We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
CLERK (2021)
I'm an awkward, nervous person with extreme social anxiety, and one of the many awkward moments in my life came in Birmingham, Alabama during the Sidewalk Film Festival in 2013. Normally I avoid parties, but at the festival there happened to be a party where they were serving free pizza - and there was no way I was going to miss out on the free pizza. So I went to this party just long enough to eat my fill, then caught a shuttle bus back to the hotel I was staying in. During that ride from the party to the hotel, there was only one other passenger on that bus: director Malcolm Ingram, who was at the festival with his documentary Continental. We talked briefly, but much of that ride went by in complete, awkward silence, because I had too much anxiety to express how cool it was that I was on a bus with Malcolm Ingram. A director whose movies I had watched, whose podcasts I had listened to. A director who happened to be good friends with the person who has brought me more entertainment in my life than anyone else ever has or will ever be able to, Kevin Smith. It was a missed opportunity. If I was a talker, I would have had a whole lot to say during that bus ride.
Ingram's latest documentary is Clerk, which is all about his friend Kevin Smith. It covers both his career - from Clerks to Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (this documentary was made before Clerks III went into production), every one of Smith's movies gets at least a moment of acknowledgment - and his personal life, from his youth in New Jersey to the heart attack that almost took him away from us in 2018. A scare he triumphantly rebounded from.
I have been an obsessive Kevin Smith fan since I was just eleven years old, I have dedicated thousands of hours of my life to watching and reading his work and listening to his podcasts, so I can't say that there's any information in Clerk that I wasn't aware of before... but that's fine. I didn't need to learn anything new. I just enjoyed having this chance to celebrate the life and career of Kevin Smith for 115 minutes. I like hearing about the ups and downs of making the movies I love. I'm proud of Kevin and the success he's had, the things he has accomplished. The guy means so much to me, I had tears in my eyes for much of Clerk's running time. Ingram did a great job with the documentary, it was a joy to watch.
And it made me regret even more that I was so awkward during that bus ride.
NEWHART (1982 - 1990)
Having made my way through the 1972 - 1978 run of The Bob Newhart Show last year, I decided to move right on from that to the next sitcom to star Bob Newhart... which just removed some words from the title of his previous show and was titled Newhart. And I have to say, I find it kind of odd that both of these shows were named after the lead actor, who plays a character with a different name in both of them. In The Bob Newhart Show he played Bob Hartley, and in Newhart he plays Dick Loudon. But that's how it goes with sitcoms sometimes.
Dick Loudon is the author of do-it-yourself books that give people advice on how to handle equipment, assemble furniture, do some repairs about the house, that sort of thing. This pays well enough that he and his wife Joanna (Mary Frann) are able to purchase the Stratford Inn, one of the oldest inns in Vermont, which Dick loves because it has so much history. It was standing there in 1774. James Madison stayed there! There's a witch corpse in the basement. Dick makes enough from his writing to take care of place regardless of guests, but the Stratford will get plenty of guests over the show's eight seasons. And Dick will get a side gig, hosting a local talk show called Vermont Today.
As on his other show, Newhart is surrounded by quirky characters on this show. There's the Stratford's handyman George (Tom Poston), one of the most good-hearted people on the show, even if he's not quick-witted. There's the backwoods fellow Larry (William Sanderson) and his silent brothers Darryl (Tony Papenfuss) and Darryl (John Voldstad), three of the most well-remembered TV characters of the '80s (and 1990). When the show starts out, there's also habitual liar Kirk (Steven Kampmann), who owns the neighboring cafe. Kirk is a real pain with his constant lying and was written off the show after season 2. That's because the girl he was smitten with, heiress Leslie (Jennifer Holmes), who takes a job as the Stratford Inn's maid because she wants to see what it's like to be average, was written off the show after season 1.
Leslie was replaced by her heiress cousin Stephanie (Julia Duffy), who had appeared on the show during season 1. While Leslie was pleasant and down-to-earth, the idea was that the show would be more fun to have Stephanie as the maid because she was very flawed; self-absorbed and materialistic. They certainly gave Stephanie a lot of screen time over the seasons, especially once they paired her up with Michael Harris (Peter Scolari), the self-absorbed and materialistic producer of Dick's TV show. They are very over-the-top characters, which fit the tone of Newhart as it evolved over the years.
Other nutball characters pop in here and there along the way - really, almost everyone who appears on Newhart other than Dick and Joanna is a nutball. Like tough-talking cop Shifflett (Todd Susman), nymphomaniac librarian Prudence Goddard (Kathy Kinney), and mayor Chester Wanamaker (William Lanteau), who is always accompanied by his "yes man" best friend Jim Dixon (Thomas Hill). Some of my favorite line deliveries on the show came from Hill, who would say some of the dumbest things with a loud voice and a smile on his face.
Newhart got crazier and crazier as it went along, sometimes it ventured into the bizarre, and by the time it got to season eight it was completely absurd. There was never much in the way of character drama or evolution, not much to really grab your heart and make you care - maybe some moments here and there with George, or episodes where Stephanie gets in touch with the humanity buried under her nonsense. That's why it's so easy to go along with the series finale... which I'll go ahead and spoil, because people have already been talking about it for over thirty years now. In the final moments of the last episode, we find out that the entire show was nothing but a dream that Bob Hartley had after eating a late supper. He wakes up in bed next to his wife Emily (Suzanne Pleshette) and we get a quick coda to The Bob Newhart Show as the ending of Newhart. The events in Newhart never happened, the characters never existed. And that makes sense, because it was all too silly to be believed.
It is pretty mind-blowing that Bob's dream gave us a show that lasted longer than his own show. (The Bob Newhart Show ran for 6 seasons and 142 episodes, Newhart ran for 8 seasons and 184 episodes.)
A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988)
A Fish Called Wanda was a collaboration between director Charles Crichton and writer/star John Cleese, comedy veterans with decades of experience. They spent years crafting the story together and perfecting the script - so it makes total sense that the result of this collaboration was a major financial and critical success. The movie is considered to be one of the best comedies ever made. And I have to admit, when I first saw it as a youngster, I didn't get it. I was a fan of plenty of '80s comedies by that point, but this one was somehow beyond me. So I wasn't all that familiar with A Fish Called Wanda when I was asked to write a video script about it for the Revisiting series on the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel. But I took the job. The series is called Revisiting, after all, and this gave me a reason to revisit a movie I hadn't watched in many years.
As it turns out, A Fish Called Wanda worked for me a lot better as a 38 year old than it did when I was a tween. Now I understand the humor and can see why the movie has a fan following and is so highly respected - and I was able to convey that information through the script I wrote for the Revisited video, which is now available to watch at THIS LINK.
The story centers on a group of people planning a diamond heist: mastermind George Thomason (Tom Georgeson); his right hand man Ken Pile (Michael Palin), who has a severe stammer; Wanda Gershwitz (Jamie Lee Curtis), who has seduced George merely so she can get close to those diamonds; and Wanda's lover (for the last two weeks) Otto West, who she introduces to the others as her brother. Otto is played by Kevin Kline, who won an Oscar for his performance as this ridiculous, idiotic, faux intellectual. Wanda and Otto plan to turn George in to the police and steal the diamonds out from under him after the heist - and Wanda is planning to knock Otto out and get away with the diamonds on her own as the next step. Problem is, George moved the diamonds before Wanda and Otto could take them.
Now George is in jail, awaiting trial. In the quest to find out where the diamonds are, Wanda decides to seduce the information out of his barrister, Archie Leach - played by Cleese and named after Cary Grant (Archie Leach was his birth name). Otto acts like he's not jealous, but is actually intensely jealous to see Wanda fake-pursuing this guy. And despite being married, Archie dives right into this affair. Meanwhile, George has tasked Ken with killing Eileen Coady (Patricia Hayes), the elderly lady who saw them getting away from the heist and identified him to the authorities.
So A Fish Called Wanda is filled with bad people doing terrible things, which is probably why I didn't understand it when I was a kid. Plus, you know, it's British, and I'm not. The movie expects you to laugh at things you normally would not laugh at, like the sight of the animal-loving Ken accidentally causing the deaths of Eileen Coady's adorable little dogs instead of the woman herself. Of course I wasn't going to laugh at that as a youngster. As an adult, I see why this is humorous within the context of the story and the characters.
This is a great, really funny comedy... which makes a slight misstep at the end when it wants us to believe that Wanda has actually grown to care about Archie. She was just using him to get to the diamonds, like she was using everybody else. But that was a change made at the demand of a test screening audience that bought into their relationship for some reason. Aside from that, it all works extremely well. And if you'd like to hear a whole lot of trivia and more discussion of the movie, check out that video I wrote.
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