BEFORE: I've been talking about how everything is connected, and you see this more in docs because if you think a lot of people have co-starred in movies with other people, this goes double for real life, everyone KNOWS hundreds or thousands of people, and this gets reflected in docs - one could argue that connecting docs is easier than connecting fiction films. BUT, it requires me to KNOW stuff, like knowing that Paul Anka wrote a song for Frank Sinatra (easy, everybody knows that) or that Clint Eastwood was a big fan of Roberta Flack's big hit song (umm, sure, but who knew?). Then there's stuff that just comes up randomly, like the fact Earth, Wind & Fire were inspired by the film "Close Encounters" (well, I guess some things we can all learn together)
One of the big nexus points this time around is going to be "Saturday Night Live" - over the last year documentaries came out about Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Lorne Michaels and Martin Short - great, these are all right up my alley. The easiest thing to do would be to put them all next to each other and make a mini-chain, but that's not what happened, as I was working with the cast info from IMDB, which was incomplete at the time. Also, I had to think about including those docs with smaller casts, the ones it might be harder to link to, and that the easiest way to link docs might not be the BEST way to link docs. Plus I suddenly decided to up the ante and increase the number of docs from 43 to FIFTY, right after saying that was impossible I saw the way to do that, and once I had it, I didn't want to change it. So we're going to bounce in and out of the SNL topic, hell, the "Jaws" doc even used footage of the "Land Shark" sketches, because why not?
So all of this affects who's on the leader board - SNL cast members have a definite edge this year, and thanks to January's films I now have a tie at first place, Bill Murray has risen through the ranks to square off against Jason Statham, they both have 6 appearances. Now usually if you told me about a match-up like that the safe money would be on Statham, but this isn't a street fight, so I think we'll see Bill Murray a few more times, and also Dan Aykroyd is right behind with five appearances. But the year could just as easily go to Johnny Carson or David Letterman, we'll have to just play it out.
Now about "Flipside", it's really a carry-over from last year - somebody didn't show up where they were supposed to and to keep the chain alive, I had to jettison something to make it work. It's not difficult to get here, it just has an oddly specific cast list and that had to be taken into consideration. I could have gotten there through Ian McShane or Judd Apatow, but today we're going to let David Bowie carry over from "Devo", see we all learned yesterday that David Bowie worked on at least one Devo album, and what else will we learn today?
Now, for an update on matching films with U.S. states - I still have 12 U.S. states that do NOT want to easily match up with movies, meaning I also have 12 documentaries that do NOT easily suggest particular states. If necessary I will just match these up randomly, but I would rather have my selections mean something. Today is easy, though - let's learn about NEW JERSEY!
Date admitted to the U.S.: December 18, 1787 (State #3, if you can believe that)
Claim to fame: Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Gaynor were born there, also Frank Sinatra, Jon Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston and Queen Latifah. New Jersey, why aren't you calling yourself the music capital of the world? And how did you miss out on landing that Hall of Fame?
Prevalent language: The Garden State - now at first this seems to make no sense, because it's the most densely populated state that there is. But then there's the Pine Barrens, a huge undeveloped, forested part of the state that nobody wants to live in.
State Motto: "Which exit should I get off the turnpike?"
State Flower: Violet
State Fruit: Blueberry
State Fruit: Blueberry
State Fish: Brook trout
State Reptile: Of course it's a turtle, a bog turtle
State Bird: Eastern goldfinch
State Tree: Red Oak
State Beverage: Cranberry juice, but I'm betting there's vodka in it so people can forget they live in New Jersey.
Notable Sports Teams: They're called New York teams, but they play in New Jersey, you know who I'm talking about, the Giants and Jets. But then they also have the Devils, the only hockey team named after a cryptid.
Fun Fact: New Jersey was two distinct provinces between 1674 and 1702, there was East Jersey and West Jersey - and probably one of them ate something called pork roll and the other called it Taylor ham. George Washington and his troops famously crossed the Delaware River at Christmas time in 1776, and that was the last time a President ever visited the state. It's also the home of the Miss America Pageant, the first drive-in movie and the Hindenburg disaster. Make of that what you will.
Yeah, I've been there - it would be hard for me to live in NYC and never visit New Jersey, though I sure tried. We went to Atlantic City some time around 2002 or 2003 and we didn't care for it, but then we tried again in 2014 and had a better time, so we went there two or three times a year until the pandemic hit. We went back in June 2022 and everything was different, a lot of high-profile stuff just never re-opened, like the Apple store and the fancy restaurants. We tried again in March 2024 and things were better, but the city was still in recovery. But we saw Pentatonix there, so there are concerts, buffets, steakhouses and slot machines, and we like all of those things so here's hoping. Anyway my record rises to 10 - 2 for states visited.
THE PLOT: A comical attempt to save a New Jersey record store and confront a mid-life crisis.
AFTER: So yeah, I scanned through this last year, just to find out who was in it, and then I had to drop it from the Block because I wanted to move "Pee-Wee as Himself" to later in the countdown (umm, I think that was the reason?) so it would fall on the anniversary of Paul Reubens' death. And then, you know, I finished out the year right on schedule, so really, it was the right move, I needed that slot for something else. I was at an advantage today when I watched the film for real, because I already knew what it was about, and that narratively it's all over the place. It's about a filmmaker who, after making his first documentary, can't seem to finish a second one. He tries and tries again, but circumstances change and he gets busy doing other things, and then of course funding doesn't come together and people won't return his calls and so there's another drive filled with footage and rough cuts that does NOT get turned into a coherent feature.
There's the one about the struggling record store he used to work at, there's one about an author with writer's block, there's one about a photographer with a terminal condition who took some of the most iconic photos of jazz legends. Along the way the director spends time working for Ira Glass and the TV version of "This American Life", and then gets hired to make commercials, which pays actual money, and hey, he gets married and has two kids, that's an accomplishment in itself, definitely a time-drain, and manages to squeeze in a midlife crisis. There's always time for one of those, right? He also considers making something out of his family's compulsive hoarding, and the fact that his father spent decades helping himself to extra soap at hotels, and may have the world's largest collection of that.
So Mr. Wilcha's problem doesn't seem to be a lack of material, he's spoiled for choice, however each one of these pitches is like half of an idea, none of them manage to coalesce into a complete thought, this could be why he can't seem to finish making a film. He's documenting his life and experiences, which doesn't seem to have an ending, but hey, that's a good thing, right? Finally he lands on the idea to just make a documentary about all of the unfinished projects, which means we're going to jump liberally from this footage to that footage, there's no through-line except all of the filming was done by the same "stuck" director, and of course this seems like the ultimate Artist Brain solution, as if we're appearing on "Chopped" and time is running out, so just throw everything into a blender, puree it, call it a soup, and hope for the best.
Come on, this is cheating of the highest order, right? It's way too meta, and you shouldn't be allowed to make a film about how hard it is to make a film. This is the equivalent of that scene in every film about writers when they're staring at an empty page in the typewriter and they don't know how to start. Well, if we could just START this film about not being able to FINISH a film, then we're like halfway there, right? Nope, not in the least. The projects are so diverse here that the only thing tying them together is the guy who can't finish a film about any of them. And it's like he wants this situation to be SO BAD that he ignores the good news, which is that he DID finish the first doc, and he DID make a doc for Judd Apatow about the making of "Funny People", and then he DID find work making commercials, we can assume that he finished at least a few of those.
Devo said last night that "The Beginning Was the End", like as soon as they started their career, the clock was ticking, and it's only a matter of time before your band is creatively outdated or the record company contract runs out, or you get fired for not toeing the line or you make a cartoon where a french fry suggestively enters a donut, repeatedly. Now we have to also wonder here if also "The End Was the Beginning", meaning - can we take all these failed, ended projects and Frankenstein them together to make something that is alive, that has meaning in some way? Last year I would have said, "Hell, no, of course not!" but at least now I'm willing to entertain the possibility.
However, it's going to take bending over backwards to make it happen. I've lived in this creative world, sort of, if you just replace "documentary" with "animation". My boss had a number of projects that didn't come to fruition, one was for Whoopi Goldberg, who paid for a project that was written, drawn and edited but then didn't sell anywhere. However the important thing to stress is that we got paid up front, this always helps. A weird coincidence is that I know where Ira Glass's production office is, or was, for a number of years the animation studio I worked for was in the same building, just Ira's office was on a higher floor. (Umm, it's weird but I recognize the windows seen in Ira's office, of course, there could be a hundred Manhattan buildings with windows like those...). I saw Ira Glass at an airport once, but I did not feel comfortable talking to him and telling him we worked in the same building, that would have been just be a bit too weird.
So really, here, the filmmaker is the only connection between all of the things - like Flipside Records and its crazy employee that Chris used to fool around with, and then she replaced him at his job when he went off to college. There's the pork store in town which threw away all those boxes, and they hold records perfectly, which is why the record store always smells so meaty. There's another record store in town, owned by another Dan, which Chris finally sells all of HIS records to, because they pay better than Flipside AND they'll be more likely to end up being sold to someone who will appreciate them. Don't forget Uncle Floyd, the longtime late night TV show host, who is relegated to coming to Flipside to write jingles and film a commercial. David Milch, creator of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood", who sent Chris on a B.S. mission to make that documentary about the photographer, only he had a secret motive for doing that, only he has dementia now and he can't remember what it was. And Judd Apatow, who called Chris away from New Jersey in the first place, gets chewed out by Chris' mother for breaking up her family and keeping her grandkids on the other side of the country. Yeah, it's all still one big, crazy interconnected mess, isn't it? But that's life.
Weirdest of all could be the appearance of David Bowie, who died in 2016 but somehow managed to perform a song about Uncle Floyd and his puppet, Oogie, before that (2002?). That's just surreal, man, but you kind of get the feeling there were a lot of things about Bowie that were on the verge of being surreal. Now, of course, Bowie is dead and Uncle Floyd passed away in January, Ira Glass got divorced after learning to dance for a stage show, Quincy Jones died too and of course Herman Leonard succumbed to his illness. Miles Davis, Kurt Cobain, Frank Sinatra, it all reminds me of a T-shirt I saw recently that had a cartoon dinosaur on it, and there was a thought bubble over his head that read "All of my friends are dead." Yeah, man, I know the feeling.
Everything has to come to an end, eventually, whether it's a band or a TV show or a record store or your time making movies. Nothing is sustainable forever, everything to some degree is a sinking ship, and we know that you can keep a sinking ship afloat for a while, even if you know it's sinking. Radio, newspapers, comic books, record stores, these are DYING industries, but people work hard everyday to keep them afloat, because that's their job, that's what they know how to do, and anyway, which clock is going to run out first, their industry's clock or their own? Photography, animation, tattooing, tending bar, how long before we're all replaced by service robots or A.I. and none of us are necessary any more? What happens then? Does the economy collapse when nobody has a job? When do you sell the store, sell the house, cash out and go live in a little hut on an island somewhere, and try to be happy while you run out your own clock? Or are you going to keep sinking a little bit deeper into debt each day while you try to keep your dying store open? It's a complex question.
Don't forget to keep your head warm...Twinkle, Twinkle, Uncle Floyd...
Directed by Christopher Wilcha (director of "Knock Knock, It's Tig Notaro")
Also starring Christopher Wilcha, Judd Apatow (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Monica Bill Barnes, Anna Bass, Dan Dondiego Jr., Ira Glass (last heard in "Scoob!"), Starlee Kline, Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "Blink Twice"), Herman Leonard, David Milch, Rita Stern Milch, Kerry O'Neill, Daniel Salsberg, Joe Smith, Floyd Vivino (last seen in "Crazy People"), John S. Wilcha, Pat Wilcha,
with archive footage of Louis Armstrong, Nat "King" Cole (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), Kurt Cobain (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Miles Davis (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Quincy Jones (last seen in "Paul Anka: His Way"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Errol Morris (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ed O'Neill (last seen in "Sun Dogs"), Seth Rogen (last seen in "Good Fortune"), Adam Sandler (last seen in "Jay Kelly"), Jason Segel (last seen in "The Discovery"), Frank Sinatra (also last seen in "Paul Anka: His Way"), David Spade (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), and the band Pussy Galore.
RATING: 4 out of 10 cassettes available from the Columbia House Record Club (for just one penny? What a deal!)
No comments:
Post a Comment