Mock Robin

A Mighty Wind (2003): written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Mary Gross (Ma Klapper), Harry Shearer (Mark Shubb), Michael McKean (Jerry Palter), Christopher Guest (Alan Barrows), Eugene Levy (Mitch Cohen), Catherine O'Hara (Mickey Crabbe), Bob Balaban (Jonathan Steinbloom), Jane Lynch (Laurie Bohner), John Michael Higgins (Terry Bohner), and Parker Posey (Sissy Knox): From those wonderful folks who brought you Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show comes this, a loving, satiric tribute to the commercial folk music of the 1950's and early 1960's. 

Back then bands like The Kingston Trio and The New Christy Minstrels strode the Earth like giants. But their time would soon end as rock-and-roll would reassert itself with the rise of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

This film is even more of a delight to someone who lived through this musical era (like, say, my Mom). But it's great nonetheless, with catchy songs that sound authentic and odd personalities that seem even more authentic. There's not a bad performance here, and one of the songs ("There's a Kiss at the End of the Rainbow") nabbed a Best Song Oscar Nomination. And frankly, should have won. In a better world, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara would also have received Oscar nods for their pitch-perfect characters, the mismatched duo of Mitch and Mickey, reuniting along with other acts for a tribute to a deceased record company owner. Brilliant, funny, sad. Highly recommended.

Waiting for Guffman (1996): written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Christopher Guest (Corky St. Clair), Fred Willard (Ron Albertson), Catherine O'Hara (Sheila Albertson), Parker Posey (Libby Mae Brown), Eugene Levy (Dr. Alan Pearl), and Bob Balaban (Lloyd Miller): Though the real film beginning of the Christopher Guest/Michael McKean/ And Friends mockumentaries was This is Spinal Tap, that film was directed by Rob Reiner. Waiting for Guffman was Guest's first turn in the director's chair, and Eugene Levy's first great contribution to this loose-knit confederacy of dunces.

It's a great film. Anyone who's from a small town will recognize many of the characters, perhaps even in themselves. The love Guest, Levy, and Company bring to the film helps the satire -- occasionally, sweetly bleak -- go down smoothly. The show must go on, and it generally does. The self-delusions of the assorted actors, directors, singers, and adoring townsfolk is Leacockian in stature. Highly recommended.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994): written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen with Sam Raimi; starring Tim Robbins (Norville Barnes), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Amy Archer), Paul Newman (Mussburger), Charles Durning (Hudsucker), and Bill Cobbs (Moses): The Hudsucker Proxy is like some lost Coen Brothers film, at least to the general public. But it's swell! And Producer Joel Silver ponied up about $40 million for the Coen Brothers to make it. That was crazy. And much-appreciated. The sets! The actors! You know... for kids! Well, not exactly.

The Hudsucker Proxy has the DNA of many later, more celebrated Coen Brothers Joints swirling through its giddy bloodstream, perhaps most noticeably Hail, Caesar! and The Big Lebowski. Its protagonist, as played by Tim Robbins, is an amiable, gullible small-town kid who wants to sell his ingenious product to the world. Jennifer Jason Leigh does a remarkable sustained amalgam of Rosalind Russell and Katherine Hepburn as cynical New York reporter Amy Archer. Paul Newman is evil incarnate, and Charles Durning has one of the most memorable scenes in the history of ghosts in cinema.

One can see the oddities of the production delighting the Coens throughout. While the film pays homage to the screwball comedies and dramedies of the 1930's and 1940's, it's set in the late 1950's. Why? I don't know -- everything about the production screams 1930's Art Deco. Why is the supernatural in the movie? Who are the clock-keeper and the sign-painter? Why do Jennifer Jason Leigh's scenes in her editor's office play like homages to the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie? 

For that matter, why does the reporter's relationship with Tim Robbins' character seem more like the relationship between Lois Lane and Clark Kent than anything from the film's screwball pedigree?

I don't really know. It's a great, weird film that was  a financial disaster when it came out. So what? Salute Joel Silver for his crazy desire to see a big-budget Arthouse movie from the Coen Brothers. Salute! Highly recommended.

Satire is a State of Mind

Being There: adapted by Jerzy Kosinski and Robert C. Jones from the 1971 novel by Kosinski; directed by Hal Ashby; starring Peter Sellers (Chance), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand), Melvyn Douglas (Ben Rand), Jack Warden (President 'Bobby'), Richard Dysart (Dr. Robert Allenby), and Ruth Attaway (Louise) (1979): 

The last great performance of the inestimably great Peter Sellers should have nabbed him a Best Actor Oscar. But the Academy hates comedy. Hal Ashby's film, adapted from Jerzy Kosinski's partially plagiarized 1971 novel, was a pet project of Sellers for years. Only the success of the later Pink Panther films secured him the clout to get it made. And boy, is it dandy.

Sellers plays Chance, the live-in gardener for a Washington recluse known only as the Old Man. Chance is... well, simple. Very simple. Amiable and harmless and simple. And boy, does he love TV! And having apparently never left the Old Man's house, no record of Chance's existence seems to exist. When the Old Man dies, no provisions for Chance exist in the will. So he's cast out to walk the streets of Washington, DC.  

Almost everything Chance knows about the world comes from the mediated world of television: he wants to watch TV all the time, if possible. And as he watches, he'll sometimes imitate what he sees. He imitates the gestures of people around him.  He parrots back what people say to him (along with the occasional 'I understand,' which for Chance really means 'I don't know what you're talking about, I'm just being polite'). And when pressed, he'll talk about gardening. There's almost no there there. So of course some people view him as wise and insightful.

Sellers modeled some of his performance on the screen persona of Stan Laurel. It's absolutely winning in any event, ranging from subtle bits that modulate Chance's affably blank stare depending on the situation to moments of absurd slapstick. Chance reflects back to people what they want to see in him. None of his utterances are cryptic or wise, but people -- and especially the rich people he falls in with -- take his comments on proper gardening as wise thoughts on the U.S. economy.

Being There is a surprisingly bleak satire of American politics, sweetened by Chance's utter simplicity and sweetness. He's a holy fool who has fallen in with the Illuminati. And the Illuminati just aren't all that bright. Indeed, the rulers of the world pretty much all seem to be idiots made idiotic by their own narcissistic self-involvement. Chance's former housekeeper knows what he really is; as she observes when she sees him on a talk show, just being white in America can get a person almost anything.

Being There is in many ways the mirror-image of another great satire of the 1970's, Network. But here, the sinister Cabal that really runs things is made up of people who've willed themselves into perfect blindness. What the last scene of the movie, made up on the set by director Ashby and Sellers, means to the overall movie is something for the individual viewer to decide. Me, I'm still not sure. Highly recommended.

Best in Show: written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Parker Posey (Meg Swan), Michael Hitchcock (Hamilton Swan), Catherine O'Hara (Cookie Fleck), Eugene Levy (Gerry Fleck), Bob Balaban (Dr. Theodore W. Millbank, III), Christopher Guest (Harlan Pepper), Michael McKean (Stefan Vanderhoof), John Michael Higgins (Scott Donlan), Jennifer Coolidge (Sherri Ann Cabot), Jane Lynch (Christy Cummings), and Ed Begley Jr. (Hotel Manager) (2000):

Maybe the high point of movies made by Christopher Guest and his merry band of co-writers and performers, though some prefer Waiting for Guffman. I don't include This is Spinal Tap because it has Rob Reiner directing. This one, focused on several people whose dogs are competing in a dog show based on the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, is a comic gem. 

While the characters all verge on being comic grotesques, they're invested with enough warmth and sympathy to make Best in Show a rarity -- a gentle satire. The performances are superb, the direction smoothly negotiates the faux-documentary approach, and the writing absolutely sparkles with wit and goofiness. Best in Show is an all-timer. Highly recommended.

Hello, Cleveland!

This is Spinal Tap, written by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner; directed by Rob Reiner; starring Rob Reiner (Marty DiBergi), Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins), Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel), Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) and Tony Hendra (Ian Faith) (1984): One of the three or four great, fake documentaries of all time, This is Spinal Tap follows heavy-metal survivors Spinal Tap (who started life as Beatlesque quartet The Thamesman in the 1960's) on an ill-fated album release tour in the United States.

After this would come further forays into faux documentary by Guest, McKean, Shearer and friends that would include SCTV alums Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara. This is Spinal Tap still seems like the best of these productions, in part because it seems so organic and lived-in, in part because it's got some of the great lines of all time..."It goes to eleven"..."There's a fine line between stupid and clever"..."None more blacker"..."I call it 'Lick My Love Pump.'"...and some of the great fake songs of all time, along with screwed-up concert footage, the band getting lost under the stage in Cleveland, the Stonehenge disaster, and two suspicious cold sores.

It's a hallmark of how great the film is that one forever after uses it to explain ridiculous rock-and-roll moments that happened after the film came out. U2 seem even more gormless than Spinal Tap when they too visit Elvis's grave in their horrible, pretentious, utterly real documentary Rattle and Hum. Bono seems like David St. Hubbins writ larger, and the Edge like Nigel Tufnel.

The Stonehenge sequence parodies a host of ridiculous concept albums and accompanying overblown stage shows, but it also anticipates David Bowie's subsequent Glass Spider tour and album, the latter of which opens with a portentous spoken-word bit that makes Spinal Tap sound clever and concise by comparison. And the band's desire to do a rock-opera about Jack the Ripper really doesn't seem as stupid as it should after Paul Simon's mega-flop The Capeman, a doo-wop Broadway musical about a real-life teen-aged killer of two teen-agers.

And of course there's the parade of drummers, a surprising number of which have the nickname "Stumpy." And the cameos, the best of which may be Paul Shaffer as an unctuous PR guy, though Fred Willard also has a killer bit during the band's low point. To quote Marty DiBergi, but enough of my yakking. Highest recommendation.

Three

They Live, written by John Carpenter, based on the short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson; directed by John Carpenter; starring Roddy Piper (Nada), Keith David (Frank) and Meg Foster (Holly) (1988): John Carpenter's snarly dystopic satire looks as fresh and relevant now as it did in 1988. Maybe moreso, given the increasing ascendancy of corporations Uber Alles in the interim, the Occupy movements, and all the other stuff that's happened since then.

Wrestler Roddy Piper makes an engaging hero as Nada, an umemployed manual labourer who arrives in Los Angeles looking for work and instead discovers a conspiracy aimed at destroying the middle-class and working-class. Nada's a man of action (he is played by a professional wrestler, after all), and soon he and his initially reluctant compadre Frank (the always marvelous Keith David) are going toe-to-toe with the Secret Rulers of the World.

Is this a perfect movie? No. Some of Piper's witticisms fall pretty flat, though others ("I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum.") have justifiably become classics. The cinematography looks amazingly crummy, which fits the film without necessarily being intentional (Carpenter's films often look crummy, as if they were shot on videotape and then transferred to film).

Nonetheless, this is one of the two or three best science-fiction films in the sub-genre of Paranoid Conspiracy That's Actually True. It may not look as good as The Matrix, another film in that sub-genre, but the eight-minute fight between Nada and Frank, as Nada tries to get Frank to on the sunglasses that allow a person to see what's really going on in the world, beats almost any fight sequence I can think of for sheer stubbornness on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers. Highly recommended.


　

The Muppets, written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, based on characters created by Jim Henson; directed by James Bobin; starring Jason Segel (Gary), Amy Adams (Mary), Chris Cooper (Tex Richman), and the Muppets (2011): The Muppets return to the big screen after more than a decade away thanks to the slightly unlikely Muppet-love of Jason Segel. It's great to see all of them again, and the gossamer-thin plot doesn't get in the way of an assortment of great Muppet moments and the occasional song. Segel, Adams, and Cooper strike just the right note of earnestness mixed with gently self-mocking metafictionality. Recommended.

　

Waiting for Guffman, written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Christopher Guest (Corky St. Clair), Fred Willard (Ron Albertson), Catherine O'Hara (Sheila Albertson), Parker Posey (Libby Mae Brown), Eugene Levy (Dr. Allan Pearl) and Bob Balaban (Lloyd Miller) (1996): It's Blaine, Missouri's 150th anniversary, and resident little-theatre guru Corky St. Clair will write and direct a musical tribute to the history of the small town. Oh, boy, will he ever.

Writers Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy hit pretty much all the right notes in this affectionate but clear-eyed tribute to the delusions that theatre can bring on in people who long to be something other than what they are, even if they dream of being something they're not actually good at. It now looks like a satire of the American Idol generation, though of course it isn't -- in tone and execution, it hews closer to Stephen Leacock's scathing, sympathetic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Highly recommended.