lee-at-the-movies

[lee-at-the-movies]

Powder

(1995)

Director: Victor Salva

*Spoilers*

I’m not sure I've ever seen a movie that insists upon itself to the degree 1995′s Powder does. Director Victor Salva is relentless in his campaign to tell the audience they are being moved. There is not a solitary element of this film that isn’t contrived to the point of parody. The average Lifetime channel flick is more confident letting its audience process emotions without being steered, groomed if you will, at every moment. Powder uses its score to evoke sympathy and warmth the way sitcoms use laugh tracks to let you know something funny is happening. Had the filmmakers given the audience more room to freely interpret the events taking on place screen, they would have ran the risk of having people see Powder for the ludicrous freak show that it is.

To quickly run through the plot of Powder - a pregnant lady gets struck by lightning and dies, but the baby lives. The father rejects the baby at the hospital and it’s raised by some hick grandparents. Sixteenish years later a the grandparents die and a social worker discovers the then teenaged boy living in a dank, book-filled basement out in the country. His name is Jeremy, AKA Powder. He’s albino, hairless and agoraphobic, but he’s read Moby Dick, so the social worker knows he must be a gifted kid. She takes him to a boys home, enrolls him in the local high school, he displays misunderstood powers, hearts are allegedly warmed, minds are expanded, yada yada yada....

It’s all tone deaf. The first act seems like it should be leading up to Powder turning on society and hurting people. That would have been more compelling! The people in town are actually a little nicer to Jeremy than you would think. There is obviously the one implausibly vicious bully and his bitchboys who instantly target him, but Jeremy is literally some kind of Nosferatu-lookin, bald-headed ass, cellar dwelling, electrical warlock monster. Upon going to school for the first time, he is only bullied for 30 seconds before he opts to use fucking psycho-electric telekinesis on the whole cafeteria in what would, in real life, be a TERRIFYING display. People SHOULD other him for that! Instead, he doesn’t even get detention and a hot girl suddenly has eyes for him - the chalk white, hairless MONSTER that recently crawled out of a dilapidated basement on the outskirts of town! 

His persecution is:

A) not as extensive as a movie like this calls for 

B) warranted, for the most part

Sakes! I’m not in favor of hunting, but I’m also not in favor of mind rape! There is a crucial scene in this movie where Powder is disgusted to witness one of the sheriff deputies hunting deer with bully kids. His response is to grab the guy by the arm and TRANSPORT HIS FUCKING CONSCIOUSNESS into the body of the dying animal! Since when is it okay to brain swap people without their permission? Two wrongs don’t make a right, Powder.  He’s supposed to be perfect! That is the text of the movie. The movie explicitly tells you that Powder IS better than you. This kid is literally an ascended being. 

I rented this movie because I wanted to see something featuring 90s Jeff Goldblum. He plays the physics teacher at Jeremy’s high school. After being accidentally electrocuted by the dangerous monster child Goldblum apparently feels smarter and fucks better. This causes him to postulate to powdery ole Jeremy that he must being living proof of some misappropriated Einstein theory about humans being able to become light energy. In the movie, Goldblum is presenting it to Powder as a theory, but as a viewer you know the film is basically declaring that is how we are to understand Powder from that point on. Jeff Goldblum touches him inappropriately in this scene. He begins to stroke Jeremy’s body and head, caressing him sensually. There is a justification given for this, but it is false and Goldblum is still his fucking physics teacher! Sick!

The whole time this dusty little ghoul has been seeing the social worker played by Mary Steenbergen - the one who pulled him out his wet book-hole. Jeremy has one last blowup with the jock kids after randomly walking into a gym and staring at one of the “bullies” taking a shower. The jocks get rightfully weirded out. He is, after all, a dangerous Magneto-esque goblin who can steal their minds and electrify their bodies. They pull his pants down and push him in a puddle of mud. You would think that being covered in mud might limit Powder’s ability to extoll psycho-electric violence, but you’d be wrong. He fucking KILLS one of them for this, but he brings them back to life so it’s still Powder being perfect and too good for this world. It’s not dark at all. 

This last kerfuffle is the last straw for Jeremy, his social worker and his physics professor. They decide that Powder will have an easier time finding acceptance in a different environment. (They were probably going to move to Austin or something. I think this movie took place in Texas.) Jeremy seems onboard with this plan. He has his neighborhood watch logo rapist costume on, his briefcase at his side, but then it begins to storm. So instead of getting in the car waiting for him, Jeremy sprints wildly into a field. Nobody knows what the fuck he’s doing, but they do not give much chase. A bolt of lightning strikes the bald teenager, either vaporizing and or consuming him. This is all a good thing. Everybody instantly intuits that Jeremy had decided to become light energy. They felt him in their loins or something after he was zapped. Nobody entertains the possibility that he was simply exploded and killed dead by a giant lightning bolt. That’s what their eyes observed, but they’re all going with the random hypothesis of a high school science teacher and choosing to believe the ashy kid in the fedora was some kind of Akira like god being. 

How did Powder even decide that was a possibility? Was Jeff Goldblum telling him he had 100% usage of his brain before molesting him all he needed to hear to figure out that he had the option of becoming lightning? I choose to believe that he didn’t ascend to a higher state at all. In my mental canon, Powder commits suicide via lightning storm and everybody looking on is fine with it, because he is a dangerous little creep. They all knew he would eventually turn on humanity, so they put it in his head that he could become electricity by letting lightning strike his body. By the way, if that’s NOT the case, then did Jeff Goldblum discover that superhumans can be made by electrocuting pregnant women? That’s how Powder got his freak abilities. His fucking mom was struck by lightning while he was in the womb. Nothing about this movie was okay. None of it made emotional sense, sci-fi sense or basic common sense. I have so much more to say about Powder, but I’m cutting myself off. Life needn’t be so Powdery.

Verdict - it’s bad

I’m glad to have seen Powder. It’s fun to hate and pick apart, but it’s insultingly pushy. Speaking of which, apparently this director is a pervert. He abused some kid on the set of a movie called Clownhouse. Imagine that. Maybe that scene with Jeff Goldblum fondling Powder’s dome was exactly as problematic as it felt. If you are not a jaded individual or somebody that enjoys picking apart shitty movies, there is no reason you should ever subject yourself to this movie. It’s a bizarrely bad movie made by a sick child abuser.

Note: I did not know the stuff about the director going into this viewing. As I said, I was looking for a 90s Goldblum movie and this is what I settled on. I only learned the director was a pervert afterwards. Same guy directed Jeepers Creepers. What’s up with him and abandoned country basements? I wonder if there’s something worth investigating there.

[lee-at-the-movies]

Summer Rental

(1985)

Director: Carl Reiner

I first saw Summer Rental when I was 14. I remember it well, because I was sick. It’s odd how you remember the things you watch on TV when you're sick, especially as a kid. I wasn’t even home from school. It was either winter break or a weekend. The memory has always been warm, so I assumed the movie was probably decent enough.

My decision to revisit Summer Rental 15 winters later was probably spurred by my newfound fascination with the movie, nay, film Captain Ron. Maybe being stuck inside during this pandemic winter is making these tropical movies look like an escape. I don’t know. What I do know is this: Summer Rental wasn’t quite what I remembered. I never put much stock into the critical consensus surrounding decades old movies. After all, Captain Ron is an unsung masterpiece and it has a 23% score on Rotten Tomatoes. There is a reason this John Candy vehicle got panned though.

Summer Rental is an unlicensed National Lampoon’s Vacation sequel. 

This really felt like it was originally written as a spec script for a sequel to the first Vacation. I suppose there was a whole genre of “guy with a picturesque family has a bad vacation” movies in the 80s and early 90s, but the resemblance to the Chevy Chase franchise is obvious. The script for the first 2 acts may as well have said ��John Candy has Clark Griswold style mishaps. Audience laughs riotously.” Even his wife in this movie can best be described as “Dollar Store Beverly Di’angelo.” She and the kids are barely characters in this movie. The boat race angle in act 3 kind of sets it apart from the Vacation movies, but locks it into the “yuppies ruining a vacation spot” trope that is so prevalent in 80s movies. 

Being generic and derivative isn’t a mortal sin, if a movie at least scratches the itches it promises to scratch. Summer Rental does not do so. Several gags end abruptly without seeing whatever jokes they’re pursuing all the way through to their logical conclusions - as if they overestimated John Candy’s ability to adlib as a fat Clark Griswold stand-in and didn’t actually write the endings to scenes. A storyline that had his wife and kids hanging out with some other better looking guy also goes absolutely nowhere. John Candy tries hard and is likable throughout, but there’s not enough in the actual script for him to drag this movie out of the mud. The regatta conflict is introduced way too late and plays out in a way that is equal parts frustratingly stupid and predictable. Summer Rental basically just has the audience aimlessly hangout with a sunburnt fat guy and then, with 20 minutes left, suddenly decides to be about a boat race.

Verdict - it’s bad

This movie would definitely be better if it was just a Vacation sequel starring Chevy Chase as Clark Griswald. According to wikipedia, Bernie Brillstein said it was inspired by a vacation he had went on. Bullshit. Summer Rental was definitely based on the success of a different movie about a bumbling asshole taking his blonde wife and their kids on a vacation full of disappointing compromises. It’s short on laughs, short on story and short on any of the cheap thrills that sometimes make generic 80s movies memorable (AKA gratuitous nudity). There are plenty of better John Candy vehicles where he is playing more authentic and or more likable versions of the classic John Candy character. The character in this movie lacks that signature Candy warmth. Pass. 

Note: I did fuck with the cheesy score in this movie. It’s comforting in a way that evokes an optimistic period of my life. 

[lee-at-the-movies]

Black Caesar 

(1973)

Directed by Larry Cohen

*Spoiler Heavy*

Few would be shocked to discover that Black Caesar is a tour de force in style, but it’s so much more than mere aesthetics. There is a surprising amount of substance in this sophisticated character study masquerading as crass blaxploitation. It’s a criminal epic about a tragic hero reaching the pinnacle of his ambitions, only to be faced with the reality that life has obstacles that cannot be outmuscled or outran. 

The film opens up on a teenaged version of Tommy Gibbs scraping by as a fledging criminal in New York City’s seedy underbelly. He is sent to the apartment of a crooked cop to make a cash drop, but surprise, the cop is a virulent racist. The pig accuses Tommy of theft, which he denies. The racist LEO brutalizes Tommy for his insolence and arrests him. Off to the clink our tragic hero goes. The beating was a socio-political epiphany for Tommy. Shortly before his incarceration, he waxes poetic from a hospital bed - painting post prison visions of grandeur for his reluctant friend, Joe. A freshly radicalized Tommy seemingly uses prison as a criminal university - ensuring he will no longer be the nail upon his release, but instead the hammer. 

The film doesn’t actually depict his time in prison. Black Caesar picks back up as Tommy is set loose on NYC. It wastes no time at all launching into stylized gangster violence. The pace at which Tommy ascends the criminal underworld and defeats enemies is abrupt at first.  He achieves all of his goals with Machiavellian ease. For a time, it seems as if the movie may as well be over, as Tommy has done what he set out to do. However, the movie’s true narrative focus becomes clear as Tommy becomes the villain of his own story. Somewhere along the way, he loses his humanity. When hubris finally catches up to him, his egomaniacal toxicity have been the people around him have been driven away. The rollercoaster he rode to the top of NYC’s criminal landscape enters a free fall.

Now alone, Tommy is shot fleeing from assassins. The cop who beat him as a teenager tracks Tommy back to his office to finish him off, but NYC’s first black don uses what little strength he has left to overcome his old nemesis and beat him to death with a shine box. Then - with nobody left for him to exist in opposition to - Tommy - rapidly losing blood - dreams shattered - runs back towards the ruinous wastelands that used to be his childhood home. A random gang of teenagers attacks him like a pack of hyenas tearing apart a wounded old Lion - exiled from his pride. Tommy presumably dies there in the rubble. His criminal life literally having come full circle.

Black Caesar is an inspired piece of 70s filmmaking from beginning to end. Its exceptional craftsmanship stands out in a sea of lazily made genre-mates. The running sequence at the very beginning of the film may be my very favorite of its kind. I got the sense that this was a meticulously storyboarded project. Impressive helicopter shots of the city’s urban center evoke an inescapable concrete hell where one’s screams would certainly be lost to the rest of the world. Landscape shots of New York City’s outskirts depict an equally inescapable wasteland- an endless expanse of destroyed and abandoned buildings. This use of setting gives the viewers a powerful impression of the desperation and cruelty that created Tommy and underworld he operates in. The visuals in this movie are elevated by James Brown’s scoring. This was his first time making music for a film and the result is iconic. 

It’s not a perfect movie though. There are no compelling female characters. They are all hysterical victims, except for the one white lady. That lady is a bit of an enigma. I suppose she exists to affirm Tommy’s idealogical purity to the viewer. Maybe she was a swerve to remind you that this isn’t your average blaxploitation movie. Still an odd and poorly acted character, no less. To be honest, none of the acting in this movie is top notch. It’s all C to B movie level acting, even in the case of Fred Williamson as Tommy Gibbs. Williamson is captivating for sure, but it’s not exactly a Denzel Washington quality performance. 

Verdict - It’s good, very good.

Black Caesar transcends the exploitation tag. A wide audience could enjoy this movie on multiple levels. It’s more or less Black Scarface. It’s a little less about race than you would assume going in. The director was actually some jewish guy, so maybe it was good he stayed in his lane. Larry Cohen did succeed in making an emotionally intelligent movie that was more about the fragility of dreams and one’s ego. That is not to say there aren't any astute social observations to be gleaned from the movie’s plot. There are, but the movie  stands on its own better as a broad depiction of a mobbed up anti-hero.

[lee-at-the-movies]

You, Me and Dupree

(2006)

Directors: Joe and Anthony Russo

      You, Me and Dupree was most likely born out of the following thought - “We’ve seen Owen Wilson crash weddings and that made bank. What if we had him crash a honeymoon???” Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson are cast as a newlywed couple. The film begins at their wedding in Hawaii, but confusingly they return to their boring ass house for the honeymoon. Their non-honeymoon honeymoon is interrupted when a run of bad luck leaves Matt Dillon’s slacker BFF Dupree in need of a couch to surf. Instead of enjoying that new marriage smell, the couple is stuck smelling the buffalo wing and milk induced diarrhea of Matt Dillon’s newly unemployed buddy. They don’t make movies like this anymore, do they? They really don’t and if they did, it would probably be Tiffany Haddish doing the wing eating and the shitting, instead of Owen Wilson.

      There are a few fundamental things that don’t work in this movie. The entire premise is flawed. It seems like the result of lazily reverse engineering the “what if Owen Wilson crashed a honeymoon?” idea. Why would anybody get married in Hawaii and honeymoon at home? How can Dupree be interrupting a honeymoon, if they basically decided not to do it at all? They didn’t even take work off. That’s the problem with trying to write Honeymoon Crashers. You have to have the couple do this inexplicable at home honeymoon, because Dupree would seem like a dangerous stalker taking a flight to follow them all the way to Hawaii or something. That’s not a major obstruction to enjoying YMAD though. It’s all just a jumping off point for hijinks anyways.

      Matt Dillon is the only truly dysfunctional part of this, otherwise, very likable movie. He’s all wrong for this role. I don’t buy him as a character who doesn’t speak up for himself and acts like a bystander to his own reality. He’s too tall, too broad shouldered, too good looking, too deep-voiced and too old for any of that to be believable without some American Beauty style characterization. Michael Douglas plays his father in law who is always trying to emasculate him for some unexplained reason. Like, jarringly unexplained. It felt like this movie was written as another Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson movie, but they couldn’t actually cast Stiller in the straight man role without compromising the focus of the movie. It would have lost its Dupreeness. Kate Hudson is pretty good in her role, but it’s weird that she’s so much younger than Matt Dillon in real life. I’ll hold that against Dillon and not her.

     Everything about Owen Wilson as Dupree worked big time for me. It’s possible that I have a soft spot for Dupree-like characters, because I wish my slacker life could workout like one of these comedy movies. As trope laden as he is, Randolph Dupree is a well realized character with more layers than a Twix. He may be an underemployed man child, but he isn’t a loser by any stretch. He is a success by his own measures. Dupree is a man who practices self-love and self-care. He maintains a diverse range of interests, hobbies and talents. He takes care of his body. His life is actually incredibly full for somebody without a house, job or relationship. Dupree is at ease with who he is -  he isn’t seeking anybody’s approval - so he’s free to connect with those around him in ways uptight people fail to. He sees people for who they are and they respond well to feeling recognized. His authenticity is refreshing. There is nothing fake about Dupree. That is the conflict of the movie. Matt Dillon feels comfortable with Dupree in his home as long as Dupree is a giant fuck-up, but once Dupree starts behaving himself and making friends with his wife - he becomes anti-Dupree. Paranoid jealousy begins to simmer in Matt Dillon, because as his best friend he knows better than anybody how charming Dupree can be. The toxic friendship psychology in this movie is more well-constructed than in most Seth Rogen movies. He’s in this, by the way!

    I’ve actually managed to say a lot about this movie without spoiling anything about it, so I’m gonna wind this review down instead of explaining the ending. 

Verdict: It’s okay

    I’m fascinated by movies about lovable fuck-ups in their 30s, but I’d be lying if I said there was anything very special or hilarious about this movie. It is a comedy and comedies are supposed to be funny. This is more likable than it is laughter inducing. If you’re a fan of Owen Wilson, then you should definitely see this movie. It’s quintessential Wilson, but Matt Dillon really was the wrong choice for this. Ben Stiller would have taken too much of the movie’s gravity, but somebody like Jason Bateman or Matthew Broderick in the straight man role would have taken this from okay to legitimately good.

Note: This movie has the best Seth Rogen laugh in the history of Seth Rogen laughs.

[lee-at-the-movies]

Critters

(1986)

Director: Stephen Harek

*Some spoilers*

Critters starts off promising. The first thing we see is a giant asteroid floating through space. I love the way the practical effect looks and they actually do a nice little piece of world building on the asteroid. It’s an intergalactic prison colony of sorts which the critters escape from. Two shapeshifting space bounty hunters are tasked with catching them. Pretty good set up for an 80s movie, you would think. Then we get to Earth.....Right away it seems like it’s setting up to be a movie for young boys about a young boy blowing up cool monsters with fireworks, but the kid’s weird fireworks obsession is totally under-utilized.  Why is he so obsessed with fireworks anyways? He takes them everywhere. That’s creepy. That’s a school shooter red flag. I wasn’t into him from the jump. The bounty hunters were kind of cool, but they’re so stoic. I know the stoicism was central to their character. I’m just pointing out that two characters almost devoid of personality wound up being the most charismatic characters in this pointless downgrade from Gremlins. I will say that the bounty hunters and the whole extraterrestrial aspect of it does set the plot apart from Gremlins slightly. On the other hand, it just winds up grouping itself in with a shit ton of other generic 80s movies that deal with various degrees of alien nonsense happening to and around small town Earthlings. 

There’s a part where the giant critter, which we never actually see, grabs the daughter’s right tit and it really does look like a giant Gremlin arm. The critters do look compelling and well-made in still images, but the puppets themselves are very inexpressive in real time. The Gremlins puppets said a lot with their eyes and facial articulations. The Critters do not. In fact, they speak in subtitles to make up for it, but don’t ever say anything worth reading. They basically just say things like “fuck!”.

Like many 80s comedies, being a honeypot is this movie’s biggest problem. It could get a way with being an unnecessary Gremlins clone, if it at least fulfilled its promises, but it’s a gip. The Critters never even ate, let alone killed, anybody on screen apart from the ritual sacrifice of the douchey 80s movie boyfriend! They bite a few other people on camera and there is the implied eating of one cop, but that is all. Not nearly enough carnage. The promotional material makes the Critters seems like they’re going to engage in a genocidal scale of violence, but nope. They basically just harass one family. It all takes place in the dark too. Critters is relatively toothless for a horror comedy about toothy little aliens that eat everything in sight. Crittters is a lie.

 What a shit movie. Fuck Critters.  I won’t be watching the sequels.

Verdict: 👎 

The makers of this movie claim that they had this idea before Gremlins came out. Whatever. That could be true, but Critters is still a dollar store version of Gremlins. Which is disappointing, because I swear I’d spent half my lifeplanning on eventually seeing this movie. There are a dozen better 80 movies revolving around plucky young boys fighting off little monsters. Skip this and watch The Gate or just good Ole Gremlins. 

[lee-at-the-movies]

Reign Over Me

(2007)

Director: Mike Binder

*spoilers*

This movie’s existence is somewhat puzzling. Why Mike Binder, who wrote, directed and produced this movie, set out to write this bizarre story is beyond me. It’s like I Am Sam, but instead of being mentally challenged, Adam Sandler is a weirdo with what can only be functionally understood as some kind of fictional 9-11 induced Asperger’s. He lost his wife and 3 kids in one of the attacks and spends his life riding around New York on a moped scooter, listening to Bruce Springsteen and doing what he can to suppress the memory of his former life.

Don Cheadle plays opposite Sandler as a dentist who is having a very VERY mild mid-life crisis. Jada Pinkett Smith is cast as his boring wife. She’s kind of a non-character. Her presence in the movie is just a plot device to justify Don Cheadle wanting to ignore his family and spend time with a dysfunctional, mentally ill, homophobic, unpredictably violent, grief stricken man child former college roommate. Cheadle hasn’t seen this guy in 20 years and the guy is NOT exactly a barrel of monkeys, but I guess Jada Pinkett Smith was just that intolerable to be around. For fuck’s sake, she only wanted to do puzzles with him. There’s a different version of this story where JPS is getting dicked down by some other guy, because Don Cheadle would rather play PS2 and eat pizza with an insane person than do another puzzle with his hot wife. Oh and they have kids too, but they do not matter at all. 

The 3rd act is where it really becomes 9-11 I Am Sam. Sandler’s character loses his few remaining marbles after Don Cheadle is pulled out of his dysfunctional orbit. This causes him to do some violent shit (this character really is dangerously violent) in an attempt to get himself shot by police. Yes, for real. The tone of this movie is all over the place. Instead of seeing Sandler prosecuted for threatening to murder strangers, we end up in family court deciding whether or not he’s going to spend a year in a mental hospital. Don Cheadle, a dentist, is some how his most effective legal advocate. The final scene of the movie recalls the ending of Forrest Gump in a way that is somehow both predictable and absurd.

Verdict: 👎

There is ironic entertainment to be gleaned from this bizarre mishmash of misguided sentimentality. You would have to be a very basic person to enjoy this movie the way Mike Binder probably hoped people would. The movie would have been better served to pick a genre and stick to it, rather than trying to be all things to all people. To it’s credit, it never politicizes anything about 9-11. There was a lot of post 9-11 movies that played on people’s prejudices, but this movie is not exploitative in that way (just a dozen other ways).

[lee-at-the-movies]

Adaptation 

(2002)

Director: Spike Jonze

*Vague Spoilers*

Adaptation is a comedy-drama by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, the writer/director duo behind Being John Malkovich. It stars Nicolas Cage as heavily a fictionalized version of Kaufman struggling to adapt a book about blackmarket orchid smuggling for a screenplay. Meryl Streep plays the author of the book Kaufman is tasked with adapting. She and Mr. Orchids, Chris Cooper, have their own B plot going on throughout the 115 minute movie. I personally did not care for any elements of the plot that didn’t revolve around Nicolas Cage. 

To me it seemed like Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper were mere plot devices. I found them hard to care about. Cage spends the whole movie wallowing and failing to finish his screenplay and the movie itself explicitly states to “never use a deus ex machina”, but I’d argue that what happened between the 3 main characters at the end was just that. I understand that it was likely an intentional contradiction meant to serve the whole meta nature of the movie, but I felt like screen time was squandered on the exploration of 2 characters I could not get at all invested in. The strongest part of the movie was the chemistry between Cage and Cage as Charlie Kaufman and his obliviously optimistic twin brother. I would have loved 10 more minutes with those 2 characters in exchange for 10 fewer with Streep and Chris Cooper.

Verdict: 👍

Fans of Kaufman, Cage and Jones will approve of this film. I don’t think it’s as good or thought provoking as Being John Malkovich or any other Kaufman movie, but it’s easily one of Cage’s most credible performances. The 3rd act’s Kaufman style meta crescendo is satisfying to unwrap - like some “the story is the story” Abed from Community nonsense. I suspect that most people uninitiated to this type of meta examination of storytelling would think that this was a mostly pointless movie where “nothing happened until the end”. Which is fair. 

[lee-at-the-movies]

Guess Who

(2005)

Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan

Guess Who is a comedy, not quite sure what sub-genre, about Ashton Kutcher trying to survive his first visit with his black fiancé’s toxically masculine and reverse racist father played by the late Bernie Mac. It’s an inversion of the old film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”. However, it’s only very surface level in its social commentary. It is a comedy after all, but I’m not sure a lot of black people would really relate to this movie.

 As I said, it’s an inversion of the old movie about a black guy coming to dinner at the home of his GF’s wealthy, conservative, white parents, but the only thing they actually inverted was the character’s skin colors. Real world racial tension is virtually absent from this movie. Bernie Mac’s character lives in a rich white Chicago suburb - in a giant house - surrounded by other mansions inhabited by rich white people. He works at a bank and is obsessed with Nascar, specially Jeff Gordon. The whole premise of Mac’s character hating his daughter dating a white guy falls flat when it’s as if he spent his entire life up to that point trying to assimilate to whiteness. It’s confusing in that way. The film honestly does a much better job of conveying why Mac hates Ashton Kutcher’s character for being a bit of a pussy than it does addressing anything about race.

The leads do put forth charming performances though. Guess Who is undeniably a pretty cute movie. Some may say charming. Comedy movies rarely have any business being longer than 90 minutes and this definitely drags in places, but it has memorable moments. I’ve spent the past 15 years thinking about the “You gon’ force me to use the muscle” line. I’ll be the first person to point out that Bernie Mac was a problematic figure, but it’s hard to judge guy that died before recent history too harshly - so I still have a warmth towards him. He and Kutcher definitely carried a very below average movie to the realm of average. There is a decent song or two in the soundtrack too.

Verdict:🤏 it’s okay

If you have nostalgia for the Mac Man or 2000s era Kutch, you may be able to squeeze a decent time out of this experience. In any other case, it’s a skip.

[lee-at-the-movies]

The Dream Team

(1989)

Director: Howard Zieff

Full disclosure: I had a formative experience in a mental hospital and I’m now very drawn to mental hospital movies. The cover caught my eye at the videostore and the synopsis on the back sounded entertaining enough to sit through on a winter afternoon. Wrong.

This movie is shit. For a comedy, there are very few gags. Nothing seems designed to be funny, but instead only vaguely humorous. The movie takes its time and never builds any momentum. 

It would have been better as an action comedy. None of the zaniness that you’d expect from a movie with this plot is ever present on screen. The plot revolves around 4 mental patients being taken out to a Yankees game and being set loose after their doctor is kidnapped en route to the game. You never feel like the mental patients are going to do anything unpredictable or crazy though. Instead they are all 1 dimensional characters, 1 joke characters and they never even make it to the baseball game.

Peter Boyle is almost memorable as an old guy who thinks he is Jesus, but he’s ultimately an afterthought. This is a Michael Keaton vehicle. I spent most of my time analyzing his appeal, or lack thereof. I’ve seen a handful of his other comedy vehicles and I feel like he’s always miscast. He comes across as a smartass for sure, but he never comes off as someone anybody would find likable or attractive. The hockey hair alone makes him unfuckable. There was a potentially interesting wrinkle to Christopher Lloyd’s character, but they waited too long to introduce it and only explored it for one scene.

Verdict: 👎

This movie fuckin blows. It’s long and slow for a comedy and it doesn’t fulfill any of the synopsis’s promised zaniness or excitement. 

[lee-at-the-movies]

Don’t Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood

(1996)

Director: Keenan Ivory Wayans

Is it good? No, not really. Don’t Be a Menace was never a good movie, but it does age surprisingly well as a piece of nostalgia. It’s only mildly ignorant for a 90s comedy. Usually they are overtly homophobic, but this one is only overtly racist with MILD homophobia hahaha. If you’ve never seen hood movies, you will get very little out of this. It is the Airplane! of hood movies. That said, it is objectively a plotless movie that doesn’t have a ton to say and you really begin to feel that by the end. 

Verdict: 👍

 It’s worth rewatching if you’ve not seen it in a few decades. Can’t recommend a first time watch unless you’ve seen some of the requisite hood movies. You need to have at least seen Boyz in the Hood. It definitely succeeds at being a spoofing and lampshading its targets.

Note: The song playing during the cookout scene is “Can’t Be Wasting My Time” by Mona Lisa and you should F with it.