Category Archives: bad comedy

Episode 73: Real Genius (1985, Martha Coolidge) / My Science Project (1985, Jonathan R. Beutel)

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In this episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast, we party like its 1985 and try to keep our intellectual hats on – much like the authors of our two films, Real Genius and My Science Project. As discussed in our Revenge of the Nerds episode, there was a formative period in the decade of Reagan towards the social acceptance and respect for geeky, gawky intellectuals, at least so far as they could get down and party like the rest of us. This bra bomb better work, Nerdlinger!

Real Genius has built a considerable reputation as a cult comedy classic, surprisingly so, in that the film was not a financial success at the time and remains relatively unknown today. However, most everyone who has seen one or two scenes of Val Kilmer retains fond memories of his peak comic abilities, cast in the mold of the Bill Murray anarchic-slacker archetype who has ruled movie comedies arguably until present day.

Kilmer represents the best that archetype can be in Real Genius, a smart aleck who is actually smart, loves the ladies, defends the underdogs, and is not opposed to authority per se, but to authority figures like William Atherton who – whaddya know – was also a dickish authority figure in Ghostbusters the year prior.

Real Genius also was ahead of its time to the degree that some of the nerds in the film are quirky in ways that are true to life, rather than possessing cheap sitcom quirk, whether they’re Michelle Meyrink’s OCD nerdette or Robert Prescott as the bully-nerd Kent. Gabriel Jarret’s main character is also a sensitively portrayed wimp, and he probably hates Val Kilmer forever (geddit) for stealing the show and taking center stage on the awful theatrical poster, which misconstrues the film as some kind of madcap yuppie misadventure.

From a smart film pretending to be dumb to vice versa, My Science Project is a film with a lot of confidence and no brains whatsoever to get in the way of Fisher Stevens. Released by Touchstone, the story definitely has a kind of Disney-esque whimsy that could have made an entertaining movie for kids in more competent hands. Unfortunately, writer-director Jonathan R. Betuel of “The Last Starfighter” writing fame (and “Theodore Rex” infamy to come) doesn’t seem to know whom he’s making the movie for, let alone why his own film even needs to exist.

The main characters are high schoolers with less believable personalities than the cast of Saved By The Bell and despite the film’s Ghostbusters inspired poster promising a special effects extravaganza, the titular science project doesn’t begin to go haywire until halfway through the run time. Which means there’s plenty of time for the one-dimensional characters to twiddle their thumbs as Dennis Hopper earns a paycheck and star John Stockwell wishes he were still being chased by Christine.

All this, plus a tyrannosaurus rex (Bethuel really likes dinosaurs), props for the underrated Jonathan Gries (a basement dweller in Real Genius), and serious consideration of how special effects usually hurt comedies rather than help them in this young, fast and scientific episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast.

NEXT EPISODE: SUPERGIRL (1984, JEANNOT SZWARC) AUDIO COMMENTARY TRACK!

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Episode 72: Mannequin Two: On The Move (1991, Stewart Raffill) audio commentary track

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This week on An Alan Smithee Podcast we return to a magnificent obsession that began with our first good-movie / bad-movie episode, the wonderful world of Mannequin. In keeping with that milestone, this is also our first non-special commentary track. Yes, we just did one for Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 but that was for Christmas and this isn’t for National William Ragsdale Appreciation Month or anything.

The first Mannequin is sort of fondly remembered by pubescent fans of the very non-threatening Andrew McCarthy. What pubescent girl is going to dream of William Ragsdale? This is an important question as the target audience for the McCarthy-less Mannequin Two surely must have been undiscriminating girls being taken by their moms to the Saturday matinee. Or Andrew Wickliffe, whom it turns out was at such a screening in the unholy year of 1991. Even Kim Cattrall knew to stay away from this one, much to the chagrin of Crow T. Robot, since she can always brighten up dark stains on cinema like City Limits or Split Second. Or not.

Among topics discussed in the film’s excruciating 95 minutes are consumerist fantasies, 80s teen heartthrobs, Comedy Central’s movie programming in the 1990s, the city of Kill-adelphia, the awful filmography of Stewart Raffill, Meshach Taylor’s courageous portrayal of African-American Homosexual-American “Hollywood” Montrose, Terry Kiser’s awfulness, real dolls, the semantics of Two/Too/2 in the titles of unrelated 80s sequels, excising homosexuality through film editing, the lamented career of Zach Galligan, and much much more!

NEXT WEEK: WHIZ KIDS OF 1985 DOUBLE FEATURE! MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985, JONATHAN R. BETUEL) / REAL GENIUS (1985, MARTHA COOLIDGE)

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Episode 71: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, Alfred Hitchcock) / The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997, Jon Amiel)

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In the several most recent episodes of An Alan Smithee Podcast, Andrew and myself have agreed to pairings of films that actually made sense. No more pairings of Mannequin 1: Not Yet On The Move and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but rather the clean through-line of Poltergeist with Poltergeist II: The Other Side, or even Roger Rabbit with Cool World. This week’s episode is a dip back into the slough of disparate. You’ll have to forgive us simply because this pairing of titles was too convivial to resist. Most conveniently, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a very darn well made piece of entertainment while The Man Who Knew Too Little is an unmitigated piece of shit. The extended suffix to both of these lengthy titles could have been, “about filmmaking.”

In keeping with the spiring of Hitchcock, I confess the shift in An Alan Smithee podcast’s format was brought about just as much by frustration connecting the themes, ideas or incidental details of unrelated movies in these write-ups as the desire to increase listenership through coherence in discussion. Yet as seems to happen, there’s more in common with two marginally related movies – i.e, they were actual movies that were once made, like The Stranger and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back – than at first glance. The Man Who Knew Too Little is not a parody of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Bill Murray’s vehicle had several arbitrary possibilities for a title bandied about, the most charming of which was probably the official German title, Agent Null Null Nix.

The face of each respective film, Alfred Hitchcock and Bill Murray, were on the precipice of a dark turn. In Hitch’s case, this film and North By Northwest were his last “family entertainment” films, if you’ll pardon the hacky marketing term. The Man Who Knew Too Much even stars a young boy and makes the reunion with his mother (played by Doris Day, ’nuff said) the emotional core of the narrative, even after Jimmy “James” Stewart has finished uselessly chasing the kidnappers. Compare this benignly oedipal comfort food a moment to several of Hitchcock’s next films: the obsessive insanity of Vertigo, the original oedipal slasher Psycho, and The Birds wasn’t exactly family viewing either.

Then there’s the trouble with Billy. A goodly portion of our discussion is devoted to deconstructing Murray since there’s so little to consider within The Man Who Knew Too Little except that it was his last attempt to remain a star in the American comedy mainstream. It’s like when Steve Martin decided early to switch to safe family comedies instead of being funny. In 1998 he starred in Rushmore, which is a great movie but marked the continuing fluctuation between indie™ Oscar bait and godawful paydays like Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties. Bill Murray is more popular than ever, even though he’s never been less funny.

Simultaneously and possibly unintentionally by Murray, hipster syndicates anointed him the funniest living man in America and a pop-art icon, like Marilyn Monroe in the hands of Andy Warhol. You’ll hear our conclusions regarding this phenomena, but as you read these words consider the angle that Bill Murray’s deification by hipsters as the greatest comic actor in history rests upon the same film as any normal person’s recollection of Murray – that air thin miracle Ghostbusters – and every hipster wishes they could be Dr. Peter Venkman, a dryly sarcastic and emotionally barren asshole who nonetheless has all the best lines and ultimately gets the girl after her first impression of him is that of a total creep.

NEXT WEEK: MANNEQUIN 2: ON THE MOVE: THE COMMENTARY TRACK!

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Episode 66: She Done Him Wrong (1933, Lowell Sherman) / Sextette (1978, Ken Hughes)

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This may well be the worst episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast since the last worst episode. That alone should make for required listening. We are defeated by overestimating the entertainment value of a Hollywood “legend” whose golden years may not have been all that amusing, even in what is considered to be her best film.

The icon is Mae “Come Up And See Me Sometime” West, and the nominally good film is She Done Him Wrong (1933). By the time we get to the more auspiciously dire swan song Sextette (1978) our spirits are already broken and discussing the not-so-fine art of double entendres becomes insult to injury.

West’s life would probably make a better film than any films of her own. West worked her way up in vaudeville, rebelling against stuffy social bigotry and sexual repression like every other young punk in the 1920s and crafting the stage persona she came to be known for onscreen: a brassy, wisecracking maneater who dominated and manipulated all those around her and constantly joked between the lines about her sexual prowess. This proto-post-feminist shtick was heady stuff for the time, as were her drag queen inspired fashion choices and shimmy-shawobble hip movements inspired by black nightclub dancers.

What’s headier to think of today is that West was thought of as a sexual object of desire and not merely a comedian – which is exactly how she liked it. People come to see her on Vaudeville for the raunchy laughs while her nudity-free act let her revel in skits and songs about her sexual power as a universally irresistible man magnet. She wasn’t the most attractive broad in show business but there wasn’t yet an official middle ground between glamourous and funny women performers. Women weren’t even legally ruled funny by the Supreme Court until 1927. Her breakout Broadway play Diamond Lil was a saucy melodrama set in the “Gay 90s” at the turn of the century, and by the end of the roaring twenties everyone in New York knew of West.

When she arrived in Hollywood, Diamond Lil was prepared for the screen as She Done Him Wrong, much to the consternation of the Hays censorship office who’d already caught wind of West’s reputation. This was a big factor in my urging of the film as West’s “good” movie for Alan Smithee Podcast – if the Hays office hated it, it must be good, right? Joe Bob Briggs even featured it in his book of essays on sexually liberating milestones in film, Profoundly Erotic. I can’t blame him for recognizing the cultural significance of Mae West and her best known work outside of My Little Chickadee with W.C. Fields, but he should have affixed the same warning that he gave Blood Feast in the similar tome Profoundly Disturbing – this film is more fun to talk about than it is to actually watch.

At just over an hour, She Done Him Wrong crawls like a snail. A film so short shouldn’t need musical numbers but there’s almost as much padding as the inside of Mae’s girdle. The story revolves around her headliner status at an 1890s saloon and dancing hall, which means the songs featured were considered kind of corny even in 1933. Mae’s songs are about as sexy as a slow ready of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.”

You can count the number of sets on your hand as the obviously stagebound nature of the original play relegates everything to either mustachioed fops onstage or West hamming it up with cocktail napkin quality zingers in her private backstage boudoir. Some of her come-ons are directed at young Cary Grant, who had acted in a few prior films including Blonde Venus with Marlene Dietrich, but whom West would claim “discovery” of for the rest of her life.

Mae West’s life after She Done Him Wrong was an experiment in aging timelessness. Far ahead of the cultural curve, West was absorbed into collective consciousness almost immediately by cartoons, quotations and parody. By the 1940s she was already considered old hat and muzzled by stricter Hays Code regulations on the depiction of promiscuity. She left Hollywood, making sporadic television appearances over the years and otherwise supporting herself with live performances around the world. At some point the warm tide of nostalgia that made W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers hip again revived interest in and respect for her libertine overtones and she returned to film Gore Vidal’s other infamous contribution to cinema besides Caligula (previously discussed in this episode), the infamous Myra Breckinridge (1970). At the age of 77, her looks and timing obviously weren’t what they once were, which is why it may have taken another eight years before two young, eager and likely homosexual fans from Crown International Pictures approached her about filming her last attempt at Broadway, the 1961 farce Sextette.

There are two forces at work in Sextette which have rightfully qualified the film for previous inclusion on “Razzie Award” lists of “the worst films ever made” and the like. The first is obviously that West is, uh, not well. She’s playing herself the only way she can, far past not only the cultural expiration date of her act but that of her corporeal husk. This results in line readings of corny innuendo with pauses so awkward, rumors have persisted for years that she was being fed her lines through earpiece microphones under her wig. This leads to some real ickiness between her and Timothy Dalton, giving his all as her newest husband (the sixth) who can’t wait to make the kind of proper Englishman love to West that she hasn’t had since Cary Grant.

The film would’ve been enough of a mess with her running around on Dalton while occasionally stopping for disco-infused songs. Elevating the film the true clusterbomb status is the gaggle of guest stars playing West’s former husbands who all happen to be staying in her honeymoon hotel, with great wackiness and misunderstanding. The guest star ensemble method of casting had reached a tacky nadir by the late 70s and Sextette combines vintage 70s celebrity scenery chewers sprinkled with West’s geriatric Hollywood pals doing her a favor: Keith Moon AND Ringo Starr, George Hamilton, Tony Curtis, Walter Pidgeon, Alice Cooper, George Raft and who else but Dom Deluise as West’s right hand man. Some acquit themselves admirably, like Dalton. Deluise sings and dances on a piano.

Unfunny comedies are hard to appreciate even if they’re historically significant. Our next attempt to class up Alan Smithee Podcast won’t rely so heavily on dated hipness and sultry sirens. Future bad-movie selections, however, will probably include Dom Deluise again at least once.

NEXT EPISODE: WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988, ROBERT ZEMECKIS) / COOL WORLD (1992, RALPH BAKSHI)

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Episode 61: Revenge of the Nerds (1984, Jeff Kanew) / Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987, Joe Roth)

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Nerds came of age in the 1980s. Marginalized for decades prior in a variety of insufficiently descriptive monikers like bookworms and poindexters, the sudden advent of personal computing and mounting intrusion of technology into the everyday lives of socially healthy people were bringing bespectacled geeks into cultural consciousness. This meant they were no longer marginalized: nerd characters were becoming a part of TV and movie casts as fully rounded stereotypes of many traits. In this episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast we discuss the epochal Revenge of the Nerds, which acknowledged the pile of nerd stereotypes accumulated since at least the breakout performance of Eddie Deezen in Grease and as blaxploitation films of the 70s did for black stereotypes, attempted to make nerds kind of cool through comic exaggeration and emphasizing their underdog status.

After 1984, far fewer movie nerds were mainly the butt of jokes – rather becoming humanized like Crispin Glover’s George McFly in Back to the Future, Anthony Michael Hall in Weird Science or stupid Patrick Dempsey in Can’t Buy Me Love. The common denominator is of course their desire to get laid, which is universal to the male moviegoer and made more attainable when even “Genuine Nerd” Toby Radloff (of American Splendor fame) could find his Bride of Killer Nerd in the 1992 Troma film of the same title.

American Splendor comics actually featured a story of Radloff going to see Revenge of the Nerds which was recreated in the Paul Giamatti film years later. To be sure, the joke of the scene is how the nerds in the film are ultimately the creations of Hollywood and not entirely comparable to real life – their happy ending triumph over the bullying jocks is preordained – but genuine nerds like Toby needed that fantasy in 1984. They needed to see the jocks as villains for once, and were willing to look the other way on the occasional spot of movie bullstuff like the nerds having a robot butler in their frat house and working virtual magic with the pitiful computers of their day. For once, normals were invited to laugh with these guys and not at them. The relationship of lead nerds Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards is established from the beginning as one of longtime mutual endurance in the face of social intolerance. Their sensitivity towards one another anchors the story from the start in the reality that lots of nice young men don’t fit in because they’re awkward, not because they’re inferior people.

The film’s secret weapon may be the broader categorization of “nerds” as anyone who doesn’t fit into the social hierarchy. The stunningly cohesive ensemble cast is an even split of classic nerds (Timothy Busfield, Andrew Cassese, Edwards & Carradine) and simple misfits: Brian Tochi the Japanese exhange student, Larry B. Scott as the openly gay black guy, and Curtis Armstrong as the immortal “Booger.” Armstrong’s character is the perfect distillation of qualities which make someone unpopular with the in crowd without actually being too smart, too unfashionable or too shy to the degree that classic nerds are. He’s merely rude, crude, lewd, dry, gross and underachieving. Hard to believe that 15 years later, guys like Seth Rogen and James Franco would be more or less honing their “Booger” personas on the movie career launching pad of Freaks & Geeks.

While the effect of Revenge of the Nerds on the rest of pop culture began almost immediately, 20th Century Fox didn’t have clue one as to why the film was popular – let alone worked – when they signed a different director and writer for the 1987 sequel Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise. The extent of creativity for the follow up was literally “let’s send the nerds to Ft. Lauderdale, where hijinks ensue.” Nerds In Paradise does what the first film didn’t, which is to play the nerds as near-total goons from Mars incapable of normal human behavior. The jokes are seldom based on performance or character, instead a turgid series of encounters with wacky ethnic stereotypes or comical misunderstandings lurch by while three-fifths of the returning cast from the first film were presumably getting soused between takes. Even the jocks are more two dimensional this time around; the cruelty of Ted McGinley in the first film had a realistic nuance compared to the bigger-is-funnier pranks of Bradley Whitford which ultimately culminate in stranding the nerds on a freaking desert island.

Probably worst of all for the average non-nerd moviegoer in 1987 was the total lack of nudity compared to the rather ribald Part One: Nerds In Paradise bears the rating of PG-13, resulting in nothing appealing for any audience except perhaps preadolescents too young to watch the first film and not discriminating enough to realize what they’re watching isn’t funny.

NEXT WEEK: TWILIGHT ZONE THE MOVIE SPECIAL! TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983, JOHN LANDIS & STEVEN SPIELBERG & JOE DANTE & GEORGE MILLER)

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Episode 58: Airplane! (1980, Jim Abrahams & David Zucker & Jerry Zucker) / Airplane II: The Sequel (1982, Ken Finkleman)

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Airplane! did not invent the parody genre, but ushered in a new era which lasted nearly 20 years before indbreeding with the “_____ Movie” series. Jeff Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker – ZAZ to their fans – would reach their peak with the Naked Gun trilogy, starring Leslie Nielsen, and peppered the 80s with other genre spoofs while inspiring countless imitators. Airplane! was their first hiring of Nielsen, whom along with the rest of the supporting cast was not from a comedy background. Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves and Robert Stack all evidently were adroit at self-parody and ready in their careers to do it. Stack actually beat the rest of them to the punch the previous year with Spielberg’s 1941. Their commitment to straight faced silliness is the quantum leap from previously silly feature length film parodies, which were pretty few and far in between to begin with. Coupled with ZAZ’s rapid fire pace of jokes of all kinds ranging from tasteless shock gags to groanworthy wordplay, there’s something silly in Airplane! for everybody.

The film’s longevity is as epochal as our own culture’s inward decay. The genre context of the 1970s which Airplane! was based on is as distant to modern attitudes the 1950s thriller fodder ZAZ remembered the supporting cast from. Leslie Nielson is the focal point of the film by way of being referenced on The Office and An Alan Smithee Podcast’s least favorite film critic Roger Ebert’s deeming him “The Olivier of Spoofs” in his review of Jerry Zucker’s unfortunate Scary Movie 3. Obviously we are now in the decadent phase where all culture that could be parodied is a self-parody or ironically bad or copied on Family Guy and re-edited on Youtube. As George W.S. Trow wrote, after chronicling the unraveling of existing context, we will establish the context of no-context and chronicle that.

Airplane II: The Sequel is not an awful film, but the lack of immediate continuance in the sequel-heavy 80s is indicative of either higher standards for low comedy than we have in the wake of Scary Movie 4, or a lack of standards for the nascent subgenre of parodies and spoofs. ZAZ disowned the film, and have since done worse.

Besides being completely pointless, writer-director Ken Finkleman brings nothing new besides the ultimately irrelevant (but trendy) replacement of the airplane with a space shuttle bound through space for the moon. Science Fiction parody is gently brushed against once or twice and never again, probably since producer Howard W. Koch was already nervous that ZAZ abandoned him and didn’t want Finkleman to deviate too much from whatever it was worked the first time. Thus returning are Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty as the stars plus Bridges and Graves. The rest of the supporting cast is admirably chosen for their previously serious or at least mostly-serious careers, like Rip Torn and Chuck Conners, yet they’re underutilized or misused. William Shatner does catapult the movie into solid mediocrity by giving a then-rare comedic turn in the final act.

The returning cast is pressed on to repeat their jokes from the first film, as if Airplane II: The Sequel can be a parody of a parody. In this navel-gaving Finkleman might have been a bit ahead of his time. A few good jokes here and there, but with so many that’s to be expected. Airplane II: The Sequel is a waste of effort to watch, except for Shatner, and when that’s the best recommendation you know something stinks.

NEXT WEEK: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981, JOHN CARPENTER) & 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK (1983, ERNESTO GASTALDI)

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Episode 36: The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles) / Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001, Kevin Smith)

Kevin Smith and Orson Welles have a lot in common. Firstly, they’ve both written and directed many of their own films. Secondly, they star in their own films. Thirdly, they like to eat. Okay, so they have three things in common.

The Stranger is quizzically one of Welles’ lesser known works despite being one of his most accessible. In a plot seemingly inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt, Welles himself portrays a Nazi war criminal hiding undetected in the milieu of small town America while plotting his future schemes. He’s so evil he kicks dogs! Hot on his trail is Edward G. Robinson, who nyaah sees through his perfect American accent and begins to turn the screws on Welles’ newly married bride, the lovely Loretta Young. When confronted, Welles strings her along as long as he can. But for how long?

Many sophisticated crane and tracking shots distinguish this modestly budgeted thriller as a warmup for later Welles classics such as Touch Of Evil. Despite his own dismissal the project as mere work for hire – which it certainly is – work for hire from Orson Welles amounts to an entertaining thriller easily in league with any other. While Robinson’s character is not particularly developed, Young’s is a minor masterpiece of tragic love for a man she has begun to understand is bad without fathoming the true extent of his evil. Welles does not give so much as a single noble quality to his beast.

Unlike a work-for-hire job, Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is nothing less than one man’s completely unwarranted magnum ode to himself. Back in 2001, Miramax was far from bankruptcy and was actually willing to fund such folly. This is 22 million dollars they probably wish they had back right now. Smith has never been a serious moneymaker screenwriter on the level of, say, Joe Eszterhas or Shane Black, but what he lacked in misogyny he made up for with good casting, unpretentious comedy and the cutting edge gimmick of having his characters talk about Star Wars and Marvel comics for no reason.

His accumulated goodwill as the comic writer-director for geeks in the 90s finally put him over into the mainstream with Dogma. Then he had a choice to make. Either branch out beyond his New Jersey buddy comedy that began with Clerks five years earlier, or do more of the same. Promising to his lovingly patronized merchandise-consuming online fan following that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back would be the final film in that mold – replete with cameos by the characters of each previous film – he wrote a stream of consciousness ripoff of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure starring himself. Then he broke his promise with Clerks 2 after Jersey Girl bombed.

We give a little extra time in this episode to his evisceration, but only because we were once fans ourselves.

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NEXT WEEK: MEAN STREETS (1973, MARTIN SCORCESE) & SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO (1991, MARK L. LESTER)

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Episode 31: Cops & Robbersons (1994, Michael Ritchie) & Barton Fink (1991, Joel & Ethan Coen)

This episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast is about banality and the people who make it by trade.

In the heat of anger Bill Murray once yelled “medium talent!” in Chevy Chase’s face. Few knew then that that name would be synonymous with mediocrity of talent and unspectacularly fatal career killing behavior of drugs and personal boorish behavior. Rather than go on in a flame of major flops, Chase’s film career descended by inches. By 1994 the depths were already being dug as low as they’d go before coming out the other side of the Earth into a postscript career of being in on the joke in small roles like Dirty Work, the Comedy Central Friar’s Club roast special and a pundit on MSNBC.

Director Michael Ritchie of past glorious like The Bad News Bears doesn’t help any more than he could for Chase in Fletch Lives although the timing of the mostly horrible supporting cast is as well paced as can be. Chase probably got him the job for a quick buck a chance to work with Jack Palance, whose late 80s mainstream career resurgence was waning. Unlike his assured, auto-pilot screen persona, Chase struggles to define his personality beyond the goofy dad act the Vacation movies branded him by and settles for acting as mentally disabled as we’d see before Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered.

The Coens can’t catch a break. Yes, they’re beloved by the critics and fans. Yes, they’ve won Oscars including Best Picture for No Country For Old Men just a couple years ago. However, when they’ve consciously tried to please the common man with stuff like The Ladykillers, The Hudsucker Proxy or Intolerable Cruelty, the common man ignores them. When they’re true to their own backgrounds as in Fargo people think that’s all they are, and when they go off on a lark of casual comedic brilliance as in The Big Lebwoski it takes the common dudes ten years to recognize their ultimate icon.

Barton Fink has a lot of the same problems and a lot more delusions. He’s also a 1940s playwright turned screenwriter and his Hollywood is another world. To this effect, the first pairing of Coens with their future preferred director of photography makes Barton’s descent into the hells of writer’s block, pushy bigwigs and above all his own dangerously naive delusions a formal exercise in a nightmare on film. This is one of the driest black comedies ever made and John Goodman is as unforgettable as he would be in Lebowski in his role as a common man.

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Episode 16: Funland (1987, Michael A. Simpson) / Asako In Ruby Shoes (2000, Je-yong Lee)

Andrew and Matt heal the wounds of boredom suffered in Funland, a very light dark comedy from the director of comparatively brilliant Sleepaway Camp 2 and 3. David Lander, TV’s “Squiggy” on Laverne & Shirley gives his annoying all in the story of a disgruntled clown driven to revenge against new theme park owners but only after an hour and fifteen minutes of sleep inducing soft satire. Despite the presence of Bruce Mahler, the yuks are strictly sub-Police Academy. Bruce had a better acting turn when Jason Voorhees twisted his noggin off.

Here’s the best scene in the movie, and it’s not even that good!

This movie is so worthless the owners had to change the poster and stick the tape in the horror section of video stores:

We then refresh ourselves with the existentialist love story Asako In Ruby Shoes, directed by Je-yong Lee. What if Japanese and Korean producers came together to fund the story of a suicide obsessed Japanese girl and Internet porn loving Korean man coming together? Sound raunchy? This is actually one of the sweetest love stories ever told in a series of abstract coincidences. Our discussion gets kind of really spoiler heavy so it’s best you watch the movie before listening to this episode.

But don’t EVER watch Funland!

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