Re-Views: ‘Moonlight Mile’ (2002)

One of the hardest things for a filmmaker to convey is sincerity. Even if you earnestly believe in what your movie is about, by the time it goes through the process of casting, filming, and editing — unless you have total control over all those things — your vision is liable to be compromised. For truly personal expressions, there’s less risk in writing a book or a song, something that doesn’t require assistance and input from dozens of other people, many of whom are only interested in profitability.

When a movie does succeed at expressing a filmmaker’s innermost feelings, it’s almost miraculous. Yet even then, not every viewer is going to feel the same way. I loved Brad Silberling’s “Moonlight Mile,” a 2002 drama about a young man’s relationship with the parents of his recently murdered fiancee. Silberling based it loosely on his own experiences: he’d been dating the actress Rebecca Schaeffer when she was killed by an obsessive fan in 1989. To me, his personal connection to grief and loss came across in the film. But for many critics, it didn’t work at all. While my glowing review did have some company, the overall consensus was lukewarm: Metacritic has the average score at 59 out of 100. It failed at the box office, making just $10 million worldwide, and fell off the radar.

All of this makes “Moonlight Mile” a prime candidate for the Re-Views column. How will a second viewing a decade later change my opinion? Or will it change at all?? You’re probably feeling a lot of suspense and excitement now, so just stay calm.

What I said then: “You need only observe the brief moment when a dog vomits during a wake to understand that ‘Moonlight Mile,’ while preoccupied with the aftermath of a tragic death, is not going to be unreasonably melancholy…. The film is touching and thoughtful, but also extremely funny…. Twenty-two-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal continues to establish himself as one of his generation’s best actors with his heartbreakingly sympathetic performance as Joe. The suddenness with which he can go from passivity to great emotion is startling; it perfectly mirrors the real-life roller coaster of the grieving process…. Susan Sarandon is worthy of an Oscar nomination…. She is splendidly vulnerable, as is [Dustin] Hoffman, who is such a brilliant, diverse actor that things like this look easy when he does them. [Writer-director Brad] Silberling has found that the most effective way to help an audience feel something is not to beat them over the head with it. At its heart, this is every bit as melancholy and sad as its subject matter suggests, but Silberling’s style allows for humor and hope, joy and optimism. In the end, we feel we’ve been on the same search for meaning that Joe has, and that the journey has enriched us the way it has him.” Grade: A- [Here's the whole review.]

(Pet peeve: saying that someone’s acting is worthy of Oscar consideration. It gives the impression that you consider awards to be the ultimate validator. I don’t believe that, and I didn’t then. This was just a lazy way of saying that Sarandon is excellent, and that the people who compile lists of excellent things would do well to keep her in mind.)

The re-viewing: I still like the details that can only have come from someone who has dealt firsthand with death (which, admittedly, is a large section of the population). Sarandon’s character vents frustration over well-meaning friends’ reactions to her daughter’s death, and even acknowledges that yes, she’s impossible to please: she’s annoyed when they say something, and she’s annoyed when they don’t. She’s allowed to be that way because her daughter just died, for crying out loud. The authenticity of the screenplay is unmistakable.

I stand by what I said about the performances, too. Sarandon and Hoffman were old pros, and they delivered the level of quality you expect from them. If “Moonlight Mile” had gotten more attention in general, I really do think Sarandon’s performance might have been nominated for awards. Gyllenhaal only had a few major roles under his belt at this point, but all of them (yes, even “Bubble Boy”) suggested he had promise. His emotional scenes here are the kind that actors put on their highlight reels: solid, professional work demonstrating facility with the fundamentals of acting and genuine talent.

But I’m more troubled on second viewing by two major elements that only seem to have bothered me slightly the first time. Here’s a paragraph from my 2002 review:

“Joe’s dilemma over whether to help his would-be father-in-law put the bar out of business is a disappointingly conventional plot device for a film that is otherwise so fresh. Ditto a courtroom scene near the end: Beware of courtroom scenes in movies that are not, overall, court-centered movies. It’s a screenwriter’s lazy way of forcing his characters to say what’s on their minds, under oath, in a neat, tidy little speech.”

I’d forgotten about the courtroom scene until I got to that part of the movie, whereupon I remembered it and groaned audibly. The first time around, the emotional force of the movie as a whole was enough to make me overlook those story-related mediocrities. This time, not so much. This time, I related to what critic Kenneth Turan wrote about the film:

“What’s on screen is too honest and from the heart to totally dismiss but too slick and contrived to completely embrace. This is a film that cares about genuine emotion but also wants to tame it, to tidy it up and keep it confined to quarters.”

Yes. That’s exactly it. A few critics, including the estimable James Berardinelli, flat-out hated the movie, didn’t find an authentic moment in the whole thing. That’s crazy talk, if you ask me. But the more common sentiment was what Turan described: admiration for the truthful elements, but qualms over the more contrived ones. This second viewing has brought me around to that point of view. Now the real healing can begin. (Or something.)

Do I still love this movie? “Love” has been downgraded to “like,” but my feelings are still positive overall. If you can put aside the plot devices that ring false, you’ll find three sharp, sympathetic lead performances and a lot of heart, with very little saccharine. The relationship between Gyllenhaal and Sarandon as his almost-mother-in-law is particularly satisfying. I take comfort in the movie’s gentle messages, tidy though they are, about how we try to be what our loved ones need us to be. It’s good stuff. Grade: B

Categories: Columns

Tags: Moonlight Mile

Re-Views: ‘American Beauty’ (1999)

Like almost every film that wins the Oscar for Best Picture, “American Beauty” was highly acclaimed, and then suffered a backlash for being too highly acclaimed. (The nerve of some movies, being praised enthusiastically!) Though the vast majority of contemporary reviews were positive — 88% at Rotten Tomatoes, with a Metacritic score of 86 out of 100 — once all the shouting was over, a sense of buyer’s remorse began to creep in.

In 2005, Premiere magazine put “American Beauty” at the top of its list of the “20 most overrated movies of all time.” (The feature is no longer online, but the list is archived here.) The New York Times’ A.O. Scott famously hates it, and mentions his disdain every chance he gets. A simple Google search for “American Beauty” overrated brings up numerous like-minded sentiments.

Now, the condescending term “overrated” makes me feel stabby: What you’re saying is that the amount YOU like the movie is the correct amount, and anyone who liked it more than you did has made an error. But I understand the sentiment. “American Beauty” won a lot of awards, yet plenty of viewers don’t think it’s that great. That’s fair. And since its director, Sam Mendes, has a certain James Bond movie coming out this week, it seemed like a good time to take another look at his first film, 13 years later.

What I said then: “This is an extraordinary film, managing to be both dreary and optimistic simultaneously…. As with all the great daydreaming milquetoast protagonists, from Willy Loman to Walter Mitty, there is some amount of hope by the end – even if that hope seems shattered by the final scene and its implications…. Not one of these characters is good, nor do any of their real selves match their facades, but several are still sympathetic and even lovable…. ‘American Beauty’ is compelling to watch, full of black humor, evocative imagery and wrenching sadness. It creates more of a mood than an actual theme or message, though even that mood is difficult to describe. You have to see it to understand that even by seeing it, you may not understand it. All you know is, you’ve just watched a movie you couldn’t take your eyes off of for a second.” Grade: A [Here's the whole review.]

Allow me to point out something about that review: it’s not very good. I was still pretty new to the whole film critic biz, and my recollection is that “American Beauty” stumped me. I knew I loved it, but I had a hard time explaining what I loved about it, or why — which, you know, is only the whole point of a movie review.

The re-viewing: 13 years later, it’s hard to watch “American Beauty” without thinking about the parodies, homages and rip-offs it inspired. That business with the floating plastic bag (which is a little precious), the rose petals, and Thomas Newman’s distinctive plink-plink musical score feel particularly dated now — not because they’re typical of movies from 1999, but because they’ve been reproduced and referenced so often since then. Screenwriter Alan Ball’s next project, HBO’s wonderful “Six Feet Under,” was cut from the same cloth, adding to the familiarity.

I think what made it difficult to put my finger on why I liked the movie is also what turned some viewers off altogether. Its tone is constantly shifting from dark comedy to suburban drama to broad satire to middle-class tragedy. Most of the characters are two-dimensional types: the dissatisfied midlife-crisis husband who buys a sports car, the career-driven wife who has an affair, the homophobic Marine with a Southern accent, the teenage Lolita and so on. This lack of depth is fine (preferable, even) when the movie is operating as an almost farcical satire, a slick mockery of the fakeness of modern American life. But I can see how it would be problematic for viewers who find it off-putting not to be able to sympathize with anyone, especially as the story progresses and we’re drawn more deeply into the serious crises facing these shallow people.

Sometimes the shift in tone happens abruptly, leaving us uncertain how we’re supposed to react. The scene where Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) observes his son (Wes Bentley) selling drugs to Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) but misinterprets it as a gay sex liaison is straight out of a sitcom or an Austin Powers movie. It’s clearly meant to be funny. But it’s immediately followed by Fitts’s violent and shocking retaliation against his son, permanently fracturing their relationship and steering the film toward its tragic conclusion.

As viewers, we’re not comfortable with such important plot developments arising out of such a goofy scenario. We expect funny misunderstandings to have light consequences, and for heavy dramatics to have serious roots. Going against that feels wrong, like the filmmakers miscalculated somewhere. A person’s reaction to the movie might hinge on whether this strikes them as a mistake, or as an intentional subversion of expectations, perhaps a comment on how the most important moments of our lives can have their origins in triviality. Basically, it either works for you or it doesn’t.

Newman’s score plays a greater role in the film’s success than I realized. Like the movie itself, the music is ambiguous, without much melody, often upbeat even when it seems like it shouldn’t be. It isn’t unpleasant, but it doesn’t follow a traditional pattern, either. Is the jauntiness meant as mockery of these poor fools’ tragic lives, a sarcastic underscore to a dark comedy? Or is it a clue that the movie isn’t tragic at all — that finding moments of beauty and clarity, as some of the characters do, fulfills them and makes the story an optimistic one? Either interpretation is justified. That multifaceted, it-works-on-different-levels element is one more thing to admire about the movie.

Do I still love this movie? As it turns out, I do. Whether you view it as a scathing satire or a piercing drama, or some combination of the two, it’s effective at grabbing hold and not letting go. It’s compelling in an unusual way, adhering to a formula while continually refreshing itself with vivid performances and creative flourishes. Hopeful or pessimistic, bleak or beautiful, we have no reason to disown this movie. Embrace it! Even that stupid plastic bag. Grade: A-

Categories: Columns

Tags: american beauty, Eric's Re-Views, American Beauty, Sam Mendes, Kevin Spacey, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper

Re-Views: For Love of the Game (1999)

My relationship with baseball is complicated. I grew up with brothers and a dad who were enthusiastic players and fans, and so my childhood memories of summertime are filled with Dodger games on TV and many warm nights at the Little League field, where it seems like my brothers were always playing, or my dad was always umpiring, or my mom was acting as official scorekeeper.

The complicated part is that I never had any interest in playing baseball, and only passing interest in watching it. I’ve never made the choice to watch a game on TV — but if I’m with people who are watching one, I will gladly follow along. It feels like an essential part of America, and I’m a fan of America. Baseball is also part of my family, and since I love my family I guess I also love baseball. The sport has personal meaning for me.

I suspect that’s why For Love of the Game, Kevin Costner’s love letter to baseball, worked so well on me when I saw it in 1999. Not only is it about the pure joy of the sport, it has Vin Scully as the play-by-play announcer — Vin Scully, who’s been calling Dodger games for like 80 years and who is basically the voice of my childhood. Even if I wasn’t paying attention to the game on TV, I could hear good ol’ Vin describing it. I probably have a Pavlovian response to that man’s warm, friendly voice.

What I Said Then

“After a string of disappointing (and even downright bad) films, Costner reminds us in this one why we ever liked him in the first place. He IS capable of acting, even emoting at times. When he wants to be, he’s an effective Everyman, a guy that both men and women find appealing and enjoyable to watch…. It’s a genuinely compelling storytelling format, and the leisurely sport of baseball lends itself nicely to such reflection…. If any movie can restore America’s love for this game, it’s this one. The outcome of the game is fairly predictable, but still quite thrilling, as all good sports movies are, and the casting of real-life announcer Vin Scully as the play-by-play man was pure genius…. If Vin Scully tells me that baseball is a fantastic game, and a metaphor for life, and all the other things this movie tells me it is, I believe him. You’ll believe, too.” Grade: A- [complete review]

A majority of critics gave it favorable reviews, but just barely: Rotten Tomatoes has it at 54 percent. Very few of them, other than mine, were all-out raves, instead falling into the three-stars-out-of-four range. Some of the negative reviews explicitly said that the movie doesn’t work at all if you’re not already a baseball lover (and I agree). Others found the whole thing just plain boring. Would a second viewing, 12 years later, have the same effect on me?

The Re-viewing

Remembering very few details and not having read my review before I watched it, I was surprised by the opening credits — Sam Raimi directed this? I’d have sworn it was Costner himself. I’d also forgotten that it has three guys in the cast who have since turned out to be among my favorite actors: John C. Reilly, Brian Cox, and JK Simmons. This was shaping up to be a fine film, and for reasons I wouldn’t have even appreciated in 1999!

Ugh, then there’s Kelly Preston. She performs without distinction a role that is the film’s weakest attribute anyway, that of Costner’s love interest. The film’s structure has Costner’s Billy Chapel pitching what may well be the last game of his major-league career, and reflecting on his past as he does so. Some of those flashbacks relate directly to baseball — old teammates being traded away, new guys looking to him as a mentor — but most of them concern Billy’s relationship with Preston’s character, Jane. He’s a celebrity athlete who lives for baseball; she’s of secondary importance; yada yada. My notes contain this rather diplomatic observation: “non-baseball scenes are a little flat.”

Sometimes the movie is too on-the-nose, as when Billy injures his hand during the off-season and must be rushed to the hospital. He tells Jane to call his trainer: “He’s the most important person for me right now!” Jane is devastated to have it spelled out in no uncertain terms that the man responsible for saving her boyfriend’s career is more important to him than she is. (Being married to John Travolta in real life, she is probably used to bitter disappointment.)

On the other hand, some of the movie’s hokeyness is charming, in that old-fashioned, take-me-out-to-the-ball-game kind of way. The first few scenes lay it on thick: it’s the last game of the season; Billy’s beloved team owner has sold the team; Billy will probably be traded; Jane is about to move to London. This is truly the Big Game. It ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS!! I roll my eyes at that, but I have to admire the earnestness. And the fact is, baseball often does come down to do-or-die situations. “Bottom of the ninth, two outs, three runs behind, bases loaded” is a cliche — but it happens! Those off-the-field circumstances that can fill a game with added meaning are part of the reason sports fans love their sports.

Raimi does a terrific job switching back and forth between putting us on the field with Costner and putting us in the TV viewing audience, with Vin Scully guiding us. Scully’s lines must have been scripted, but he delivers them naturally, and they all sound like things he would really say. Look at how he sums things up:

“You get the feeling that Billy Chapel isn’t pitching against left handers, he isn’t pitching against pinch hitters, he isn’t pitching against the Yankees. He’s pitching against time. He’s pitching against the future, against age, and even, when you think about his career, against ending. And tonight I think he might be able to use that aching old arm one more time to push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer.”

Reading that, I think it’s corny. Hearing it delivered by Vin Scully, I think it’s beautiful. The game’s final stirring moments build suspense the way most sports movies do, before delivering a cathartic and satisfying finish. Scully says: “The cathedral that is Yankee Stadium belongs to a Chapel.” Yeah, it’s hokey. But tell that to the lump in my throat!

Do I Still Love this Movie?

No, but I honestly do like it. Costner’s running monologue as he pitches, his interaction with his catcher/friend John C. Reilly, all the commentary that encapsulates the simple pleasures of the sport, Basil Poledouris’ rousing musical score — that stuff works, and it works well. If it weren’t for the just-average relationship story on the side, this would be a classic of the Baseball Movie genre. Grade: B

Tags: Brian Cox, for love of the game, JK Simmons, john c. reilly, kelly preston, kevin costner, re-views, sam raimi, vin scully

Re-Views: House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Rob Zombie had a hard time getting his directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses, into theaters. It was only through perseverance, commitment, and a deal with the dark lord Satan that he finally succeeded in sharing his vision with the world. We’ve hardly been able to get rid of him ever since.

Man, did I ever hate this movie.

What I Said Then:

“A massively unpleasant film…. I have seen movies with more gore and carnage … but I don’t know that I’ve seen it done with more distastefulness than this. It is so crass that even fans of crassness may find it unenjoyable…. The teens are bitter and stupid and unworthy of sympathy; their captors are ugly, vile persons unworthy of being feared…. As with many first-timers, Zombie’s directorial style is over-done and amateurish. He randomly cuts to violent and/or sexual images every now and then, evidently just for shock value, and he permits some of the worst acting I’ve seen in a good long while…. When movies like these are fun, they are fun because they introduce clever or amusing ways of killing people, or because some level of wit is exhibited by the filmmaker. House of 1000 Corpses has none of this…. This is a hateful, vicious piece of work that is best left ignored. Grade: F [complete review]

The circumstances remind me of a movie I Re-Viewed a couple weeks ago, Freddy Got Fingered, which I also remembered as being a grotesquely unpleasant experience the first time. I saw House of 1000 Corpses on opening day, April 11, 2003, because it hadn’t been screened for critics beforehand (a practice that was much less common in 2003 than it is now). My friend Brett went with me, because we had this thing where we watched horror movies together, no matter how bad it seemed like they were going to be. We both found this one irredeemably repellent and stupid. (“Movie hates me,” I jotted in my notes.) I was able to work out some of my anger by writing a scathing review, but I don’t know what Brett did. Probably killed a hobo, if I know Brett.

Rob Zombie (real name: Robert Bartleh Cummings, and I’m not making that up) was a heavy-metal musician first, but his move to filmmaking wasn’t completely random. His band, White Zombie, was named after a 1932 Bela Lugosi movie, and Zombie had directed a few of his own music videos. It’s clear from watching House of 1000 Corpses that he was a big fan of the 1970s exploitation and horror films (including Halloween, which he would eventually direct a remake of). A few of his cast members were veterans of such movies.

Nonetheless, it was Zombie’s previously established musical fanbase that gave House of 1000 Corpses its cult following. Instead of selling out when he became a filmmaker, Rob Zombie made exactly the kind of movie that Rob Zombie fans would go for. Fans of horror movies in general and exploitation cinema specifically, well, maybe not.

The Re-viewing

The first viewing, eight years ago, felt like a mindless assault on my senses. The second viewing, just recently, was far less unpleasant. There are probably several reasons for this, but I suspect it’s mainly because I’ve seen several movies of this nature in the meantime that were more repugnant and ugly than House of 1000 Corpses is — including its sequel, The Devil’s Rejects (2005).

I’m not sure how to feel about the realization that what was once among my most awful movie-watching experiences now doesn’t even make the top 10.

House of 1000 Corpses prefigured the torture-horror trend, coming out well before the Saw series, Hostel, and the others. When I saw it, I had only a passing familiarity with its gruesome predecessors (The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc.). I’d seen plenty of slasher movies, but the victims almost always die quickly in those. Torture was a relatively new and hideous notion for me, moviewise.

But it isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. As I’ve seen more exploitation films, both old and new, on DVD, in theaters, and at festivals, I’ve become fascinated with them (in a completely wholesome manner, I promise). The way they’re structured, the narrative devices they use, their methods of pushing our buttons — all of that is endlessly intriguing to a person who likes to analyze things. Most of these movies are ugly and unpleasant, of course: that’s the point. But I’ve come to appreciate the difference between a movie that rattles your senses in a manner that is ultimately “enjoyable” and one that’s just off-putting and nasty.

There’s a fine line, though, and the line is different for everyone. Listen to the people coming out of a Fantastic Fest screening — who tend to be aficionados of extreme cinema — and you’ll hear opposite reactions to the same movie. What’s awesomely, grotesquely, violently entertaining to one person is merely revolting to another.

Which isn’t to say that I enjoyed House of 1000 Corpses on second viewing, only that it didn’t seem to be sitting on my head and punching me in the face the whole time. For I haven’t just seen movies that were more hateful since 2003 — I’ve also seen movies that did this sort of thing much, much better. I’ve seen exploitation films whose central premises have actual ideas behind them, where some wit and imagination are on display, movies that aren’t forced to rely on random cutaways of violence and naked girls for cheap shocks.

Zombie occasionally toys with giving his maniacs a demented motive for their violence, having them utter lines suggesting resentment toward outsiders, or defensiveness about being ignorant hillbillies, or fear of being mocked by city slickers. But the idea is never explored beyond a couple bits of dialogue. We get the sense that these lunatics torture and kill without motive, for no reason other than that they are pure evil. But I’ve seen that done better, too. I’ve seen pointlessly cruel movies where the pointless cruelty was scarier, more unsettling, more chilling.

Zombie has obviously seen the classics of the exploitation-horror genre. But I don’t think he understands what makes them work. Or perhaps he does understand and just wasn’t able to duplicate it himself. In any event, my overriding thought for much of this second viewing was something closer to pity: Aw, look! He’s trying to make something disturbing and creepy! How adorable!

Do I Still Hate this Movie?

Yes, albeit with less fervent passion. It’s not aggressively awful; more like benignly awful, the kind of awful you can sit through without becoming enraged. So I guess that’s a step up? Grade: D

Re-Views: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

By the time Kevin Smith made Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, in 2001, he’d already secured a place in the pantheon of Cool Gen-X Filmmaker Geeks with his four previous efforts: Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma. They were all set in the same universe, with characters from one film popping up in the others, an ingenious gimmick that gave Smith’s fans the feeling that they were all insiders. It helped that each movie featured an appearance by the cuddly, ursine Smith himself, in the guise of Silent Bob, affable partner to the motormouthed vulgarian pothead known as Jay (Jason Mewes).

I came late to the party. I discovered (and loved) Clerks just before Dogma came out, and while I never saw Chasing Amy or Mallrats, what I experienced of Smith’s work appealed to me. The films struck me as funny, irreverent, and intelligent summations of Smith’s generation. Since I was part of that generation (he’s four years older than me), and since I was in my mid-20s when I found him, his obsession with pop culture was right up my alley.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was the culmination of Smith-ism, piling all of his characters and fixations into a movie that also happened to have a good-sized budget and would be chock-full of celebrity cameos. It was a movie just for Smith’s loyal admirers, like something a fan club would send out to its charter members. And I ate it up.

What I said then: “A parody of modern filmmaking that is itself a compelling example of it — a movie that has room to dish out criticism, because it can withstand the same when it’s flung back…. The film is one giddy set piece after another, full of cameos from celebrities who clearly just love Kevin Smith movies and wanted to be in one…. The jokes are surprisingly on-target and fresh, with few misfires…. The film is self-indulgent [but] the reason the self-indulgence is OK is that we like Kevin Smith. He’s the cool, popular kid in school who doesn’t fit with any of the cliques but is accepted by all of them. I hope he hangs around with us for a long time.” Grade: A- [complete review]

Even at the time, my review was more effusive than most. The film had a 53 percent positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 5.7 out of 10 — suggesting that even among those who praised the movie, not many looooved it. I wish I could find my notebook from back then so I could see what I jotted down during the screening.

This would turn out to be Kevin Smith’s high point in some ways. It was his widest release to date, and even now is second only to Cop Out. Its U.S. box-office gross of $30.8 million was barely behind Dogma for first place, and has since been surpassed only by Zack and Miri Make a Porno (barely) and Cop Out. He didn’t make another film for three years, and it was the much-derided Jersey Girl. He followed that with Clerks II and Zack and Miri, both obvious and not particularly successful attempts to recapture his former profane glory. And then there was Cop Out, whose critical drubbing led Smith to rant on Twitter about how the critics were biased against him. (He was partially correct. Critics are biased against bad movies, and he made a bad movie.)

The Re-viewing

Having been moderately to significantly disappointed by all of Smith’s subsequent films, I was eager to re-watch one from the glory days. Some classic Smith! That’s what the doctor ordered.

Well, the doctor’s order has gone unfilled. I re-watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and was astonished — dumbfounded — at how awful it was. I barely cracked a smile. Mostly I sat there in stoned-faced disbelief. What an insufferably unfunny mess! How could 2001 Eric and 2011 Eric have such wildly divergent views on the same movie?

The major problem, I think, is that JASBSB was very “of the moment,” and that moment has passed. The jokes about Miramax and its stalwarts (like Gus Van Sant and Wes Craven) are all hopelessly out-of-date now. So are the Affleck and Damon bits and the cameos by James Van Der Beek and Jason Biggs. It’s like watching an SNL “Weekend Update” segment from a decade ago. You understand what the jokes mean — and they were probably funny at the time — but they don’t have any resonance anymore.

My 2001 review said this: “A parody of modern filmmaking that is itself a compelling example of it — a movie that has room to dish out criticism, because it can withstand the same when it’s flung back.” I laughed when I re-read that, because on the second viewing, I’d had exactly the opposite opinion.

Someone in the movie, objecting to the development of a film about Jay and Silent Bob, says that they’re “one-note jokes that only stoners laugh at.” There are many such meta-jokes sprinkled throughout the film, Smith’s way of responding to people who were skeptical about the idea of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Ideally, those skeptics are watching JASBSB and thinking, “Wow, this is actually pretty good. We stand corrected. Well played, Smith!”

But here’s what I was thinking: “Yeah, Kev, they ARE one-note jokes. Yeah, actually, there ISN’T enough material here for an entire movie. As a matter of fact, you should NOT have been nearly as confident about this as you were.”

I also kept thinking: “Why is every character in this movie — not just Jay and Silent Bob but EVERYONE — so obsessed with gay sex?” The entire run of Queer as Folk had fewer references to gay sex than this movie does. It isn’t that the jokes are offensive, but that they’re so numerous, suggesting that Smith has a very, very short list of things he thinks are funny and has to keep coming back to the same ones.

I counted four separate instances of characters making a wink-wink meta-joke and then turning to look directly at the camera — you know, in case we didn’t understand that “a Jay and Silent Bob movie? Feature length? Who’d pay to see that?” was a reference to THIS movie! The one we’re watching!! One of those bits might work. But four? Yeesh. It’s like the movie is so pleased with being self-referential that it can’t stop telling us how self-referential it is.

The humor is generally blunt and obvious in that way. For example, Mark Hamill shows up and has a light-saber fight with Jay and Silent Bob. It ends with his hand being sliced off — a joke that every single member of the audience gets immediately, because that’s what happened to Luke Skywalker. WE GET IT. Yet Smith underscores the joke by having Hamill say, “Not again!” Ugh.

Damon and Affleck’s goofy self-parody made me chuckle a little, as did Chris Rock’s turn as an angry director. My beloved Will Ferrell, for whom I have a confessed weakness, elicited what, two or three small laughs? How is that even possible??

Do I still love this movie?

Wow, no. The Hollywood parodies are dated and clunky, the central characters tiresome, the vulgarity mostly un-clever. The self-indulgence that I enjoyed 10 years ago because Smith was in his prime now just seems desperate and smug. I suspect that one’s satisfaction with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is dependent on one’s current level of fondness for Kevin Smith in general. Lapsed devotees like myself won’t find anything to re-convert them.

Grade: D

Re-Views: Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

For 10 years, my go-to answer when someone asks what’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen has been Freddy Got Fingered. There might be movies I’ve seen that were just as bad (especially since I started doing the Eric’s Bad Movies column), but I definitely can’t think of anything worse.

Vividly do I recall the screening. Many people walked out — and this was one of those free promotional screenings, where the crowd is filled with rubes and hobos who will watch ANYTHING as long as it’s free. There was much agonized writhing on the critics’ row (and, yes, even one walkout); afterward, we felt like we’d survived a harrowing trauma together, like the Oceanic 6 on Lost. (Fellow critic Sean Means after I recently brought it up and called us “shell-shocked survivors”: “I’ve seen some things, man.”) The reviews nationwide almost universally were not just negative but scathing. And despite Tom Green’s then-current popularity on MTV, audiences were likewise repelled by his movie. It opened in fifth place and sank like a stone from there.

But after a couple years a curious thing happened. People began to speak positively of Freddy Got Fingered. It developed a cult following. That happens to almost all bad movies, but Freddy Got Fingered was being championed by such estimable writers as the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin and IFC’s Vadim Rizov. That’s in addition to the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, the only major critic who gave the film a positive review right from the start.

These supporters don’t generally claim that the movie made them laugh uproariously from beginning to end. Instead, they describe it in terms of fascination: “It’s confrontational in a very real, near-avant-garde way” (Rizov). “It helps to see Fingered less as a conventional comedy than as a borderline Dadaist provocation, a $15 million prank at the studio’s expense” (Rabin). “The movie’s comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant” (Scott).

Clearly these writers saw something about the film that I didn’t, something beyond just “this is gross and not funny” and more fundamental about its very nature. In the back of my mind, I had always suspected that there was more to Freddy Got Fingered than I’d given it credit for. It’s just too bizarre, too single-mindedly excruciating, not to have been that way at least partially on purpose. Since I am brave, I ventured to give it another try.

What I said then: “Is Freddy Got Fingered the worst movie ever made? I don’t know; I haven’t seen every movie ever made. But of the couple thousand or so I have seen, there’s no contest. This is the worst. The film has a clear contempt for its audience…. The only reason [the character] would be acting this way would be if he were severely retarded…. We’ve seen outrageousness and crassness be funny before. It is not funny here. There are no characters to identify with. There is no underlying sweetness. There is no subtle good-natured outlook. There is only caustic ugliness…. Dull, insipid, horrific, uninspired, painful, ill-conceived, amateurish, embarrassing, foolish, moronic. These are the only printable words I can think of for Freddy Got Fingered. No, wait, I thought of some more. Vapid, boring, stupefying, unoriginal, cynical, illogical, slow-moving, malodorous and putrid. Do not, under any circumstances, see this movie.” Grade: F [complete review]

Here are my handwritten notes from the screening 10 years ago. Notice my very first observation about Green’s character.

The re-viewing: When people have defended the film directly to me, their accounts of enjoying it have shared the common theme of concurrent marijuana consumption. I do not doubt that this, or indeed almost any broad comedy, is more pleasant when the viewer is stoned, but that’s no way to conduct a serious professional experiment. We are scientists, dammit. I wasn’t under the influence of anything when I saw it in 2001, nor was I when I saw it last week.

The film certainly isn’t misleading. It’s barely 10 minutes old before Tom Green’s character, Gord Brody, stops by the side of the road to masturbate a horse, graphically, and for no narrative reason whatsoever. The message is clear: It’s gonna be that kind of movie. The kind of movie where that kind of thing happens. Whatever kind of movie that may be.

Over and over again, Green will set up a comedy bit and then fail (or refuse) to give it a punch line. Things happen randomly; they happen for a couple minutes; then they stop happening and we move on to something else. There is only the barest skeleton of a plot. Normally, a comedy writer might conceive a hilarious image — say, a guy swinging a newborn baby around by its umbilical cord — and then come up with the path that leads to it, the series of events that would plausibly culminate in such an outrageous act. Green ignores this and instead goes right to the insane images: swinging the baby around, playing a keyboard with sausages tied to his fingers, masturbating a horse, licking the exposed bone of man who has broken his leg, and so on, with no pretense of setup.

So the question is this: Does Green not understand how to make comedy, or does he understand the rules and is violating them on purpose? The chief difference between your illiterate Facebook friend and an avant-garde novelist is that the latter knows the rules of grammar and style and intentionally disregards them, and the former simply doesn’t know them.

The answer lies within the film itself. I was struck, as so many of us have been over the years, by the words of Anthony Michael Hall. He plays an animation-studio honcho to whom Gord has pitched his cartoon ideas. He says:

“Your drawings are pretty good. But it doesn’t make any sense. It’s f****** stupid. OK? What you need here is elevation. There actually has to be something that happens that’s actually funny. What the f*** is happening here?”

Since it’s unfathomable that Green included these lines in his screenplay without being aware that they also applied to his movie, let’s consider why he had a character address the film’s deficiencies so directly. It seems to me that they are not “deficiencies” in the sense of being mistakes, because Green is doing it on purpose. He understands comedy perfectly well and is deconstructing it.

For example, one of the hallmarks of comedy is slapstick. We laugh when somebody falls down. We don’t usually laugh, however, if it looks like the person has been injured. If it looks painful, we wince rather than laugh. Green plays with this throughout the movie. Gord’s buddy Darren (Harland Williams) skateboards down a ramp, falls — and shatters his leg in a horrific manner. He screams in agony, the bone protruding from the wound. The gore isn’t absurdly over-the-top (and thus still funny), as when Monty Python’s quaint picnic turns into a bloodbath. Instead, it’s gruesome and realistic. Green doesn’t expect us to laugh at the image. He expect us to be repulsed by it, and therefore to laugh at how inappropriate it was for the movie to feature it. The thing itself isn’t the joke; the joke is the fact that the thing was included in the film at all.

Similarly, there’s the running gag of the young neighbor boy who keeps being injured, always bloodily and painfully. Where we’d normally laugh at someone being hit in the face with a baseball, we’re aghast when this poor kid comes away screaming with a bloody mouth and chipped teeth. It could be that Green is criticizing the audience’s taste in humor — “You think it’s FUNNY when someone falls down?? I’ll show you what it REALLY looks like!” — but I doubt it. I think he’s just messing around with it, taking it apart to see if it still works, and demonstrating that it doesn’t. Why? I dunno. For fun?

But it gets even more meta. There are certain taboos in comedy. To name just a few, you’re not supposed to hurt kids (especially babies) or women, or make jokes about sexual molestation, or engage in bestiality. To disregard such taboos is to tread on dangerous ground, comedywise. The audience has to understand, first of all, that you KNOW it’s a taboo, and that you’re violating it intentionally. You also have to be extra-clever about it — an ordinary effort won’t do when you’re working uphill. I think Green is aware of all this, and in Freddy Got Fingered he completely ignores it. All those things (and more) are joked about, and never with any good reason or clever setup or comedy payoff. The film’s title comes from Gord’s baseless accusation that his father molested his younger brother — a plot point that doesn’t show up until halfway into the film, and then is quickly disregarded. So not only does Green violate the taboos, he violates the rules about how to violate the taboos.

There are also scenes of flat-out absurdity, like the one where Gord puts a suit on backwards and sings “Backwards Man,” or when he goes scuba-diving in the toilet. These fall into another category, one that’s somewhat more common: we laugh at the stupidity of it, and then laugh at the fact that we laughed at it. (For examples of this kind of thing that did a better job of it, see Hot Rod or The Brothers Solomon.)

One of my sticking points 10 years ago was the brief scene in which Gord gets a job at a cheese-sandwich factory and immediately starts behaving in an embarrassingly vulgar fashion in order to discomfit his fellow employees. It’s the kind of stunt Green did a lot of on his MTV shows. But there, he was himself, Tom Green, the cameras were hidden, and the witnesses were innocent bystanders. The laughs came from seeing their stunned reactions to Green’s unexplained nonsense. In the movie, Green is playing a character, and the people observing his idiocy are paid extras. In other words, Tom Green has a reason to act that way; Gord Brody doesn’t.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Green wanted to duplicate the kind of prank he did on his MTV show but failed to grasp that it wouldn’t work in this context, failed to understand that what makes it funny on TV is that the bystanders aren’t in on the joke. The other possibility is that Green knew it wouldn’t work and did it anyway. I’m inclined to think the second option is the truth. He took the comedy apart to see if it would still work, and demonstrated that it didn’t. Why? I dunno. For fun?

Do I still hate this movie? Well, yes. The fact that it’s irritating and tiresome on purpose doesn’t make it any more bearable. Whether someone hits you in the head with a hammer intentionally or by accident, either way, you still got hit in the head with a hammer. But I do understand the film better now, and as a comedy nerd I can appreciate — notice I do not say enjoy — Green’s bizarre experiment. Just as I wouldn’t recommend Birth of a Nation to anyone but the most hardcore students of film history (or racists), I wouldn’t recommend Freddy Got Fingered to anyone but the most devoted students of the comedic arts (or stoned people). Grade as a source of entertainment: F. Grade as an experiment: C

Re-Views: Gladiator

Remember what it was like in the summer of 2000, with everyone walking around saying “Are you not entertained?!” and “That vexes me. I am terribly vexed” all the time? Those were the days. Gladiator was the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year, and it won Best Picture at the Oscars, too — a combination of popular success and Academy acclaim that is rarer than you might think.

I was among the majority of critics who gave Gladiator a positive review when it opened, on May 5, 2000. I put it on my top 10 list for the year (No. 8) and bought the DVD. And yet I never got around to watching it a second time. I’ve had that DVD for 11 years and never put it in the DVD player until now.

What I said then: “The film is so enthralling — so gosh-darned ENTERTAINING, to use an old-fashioned, non-film-critic word — that 2 1/2 hours seems like nothing. It’s a classic-style epic story of heroism, loyalty and bravery, with Russell Crowe delivering a stand-up-and-cheer performance…. The film is visually arresting…. More important are the great performances from Crowe and Phoenix…. Maximus’s journey from general to slave to gladiator to hero makes for a wonderfully moving film. Action movies and gladiator movies have not garnered much respect before, but Gladiator‘s depth and humanity make the whole thing seem legit.” Grade: A [complete review]

The re-viewing: The reason widescreen movies were invented in the first place was to lure people away from their TVs by giving something they couldn’t get at home. This became a problem when VCRs showed up, because suddenly people were trying to watch, on their TVs, movies that were specifically meant NOT to be watched on TVs.

The situation has improved since the days of giant, clunky VCRs, and even since the dawn of the digital era (which wasn’t all that long ago). The picture quality on the products themselves is better, and TVs are shaped like movie screens, the better to hold the wide, rectangular images. But while we like to claim that our home entertainment systems are every bit as good as a movie theater, that’s not actually true for the vast majority of us. You’ll notice the difference on the rare occasion that you go to a theater with a giant screen, a state-of-the-art sound system, and top-notch projection. You can approximate that at home, but you can’t duplicate it exactly, not unless your home can accommodate a 50-foot screen.

I think Gladiator might be the type of film that suffers from being scaled down. Even on the ol’ 46-inch plasma flatscreen accompanied by DTS Digital Surround Sound, it’s not as grand, not as epic as it was in the theater. I think this, in turn, is because the story’s emotional core — the human side — is superficial. When the bells and whistles that bolster it are diminished, that lack of depth becomes more noticeable.

It is a rousing tale, though. Everything is set up for maximum satisfaction. Maximus’ wife and son are not just murdered but brutally murdered; Commodus is not just villainous but an incestuous coward to boot; Maximus is very good at killing people but only does so when he is absolutely obligated. The film is very much like the gladiator contests it depicts: you give the audience a simple narrative with clear heroes and villains, and make sure the good guys win while delivering plenty of blood.

I was intrigued this time by the film’s commentary on what makes a good gladiator: It’s not just killing your opponent; it’s killing him in a manner that will entertain the audience. Maximus complains that he’s a prisoner, “with the power only to amuse a mob.” Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) replies: “That IS power.” And she has a point. Whoever can entertain the rowdy masses can wield tremendous influence. Just ask Michael Bay.

Do I still love this movie? I think “like” is a more appropriate term. It’s a perfectly good adrenaline-pumping rah-rah adventure, and fine popcorn fodder. And there’s nothing wrong with that! But it doesn’t do much to transcend the genre into the realm of true greatness. Grade: B+

Re-Views: Not Another Teen Movie

Comedy is hard to execute, and even harder to review. All opinions are subjective, obviously, but I feel it especially with comedies. What makes me laugh might not make you laugh. What strikes me as unfunny today might seem hilarious five years from now, a month from now, even an hour from now. Your sense of humor is shaped by your subconscious, your expectations, your previous comedy experiences, your previous life experiences — it’s basically the sum of who you are, and it’s unique to each individual. You and your best friend might seem to laugh at all the same things, but I guarantee that’s not literally true, not 100 percent of the time.

Now, there’s a lot of overlap in people’s senses of humor, of course. That’s why certain comedians, TV shows, and movies are popular, because they make sizable groups of people laugh. But to paraphrase an old saying, you can make some people laugh all the time, and you can make all people laugh some of the time, but you can’t make all the people laugh all the time.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve pretty much reversed my opinion of Not Another Teen Movie.

What I said then: “[It] does a fine job mimicking the common plot devices and stock characters of teen movies … but has no idea how to make fun of them. It thinks that re-creating events from famous movies is the same thing as ‘parody’ or ‘satire.’… Not Another Teen Movie is, in fact, just another teen movie…. This one is stupid, obvious, unfunny, desperate and insulting — even for people who like teen movies. It was a great idea for a parody, but it was handled just about as badly as it could have been.” Grade: D-

Whew! That was a scorcher, no? The one thing that saved it from getting an F (which I cited in the review) was the out-of-nowhere musical number. Otherwise, I appear to have hated this thing.

(Hey, look what I found! It’s my notepad from December 2001, with the actual notes I took during the screening! These notes are far more detailed than what I usually jot down. It would appear that I was so fed up with the movie that I started writing the review while I was still watching it.)

I had plenty of company in disliking it. Rotten Tomatoes reports that just 28% of reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4 out of 10. Metacritic has the average critic rating at 32 out of 100. It performed reasonably well at the box office, though, opening in third place and eventually making $38 million in the U.S. That’d be about $52 million at today’s ticket prices, a Hall Pass or The Dilemma-sized modest success.

The re-viewing: I didn’t realize until it was too late that the DVD I was watching was the super awesome mega extended director’s cut, or whatever. At 99 minutes, it was 17 minutes longer than the theatrical version. I have no idea what was added. So this isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s close enough. More like an apples-to-bigger-apples comparison.

Anyway, I was instantly amused by Ricky (Eric Jungmann), the platonic best friend who wears a fedora and dresses in the “look how much of an individual I am!” style. His appearance and demeanor are dead-on imitations of that stock character from other movies (and, indeed, from that stock character in real life). He doesn’t do much in the way of satiric exaggeration — but since that type of character hadn’t entered my mind recently, just having it recreated so accurately was enough to make me laugh.

Jaime Pressly, who went on to fame in My Name Is Earl, is consistently funny as Priscilla, the shrewish cheerleader. She’s mostly on hand to parody Bring It On (a movie that is funnier than this one, so spoofing it is risky), and I’d always remembered her big line: “Oh, it’s already been broughten.” When the lily-white Priscilla vehemently denies stealing a routine from the black North Compton cheerleaders, I knew what the punchline was going to be: Priscilla would do her routine, and it would have elements that obviously brand it as belonging to North Compton. I was unprepared, however, for the specificity of it: “We are the North Compton wild cats. We’re black, we know it. We shake our big booties and we show it. We ain’t white. We ain’t white. We definitely ain’t white. Break it down n***as.” That’s broad, mildly offensive, and absurdly funny.

I believe Not Another Teen Movie is where we found Chris Evans, who went on to be the guy on fire in Fantastic Four and is about to be Captain America. My 2001 review suggested no one in the cast performed with any distinction, but this time I found Evans’ cheerful dumbness entertaining. There’s that relatively famous scene (a spoof of Varsity Blues) in which Evans tries to seduce a girl by entering the room with whipped cream covering his private parts. Before that happens, though, when he’s still fully clothed, he jauntily exits the room to go prepare, and as he does so he does a little leap and clicks his heels together. That small touch of whimsy cracked me up, and it perfectly encapsulates his likable, stupid character.

I still think the movie, apart from a few gems here and there, isn’t very clever in its satire. Most of the laughs are from pure silliness, rather than from mocking the tropes of teen movies. There are plenty of scenes that aren’t funny at all, where a joke is belabored to the point of tedium.

But I find myself having changed my opinion on so many specifics. In 2001, I criticized the movie for making fun of American Pie‘s bathroom humor while also indulging in it. But the scene with the explosive toilet is intercut with an English teacher lecturing his students on how modern humor has gotten so crass and vulgar. The movie knows exactly what it’s doing there; how did I miss that?

I also faulted it for trying to mock both classic ’80s teen comedies as well as recent ones. I can see how the blending of old and new might have been an awkward fit at the time, and I still think NATM dates itself by including too many specific references to then-hot-but-now-forgotten films like Cruel Intentions and Varsity Blues. But now, in 2011, the ’80s comedies and the late ’90s ones are ALL old. The Breakfast Club homages blend right in with the American Pie spoofs, because they’re all part of the same crazy quilt of memory now. There’s no conflict.

And that’s ultimately why I think the movie worked so much better for me now than it did then: the passage of time. I’ve had a decade to forget all the current films it was referencing, so seeing them recreated faithfully — and by such an upbeat, game-for-anything cast — didn’t feel like a simple-minded retread; it felt like comedy. It hadn’t occurred to me before that it might be easier to parody something we haven’t thought about in a while than it is to parody something that’s on everyone’s minds right now. We’re more likely to be caught by surprise (the essence of comedy) when the targets seem to come from out of nowhere, rather than from last month’s box office top 10.

Do I still hate this movie? I do not! I rather like it, actually. It’s not a great comedy by any means — it does have scenes and subplots that fall completely flat — but I’d easily call it a “good” one. Grade: B-

Re-Views: Man on the Moon

As far as I know, this Andy Kaufman biopic is the only movie to be based on an R.E.M. song. But I would definitely be interested in a movie version of “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

What I said then: “Man on the Moon stumbles awkwardly in some minor areas, but still manages to convey in fascinating terms the oddness of Andy Kaufman’s life…. Jim Carrey … has never committed himself so deeply to a role…. It retells Andy’s public life but gives almost no insight whatsoever into his private life. Why make the movie if you’re not going to say anything?… It’s highly entertaining … but as a biography, it’s about as insightful as a guy lip-synching the Mighty Mouse theme.” Grade: A-

Ugh, I’m a moron. Or rather, I was a moron in 1999. I’m really smart now. A rookie movie critic in those days, I tended to be rather promiscuous with my A’s and A-’s. Basically, if I enjoyed a movie and didn’t notice anything particularly wrong with it, I gave it an A. If there were a couple of minor flaws in an otherwise entertaining film, it got an A-. Over time I adjusted my philosophy to where a movie like that — good, solid, enjoyable, well-made — is a B or B+. Higher grades are reserved for the films that go the extra mile, the ones that don’t just avoid doing anything wrong but provoke what Roger Ebert calls “an ineffable tingle at the base of my spine.”

But even by my lax standards of the time, my Man on the Moon review reads like a B, not an A-. Half the review is about the film’s shortcomings and weaknesses. If they were “minor,” as I said, why did I spend so many words talking about them? How did I write that review, re-read it, and then decide, “Yep, that’s an A-”? Like I said, I was a moron. You probably shouldn’t trust anything I said prior to the 21st century.

Man in the Moon came at a pivotal time in Jim Carrey’s career. After breaking out in the 1990s as an over-the-top comedy performer, he’d gotten rave reviews (and a Golden Globe) for his more nuanced and dramatic performance in The Truman Show. Now he was following it up with what seemed like a perfect opportunity to gain critical respect and perhaps even Oscar consideration. Man on the Moon was a biopic of a famous person; released in prime Oscar-bait season (late December); and directed by Academy Award winner Milos Forman, who’d made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, and The People vs. Larry Flynt.

As it turned out, Man on the Moon only fared so-so with critics, with a few raves, a few pans, and a lot of eh, it’s all rights. (The Metacritic average is 58 out of 100; it’s 62% positive at Rotten Tomatoes.) It performed marginally at the box office. Carrey won another Golden Globe, and the film was nominated for best comedy or musical (it’s not really either), but who cares about Golden Globes? Man on the Moon didn’t get a single Oscar nomination, and now Carrey is acting opposite CGI penguins.

The re-viewing: Carrey really is terrific as Andy Kaufman, at least in terms of impersonating his voice and mannerisms. In terms of helping us understand what made Kaufman tick, he’s a bust — but I think that’s attributable to the screenplay (by the guys who wrote Problem Child! OK, and also The People vs. Larry Flynt), which doesn’t give any insight. And maybe there was none to give. Kaufman’s longtime friend and collaborator Bob Zmuda (played by Paul Giamatti) was an executive producer on the film. If he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) help Carrey, Forman, and the screenwriters understand Kaufman, nobody could. Perhaps providing a biography of a man best known for being an enigma was a fool’s errand to begin with.

The re-enactments of Kaufman’s famous public incidents are fun to watch, with fairly accurate re-creations of the Saturday Night Live, Taxi, and Late Night with David Letterman sets, and excellent mimicking of Kaufman’s behavior. Kaufman’s first appearance on SNL (on the show’s first episode) is on Netflix Instant, and clips of the Jerry Lawler/David Letterman fight are on YouTube. That wasn’t the case in 1999; moviegoers couldn’t easily compare Man on the Moon‘s versions with the originals. I think the slight differences are fascinating. For example, in the movie’s depiction of the SNL appearance, Kaufman stands there silently before playing the Mighty Mouse record for much, much longer than he actually did — obviously, this creates tension over whether Kaufman will bomb on national television.

Norm Macdonald appears as a cast member of Fridays, ABC’s short-lived SNL ripoff on which Kaufman was a guest. I didn’t realize until now that Macdonald wasn’t just playing some forgotten Fridays performer — he was playing Michael Richards! Interesting tidbit: Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Man on the Moon, next wrote and directed Norm Macdonald’s Screwed. Also, in that Fridays scene, the producer Kaufman gets into a fight with is played by the real Bob Zmuda. Trivia!

Do I still love this movie? It would be more accurate to say I never loved it in the first place. The second viewing, 11 1/2 years later, held plenty of entertainment value for me, and I’m more intrigued by Kaufman’s avant-garde style of anti-comedy now than I was then. For that reason, I wish even more ardently that we could get a feel for what went on in Kaufman’s batty head. As an “inside Hollywood” backstage story, though, Man on the Moon is above average. Grade: B

Re-Views: Kung Pow: Enter the Fist

It seems strange to rave about how terrific a movie is and then never watch it a second time. There are perfectly logical reasons why things turn out that way, but it sounds backwards, you know?

There is no such paradox with a movie you hated. I’ve never re-watched the vast majority of the films that I’ve given F and D- reviews over the years, because why would I? I’m fascinated and often amused by bad movies, sure, but once is usually enough.

But many of the movies I’ve loathed have defenders. Not idiot defenders like all movies have (“TRANSFORMERS REVENGE OF THE FALLEN WUZ AWESOM U R TO OLD TO GET IT!!”) but actual supporters. Some of these films have developed cult followings of viewers who genuinely, non-ironically consider them quality entertainment. These people see something in these movies that I didn’t — and that intrigues me. We saw the same movie. Why does it work for them but not for me?

So on alternate weeks in this new Re-Views column, I’ll give a second chance to a movie I hated the first time. Who knows how my opinion might shift when the viewings are several years apart? Who knows what triggers might go off that didn’t fire the first time? There’s also the chance I’ll hate it even more the second time, which might be fun in its own way.

First up: Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

What I said then: “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist has a marvelous premise but fails completely due to some fundamental misunderstandings of the ways of comedy…. Having the mouths out of sync with the words is funny … but not forever. Giving the characters silly voices is funny … but not forever. Nearly every joke goes beyond the realm of humor and into the realm of being over-done. It’s the perfect example of a movie that should have been 15 minutes long.” Grade: F

It seemed like all the world agreed with me. At Rotten Tomatoes, only 11 percent of the reviews are considered positive, and the overall average rating is 2.8 out of 10 — which means the people who didn’t like it really didn’t like it. Nobody was lukewarm on this thing. The box office was appropriately low, topping off at about $17 million.

The re-viewing: The main problem the first time around, and the focus of my review nine years ago, was that the movie’s premise is unclear. It purports to be a comical re-dubbing of an obscure kung fu flick from the 1970s, with writer/director Steve Oedekerk digitally inserted into the action. But then it has scenes that are obviously new, made from scratch, so seamlessly integrated with the old stuff that it’s almost impossible to tell which is which. Those new scenes, like the old ones, have the actors’ mouths out of sync with their words … except now it’s intentional. And it doesn’t really work, comedy-wise, to make fun of “mistakes” that you put there just so they could be made fun of. The human funny bone recognizes such chicanery, and rebels against it.

For the second viewing, I tried to disregard such matters and just let the jokes wash over me. The common direction to “just turn your brain off!” is nonsensical, not to mention impossible without the aid of foreign substances, but I vowed to be as forgiving and easy-going as possible.

It didn’t really work.

The flaws I fixated on originally didn’t bug me as much this time. Instead, I was struck by what a sloppy conceptual mess it is overall. Some scenes are straight-up re-dubbing, replacing the original dialogue with silly stuff. Then there’s a scene where the Steve Oedekerk character does battle with a CGI cow, and one where he talks to a James Earl Jones-ish spirit in the sky, a la The Lion King. (Yes, a Lion King parody is best when you do it eight years after everyone else, and for no good reason.) Sometimes the humor is based solely on the fact that the people doing the dubbing are talking in funny voices. Other times there’s legitimate satire of the original movie’s incompetence, with jokes about how a character’s shirt changes color in the middle of a scene. There’s a surreal running gag about Oedekerk’s tongue having a face of its own. The movie’s trying to do several very different things all at once, and as a result none of them quite work.

Given all this, I was surprised by how much I laughed, i.e., that I laughed at all. A few bits of silliness made me chuckle, even guffaw once or twice. If Oedekerk — who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in it — had narrowed it down to one unified concept, it could have worked very well. Probably just as a 10-minute short, not an 82-minute feature, but still. It had potential.

Do I still hate this movie? No, I’ve backed off from my original “hate” assessment. Parts of it are agonizingly pointless and unfunny, but most of it is either harmless or even mildly amusing. I’m still glad they never followed through on the threat to make a sequel, though. Grade: C-