BEFORE: Donald Trump carries over from "Unfit", and he's my link out of political documentaries to...well, other documentaries. I'll get back to fiction soon, I promise. My wife watched this documentary a couple months ago and recommended it to me (it's available on HBO Max), and while I don't focus on films suggested most of the time, once in a while I'll make an exception.
It's Oscar time, yet somehow this 2020 documentary didn't get a nomination, it must have fallen through the cracks somehow. This was the year that even streaming films were allowed to qualify, for the first time, so airing on HBO Max wouldn't have made this one ineligible. Maybe there was a problem with the paperwork or something - nope, this one didn't even make the shortlist, which is the list of films from which the Academy voters pick the five nominees. Well, you know what, it's a tough category, there were 238 documentaries that qualified, but only 15 made the shortlist, including "All In: The Fight for Democracy", but even that didn't get a nomination. But somehow "My Octopus Teacher" did...
Today, of course, you can watch "Singin' in the Rain" on TCM at 6:00 pm and that should finish with enough time for you to switch over to the ceremony - unless you like all that red carpet stuff and watching stars get out of their limos. Here's tomorrow's line-up from TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", which seems to have some more appropriate films about acting in it:
8:00 am "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) - SEEN IT
10:15 am "Stage Door" (1937) - SEEN IT
12:00 pm "Stage Door Canteen" (1943)
2:15 pm "Stagecoach" (1939) - SEEN IT
4:00 pm "Stand By For Action" (1942)
6:00 pm "A Star Is Born" (1937)
8:00 pm "A Star Is Born" (1954) - SEEN IT
11:15 pm "A Star Is Born" (1976) - SEEN IT
1:45 am "Star Witness" (1931)
3:00 am "Step Lively" (1944)
4:30 am "A Stolen Life" (1946)
Wow, if you can make it through "Stage Door" and all three versions of "A Star Is Born", more power to you. That's one way to wind down from the Oscars, I suppose. Hitting for another 5 out of 11 brings me to 122 seen out of 302 films, still hovering just above my cut-off at 40.3% with five days remaining.
THE PLOT: A documentary that focuses on a legendary dangerous water park and its slew of injuries and crimes along with child safety concerns.
AFTER: Action Park was a real place, if you grew up in the New York City area during the late 80's or early 90's, you probably either wanted to go there or went there and regretted it, and if you grew up in North Jersey you may have worked there, despite having no marketable skills or basic lifeguard training. A former Wall Street trader named Eugene Mulvihill bought two ski resorts after being barred from trading stocks, and wanted to develop something to make money during the non-winter months, and he came up with a three-park system that combined a water park, a concrete "alpine slide" and Motorworld (home of go-karts, car racing, and battle tanks).
Problems in design and operation plagued the park for years - it seems appropriate that my lead-in link is Donald Trump and my lead-out will be Walt Disney, because Mulvihill embodied sort of a combination of these two men, he had the aspiration and ambition of Disney, combined with the ineptitude, lack of follow-through and pure greed of Trump. (Trump considered investing in Action Park at one point, but after visiting the site he decided it was too risky, low class and hands-off for even him.) You could say that Action Park is a great metaphor for the Trump presidency - Trump put an oilman in charge of the EPA, and a certified idiot in charge of the Department of Education, while Mulvihill hired unreliable teens to supervise the rides and act as lifeguards - in both cases, it was if the inmates were running the asylum, while management was nowhere to be seen. Mulvihill had money-laundering schemes, as did Trump, I'm sure, and as with Action Park, those of us who survived walked away from that administration wondering how we did it.
Normal amusement parks spend years developing rides, they'll bring in a team of experts to figure out how to get the maximum G-force out of a roller coaster drop, then have another team of experts build a ride according to the specs, then a third team would be responsible for daily inspections and maintaining safety standards. Action Park had none of that, and they passed the savings on to you. They designed whatever rides, swings and jumps seemed cool with zero research, then Gene would tinker with the designs to make them faster, cooler and even less safe, and then safety inspections? You can probably infer that the standards were at a minimum. The instructions from the average lifeguard on how to stay safe on the water slides were probably, "OK, you're next. Don't die."
A lot of problems should have been obvious at that planning stage - the alpine slide was RIGHT under the ski lift that people needed to ride to get to the top of the slide, along with their heavy plastic sled that could easily fall or be dropped off the chairlift, to land on the people riding down the slide, or land on the slide and create an obstacle for the next rider down the chute. Eventually it became a challenge, people would ride up with an extra sled just to see if they could drop that sled RIGHT on a rider on the track. It turns out that everything IS legal in New Jersey, as the song goes.
When the management built a beer hall to celebrate OktoberFest, St. Patrick's Day and, umm, Wednesday, they placed it RIGHT next to the race car track. No, that couldn't possibly become an issue in the future, that checks out OK. Teens getting loaded at the beer hall and then racing cars, what could possibly go wrong? Or combining binge drinking with speedboat racing and bungee-jumping, that sure sounds like a great idea. The park was also constructed on BOTH sides of a New Jersey highway, what genius signed off on THAT?
Cliff diving was a popular activity in some parts of the world, why not bring that practice to New Jersey and encourage a lot of untrained teens to do it? Who wasn't ready for a 20-foot drop into a pool full of people who were too slow to swim out of the way to avoid having another person cliff-dive right on top of them? Even the wave pool (or as the employees called it, the "grave pool") was known for creating such an undertow that people standing in the pool would get dragged to the bottom, often grabbing on to two friends to bring them down too, because misery loves company. Then even on the Colorado River Ride, where teams of people would travel on a course similar to rapids on inflatable circular rafts, it was left up to the patrons to somehow get their crafts to the end of the ride, bumping into other rafts on a too-crowded course, and this led to many fist-fights in the giant pool at the end.
The classic had to be the Cannonball Loop, a too-high water slide with a loop at the end, which was designed with no knowledge of physics or safety, just "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a loop at the end?" Test dummies that were sent down the loop ended up in pieces in the pool, so that's when management knew they had a hit. Riders that were too small couldn't build up enough momentum to clear the loop, and riders that were too big got stuck at the top - yet there was no "You must be THIS tall and also THIS short" sign at the top of the course, they just sent everyone down the chute and hoped for the best.
It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt - then, of course, it's hilarious. But then not so much when somebody dies, which did happen. Often. Someone got electrocuted on the Kayak Experience after one of the fans used to propel the water short-circuited, and another person had a heart attack after using the Tarzan swing, which propelled people into VERY cold water. The whole park was connected by asphalt, which, you know, got very hot during the summer, and that would only be bad if people were walking around barefoot after swimming. Action Park also had the first skydiving simulator in the U.S., where riders were held up by the power of giant fans, which would cut out at the end of the ride - yeah, that probably never ended well.
To make matters worse, accidents were constantly under-reported, the park's insurance company was, umm, non-existent, and safety concerns were ignored because the park brought in so much economic traffic from the NYC area, and teens came back to school in September with noticeable injuries like "ride rash", and some teens never came back from Action Park at all. I don't remember where it happened, but I went on an Alpine Slide once - my sister wanted to go to a water-park, and I couldn't swim, so they handed me a plastic sled and put me on the chair-lift. There was no protection, nobody around for miles, anything could have happened, and I felt the course was much too dangerous, so I took the ride at a snail's pace, barely moving down the mountain, afraid to really open that thing up and cut loose. This film confirms that my instincts as a pre-teen were solid, the first fatality at Action Park was on the Alpine Slide, when a teen's sled jumped the track and his head struck a rock.
Usually I would agree that kids today are overly protected by their "helicopter parents", that concerns over their well-being are exaggerated, producing a generation of weak and ineffectual kids coming up, but sometimes the parents have good reason to be concerned. There are, or at least WERE, very unsafe places to go and very unsafe things to do there. And kids do get injured riding bikes and skateboarding and swimming in pools, so maybe I've got this all wrong.
One bad decision, like "OK, you can go to Action Park", and that's all she wrote.
Also starring Chris Gethard (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Faith Anderson, Alison Becker, Bill Benneyan, Matthew Callan, Jim DeSaye, Daron Fitch, Joe Hession, Mark Johnson, Bob Krahulik, Brian Larsson, Esther Larsson, Mark Malkoff, Andrew Mulvihill, Jessi Paladini, Mary Pilon, Seth Porges, Jason Scott, Tom Shaw, Ed Youmans, with narration by John Hodgman (last seen in "Movie 43")
with archive footage of Tony Bennett (last seen in "Quincy"), Robert Brennan, Jerry Cantrell, Walt Disney, Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Unlocked"), Corey Feldman (last seen in "The 'Burbs"), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Eugene Mulvihill, Wayne Newton, River Phoenix (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Riki Rachtman, Ronald Reagan (also carrying over from "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Ivana Trump (ditto), Layne Staley
RATING: 7 out of 10 dislocated shoulders
No comments:
Post a Comment