In the Latest Round Up of Blurbs from my Upcoming Book I Look at The Comeback Trail, Top Five and WiredToo Much, Too Soon, Doomed!,
For the last two years much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the film industry. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page.
I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 397 movies so far and will cover god knows how many in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about.
In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page or pre-order The Fractured Mirror over at Backerkit. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible.
The Comeback Trail (2023)
Harry Hurwitz’s clever show business satire The Comeback Trail spent nearly a decade on the shelf. The cult comedy finished shooting in 1974 but was only released in 1982. A remake similarly spent long, agonizing years on the shelf not getting any funnier as well after filming wrapped in 2019. This eternity in film purgatory could not be blamed on an absence of star-power. The Comeback Trail reunites the Academy-Award winning co-stars of Unforgiven, Tommy Lee Jones and Morgan Freeman, in addition to bringing together Robert De Niro with his Midnight Run screenwriter George Gallo, who directs and cowrote the screenplay with Josh Posner.
Unfortunately The Comeback Trail does not need legendary actors or Oscar winners. It needs funny performers and De Niro, Jones and Freeman do not qualify.
The maddeningly and consistently miscast Robert De Niro flounders in the thankless lead role of Max Barber. He’s a bottom-feeding show-business parasite who cranks out sleazy exploitation cheapies for the drive-in market and owes a small fortune to movie-obsessed mobster Reggie Fontaine (Morgan Freeman).
When a famous actor dies while shooting a film that is handsomely insured it gives the schlockmeister a killer idea: he’ll cast a feeble old-timer in a physically demanding lead role and then get rich when he dies during production from the insurance payout.
Max chooses suicidal, broken-hearted Duke Montana (Tommy Lee Jones), a has been western star, as his patsy and is horrified to discover that the old man is seemingly indestructible. In sharp contrast to the original, The Comeback Trail lays the mawkish sentimentality on thick. That ensures that the overreaching and underachieving remake fails as a drama about old men pursuing one last dream in the twilight of their lives as well as bombing as a laugh-free dark comedy full of DOA slapstick set-pieces. This buffoonery is unsanctionable.
Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four (2015) FM
The high profile shelving of Batgirl makes the ill-fated 1990s Roger Corman The Fantastic Four film less unique but no less remarkable. The never-released 1994 cheapie is no longer the only movie inspired by famous comic book characters that was cancelled by the studio that created it to the horror of its cast and crew as well as fans apoplectic that they’d been robbed of an opportunity to see their favorite superheroes onscreen.
The cast of The Fantastic Four understandably thought that playing some of the most iconic characters in pop culture would be good for their careers. They did not realize that they had signed on for a project that was designed to fail, that was born specifically for the sake of dying. The Corman The Fantastic Four wasn’t a movie; it was a suicide mission.
When The Fantastic Four was made superhero entertainment hadn’t yet conquered pop culture. The genre was so low-rent that, in one of the film’s most fascinating revelations, Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman talks about being approached to make a Fantastic Four movie and turning it down on the basis that it would be beneath his dignity.
Roger Corman said yes. The Fantastic Four had a million dollar budget. That was big for Corman but microscopic for a special effects-intensive superhero movie.
Everyone did the best with the very limited resources they had but even Corman can’t make a convincing comic book movie for that little money. Yet the filmmakers believed in the film and its possibilities so strongly that some of them used their own money to complete The Fantastic Four.
It’s hard not to feel for these frustrated artists as they recount, with great emotion and deep sadness, how their big break morphed into the biggest disappointment of their careers.
Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four is a tragedy and a bleakly funny dark comedy about the complicated, fraught intersection of entertainment and commerce.
Thanks to the internet, The Fantastic Four is now available to anyone with Youtube. That ending is less happy than bittersweet but the fact The Fantastic Four is widely available, albeit not in a legal or official form, represents a triumph in itself.
Too Much Too Soon (1958)
Diana Barrymore led a wild, messy, self-destructive life and died an early, all too predictable death. But before the beautiful, doomed scion of the legendary American acting dynasty died in 1960 at thirty-eight under shadowy circumstances she told her story, with the help of ghostwriter Gerold Frank, in the salacious 1957 memoir Too Much Too Soon. A year later it was luridly adapted for the big screen just two years before its subject’s death.
Dorothy Malone plays the actress as a beautiful, big-eyed overgrown child who is borderline feral in her insatiable appetite for booze and bad men. She cannot resist handsome rogues with silver tongues, including her father John, an alcoholic charmer played by Errol Flynn, a real life friend and protege of the legendary thespian.
After an extended absence the famously boozy actor reconnects with his adoring adult daughter, who gazes at him with a look that feels disconcertingly romantic and sexual rather than familial. The aspiring actress can’t hope to match her father’s talent, charisma or authority but she can more than keep up with his unfortunate predilection for self-destruction.
Flynn delivers a wonderful performance both achingly sad and brashly entertaining. He knows this character because he was a close friend but also because, on some level, Flynn was this character, a larger than life movie star whose vices were as legendary as his gifts.
Like its cursed, glamorous protagonist, Too Much Too Soon never recovers from the death of John Barrymore, which occurs halfway through. After the death of a man who meant everything to her, Diana lurches drunkenly in the gutter, getting married and then divorced to terrible men and blowing her big shot at movie stardom through a combination of talentlessness and unprofessionalism.
Flynn almost makes Too Much Too Soon worth watching but it’s ultimately much too much, a wildly excessive would-be guilty pleasure that’s all guilt and no pleasure in its ugly, dispiriting and deeply unkind second hour.
Top Five (2014) FM
Chris Rock followed in the footsteps of Woody Allen’s famously prickly and off-putting 1980 comedy-drama Stardust Memories with his own prickly and sometimes off-putting 2014 comedy-drama Top Five. Like the unmistakably Woody Allen-like character Allen played in Stardust Memories, Andre Allen, the unmistakably Chris Rock-like movie star Rock plays here, is tired of making the public laugh with silly comedies and wants to move them instead with dramas that speak to him as an artist and a man. To that end Andre has taken a break from playing a wildly popular bear policeman named Hammy in order to play real-life Haitian revolutionary Dutty Boukman in the biopic Uprize.
Top Five follows Andre as he is interviewed by Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), a New York Times journalist with a very stupid, unnecessary secret that single-handedly makes the film dumber and more convoluted.
Andre has to put up with the public’s love for Hammy and disinterest in the new direction of his film career as he revisits his old haunts and takes stock of his life just a few days before his marriage to a reality show diva.
Top Five finds Rock growing as an actor as well as a filmmaker playing a flawed, complicated man at a crossroads but many of the film’s best moments belong to a stacked supporting cast that includes ringers like Tracy Morgan, Cedric the Entertainer, Kevin Hart and J.B. Smoove. Top Five is alive, raw and personal but it’s also frustratingly if predictably problematic and glib in its depiction of tabloid culture and random but intense homophobia and gay panic humor involving Chelsea’s just barely closeted gay boyfriend Brad (Anders Holm), whose zeal for being sodomized is the butt of far too many jokes.
Top Five is either a bad movie with a lot of really good stuff in it or a good movie with a lot of really bad stuff in it. Rock has grown as a writer, director, actor and storyteller but not to the point that he doesn’t need a last-minute assist from DMX singing Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” through prison bars to put this tricky, inspired, frustrating and ultimately deeply personal film in the win column.
Wired (1989)
For many unknown actors getting cast as a legendary icon in a controversial biopic would be the break of a lifetime. For Michael Chiklis, playing John Belushi in 1989’s Wired was a disaster he was lucky to survive. In a rare, uncharacteristic fit of good judgment Hollywood turned its back on the seedy, sensationalistic and cruel feature-film adaptation of Bob Woodward’s money-grubbing best-seller for moral as well as creative reasons. Director Larry Peerce never directed another feature film. This was similarly screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s final credit. Yet Wired would have flopped even if the entirety of the film business was behind it. It’s not just as bad as its abysmal reputation suggests; it’s worse.
Wired at least deserves credit for being egregiously awful in a novel fashion. Rauch’s screenplay piles on pointless post-modern wankery with a tasteless framing device in which Belushi’s confused and horrified ghost is led through a surreal journey through his life by a cab-driving guardian angel played by Ray Sharkey.
Wired portrays its subject as a drug addict first and foremost, a fatal overdose second, a monster of id and ego third and a comic performer of rare ability and distinction a distant third. Wired depicts Belushi as someone whose adult life was one long drug binge littered with intermittent moments of comic greatness.
Wired never lets audiences forget for a moment that John Belushi was a drug addict who died young of a fatal drug overdose. The film is morbidly obsessed with the condition of Belushi’s corpse and the mechanics of injecting speedballs.
The rightly notorious, reviled biopic features recreations of Belushi’s performances on Saturday Night Live and Animal House that aren’t just unfunny: they’re anti-funny. The filmmakers don’t understand the comic mind, at all, yet they feel obligated to unsuccessfully attempt comedy all the same.
Wired's unfortunate existence is a giant glob of spit in the face of Belushi, Belushi’s memory and everyone who loved him because he was a comic genius and a great man and not the grotesque, hateful caricature of a junky he is here.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
Kevin Smith borrowed liberally from the pages of the wildly successful Judd Apatow playbook when he wrote and directed 2008’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. For the first time in his career Smith embraced improvisation at the behest of star Seth Rogen. Smith purloined other members of Apatow’s repertory company as well: The 40 Year Old Virgin’s Elizabeth Banks is the female romantic lead and The 40 Year Old Virgin’s Gerry Bednob and Knocked Up’s Craig Robinson have supporting roles.
Rogen plays Zack Brown, a quintessentially Apatowian man-child. He’s an under-achieving twenty-something slacker who lives with his longtime platonic best friend Miriam "Miri" Linky (Elizabeth Banks). The luckless duo are so broke that they are perpetually fighting homelessness when Zack decides to pick up some quick, easy money with a Star Wars-themed porn parody featuring himself, Miri and some professionals, including one played by Traci Lords, who in real life was forced into pornography while still underage.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is so raunchy that the dialogue actually becomes less profane once its characters start fucking each other on camera for money. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is filthy without being particularly funny. Plot-wise and thematically it’s an uninspired combination of two exhausted cliches: best friends who don’t realize that they’re in love with one another and the culture-clash comedy of non-pornographers with only a vague sense of what pornography even entails getting into the adult film business with comic results.
Rogen and Banks are likable leads but the film’s affability is compromised by its weird conception of gay sex as both inherently exotic and hilarious and a bizarrely, unnecessary blast of sexism in the form of Tisha Campbell-Martin’s portrayal of a shrewish wife. Smith is a big believer in the idea of writing what you know. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is one of four films Smith has made about making movies. It’s the best of the bunch but as a lowbrow comedy it leaves much to be desired, primarily in terms of laughs and originality.
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