Friday, July 11, 2025

“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”: A Holiday for an Early Tech Bro

Today someone close to me got rear-ended on an L.A. freeway. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but he’s now mourning the damage to his late-model luxury car. And I can’t say I blame him. A well-designed automobile can be a thing of beauty, and I can’t laugh off the minor damage to a previously blemish-free chassis. All of which is making me ponder the film I just re-watched this past weekend, the 1986 John Hughes classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

 Ferris Bueller is a comedy with appeal for the teenage kid in all of us. This story of a suburban high school senior (Matthew Broderick) who decides to go AWOLfrom his scholastic obligations makes the adult world seem pretty dreary indeed. His teachers are automatons, going through the motions of presenting facts to their thoroughly-bored charges. The school principal (buoyed up by his dim-witted secretary) is a beady-eyed prig whose personal vendetta against Ferris leads him into actions that are downright psychopathic. Ferris’s parents, well-meaning though they might be, are too caught up in their professional lives to really understand their rambunctious son, and too loving to ever suspect him of being the con artist he is. (They are, though, all too willing to suspect his highly volatile sister—Jennifer Grey—of making trouble.)

 Ferris has never forgiven his sister for getting a car as a gift, when he himself “only” received a computer. But it’s his creative computer skills, along with his talent for mischief, that allows him to fake illness and then round up two friends for a thoroughly unauthorized daytrip to Chicago. Their vehicle of choice is a cherry-red low-mileage 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder belonging to the dad of his best buddy, Cameron. We never meet this father, but he seems to signify all that is wrong with American adulthood: his possessions apparently mean more to him than his son, who is as timid as Ferris is bold.

  On their breakneck adventure to the big city, Ferris and the others bring their youthful exuberance to the world of grown-ups. They lunch in a swanky restaurant, have prime seats at a Chicago Cubs game, caper through the world-famous Art Institute, and wind up at a German-themed street parade where Ferris finds his way onto a float, leading the crowd in a chorus of “Twist and Shout.” Meanwhile, the fate of that Ferrari remains in question, because we in the audience know (as Ferris and his friends do not) that a couple of scruffy parking lot attendants are taking it joyriding, And, since Ferris’s idea that the odometer can be re-set if the car is run backward doesn’t actually work, Cameron arrives home in a state of panic. I will not go into the ultimate fate of the car, but it seems that his deep-rooted fear of his father is about to undergo a major metamorphosis.

 What will happen to these young characters when they too arrive at adulthood? College is in their future, but none of them seems to have clear-cut goals, nor even any interests beyond having a good time. We know that all three are approaching a turning point, but where they’ll go from here is hardly obvious. Cameron may (or may not) be developing some courage. Sloane (the only girl of the trio) is clearly smitten,  ready to go wherever Ferris may lead. As for Ferris himself, he’s too smart and too crafty to let the adult world cut him down to size. I see him as an early incarnation of a tech bro, the potential Elon Musk of his generation. 

 

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Fiddlers on the Roof: The Laemmles Bring Art-House Movies to Angelenos

Motion picture buffs probably know something about Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), the German-born Hollywood producer who helped found and run Universal Studios.  In 1915, he opened the world’s largest movie production facility in what has come to be called Studio City, just over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood, California. As a producer he was chiefly known for classic silent and early sound horror flicks, among them Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931). As everybody’s “Uncle Carl,” he was later revered for saving scores of family members and one-time Jewish neighbors from the Nazis by sponsoring their emigration to the U.S.

 There’s a venerable movie theatre on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Los Angeles that devotes one lobby wall to memorabilia from the life and career of Carl Laemmle. That’s not surprising, because the Royal is the flagship of the Laemmle theatre-chain, known throughout the L.A. area for presenting independent and foreign-language movies that might well be overlooked by big multiplexes where the Hollywood studios have box-office clout. (The official Laemmle Theatre motto is “Not afraid of subtitles.”) The Laemmle chain was founded in 1938 by Kurt and Max Laemmle, cousins of Carl and themselves immigrants from Germany. In the early 1970s, when my boss Roger Corman decided to distribute Ingmar Bergman’s extraordinary Cries and Whispers and Federico Fellini’s delightful Amarcord to American audiences, I remember Max and his son Robert showing up at a local screening-room to check out the films and help make plans for their local and national release. No question: these guys really loved films by European masters. Over the years they introduced to L.A. audiences such super-hits as La Cage aux Folles, as well as offbeat films by Martin Scorsese and other American masters.

 The Laemmle chain is still very much an all-in-the-family venture, now headed by Robert’s son Greg. He has presided over the theatres in a difficult era, coping with the challenges posed by streaming and (yes!) the pandemic, a time when public venues like movie houses were closed for over a year. Probably to raise everyone’s spirits, Greg and company kept updating the Royal’s pandemic-era marquee, using actual movie titles to comment on the situation. Films that were supposedly “now playing” included Mask and Requiem for a Dream, while among the promised films that were “coming soon” was The Awakening.    

 Today Greg Laemmle, who just prior to the pandemic had seriously considered selling the theatre chain, continues to run it. Which means that art-film lovers across the L.A. megalopolis can still feast their eyes on foreign movies, quirky movies, and the occasional revival of a golden oldie. Following some pandemic-related adjustments, there are now seven locations throughout SoCal, including my beloved Monica Film Center, where the Laemmles annually screen Fiddler on the Roof on Christmas eve. (Costumes are encouraged, and everyone is invited to sing along.)

 A fairly new feature of Laemmle World is a video podcast, “Inside the Arthouse,” which offers an insider’s perspective on today’s art cinema. It’s co-hosted by Greg Laemmle and veteran actor Raphael Sbarge, who has recently turned to directing. (His 2019 documentary, Foodways, was nominated for an Emmy.) Sbarge’s 2022 documentary, Only in Theaters, chronicles the story of the Laemmle Theater chain, with special attention to those tough pandemic years. For me there’s a quiet personal joke in Sbarge’s deep involvement with the Laemmle theatres. Back in 1993, he starred for Roger Corman in a gory but lucrative creature-feature, Carnosaur, which was explicitly designed (how well I remember!) to beat Spielberg’s Jurassic Park into theatres. That’s one Corman movie I suspect never played on a Laemmle screen. 




 


Friday, July 4, 2025

Comedy the Jean Arthur Way

Effervescent blonde Jean Arthur is best known for three Frank Capra films she made in the late 1930s: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Though she occasionally starred in dramas (and ended her career in a classic 1953 western, Shane), she was best known as the star of outrageous comedies. Of course I’ve seen her best-known films, but my local library has a nifty compilation of comic gems, Icons of Screwball Comedy (volume 1). I brought it home because I was interested in re-watching My Sister Eileen, starring Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair. But the two standouts of the collection both featured Arthur: 1935’s If You Could Only Cook and 1940’s Too Many Husbands.

 If You Could Only Cook is a classic Depression-era film, in which a wealthy, pedigreed automobile designer—suddenly unemployed because of an idealistic stand at a board meeting—allows himself to be persuaded by Arthur’s out-of-work Joan Hawthorne that the two of them, posing as a married couple, should apply for a job as cook and butler for a pair of thugs (Leo Carrillo and his gravel-voiced enforcer, Lionel Stander) Fortunately, Joan really can cook –so much for that catchy title—but Herbert Marshall’s Jim needs to sneak home to his mansion to get on-the-job instructions from his own loyal retainer.

 Since this is a Depression comedy, the wealthy don’t come off very well, but leading man Marshall seems much improved by the time he spends slumming. He and Arthur have some great comic scenes in which they must work out who’s going to sleep where, but ultimately he’s all too ready give up his stuffy fiancée and (of course!) make a life with the thoroughly middle-class Arthur. That’s after she’s packed off to jail  following a good-hearted misunderstanding. (In 1930s flicks, there’s often a lot of jail time.)

 By 1940, social issues were not quite so front-and-center. But the screwball trend persisted. In Too Many Husbands, Arthur is Vicky Lowndes, married to Melvyn Douglas’s businessman Henry Lowndes, since six months after her first husband, Bill Cardew (Fred MacMurray) disappeared at sea. The new marriage seems to be going swimmingly, though Vicky is perturbed when Henry removes the name of his presumably-dead best friend and business partner from the door of an office suite they once shared. But, wouldn’t you know? On the very day that the name disappears, Bill turns up. Not knowing about the change in his wife’s marital  status, he of course figures that their connubial life will resume immediately.

 Too Many Husbands sets up an impossible situation, and then waits to see how the characters will solve it. What’s interesting is that Arthur’s Vicky has no wish to choose between two worthy but very different men. There’s a moment midway through the film where we clearly see it in her face: this is going to be fun!  In 1940, a ménage à trois was not something that could be publicly endorsed, but the final scene – Vicky dancing simultaneously with both men in a nightclub—hints that something of the sort is perhaps a possibility. (To be fair, there’s a Noel Coward play and pre-code movie, Design for Living, with a rather similar ending.)

 Early in her career, Jean Arthur was advised to  quit show business, because she just wasn’t sexy enough. Personally, I find her pert and adorable, a big improvement over the classic vamps who are trying so hard to get our attention. And she can cook too! 

 


 

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Brush Up Your Shakespeare: Hamlet Goes Hollywood


As an avid theatre-goer, I’ve noticed lately that major stage productions seem to be relying more and more on effects that can only be called cinematic. In the early years, the motion picture industry was clearly envious of the public prestige enjoyed by live theatre. Broadway plays and Broadway stars were quickly snatched up by Hollywood, and it’s remarkable how many movies of the Thirties and Forties (in particular) focus on stage-based plotlines. See, for instance, Busby Berkeley gems like Forty-Second Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, all of which pretend to be about the staging of Broadway musical extravaganzas, although the numbers they contain (full of fancy overhead shots, for instance) could only have been made on a soundstage. 

 That was then. Now Broadway has discovered that playgoers willing to shell out the big bucks to see a show in person appreciate flashy cinematic touches. I recently saw the touring company of Harry  Potter and the Cursed Child, and was impressed by its many magical moments. This was skillfully handled stage magic, though (disappearances, transformations, pyrotechnic effects, and so on), and thus was thoroughly a part of theatrical tradition. But several award-winning shows on Broadway right now feel justified by their subject matter for introducing video in heavy doses to the stage production. I have to confess that I haven’t seen either one, so I can’t comment on how successful these experiments might be. Nonetheless . . .  

 Good Night, and Good Luck is an historical drama about the very public conflict between venerated newscaster Edward R. Murrow and the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. George Clooney, who directed and co-wrote the 2005 film, makes his Broadway debut in the Edward R. Murrow role. Because the play has a great deal to say about news reporting and about the impact of television on the American public, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that it culminates in a video montage of updated archival footage that includes the destruction of the World Trade Center and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  

 More film-centric, of course, is the current revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicalized Sunset Boulevard, for which the talented but (I would argue) under-age Nicole Scherzinger just won an acting Tony. The 1950 movie drama about a fading film star, directed by Billy Wilder with a remarkable Gloria Swanson in the leading role, has naturally led to a stage production that is all about movies and movie-making. As the L.A. Times reviewer put it, in this production “the camera is undeniably king. The darkened stage, swathed in movie projector fog, seems like a studio set in which dreams are manufactured through live projections along with more traditional Hollywood means.”  Live camera feeds are used at times to follow the actors, and this Norma Desmond, up there on the stage, definitely gets her close-up.  

 Then there’s the new Hamlet, adapted and directed by Robert O’Hara, appearing now at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. For much of its length it is a somewhat traditional Shakespearean tragedy, though drastically cut and highlighting anything potentially raunchy. Then everything implodes into a behind-the-scenes noir with a gumshoe who’s a blend of Sam Spade and Benoit Blanc investigating who did what to whom, on behalf of the suits at the Elsinore Film Corporation. Why? I don’t rightly know. It’s fun to see the spilling out of secrets not in Shakespeare’s original text, and I liked some of the inevitable cinematic touches (like the appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost on a huge screen). But what does it add to Hamlet? Really, not much at all. 

 

                                    Nicole Scherzinger in Broadway's Sunset Boulevard

 

"Hamlet" at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum  

 

 

 

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Tina Fey in All Seasons

I’m surely not alone in considering Tina Fey a national treasure. She has oodles of talent as a performer, and is a welcome MC at televised events. But I want to focus here on her brilliance as a writer, someone who can look at facets of our culture run amok and synthesize them into comedy gold.  

 Fey has been involved with television since her Saturday Night Live days (basically 1997-2006, though who can forget her return as Sarah Palin before the 2008 election?) In 2006 she created and starred in 30 Rock, an hilarious satire of a TV network, and she was also responsible for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I found weird and funny. As a screenwriter, she made a brilliant debut with the 2004 teen comedy, Mean Girls. Who but Tina Fey would be smart enough to read a self-help book about adolescent bad behavior, sociologist Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, and fashion it into a hit movie?

 It helped a great deal that the film was populated by rising young stars, including Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried, along with Fey herself (in a teacher role) and best bud Amy Poehler, playing a particularly indulgent mom. This now-classic satire of high school girl-cliques has ultimately become a part of the American vocabulary, labeling self-improved and self-satisfied young women as “The Plastics” and introducing the concept of a “burn book” full of deliciously malicious gossip. (Clearly this reference is what led tech journalist Kara Swisher to publish in 2004 her Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. I’m also amused that the main non-conformist girl in the film, the one who aims to bring down The Plastics for reasons of her own, is dubbed Janis Ian, immortalizing the young singer/songwriter who had expressed her own teen angst through major pop hits like “At Seventeen.”)

 So potent has Mean Girls been that it was reincarnated, with Fey’s help, as a 2018 Broadway musical and a subsequent 2024 film adaptation. But Fey has not been idle since. It intrigues me that her most recent project is a mini-series which has just been renewed for its second season on Netflix. Again she chose her source carefully: a 1981 film written, directed by, and starring the wonderful Alan Alda. Alda’s The Four Seasons, which (natch!) features a lot of Vivaldi on the soundtrack, chronicles three well-heeled married couples who are close friends and always vacation together. Over the course of a particularly eventual year, one husband strays in dramatic fashion, and the others begin to question their lives and their values. The cast is first-rate (Carol Burnett plays Alda’s hyper-efficient wife, and Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, and Rita Moreno are the others in the friend-group). It was nice to see, at the beginning of the Netflix mini-series, the now eighty-nine-year-old Alda in a gracious cameo role.

 The first season of Fey’s Four Seasons miniseries essentially expands on the basic concept of Alda’s film, showing mature adults—long settled into marriages and careers—suddenly re-thinking their life-choices. It’s interesting to see Fey, who essentially plays the Carol Burnett role, wrestling with being a middle-aged person. We’re so used to her focusing in her projects on teenagers and on career gals: now she’s portraying a wife and the mom of a college-age daughter, someone who has made good choices but is starting to wonder what it all means. At 55, as a wife and a mother of two, Fey is clearly beginning to contemplate the full trajectory of a mature life. And we get to come along for the ride. 

 


Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Older Doesn’t Always Mean Wiser: “Nobody’s Fool”

Why’d I watch a 1994 character piece called Nobody’s Fool? Partly it had to do with the death in May of writer/director Robert Benton, whose down-to-earth work I’d long admired. As a complete unknown, he co-wrote (with David Newman) Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most remarkable films of the remarkable film year 1967. Over a decade later he both wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer, winning himself two Oscars. And there was another Oscar in 1984, honoring his original script for Places in the Heart, a film based—I’m told—on his own Texas family. He directed that one too.  

 Watching Nobody Fool was my salute to Benton’s talent for making the everyday seem special and unique. It was also my tribute to co-star Jessica Tandy, for whom this was a final film. (The original Blanche DuBois died at age 85, just before the film’s release.)  Many others in the film’s cast are also no longer with us: it’s particularly poignant to see Philip Seymour Hoffman in the small but goofy role of a small town cop who’s a little too quick on the trigger. But of course the biggest loss has been that of star Paul Newman, who—then just shy of 70 years of age—was nominated yet again for a Best Actor Oscar for this role. (He lost to Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, but at this late point in his career Newman had already finally snagged a statuette for The Color of Money.) He would be nominated once more for 2002’s Road to Perdition, voiced a role in Disney’s Cars in 2006, and passed from the scene in 2008, at age 83. 

 Nobody’s Fool is poignant, but also quite funny. (At least some of the credit should go to novelist Richard Russo, who wrote the novel on which the film is based.) Set in the dead of winter in an upstate New York hamlet where everybody knows everybody’s business, it focuses on Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a sometimes-construction worker with a bum knee, an appreciation for poker, and a boyish enjoyment of playing tricks on his boss (Bruce Willis). He may seem happy-go-lucky, but there are dark memories of a drunken father and of his own greatest misstep: walking out on a wife and young son many years before. Though he only moved across town, Sully and his son have never re-connected. But the son is back now, with kids and problems of his own, and Sully finds himself in the odd position of needing to act like a grown-up. It’s a layered and thoroughly fascinating performance.  

 Part of what makes the film feel so lived-in is the casting of veteran actors who really help the fictional North Bath, New York feel like a community full of lovable eccentrics. There is, for instance, the rather inept lawyer (Gene Saks) who puts up his artificial leg as his stake in a poker game. Bruce Willis, who reportedly took a major pay cut for the chance to act with Newman, is memorable as the construction boss (and feckless womanizer) who makes Sully’s life miserable but owns a really classy red snow-blower that becomes a running joke. As Willis’s neglected wife, Melanie Griffith is her appealing self. 

 What’s really striking about Newman’s character is that—for all his reputation as a ne’er-do-well—he turns out to be one of the kindest souls in town. It’s his kindness that Jessica Tandy sees in him when she refuses to stop being his landlady, despite her own son’s bluster. Yes, he’s a nuisance, but we sure need more of his ilk.  

 

 

 

Friday, June 20, 2025

Scratching My Old Ass

My Old Ass, a dramedy that popped up at the end of 2024, seems at first glance a raunchy teen flick, full of lots of giggling, girl-on-girl sex, and gorgeous vistas of the Canadian countryside. It’s only later that the viewer discovers the film’s tender heart. And realizes that writer/director Megan Park, a Canadian multi-talent who has much more on her mind than teenage vulgarity, is headed for a bright future.

 It's the end of summer, a very poignant time if you’re about to leave home for college in the big  bad city. Elliott and her gal pals (why this trend of giving leading ladies masculine character names?) are camping on the shore of a local lake, celebrating Elliott’s eighteenth birthday and  pondering what the future will hold. There’s a ceremonial ingestion of magic mushrooms,  and Elliott wakes up in her tent to discover an unexpected visitor, a thirty-something version of herself (Aubrey Plaza).

 Elliott is skeptical, of course, but is finally persuaded that this older pal is a future incarnation of herself, sent to guide her on her pathway toward adulthood. It all sounds helpful . . . until Older Elliott sternly warns her not to have anything to do with a guy named Chad. No prob: she doesn’t know anyone named Chad. But then . . . a nice-looking young man comes paddling up, and she’s trying hard not to be smitten.

 The film’s central section has Elliott desperately trying to avoid Chad, for reasons that she can’t explain and her “old ass” (who’s just a phone call away) refuses to clarify. Chad is kind, smart, and good-looking: what’s not to like? It’s not until late in the movie that Elliott decides—despite all the warnings—that Chad is just too good to be removed from her life. It’s then that Older Elliott finally admits how and why a relationship with Chad will upend her life . . .  and belatedly agrees that, despite it all, he is worth the pain that will inevitably arise.

 Far be it from me to spill all the script’s secrets. Let’s just say here that this wacky teen comedy evolves into a serious exploration of the heartache that is all a part of growing up and moving out into the world. (Aside from the whole Chad business, Elliott needs to come to terms with her parents, who’re suddenly planning to sell the cranberry farm on  which she was raised, And she needs to make peace with her younger brothers, whose goals in life seem hugely different from her own.)

 The coming of age dramedy has always been popular with movie-going audiences, dating back to Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy films. In my own generation, The Graduate (1967) was the movie that spelled out the joys and pitfalls of impending adulthood. The year 1978 saw an exuberant high school musical based on the stage hit, Grease. The previous year had brought us the star of Grease, John Travolta, girding up to move beyond Brooklyn in Saturday Night Fever. The Eighties were, of course, the era of John Hughes, who—in films like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink—explored the pain and pleasure of high school.

 The eighteen-year-olds of M y Old Ass are hardly as innocent as the Andy Hardy gang or even John Hughes’ youthful ensembles. Sex and drugs are definitely a part of their lives. Still, they remain good kids, tentatively checking out the world they’re going to inherit. I defy you not to be touched..