BEFORE: September is here, and I still can't go to the movies. It's OK, I planned for this. There are enough movies available on streaming platforms for me to hold out until November, what a relief. I'm giving the industry two more months to get its act together - I'm secretly hoping theaters in NYC will open soon, because I'm figuring that they're going to need an influx of ushers and concession stan workers, and I really need to get a second job, and get off partial unemployment. I've worked in theaters before, and since the shifts are mostly nights and weekends, I could still work days at my old job and still have time for more job-hunting. That's the plan, anyway.
For some people, September means "back to school", and look what happened here, all my debating and fretting over my chain, and breaking it apart and putting it back together again, and turning pieces of it around, and a high-school based film is right here on September 1. Honestly, I didn't plan this, I thought this was a prison movie, which it is, but it's also a high school movie. Divine providence manifests itself once again. I had three other school-based films planned for later in the month, this will make four, and it's a nice surprise. Here's another one - David Hasselhoff carries over from "Killing Hasselhoff". Yep, it's a Hoff two-fer. Who saw that one coming?
Before we proceed, here are the platform stats from August, the first month this year that I didn't overbook or double-up:
AUGUST -
9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Hitsville: The Making of Motown, 13 Going on 30, The Equalizer 2, Captive State, The Gambler, Matinee, The Kid, Death Wish
0 Movies watched on cable (not saved):
4 watched on Netflix: Fyre, A Single Man, The Ballad of Lefty Brown, Killing Hasselhoff
1 watched on iTunes: Greed
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Wonderstruck
4 watched on Hulu: Whitney, Fyre Fraud, Where'd You Go Bernadette, Once Upon a Time in Venice
2 watched on Tubi: Muscle Shoals, Lay the Favorite
2 watched on other random sites: Shine a Light, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
23 TOTAL
I was all over the place in August, cable films didn't even make up 50% of my viewing, or even 40%. But that's just the kind of month I had, a weird mix of weird films that was slammed together for one purpose only, just to connect the end of the documentary chain with the start of the back-to-school chain. It still represents some solid work on my part, but with vigilante action films, westerns, sci-fi and alien invasion films, off-beat comedies, and also docs on Motown, the Rolling Stones AND the Fyre Festival, what else is there to say about August? Hey, at least it was unique - and at least I avoided watching "Trolls World Tour", which also could have connected to "Killing Hasselhoff" via Ron Funches and to tonight's film via Zooey Deschanel. Whoops, sorry, I don't seem to have a slot for that one - come see me in 2021. Maybe.
THE PLOT: A high school senior branded uncool in the ninth grade gets himself expelled to change his image to a cool kid at another high school.
AFTER: While people in America are concerned with "cancel culture", I've spent my year enduring "reschedule culture" - that doesn't really sound as catchy, but in its own way, it's a bit more positive. For me it's a constant process of rescheduling the films that don't seem to fit - plus it might be helpful to view the Covid-19 pandemic as a constant rescheduling of everything. Like in May when I first ventured out of the house, I noticed that drug stores in NYC were still selling Easter candy, though Easter was on April 12. I guess after Easter there are no good candy holidays until Halloween, plus there might not have been enough people working at the drugstore to pack it all up (ah, so THAT'S why marshmallow Peeps always taste stale...) so I took advantage of the situation and loaded up on peanut butter eggs, maple creme eggs, marshmallow eggs - basically any flavor of egg-shaped chocolate went into my basket, and that kept me snacking through June, because I stored it all on the fridge. But that's what you have to do in 2020, it seems - we went out for our Easter dinner in July, and then in July there were too many amateur fireworks for us to venture out, so Fourth of July celebrations for us might happen in mid-September, you never know. Then I visited my parents the weekend after Father's Day for a re-scheduled Mother's Day/Father's Day weekend, and so on.
By extension, New York Comic-Con wasn't cancelled, it's rescheduled for a bigger event next year - hopefully it doesn't conflict with the 2020/2021 Olympics, right? Indoor dining in NYC is still rescheduled for either the vaccine proving effective, or a class-action lawsuit once the weather gets too cold to sit outside - and that's coming. The start of indoor school is now rescheduled for Sept. 21 in NYC, to triple-check safety measures and also prevent a teachers' strike. The tax deadline was rescheduled this year, plus baseball games, basketball games, college football and so on. Life keeps moving forward, but everything's also on hold, and significant events just keep getting moved into the future, again and again. The fact that the "New Mutants" movie is screening anywhere, for anybody, is a minor miracle, turns out that the fifth try at a release date was the charm. I might be cut out for this lifestyle, because I've spent the last 12 years living it - every time I watch one movie, I'm saying "Let's hold off on those other 379 movies on my list..." Meanwhile while I'm still sticking to this actor-linking format, there are classic films like "Grand Illusion" or "The Prisoner of Zenda" that have been waiting patiently for their turn, and it seems they may be waiting in vain. And this will probably be yet another October where classic horror films like "Salem's Lot" and "The Mummy's Tomb" go unwatched again.
But, they say that every dog has his day. Every film, hopefully, will get its chance to be seen. Yes, even "Trolls World Tour", god help me. (Someday, just not today. Look, I've agreed to watch the "Twilight" films this October, I can only handle so much.). And that brings me to "The New Guy", a film that I passed on when it was on cable - it just seemed too below the radar. Then it was on Hulu, so I figured, what the heck, and added it to my playlist. You've probably guessed by now that by the time I was ready to watch it, and found a way to link to it, it was gone from Hulu - that's par for the course, I think I have about a 50% success rate with Hulu on this front. Who the hell's in charge of this streaming thing, anyway, who decided that two years is the preferred amount of time for a film to be available? Who does this help, or is this all an extension of that horrible "Disney Vault" mentality, namely the theory that if a film is kept from the public, somehow it regains its value and people will suddenly want it again? This doesn't help the people who want to see it NOW, does it? I'm finally ready for this film, it serves a linking purpose for me as well as being entertaining (ideally...), but now I have to pay $3.99 to see it? Well, that's going to color my opinion of it, isn't it? I might rate this film higher if it's FREE, or included with one of our monthly subscriptions. We need to get to a place where every film is available, all the time, and nothing is unavailable, why doesn't that fit with anyone's corporate strategies? Don't make me cancel - er, reschedule - you yet again.
OK, rant over, I paid the $3.99, but now the pressure is on "The New Guy" to be worth the cost. Eh, I'm not sure if it is. I've seen so many films about navigating high school, from "Never Been Kissed" and "Can't Hardly Wait" back in the day, to more modern films like "Superbad" and "Booksmart". They're all using the same playbook, really - and it's very outdated. That's what tends to happen when you have movies about 17-year-olds, played by 22-year-olds, that have been written by 40-year-olds. If you really want to know what's going on in high-school NOW, why not produce films written by current high-school students? I suppose "Love, Simon" was notably progressive, at least on the sexual orientation front, but the classroom stuff keeps taking a back seat to the social interactions. All of these high-school films spend more time in the bathrooms than in the classrooms, while my high school experience was about learning. Sure, I had extra-curriculars, but also I had a job on nights and weekends, so I sure didn't have any time for dating. (I had no idea how to talk to girls anyway, so it all sort of worked out.).
For Dizzy (Gillespie) Harrison, it's all about rising above his current social status, where he's nothing more than a "blip" on everyone's radar. His friends are "blips" too, which calls to mind other films where the losers get together and commiserate like "The Goonies" (which we re-watched this past weekend) or "Good Boys", or "Superbad", etc. Here Dizzy and his "blip" friends have formed a funk band and are constantly rehearsing, but I guess that path takes too long to be cool, so Dizzy's got to speed up the process. Here the movie has to go through a bunch of contortionist acts to get Dizzy into jail - he gets a public erection while talking to a girl, an older librarian then thinks he has a concealed weapon in his pants, so she grabs it, causing him to have a broken penis, and this somehow convinces the school counselor that he has Tourette's Syndrome, so she puts him on medication, and the medication somehow makes him jump on stage with a gospel choir at the mall, and for this he gets arrested. Wow - that's a lot to take in, so many contrivances in the first 10 minutes of the film, that it's almost painful.
And then once he's in prison, the contrivances continue - he shares the weirdest possible bullying experience with his cell-mate, Luther, so of course they instantly bond. Luther's also been moved from prison to prison, and found that if you're on the bottom of the social ladder in one place, the easiest thing to do is to act up and get yourself moved to another prison, where you can start from scratch, act even crazier, and maybe end up on top. And thanks to pop culture and movie tropes, we all know by now what to do on your first day in prison, right? You're supposed to find the biggest, baddest mofo in the prison, and beat him up, just to show everybody how tough you are, that you're not messing around. I wonder, has this advice ever worked out for anybody? Or has it just gotten a lot of prison newbies killed? I'd like to see some stats on this. Anyway, Dizzy goes back to high school - which is just another form of prison, if you choose to think about it like that, and he sets out to get himself expelled. He cheats on an exam, then tries to bribe the teacher, even records video of the principal straining in a bathroom stall (he uses a security camera with an unbelievably long cord, because this film was made a couple years before everybody had video cameras on their phones) but nothing seems to work. Finally he breaks a mop handle in two (intending to smack the principal with it) and gets expelled for destroying school property.
Dizzy then goes back to prison - though it's a bit unclear if he was jailed for breaking the mop handle, or if he was just visiting his old cell-mates for more advice. Either way, he gets a prison make-over, learns to walk tough and act tough and make "crazy eyes", even gets a jailhouse tattoo, which is all going to help him make that all-important first impression at his new school. He somehow changes his name to Gil Harris, dyes his hair blond, and gets his new prison friends to drop him off at the new school in restraints, as if he's Hannibal Lecter or something. (Actually, this was a riff on Steve Buscemi's character in "Con Air"). Right, because they frequently allow violent serial-killing teens to attend classes with regular kids. It's a bit much, but it works.
"Gil" then quickly identifies the 25-year-old tough teen who's at the top of the social pyramid (it helps that East Highland High) was built on a big metaphorical hill, and only the most popular kids get to sit at the top of the hill, so they can more easily bully the loser kids who can't or aren't allowed to climb up the hill. At the top of the hill is Conner, a classic leather-jacket wearing bully of the "greaser" variety, who takes Gil down with one punch. Gil gets up and retaliates, but as luck would have it, the bell rang and nobody got to see it. So Gil has to drag the unconscious Conner around through the halls and then pull the fire alarm, just so everybody can see that the new guy means business. Like most of this film, this comedy bit ends up working, but it's a long, arduous struggle to get there. (I see your "hill as social status" metaphor, and raise you a "finding comedy is like dragging a bully's unconscious body around" one.)
What's the moral here? That with a little bit of planning, some hard work, and maybe a couple of lucky breaks, it's possible to completely re-invent yourself, and improve your social situation? OK, I guess that works, but then also there's a danger that if you completely burn down your life plan and start a new one, you may lose what made you special and unique in the first place. "Fake it till you make it" can produce results, but it can also make you a fake version of yourself, because Gil finds himself turning his back on his friends when he's got a shot at getting close to the hot girl at the new school. Meanwhile there was Nora, one of his "blip" friends, there all the time, right there in his band, and he just never thought of her in that way? People might totally want to ship Dizzy and Nora here ("Dora"?) but it all works out - Nora had her eye on somebody else, anyway, which is awfully convenient. Hey, let's note that Zooey Deschanel was in teen comedies like "The New Guy" before she became famous for starring in "The New Girl" on TV.
There are a few clever bits here, like when Dizzy/Gil decides to invigorate the East Highland football team by re-enacting the classic motivational scene from "Patton" to get them their first win in years, then he gets the whole school to participate in a parody of "Braveheart" later in the film when they've somehow reached the state championship. Umm, NITPICK POINT here, Texas is a pretty big state with a lot of high schools, so I think to win the state championship you can't just be a good football team, you've got to be like the best football team ever, and I think you have to win like 87 games in a row - but I'll admit I'm not quite sure how high school sports works. Like most everything else in this film, this seems just a little bit beyond believable, that one guy on a horse could turn a team full of zeroes into champions.
Ultimately I think this one lands somewhere between "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Drillbit Taylor", if that makes any sense. I actually had to check the dates, this film came out two years BEFORE "Napoleon Dynamite" did - while watching it I was willing to bet that it was one of those films that came out a few years after, trying to capitalize on the unexpected success of that quirky little indie film. Nope, this one came first. But all three films sort of have the same DNA, the same message about how being quirky or a misfit is OK, despite whatever the bullies at your school do to bring you down. They all just take different roads to end up in the same place (umm, more or less). And like "Killing Hasselhoff", the extensive blooper reel during the closing credits implies that much of this film, perhaps most of the film, was improvised. So, umm, what did the screenwriter DO, then?
It's nice to know, though probably wishful thinking, that if all the so-called losers in a high school can band together, they can change the social status rules for everyone - all the nerds, geeks, freaks, weirdos, disabled kids and troubled teens working together is a nice thought, but possibly also a pipe dream. (Plus, getting all the losers working together could produce another Columbine, instead of a high-school paradise.). But perhaps there's a metaphor somewhere in there about voting - the largest voting block in the 2016 election was the people who didn't vote at all, and they certainly had an impact with their absence. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anything, maybe if the non-voters voted they also would have been split among the candidates in similar proportion, but we'll never know, will we? But if the non-voters could come together and somehow agree, which is unlikely, I'll admit, they do have the potential power to change the course of history. But as we all know, they probably won't - an entire generation of disaffected Americans isn't suddenly going to get motivated overnight.
NITPICK POINT: Remember what I was saying about 40-year old writers not portraying high school accurately? This film really screws up the school football season, even worse than a pandemic could. Dizzy's band is scheduled to play at the homecoming dance, which somehow takes place after the championship football game. That's simply not how any high-school calendar works. Homecoming is traditionally in the fall, representing when a football team that's been playing on the road at other schools finally comes back to their home field (though admittedly, the team hasn't really "gone" anywhere, the students still need to show up for classes in-between games played on the road, right?) for a big game, maybe against a traditional rival school. The state championship would logically be at the END of the sports season, right? (again, not an expert on the high-school sports, but come on.). So in what universe could the championship game come BEFORE homecoming? I went through something similar with a director who insisted that proms took place in the fall, and I tried in vain to convince him that proms always take place in the spring, like May or June. He was clearly confusing prom with homecoming, because that film also had a prominent football game sequence, right before the big dance in the fall. Some screenwriters and directors get into their 40's or 50's and forget details about how high school functions - I just couldn't convince him that a fall dance should be called homecoming, since proms take place in the spring, so the resulting movie's calendar makes no sense as a result. (I begged him, call anybody on the phone, any friend you trust, and ask that person when prom is - he refused to do that.). Who knows, maybe the school calendar will get so screwed up this year because of the coronavirus that maybe the football championship game will happen right before homecoming.
Also starring DJ Qualls (last seen in "The Core"), Eliza Dushku (last heard in "Batman: Year One"), Eddie Griffin (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Zooey Deschanel (last heard in "Trolls"), Lyle Lovett (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"), Jerod Mixon (last seen in "Me, Myself & Irene"), Parry Shen, Rachael E. Stevens, Ameer Baraka, Kina Cosper, Ross Patterson, Geoffrey Lewis (last seen in "The Great Waldo Pepper"), Kurt Fuller (last seen in "Ghostheads"), Sunny Mabrey (last seen in "xXx: State of the Union"), Illeana Douglas (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Justine Johnston, Matt Gogin, Jerry O'Connell (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Charlie O'Connell, Henry Rollins (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), M.C. Gainey (last seen in "Wonderland"), Horatio Sanz (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Josh Todd (last seen in "The Banger Sisters"), Julius Carry, Avery Waddell, Mike Erwin, Bryan Shy, Laura Clifton, with cameos from Vanilla Ice (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Tony Hawk (last seen in "xXx"), Tommy Lee (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Kool Moe Dee (last seen in "Quincy"), Jermaine Dupri, Kyle Gass (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Gene Simmons (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Jai Rodriguez, with archive footage of James Brown (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown").
RATING: 5 out of 10 swimsuits worn by Danielle in a gratuitous impromptu fashion show at the mall.
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