joe Paterno” in every Airport viewing!).  In all of the other Airport movies, Joe’s character is presented as a mechanic/logistics guy.  They never allude to him being a pilot of any kind.   In this movie—he’s all decked out with a captain’s uniform and flies the dang plane!  WHAT???!!!!   Comparatively speaking, this one was a dud—out of the four. 

What we liked:   Guest appearance by Jimmy Walker (DYNOMITE!)      What confused us:  The guest appearance of Charo.  We waited the whole flipping movie to see that outrageous woman that no one can understand, and when she shows up, it is for literally 2 lines and 40 seconds of airtime.  What was the point?????  Obviously, she was there for name value only.

Ratings: Jason 2; Kathy and me 1

Movie #2:  Airplane!  (1980, with Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Robert Hays, Peter Graves)

What’s your vector, Victor?

The hilarious spoof of the Airport movies, Airplane! Is a comedy that everybody knows.  I have to admit—I’d seen it before, and laughed at spots, but after having watched the disaster movies that this one based itself on, I was crying I was laughing so hard.  At everything!  A pedophile captain (which was really creepy, yet you still laughed), Kareem Abdul Jabar as co-pilot (which makes one ask… what the hell ever happened to him, anyway?….), a neurotic war vet (who thinks he’s John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever), and a host of odd, quirky people.  Everyone’s dying from bad fish dinners, the air traffic controller is trying to quit smoking, drinking, and sniffing glue—all unsuccessfully, and the neurotic war vet has to land the plane.   But the question in the forefront of everyone’s minds as the plane is in turmoil is “When we land—will we be stampeded to death by flower-bearing, muumuu wearing religious zealots?  No.. we want to die now.  We don’t want to land at the airport with the religious hippies!!!” 

What we liked:  Jimmy Walker’s cameo as the airplane washer (DYNOMITE!).    Moral of the story:  for the love of humanity… don’t ever choose a fish dinner on an airplane—if food is even offered during a flight ever again—remember… just say no to the fish!

Ratings:  Jason 5; Kathy and Me 4

The Starlet and the Sharktopus

With Halloween and the election over, and the world returning to normal (as much as is possible), we resumed movie night this week with an eclectic mix of features.

Movie #1:  The Star (1952, with Bette Davis and Sterling Hayden)

Bette Davis is a bit older in this movie.  Portraying a washed-up starlet whose aging has alienated her from the glittering Hollywood circles she used to move in, this movie follows our desperate leading lady through bankruptcy, family dramas, and finally being thrown in the drunk tank following a minor car accident brought on by intoxication.  She’s subsequently bailed out by a former pool boy (Sterling Hayden) that she gave a break to in one of her earlier films.  Joe (the former pool boy) tries to impress upon Margaret (our aging starlet) the futility of pursuing a career in Hollywood now and tries hard to make her see the merits of living a more “normal” life.  Needless to say, our starlet’s ego can’t even comprehend that she’s unwanted in Hollywood.  She’s flubs up a screen test by trying to play it young and sexy—in direct contradiction to the sullen old maid that’s required of the character.  Naturally, she’s passed over and the favor provided by the gift of a screen test proves futile.  This seems to bring about either a nervous breakdown or an epiphany….we couldn’t really tell which it was…very unclear.

Issues:  1. For one hour and 28 minutes, Bette Davis desperately parades herself around Hollywood practically begging for a movie.  She is completely fueled by her ego and has deluded herself into thinking she’s not “aged out”.  In the last 55 seconds of the movie, she gives all that up and runs to Joe with her long-lost daughter seeking family over fame.  I don’t buy it.  This was a cop-out to end the movie and was cooked up by some Neanderthal male sitting in a huge office wanting to reflect the “correct way for women to behave”.    2.  We assumed from the movie’s intimations that Joe was supposed to be in love with Margaret.  Well, other than seeing his wish to help someone who had once helped him and a fond remembrance for his crush as a very young man, we didn’t see any kind of chemistry between these two that would make anyone believe they were in love.  At all.   Huge problem in buying that they wanted to be a family and were in love.

Things We Loved:  Bette Davis was made up as a very dowdy and old woman for her screen test.  She then locked herself into a dressing room and redid her costume to reflect sex and youth.  Our favorite—she TOTALLY did Joan Crawford hair & bangs!!!  We think she did it to mock Joan—they were such rivals, you know….

Ratings:  Jason 2;  Kathy 2.5;  Me…1.5 –I just had a really hard time buying what they were selling.

Movie #2:  Sharktopus (2010, with Eric Roberts)

Okay—ever since we started “Movie Night”, Kathy has been insisting that we need to see this movie.  She has talked about how awesome it is for two years.  We have been trying repeatedly to catch it on streaming or as a DVD.  Well, the wait was over.  It finally came to us as a Netflix DVD.  IT SUCKED!  All that buildup---all that “foreplay”, and it was as bad as a gym-sock flavored ice cream cone.  I was on my phone looking at Pinterest almost the entire movie, and Jason was just sitting there with his eyes glazed over.  I think his brain actually stopped working for a bit due to the mind-numbing suck-ness of this movie.  Most creature-features have horrible CGI—you come to expect it really—but this was just really, really bad.  Really. Bad.   Also, you didn’t give a flying donkey’s right ass-cheek if that stupid fish/octopus/metallic teeth-gnasher  ate anybody or not.  There was not one character to remotely be interested in much less want to root for.  The thing Kathy loved about it was the Sharktopus could go on land… how the hell it could do that, no one knows.  For one, it doesn’t have lungs, so how could it breathe indefinitely on land while attacking Mexican coastal resorts and eating burrito and tequila filled tourists?  And two, it doesn’t have legs or feet.  Just tentacles.  How can you walk on tentacles?  They don’t have bones. 

We still maintain that The Swarm is the absolute worst movie of all time… but this is definitely the worst creature-feature ever.  Eric Roberts really, really needed $62.43 so that he could get some groceries at the Piggly Wiggly.  I’m sure Julia Roberts would decline to comment if I could ask her about it due to the embarrassment of having a relative actually film this.  (Not that she’s all that great herself, but then…. she’s not in Sharktopus is she????)

Kathy---you lied.  What the heck were you on when you saw this the first time that you fell in love with it so much????  I think you’d had a bit too much Miller Lite—you saw this through beer-goggles, didn’t  you?  That’s the only explanation….

Ratings:  Jason 0.5;  Kathy 1 (but she wants it known that she still loves the Sharktopus); Me….0.2 maybe

The Rest! (of the haunted story....)

Well, after battling a sinus infection for 2 weeks and surviving the insanity of helping throw the annual Halloween extravaganza, I can fill you all in on our last night of terror….

Last Week….

Movie #1:  The Ring (2002, with Naomi Watts, Brian Cox, Martin Henderson)

We three had already seen this movie.  It completely freaked us out the first time.  It was still just as creepy this go-around.  Impending death…a bizarre video…suicidal horses…sadistic and freaky little girl… If someone gives you an old VHS tape to watch—DON’T DO IT!!!  YOU WILL DIE!!!  (I can’t say more in case folks haven’t seen it… No spoilers for this one!)

Ratings:  4s all around!

Movie #2:  Halloween III:  Season of the Witch (1982, with Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin)

Worst movie in any of the slasher franchises…seriously.  John Carpenter agreed to direct another Halloween movie providing the plot revolved around some other psychopath than Michael Myers.  BIG MISTAKE.  You go from two excellent, and downright scary, horror flicks (Halloween and Halloween II) to this horrible dud.  Basic premise—all the kids buy these masks that will turn them into killers at 9pm on Halloween.  Here’s the first problem—there are 3 mask designs…it is absolutely unfathomable that all the children in the country will all want to be the same.  Problem number two—you don’t care about any of the characters whatsoever, so you really don’t give a crap that they’re all gonna be murdered in a matter of hours by brainwashed child delinquents hopped up on sugar and chocolate.  Problem number three—an entire town is decimated and then replenished with androids by one really ancient Irishman.  Like no one would notice what was going on… I mean—really.   Problem number four—the title says “Season of the Witch”.  There’s no mention of witches… at all.  They did drag a huge pillar from Stonehenge to southern California, but it’s all done with lasers not witchcraft.  Problem number five—that damn annoying commercial jingle that plays the ENTIRE movie.  You want all the little kids to murder everyone just so that damn jingle would stop.  Seriously.  Annoying.  As.  Crap.

Note:  It is our belief that every electronic synthesizer in California was blown up in the making of the music for this movie.  Our sympathies to the Synthesizer Humane Society of the 1980s.

Ratings: Jason 2; Kathy 1; Me…. -.5 (Yes, that’s a negative sign. 88 minutes of my life that I will never get back.)

Halloween Week!!!!!  (Movies that involve lots of fog)

Movie #1:  Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci)

This is a retelling of Washington Irving’s classic short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.  Although Tim Burton takes liberties with the plot, he remains true to the eerie atmosphere of Irving’s creation and the little idiosyncrasies of the different characters.  Burton is a great character developer (excepting Dark Shadows… see earlier blog post), and he excels in this one.  He takes a large number of townspeople and creates this little world in which superstition, fear of evil, mistrust, and preservation of appearances are all paramount.  “Truth is not always appearance.”   Johnny Depp (sigh….) plays Ichabod Crane, and in interviews about his performance, he has always maintained that he saw Crane as a sort-of prepubescent girl—prissy, frightened of shadows, and a know-it-all.   It works in this movie.  It gives enough humor to offset the ominous happenings in the Hollow.  We loved:  the scarecrows in this movie!  They were often more frightening than the horseman!  We also loved:  the casting for this movie.  Michael Gough, Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, Jeffrey Jones… they were all phenomenal. 

Ratings:  Jason & Kathy 4s; Me 4.5

Movie #2:  The Fog (1980, John Carpenter, with Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hal Holbrook)

I just love how all of John Carpenter’s creations have his name in the title credits:  John Carpenter’s The Fog; John Carpenter’s Halloween; John Carpenter’s The Thing….    They’re his damn it, and he wants to be sure you know!   Honestly, I saw the 2005 remake (and love it) before I ever saw this original.  It is dated now; however, the premise is good.  The interesting thing about this movie to us was that a large portion of the cast were all in Carpenter’s Halloween… kinda like Tim Burton always uses the same folks… but if ain’t broke, don’t fix it!  I can’t say much about plot because again I don’t want to spoil it for folks that haven’t seen it. However, I will say… watch the remake.  Of the two, the 2005 version communicates the story better, and the effects are much, much better.   We all agreed that the ending of Carpenter’s original 1980 movie would have been better if the eyes didn’t glow red.  Those glowing red eyes took silhouettes that would be very scary and turned them into 1980s cheese. 

Ratings:   2.5s all around.