The Muppet Movie 1979 A Movie A Day Day 38

There is only one thing this entry and yesterdays have in common. As with New York, New York the Muppet Movie has a truly terrific song that failed to win an Academy award. If anyone can whistle the tune from Norma Rae that won this year, I'll fall over on my butt. The Rainbow Connection inspired artists, film-makers and musicians around the globe, and the song was actually performed by the star in the movie. As with many things in the Universe, this phenomena cannot be explained. The song is perfect as is the film it comes from. This lighthearted concoction of music, comedy and stars is just what a family audience should want. I love Pixar Movies but there needs to be a new Muppet film now. These characters are too lovable to lay dormant for a dozen years on our movie screens.

In the summer of 1979, I floated in the pool, Dee worked her first job out of college at the Bank of America, and we spent our leisure time going to Hollywood to see movies. At the point the Muppet Movie had opened, we had already been downtown to see Alien a couple of times. Later we would be seeing The Life of Brian and Apocalypse Now. Thankfully, one summer night, probably a weekend evening, we enjoyed the bliss that is the first feature film from our hero Jim Henson and his pals. We saw this movie at the Cinerama Dome with my friend Don Hayes. The show was so packed that we had to sit in the third row and all of us got cricks in our necks from looking up at the giant screen just a few feet away from us. Don was my best friend in the Seventh and Eighth grades. We had moved to Alhambra and I was going to a new school. I think Don took pity on me, (I was a year younger than everyone else) but decided I was alright when I talked back to another kid who had been picking on me. (I did that talking with my steel lunchbox against the kids head). Don had gotten married to his high school sweetheart Cheryl the year before but it was not working out. I don't remember if they were separated when we went to the movie, but I do know that she did not go with us.

Kermit the frog was actually a television star at this point. He and his cohorts had been ruling the airwaves with a syndicated TV show that was chaotic and hysterical. If you parents out there have not shared the Muppet show with your kids, shame on you. All of the characters from the show are in the movie in one way or another. The film purports to tell the backstory of the Muppets rise to fame. It is really a road picture, with a chase thrown in to add some drive to the narrative. Along the way, Kermit picks up a best friend, a girlfriend, and a cast of goofballs that should delight anyone. They run into a couple of dozen Hollywood big-shots who show up for a scene or two or sometimes just a single line. Orson Wells gets more out of his one sentence than he did in the last three movies he directed. What a joy it was to watch an old hand like Bob Hope trade quips with Fozzy Bear, like they were an old vaudeville act. The film marks the final appearance of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist act that found fame of all places on the radio in the 1930s. My Dad had a antique spoon that had Charlie McCarthy's likeness on the end. It went with all the other radio premiums that we had to sell when he needed care in his last years.

Paul Williams wrote the wonderful songs in the film, along with Kenny Ascher. Rainbow Connection is the star among the songs but I love "The Magic Store", which finishes off the film with a piece of heartwarming legerdemain. "Moving Right Along" is a highway song that I know we must have burst into on our trip around the country back in 1999. This is the second movie on the list to feature a cameo by Steve Martin, but unlike Sgt Pepper, he doesn't get to sing, he only gets to be hilarious. There is nothing that would improve this movie. So along with Alien, the summer of 1979 had two perfect films.

Dolores and I have quoted lines from this movie to each other our entire marriage. "Myth,myth!" "Yeth". "I'm lost", "maybe you should try Hare Krishna". "No Problem". Next to Star Wars and Star Trek, the Muppets are our greatest cultural touchstones. The songs from this movie resonated in my head for years. I hadn't seen the whole film for at least a decade, but as it was playing tonight, it was easy to sing along with. We have loved all the motion pictures featuring the Muppets, even Muppets in Space, which was not a great effort and their last major film. There is supposed to be a new Muppet Movie at Christmas 2011, please let it show up. Re-watching the first of these classic puppet movies featuring characters that are more real to me than many live movie stars are, I must agree with Rolfe the Dog when he sings the refrain, "You can't live with em, you can't live without em, there's something irresistible-ish about em."

New York, New York 1977 A Movie A Day Day 37

The title tune for this movie became Frank Sinatra's signature song in the last couple decades of his life. Liza Minelli still performs it and It brings the house down. In the movie "Lost in America" the advertising firm is creaming their pants because they secured the rights to the song. Yet in 1977, when the song was the theme from this movie, it did not win an Academy Award for best song. Hell, it was not even nominated. How could that happen to a song that became and remains so popular. It's simple, Academy members must have seen the movie.

Martin Scorsese is probably America's greatest living director. His movies are widely praised by critics, fawned over by industry types and beloved by film fans. May all of those people be spared having to sit through this horrible mess of an idea, in search of a movie. I told Dolores as I was watching it, that it reminds me of the scene from Raging Bull where Jake LaMotta is arguing with his wife in the kitchen over how long the steak should be cooked. That was a good dramatic scene. Now take it and stretch it to almost three hours, add music and make the main character even more loathsomely hateful than LaMotta, and you have New York, New York. This is a bad marriage displayed for people to be entertained by. "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf" at least had some tension and humor and good performances. This movie has the one song, they save it for the end, it is the only effectively presented musical sequence in the film, but the last 10 minutes cannot erase the memory of the turgid dramatics of the preceding 153 minutes. I took Dee to see this when we were dating in 1977. I think we saw it at a theater in Cerritos or the Norwalk area. I'm surprised that she married me after this.

There are two things about the movie that I liked, (other than the fact that it finally ended and I will never have to see it again). The art direction is really nice at evoking the post war period as we remember it from movies. The night clubs are spectacular and the lighting is atmospheric. Some of the outdoor sets are deliberately designed to look fake in a Hollywood back-lot fashion. The colors pop out at you and the wall decorations make you wish that you had an artist like that available to do murals in your house. The other thing that works are the costumes, they are lush and quite entrancing. Liza has some terrific suits she wears and the hats and gloves are really classy ways of emphasizing a different time. DeNiro starts off in a Hawaiian print shirt that is tacky as hell but shows how he is trying to throw off the drab Army clothes he has been burdened with. Later he has some suits that are loud but stylish, they are the flamboyant kind of clothes an entertainer might very well have worn in those days. OK, that's all I liked.

There are scenes that go on for painful minute after painful minute. The first half hour of the movie is practically a conversation where DeNiro's character tries to pick up the girl. He is so obnoxious that I can't figure out why she doesn't have the manager of the club throw him out. (The reason is that if she had any sense at all there would be no movie and we could cut straight to the music video at the end. The DeNiro character gets progressively more annoying, alienating every one else in the story. The final shot of the film must be intended to be ironic, she decides not to meet him after all outside of a party where they briefly re-connect after he has abandoned her and their newborn son for 7 years. If only she had given him a fake phone number at the beginning we could have been spared this waste of time.

I read that Scorsese was despondent over the failure of this film. He had intended it to be experimental and to take him out of the grim urban dramas he had been making up till that point. This movie was grimmer than Taxi Driver, how was it going to get him out of his rut? Apparently, the lack of success lead him into a period of drug use, but from what I saw here, he was already under the influence of something. If you ever want to break someone of the movie watching habit, I suggest a double feature of Nashville and New York, New York. They may never want to see another film and you will understand what killed musicals for twenty years.

Animal House 1978 A Movie A Day Day 36

This last week of films from the seventies has got to make you movie goers of today jealous. Jaws, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and now Animal House. This was the college comedy of the seventies. It defined what a campus comedy would be for the next 30 years, it made a movie star out of John Belushi and established John Landis as the go to director for comedy themed material for the following decade. The poster of Belushi as Blutto with a beer, hung on dorm room walls, office doors and anywhere else people could fit it. The movie was set sixteen years earlier then when it came out, but college students have emulated the attitude ever since. Amanda believes that the Trojan Marching Band is trying to exist as a clone of Delta house. From all the drinking and stupid nicknames I saw when she was in the band, I don't think she was far off the mark.

This was the summer of 1978, the last summer before my final year as an undergraduate. The debate team had been doing research all summer long, the Western Forensic Institute was convening for the last time, and we were getting ready for what we expected to be a banner year. My debate partner Rick Rollino and I, felt like the chance to be the top USC team was in our grasp. Maybe this was a distorted view, because there were still several great debaters coming back for that year, but the legends that had dominated our time there had moved on. We had swagger in our attitude. It did not work out as well as we had hoped based on the previous year, but we still were quite successful and I am proud of what we accomplished. Rick and I had run for Co-Captains of the Debate squad and we were fortunately beaten by our good friend Leo Mohr. Leo was going to be debating with Bill Gross at that point but would soon move into a partnership with Kim Maerowitz. One summer night, as we were winding down a day at S.C. doing practice debates, the whole squad seemed to decide to go see this movie together. For some reason we ended up in Pasadena at the same theater I mentioned in my JAWS post a couple of days ago. Can you imagine anything more perfect than a group of good friends, seeing this movie on a summer night just a few days before the fall term started? We had a blast. The theater was full, I was a senior and we had freshmen and sophomores that looked up to us. And we were leading them into this debauchery. What Fun.

Animal House is critic proof because the audience for it is always going to see themselves in the story. There are plenty of jokes, but it is all in aid of a simple nostalgia story. Unlike some of the comedies that would come later, like Airplane, this was not a joke movie but a comedy. The humor grows out of the situation not from a sight gag or a throwaway pun. Even the wild out of control scenes stem from the characters or the story. Belushi's trip through the cafeteria has plenty of sight gags but they come from the devil-may-care attitude and slovenly character that Belushi created. His Blutto was a hero to college students, not because he was a slob, but because he was one of us. He takes advantage of too much beer, naive freshmen, and a general lack of supervision. There are only two sight gags in the movie that take us out of the notion that we are watching real events. One is Kevin Bacon flattened by the crowd at the parade (this is a joke that foreshadows Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the other involves Belushi. When he is on the ladder, peeking in the Sorority house, he bounces the ladder down to another window. It is just as unrealistic as the other gag but it works because we can imagine Blutto trying to do this even if it is not physically possible.

The scroll at the end of the movie, showing what became of the characters, was probably a parody of the more sober ending of American Graffiti. The jokes here were sly and topical. For several years after, Universal Studios also gave a discount to people who actually asked for Babs. This movie was re-released a couple of times in the next year or two, but that may have been the last set of re-releases for a movie except for special event type pictures. Video tape was coming, and people would enjoy reliving their movie experiences at home rather than at the theater. It was the end of an era because of technological innovation. The next summer would have some very different moods around it. I loved the summer of 1979 despite all the tough things that happened in our lives that year. The closing of summer 1978 marked the end of my childhood. The memory of going to this movie is a lot like a more heartwarming cross between the final character scrolls of Animal House and American Graffiti.

From an historical point of view the world was changing a great deal when Animal House was the king of comedy, but if you want to find the specific point that the 1970s came to a close, it won't be when the calender slipped into the eighties, it was not the election of Ronald Reagan or the death of disco. The 1970s died on a day in March 1981, at a hotel in Hollywood, where the shooting star that was Blutto in Animal House, went to that great Toga Party in the sky.

Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia 1974 A Movie A Day Day 35

This is one of the strangest movies I ever saw and that includes "Lost Highway" and "The Teacher". This was a contemporary western, featuring one of our finest character actors, in a role that allows him to show us his range and abilities. It comes together though like a nightmare, with bits and pieces of information floating in front of us but never quite coalescing into something fathomable. Sam Peckinpaugh was noted as a Director of violent masculine themed movies, and here he hits all the notes but they are sour. I think we are supposed to have a bad taste in our mouths after this, but it really needs to be a little more coherent. This movie has a reputation among film aficionados, and it is probably deserved, but I can't really recommend it to anyone except Peckinpaugh completists.

For years Dolores has given me a hard time about liking this movie. It is completely understandable why she would object. The main character is a disgusting slob, that sells himself out for money and doesn't really know what is going on. His girlfriend/fiance is a hooker, that really seems to love him and is maybe the one empathetic character in the film, and of course every bad thing you can imagine befalls her. Our third lead is a disembodied Lothario, responsible for impregnating a young girl, running away from her, whoring it up for three days and then dying off screen, all before he makes his first appearance as a head. Our main character Bennie, then spends days traveling around and carrying on a conversation with the dead guys noggin. Oh yeah, a whole lot of people die, some of whom deserve it and many who do not. All of this takes place in parts of Mexico that are not really on the tourist maps and that we would pay money to avoid. So the real question is, given all of that, why do I like the movie?

The number one reason I have already mentioned. Warren Oats was a guy that never became a big star, but he could make a movie better. He acts in this film, mostly with his mouth, since his eyes are covered by an ugly pair of sunglasses for 90% of the story. The character arc does allow him to grow and change as much as a man in his position could. He is not really a good guy, but by the end of the movie he is a righteous one. Compared to a slick revenge picture from today, a movie like "Taken", he seems way out of his depth. "Bennie" is not slick, he is sloppy and lucky and unlucky. He is more of the real world and therefore to a degree sympathetic despite his flaws. Oates gets some scenes of rage, self pity, romance, regret and stupidity. They do not always fit together, and there are long passages that seem like indulgences on the part of the director. Sometimes those slow moving sequences contain a gem of a moment, like the picnic under the tree, or the monologue with Alfredo in the shower. Other times they just seem slow, like Peckinpaugh is repeating the slow-motion part of the action scene in the dramatic scenes.

A second reason I like the film is the sleazy aura surrounding the characters. Not the locations, they are disgusting and not really something that hold our attention. I'm talking about the casualness with which Bennie falls in with Contract killers, who turn out to be sub-contractors for another group of contract killers. This makes "Bennie" the pilot fish of the food chain. Excited about the scraps he is going to get, and not realizing how much bigger the reward really is. Gig Young an Academy Award winner, and Robert Webber an actor we talked about before in this blog, may be gay, may be simply slumming it but they ooze silky creepiness. Their characters are in one big shootout that is set up very well and executed the way it should be. A later shootout with the higher ups has some of the same greasy slimy businesslike manner of doing things. The final shootout is an anti-climax except for the actions of the girl who bore Alfredo Garcia's bastard child.

Finally, I like the movie on general principles. It is a revenge story, which I always find satisfying. There is slow motion violence, which I first saw in The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde, and it seems so much more real and awful when it happens that way. Also, let's face it, this may be the Coolest title of a mainstream movie ever released in the English language cinema. You know what is coming at you from those seven gruesome little words.