This is a publication I've essentially been doing since 1992 in various forms. It's mostly movie reviews (as well as other media), but it does occasionally feature my other thoughts on other subjects. It became an official "blog" on February 20, 2005. Over time I hope to add older pieces.
Easily one of my favorite Abbott and Costello films, Who Done It? finds the boys working behind the lunch counter at a radio station hoping to eventually work their way up to becoming writers for the station. When the President of the station is murdered during a live broadcast, the boys step up to solve the case assuming that if they do they can get the job of their dreams. Of course, they get into more trouble than ever and hilarity ensues with some great bits (including the improvised Watts-Volts bit that gets self-referential by mentioning a line from Who's On First?), some great supporting characters (like Mary Wickes) and no musical numbers (a first for an Abbott and Costello movie) as the boys try to solve the case and evade the police and others. The film is flat out funny from start to finish.
The boys are in top form here and this is easily one of their best films. Sure there are recycled plot points, gags, jokes and set pieces but they are all done perfectly and feel as if they had never been done before (right down to the murder mystery in a radio station plot which still is a great concept even if it's been done to death). There is nothing extraneous here (although the Costello & Mary Wickes romance doesn't get as developed as much as one would like) and the film moves at a frantic pace. If you had to pick one Abbott and Costello movie to see if you've never seen one, this would be a good one to start with (there are others that fall into this category as well).
Who Done It? has been released on VHS, LaserDisc (in the Abbott and Costello Comedy Collection Box Set) and twice on DVD; first in The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume One and then as part of Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection. The DVDs feature the trailer and an entertaining/informative audio commentary from Frank Conniff (yes...TV's Frank from Mystery Science Theater 3000).
With their return to Universal after MGM's Rio Rita "remake," the boys were put into a film in an attempt to recreate the success of Paramount's Hope & Crosby Road movies. So we get Pardon My Sarong which follows the same formula as the previous Abbott & Costello Universal films. There's some musical numbers (all great, especially the ones featuring The Ink Spots and Tip, Tap, Toe, but they slow down the film) and a love story that's kind of bland (and doesn't really go anywhere). There's two villains (Willam Demerest in the first half, Lionel Atwill in the the second) and the usual antics from the boys.
Pardon My Sarong finds the boys as bus drivers who are being pursued by a police detective (Demerest) when they don't return the bus to the company after escorting a wealthy bachelor (Robert Paige) from Chicago to Los Angeles. After escaping the detective (by accidentally driving the bus into the ocean), the boys wind up working on the bachelor's boat and helping him sail to Hawaii (where they also bring along the sister of a competitor who tried sabotaging the boat). Once they are shipwrecked on an uncharted island their antics involve an evil scientist (Atwill), his henchmen, a group of natives who think Costello is a God and have the ability to break out into an swing number with English lyrics at the drop of the hat (making one think the evil scientist is related to Busby Berkeley).
While this may have been the second highest grossing film of 1942, critics were starting to get a bit tired of the boys (after all they had 6 films released in the previous year, 3 of which were stories that found them in the Armed Forces). But they remained popular with the movie going public. Looking back, this isn't one of their best films, but it certainly has enough laughs to keep it from being one of their worst. Middle of the road Abbott & Costello is a fine way to spend your Sunday mornings.
Pardon My Sarong has been released on VHS and twice on DVD; first in The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume One and then as part of Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection.
As an avid reader (at least before becoming a parent where the reading style and content changed) I don't remember what got me to read Frank Herbert's Dune. It may have been the eventual logical progression from a kid falling more in love with Science Fiction after Star Wars to seeking out other forms of it and as a teen hearing of a new movie eventually coming out based on a classic Science Fiction book I hadn't read. Whatever it was I tried to devour that book. It was thick, it was dense, but it was oh so yummy at the end. If there could be a literary classic like Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities that was set in the Science Fiction genre, then it was Dune. And reading Dune begat reading Dune Messiah which at less than half the length of the original seemed four times as dense. Admittedly it took me DECADES to finally finish it and move on to the third book...which I am technically still in the middle of reading several years later...luckily, there was a miniseries that combined the 2nd and 3rd books...so I kind of get the story and should probably move on to the later books since I bought them as a teen with the intention of getting through the whole series...but I digress.
As a film buff I don't remember when or the circumstances of seeing my first Alejandro Jodorowsky film. I know it was El Topo and it was a bizarre and surreal experience. So was The Holy Mountain and so was Santa Sangre and so was Fando and Liz (his first film which I saw much later than the others). And I also can't tell you when I first found out that Jodorowsky had at one point been attached to make a film version of Dune in the 70s. But if was certainly after David Lynch's version was out. A more surreal version of Dune was potentially on the table? That blew my mind.
Over the years, via magazines and eventually that repository of all info known as the internet, I learned some of the details of what Jodorowsky was planning...and now we finally have a documentary that examines this film that was never made and most likely never will be at this point. But director Frank Pavitch puts forth a strong argument that this nonexistent surrealist masterpiece that never got made in the mid 70s was actually an inspiration for all the major Science Fiction films made from Star Wars to Alien to Blade Runner to The Matrix. And it is hard to argue with this theory once you see the madness that would have been Jodorowsky's Dune.
Chilean-French film director Alejandro Jodorowsky takes us on a journey from the first inkling of his idea to make Dune into a movie (he had never read the book...only heard it was a masterpiece and when offered a chance to do whatever he wanted after The Holy Mountain by producer Michel Seydoux that is what poured out of his mouth). We get incredibly crazy stories of how he assembled the rest of his team of "warriors" (as he calls them since he really thought he was making the most important and epic film ever)...some were people he desperately wanted at the start (Salvador Dali had to play the Emperor), some were people he didn't know he wanted and found them almost by accident or happenstance (he spotted a comic book with art by Jean Giroud, better known as Moebius, and decided right there they needed to meet and they happened to be staying at the same hotel at the time) and some were people he may have dragged in kicking and screaming (he cast his 12 year old son Brontis in the lead role of Paul and had him vigorously trained in various martial arts). Others that eventually got on board were Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger behind the scenes and Orson Welles, David Carradine and Mick Jagger in front of the camera.
Pavitch lets the various interviewees tell their stories and each and every one is fascinating. Jodorowsky holds court and is so charismatic and engaging and insane at times (you probably had to be to match the demands of Dali to appear in the film...he wanted to be the highest paid actor ever and demanded $100,000 per hour, so Jodorowsky & Seydoux realized they only needed him for what would amount to 3 or so minutes of screen time and agreed to pay him $100,000 per minute instead). The excitement and energy that everyone had for this film to be made is infectious...and when they get to why it never happened you feel the disappointment. No...you will be disappointed.
All of the work that was put into the film by all the talent involved in the pre-production process eventually would up in a giant book that was used to sell the project to the studios. If this book was seen by many at the various studios it wouldn't be a hard leap to imagine Pavitch's thesis that the unmade Dune influenced so many other films to come after/instead of it. Some of Ralph McQuarrie's designs for Star Wars feel like Moebius' designs. O'Bannon and Giger wound up working together on Alien and it's a bit obvious that Giger repurposed some of his own work. Even Dino DeLaurentis, who wound up with the rights to Dune after Jodorowsky's version imploded, obviously got designer Danilo Donati to model some of the work on 1980's Flash Gordon after Jodorowsky's Dune.
It's sad this never got made, but it probably could not have been made at the time. The technology didn't exist to truly realize Jodorowsky's dream (heck...that's why Lucas has been continually tinkering with his Star Wars films). Jodorowsky tells of how he did go to see David Lynch's film. I won't spoil his reaction here, but it is honest and heartfelt, rude and priceless...it is a very human response.
Films about film making are almost always fascinating. Jodorowsky's Dune is no exception. The film shows us the excitement, hubris, madness, creativity and kinship that goes into making a movie as well as the hardship, disappointment and sadness when the dream is ultimately not realized. Now someone needs to at least publish the damn book that made the rounds to the studios. It would make a great coffee table book.
After six successful films at Universal, MGM borrowed the boys and stuck them in a very very very loose remake of a Wheeler & Woolsey musical comedy that had been based on a successful Ziegfeld Broadway musical comedy (which essentially launched the careers of Wheeler & Woolsey). The plot finds the boys being hired as detectives at a hotel on the Mexican border and getting involved with Nazi spies. John Carroll and Kathryn Grayson co-star in the love story part of the plot.
The film features none of the boys classic patented routines, but does have a number of funny bits...none of which are as funny as the classic stuff (the highlights being a spinning car lift, a washing machine and a donkey with Hitler's voice coming out of it). MGM was not really known for their comedies. In fact, the studio was pretty good at misusing the famous comedians they did bring under contract (but that's a discussion for another time). The only notable things in the film are Barry Nelson briefly appearing as a secret agent a dozen years before playing an Americanized James Bond on CBS and opera star Kathryn Grayson in her first leading role (she had appeared in a few films before this in cameos or supporting roles...here she has the title role and is third billed after Abbott & Costello).
Rio Rita feels like a step backwards for the boys. More akin to their first film One Night in the Tropics than their most recent films but with more musical numbers that are not as catchy or memorable (assuming one can remember any songs from that film), Rio Rita is a passable way to spend a Sunday morning, but not something that stands up to repeat viewings too often.
Rio Rita has appeared on VHS, Laserdisc (in a double feature with their second MGM film Lost in a Harem) and is available on MOD DVD-R from Warner Archive Collection (which also includes the trailer).
Next weekend: Back to Universal with Pardon My Sarong.
The boys return for their first film of 1942 with Ride 'em Cowboy. In sitting back and thinking over the films that Abbott & Costello have done to this point, the last four (of the five total) were all shot and released in 1941 (Buck Privates started production in mid December 1940 but was still shooting into mid January 1941 before its release at the end of that month). That's a crazy hectic schedule when you also realize that this film was also shot in 1941 (and their next film Rio Rita started production in 1941)...especially with three of them being service comedies and the other two (this film and Hold That Ghost) being shifted around to accommodate getting the service comedies out sooner. Five of their first six films were all in production during 1941. Crazy.
Anyway, Ride 'em Cowboy finds the boys working as vendors at a Rodeo, getting into a kerfuffle with their boss and accidentally "running away" (when they're locked in a cattle car) to a Ranch (but not before Costello accidentally winds up engaged to an Indian squaw) and team up with some of their Rodeo friends who are there to help train a writer of Western novels become the real cowboy his press agent claims he is.
The formula that was set up in One Night in the Tropics still remains (albeit the boys are the "A" story and the romance is the "B" story which may propel the plot, but gets less screen time). The boys have some great bits (Herd a cows, Poker, The Diving Routine) and there's lots of great physical comedy as Costello gets dragged by horses, kicked by cows, etc. The romance story (faux Western novelist falls in love with Cowgirl training him) isn't intrusive at all, but it also isn't good either (are they ever?).
There are plenty of musical numbers, mostly by The Merry Macs, but we also get the film debut of the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald (singing "A Tisket A Tasket"). Fitzgerald is so good in her one number (she does have more screen time that just that as a friend to lead Anne Gywnn) that one hopes she gets more than that one number (which she does when she accompanies The Merry Macs on one number which mixes swing and square dancing...which is kind of ahead of the time).
By this film the boys have settled into a formula that was obvious but hadn't actually taken over and become tired. There are some gems coming up in the next few weeks (I'm a big fan of Who Done It), but I can see the potential for repetition to set in quickly.
Ride 'em Cowboy has been released on VHS, Laserdisc (as part of the Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Comedy Collection Box Set) and on DVD twice (first as part of The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume One and then as part of Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection).
Sometimes when I'm watching a movie other movies will pop into my head. It's not a bad thing and I don't dwell on them very long. It's more like "oh...this movie is like this other movie." And so it was watching Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel which had moments that caused Steven Soderbergh's Kafka and the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy to pop into my head (in addition to other Wes Anderson films of course).
A story told within a story being told, The Grand Budapest Hotel is about the friendship that develops between the hotel's Concierge (Ralph Fiennes) and the new Lobby Boy (Tony Rivolori in the scenes from the 1930s and F. Murray Abraham in the scenes from the 1960s). They get mixed up in the murder of a Dowager whom the Concierge had been sleeping with and lots of weird chaos ensues involving many colorful characters. To say anymore would ruin the fun of the film's story as it unfolds. It is funny and touching in places.
This may be my favorite Wes Anderson film to date. The story is engaging and highly entertaining. The cast is perfect from Fiennes as the Concierge who prides himself on giving the guests the exceptional service he believes they deserve to Rivolori as the Lobby Boy trying to keep up to Jeff Goldblum's weird nervous lawyer and Willem Dafoe's thug trying to tie up loose ends. Since I didn't see this in theaters, it took a bit to realize that Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yoeman shot the film using three different aspect ratios on purpose (instead of my initial confusion of wondering why we would have a pan and scan HD master in the 21st century). It helps give the three eras of the story three very distinct looks.
If you enjoy quirky original films (admittedly I'm not sure we needed the story being within a story of a story concept as maybe two layers would have been plenty), you should enjoy The Grand Budapest Hotel.
I haven't seen the stage version of Jersey Boys so I'm at a bit of a loss to make a comparison to that. What research I've done on it tells me that it is a juke box musical that uses the popular tunes made famous by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to tell the story of their rise and fall and rise in a Rashomon like manner. It's been running almost ten years now and doesn't seem to have an end in sight. I can see the concept being very popular with baby boomers kind of how Mamma Mia is (just with a newly written story that incorporates ABBA's music).
The film version is directed by Clint Eastwood and I'm not sure if he needed the money or lost a bet or owed the Mafia money. The film version misfires in so many aspects it becomes more of a study on how not to adapt a popular stage musical to film (it reminded me of the paper I wrote in grad school doing comparisons between Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and Brian DePalma's film adapation using the novel, a couple of drafts of the script and the finished film...If I were still in school this film would present a great follow up to that paper).
Jersey Boys is little more than a typical "by the numbers" musical biopic that has little to offer in any way shape or form. Even most of the musical numbers that still remain (it seems the score has been gutted as the film barely seems like a musical at all) don't get completed. The acting ranges from adequate to weird (Christopher Walken seems to be playing a Xerox of a character he's played before while doing an impression of Christopher Walken).
This feels like a concept that wasn't fleshed out as the idea of the four band members each telling a part of their story but only seeing it from their side at the time is there (they do narrate, but there's no logic or consistency as to who narrates when). The story seems to skip all over the place and there is little sense of
how much time passes between the start of the film in 1951 and the
"epilogue" in 1990 beyond watching Valli's daughter grow up. There are
huge gaps in the story (how many daughters does Valli have? when exactly
and how did his marriage dissolve?) and the actors basically seem to
age by growing facial hair and wearing wigs, but still looking the same
age they did at the start. It's distracting.At the end of the film, one of the characters (I forget which) mentions the scene depicted in the poster above. We don't actually see that until the very end of the film, but he mentions it like we should have already seen it. And that's part of the problem. If it is a by the numbers biopic at the end of the day, the film makers forgot to include the odd numbers and left out the colors green and purple. There is little beyond the nostalgic appeal of the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Season to recommend this film and even that isn't played up as much as it should be.
There was a preview for an upcoming film about James Brown (called Get On Up) that played before this. That seemed like it would be more interesting. Let's hope that Clint Eastwood has a better film up his sleeve for his next film because this would be a bad place to end a distinguished directing career.
It's mid 1941 and the boys are back in their 4th film (even though it was shot third). The film starts off with the boys as replacement waiters in a nightclub where we get the film off to an unfortunately awkward start watching Ted Lewis singing "Me and My Shadow" while being shadowed by an African American dancer. It is our 21st Century vantage point that makes this odd, but Lewis was one of the first prominent entertainers to employ African American performers (he started in the late 1920s) and things recover quickly with a quick routine between the boys and a number by the Andrew Sisters (for the third and last time in an Abbott & Costello film) before the plot proper gets under way. The boys get mixed up with a gangster named Moose Matson who gives them his last will & testament bequeathing an old tavern to those with him at his time of death (the boys). Lots of hijinks ensue as the boys (and an odd collection of other "bus" passengers stranded with them) spend the night in the mobster's spooky Tavern.
The film has a number of self referential moments. The boys know they're in a "haunted house" and point out some of the tropes of the genre just before they actually happen (and it helps that one of the other passengers is a "famous" radio actress, played by Joan Davis, who is only known for her screaming). Some of the highlights of the film are a dance routine between Lou and Davis set to the "Blue Danube", Lou and the bedroom that changes into a casino and the Moving Candle routine.
This is, for me, the funniest of their early movies. The boys' routines seem to be blended into the plot better (instead of still feeling like they were dropped in) and the plot actually seems to move from point A to point B (instead of meandering around a basic concept).
Hold That Ghost has appeared on VHS, Laser Disc (as a double feature with The Time of Their Lives) and DVD twice (first as part of "The Best of Abbott and Costello Volume 1" and then as part of "Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection"...both versions contain a jovial and informative commentary by film historian Jeff Miller who also watched the boys on WPIX out of NYC).
My intro to Abbott & Costello came courtesy of WPIX in New York. Every Sunday for as far back as I can remember, they ran their Sunday Morning Movie and it was always Abbott & Costello (at least I don't remember anything else ever being run aside from Abbott & Costello).
I know I saw every one of their movies this way. It was a great way to start a Sunday (if one slept late) back in the day when you didn't have too many choice for finding programming on TV.
Last weekend being Memorial Day and the boys no longer having Hebrew School until the fall, I thought it was a great opportunity to pull out Buck Privates and show it to the kids. It quickly devolved into my watching most of the film by myself (though the D-man did spend a chunk of the film next to me playing games on my iPad). It brought back great memories...so much so that I decided as long as there was nowhere to be on Sunday mornings, I'd be going through the A&C catalog in chronological order...but having watched their 2nd film first, I needed to back up one film.
The boys (Abbott & Costello, not Mac & the D-man) first appeared on screen in One Night in the Tropics. I know I had seen the film a few times before (I've probably seen it 3 or 4 times which is certainly not as many times as several of their other films) and that it had been a while since I had last seen it (most likely when it first came out on DVD as part of a set entitled "The Best of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Volume One" back in 2004 -- since replaced with "Abbott and Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection" which was the only way to get It Ain't Hay due to licensing rights issues blocking a prior release). For reasons unknown, whenever I think of this film I tend to actually think of Pardon My Sarong (probably due the "tropical" feel of that film as well).
So, how is One Night in the Tropics? As a typical romantic musical comedy of the late 30s/early 40s (the film was released in 1940) it's B material at best. Cute, but nothing special. The plot as such involves two friend, one an insurance salesman who sells his friend a "love insurance policy" because he knows the sap won't marry his fiance (and predictably he winds up with an ex while the insurance salesman winds up with the fiance). Alan Jones, Robert Cummings, Nancy Kelly and Peggy Moran play the couples while Mary Boland plays the stuffy Aunt Kitty (to Nancy Kelly) and William Frawley (Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy a decade later than this) as a nightclub owner who underwrites the policy and sends two of his "guys" to make sure the policy doesn't pay out. The "guys" are the "boys".
Obviously, the highlight of the film are Abbott & Costello. The plot stops dead in its tracks almost every time they appear, but it is worth it. We get some of their most famous bits spread across the film: "Mustard," "Jonah and the Whale," "A Dollar A Day" and even a truncated version of their most famous bit "Who's on First ." Each and every one of the is as funny now as they were then and it's nice to see A&C do the stuff they had been doing for over a decade already...routines that had been polished like diamonds.
It's a cute film at best that shows off the comedy due in a great light and was the start to a long run of more successful films for them.
I'll take a look at Buck Privates later in the week before we roll into In the Navy next weekend.
