The impending arrival of summer brings with it a dose of sweaty
laughter in the form of 1979’s Meatballs,
featuring Bill Murray in his first starring big screen role. Though it helped
spawn a number of desultory sequels and hornball teen sex comedies, director Ivan
Reitman’s debut studio film is actually a very sweet-natured albeit ramshackle movie,
powered by Murray’s shaggy
personality and indefatigable energy.
Murray stars as Tripper
Harrison, the wackiest counselor in the history of North Star, a plebian summer
camp which stands in stark contrast to the nearby elitist Camp Mohawk, the annual hot-months roost
for snotty and privileged young brats. Despite this purposefully highlighted
distinction (and the obligatory Olympiad competition finale between the groups),
there’s actually much less inter-camp pranksterism than one might surmise based
on that synopsis. Most of the film centers on Tripper and some of the other
counselors cracking jokes with one another, playing tricks on lead counselor Morty
(Harvey Atkin), and good-naturedly chasing female staffers like headstrong Roxanne
(Kate Lynch).
What’s most notable about Meatballs is just how real
the kids are, and how legitimate its setting and energy feels. That’s not too
surprising considering it was filmed on location at an actual summer getaway, Camp White Pine, located just north of Toronto,
and used many of the camp’s actual enrollees and counselors as extras. Meatballs isn’t a movie with a lot of
preciousness in it; in fact, it’s downright sloppy at times, which is either
part of its charm or cause for wincing. Watching this film again, definitely
more than 20 years since I’d seen it, I was struck by just how much some of its
silly moments — not to mention the sing-songy, insidiously catchy theme song, which
kicks off with the refrain, “Are you ready for summer?” — stick to your psyche.
One of the biggest such reminiscences, of course, is Murray’s
wild speech of pressure-valve release and underdog empowerment, which builds to
a chanted, repetitive climax of, “It just doesn’t matter!” It’s funny, but
there’s also something that rings really psychologically true in that scene,
which makes it even more memorable.
Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a raised-lettering
cardboard slipcover, this special edition release of Meatballs is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and has
been digitally re-mastered under Reitman’s supervision for optimal picture and
sound. There are a few light flashes and color problems early on, but these
annoyances quickly recede into the background for the most part. Audio is
presented in strong English language Dolby digital 5.1 and stereo mixes, with
optional English, Spanish and French subtitles.
There’s also an audio commentary track with Reitman and
co-writer Dan Goldberg, and it’s a warm and self-effacing affair. The pair talks
about add-on re-shoots, which included the movie’s cold open with Tripper first
awaking, as well as the card-playing and bus terminal scenes with Tripper and Rudy,
to better flesh out the arc of their relationship. The production’s lack of
financing is frequently mentioned, and Reitman takes care to point out crew
members who serve as occasional extras (casting director Jack Blum even played gangly
Spaz). Reitman also tells a funny anecdote about contacting composer Elmer
Bernstein, and working out a deal for him to score the movie on spec; Bernstein
agreed, for a percentage of its receipts, and Reitman relates that it turned
out to be one of the more lucrative assignments he ever arranged.
A three-part making of documentary runs 47 minutes in total,
and includes sit-down interviews with Reitman, writer Goldberg and the
aforementioned actors Makepeace, Lynch and Atkin, as well as writer Len Blum,
costume designer Judy Gellman and many more. The big problem, of course: no Murray.
That’s a mortal wound, really, for a title constructed around such a cult of
personality. That said, there are plenty of nice stories and insights herein, including
from Reitman and others recounting the movie’s campfire ghost story scene. Murray
was apparently a bit drunk, as were several other cast members; Reitman jokes
that he thinks Murray channeled
Richard Burton in the sequence. Keith Knight, meanwhile, relates how he won his
role in large measure by impulsively shaving his moustache (grown for a stageplay
he was in at the time) on site at an audition, in order to convince Reitman
that he could in fact look younger. Most fascinatingly, Reitman and Goldberg
recount how the famously elusive and noncommittal Murray never actually technically
committed to the movie; his friend Harold Ramis was hired to punch up the
script, but Murray kept stringing Reitman and the producers along before
finally just saying he’d “be there” after they’d already started shooting, and
showing up on the third day of filming. Overall, a big part of Meatballs’ appeal lies in one’s embrace
of it as nostalgia. It’s a lighthearted family romp, and key to understanding and
appreciating the further ascendancy of Murray’s
big screen career. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Nikki Reed is no longer the messed-up young girl from Thirteen, the breakthrough film which she co-authored with director Catherine Hardwicke, based on her own slippery-slope experiences of an emancipated adolescence. Of course, she never really was that girl, as she’s quick to point out. Refreshingly unguarded during a recent sit-down chat at a Los Angeles hotel, Reed has a sly, astute and furtively confidential tone — when she appends a questioning “you know” to the end of a sentence, it’s not some vacuous, Valley Girl vernacular, but rather an intimate, imploring solicitation of deeper agreement and common ground.
Reed’s most recent films — Mini’s First Time and Cherry Crush, the latter of which hits DVD in a few weeks — didn’t catch fire at the box office, but with a Kevin Smith television pilot (Reaper) and a couple more indie flicks in the can (Familiar Strangers, Privileged), the 19-year-old Reed stands poised to make another full-frontal assault on Hollywood in the near future, all with an eye toward eventually writing and producing more of her own projects. “I didn’t know I was going to act until four years ago,” Reed says. “I did Thirteen and was like, ‘Whoah, that was cool, what a funny mistake.’ And then all of a sudden I moved out and couldn’t go back to school and that was my only choice. So I acted to pay the bills. Now I’m acting because I enjoy it. And that’s all I can say about it, because it’s not going to be the rest of my life.”For the full feature piece/interview, from FilmStew, click here.
So the trailer for Captivity, the Roland Joffé film that created an uproar with its controversial marketing scheme and subsequent slapdown by the MPAA, has dropped online and in select theaters, and it does little to dissuade those that have argued passionately that Eli Roth‘s recent Hostel: Part II is indicative of the cultural highway to hell that this country is on. It’s “torture porn,” with flesh in a blender, goosing screams with little (apparent) sense of identification, yadda yadda yadda…
Look, the way these movies are marketed and the stark reality of them are two different things entirely. To me, The Hills Have Eyes and, most of all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning are much more emblematic of the new stalking cinema of sadism, because they have so much more less to say than Roth’s Hostel flicks. The jury is still out and the book is still open on Captivity, meanwhile. Joffé (The Killing Fields) is a talented director, but he can succumb to laziness, and on the surface this has the scent of a paycheck job, like Boaz Yakin doing Uptown Girls or Wayne Wang doing Last Holiday. Elisha Cuthbert, who I really liked in the underrated The Girl Next Door — and not merely because she was playing a porn star, you hornballs — shows me nothing really special here, but the trailer is selling gore, not nuance. (Meanwhile, I guess armpit fetishists can dig on the above photo.) Uh oh… just noticed that Pruitt Taylor Vince (Heavy, Identity) is in the movie. That can only mean one thing, really. Well… one of two things, each related to one another.
Well, the trailer for I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, has dropped. Releasing from Warner Bros. in December, the third filmed version of the well known Richard Matheson novella (and the first
to actually use its title) has, of course, gone through all sorts of casting changes and production starts and stops over the years, with actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and directors like Ridley Scott and James Cameron attached to it at various points. Teaming with Smith — who has a penchant for milking the full commercial value out of apocalyptic scenarios — is director Francis Lawrence, who did some good things with the vaguely thematically similar Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves.
The first portion of the trailer is generic end-of-days mayhem, with surging, panicked crowds, explosions and the like. Yawn… It kind of looked like outtakes from War of the Worlds, honestly. The second half, though, hinted at something darker, or at least a bit more interesting. Naturally, Smith’s character is not alone, and some kick-ass action stuff will ensue. But the scope of the “desperate desolation” stuff — including an aerial city shot and Smith knocking golf balls off a skyscraper’s roof, somehow trumping Tom Cruise flailing about in an empty Times Square in Vanilla Sky — was impressive, and made me recall how much I loved reading Stephen King’s The Stand as a kid. Sure, this isn’t going to be Cast Away or anything, but it did make me think how sort of primal a response we have to abandoned human spaces, how that sets off deep-set warning bells that can only be described as innate and animalistic.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this movie is going to slay at the box office. Smith pushed The Pursuit of Happyness to a $26 million opening and a $163 million gross last holiday season, and this wheelhouse pairing of bankable star and concept will make I Am Legend the year’s last big action epic, guaranteeing it a theatrical run well into Oscar race season. Again, for the trailer, click here.
It wasn’t too many years ago that the peddlers of reality television
were regarded in Hollywood as a band of gypsy reprobates, gatecrashers
of the industry whose stolen time in the sun surely wouldn’t last long
when stacked up against the quality and tradition of conventional
programming. Six seasons of American Idol later — and after four straight
years of that being the top show on television — how quaint and downright silly
that notion now seems. Reality TV, of course, has spread like a
wildfire, rapaciously and unapologetically gobbling up standard,
scripted fare, and giving viewers both a window into and mirror image
of lives less ordinary.
But there’s another more diagnosable and largely undiscussed trend
bubbling just beneath the surface: namely, the manner in which the conventions and modes of expression of these reality shows — from direct-address “confessionals” to lurking camera angles and ironic framing — are bleeding into scripted entertainment and other Hollywood art forms, from Michael Moore’s incendiary and populist documentaries to hit sitcoms like The Office.
With the release of this past week’s kids’ flick Surf’s Up, another frontier has been crossed. The choice of docu-style in such a mainstream piece of animated fare is
more than an unusual one — it’s downright groundbreaking, basically
staking the movie’s box office odds on the assertion that kids already grasp
this new style of storytelling. For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer wings into theaters this weekend, and I’ll have more thoughts on the movie soon. In advance of its opening, however — and though busy preparing for a family vacation — writer Don Payne graciously took some time recently to submit to an email interview. To wit:
Brent Simon: So I
know you’ve said that you were a big fan of comics growing up. I read a few
here and there, but then mostly got into books, dime store-type serial
mysteries, etc. What do you think it was about that form that most appealed to
you — the combination of word and image, the fantastical storylines?
Don Payne: I
think it was both. As a kid (and as an adult), there’s just something appealing
about superhero stories and seeing them told in the unique visual medium of
comics. I was particularly drawn to Marvel comics because their characters
seemed very real to me. I suppose it’s because (as has been said many times
before) the Marvel heroes weren’t perfect — they all had human flaws. Spider-Man
was a nerdy high school kid who had trouble with girls, the Fantastic Four were
a dysfunctional family with money problems, Daredevil was blind, the X-Men were
victims of intolerance, etc. Even as a kid, that made the comics all the more
interesting to me.
BS: Was writing a
constant for you as a kid, or were you into entertainment more generally, and
then gravitated to writing later, in high school or college?
DP: I was always
into sci-fi, comics and fantasy, thanks largely to the influence of my older
brother. I made up my own comics and stories as a kid. I also did a lot of
acting and, by the time I got to high school, I was making movies with a Super
8 camera. By the time I got to college, I knew I wanted to work in film, and by
the end of my senior year at UCLA, I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter.
BS: What do you
take as the major themes of Fantastic Four? And with so many comics out there,
why do you think so many people still care so strongly about it?
DP: I think the
strength of family has always been a major theme of the Fantastic Four, and
people can relate to that. As much as they squabble and bicker with one
another, at the end of the day, they really love each other. Any one of them
would sacrifice his or her own live to save the life of any other member of the
team. Another thing that’s unique about the F4 is that they have
no secret identities. Originally, they didn’t even have costumes. They’re
dealing with issues of privacy and celebrity, which other superheroes don’t
have to contend with. I also think the uniquely cosmic, sci-fi elements of the
comic have made them popular as well. And, of course, the popularity of any
dramatic work depends on the appeal of the characters — and all four members of
the team are great characters.
BS: Coming on
board to a sequel must be a somewhat strange feeling. You know you’re wanted,
as it were, because you’ve been selected independent of any carryover loyalty
from the first film, but you also don’t have any of that battle-tested shared
experience of the franchise. So after being hired, describe the process: Did
you meet or talk at all with any of the actors, collectively or individually?
Director Tim Story, Avi Arad and other producers? Or was it more just a matter
of getting on the same page with the studio, and then hunkering down on
something everyone had signed off on?
DP: I did feel
like the new kid on the block when I came on board. Pretty much everyone else on
the project had worked together on the first film. But the people involved were
very welcoming and accepting of new ideas. I had meetings with the studio,
director Tim Story and Marvel producers Avi Arad and Kevin Feige since the very
start of my involvement on the project — actually, even prior to that — so I
knew them all. They had their ideas about what they wanted to see in this film,
I had my ideas, and it was my job to put them all together and make it work. By the way, for the record, the official writing credits on Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
are, “Story by John Turman and Mark Frost, Screenplay by Don Payne and Mark
Frost.”
BS: The first
film was a $330 million worldwide hit, yet was also rather tepidly received in
some fan-boy corners, and critically as well. To what degree, if any, do you
think studio reaction to the first film helped shape the main narrative choices
of the second movie?
DP: There was a
learning curve with the first film. I think everyone involved in the production
was trying to find the right tone. Now people have a better idea what the
strengths of the franchise are, and I think that’s allowed us to try some new
things in this film. The inclusion of the Silver Surfer shows that they’re
willing to go a little more cosmic than in the first film, which is great.
BS: Not meant as
a loaded question, honestly, but rather as a general query offshoot given your
insider’s point-of-view — in your opinion is there too much studio emphasis
placed on attempted pandering to the Internet-fed, loud (but presumably loyal)
core audiences of adapted works, rather than merely investing in the craft of
storytelling?
DP: I think
everyone involved in a movie wants to tell a good story. I also think it’s difficult
to pander to the “core audience,” because the fan base isn’t some monolithic
entity. It’s made up of individuals who, while they all share a love for the
source material, have many different opinions of how they’d like to see it
executed on the screen. You also need to make a movie that has crossover
appeal, something that’s going to please mainstream audiences as well as the
hardcore fans. On the other hand, if there’s a big consensus on a
particular issue among the fans, you’d better not ignore it. It’s not just
because the fans make up a large part of your audience — they’re also in tune
with what made the material great to begin with. The big things that the fans
love are the reasons that the source material is so popular, and that popularity
is why the movie is getting made in the first place. So you want those big
things to translate to the screen.
BS: Were there
any discussions that you recall about the first movie’s performance overseas,
where it did, I think, slightly more of its overall business?
DP: I think
people realized that the Fantastic Four’s popularity wasn’t just limited to the US audience. I
also think that’s why this film has such a global scope to the action — which
is a great thing, in my opinion. In the comics, the Fantastic Four weren’t
limited to New York, like Spider-Man and other superheroes seemed to be. They went around the world,
across the galaxy, and into the Negative Zone.
BS: In your
opinion, what makes the Silver Surfer such a good villain, a fan favorite?
DP: There are
many, many reasons. First off, he’s not merely a villain — he’s a conflicted
soul, a tortured individual. He’s noble and selfless, having sacrificed himself
to save his home planet and the woman he loved by agreeing to serve Galactus. And
yet, in doing so, he’s also taking part in genocide on a cosmic scale. So
there’s a real complexity and moral ambiguity to his character. And if you’ve
read the comics, you know he’s ultimately not a villain at all, after his sense
of compassion is reawakened. He’s also got the power to manipulate matter and
energy, and he’s a silver guy who rides on a flying surfboard. So that’s pretty
cool.
BS: What was the
hardest part of the overall writing experience? Coming from more of a comedy background, did you find crafting action scenes with the potential for swirling special
effects mind-bogglingly difficult, or was it a sort of cathartic, left-field
release?
DP: I think the
hardest part of the job for any writer is to reconcile the various visions and
ideas of the director, the studio, the producer — sometimes even the actors — with
each other and with your own. It’s a collaborative process, but the writer is
the one who’s got to make it all work in the script. I also had the added pressure of this being a big franchise
film featuring a superhero team which I cared about a great deal. As a fan, you
want it to be something that, if you had no involvement with the movie
whatsoever, you’d come out of the theater thinking you’d just seen something
great. I actually kind of stumbled into a comedy career. I got my
MFA in screenwriting at UCLA and wrote a lot of non-comedy scripts while I was
in school. I only wound up in comedy because that was the first break I got in
the business. I’d written genre stuff before, so I always loved writing big
action/special effects sequences. And, of course, I think if you spend years
reading the visual medium of comic books, you get a good background for writing
action sequences.
BS: So here’s a
fun one. When you’re laboring on a script like this one, where secrecy matters and
what not, and pesky reporters and writers (like me last year) are all angling
for some minute scoop (be it about character, content, cameos, design or tone), do you have to sign a lengthy and detailed non-disclosure confidentiality
agreement, or does Rupert Murdoch simply appear via teleconference, mutter “We
know where you live,” and shoot you a stern stare while casually burning stacks
of $100 bills? That is to say, I know you and many other folks take the (quite
reasonable) blanket position of not talking about anything, but do studios like
to explicitly spell out what they don’t want discussed?
DP: No one has
ever come to me and said, “You can’t talk about this.” But some things are just
common sense. You don’t want to spoil the details of a movie you’re working on.
You want it to be experienced in the way that movies are supposed to be
experienced — in the theater when it’s finished.
BS: I received some
reader-submitted questions, a lot of which centered on the movie’s PG rating,
so a couple queries there: was that rating part of a studio mandate, based on
discussions and/or some sort of research tied to the first film’s performance,
or was it a little more vague than that, meaning a borderline call that the
MPAA just happened to find not deserving of a stricter rating?
DP: I have no
idea why it got a PG rating. There was never any mandate that I ever heard of
to limit or modify content to get either a PG or PG-13 rating — certainly not
in the writing process. There are some pretty intense action sequences in
there, more intense than in the first film, so I was a little surprised by the
rating, to be honest. The bottom line to me, though, is whether a movie is good
or bad, not what its rating is. To tell you the truth, I think some of the hullabaloo I’ve
seen online about the rating brings up an interesting issue. A lot of the comic
book purists — the ones who would like to see as literal a translation of the
great Stan Lee/Jack Kirby works onscreen as possible — are the same ones who
are worried about the film’s PG rating being a negative. But the comic book
stories as written by Stan and Jack never included anything that would have
been the equivalent of a PG-13 rating. They were written to include a young
readership. It’s more in keeping with the spirit of Stan and Jack not to forget
that audience. And I’m not talking about dumbing anything down for kids, but
making a movie that can include them and spur their imagination and sense of
wonder — like the comics did for me and for so many other fans out there. And,
hopefully, the movie will introduce a new generation of kids to the comics as
well.
BS: Another
reader expressed appreciation about the character of Silver Surfer making his
way to the screen, but wanted to ask about the message board speculation of Galactus
being teased as a cloud/vortex, and not being true to the comics’ form everyone
knows Galactus as. Your thoughts/comments?
DP: I can’t talk
about Galactus in detail, but I will say this. Whatever his onscreen
manifestation is, it doesn’t preclude any form he might take on in any future
film. Galactus is a being who wields virtually limitless, godlike power over
matter and energy. I think he could assume any manifestation he so chooses.
BS: Finally, how
much on-set writing work (or, conversely, slack-jawed, good-time loafing) did Rise of the Silver Surfer entail versus
your feature writing debut, My Super
Ex-Girlfriend?
DP: On both
projects, my time on the set was severely limited because of my full-time job at The Simpsons. (I’m now a consulting
producer on the show. I only go in two days a week, which frees up a lot more
time for me to do feature work and to actually see my family.) On Super Ex, I was able to get out to the
set New York for about three
weeks during production. The director, Ivan Reitman, thought I’d be bored, but
it was my first experience on a movie set, so every minute was fascinating to
me. For Rise of the Silver
Surfer, I went up to Vancouver
for a couple weeks to do some rewriting shortly before the start of production.
It was a great experience seeing this amazing production apparatus gearing up
to make the film. After production started, I kept in touch via e-mail with
director Tim Story on the set. He would send me requests for little fixes or
alternate lines of dialogue when he needed them, and I would turn them around
pretty quickly.
BS: And hey, any
involvement on The Simpsons Movie at
all?
DP: None. But I know
all the guys who wrote it, and I think it’s going to be great. I just hope I
can score a free ticket.
Rialto Theatre is located in the heart of South
Pasadena. Built in 1925, and sporting a unique blend
of Spanish Baroque and Egyptian stylings, the Rialto
was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and has been
featured in many films and commercials, most notably Robert Altman’s The Player. Ticket prices for the midnight shows are $8.75. For more information, phone (626) 444-FILM, or click here.
, but it’s Murray’s blithe banter (“Oh, you must<br />
be the short, depressed kid we ordered…”) that keeps things for the most part airy<br />
and amusing. The movie’s only other real storyline of significance finds<br />
Tripper mentoring little Rudy (Chris Makepeace, sporting a crazy rug that makes<br />
him look like a pint-sized Michael Penn), a lonely kid from a single-parent<br />
household who feels like an outcast and can’t find his niche at North Star.</p>
<p class=)
Rialto Theatre is located in the heart of