Tag: Dan Ackroyd

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing In Memphis: Automobile Edition

Vin Diesel and Daniela Melchior do car-related things in FAST X. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Did you know The Fast & The Furious, the 2001 film that started it all, was named for a 1954 B-picture by Roger Corman? The legendary schlockmeister traded the title for access to Universal Studio’s stock footage library. Now, it’s a billion dollar franchise that made Vin Diesel a household name and street racing cool.

This weekend, the tenth and perhaps last (or second-to-last, or even third-to-last, depending on who you believe) film in the series, Fast X, premieres. What’s it about? Who cares? Big muscle guys make cars go vroom.

In other car-related Memphis movie news, this month’s Time Warp Drive-In is on Saturday (May 20), and the theme is “Sing-A-Long Sinema: Mad Musicals in May.” The opener is based on a Roger Corman film (there’s that name again) from 1960 that became a classic musical in 1986. Little Shop of Horrors is directed by Frank Oz (yeah, the Muppet guy) and stars Rick Moranis as Seymour, a florist with a taste for the exotic who finds a plant from outer space. It’s a hit for the flower shop, owned by Mr. Mushnick (Vincent Gardenia), but Seymour’s got a secret. The plant, named Audrey II, is sentient, has an amazing singing voice (provided by Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops), and thirsts for human blood. When Audrey II offers to help Seymour land his love interest Audrey I (Ellen Greene in an all-time great supporting role) by disappearing her dentist boyfriend (Steve Martin, in an all-time great dual cameo with Bill Murray), things get interesting. The doo-wop revival songs, the impeccable puppetry, and a cast of legends at the top of their game, make Little Shop of Horrors an absolute must-see for people who like to have fun.

The second musical of the evening probably needs no introduction. So I won’t give it one. Instead, let’s just watch John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd cook with an all-star band, including Memphis muscle men Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper, and Matt “Guitar” Murphy, while reflecting on the fact that Belushi broke his foot the night before he filmed this scene.

Rounding out this absolute unit of a triple bill is The Wiz. The 1978 Sidney Lumet film is an all-Black musical adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, with a score by Quincy Jones. When Indie Memphis revived it at the drive-in in 2020, it was a blast and a half. Watch Micheal Jackson slay, even though he’s stuck on a pole as The Scarecrow.

The Time Warp Drive-In is Saturday, May 20 at the Malco Summer Drive-In. Show starts as dusk.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

McKenna Grace as Phoebe, with Logan Kim as Podcast, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Ghostbusters is a prime example of lightning in a bottle. There are some things that are just unique products of the time and place where they were created. They defy formula. Even if you put the same team back together and gave them all the tools and time they needed, they couldn’t replicate their success. 

The 1984 Ghostbusters was the product of the fevered mind of Dan Aykroyd. The story of a trio of misfit scientists who travel through time and space to battle supernatural threats was meant as a follow-up to his and John Belushi’s mega-hit The Blues Brothers, with the third part to be played by Eddie Murphy. After Belushi died in 1982, Murphy got his own franchise with Beverly Hills Cop, and Aykroyd retreated into a fallout shelter on Martha’s Vineyard with Harold Ramis to retool the script for Bill Murray and director Ivan Reitman. The Ghostbusters became supernatural entrepreneurs, more pest control than Doctor Who. 

Grace, Kim, and Finn Wolfhard cruisin’ in the Ectomobile.

Genre-wise, the fantasy action comedy had very little precedent. Reitman got the tone exactly right. It was the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, so there was an ample budget for special effects. Aykroyd was still at the top of his game, Ramis played Spock-but-funny, Ernie Hudson was the relatable everyman, Sigourney Weaver was sexy as hell, and Murray delivered one of the greatest comedy performances of all time. Propelled by a theme song by former Stevie Wonder sideman Ray Parker Jr. that became an unlikely No. 1 hit, Ghostbusters became the most profitable comedy of all time. 

When the principals got back together five years later for Ghostbusters II, it wasn’t the same. The film has its moments, but the elements never gel the way they did the first time out. For years, Aykroyd worked on a third installment, called Hellbent, but Murray saw the writing on the wall and once Ramis died in 2014, that seemed to be the end of it. 

But Ghostbusters is all about coming back from the dead, so in 2016, a gender-swapped version was produced with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. It, too, had its moments, but lacked that certain magic, and was the subject of a sexist social media backlash. Which might be why Ghostbusters: Afterlife exists. 

At least it’s better than The Rise of Skywalker, the other film that was produced as a response to closed-minded people freaking out over changes to their favorite ’80s film franchise. Produced by Ivan Reitman and directed by his son Jason Reitman, Afterlife moves the action from New York City to rural Oklahoma. Callie (Carrie Coon) gets evicted from her New York apartment with her two children, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), only to find out that her estranged father has died and left them a spooky old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. While Callie tries to deal with her late father’s estate, Trevor tries to fit in with the local teens — especially cool girl Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Phoebe, a budding science geek who is too smart for her own good, is drawn into investigating unexplained earthquake swarms with her summer school teacher Gary (Paul Rudd). This part of the film is a solid kids-solving-mysteries story, like Goonies, but less annoying. 

As the story threads come together, Phoebe and Trevor learn that their grandfather, whom they never met, was Egon Spengler, a member of the Ghostbusters who cleaned up the Manhattan ghost flap of 1984. Naturally, the reason he moved to central Oklahoma was ghost-related, and now his grandkids must clean up the mess he left behind or, you know … human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! 

It’s weird to say, but it’s the familiar elements that derail Afterlife. Just when things get cooking with the new kids, we have to pause to re-introduce the Ectomobile. When the surviving old guys show up to help save the day, it seems perfunctory. Even the glorious moment when Bill Murray is doing Peter Venkman again undercuts the “action” part of “action comedy.” 

You can’t catch lightning in a bottle a second time. But I’m willing to give Ghostbusters: Afterlife the benefit of the doubt for two reasons: one, the screenplay mostly works, with the story flowing from the internal logic Aykroyd set up in 1984, even though it’s not nearly as funny. And two, Mckenna Grace gives an absolutely crackerjack performance. Mark my words, she’s a movie star in waiting. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Interview

Have you ever heard of The Streisand Effect? Back in 2003, Barbara Streisand somehow spotted her Malibu home in one of 12,000 aerial photographs of the California coast on a photographers’ website and sued him because she didn’t want anyone looking at her house. But here’s the thing: If she hadn’t pointed out that her home was the subject of one of 12,000 pictures, no one would have known, or probably even cared, that it was there. But now, because of Striesand’s attempt to suppress the photograph, it has its own Wikipedia page. The act of trying to suppress something brought more attention to it than it would have gotten anyway.

Diana Bang, Seth Rogan, and James Franco in The Interview.

You’ve probably heard the story of The Interview by now: Seth Rogan, the “stoner king of Hollywood”, and his friend from the Freaks and Geeks days, James Franco made another of their middlebrow comedy movies to be released last Christmas. The plot involved Franco’s character, talk show host Dave Skylark, getting a chance to interview North Korean leader Kim Jon Un. The CIA, represented by Agent Lacey (Party Down vet Lizzy Caplan), makes them an offer they can’t refuse: Assassinate Kim. Will they do it, or are they too stupid to pull it off?

There are a few times in history when a group of filmmakers have made big, lasting political statements or captured the zeitgeist just right. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, lampooned Hitler on the eve of war. The backdrop for Casablanca’s love story was a community of political refugees from war-torn Europe, a description that fit many of the actors on the screen. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove skewered the insanity of a world preparing to destroy itself with nuclear weapons. Now, to this rarefied list of films, we must add The Interview. And you can blame the Streisand effect for that, because The Great Dictator, it ain’t.

Donna Dixon, Dan Ackroyd, and Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us.

Don’t get me wrong. The Interview is not a bad film, per se. It has some funny moments, and some decent performances by Franco, Rogan, and Diana Bang as Sook, the North Korean handler assigned to Skylark.  It’s a surprisingly old fashioned action comedy in the John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd vein. It wants to be The Blues Brothers, but its nearest antecedent would be Spies Like Us, the 1985 John Landis comedy that was originally supposed to star Ackroyd and Belushi but ended up replacing the deceased half of the duo with Chevy Chase. Like Spies Like Us, The Interview has its comic duo (Rogan plays Franco’s producer Aaron Rappaport) as untrained, and none too bright, field agents thrown into a totalitarian Communist dictatorship on a perilous mission of international import. The only reason the filmmakers chose North Korea as a target for humor is because they’re the only totalitarian Communist dictatorship still around 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, and their internal propaganda looks ridiculous to the West. 

Randall Park as Kim Jong Un

But some movies are born great, and some movies have greatness thrust upon them. That’s what happened to The Interview when Kim Jong Un ordered a cyber hit on Sony Pictures after hearing that Hollywood was imagining his assassination. One of the many intertwining ironies of this whole affair is that the actor who plays Kim Jong Un, Randall Park, gives the best performance in the entire movie. Sure, his Kim is a privileged buffoon, but so are Rogan and Franco’s characters. Had the North Korean dictator simply ignored the movie’s provocation—if it can even be said to rise to the level of provocation—it would have made some money providing cheap laughs to theatergoers over the holidays and then been flushed down the memory hole with Spies Like Us.

But as it is, The Interview will have repercussions far beyond the multiplexes of the world. It’s an attack on a private company inside the borders of the United States by a state actor, and the United States has decided to respond. We still don’t know exactly who did it, although I find it unlikely that anyone but Kim was ultimately behind it, no matter who was hired by whom to do the dirty work, for the simple reason that the movie is so innocuous. Equally implausible is the theory that it was all a publicity stunt by Sony, as the damage to that studio is real and likely to be lasting, depending on exactly how many people Sony owes money to that have their lawyers and accountants pouring over the studio’s leaked financial information right now. The decision to pull the movie from release in the face of anonymous terroristic threats makes more sense if you consider that the theater chains were likely more concerned about their IT infrastructure being turned inside out than a physical attack.

Rogan and company didn’t do anything but set out to make a funny movie, and they were reasonably successful. The filmmakers were just artists doing their job, until they got swept up in something bigger. Maybe that’s how art is supposed to work. 

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Summer Movie Journal #6

1941 (1979; dir. Steven Spielberg)—Hollywood will not rest until every inspirational story from World War II becomes a hand-over-heart ode to the Greatest Generation. Brad Pitt plays Sergeant Wardaddy—oh, come on—in Fury, which comes out in October; Angelina Jolie directed Unbroken, an “inspiring true story” about WWII prison camps which opens on Christmas Day. In this context, Steven Spielberg’s self-proclaimed “blast in the face” about the night the Japs tried to invade southern California is, if anything, even more vital and necessary. Spielberg and his co-conspirators (among them Robert Zemeckis, John Milius, and anyone who happened to drop by the set) put everything they had into this hyperactive, all-ages demolition derby, and their work shows: it never settles down and never lets up. Nothing is safe; everything is demolished. Among the casualties are the Hollywoodland sign, the USO, the concept of military intelligence, the concept of female virtue, many huge vats of paint, Christmas cheer, the fantasy of living a quiet life in the suburbs and the sanctity of a morning skinny-dip in the Pacific Ocean. It’s infantile, lewd, sticky, gross, and popping with nasty urges; Nancy Allen’s J.G. Ballard-like airplane fetish is maybe the third-kinkiest thing here. And gol-lee, how about that cast: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Robert Stack, Toshiro Mifune (who, naturally, speaks only Japanese), Christopher Lee (who, unnaturally, speaks only German), Slim Pickens, and Samuel Fuller, plus a dozen other major and minor cameos. (Three of the four leads in Laverne & Shirley? Mickey Rourke???) I found it an unfunny mess, but I also found it a fascinating free-for-all and a heartwarming piece of civil disobedience that would warm Thomas Jefferson’s heart. Upped a notch for chutzpah. Grade: A-


Get On Up (2014; dir. Tate Taylor)— In his magnificent and perceptive 2006 Rolling Stone profile “Being James Brown”, Jonathan Lethem made the following claim: “James Brown is, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a man unstuck in time. He’s a time traveler, but unlike the HG Wells-ian variety, he lacks any control over his migrations in time, which also seem to be circumscribed to the period of his own allotted lifespan. Indeed, it may be the case that James Brown is often confused as to what moment in time he occupies at any given moment.” This wildly original sci-fi thesis informs Tate Taylor’s superb new Brown biopic, which conceives of the Godfather of Soul’s life as an endless groove where the needle can be picked up and dropped at random. The jumbled chronology and gallery of James Browns striding through the film only adds to the legend; after seeing Get On Up, I went back to RJ Smith’s biography The One to confirm some details. Did Bobby Byrd really spring Brown from prison and bring him home? (Yes.) Did Little Richard really flirt with Brown at a hamburger stand one night and tell him about the white devils running the music industry? (Probably.) Did a pre-teen Brown win a “battle royale” straight out of Invisible Man? (Yes.) Did he hear the strains of “Cold Sweat” as he did so? (Maybe. Time travel, remember.)As Brown, Chadwick Boseman is sensational—he’s funny without being a parody, and his lip-synching feels like the real thing. His James Brown is electrifying, seductive, materialistic, mythic. And scary, too; watch Boseman look straight into the camera at you after he decks his wife on Christmas Day. Then try to deny Brown’s place at the forefront of pop music today. It can’t be done, because James Brown is history. Let the record show that, to my surprise, I found Get On Up superior to Boyhood in pretty much every way. Grade: A-


The Trip (2010; dir. Michael Winterbottom)—In this semi-authentic travel documentary, actor/comedian Steve Coogan and actor/comedian Rob Brydon travel around northern England, eat fine cuisine, and try to make each other laugh. There’s a little more to it, of course, but not much; Coogan cheats on his American girlfriend twice and falls into a stream, while Brydon quotes Wordsworth in a Scottish accent and tries to talk his wife into phone sex. Will you like it? Depends on how intrigued you are by the prospect of dueling Michael Caine impressions. Civilians like me imagine that this is how professional funny people interact, and it’s simultaneously hilarious and exhausting to watch them engage in endless, irritating, look-at-me riffing that doesn’t stop until someone either laughs or leaves the table. But watching Coogan and Brydon critique each other’s attempts to sound like Sean Connery and Roger Moore, or listening to them as they endlessly repeat the Goldfinger line “Come, come, Mr. Bond, you derive just as much pleasure from killing as I do” is something, like the Lake District, that must be experienced first-hand. Mere words fail me. The sequel, The Trip to Italy, arrives in select cities—like mine—this Friday. Grade: A-


Katzelmacher (1969; dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)—Of the dozens of films Fassbinder cranked out before his untimely death in 1982 at age 37, I’ve only seen a handful. But I’ve never been disappointed by his infectious tawdriness and sadistic stylistic voluptuousness; movies like Martha and The Marriage of Maria Braun are not soon forgotten. Katzelmacher, Fassbinder’s second feature, is about working-class belligerence, fear and boredom in a drab, desolate Munich apartment complex. Apparently, in the days before cell phones, people who couldn’t afford to entertain themselves or smoke cigarettes all day squatted outside their apartment, swapped gossip and lies, and beat up foreigners before returning to their hovels for some brutally clinical sex. The actors look worn down to their gums by whatever it is they do for a living off-camera, and the camera is almost entirely motionless; like the characters, it can’t seem to go anywhere or get out of its narrow rut. Grade: A-