BEFORE: Two actors carry over from "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" - they are "Weird Al" Yankovic (big fan, happy to FINALLY use him as a link) and Steve Higgins, who's known now for being Fallon's sidekick on "The Tonight Show", but apparently he's been around for years as a writer on SNL. Higgins may not have many acting credits, but Weird Al has made a TON of cameos over the years, it's surprising that he hasn't turned up more often here at the Movie Year. He's only popped up in four films out of nearly 2,800 and three of those were in this calendar year.
I last saw him in concert in San Diego in July 2016, and in-between the songs (while Al was changing costumes, no doubt) they played video montages of Al's cameos from various movies and TV shows over the years, and there really are a lot of them. Just look on IMDB, the guy has over 100 acting credits (these include his own music videos, though), and almost 200 credits as "Self" (but some of these count as acting, this includes times he played himself in movies as well as talk-show appearances). The IMDB really needs to break down these categories better - I think many of these listings end up in the wrong section...
THE PLOT: A couple of creative losers accidentally become big shots in the music video industry.
AFTER: I passed on this film a few times, because like many cult films it comes around on cable every so often - I think I was probably confusing it with the film "Airheads", which I had seen. But it's a different film with a different agenda, and I've just seen it referred to online as "a little film that tried way too hard", and that's as good a description as any.
But let's get the Trump similarities out of the way - part of the plot concerns a rich right-wing Presidential candidate with two useless adult sons, trying to track down an incriminating sex tape of him doing some really kinky things. Hmm, does that sound familiar? The character's name is Norman Mart, and that even has the same cadence, two-syllable first name and a one-syllable last name. There's no way this film from 1988 could have peeked into the future, but maybe this film is worth another look for its predictive quality alone.
I did a lot of work on music videos myself in the late 1980's, mostly as a production assistant, when I was a recent graduate of NYU film school, and just glad to have a foot, or any other kind of appendage, in the proverbial door. So I know this world well, for a few years there it seemed like the only money to be made came from music videos, because at least the clients had money to spend, and the alternative was to work on an educational piece, or worse, your own project, both of which were likely to pay a lot less. I've spoken often about my first day on the job, which was prepping for two music videos being shot back-to-back, one for Rick James and the other for Apollonia - I got to be on set for the Rick James one, I remember holding the cables off the floor as the director moved around with the handheld camera. I worked in some capacity on other music videos (or Sesame Street segments, we treated them equally) for Leon Redbone, Jeff Healey, En Vogue, Alphaville, and a piece for The Residents. The directors I was working for were part of the whole downtown art scene, so they knew a bunch of the big names in the video art and dance world - but it was still a rough place to work, never knowing when the next paying gig was going to come in, so we'd spend a lot of time sending out demo reels and taking any job that came in, even if it was just editing stock footage together for a video-game commercial or an in-house corporate promo.
So this film sort of works in that sense, capturing the feeling of owning a tiny video-production company in the late 1980's. But I have to consider it a NITPICK POINT that characters in this film are just starting to figure out the power and potential of music videos, when the truth is that they'd been prominent since at least 1983 when MTV started, and also before that, so why doesn't anyone in a 1988 film seem to believe in them at first?
There's another NITPICK POINT in the film where the two video entrepreneurs are hired to tape a man reading his own will, and the gag is that they're acting like auteurs, forcing him to record the thing again and again while he's lying in a hospital bed, because he's not delivering the lines with enough "feeling". It's supposed to be funny when the guy expires on the 14th take, and it is - but then the director acts like he didn't get the shot, and the implication then is that they won't get paid. But hey, guys, if it's the 14th take, that means that there are 13 previous takes where the guy read the will, so that means that they DID get the will recorded, and the job was therefore completed - unless they did something incredibly stupid like keep recording over the same piece of tape, and nobody did that back then, because videotape was seemingly infinite, we all just kept buying more and more of it.
This film also predicted that the best use of music-video imagery would be to sell stuff, the directors make an upgraded commercial for Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles (which is apparently a real restaurant in L.A.!) and it looks and sounds just like a rap video. There's also a music video they make for a Swedish band called Cube Squared that ends up looking like something that OK GO would make a couple of decades later.
But the main plot (umm, I guess) concerns a plot to sabotage the Menudo concert, which is about to be broadcast around the world, and replace it with a performance by the Swanky Modes, a couple of famous soul singers who have fallen on hard times. It's a noble enough calling, I suppose - but are the people who tuned in to see Menudo really going to be satisfied if they don't see their favorite boy band, but a couple of old soul singers instead? Aren't they just going to change the channel when they find out that Menudo isn't going to be performing?
Also starring John Cusack (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine 2"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Mary Crosby (last seen in "The Legend of Zorro"), Clu Galager (last seen in "Into the Night"), Katy Boyer (last seen in "The Island"), Jessica Walter (last seen in "Slums of Beverly Hills"), Sam Moore (last seen in "Blues Brothers 2000"), Junior Walker, Susan Tyrrell (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Doug McClure (last seen in "52 Pick-Up"), Connie Stevens (last seen in "Way...Way Out"), King Cotton, Don Cornelius, Lee Arenberg (last seen in "Robocop 3"), with cameos from Lyle Alzado, Xander Berkeley (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Coati Mundi (ditto), Bobcat Goldthwait, Ted Nugent, Jello Biafra, Doug E. Fresh, Michael Nesmith, Martha Quinn, Courtney Love (also last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), David Anthony Higgins and the band Fishbone.
RATING: 4 out of 10 limbo dancers
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