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#4. That Thing You Do!

(PG, 1h 48m, Comedy/Drama/Music, 1996)

Now for a movie I will never run out of praise for. Wholesome and rewarding, a local boy band’s miraculous skyrocket to fame in 1964 finds its perfect tempo while paying cultural homage in the Tom Hanks directed-and-acted one-of-many-ones hit wonder, That Thing You Do!. In a word? Refreshing.

Cool cat Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) just wants to play drums. Long after the glazed ‘n’ dazed customers have left and the books have been cooked at his family’s appliance store in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, Guy retreats to the basement with his idol Del Paxton on vinyl to sit on his throne and deal out rhythm like only a boy desperate to make it big can. Here, there is no housewife wanting to buy a washer, here, the only record needle Guy deals is back to the top of his most prized album, Time to Blow. On his throne, he is king; on his throne, Guy Patterson is Spartacus.

Drummer needs a band, right? (I’m a musician - drummers’ll tell you they don’t.) Guy gets his break when he sits in with local band The Wonders. Chad, the original drummer, broke his arm playing leapfrog over a parking meter. But actually though! I love that scene. It’s half of the band looking all serious, meanwhile Chad and the bass player are jumping over meters like a bunch of no-good scally-wagging top-poppers. The other thing about the bass player was how long it took me to realize that he does not in fact have a name beyond the bass player. When credited, he’s referred to as T. B. Player - the bass player?? The world may never know.

The Wonders start playing locally, cut some records, sign a deal, life is good. Then, the true big break arrives - The Wonders have caught the attention of Mr. White (Tom Hanks), who is looking to sign the boys to the Play-Tone Galaxy of Stars and launch the band into true orbit.

Ambitiously filling the roles of director, writer, and co-star, Tom Hanks crafts a masterpiece of timing and dialogue in That Thing You Do!. He wastes not one iota of script, each line either serving to develop the characters, crack a joke, advance the plot, or do all three at once. Each character is distinct in terms of conversation and affect, from funny Lenny (Steve Zahn) to brooding Jimmy (Jonathon Schaech) to even the purposefully faceless bass player (Ethan Embry). Each Wonder is a boy you know, or a person you have been. In a way, we all spend time being ‘the bass player’ at some point.

The expertly timed dialogue reflects Tom Hanks’ Hollywood tenure and proximity to all the big writers. The script also highlights Hanks’ own wit and experience growing up in Southern California. You could watch this with your parents and see them recognize the show playing in the background at Patterson’s Appliances. Mr. White coaches the boys before each performance with a tagline familiar to any musician that there is no time for idling around and letting the audience grow cold or letting the applause die out: “you unplug and you run!”. Mr. White is always quick to offer the boys compliments on their looks, too; whether in black suits or red suits, they look great no matter what.

Fay’s (Liv Tyler) shining one-liner is her break-up with Jimmy, who has been two years too arrogant to see the true devotion before him which he can only imitate in his songs. Some may snub Tyler’s emotionless delivery, but it’s the flatness of her voice and stillness of her face that shows the exhaustion of loving without return: “shame on me for kissing you with my eyes closed so tight.” You tell ‘im, Fay.

Fictitious jazz legend Del Paxton’s words of wisdom to Guy ring true not only for any musician, but any person looking to hold the present together beyond honest capability. As Guy watches his one-hit wonder band fizzle out as if in a supernova, Paxton reminds Guy how impermanent the glitz before him is: “bands come and go, but you gotta keep playing.” 

How relatable is this for you? I was in two bands in college, and each had the right people in the right place at the right time. My rock orchestra saw its fifteen minutes when we had the chance to open for Heart until our set got rained out. Summer ran out, and I had to go back to school. My old time band saw a hint of traction on the contra dance circuit before the day we all had graduated and were slingshot far, far away from each other. The gigs were good and the memories greater. As I know for me and I’m sure for all of them, I’ve just had to keep playing. In no way does the passage of time or accumulation of distance diminish the value of what we had. Like 1964, the year had to end at some point.

Speaking of 1964, while at the College of Wailing and Mayhem, I took a four-credit course in my senior year on the music of The Beatles. I kid you not. Easily the most engaging and knowledgeable professor I had the pleasure to study with. That Thing You Do! did its homework in paralleling The Beatles, not counting obvious references in the script. Like The Beatles, The Wonders lose their original bass player and replace their original drummer. Both go for a name pun: before Mr. White changed their name to something less confusing, it was The Oneders (the oh-NEE-ders??). For both bands, their hit break-through single was a slower song made great by sneakily speeding it up (see “Please Please Me”). Some say Mr. White has a male lover in the extended edition to mirror Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, but my copy of the movie leaves all of that to the imagination.

As if this movie isn’t enough fun to watch, you can tell it was a fun time to make. Reading through the list of actors and cameos, Tom Hanks was clearly throwing a block party for his family and friends and just wrote it off as filming. Even Bryan Cranston appears for a moment, and Hank’s wife Rita Wilson plays the waitress at the jazz club.

Possibly the most thrilling scene is when the boys hear their single on the radio for the first time. Wherever each Wonder is in Erie, they’ve got their ear tuned to the local AM waves. The very second when they hear the first bar of Guy’s drum beat, they all flock to the appliance store, tripping over themselves, running to be together, basking in the pure ecstasy of the moment. The dream that each of them had visions of, Jimmy and Lenny and Guy and Fay and the other one, all saw a glimpse of it eclipse with reality when, for maybe two minutes, they ruled local air. There is jumping and crying and screaming. There are moments like these in everyone’s life, like getting into college, or getting engaged, or watching your garden bloom in the full sun of spring for the first time. The Wonders are hitting a milestone, maybe one they thought they would not see. They start something big, and it’s only the first of many. We know how the story ends, but in that moment, they can’t even dream of waking up. Anything could happen.

P.s. -- go see “Baby Driver” before it leaves the theater! It’s a good time.

P.p.s. -- even if you don’t find yourself watching this movie, you’ve at least got to give the single a shot!

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#3. Sleepless in Seattle

(PG, 1hr 45m, Comedy/Drama/Romance, 1993)

* Unless otherwise noted, all movie stats come from IMDb.

If you’re making a piece of toast, there is little you can do wrong. Some ingredients, however, turn a steady into a stunner. Likewise, the only movie part Tom Hanks hasn’t played is a bad one. Adding Meg Ryan to the mix always ensures something sweet, special, and certain to melt your heart.

Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) is a widower (trust me, I looked it up, widow is the woman) who, coping with grief, leaves town for Seattle with his son Jonah (Ross Malinger). Jonah, coping with his sleepless father, dials a late-night radio love expert, desperate to see his father happy again. Women across America fall in love with the fractured but strong father Jonah describes on the air, including Annie Reed (Meg Ryan). But oh – Annie is engaged! And to that rare species of man allergic to all of God’s green earth.

Like any fantasy-driven romance, Hanks and Ryan are not in the same state. In fact, they don’t touch the same ocean. But ain’t no mountain high enough, friends, for Jonah to rendezvous across the Rockies to force his dad to chase him to the Empire State Building where he will meet Annie, the woman he’s sure will be the best mother and wife of all the gentlewomen callers. But I’m not going to tell you what happens in this movie!

The most recent time I watched this movie, my friends The Geologist and Marty (not her real name) were over. Having never seen a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan double-team as a cinema dream, it was my obligation as friend to open the door. At one point, one of my doofus friends stops the movie instead of pausing it, making us start the movie entirely over, and there was no scene selection option, so we had to fast-forward from the very beginning, so the other friend and I groaned really loudly so she felt bad. In one scene, Meg Ryan listens to Christmas tunes on the radio, and sings “horses horses horses horses,” but sped up, it sounds like “harsesharsesharsesharses.” You would laugh too if you weren’t expecting it.

Sleepless in Seattle is the realization of your childhood daydream about calling in to late-night radio shows and having your problems solved by a far-removed woman with a soothing voice and catchy jingle. I would not be surprised if the radio host in the movie were based off Delilah, the one-name-only queen of pairing your hand in life with the perfect song who always has the silkiest voice on air. Delilah, if you’re out there, I adopted you as my mother when I was in the third grade via my pink Hello Kitty boom box.

While the movie is a story of love lost and won, the most beautiful relationship here is between Hanks and his son. No tragedy ought to be strong enough to break a family, for that is where strength comes from; with each other, the two men find it within themselves to keep going.

Fun finds! Also note bountiful allusion, obvious and subtle, to the Cary Grant melodrama An Affair to Remember. Before Annie, Hanks dates a woman whose laugh is like Elmer Fudd stuck on a juicer. The txtspeak featured in the dialogue is representative of mass unfamiliarity with the burgeoning Internet, now so quickly quaint anachronisms in 2016. Hopefully this means we will regain the ability to “can even” within another decade.

Overall, this movie is a classic for a reason. If you only pull it off the shelf every five years, the point is that it has a place on the shelf. Not my personal favorite Hanks/Ryan film, but it’s a fun time with people who haven’t seen it.

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#2. The ‘Burbs

(PG, 1h 41 min, Comedy/Mystery/Thriller, 1989)

I am no stranger to the suburbs. Born and bred in the cradle of suburban paradise, our nuclear family moved to many states, yet always lived in Levittown, USA. The sights of overworked dads mowing undercut lawns and their overweight dogs squatting on someone else’s grass are familiar to me. There’s comfort in predictability and routine.

But there is no sense of peace like the privilege of having good neighbors. And no entertainment like having kooky ones.

In The ‘Burbs, Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) earns himself a week of vacation and is content to roost at home for seven days. Carol (Carrie Fisher), Ray’s wife, tries to convince Ray to take the family to their favorite lake house to veg out and drink coffee.  However, right as neighbors have been inexplicably vanishing, the mysterious and standoffish Klopek family moves in down the block. The only good the Klopeks bring is in uniting formerly hostile neighbors in shared suspicion.

So lake house? Nah. Ray thinks it would be cooler to form his own band of ‘burb-ites and snoop on neo-Boo Radley down the street.

The movie’s shining achievement is its steady, believable descent into pure hysteria and absurdity. Ray’s crew consists of an Average Joe in no rush to go home to his wife, a Vietnam vet who never really made it back to America, or reality, and one owner of many yapper dogs. The snoop, they sleuth, they theory, they query. If this movie where an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it would be called, The Gang Suspects Their Neighbors are Undercover Nazi Cannibal Scientists.

We’ve been there before. One neighbor thinks another neighbor is a little off the wall, finds another neighbor who feels the same way about the kooky folks next door, next thing you know, that odd neighbor is certifiably a whack-job. Who, however, is the real crazy neighbor when all of a sudden Tom Hanks comes slinking in to your underground laboratory and starts digging a six-foot hole in the ground?? He wasn’t trying to get to China, I’ll tell you that much.

Have you ever been a kooky neighbor though, perhaps without realizing it? Once when our dog The Cuteness had soiled his bed, it made more sense to me to try cleaning it rather than buy a new one (like $40! No go!). So I took off the cushy plush covering to wash, and then I dragged the soiled foam outside to spray it with the hose, but I couldn’t just do that, so I dragged the piss-soaked foam out to the drainage, pulled the hose all the way out to the edge of the driveway, and started shooting at this sad piece of foam in the middle of a hot summer day. There was the time we put up holiday lights using a hockey stick, but I think we’ve all done ridiculous things in the name of yardwork.

All the while, the Zack Bell-meets-Calvin sort of kid next door invites all his stoner buddies over to watch the absurdity unfold. Maybe some bored kids or their mom separated their venetian blinds a few years ago to get a load of me, power washing the dog bed. Like a reasonable thing to do.

Anyway, this movie a hoot and a half, I had tears down my face towards the end, much better than The Money Pit. Highly relatable.

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#1. The Money Pit

(PG, 1 hr 31 min, Comedy, 1986)

Last winter, my brother the Giant gifted me a small bundle of Hanks films for the cause. Included was The Money Pit, the 80’s caper about penniless couple Walter (Tom Hanks) and Anna (Shelley Long) who buy a fixer-upper mansion.

The couple needed to move so to put some map-space between them and Anna’s omnipresent ex-boyfriend “the Maestro” (Alexander Godunov). He’s hung up on Anna, thinks she’ll come back, etc., we get it. Distance wasn’t a problem when the Maestro was abroad, but upon his return, the couple really needed to stop secretly living in the Maestro’s house.

Only catch is that the mansion’s a “full-on Monet”, to quote (a personal favorite) the 1995 classic Clueless: “from far away, it looks okay, but up close, it’s a big ol’ mess.” The plan is to fix it, sell it, and walk away like Walter White-level house-flippers.

Now, Walter wants to marry Anna. Anna, however, won’t commit. So instead they buy this mansion together. Walter is very devoted to Anna during the ups and downs of fixing “a piece of swiss cheese with a door.” Walter needs to leave town for business, so what does lonely girlfriend do? Spend the night with ex-boyfriend.

You could go for the obvious and say the decaying mansion was a metaphor for their troubled relationship. Once grand and opulent, a lack of commitment by the owners to fix little problems early on let the once-glittering palace fall into dust. By a miraculous turn of events, however, and a rambunctious construction crew (a plug for counseling?), the house forgives itself for allowing the previous tenant to spend the night, though the doors and windows were surely locked, because Walter loves Anna too much. And, who would want to get a whole new house after working on this one for so long and with so much money? Never fall for the sunk-cost fallacy. Tom Hanks did; he fell right through the ceiling of his sinking broken dream mansion.

In the end, it comes to light that Anna did not actually sleep with the Maestro. Walter forgives Anna regardless, because he would just miss her too much if she left. If you’re going to gamble with all your money, you might be the sort of person who gambles with all your heart, too.

The Money Pit delivers laughs for anyone familiar with the costs we make in moving. During one childhood move across many states, I accidentally packed my favorite Pikachu in one of the moving boxes, so my loving parents surprised me with one of those super cute talking Pikachu toys to mollify me. Who deserves that kind of generosity? 

Highlights include the colorful wrecking crew and contractors, the naughty cherub water fountain, and Tom Hanks getting stuck in the floor. You look at the out-of-control wrecking crew, the fickle contractors, the flying roasted turkey, and laugh, thinking, surely, this would never happen in real life. And thank goodness for that.

Quick score: 3/5

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Getting Started

Eventually, if we are of good character, we will do the things we said we would do. Tom Hanks said he would become an actor; decades later, I said I would watch every single one of his movies.

What started as a relaxing weekly routine is becoming a deliberate endeavor. Every Sunday after brunch, I’d settle in with my Beagle and some coffee and watch a movie I picked up from the library earlier in the week. Sometimes action, sometimes mystery, but after a while, always Tom Hanks. Another week, another movie - my brother the Giant jokingly asked if I hadn’t seen all of his movies already.  We surmised that there’s not a single personality Tom Hanks hasn’t played. “I know,” I plotted. “I’ll watch every single Tom Hanks movie and find out.”

Here’s how this will work: every week, I will watch a movie. Every Sunday, I will tell you about it. Probably won’t read like critical movie reviews. It’s better to imagine I’m not behind printed newspaper ink, but rather beside you at the dinner table.

Hanks has acted in seventy movies to date, including four set to be released in 2016. Let’s say we watch four movies in a month, so about eighteen months. So if I keep to one movie a week every week, by my rough liberal arts math skills, this observation will likely take us into the latter half of 2017. At that point, I will have graduated college, likely have found a job, and hopefully occupied my time with more productive things than musing on the movies of a single Hollywood star.

But Tom Hanks is no ordinary Hollywood star. Granted, we all ought to be skeptical of the media making anyone look like a saint, but for Hanks, there is little the media must do. The actor, a gentleman and a scholar, shows us that the best gift you can give to the world is your authentic self.

Enough of that. Let the movies begin!