Found-Again Friday: Beyond Therapy

At some point, every kid will beg their parents to let them see an R-rated movie. I was an only child, so I say without shame that my nagging skills—in this and every other regard—were highly advanced, and so Mom took me to see my first R film in the theater when I was 13.

A sort-of art film based on a play.

Why did I waste my +20 Tongue of Nagging on such a thing? In other words, Why Found-Again?–or indeed, found in the first place?

For obvious reasons.

Indeed, this movie represented for me some sort of zenith (nadir?) of Goldblum-fan dweebdom.
Indeed, this movie represented for me some sort of zenith (nadir?) of Goldblum-fan dweebdom.

And for reasons that are obvious if you’ve seen American Dreamer.

I don't think it's actually possible to make Tom Conti not cute, but they certainly had a go at it.
I don’t think it’s actually possible to make Tom Conti not cute, but they certainly had a go at it.

The Premise: I think you have me stumped there. The romantic foibles of some incredibly neurotic people?

Bisexual Bruce (Goldblum) attempts to date homophobic basket case Prudence (Julie Hagerty) while still living with his boyfriend Bob (Christopher Guest). Both Bruce and Prudence are in therapy, with counselors (Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson) in adjacent offices who meet up for quickies during particularly boring sessions. Add in Bob’s excitable mother and a number of minor characters from a French restaurant, and you have a recipe for a nervous breakdown—on the audience’s part, also.

I had an “aha!” moment when I saw that Robert Altman directed Beyond Therapy. While it’s not a comment on the quality of the man’s body of work, this proves Altman’s movies have been Not Doing It For Me since I was a tween (the sole exception: Prêt-à-Porter), and that made me feel a bit better about my initial reaction.

However, it seems to have also shot my usual methods straight to hell. This movie is so scattered, it deserves a scattered writeup. Brace yourself for incoming bullet points!

  • I think this must mark the beginning of Goldblum’s European period, so I did learn something!
  • The set design in this movie is fantastic, from the paintings in the Tom Conti character’s office to Bruce and Bob’s apartment.
  • Christopher Guest with facial hair will always ever be Count Rugen to me, which makes his turn as Bob a bit…odd.
  • At the restaurant, Prudence says she writes for People magazine, just like Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill.
  • There’s what I am pretty sure is an Airplane! in-joke referencing Ethel Merman.
  • While it’s neat to see a movie from this far back with a bisexual protagonist, really, did it have to be like this??
  • There is a very cute rabbit hand-puppet.

The Verdict: This didn’t even make my worst-movies list back on my old site, because in spite of its flaws, Beyond Therapy was kind of forgettable in 1987, and I suspect it will be this time too. As I haven’t yet forgotten it, though, my advice is this: treat it as you would treat the Ark of the Covenant. This is a film whose one sound decision, other than set design, was “Let’s put a vest on Conti.” Unless you too are on a quest to see everything Goldblum ever made, avoid avoid avoid.

Might go well with: Leaving the room, watching a better movie in another room, and having a good, stiff drink.

Next time: Blogathon entry!

Found-Again Friday: Be Buried in the Rain by Barbara Michaels

Why Found-Again? As usual, darned if I know. I’ve read a lot of Barbara Michaels novels and I own my favorites, but this 1986 book is the only one that doesn’t get a yearly re-read, even though it’s set in the general area where I grew up and is in other ways relevant to my interests.

The Premise: Broadly, the premise of most Barbara Michaels books: a heroine finds herself in a creepy old house that is filled with danger from forces both spectral and human. The genre is gothic/romantic suspense, which can definitely stray too far into its own silly conventions: then again, which genre doesn’t from time to time?

In Be Buried in the Rain, our heroine Julie has a lot to be cynical about: the moment medical school isn’t keeping her busy, she’s asked to spend the summer taking care of her (evil) grandmother at a run-down farmhouse somewhere near Tidewater. Julie finally agrees, which brings her into contact with a former lover, a smarmy politician who happens to be her cousin, and an assortment of zealots, religious and New Age alike—all of whom are very interested when two skeletons turn up on the road. What secret from the past is hidden in those bones?

My hardcover. Not sure what that well-landscaped mansion is supposed to be, but I bet our main character would've had a much nicer time there.
My hardcover. Not sure what that well-landscaped mansion is supposed to be, but I bet our main character would’ve had a much nicer time there.

I’ll say this for our protagonist: faced with ailing and nutty relatives, she does not start watching Highlander obsessively. I’ve heard that can happen.

"I'm pretty sure that's just a myth."
“I’m pretty sure that’s just a myth.”

Instead Julie takes matters into her own hands, reading to her grandmother by day—if you break it down into real time, this is probably a book about a woman reading Bleak House aloud—and looking into the mystery in her precious free time. This is a mystery story, but it is also a book about family and…well, how family can screw you up.

The Verdict: Only this year have I come to realize how much these books, which I first read as a young teenager, have influenced both the way I write and what my concept of “a novel for grownups” should resemble in general shape and tone. That said, I think in this case the similarities to my own experiences are working against it, making it less interesting than the Michaels books set in Georgetown or farther abroad.

(…And while I was writing this, I  remembered that somewhere in my hometown, there may still be video of me doing a book talk for this in the eighth grade. Talk about horrors from the past…)

Might go well with: Country ham biscuits, Dickens, a nice nightgown.

 

Next time: The hiatus will come to an end and we’ll catch up with the Quest family. I will also be doing something fun here next weekend—by which I mean the weekend after the approaching one.

 

Found-Again Friday: Musical Interlude 7

We’re going waaaaay back this time, to the music I heard as a very small child. My dad grew up on a farm and liked to listen to a lot of WCMS FM, our country station... and as a result, so did I.

Listen, at least. Like? Sometimes.

Every few years, I am distressed to discover I still remember the chorus to this one.

This next one was one of my favorites when I was three or so— pretty embarrassing given what I can’t even really call the subtext. It’s just…text:

By the time I was five, I was just barely starting to grasp that whole subtext thing, though.

I’ve been trying for years, but have never managed to reconcile Conway Twitty’s lyrics with…well, with his hair, for one thing.

And there’s no way to make a list like this and not end on Dolly Parton. Pretty sure that’s a law.

Enjoy!

 

 

Found-Again Friday (Sort Of): Heaven’s Prisoners

This one’s iffy: while it’s true that I once sat down to watch Heaven’s Prisoners and remained in the room the whole time, I fell asleep and never followed up until last week. After all, it seemed incomprehensible that anything with Eric Roberts as the bad guy could be dull enough to incite sleep. It might not be good, but it shouldn’t be dull.

Good news, kind of!

The Premise: This is one of two film adaptations of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books: regular readers will remember that these often have a similar structure to episodes of Highlander: The Series. Alec Baldwin stars as Robicheaux, an alcoholic ex-cop who tries and fails to shake his past by leaving New Orleans and opening a bait shop in the bayou. A plane crash lands him with both a foster child and a mystery, and the answer lies with his childhood friend, mobster wannabe Bubba Rocque (Roberts).

People forget Alec Baldwin could noir like a champ back in the 1990s.
People forget Alec Baldwin could noir like a champ back in the 1990s. Then again, I also liked The Shadow.

The good news is that if you get past the first 40 minutes or so without pricking your finger on a magic spindle, Heaven’s Prisoners picks up considerably, with some nice action sequences and interesting secondary characters. (The other good news is the soundtrack, which is naturally blues-heavy.) The bad news is that it’s often a colossal downer of a film; if you’ve read the books, you know Robicheaux is what you might get if Thomas Hardy had a bowl of jambalaya, watched a few cop shows, and decided to write a mystery series, so this is not surprising. And then there’s Bubba Rocque. Did I mention Eric Roberts sports a distracting combination cornrows/French braid/man-bun for most of the film? You won’t be able to forget it.

The Verdict: Definitely better than I remembered (in that I got  all the way through it), but still not quite the movie the books deserve.

Might go well with: Etouffée, beer, and the much sillier The Big Easy, since I’ve got to admit I’ve never conked out on that one.

Found-Again Friday: The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

Why Found-Again? For personal reasons too depressing to go into, I don’t watch this very often—which is, as you know if you’ve ever seen it, a total shame. 1999’s Thomas Crown Affair is a wonderful movie, and I don’t say that often enough.

The Premise: Bored gazillionaire businessman Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) turns to art theft for a little excitement and gets more than he bargained for when the theft brings ruthless insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) into his life. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, if you’re the sort of person who thinks a cat and a mouse might hook up at a fancy-dress ball.

The Thomas Crown Affair—a quasi-remake of the 1960s heist film with Steve McQueen—is a mystery movie. It’s a heist movie. It’s a romance movie. It’s an art-museumgoer-geekery movie. It has an amazing soundtrack. It’s a worthy successor in wit and pace to The Thin Man, the movie that is my gold standard for non-supernatural films.* And more to the point, Crown is the other role Brosnan was born to play—after Remington Steele and that shooty guy with the short name.

This film is so. Much. Fun.

The Verdict: Sorry, I couldn’t hear you: I was too busy bouncing on my couch in joy as Nina Simone wailed on my television. Are you watching this yet? Why aren’t you watching this yet?

Watch this!

Might go well with: Champagne, the first season of Remington Steele, apples.

 

 

*I’m classifying sci-fi in the supernatural category for the purposes of this review, although there are lots of excellent arguments as to why I probably shouldn’t.

Found-Again Friday: Oscar

Why Found-Again? In a way, I already had one found-again conversion moment with Oscar: I walked out on it in the theater back when I was a teenager on the grounds that it was too silly. Now I own it, but don’t watch it very often—maybe once for every 50 times I quote from it, in fact. So what’s the deal?

The Premise: Twofold:

1) Being a mobster who’s trying to go straight is one lasting administrative headache, not least when your idea of “going straight” is going into finance.

2) What audiences in the early 1990s were really missing was a chance to return to the era of screwball comedies.

For people who think the appearance of Sylvester Stallone always guarantees a crapstorm on the horizon, there’s probably no hope of convincing them to like Oscar. But I like Stallone here as “Snaps” Provolone, a successful mob boss trying to go straight as a promise to his dead father (Kirk Douglas).

The only things standing in his way are the cops, the rival gang, the snooty bankers who want his money, his lovesick but devious accountant, a desperate daughter trying to get freedom at any cost, and his exasperated wife: after all that, you’d have big, sad eyes too.

Oscar has one heck of a cast: in addition to Stallone, you have Marisa Tomei, Peter Riegert, Chazz Palminteri, and Tim Curry as a character I love so much I named one of my bettas after him, the elocution teacher Dr. Poole. That’s a lot of people who are fun to watch, even when the plot threatens to wear thin.

Getting back to point 2 above, though, this movie tends to be an acquired taste, a little too silly for people who want a witty comedy and not silly enough for fans of, say, the Naked Gun series. Watching the actual screwball comedies of the early twentieth century has given me a better grounding to appreciate Oscar, but there’s a case to be made that a movie shouldn’t always come with its own research project.

The Verdict: I don’t know why I don’t watch this more often, especially since I steal henchman Connie’s “I’m gettin’ good at this!” line almost weekly. I know I said above that it was an acquired taste, but you should acquire it already.

Might go well with: Tea, smoked salmon, Johnny Dangerously.

I don’t always post full movies, but as with so many of these features, the trailer is seriously lacking (lacking about 55% of the plot, for one thing, and being oddly misleading about the rest).

Found-Again Friday: Into The Night

“The police can’t help me—I’m one of the bad guys.”

I really didn’t mean to use this space for so much Jeff Goldblum Revisited, but I’ve been watching a lot of semi-obscure ’80s/early ’90s movies lately and Into the Night fits right in.

The Premise: Nerdy engineer Ed (played by you-know-who) has insomnia, a cheating wife, and a general case of suburban malaise.

That "whoa" sound you heard back in 1987 was Tween Me watching this.
That “whoa” sound you heard back in 1987 was Tween Me watching this.

On a late-night drive, Ed inadvertently rescues Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) from a bunch of Iranian mobsters and is plunged into seedy intrigue in Los Angeles—seems Diana (see the quote above) is a jewel smuggler. Can the two of them make a deal that will get them out of this mess alive? Will Ed ever sleep? How did Dan Aykroyd get in this production, and how would we ever play Four Degrees of Jeff Goldblum without him?

This is a weird little movie, and since I didn’t recognize all the director cameos when I was younger (the movie’s director, John Landis, plays a bad guy; David “The Fly” Cronenberg plays Ed’s boss, and there are other brief appearances by Lawrence Kasdan and Roger Vadim), I am only now starting to appreciate how weird. Jim Henson has a cameo, for pete’s sake. And yet I kept wondering what kind of movie David Lynch could’ve made from this same material, since it seems to touch on a lot of his neo-noir motifs.

On the other hand, could anyone really improve on Jeff Goldblum in an Elvis car?

Wow.
Nah.

The Verdict: On the whole, I probably like this movie as much now as I did when I saw it in the ’80s, but for completely different reasons. Except for the B.B. King soundtrack, of course: that’s always good.

Keep an eye out for David Bowie in the trailer, too.

Might go well with: Bacon, other diner food.

Next time: We spend more time with Jonny Quest and friends.

Found-Again Friday: Werewolf of London

I’m a bit deficient in the old Universal horror movies, so I selected a few to visit and revisit—including this one, the favorite horror film of one of my non-horror-watching, no-you’re-a-nerd acquaintances.*

The Premise: Botanist Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) has a manor but not much of a manner, to the dismay of his lovely wife. On an expedition to Tibet to collect a night-blooming flower, he’s attacked by a wolf-creature; after he returns to England, Wilfred begins to experience certain…urges. You know the drill. The flower can stave off his transformations, but only if Wilfred can get it to bloom and keep the flowers out of the hands of a rival (Warner “Charlie Chan, for some reason” Oland).

I haven’t been so conflicted about a Found-Again entry since the Beauty and the Beast TV show turned me into a 14-year-old girl again. Rated purely on a scale of “How’s the werewolf story?,” Werewolf of London is okay, a solid 5–7 out of 10. It is, however, highly entertaining for the following reasons:

  • A marvelous cast of minor characters, including a haughty lab assistant who looks exactly like Arte Johnson in Love At First Bite, a snooty butler with a combover, and an assemblage of gin-swilling old ladies. There is also the wife’s old boyfriend, who at one point dons a leather trenchcoat and looks as much like Black Adder’s WWI Lord Flashheart as it is possible to do unironically.
See?
See?
  • We can see that Wilfred is already well on his way to villainy thanks to a tour of some really evil plants at the beginning of the movie. One appears to be a shoggoth, in fact, or some sort of shoggoth/sea anemone hybrid.
  • This is, hands down, the most stereotypically British horror movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve certainly put in my hours watching Hammer films. There’s something so endearing about a ravening monster who stops to put on his scarf and hat before he goes out to eat pedestrians.
  • Our protagonist is at one point warned that “the werewolf seeks to kill the thing it loves best.” Based on our actual body count, it would appear that what Wilfred really loves is blondes with good screaming voices.

The Verdict: As long as you don’t pin your hopes of entertainment on the actual werewolf, Werewolf of London is an awful lot of fun. If only someone had explained about the shoggoth.

Might go well with: Carpaccio, edible flowers, Bombay Sapphire.

 

Next time: Cartoon characters with frickin’ laser beams.

 

*To whom I may or may not have been married at one time.

Found-Again Friday: Musical Interlude 6

Summer is on its way out for 2015, but let’s cling to it a while with some island music! As usual, all songs posted are things that appear in my music collection—I have a weakness for reggae and soca as well as for Voltaire and nerd music and, well, almost everything else.

Here’s a voice that never fails to give me chills:

When I’m in need of a little lift in spirits, I go for this one.(Work semi-warning: bikinis, sexy dance moves, etc.)

Speaking of which, this one has spawned a lot of dance tutorials on YouTube:

I may be misremembering, but I could swear I heard a network use this to advertise reruns of the show that shares the name.

And one of the first reggae songs I ever heard back when I was a moody youth (and I liked it anyway)…

Enjoy the sunshine!

 

Next time: Jonny Quest and family are on the beach, too—though probably not listening to Tenor Saw.

 

 

Found-Again Friday: The Secret of Terror Castle: Three Investigators #1

Why Found-Again? Like many bookish kids of a certain time period, I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew novels (I was hard on books, so if you could see them, you’d think I meant that literally) and the Hardy Boys, supplemented by the occasional T.A.C.K. puzzle-mystery collection. But my favorites were the Three Investigators mysteries, so this week I’m taking a look at the first book in that series.

Not the edition I used to have, but my library had the ones with these psychedelic covers. Mem'ries....
Not the edition I used to have, but my library had the ones with these psychedelic covers. Mem’ries….

The Premise: Inquisitive youngsters Pete, Bob and Jupiter (…yeah) start a detective agency by organizing Jupiter’s family junkyard into an office and a series of brilliant secret passages and by blackmailing Alfred Hitchcock—clearly the best way to do almost anything. For their first case, the three look into the mystery of a vanished old movie star and his spooky mansion. Along the way they have to cope with rivals from school, a menacing ex-manager, and mounting evidence that the darned house may actually be haunted.

I mean it in the best possible way when I say that this one’s a Scooby-Doo episode—a connection I never made when I was watching the Scooby Gang as a kid: maybe I thought everything was like that when I was eight. As explained Gothic goes, though, it’s quite atmospheric, with no amount of explanation quite able to quell the characters’ fright.

The thing about mystery novels for kids is that they center intelligence as the most important quality the character can have—at least, that’s my theory for why I loved these books so much and idolized two of the three main characters. I have clear memories of begging my father to help me move old farm equipment around to make secret passages like The Three Investigators (he refused, thus passively saving me from a series of encounters with various poisonous snakes).

The series is not without its own mysteries, though. Unlike Nancy Drew, who seems to be forever college-aged, I can’t quite figure out how old Bob, Pete and Jupe are supposed to be. They’re too young to drive, but their kid nemesis is not, which makes me think they can’t be younger than 12. And shouldn’t their kid nemesis be interested in girls by now?

The Verdict: This was a surprisingly fun reread, despite being written in what might be called Kids’ Adventurese, with the bowdlerized swearwords and the wholesome protagonists. I suspect a few more of these will be added to the Found-Again archive as time goes on: at the very least there’s still my favorite, The Singing Serpent, yet to go.

Might go well with: popcorn, a glass of milk, envy that you never owned a printing press when you were approximately twelve years old.

 

Next time: It’s Highlander: Endgame, and probably the end of me writing about Connor MacLeod for a while.