BEFORE: You might recall that I tried to watch this film last year, right after the rock/pop documentary chain, which happened to end with a Rush documentary narrated by Paul Rudd, and that got me neatly back to fiction films starring Mr. Rudd, and according to Wikipedia, he's got a cameo in this film, as a photo in the magazine's high-school yearbook parody. OK, a couple of problems with that - it's just a photo, not any kind of footage, not even archive footage. Secondly, according to the IMDB, Paul Rudd is NOT in this movie, and that's another actor playing "The Nobody" (Larry Kroger), in the mock yearbook. And even if that WERE Paul Rudd, and I'm not saying it is, it's barely recognizable on screen - so how can I count that as a proper Paul Rudd appearance?
I did the only honest thing I could do, and removed this film from the Paul Rudd Chain - I easily found not one but TWO films on Netflix to take its place, "Mute" and "The Fundamentals of Caring". Then I mentally rescheduled this film for a later date, and I made sure that my January chain from "Game Night" to Feb. 1's film would include this, because I really really want to see it, and how often does THAT even happen?
So here it is, rescheduled from last September, and thankfully it stayed on Netflix long enough for me to re-program it. Domhnall Gleeson carries over from "Frank", which works out pretty well because both films are probably about the creative process, how art (music or comedy) is connected to genius but also to madness. And Gleeson's got a major role in this film, not just a yearbook photo, so it all worked out for the best. And with such a large cast of actors, it makes perfect sense to follow a different actor to forge a new path away from this film.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" (Movie #2,279)
THE PLOT: In the 1970's and '80s, National Lampoon's success and influence creates a new media empire overseen in part by the brilliant and troubled Douglas Kenney.
AFTER: Hey, the Oscar nominations are out, but I'll talk more about them tomorrow. It's also time once again for the Sundance Film Festival, so I should probably take a look at what's playing there, because I'll probably be adding a lot of them to my Netflix queue in a few months. Tonight's film premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2018, almost exactly one year ago (damn, I'm one day off.).
Eventually every documentary ever will be re-made as an acted fiction film, because who even watches docs any more, besides me? That's a little too close to learning. Hell, I only even watch the fun ones, about rock music and geek stuff. I've got a bunch on my list about politics, children's TV stars like Fred Rogers and Big Bird, and comedians like Robin Williams and Joan Rivers that I'm looking forward to, the rest of them I keep putting off, using the fact that they don't link to each other as a lame excuse.
So if you have seen the documentary "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead", the bad news is that this basically tells the same story, only with actors instead of interviews with the people who were there. If you have NOT seen the documentary, then you need to know that National Lampoon was a magazine that came along in the 1970's during a very dark time in American history - like, the U.S. was still involved in a war in Asia that had dragged on for far too long, and there was a President in the White House who was generally hated by young people and was known for rigging elections and blatantly lying to the American people. Wait a second...
But my point is, America needed to laugh at the time - we're seeing the same sort of thing going on now these last two years, with Trump in charge the country is literally falling apart, but it's been a gold mine for comedy writers. Every late night talk show that's made fun of the President is doing well, so if we're going to hell in a bucket, at least (on some level) we're enjoying the ride. But the Lampoon had a real target market in mind, to occupy the vast space somewhere in-between MAD Magazine and the New Yorker. Humor that was sick, irreverent and aimed squarely at the college crowd. It only took a few issues (and a cover photo threatening to shoot a dog if people didn't buy the magazine) to get the word out. Oh, and lawsuits from the offending parties helped get more eyeballs on the magazine, too. National Lampoon was to the New Yorker sort of what Hustler was to Playboy.
But this maybe also signified the point in time where the geeks started to inherit the earth. A couple of Harvard grads with minds for parody, Doug Kenney and Henry Beard, took the Harvard Lampoon into a national magazine, and then surrounded themselves with the sharpest, funniest, darkest New York satirists they could find, and started shocking people and breaking down conventions. They allowed their writers to speak their minds through their humor, and say things most people wouldn't say in mixed company. You know, kind of like Twitter today, only on paper. But bear in mind that there were probably hundreds of writers in and out of this little dysfunctional family, and this movie is openly apologetic over only being able to focus on four or five of them.
There's also the narrative device of using the older version of a man who died young as the narrator of the story. I spotted this right off, because I'd seen the documentary about National Lampoon, and I knew Doug Kenney died in his 30's, after being the guy in the "Animal House" movie that made people sit up and ask, "Who the hell is THAT guy, and why does he look and act so weird?" (For the record, he's the Delta House frat brother who only has one line in the movie, and in the end parade/riot, he's the one that leads the marching band into that blind alley.) But then here he is, being interviewed at the start of the film, only he's old, and Kenney never got old. So it's what somebody THINKS that Kenney might say, if he'd lived, like not claiming to be the guy who changed comedy in the 1970's. And who's asking him interviewquestions, God? St. Peter?
It's clear from some of the scenes here, however, what did change comedy in the 1970's - cocaine. It changed all of Hollywood, really, but it enabled comedy writers to work harder, tell jokes faster, and stay up all night partying and/or writing jokes. Maybe sometimes a combination of the two. But the other side of that is what drugs took from us in return, since it quickened the loss of John Belushi, Chris Farley, Mitch Hedberg and many others. You know that show "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee"? Well in the 1970's and 80's they were all out in cars getting something a little stronger.
Doug Kenney was some kind of addict, sure, but he also had the extra pressure of never feeling good enough to please his parents, since he couldn't live up to the memory of his older brother who died young. Toss in the added pressures of running a magazine and trying (in vain, it seems) to be faithful to his wife, and that was sort of a recipe for disaster. Kenney went walk-about for several months, got clean and started to write the "great American novel", and the film uses one of those Hollywood tropes where you see a guy with a typewriter in a beautiful tropical setting, pounding away at the keys, free from writer's block and all the conventions of society that have been holding him back. Only here there's a surprise twist, he comes back to New York with the manuscript, lets his best friend read it, then realizes it's terrible and throws it away. I must admit I've never seen that in a film before.
The casting here ranges from terrible to awesome - it's bad when the actor cast in a part looks nothing like the famous person they're playing, like John Belushi or Rodney Dangerfield. OK, I realize Rodney was unique, you're never going to find someone all bug-eyed like he was, but how hard did they TRY? Instead they got a sound-alike and mostly filmed him from very far away so nobody could tell. The there's the OK casting (Joel McHale as Chevy Chase, Seth Green as a young Christopher Guest) and the really inspired - Jon Daly as Bill Murray, Lonny Ross as Ivan Reitman, Ed Helms as talk-show host Tom Snyder and Thomas Lennon as (seriously, a pitch-perfect) Michael O'Donoghue. And sometimes, like with Paul Scheer playing Paul Schaffer, you wonder if the process was just alphabetical or something. Then there's a bunch of other cameos that will please fans of "Animal House", like seeing Martha Smith as "Babs", the Universal Studio Tour Guide, or the actor who played Neidermeyer as a publisher rejecting the idea for the National Lampoon magazine, probably his biggest role since that Twisted Sister video back in the late 1980's.
Maybe Doug Kenney really got upset when he saw the movie "Airplane", but probably that was either petty jealousy, or else to me that's a NITPICK POINT, because that film was a spoof, and Kenney, who co-wrote "Animal House" and "Caddyshack", didn't really make that kind of film. Both are straight comedies, not genre spoofs like "Airplane" was. They just don't occupy the same space. That being said, "Caddyshack" didn't really find its audience at first, it took years (and the advent of cable and home video) before it became a cult classic. The critics at the time pointed out that there are really four different storylines going on, and they don't seem to have much to do with each other, Bill Murray's going in THIS direction, and Michael O'Keefe's story is going in THAT direction, but really, it does all come together in the end, so who cares? Just imagine, if the first cut was four hours long, how terrible the movie could have been. It's amazing that they got any sort of coherent storyline out of that film, one suspects maybe they saved the film in the editing room.
And it's true that Lorne Michaels got most of the cast and the writing staff for the first season of "Saturday Night Live" from the National Lampoon's Radio Hour. But to be fair, NBC offered the timeslot first to the publisher of the Lampoon, who turned it down. So Doug Kenney could have been even more famous if he'd gone along for the ride, and in some alternate universe, "SNL" stands for "Saturday National Lampoon", or something like that. But hey, no worries, it's not like that little sketch comedy show blew up and lasted for four decades (and counting) or anything like that.
Also starring Will Forte (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Martin Mull (last seen in "Tim's Vermeer"), Neil Casey (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Jon Daly (last seen in "Masterminds"), Nelson Franklin (last seen in "Jobs"), John Gemberling, Rick Glassman, Seth Green (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Max Greenfield (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Harry Groener (last seen in "Amistad"), Camille Guaty, Ed Helms (last seen in "Vacation"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Joe Lo Truglio (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Matt Lucas (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Joel McHale (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Annette O'Toole (last seen in "Superman III"), Emmy Rossum (last seen in "Poseidon"), Jackie Tohn, Matt Walsh (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Finn Wittrock (last seen in "La La Land"), Elvy Yost, Erv Dahl, Mitchell Hurwitz, Lindsey Kraft, Andrew Gray McDonnell, Brad Morris, Lonny Ross, Michael Sherman, Steven Sims, Martha Smith, Armen Weitzman, with cameos from Rick Overton (last seen in "EdTV"), Mark Metcalf (last seen in "Julia"), David Krumholtz (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Kerri Kenney-Silver (last seen in "Downsizing"), Bob Stephenson, Chris Redd (also last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Brian Huskey (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Paul Scheer (ditto), Rich Sommer (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Carla Gallo (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), the voice of David Wain, and archive footage of Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays.
RATING: 7 out of 10 bags of "energy powder"
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