Day: March 4, 2012

Last night Walter Hill‘s Streets of Fire had its most recent midnight showing at the New Beverly. It’s been 28 years since I’ve seen it. The only thing I remember apart from the ’50s/’80s dichotomy and how Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe looked is the slogan. Not because it’s catchy, but because of how producer Joel Silver spun it when Streets bombed on opening weekend: “Tonight is what it means to be dead.”

That is arguably one of the greatest lines ever spoken by a Hollywood producer about anything, ever. When they write Silver’s obit it will definitely be included within the first five or six graphs.

Streets of Fire‘s budget of $14,500,000 was fairly sizable back then. The rule of tripling your opening weekend gross to break even meant it had to make at least $5 million over its first three days. It made about half that ($2,426,000), and ended up with a grand domestic total of just over $8 million. Obviously a failure but not exactly a staggering or historic one. Nonetheless, Silver’s line (which was reported by John Richardson in a Premiere profile called “The Selznick of Schlock” that ran in the early ’90s) stuck.

This color short of the Three Stooges, uploaded on 2.24.12, was shot by vaudevillian and photographer George Mann at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in the summer of 1938. The routine instantly dies, of course, when the hot girl (Mann’s wife Barbara) fails to slap Moe and Larry with any real pizazz. The Stooges were the original “no laugh funny” guys if you were older than ten.

It always helps to be reminded that life actually manifested in color in the 1930s. It’s easy to let yourself believe that everybody and everything existed in black and white back then.

Why isn’t there 16mm color film of Howard Hawks directing Cary Grant and Jean Arthur during the making of Only Angels Have Wings (which was underway right around this time)? Or any other big-studio filmmakers working on any noteworthy films? Why do we have to settle for the Stooges?

This is one of the greatest “no laugh funny” films ever made. I can watch it over and over and never make a sound, and discover something fresh about it every time. I actually laughed out loud three or four times when I first saw it 12 and 1/2 years ago, but only at the odd stuff like (a) Orson Bean‘s scenes, (b) John Cusack slowly tongue-mouthing his way toward guessing Catherine Keener‘s name and (c) Mary Kay Place mis-hearing things.

Charlie Kaufman will never write anything like Being John Malkovich ever again. He was at a very particular place in the mid ’90s that led him to the sucking-mud-tunnel concept and being coughed out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and all that, but he’ll never, ever find that particular kind of inspiration ever again. He’s creatively moved on and become a hot-shot director, the culture has moved on, we’ve all moved on…nevermore.

The Criterion Bluray is out May 15th. Meaning that I’ll be begging Criterion to slip me a review copy before I leave for Cannes, etc.

Safe House, Phantom Menace 3D, The Vow, Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance, Act of Valor, Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. Take Safe House off the list and none of these films are worth writing home about, and yet they’ve all made exceptional coin. There’s always been an aesthetic disconnect between Joe Popcorn and people like myself, but it seems much more pronounced recently. These are the February-March doldrums. I’m levitating with pride over my complete disinterest in The Lorax, which made $70 million this weekend.

I rarely make a sound when something is funny. I laugh inwardly for the most part, and I’m fine with that. I’ve sincerely praised many films (i.e., Greenberg) for being “no laugh funny.” But Saturday Night Live‘s humor is rarely even that. I don’t even titter inwardly. The writers are obviously sharp and clever and attuned to the culture but all the performers do in these skits is portray smug, clueless and/or arrogant assholes by way of tabloid fixtures and cultural stereotypes.

Here’s how I put in September 2009: “I almost prefer the kind of comedy that is clearly coming from a place of modest merriment (perverse or otherwise) but which you don’t really laugh at. Call them smirkers or half-chortlers or simply no-laugh comedies. Films that seem to float along on a charged-attitude high — a frame of mind that’s clearly dispensing amusement but not quite to the point of inspiring audible reactions. (Except from those awful people in theatres who laugh too loudly and too often.)

“And I’m not talking about flagantly and painfully unfunny films like The Year One, any of the Rush Hour movies, any of the ‘comedies’ by the Wayans brothers, anything starring Anna Faris or Will Ferrell or anything like Duplex or Rumor Has It or Gigli or what-have-you. I’m talking about movies that know what they’re doing and have a fine sense of dry humor but aren’t actually ‘funny.'”

Having read and seriously pondered the thoughts of Rush Limbaugh and particularly HE commenters “Moo Type” and “Duluoz Gray” in response to yesterday’s “First Draft,” I’ve come to realize that perhaps lefty liberals do look the other way while wanton sluts disrobe and hyperventilate and moan with pleasure as they writhe on top of men they’re not married to. But deep down what angers the right is that the p.c. left has condoned slutty behavior to the extent that it’s not slutty anymore.

“Is sex dirty?” Woody Allen was once asked. “It is if you do it right,” he replied. This, I suspect, is what the right longs for more than anything else. They miss having genuinely dirty sex, which can only be enjoyed with an actual slut (as opposed to, say, your wife pretending to be a loose woman as part of a role-playing thing that some couples do to spice things up). They miss the scent of sordid atmospheres and the taste of forbidden pleasures. They want their sex lives to resemble a 1958 Samuel Fuller film.

As Limbaugh indicated when he said Sandra Fluke should provide video sex tapes if her contraception is going to be paid for by the government and/or taxpayers, what these righties are really saying is that they miss the time when sluts actually walked the streets in see-through blouses and gave them hard-ons like they’ve never known since, before liberals spoiled everything by giving sluts a hug and telling them there’s no such thing as slutty behavior and “you go, girl…have a contraceptive.”

Righties are always…okay, often about “golly gee gosh” and pretending to follow Christian white-bread tradition on the surface (i.e., offering lip-surface loyalty to same), but indulging in dark, creepy, cum-stainy behavior in back alleys and cheap motels when no one’s looking. They can’t get themselves off in an open-hearted liberal way — they need to feel guilty about it or it’s no good. The righties long for the days when sluts were sluts and guys like Dulouz Gray and Moo Type occasionally knew the foul, perverted pleasure of coveting sluts and sometimes flirting with them and taking them out to dinner and then taking them back to their rundown apartments and doing things that their straightlaced, God-fearing wives would never consider, much less condone.

Righty males are too screwed up and twisted around to admit it (or even realize it) but that’s what they really want. They want sluts back to be part of the culture again (along with Confidential and Police Gazette magazine) and they hate the left for taking sluttiness away.