Roadie (1980)

Why did the armadillo cross the road?  So Alan Rudolph could show that his film Roadie begins and ends in the state of Texas.  Here’s the layout.  Young, hyper Travis Redfish (Meatloaf) lives at his father Corpus’ (Art Carney) salvage company and makes deliveries for Shiner Beer.  Catching sight of young Lola (Kaki Hunter), a groupie-in-training, Travis finds himself swept up into the whirlwind lifestyle of a rock ‘n roll roadie.

One might think, at first blush, that this film would concern itself with the idea of the call of the open road.  But this is not the case.  Travis has no desire to go on tour with musicians.  He doesn’t feel the pull of an opportunity to live life.  The only reason he becomes the world’s greatest roadie is because his mindset is antithetical to that of those around him.  This comes from his background with his dad.  Corpus and Travis are able to rig and create all manner of contraptions to make life easier.  They have a phone booth in the house that extends itself outside if someone wants a little privacy.  Travis makes his entrance (at home and in the film) on a makeshift crane/elevator that carries him between floors.  Corpus surrounds himself with a multitude of televisions, all tuned to different stations.  The thing of it is that the Redfishes are pretty much idiot savants (with the exception of sister Alice Poo [Rhonda Bates], who is just an idiot).  To call them simple folk would be understating things.  For example, none of them can pronounce “Pomona,” though Corpus’ enunciation is the one they stick with because he’s the smartest of them (hey, I had a friend who used to pronounce “San Jose” as “San Joes,” so who am I to judge?).  Corpus installed homemade braces on Alice’s teeth.  The best illustration of the Texans’ shitkickerhood, however, is the scene where Corpus, Alice, and BB (Gailard Sartain) are eating ribs and drinking beer.  Their faces are covered in pork and barbecue sauce, and the mere idea of table manners is utterly foreign.  This tableau is a snapshot of Travis.  Roadie is basically Being There with Deliverance’s Hoyt Pollard as the protagonist.  Or maybe just a quasi-Forrest Gump antecedent minus most of the sentimentality.

At the center of the film is the mismatched relationship between Travis and Lola.  These are two extremely flawed people, neither of whose world view is all that appealing.  Travis’ instant love for Lola is amusing.  He declares that, “That’s the first woman I’ve ever known who I’ve cared for as a human being,” after seeing her for a split second.  Lola knows that Travis is into her, and she knows how to manipulate him into getting her way.  Her goal in life is to be a groupie, but first, she has to have sex specifically with Alice Cooper as a sort of deflowering ritual.  Lola delights in her sexuality, but she’s naïve in its meaning and about life in general.  Much like Travis, she wears blinders to allow for her point of view, because nothing else exists or, at the bare minimum, is less than important.  She is thrilled to inform Travis that she’s only sixteen (the grin on her face when she labels herself “jailbait” is a bit bizarre).  She picks up a box of cocaine, thinking it’s Tide laundry detergent, and has it maneuvered off her by a little old lady.  Her usefulness to rock ’n roll lies in her body, not her brains, and she’s okay with that.  At first.  

Travis resents that Lola is eager to give it up to anybody who plays a musical instrument.  He feels protective of her, but he never bothers to tell her this.  It’s easier for him to react to her and lash out as needed; all emotion, no thought.  Lola resents that problem solving comes so easily to Travis, and he is more desired by everyone in the music biz than she is.  She feels that she is meant to be a Muse, but it’s Travis who inspires others.  He powers a concert with manure and solar energy.  He fixes a feedback issue with potatoes.  Their odd couple relationship is essential to the film, but it loses interest due to their steadfastly willful ignorance.  These two are at their best when they both dig in their heels and defy each other, even though I wanted to smack their heads together many, many times.  The film, of course, resolves itself in Hollywood fashion, which not only undercuts the characters but also takes the perspective of one of them as being more “correct” than the other, when both are myopic and rather uninformed.

Any love that a viewer may have for Roadie relies on two things.  First is their desire to spot all the cameos (Roy Orbison, Hank Williams Jr, Peter Frampton, ad infinitum) and listen to some music.  In some ways, it’s a concert film, though it’s hardly Woodstock, being narratively driven as it is.  The performances are staged detours to keep the people who don’t care about the story in their seats.  Even when the characters are not at a concert, any montage on the road is accompanied by a song, using shorthand to portray bonding rather than actual bonding.

Second, and a far higher hurtle to clear, is one’s tolerance for Meatloaf.  While I admire the man’s verve, he is nigh-psychotic throughout the entire film.  Meatloaf is cranked up to a thousand, squirming his body all around, flopping his long, stringy hair thither and yon.  You may have seen Chris Farley’s impression of Meatloaf at some time or another, but let me tell you, Farley captured maybe one-eighth of the actual man’s bounce.  The thing of it is, Meatloaf does show glimmers of talent in front of the camera (and he would go on to prove that he has decent acting chops).  Nevertheless, his bug-eyed performance in Roadie is both grating and a little scary.  Whether this comes from his unfettered enthusiasm, his substance abuse issues, or a combination of both is immaterial.  It’s all there on screen, good, bad, and ugly.  There are several moments when he looks like he legitimately wants to eat whomever it is he is looking at (and I mean that in the cannibal sense, not as some crack against obese people).  The film does muster up some sweetness and charm, but it also does so after screaming in your face for almost its entire length, so it feels more like apologetic backpedaling (right or wrong) than the end game intended from the beginning.

MVT:  There is a wild amount of energy in the film.  To the point of exhaustion, but it’s there.

Make or Break:  The throwdown between Blondie and Snow White (a fictitious[?] band made up of little people) is truly glorious.

Score:  6.25/10

Strange Brew (1983)

Directed by: Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas
Run time: 90 minutes

A clause in the Canadian Broadcasting Act that, in theory, ensures a certain percentage of all public broadcasting is content made in Canada. In practice this clause is sometimes used by narrow minded bureaucrats license to be narrow minded twits. Case in point Second City Television. SCTV was filmed in Canada and the majority of the cast and crew were Canadian. The only way the show could have been any more Canadian by making your TV bleed maple syrup when the show was on. The Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) didn't see it that way.

SCTV was set in the fictional American city of Mellonville and the CBC wanted a segment that was easily identified as Canadian. In response Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas slapped on some toques, moved the empty beer bottles from the writers room to a set, and inadvertently created two iconic characters. This led to the characters becoming the most popular segment on SCTV, which led to a couple of comedy records that sold well, and they were successful enough to get their own movie. But how do you make a feature length film centered around two joke bit characters? By borrowing the narrative from Hamlet and making Bob and Doug McKenzie the bit characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The movie opens with Bob and Doug showing off their new set. Which is the old set but filmed with a wider lens so you can see all the empty beer boxes in all their glory. They also got a full orchestral version of The Great White North theme song but Doug still has to preform it. With the technical improvements and useful life hack of bringing moths to a movie theater it's time to start the movie. An eight millimeter no budget sci-fi epic that only runs for a minute before breaking down. In the theater showing this movie, the audience is enraged by the obvious rip off of a movie.

Bob and Doug McKenzie were in the audience and use the chaos to escape the angry mob. They almost escape but are stopped by protagonist kryptonite, a pair of crying children who had used their allowance to see the McKenzie Brother's movie. Feeling sorry for the kids Bob hands over fifteen dollars, their Dad's beer money, to the kids so they can make their escape.  Without beer and the money to get more beer the Brother's are forced to part in the actual plot of the movie.

There is something rotten at the Elsinore Brewery and the Brewmaster Smith (Max Von Sydow) is somehow behind it. The brewery has fired nearly all the staff, installed extensive surveillance system, and the Brewmaster is conducting bizarre experiments. Worse, the president of the brewery died in a tragic accident and the leftovers from the funeral feast have been used for the wedding banquet for the president's brother and his widowed wife. To complicate matters the president's daughter Pam now owns fifty one percent of the brewery and has left school to sort out what evil is afoot at the brewery. With the aid of the brewery foreman, a former hockey star that had a nervous breakdown, and the McKenzie Brothers they stumble about and solve who is behind the Elsinore brewery foul state.

It's a fun movie. The material doesn't take itself too seriously and the cast are acting as if this how reality works while the most surreal things happen all around them. Also the McKenzie Brothers characters are not unnecessarily padded to make them the center of the movie. The only complaint I have is how the film tends to drag when the McKenzie Brothers go over board with how stupid they are at some points. It happens at a few times and is more of a personal issue than anything else. This is a solid rental and or streaming film and worth watching if it shows up on cable and the like.

MVT: Bob and Doug taking turns using the electroshock therapy machine on each other.

Make or Break: What made it for me was the McKenzie Brother accidentally drive their van into Lake Ontario. When the police diver discovers they have been using empty beer bottles to store air he doesn't try to get them out of the van. Instead the police diver hits them up for driver's license and registration.

Score: 7.5 out of 10

Wilder Napalm (1993)

I used to frequent a pizza place that, to this day, has never been topped, and no one I ever talk to is even aware of its existence.  The place is called Mama’s Pizzeria, and it is located on Belmont Avenue in Philadelphia.  It’s in an inconspicuous building with limited parking.  The hours of operation are also odd (hey, maybe the joint is a front; Considering the quality of the eats, who am I to judge?).  Inside, there is a small room for takeout orders and a couple of tables for people to dine.  Up a narrow stairway is the main dining room.  I never once ordered a pizza from Mama’s, but I also never needed to.  Rather, they make what is, in my opinion, the single best cheesesteak in the universe.  This delicacy was a little over a foot long, and for around ten dollars, it had more meat and cheese than you can comfortably fit into a human stomach (and colon).  I used to order these things, and it was all I would eat for a weekend.  I don’t know if the caliber of their cheesesteaks has held up some twenty-odd years later, but just the thought of one of those things makes me hungry even now (and I just ate).  The reason I’m promoting cheesesteaks from Mama’s in a review of Glenn Gordon Caron’s Wilder Napalm is because the restaurant had nothing but clown art decorating its walls, and in this film, one of the characters is a clown by profession (a thin connection, sure, but that’s expected from me).  That, and I miss Mama’s cheesesteaks and wanted to extoll their virtues.

Wilder and Wallace Foudroyant (adjective – Striking as with lightning; sudden and overwhelming in effect; stunning; dazzling) haven’t seen each other in five years.  Wilder (Arliss Howard) has a crummy job, but he is also a volunteer firefighter.  His wife Vida (Debra Winger) is a firebug who is due up for release from her house arrest in a few days.  Brother Wallace (Dennis Quaid) is a circus clown who rolls into town on his way to The Big Time and stirs up old resentments and tensions.  And both brothers are pyrokinetic.

Aside from the basic idea of sibling rivalry, the film deals with the dueling desires for normality and notoriety.  Wilder craves a quiet life.  He wears a tie and jacket to work at a Fotomat knockoff in an empty parking lot (guess where the circus sets up shop).  He volunteers to call BINGO at the local rec center (the film is set in Midlothian, and I assume it’s the one in Virginia, not Scotland).  When he is paged to a fire, he stops to hang his jacket on a hanger and lock the work booth door behind him.  To lose control is unacceptable because it irresponsible.  The exception to that rule is when he has sex with Vida, which can get pretty wild, apparently.  Wallace, of course, is the antithesis of Wilder.  He uses his power freely, zapping flies, melting air conditioners, and so forth.  He wants to be famous, to be “somebody.”  His big dream is to appear on Late Night with David Letterman and get rich.  Wallace likes to have fun.  When Vida’s house arrest is over, it’s Wallace who takes her out on the town.  Vida, being the tether between the two, responds to both positively.  She has genuine affection for Wilder and appreciates that he’s a solid guy (he lost a decent job because of her but never resented her for it), though she also feels constrained in their relationship to some degree.  By that same token, she’s attracted to the wild side of Wallace, who knows what she likes.  She is a musician (a cellist, not a rock ‘n roller), and she loves hanging out on top of her and Wilder’s trailer home.  She sets fires just to get the fire crew to come to her house, so she can see Wilder (she’s also an arsonist, thus explaining why she’s enthralled by the Brothers Foudroyant).  The thing about the brothers’ antagonism is that neither is one hundred percent wrong.  Wilder thinks that exposing their powers will only bring harm to them both (“You read Firestarter, didn’t ya?!”) on top of the physical dangers of it (there is a very good reason for this).  Wallace realizes that he and his brother are unique, and, if done correctly, his gift can be used to benefit himself.  The two are so dug in on their positions, that they can’t see the value of the other’s perspective.

For my money, Wilder Napalm could easily have been one of the first Marvel Comics theatrical releases (you know, if it had anything whatsoever to do with Marvel).  Screenwriter Vince Gilligan (who would write quite a few episodes of The X-Files but is far better known for creating and executive producing Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) and director Caron (also a television alumnus, having created Moonlighting and Medium) understand what makes Marvel’s characters work so well, even if they don’t refer directly to them.  That is, they are people who have real problems to deal with on a daily basis who also just so happen to be superheroes (Wallace has a costume for his Dr. Napalm alter ego, and Wilder sort of gets one by the end).  The most interesting things in Marvel comic books are usually not the obligatory slugfests but the interactions between the characters as they wend their way through their melodramatic lives (true to fashion, this movie contains both).  Borrowing heavily from the famous Stan Lee wisdom of “…in this world, with great power there must also come - - great responsibility,” the filmmakers use the brothers as foils to illustrate this point.  Further, their powers are secondary to their interrelationships while also representing the core of what is between all three of them (when the brothers get worked up, things tend to melt and boil). 

The film is quirky in both good and bad ways.  Four firemen are also an acapella group who provide a chorus for Wilder (they sing a nice version of The Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”). Character actors Stuart Varney and M Emmett Walsh both turn up in small but effective roles as the circus owner and the fire chief, respectively.    There is the dry humor of Wilder’s character as he paces through his days (Arliss Howard has always excelled at this).  Winger is genuinely charming as the earnest free spirit.  Wallace, while in his clown persona of Biff, is both unsettling and a tad menacing.  That said, the fighting between the boys turns a little too slapstick at times (there is not only a bonk on the head from a pipe but also a fire extinguisher to the face).  Further, Quaid really overdoes the histrionics most of the time in an attempt to act funny, something which never works.  He even jumps up and down like Yosemite Sam at one point.  Still, the film is breezy, the pyrotechnics are truly impressive, and overall, it’s a very satisfying experience when it’s firing on all cylinders.

MVT:  The originality going on in the script (remember, this was 1993) is admirable.

Make or Break:  The finale cuts loose emotionally and physically, and even though, we know how it will turn out, it still works a treat.

Score:  7.25/10

Get Crazy (1983)

The first show I ever went to (I’m talking about shows in the sense of paying specifically to see bands, not go to a bar or something and there’s a band playing) was Seven Seconds.  This would have been around 1988 or 1989, I believe, and the show was at The Silo in Reading, Pennsylvania (the venue was petitioned to be shut down as a “nuisance bar” in 2012; as far as I’m aware, it was not).  I remember I wore my Gorilla Biscuits shirt (which was a medium or a large on a kid who by no means should have been wearing a medium or a large tee shirt at that time) and a pair of slacks (that’s right, slacks).  Of the bands that played, the two that I remember were, of course, Seven Seconds (this would have been during Kevin Seconds long hair and bicycle shorts phase; I don’t know if he ever came out of it) and a band from the Philly/New Jersey area called 200 Stitches (who were pretty good; I still have the demo tape I bought at the show, and I saw them again some time later when I was in college; the lead singer was amazed that someone knew a lot of the words to their songs).  During the course of getting my feet wet slamming, stomping, and basically getting sweated up, my pants tore down the back (did I mention I was a husky lad back then?), but I don’t think that stopped the fun.  I went to dozens of shows following that, but that first one stuck with me (the first time always does), because of the feelings that it elicited, feelings of freedom and commonality and the catharsis of letting out every ounce of the aggression I’d been stewing in up until then.  In its own way, and despite its flaws, Allan Arkush’s Get Crazy (aka Flip Out) does a marvelous job of evincing many of those same emotions in me.

Max Wolfe (Allen Garfield as Allen Goorwitz), owner of the Saturn Theater has a huge bash planned for the New Year’s celebration, which coincides with the fifteenth anniversary of his venue.  Calling in all his favors, he throws together a card of acts with everything from the blues to punk rock.  Stage Manager Neil (Daniel Stern) tries to keep everything together while dealing with slimy rival Colin Beverly (Ed Begley, Jr), a motley crew of backstage misfits, the various eccentricities of the performers, and the hots he develops on sight for Max’s former stage manager Willy Loman (Gail Edwards).

The first thing that will stand out to anyone from the initial minutes of Get Crazy is that it is completely and utterly not intended to be taken seriously.  Sammy Fox (Miles Chapin), Max’s nephew and cutthroat capitalist, punts a small dog across the theater’s dance floor.  Soon thereafter, he gets blown up in classic Looney Tunes style.  The theater’s crew can’t muster up the energy to get the job done, but thanks to Electric Larry, the mystical drug dealer who looks like Tex Hex crossed with the Terminator endo-skeleton, they speed their way through their tasks (see what I did there?) in one of several undercranked sequences (I maintain that undercranking should really be limited to use in episodes of Gilligan’s Island).  Virginal Joey (Dan Frischman) is a walking OSHA violation waiting to happen.  He gets punched, run over, and falls off a balcony, but thankfully pops his cherry at some point.  Every time Neil sees Willy, she becomes a sex kitten from his perspective (he looks like Tarzan in this scenario, complete with chimpanzee companion).  The lighthearted goofiness is at odds with what plot there is because it’s so over the top, but it still works fairly well.  I could see this aspect grating on some viewers’ nerves, but I also think that allowing it to ruin the experience deprives one of the full impact of the film’s core.

At its heart, this movie is a love letter to music and the collective energy of live music-going escapades.  There are ostensibly five bands that Max gathers for the show.  They are King Blues (king of the blues, played by Bill Henderson), massively-populated punk band Nada (fronted by Lori Eastside, a real-life casting director), who bring along the Animal-esque Piggy (Fear’s Lee Ving), Captain Cloud (Howard Kaylan) the totally fried hippie and his hippie entourage/cult/commune, “metaphysical” musician Auden (Lou Reed), and straight up Brit rocker Reggie Wanker (Malcolm McDowell), who, unironically, lives up to his namesake in more ways than one.  King plays first, and two of the following acts cover songs of his.  This is an act of reverence for the origins of rock ‘n’ roll, an understanding of where it came from and what modern acts owe to those who came before.  It provides a unity among the artists, a shared world of musicianship, and this translates to the reception of the crowd (though the acts being this varied might not have been as well received by the throngs of weirdo punk rockers who populate the audience, but you never know).

Further to this, Arkush and company (through some extremely deft editing; after all the man did get his start in film editing trailers for Roger Corman, and he did work in clubs, so he draws extensively from both these backgrounds) do an outstanding job of capturing just what it is that made shows like this great.  This was at a time when individuality was paramount, even within genre/style constraints.  A Fear song doesn’t sound the same as a Ramones song doesn’t sound the same as a Bad Brains song.  Personal expression, visually and aurally was very important, and this isn’t exclusive to punk (though I gravitate toward that as an example, because that’s my background).  But the individual breaks down in the face of the love for the music.  It’s the life’s blood that ties the disparate groups together (there are only so many musical notes on a scale, but everyone plays them differently), and Get Crazy really drives this point home in its pure “let’s put on a show” attitude.  It helps a lot that the actors in the film actually perform the songs on the soundtrack.  It may be nostalgia for me to say that the film took me back to the joy and excitement I used to get from going to shows, but, to be frank, I’m not against nostalgia in and of itself.  Only when it inescapably binds people to the past is it a bad thing, I think.  If more films made me feel as good and brought back as many great memories as this one did, hell, I wouldn’t be against nostalgia at all. 

MVT:  The editing in the film is truly impressive.  It keeps the rip-roaring pace up all the way through.

Make or Break:  The undercranking may be a bridge too far for some.  Thankfully, these sequences are not extensive.

Score:  7/10