BEFORE: Last night's film was very meta, meaning it was a film about people making a film, and the film-within-the-film was very similar to the framing film around it (minor correction: the film within "Get Shorty" was not called "Get Shorty", but instead it was "Get Leo", apparently...) Another film that used this concept was "American Splendor", which won't be part of my countdown, since I've already seen it - but it's the life story of Harvey Pekar, Cleveland file clerk, indie comics writer, record collector, jazz critic, frequent talk-show guest and professional grumpy-pants, who passed away yesterday at the age of 70. So I'd like to send out a long-distance dedication tonight...
I met Harvey once, in an elevator at NBC, behind the scenes of the Letterman show, since my BFF Andy had done a tech favor for Harvey's wife Joyce, and she invited Andy to the show, and Andy invited me. Given the choice between the green room and the audience, we chose to sit in the audience for what would turn out to be Harvey's penultimate (I think...) appearance on Dave's NBC show.
Here's what a professional, Joanna Connors of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote about Harvey:
"Unlike the superheroes who ordinarily inhabit the pages of comic books, Pekar could not leap tall buildings in a single bound, nor move faster than a speeding bullet. Yet his comics suggested a different sort of heroism: The working-class, everyman heroics of simply making it through another day, with soul -- if not dignity -- intact.
R. Crumb said Pekar's work examined the minutia of everyday life, material "so staggeringly mundane it verges on the exotic."
Pekar himself summed it up as revealing "a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It's the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about."
Me again:
People tend to say a lot of nice things about the deceased, but I'll be honest, (and I think Harvey would agree with me) he was a cynical, cantankerous curmudgeon, and proud of it. I wish the world had more professional grumps in it, and as a fellow cynic (or so people tell me - but what do THEY know...), and a (hopefully) future curmudgeon myself, I'm feeling the loss.
See, Harvey was a sort of a blogger before there even were blogs. He took his life - every last detail of it - and put it into his ironically-titled comic book, "American Splendor". Please seek it out if you get the chance, or at least view the film and send a thought or two Harvey's way. Especially when your office routine is getting you down, or you're feeling cynical about life. It could be worse - you could be a V.A. hospital file clerk in Cleveland diagnosed with lymphoma.
The story of Harvey Pekar comes with a lesson, and a warning. The lesson is, you can always take whatever life throws at you - failing health, a bad relationship, a dead-end job, and you can process it, flip it around, and turn it into art, or at least humor. Look at me - I turned my insomnia and my obsessive list-making skills into the very blog you're reading now!
And the warning is - if you're a cranky sort of person, by all means, channel it and own it. Be the best darn cranky-pants you can be. But be aware that some people are the gatekeepers, talk-show hosts among them, and if you overplay your hand, you can wear out your welcome. I'm curious to see if Letterman gives Harvey a shout-out, since he was essentially banned from the show back in the late 80's, for criticizing General Electric and refusing to answer Dave's questions. (see also: Andy Kaufman, Crispin Glover and Joaquin Phoenix...)
In the end, this was a man who had every right to be mad at the world...and he took full advantage of that. I don't know if there's an afterlife, though I hope there is - and if there is, it's easy to imagine Harvey already complaining about the accommodations...
THE PLOT: Disenchanted with the movie industry, Chili Palmer tries the music industry, meeting and romancing a widow of a music exec on the way.
AFTER: I realize that Elmore Leonard has probably written quite a few books that feature the Chili Palmer character, but it only took two movies for the franchise to run right off the rails...usually it takes 3 or 4 sequels for a franchise to devolve this much.
We're led to believe that the music industry, like the film industry, is filled with contemptible people, from the executives to the managers to the producers, right on down to their posses. I'm sure there might be a few bad apples in the bunch, but this depiction seems sort of extreme. Very few characters in this film aren't packing heat - and we get to see what happens when "Gangstas" bump up against real gangsters.
Again, everyone wants to be famous, and everyone wants to be rich - doesn't anyone just want a simple, adequately-paying job with some health insurance and maybe a 401K?
The trouble starts when Chili's friend, a record executive, gets taken out in a drive-by shooting, and Chili hooks up with his widow (Uma Thurman) to shepherd the career of a young singer named Linda Moon. Problem is, she's already under contract as part of a girl-group with a manager named Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel, who cameo'd in "Get Shorty" as himself, but plays a different character here...)
This all puts Chili at odds with Nick's posse, and also a black record producer and HIS posse, plus the Russian mob, and he has to come up with a plan to play all the factions off against each other and not get caught in the crossfire. And you just KNOW he'll come up with a plan...
In "Get Shorty", Chili had this move where he'd break into someone's house, turn on the TV, and wait for his target to wake up to turn the TV off, then get the drop on them. Well, in this sequel it seems that everyone else uses this trick too, to the point of ridiculousness. Maybe Chili worked it into the plot of "Get Leo", and people copied it, but that's a bit of a stretch.
No, the pieces didn't really come together for me on this one, or maybe they came together a little TOO well, since all the loose ends got tied up pretty neat and quick. Of course, having a successful hit record is portrayed as the solution to all of life's little problems, but as we've seen too many times in real life, achieving fame is more often the START of people's problems. I'm just sayin'.
It's a little interesting to see Travolta and Uma Thurman play off each other in a movie that isn't "Pulp Fiction", but that's really only novelty value.
Also starring Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Zoolander"), Andre Benjamin (last seen in "Semi-Pro"), Duane "The Rock" Johnson (last seen in "The Scorpion King"), Cedric the Entertainer (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Danny DeVito (carrying over from "Get Shorty"), James Woods (last seen in "The General's Daughter"), Robert Pastorelli (last seen in "Michael), with cameos from Debi Mazar, Aerosmith, the Black-Eyed Peas, Seth Green and Scott Adsit (from "30 Rock").
RATING: 4 out of 10 back-up dancers
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