Any Slumber Party that ever featured teens partying, singing for no reason, a bizarre joke that seemed to come out of left field (ahem Better Off Dead) or a cameo by an older comedian owes a debt to The Beach Movies of the 60s. Any spunky actress, brunette or otherwise, owes a debt to Annette Funicello for paving the way. Oh…and those other Italian Americans running around the beach these days? They’ve got nothing to do with her. Aloha, Annette. We always knew who the real Big Kahuna was.
It’s not Friday. I don’t care.
I checked into Facebook an hour or so ago and saw that one of my friends had changed his cover photo to an adorable picture of Siskel, Ebert, Telly the Monster and Oscar the Grouch. I laughed. Then I scrolled down and saw why he posted it: after many years of an epic battle, cancer finally proved, again, that it sucks the most of all the things that suck. It took Roger Ebert. Come on, cancer. We all agree you’re the Suckiest of the Suck. Just stop.
My dad, sister and I watched Siskel and Ebert religiously. Our local movie theater, a converted opera house, had its own balcony, and it was always closed because of the extreme rat infestation up there, but we always fantasized that we’d sneak up there, just like they did, and get to Talk Movies. In college, my pledge name was “Siskel,” presumably for all the VHS videos I had in my room, and I remember grumbling to a friend that I was SO more Ebert than Siskel.
In the last few years I’ve been reading Ebert’s blog regularly, checking into it every few weeks, and realized some things I hadn’t known about him. He’s a brilliant writer, first of all. He’s a compassionate person. He’s a devoted husband, crazy about his wife in a way that most of us can dream about, and she’s the most extraordinary person: beautiful, strong, and fiercely caring for him. Of course, those descriptions all came from him, and I can’t imagine that he’d ever see her as anything but a warrior angel.
It breaks my heart to re-read those sentences and realize I inadvertently used present tense, and that I should’ve said “was.” He WAS those things. Cancer. Suck.
After wiping the tears from my keyboard, I knew I’d have to post a SlumberPartyMovies tribute to him. To what I’m sure would’ve been his horror, I first thought of “Summer School”–a movie I saw in a drive-in double feature, paired with “Lost Boys.” (BTW: How radical am I? Except that was the first time I’d worn my contact lenses, and one fell out during “Cry Little Sister.”)
My sister and I loved this movie. Like, LOVED it. Like, one summer, when we were totally bored, I helped Samantha write down every word of the movie in the computer so we could print it out and have the whole script. Kids, this is what your elders did before the internet.
Thumbs way up!
I tried finding a scene from the movie when Chainsaw and Dave give one of their Siskel and Ebert reviews–like after the roller coaster, when they give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and then confirm it’s a thumbs-up when a classmate barfs into the garbage can. But I couldn’t find it. What I did find was this gem.
The song, “Mind Over Matter,” rocks on every level, and we had it on our version of repeat, which is to say, we recorded it over and over on a whole tape and let it play continuously. The song plays when the students are taking their Big Test and going into labor, and–miracle of miracles–is sung by “Better Off Dead” singer EG Daily. (How did I not know that?)
Watch this video. You won’t regret it. Especially not the part at about 2:10 when motherfucking Carl Reiner dances in a linen suit. I can’t say for certain, but I’m reasonably sure this is the only appearance he ever made in a music video. What else? Strobe lights, aerobic thongs, and the cast performs onstage, something you won’t see happen again until Rockula.
What did Mr. Ebert think of Summer School? I’d tell you, except the SunTimes server crashed under the weight of millions of internet mourners moments after the news broke. I can tell you what the excerpt on Google says: “Summer School is a movie like that, a comedy so listless, leisurely and unspirited that it was an act of the will for me to care about it, even …”
My guess is, the rest of the review don’t go so good.
But Mr. Ebert, I still choose to pay tribute to you with “Mind Over Matter” anyway. And this might sound as hokey as a principal letting a teacher get tenure even though 80% of his class fails summer school, but you, sir, are the greatest example of mind over matter I’ve ever known. You fought cancer. You lost half your damned face, for Christ’s sake. And still, you wrote to us, and spoke to us, and we developed with you the kind of one-sided personal bond that one can only get by being a blogger, and allowing comments, and sharing your story with the world.
We’ll see you at the movies.
Posted in Better Off Dead, Friday Morning Videos, Tuesday Tribute
Tagged eg daily, roger ebert, summer school
Oh come on, Gene! He was an angry guy….He lost his son. Joshua.
Sigh. Roger Ebert has died, and here I thought he was going to beat cancer. In tribute, I’ll post about War Games yet again. Here is an “At the Movies” review of War games. He and Siskel sound like they’re arguing, but they’re both right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gEJpaga7gQ
So yesterday I decided to play a little April Fools joke on you, Lerlines. Nothing in that Gigli post was true, except that Gigli is a really bad movie, and that everyone in Hollywood hates Martin Brest. How much? Well, they didn’t like him very much before Gigli, how do you think they feel about him now? Hmm? The same way you feel about me? Aw come on, Lerlines. Don’t stay mad. Here. Here is a picture of young Matthew Broderick figuring out that the password is Joshua. Think of it as an apology Broderick:
Ooh! A floppy!
That was true, by the way. Martin really did get fired from War Games. Much has been written about Brest’s career, but I think this passage from War Games’ Wiki page sums it all up nicely.
Martin Brest was originally hired as director but was fired after 12 days of shooting because of an on-set argument with the producers,[3] and replaced with John Badham. Several of the scenes shot by Brest remain in the final film. Badham said that “[Brest had] taken a somewhat dark approach to the story and the way it was shot. It was like [Broderick and Sheedy] were doing someNazi undercover thing. So it was my job to make it seem like they were having fun, and that it was exciting.” According to Badham, Broderick and Sheedy were “stiff as boards” when they came onto the sound stage, having both Brest’s dark vision and the idea that they were going to get fired in their minds. Badham did 12–14 takes of the first shot to loosen the actors up. At one point, Badham decided to have a race with the two actors around the sound stage with the one who came last having to sing a song to the crew. Badham lost and sang “The Happy Wanderer“, the silliest song he could think of.[4]
For me, this is the last word on Brest’s contribution to War Games because this implies that it was Badham and not Brest who was responsible for my favourite bit in the film when Ally Sheedy laments that she will miss out on starring in a local morning aerobics show because the world is going to end. Brilliant.
I guess I should just throw out my matching leotard-tights-leg warmer combo.
All that racing around the set also explains why Sheedy and Broderick are always sweaty. Because they were running around…not because they were doing Nazi stuff, sneaking around behind everyone’s back, insulting teachers, thumbing their noses at travel agents and school administration, not waiting for the release of text-only computer games, finding back-doors, playing April Fools Day pranks on their Lerlines. Oh right. That was me. Sorry about that. Will the War Games trailer make it up to you? It’s pretty good.
Posted in Nomi's Decoder Ring, War Games
April Fools Day has become a bore. All the original Star Trek actors will be starring in the next Star Wars movie (Ha! As if Shatner would ever appear in a film with Chewbacca and break his own clause that prohibits co-stars with more body hair than him). Youtube is going dark because they are sick of cashing all those enormous cat-fell-down-the-stairs-again checks. Google introduces yet another impossible technical advance that we all secretly want and are now pissed that we can’t have. It’s like an episode of Two and A Half Men–the jokes are plentiful, amateurish, and older than the cocaine scars on Charlie Sheen’s septum.
Legally the hairiest man in the room.
The good April Fools Jokes are the ones we don’t figure out right away–like the photoshopped Migrant Mother, The Taco Liberty Bell, and Bush’s second term. But the very best April Fools pranks are the ones we never figure out. Which ones? I can’t say, we haven’t figured it them out yet. However I’ve had my suspicions about the movie Gigli for some time. First of all, it was released on March 31st in 2003. That really should’ve set off some alarm bells. Especially when it turned out to be so hellaciously bad.
Ben and Jen taking an on-camera break to contemplate what went wrong. Trivia: this scene actually made the final cut.
I know what you’re thinking. “I’ve never seen Gigli…it’s probably not as bad as everyone says it was.” Wrong. It was so bad, that the love scene that featured the biggest, most famous and sexiest couple in America consisted almost entirely of Ben Affleck talking about his penis and Jennifer Lopez demanding oral sex with the classic line: “It’s Turkey time. Gobble. Gobble.” It was so bad that even people who liked to say the word “Bennifer” and who bought that whole “Jenny from the block” BS didn’t like it. I mean, come on, J-Lo…you can’t have a rider demanding an all white dressing room filled with white lilies and honey peanut Balance Bars and call yourself Jenny from the block.
Speaking of white lilies, anyone who is unlucky enough to have actually watched even a small portion of Gigli, has had it inexplicably beaten into their heads that Gigli is Italian for lily. And anyone with a working knowledge of the Encyclopedia Britannica can discover that part of Ancient Greece’s April Fools day was celebrated by secretly fixing a lily to your friend’s back and laughing your toga-clad ass off when she finally discovered it. The last person walking around town with a lily on her back was a special kind of stupid and was henceforth known as Lilium Stultus.
The stealth placing of the stultus lily.
I know what you’re thinking. “Um…that sounds kind of dumb…even for you.” Fair enough, you bitch, but what about this: Gigli was directed by fallen Hollywood wunderkind, Martin Brest. Martin has since said of Gigli, and I quote, “I had nothing to do with that piece of sewage.” We assumed that he was alluding to the rumor that his original cut of the film followed a much darker plot where the adorable developmentally disabled kid gets killed at the end by Christopher Walken…instead of ending up on a Baywatch set (which is like a death in itself, isn’t it?) But does that really make sense? Wouldn’t killing the smartest character in the flick actually make it worse? (Spoiler alert: it would.)
These adorably precocious teens hate that guy.
Here’s what I think happened. The studio had some intern slap the flick together. They planned to release Gigli as an obvious April Fools joke, not only on the American public who had foolishly fallen for the Jen and Ben or Ben and Jen thing, but also on a director who had fallen out of favour after getting kicked off War Games. A movie called Lily, released the day before April Fools, starring Bennifer, directed by Marty Boobs…and we fell for it. Well played, Hollywood. Well played. … It beats the crap out of Bacon Scope anyway.
Posted in Holiday, Nomi's Decoder Ring
Tagged april fools, bennifer, best april fools joke ever, gigli, war games
slumber party movies 