Edgy MD

Well, yeah.

Prince-and-pauper comedy features Kevin Kline as an asshole president and the everyman-presidential imitator hired to take his place when said asshole president has a stroke. Lots of loose ends but lots of charm also. No rape scenes.

Jack is a limo driver with horrible hair under a nearly omnispresent touque and is about as anonymous as anybody in the the NYC region --- until he gets fixed up with Connie, a pastey introvert noticed only by the perverts she seems to be a magnet for. Despite both their lack of experience or self-esteem, they stumble into a relationship. As they progress, though, the couple who fixed them up turns out to be a disastrous cautionary tale. For those of you who bemoan the stupidity and shallowness and contriveyness of relationship movies, here's one about real people --- but it may (or may not) make you long for the fluff of the Amy Adams/Ryan Reynolds type of dealios, because while the DVD box promises hilarity, there's little forthcoming, but rather odd snickers and occasional graces (and graces are wonderful things) among terrifically awkward long silent shots and real --- but mortifyingly embarassing --- situations. Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars, produces, directs... caters too, I guess.

Frayed Knot wrote: Best/Worst Tool: Speed/defense That's always an unsettling combo.

I've been weighting this one. Seeing a buncha Bourne films instead. I think The Bourne Angioplasty is next.

metirish wrote: Eh is such a put down too, being doing that a lot lately Edgy. Sorry. It's not really meant as such, and to the degree that it is dismissive, it's toward the Cohen Brothers, and not you. I'm sure each film adapted more than once from the same source material would have the later creators go back to the original source. But they also have to acknowledge that frequently the success of the prior adaptation(s) is what gave their film viabliity and bow to that at some turns. The makers of The Addams Family bent over backwards to declare that their film was based on an original interpretation of Charles Addams cartoons, but of course it was informed by the TV series as well.

Eh, they all say that.

Hey, whoah, those are lessons from subsequent Die Hard movies. (Also, they're too close to true for comfort.)

Germans are clinically cool, fashionably dressed, murderous bastards. Long-haired men, too. Corrupt to the soul. Biggest threat to civilization? Scumbags. Cops could carry handguns on planes back in 1988. Didn't know that. The media are spineless parasites. All of them. Society would be safe if they just let good cops do their jobs and fuck peple up. They know who the scumbags are. Cops, man --- the good ones are kept down by the asshole brass who supervise them. The Japs can build a big financial giant. But they're not ready to find out how things really go down in the U.S. of A. The sixties of Mad Men had nothing on the eighties. You want to have sex or do some blow during an office party? Just go eight feet down the hall and do it in a vice president's office. She won't mind. Neither will the president and founder when they catch you in the act. If you call the police and report the headquarters of a multinational corporation is under attack, they won't take you seriously and will tell you to hang up. Better to blow out the first three floors of the building with a few bricks fo C-4. That'll show those impotent assholes sitting on their ass while good people are dying. 1988 was a funnier year than I appreciated.

I suppose there are more fantastic things than that on this earth, but I can't imagine what they would be.

I think it's one of those things where you remember the virtues and forget the flaws, see it years later and say, oh, right... Hopefullly, George Plimpton isn't in the room at the time.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: I'm with Ben on the Gopher business. It was stupid. This should have been a movie about a poor kid weighing an invitation to privileged adult society against the cost to his soul. Which it was, it's just that the story got hidden behind the set pieces. And the boobies.

I kinda liked Caddyshack as a movie about Danny, but really the whole Spackler subplot has nothing to do with the story except for the contrived gopher finish, and robbed from it, as good as Murray was at it. All the other oddballs play some kind of role in the arch of the story. Still has a lotta laughs but not a great movie altogether. It is strange that he's the protagonist, yet not featured in the film's marketing at all. DVD extras revealed it was clearly a script about him and his rivalries and interactions with the other caddies, but as the talent came on board, they started writing more action in the clubhouse and less in the titular caddyshack. Other things gleaned from the DVD extras: Jon Peters is as much a freaky over-the-top Hollywood jerkoff as Kevin Smith makes him out to be. This movie set the eighties standard for gratuitous boob shots. George Lucas lent them John Dykstra to create the gopher. Chevy Chase and Bill Murray had some bad blood from their SNL days and brawled on the set. Not included: Where Kenny Loggins pulled that insane vocal arrangement out of. Why Harold Ramis is the happiest guy in Hollywood when he hangs out with Bill Murray who seems to be the saddest. You get the idea that all those surreal juvenile punches sewn into it --- the caddies storming the pool, the mayhem at the yacht club --- are all Jon Peters. He's probably also responsible for the goofy symbolic nomenclature. Sarah Holcomb (Maggie) is also the actress who played the teenager who passes out on Tom Hulce in Animal House. Cursory research tells me Caddyshack was her last film and she retired before 20 --- drugged up and schizophrenic.

See, Sarah Holcomb and the robot gopher are more of what I watch movies for.

Still, though, half a star? I reserve that for 8mm bootlegs of I Am Curious Yellow.

Class warfare plays out on the links of a private golf club --- or "gof," as they call it in Scotland. ESPN ranks this as the number eight sports movie of all time. Robotic gopher created by John Dykstra.

A town of peaceful farmers is tormented by a gang of outlaws, and recruits seven gunman to protect them.

The soundtrack was... it was an excuse for a soundtrack. "Let's name a character Eleanor so we can play the Turtles song!" They do everything they can to pretend the Beatles don't exist, even though they represent the vanguard of the revolution these guys are living. They aren't referred to either by the protagonists or their enemies. They work in two Stones songs, but their heavy hitters are typically the Kinks. When they use the Who, they play an anachronistic "Won't Get Fooled Again" which would still be five years away. Even as a rock 'n' roll film, it felt terribly anachronistic. Rock 'n' roll wasn't about hairy mushy guys resisting middle age and looking for ever deeper album cuts from the Grateful Dead until the seventies. Carl is the nerd on the boat, but --- handsome, thin, young, and mod --- he should have been the hero. Emporer Rosko, the real guy on whom Hoffman's character was based, would have been 24 or 25 at that time.

How did these two films get mashed?

This was a real tragedy. They had a great chance for a revitalization here --- an appealling new star, a new setting, a retreat to a Buddhist temple, and an appearance by real-life Nisei 442nd Regimental hero Senator Daniel Inouye --- but went for a script dumber than a pile of dirt. The villian was a thin re-write of Kreese, and sidekicks in this bizzarro gang seem to be pale shadows of their counterparts in Cobra Kai. About thirty minutes in, somebody misses the memo on a re-write, and Julie's dialog moves from the lines of a hardrockin' rebel chick to those of a spoiled mallrat girly-girl. It's set in Boston, but not a single Boston accent appears. The oafs Mr. Miyage and Julie encounter tend to either be of the rural Georgian crushed baseball hat variety of redneck or the Brooklyn greaseball variety of mook. Ms. Edgy said it was worse than Karate Kid Part 3, and I said KK3 was worse. The disagreement has been a real strain on our marriage, but can probably be attributable to gender preferences. Teenagers rock out throughout the film to unrecogonzeably horrid budget corporate rock, and then suddenly in the temple, Julie does a workout to the Cranberries' "Dreams." (Was this the debut of the song?) Why didn't they turn to me? I could have scripted this sucker in four days. Anyhow, the Partridge Family episode we watched as a pre-feature attraction was OK.

Centerfield wrote: None of the sequels to The Karate Kid actually happened. You can't make me believe otherwise. I disagree with your plan to annihilate KK2 from existence. There's some real good stuff there.

While the rest of youse losers were watching the Jets, I decided to see, 14+ years after the fact, if producer Jerry Weintraub and director Christopher Cain succeeded in any small part in reviving the franchise which Weintraub and John Avildsen cranekicked in the nuts with The Karate Kid, Part III. The plot features Mr. Miyagi, in a convenient house swap with the widow of his former commanding officer, inheriting troubled teen and Met-lovin' big shot Hillary Swank. In one of those plot turns that show just how closely Hollywood scriptwriters keep their fingers on the pulse of American life, Ms Swank --- a friendless self-loathing tomboy despite her tops bearing abs-bearing tops --- is terrorized by a gang of quasi-fascist hall monitors led by a dean of discipline (bargain-basement Jack Nicholson actor Michael Ironside) that makes Kreese seem like a cupcake. That sort of thing was so totally typical of my high high school! So, with a future-two-time Oscar winner in camp, it can't be hard to improve on KK3, right? Right?

That ballad was comically ubiquitous.

This almost seems to be the film from which sprung all the elements of the classic John Wayne imitation: his gestures hitting different beats than his words, referring to his buddy as "Pilgrim," turning on the charm as if he believes he's 25 years younger and 40 pounds slimmer.

An aging Senator of a Western State returns from Washington for the funeral of a friend, a forgotten cowboy of the old school, and looks back on the confrontation that made his career --- a showdown from when he was a young idealistic lawyer facing down a ruthless gunfighter. John Ford directing at the end of his career, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles, and Lee Marvin, who's always drunk and violent.