Blog O’ Leaps

BAD EGGS (2002)

I only just saw this movie for the first time, but in my defence World Wrestling Entertainment has been putting out a lot of three-disc sets the last few years.

It’s also kind of difficult reviewing a movie in this website’s traditional freehand disembowelment fashion when you know some of the people involved, although on the other hand we mostly don’t know each other that well, and I’m big on one set of rules for one game, so what the hey.

Bad Eggs is kind of a rare motion picture bargain in that you get around five or six separate movies all rolled into one. I have a sneaking suspicion that why it never really gets anywhere in particular is that it probably needed to be just one.

Somewhere else around here I rattle on in tones of great authority based on very little, regarding the difficulty of successfully sustaining a comic tone in your more eccentric kind of comedy movie. Actually, any kind of comedy movie. You can easily confirm this in reverse to your own satisfaction, (presuming you haven’t already), the exact same way I did – by watching the thousands of man-hours of varyingly catastrophic comedy movies that didn’t come anywhere near close to getting it right, as opposed to the relatively tiny number of minor miracles that did.

Bad Eggs is amiable enough, but safely miracle-proof, unfortunately. You can see the problem in the performances in the main roles.

Mick Molloy and Bob Franklin do Abbott and Costello level dumbness, and then two minutes later they’re straight-faced, underplaying, literate verbal sharpsters. Sometimes they’re the Keystone Kops, and others resolute and resourceful police operatives. We’re meant to accept them as total stock comedy lunkheads, and then turn around and care about them as honest men fighting to overturn a corrupt system. Some hope, Irving.

After a while it’s like a game of Chinese Checkers – six different sets of marbles bumbling into each other while wobbling slowly in six different directions. Come to drink about it, there is arguably very little in the field of human experience which compares for inherent dullness with Chinese Checkers.

Some of this is the script, and some of it the performances, and some of it should have been picked up in the direction, and, basically you might think there can never be too many toppings on the one pizza, but I once saw a drunk guy eat a large one containing banana, hot sausage and garlic, and the aftermath wasn’t exactly suitable for framing.

Tony Martin wrote and directed Bad Eggs, which is fundamentally a comedy about two inept cops in a Victoria Police special investigative squad who screw up to the point of being busted back to uniformed policemen, but stumble onto a motherlode of corruption within the force which may go all the way to the top, blah blah blah, stop me if anyone hasn’t heard this before, all right I’ll go on then.

For a comedy, if I may paraphrase the eminent movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, there’s too much plot getting in the way of the story. For anything resembling dramatic purposes, there’s just no reason to get involved with the main characters as they’re portrayed. For some reason the overall effect reminds me of Chico Marx’s experiences as a spy, shadowing a political enemy in the movie Duck Soup:
“Tuesday we go to the ball game but he fool us – he no show up. Wednesday he go to the ball game but we fool him – we no show up. Thursday was a double-header – nobody show up.”
In a lot of ways, Bad Eggs is a Thursday kind of movie.

There are funny moments, and others where the characters momentarily register generally because of the likeability of the performers, and even some flickers of suspense here and there, and never the (whatever the ‘three-word’ version of ‘twain’ is) shall meet.

Also there’s the stuff where the performers just pop out of character like Paris Hilton’s entire right chest did out of her dress on an Ultimate Fighting Championships pay-per-view a while back, although in that case it did kind of add to the entertainment, and you could hazard a reasonable guess as to why it happened. And there’s the number of blown lines that got left in the movie, maybe because it was deemed ‘naturalistic’, but to me it looks like blown lines left in the picture and you wonder whether there was a short in the audio circuits in the screening room.

The reason why, say, The Castle and Crackerjack and Kenny worked dramatically – and whether, or how, they worked as comedy movies is a another major martial arts exhibition for another day – to make happy, contented puppies out of audiences is that they did the feel-good shuffle, and made the audiences care what happened to the characters, a lot of which was down to making sure the characters were consistently portrayed. Obviously I’m saying Bad Eggs went in another direction – if not several – and having just watched it I’d still be struggling to define what that direction was.

On a separate claw entirely, why is it that when the few non-talent-proof comedy people we have here in our much-loved celebrated backwater bathroom of a country finally get to make a movie where they really have some say in it, it always has to be one of those “push the buttons and phone ‘er in” feel-good type numbers with antique Hollywood plotting up the wazoo? I guess the answer’s probably located somewhere in the question, at least if you throw the word ‘financing’ in there thirty or forty times.

But, still, why can’t they just go ahead and make a funny comedy movie, with gags, and laughs and audiences doubled over to the point of mild reflux, and leave the bubble-bath to this week’s Will Ferrell or Owen Wilson equivalent? Some of these people made Frontline and The (D-Gen) Late Show. Boy Howdy, I’d like to see a movie that paraded around those levels of skills/attitude, and made people laugh like those did. I also gather I’m a majority of one on that issue.

(Actually the most viable direction for the folks I’m talking about would seem to be suggested by the Chris Guest/Eugene Levy ensemble pictures also mentioned somewhere in the soup around here. But given my own fabled sense of career direction – and for a time I was widely hailed throughout the local entertainment industry as ‘The Clown Prince of Unemployment’ – that’s probably enough vocational advice for the present article. Well, as the great 20th Century philosopher David Lee Roth once sagely noted of advice, “It’s free for a reason, you know.”)

Anyhoo, back to the Egg. The best performances in here are by Alan Brough who’s actually reasonably funny as the nerdy computer guy who helps the heroes out and establishes a definite and consistent character with relatively little screen time, and Judith Lucy who gets more screen time, but they forgot to give her very much funny to do unless you count swearing a bit. She also has some screen chemistry with Mick Malloy (as in Crackerjack) which tends to stand out in Bad Eggs, because there’s not a ton of it about. As with that movie, she plays a journalist, although in this one I don’t recall her actually doing any journalism at any point during the running time. Nicholas Bell plays the smarmy heel exactly according to requirements, an art he honed in many smarmy TV ads, except when he was the non-evil but slightly creepily obsessive perfectionist in some car servicing commercial.

Pretty much everything on the technical side is handled with complete aplomb, and you sense the odd minor miracle of expertise since you’d think this was done on a diet-shoestring budget, and it doesn’t look it at all.

The one near-great moment is the opening sequence with an uncontrolled car sliding surreally through early-morning scenes of suburban torpor before it enters a well-populated shopping mall, ploughing almost the whole way through before anyone notices. Cinematographer Graham Wood probably deserves some sort of medal, and Tony Martin already pinned around 50 kilos worth of them on him personally for nailing presumably the exact effect he must have been going for when he scripted it.

(Even this comes across with a vague aroma of not quite being the show-stoppa of hilarity it was intended to be.

The stuff that really struck me as funny:

- the inevitable scene where the big bad guy has the heroes at his mercy and he’s just making his big speech about what screw-ups they are and what he’s going to do to them, when the world’s longest and loudest recorded passenger train runs right by behind them, and everyone has to wait around patiently looking at each other, because nobody can hear a word.

- when the tour-guide lady is leading a tour group into Victorian Parliament and they over-dubbed Jane Kennedy’s voice doing a gently demented commentary which is bizarrely fixated on ‘vestibules’

- the name of Tony Martin’s (briefly heard) game show host character, which comes up in the credits as Gavin Clack

- the fact that someone is credited as ‘Hot Head Technician’. For all I know this is a perfectly valid technical job description, but I got an instant and unshakeable mental image of a Yosemite Sam type stomping around everywhere swearing and constantly smashing his tool-kit to the ground in disgust.

There’s also one throwaway line from Mick Malloy regarding a Lionel Richie CD that drew a hearty guffaw with no pain whatsoever.

It’s probably not enough, is what I’m gently piledriving at here, at least not for a comedy movie; and if it’s not a comedy movie, somebody throw me a detailed prospectus, because I don’t know what it’s meant to be.

(I know a million years ago people said roughly the same thing about, say, Jabberwocky. But the problem for people there was that it wasn’t a Monty Python comedy movie, not that you couldn’t tell it was another kind of comedy. And it had atmosphere and visual style to beat the band, which helped. And it was funnier than Bad Eggs.)

Tony Martin is an unfeasibly talented human who will hopefully have another crack at this talkie-making business again some time. If you happen to see the DVD of this and check out his ten minute or so mini-movie send-up of the Australian film industry, (in the DVD Extras), abstracted from a Late Show episode, you’ll see what I mean.

Otherwise my chief abiding interest in this particular movie is whether it was re-titled Bed Iggs for the New Zealand release.

(A very generous 6 out of 11 on the MPHOAH scale, probably bumped up at least a notch for the previously mentioned ‘Warren Perso’ item in the Extras.)

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I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-A-Book-Review Dept

RICK JOHNSON READER: TIN CANS, SQUEEMS AND THUDPIES

We now take a brief pause in “normal” programming, because I can’t believe I haven’t plugged this book on the web-psych or inter-blob or whatever it is yet. (Actually I can believe it, because I’m so absent-minded that compared to me, the average disgraced politician caught with his/her hand in the honey-jar up to the shoulder-blade who “can’t remember anything” under questioning, comes off like notoriously detail-retentive Rolling Stones archivist Bill Wyman by comparison. (Tell us again Unkey Bill, what - or whom - did the Stones’ 3rd base roadie have hanging out of his nose during breakfast on June 7th, 1965.)

The squeaky screed below explains what the book, whose title is hanging over this post like the proverbial iron butterfly, is all about. It’s my review from the Amazon website. They probably think they own it or something, and boy, is one of us in for a big surprise. I just stumbled across it when I was trying to stop them recommending ultra-violet sheep tuners and Buffalo Springfield seat-covers to me every time I go to their verblungen website. I’d kind of forgotten I’d written it, and I’d just been re-reading the book and thinking I needed to plug it here anyway, so here it is. I’ll do a tune-up version with backing harmonies later on, but this ought to trouser the cleft area until then.

If you want this book - and anyone retaining a vague semblance of activity in the pulse area should want it - you can get it from Amazon.com. You can probably get it from other places as well, but it’s one of those self-published U-haul jobs, and it would probably be easier to find a reliable tyre-stockist in the Sahara Desert, or physically isolate the dairy component of a Milk Arrowroot biscuit, as it would to find it at the source. I’ve had no problems getting multiple (or single) copies from Amazon, so go raid a buddy or spouse’s credit card today!

In the unlikely event I’ve clicked the correct button here, what follows next is the review.

There are a few handfuls of folks who read CREEM magazine back in the late 70s/early 80s who think this guy was one of the best music reviewers/pop culture decoders/plain old 20th Century humourists in the history of the world and portions of Cleveland.

Everyone else of grown-up newspaper buying age qualifies.

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EPIC MOVIE (2007)

You know those books that come out around Christmas that aren’t really books, they’re just ideas for books with 37 lines of text and a bunch of big pictures?

“1000 Sculptures You Must Fondle Before Your Liver Curdles”, “Great Tanning Disasters Of History”, “101 Ways To Insert A Mobile Phone Into A Dead Armadillo”, “Stars of the NBA Go Fishing”, “Snoop Dogg And Fergie’s Guide To The Real Da Vinci Code”, “1001 Matt Damon Movies They Made In The Last Six Months That You Must See Before Your Hair Goes” – that kind of thing.

Well, now they make movies like that apparently. I can just see the pitch for these – it must be so easy. “Uhhh, man, we’re like, gonna – you know all those rilly big movies that came out in the last year, man? Like Rings of the Lord, and X-Mans and The Di Caprio Coat and Pilots of the Caribou with Johnny Depps? We’re gonna make, like this one big movie outta all of them, and, it’ll be real funny, and we’ll put in tunes and real big titties and stuff so everyone will go kreezy and buy tickets, man. And jokes, so it’ll be real funny. Like with jokes. And real big titties again. And stuff.”

And then the designated accountant playing the part of a movie executive makes an involuntary “Ker-CHING!” noise, and says, “Here’s several million dollars for you fry cooks – go make your horrible movie out of pieces of other movies, and the world will be a better and safer place for all of us. Just don’t forget the real big titties.”

Yep, I can see the pitch, but I can’t see the script. I just saw the movie and I still can’t see the script.

Forgive the ramblings of an old popcorn stain, but once upon a time, in a megaplex-challenged galaxy far far behind, they made parody movies that were funny, had highlight gags people still quote well beyond the point of conventional annoyance decades hence, and they kind of had a point to them. The Mel Brooks films of the 70s, Woody Allen’s moments of genre parody in his “earlier, funny films”, the kung fu movie send-up contained in the timelessly knot-headed Kentucky Fried Movie – there was a little punch in the parody, they tore a little daylight through the faded painted flats of worn-out old-school studio movie-making, and probably as, or more importantly, they were littered with gags for the ages.

Epic Movie isn’t satire or parody or knowing, humourous pastiche, or send-up, or mockery – heckfire, it’s barely recognisable as comedy. Actually, I’m not sure they haven’t violated truth in advertising statutes by including the word “Movie” in the title.

It just re-states a bunch of well-known moments from recent-ish megaplex fodder, and inserts copious amounts of head-hitting and vomit. I like head-hitting in comedy movies, but this movie has more hitting in the head for less yield of laughter than anything since the Three Stooges wisely dumped Ted Healy from the act in the early 1930s. Mike Tyson’s fights had more laughs than this, although maybe not as much head-hitting. The weaker Abbott and Costello pictures are suave comedy gold next to this.

OK, no point killing a microbe with an armoured regiment, so let’s move on to the particulars of the offence.

Basically Epic Movie is nominally a re-telling of the Narnia picture, with “sampling” of other movies, inc the Pirates and X-Men franchises, Da Vinci Code, Willy Wonka, and for some reason, Nacho Libre and Borat, because we all know what a rich seam of comedy gold is always mined when you parody a parody.

It works at about the level of a Mad Magazine movie parody from the period where they’d more or less completely lost the plot/given up. Only with more big titties and body fluids.

Here are all the funny gags in it. When Jennifer Coolidge turns up playing the evil Queen of Narnia, she is immediately identified in dialogue as “Stifler’s Mom”. When one of the characters is working his way through the unfeasibly large closet that leads to Narnia, and it’s stuffed full of nothing but fur coats, he declaims with some annoyance: “Who lives here – Liberace?!” I think there’s one other from early on that I forgot, but otherwise that’s pretty much your full load.

A lot of decent talent is issued a paycheck for no apparent purpose here. Jennifer Coolidge, David Carradine, and particularly the rarely sighted and presumed extinct Crispin Glover are given nothing remotely confusable with funny to do.

Exceptions, there are two. Fred Willard, who can’t help being funny in spite of the material, and his make-up job is pretty hilarious, and he’s so (deliberately) the wrong type for his (Lion-guy from Narnia) character that it just works anyway. And an unrecognisably skinny Darrell Hammond, from Saturday Night Live (we mostly get to revel in his older tubbier episodes on cable here) as Johnny Depp in the Pirates movies is really something. They don’t really give him much that’s funny either, but he just makes it funny with that comic acting stuff. Boy, does it make a difference when someone who has truckloads of comedy technique and can also act cuts loose in something like this. It’s a textbook opportunity to study this difference in Epic Movie, because hardly anyone else seems to have a clue.

(An honourable exception is due Jim Piddock, who is a decent actor - Willard’s foil in the dog show commentary scenes from Best in Show is probably how most people know him - and generates some small joy in Ian McKellen’s Magneto role from the X-Men movies, but is hardly on-screen except to be given paltry gags about magnets which appear to be cack-handedly appropriated from old Warner Bros cartoons. I’d feel a little guilty not also mentioning Jayma Mays who plays the ditzy redhead of the four nominal lead characters. She gives some indication that she could be a valuable player in the kind of comedy film that remembers to include comedy, if she was given dialogue, direction and the ghost of a chance; and she raises a smile or two working against an unbuckable trend here.)

The rest is either pointless lookalikes (and the guy who does Jack Black is an unbelievable “You’ll look twice and then look again” ringer) or sound-alikes (the Borat guy actually resembles a tall, gay cab-driver who frequents gyms and has an unquenchable 80s Freddie Mercury fixation), and beyond that it’s a firm case of “Yeah, they look (or sound) like them, and what’s your point exactly?”

In minor roles, I think they single-handedly pushed the proprietors of every celebrity-lookalike agency in Southern California into a new tax-bracket.

There are a couple of funny things about Epic Movie, although these are purely conceptual rather than anything occasioning actual laughter from on-screen activity.

Clearly with an eye to the attention span of any likely audience member, every so often a really lame hip-hop number breaks out complete with movie-musical style and 130% humour-proof dance activity. Considering the main guys to be held accountable for the general fiasco are surnamed Friedberg and Seltzer, I’m going to take a wild co-religionist’s guess that this phenomenon has more to do with the box-office abacus than pure creative animus, and that the boys who are not so much boyz (and certainly not goys) kind of had a target audience in mind there. Beyond that, all I know for a fact is that as intrusive, boring devices go that slam a movie firmly in reverse gear and then drive you pedal-to-the-metal all the way to the gates of Snooze City, this one is a peach.

(Of the five or six times I literally fell briefly asleep during Epic Movie, at least three of them were during the dance numbers, so you can consider that scientifically validated under strict laboratory conditions.)

Actually, the one musical exception is Eagles of Death Metal – which comes as something of a surprise to me, but still - and their number is kind of fun. Maybe they should have shot a whole make-believe concert of those guys in fancy dress and left out the rest of the picture.

The other funny thing is that the movie is impeccably shot, the non-song score is surprisingly decent, and the effects, design and other visual considerations on something that presumably didn’t have a monstrous budget are fairly meticulous; but everything to do with the comedy – in general, but particularly regarding character interplay in dialogue – is routinely handled with such a comprehensive air of malpractice that you could almost make a great comedy movie by just taking careful note of everything done in Epic Movie and then going out and doing the opposite.

The timing is a beat to a beat-and-a-half out all the way. The comedy stuff plays like they shot every single featured actor separately, and then edited it together wearing blindfolds, earplugs and boxing gloves. Even given the lameness of 98.9% of the material, it’s misframed and mistimed with an alacrity that borders on the paranormal.

Anyway, I cannot recommend Epic Movie enough, or indeed, at all. It’s kind of so rank that it’s hard to believe that none of the Wayans family were directly involved. You may as well spend money on old hardened glue, or just about any Eddie Murphy movie in recent history. It’s possible that every copy of this movie destroyed could single-handedly improve worldwide entertainment standards.

(1 out of 11 on the industry-standard Marge Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap scale)

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THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)

OK you swingin’ hubcaps and moshin’ moonpies, ol’ Unca Leaps is takin’ you a scary-long time ago in the trusty Wayback Machine, way before the dawn of religion, refrigeration and what noted scientist Professor Dennis Twilight once referred to as “Them real big lizards”, to the very beginnings of time and space, when apparently Gary Busey invented rock’n’roll.

Or to put it another way, just recently on cable, in the armchair-welded late-nite state physicians refer to as “Too tired to go to bed”, I was flicking around the remote in search of easily digestible brain-death, and stumbled into The Buddy Holly Story, which I hadn’t seen since around the time that the Police were considered the musical leaders of the planet (in spite of most aural evidence to the contrary) as opposed to more recently, when I saw them suavely promoted as “Win two tickets for your Dad for Fathers’ Day!”.

I remembered The Buddy Holly Story as a vaguely neato-keeno standard musical bio-pic, but had failed to figure into rematch calculations the Electrolux effect, as its powerful make-believe history engines just suck you in and deposit you in a highly engrossing atmosphere of sock-hops, rock-bops, and no reference to rumoured prodigious penis-size issues whatsoever *, that sweeps you away with a heady brew of zippy feel-good olden days music biz snapshots and zingin’ tunes.

Buddy Holly was kind of the [fill in name of nerdenheimer chart-topper of today who will be forgotten in roughly two lunch-breaks] of his day, except he could write, and sing and play and he made music that has already lasted seven or eight tests of time and always will.

He turned up out of nowhere (officially identified as Lubbock, Texas), blitzed through some shuddery, shimmering pop-rock music, kind of codified what was to become the “rock band” sound almost as much as anyone else could claim pre-Beatles, dumped the band, switched over to masterminding some glutinous, dweeby but memorable string-pop crooners (way before anyone had even heard of a Phil Spector or Brian Wilson) and promptly died on schedule, way before his time, in the same plane crash that took care of the Big Bopper [“Chantilly Lace”, the song that every second person who remembers it thinks was Jerry Lee Lewis] and Richie Valens, who got his own neato-keeno bio-pic as valediction).

This giddy eulogy traces Holly’s history, as the kid working in his daddy’s feedstore (or whatever it was – rural small-business economics is an avowed weak spot of this website) with a sound in his head, who mucked around in the garage with it with his two local rockin’ buddies, and then after some false starts, took it nationwide with the same two buddies who became known as the Crickets, got a record accidentally issued by a minor New York label, had a US-sized hit, rocked the continent, got hitched to the record company secretary, etc, etc, plane-crash, The End.

Director Steve Rash, along with Gary Busey’s incredibly great portrayal of the nerdy but cool guy who could really rock, does an incredible job of wrapping you up and binding you into this compelling story and convincing you that that’s the way it was, and the only way it could have been. It’s a tremendously entertaining and likeable rock’n’roll movie – and I don’t just mean it’s got rock’n’roll music in it, but it IS rock’n’roll done as a movie. It even has the grace to be a traditional musical movie in many ways, but still remember to rock.

It’s kind of a cheat to come out of the Holly Story coma afterwards, do a little light reading and find out this isn’t so much a fictionalisation as a complete Fudge Factory when it comes to anything resembling a fact. Those boys he played with at home initially were nothing much to do with the band later known as the Crickets, they were some Western swing guys he played with earlier. In the movie they share all the trials, tribulations, tear-drops and tinea, but only one member of the band he initially took out of scenic Lubbock was anything to do with the later Crickets, and then not one of the best-known version of the group.

For all the valid points made about Holly as an early Brian Wilson prototype who could “hear the music perfectly formed in his head”, he didn’t do it all himself with the other guys as painted background scenery – at least one of the Crickets wrote songs as well. (Sonny Curtis also later wrote material as shockingly well-known and bizarrely diverse as “I Fought the Law” and “Love is all Around”, the latter better-known as The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme).

Also the Crickets as they became known to the general public were a four-piece band with two guitars (Sonny Curtis was the other one) in the line-up. In the movie they’re a three-piece with Buddy as the only guitar player.

And that galvanising scene in the movie where Buddy goes to Nashville, with his homies, is bullied by some fat-cat producer to record in oldsville country style with syrupy fiddles and the tempo chilled down to a slow waltz, and then punches the producer in his fat moosh and stomps off never to record with him again – well, let’s call that light historical embroidery of the Joltin’ Joe Stalin school.

What actually happened – which which I checked partly by the painstaking research method of looking at the back cover of the budget-label record I own of those sessions – is that they recorded a whole bunch of stuff for Decca in Nashville, it’s mostly rockabilly in the Carl Perkins style (which was obviously an influence on Holly, and an even earlier prototype of the rock band sound), and the reality is, when the Nashville producer in real-life told Holly his drummer from home was a bum, the drummer walked for the good of Holly’s career, and Buddy and the other guy kept right on recording.

The biggest horse-laugh when history is extracted and separated from the well-meaning and loveable whitewash job in the movie concerns the chirpy and avuncular New York producer (for Coral/Brunswick records) Norman Petty, played adorably and baldly by Conrad Janis (Mindy’s dad from the famous TV enema, Mork and Mindy).

In real life, he took over as Holly’s manager, and made sure he got a co-write on quite a few tracks (including “That’ll Be The Day” which Holly had already cut in Nashville in a different version before Holly ever met Petty, so that’s a beaut).

Also, unlike in the movie version where, in a cozy family fireside chat, he gently tries to persuade Buddy to go out on the fateful final tour because he is concerned that Buddy’s non-touring is harming Holly’s career, in the cold hard light of reality, Holly made the decision himself, allegedly because legal action between the two had left him in a Mother Hubbard-like financial state. (Source – “The New Rolling Stone Encyclopaedia of Rock & Roll”, 1995 edn.) Maybe Petty was still alive when they made the movie.

The funny thing about all this is that the movie is such a fun go-kart ride that you mostly feel cheated because you want to believe it anyway. My way of handling it is the old Marvel Comics “alternate universes” scientific theory, ie there’s the real version that actually happened, and there’s the even more movie-real version that happened somewhere on the same planet in an alternate universe where Gerald Ford became lifetime President of the Soviet Union, and Richmond football club won thirty premierships in a row.

It’s kind of bizarre that they got the guys on screen (inc Busey and that guy Toad from American Graffiti) to actually play the songs and sing rather than use the Holly originals, but it kind of adds to the urgency and fun of the performance scenes (even though they’re miming to the tracks they’ve recorded). What you lose is mostly Buddy’s voice, and Busey, at least in that way, isn’t exactly Buddy Holly, although it’s not a disaster either.

It’s still a highly enjoyable hay-ride of a make-believe biography, and if you’re partial to the old Leapster noggin-scratch that what movies are about at their best, whatever else they are, is the creation of perfect little hermetically sealed worlds that generate their own emotionally-convincing reality, then The Buddy Holly Story has all that nailed, and you can catch it on the late nite cable express and join me in the sleep disorder clinic waiting room later on.

The weirdest foot-note about the picture is whatever happened to unfortunately named director Steve Rash, who did such a bountiful bang-up on Holly Story, then near as I can see directed a grand total of three movies in the 80s, four in the 90s – none of them exactly troubling the AFI’s list of 100 all-time greats, if you smell what the Leaps is cookin’ – and bottomed out in the ought-oughts at the helm of American Pie: Band Camp, which even by the ass-clown-oriented standards of the teen movie genre, should be cordoned off by the army and officially declared a national disaster area. I don’t know whether he instead went into the carpet business like his mother had always wanted, or what happened. I don’t know whose shoes he pooped on. Normally you have to be Charles Manson to suffer career curtailment like this.

8 out of 11, on the industry-approved MPHOAH scale

* (You younger type hepcats will have to Google around to de-mystify that reference)

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A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)

To shave a reasonably short story to a bare stubble, I think the 60s Inspector Clouseau movies are probably over-rated, and the 70’s ones somewhat underrated. (Not counting the one that starred Alan Arkin instead of Peter Sellers, which no-one really rates at all.)

By that I mean the conventional critics, because I’d be guessing that Return, Strikes Back and even Revenge have been seen over and over again by far more regular human beings than the first couple in the series.

The first one (The Pink Panther) had far too much of the early 60s version of “high style”, too much plot and caper movie stuff going on, and more David Niven than was absolutely necessary.

A Shot in the Dark was the second one, and introduces pretty much all the elements that became standard in the later series – Herbert Lom as Dreyfus, Burt Kwouk as Kato, Andre Maranne as Francois, Dreyfus’s assistant – it’s just that they were pretty much all funnier later on, probably due to the most obvious reason, that they later had had the opportunity to become more comfortable with the roles.

Blake Edwards just didn’t have the handle on things that he had in the 70s pictures. There are still laughs to shake the mightiest belly, and it’s definitely a fun movie, but here he doesn’t realise in the scene with the pool game that you don’t have to give Sellers’ character a “funny” trick pool cue to get the laughs. Clouseau would be funnier screwing up without it. Dreyfus’ descent into madness due to Clouseau’s incompetence is too rushed here to really make it register the way it did later on.

You also don’t have to put Clouseau in a nudist colony to make the character funny. It’s kind of a misreading of the character (who is funnier screwing up in conventional environments). No doubt putting anything nudist in a mainstream picture in 1964 was a much bigger panic for generating knee-jerk laughs, but other than one funny gag (later copied in one of the Austin Powers pictures) where Sellers is constantly moving but ingenious ways are found to block a direct view of his downstairs particulars, the nudist colony sequence rattles on forever, comparable to the sole truly clueless scene in The Party, where everyone falls in the water, and suds go everywhere and there’s an elephant, and there’s just nothing going on in the city.

George Sanders as the suave bad-guy is certainly a lot more fun than David Niven though (and what wouldn’t be). George could play this kind of stuff in his sleep, and I think he did. Also, Elke Sommer is sensibly cast as a complete bombshell, Graham Stark is rock solid as Sellers’ assistant, and the opening ten minutes or so, which are a complete Sellers showcase, will make you laugh like a power-mower.

After the opening scenes, the comedy mostly keeps coming, but there’s a clear downturn in chuckle-yield, and most of what comes after is clearly not as sharp, for various reasons, some of which are cited above.

For some reason, this is an adaptation of a (non-Clouseau) stage play. Since patently nobody involved cared about the plot, or even pretending to resolve it halfway coherently, there are fair and reasonable grounds for wondering why they bothered, since the writers could have just as easily come up with their own whodunit without having to worry about trying to stuff a Clouseau movie into some pre-existing concoction. *

That Blake Edwards co-writer was William Peter Blatty of later The Exorcist novel fame is also bizarre enough to be going on with. It’s kind of like finding out that Orson Welles warmed up for Citizen Kane by knocking out a few scripts for the Three Stooges shorts (which is, of course, not true), or that the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, somehow wound up writing for Mr Magoo TV specials (which unfortunately is true).

The scene towards the end when Clouseau collects all the suspects in the drawing room, in a parody of all similar scenes in Agatha Christie and other whodunits, picks things up a bit, especially regarding the insuperable challenge of Sellers and Stark trying to synchronise their watches due to a plan which requires total pinpoint execution, but just isn’t going to get it.

The resolution which follows is a jaw-dropping rushed mess by any mainstream movie standards you care to name – plainly someone wanted to just get this thing in the can, and figured they’d worry about the rest after the movie was released - but by then it doesn’t really matter, and Herbert Lom really is funny in the final scenes, right until Edwards can’t think of any way to cap the picture, so everyone falls into the water again.

If you like the Clouseau pictures, this one skates by pretty much on Sellers alone, and Sellers is one of the funniest guys ever to be featured in movies, by my count. To me, the next two pictures in the series had funnier moments, but if you like the series at all, you’d still want to see this.

What’s unusual about this one, before they’d nailed the formula down, is the reliance on picture-long running gags. One of them – Clouseau continually being arrested and taken to prison in a police van with siren wailing – is not horrible or anything, but handled like the average postal service would deal with fine glassware. The other, where the infatuated Clouseau continually finds idiotic reasons to release the Elke Sommer character from custody, as more and more evidence seems to indicate her guilt, and Commissioner Dreyfus is driven crazier and crazier by it, is, as the great philosophers Spandau Ballet once put it, “Gold”.

(Maybe 7 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap)

* (Briefly, I’ve since read one account of this, and the story told in that case was that a studio had already optioned the American stage re-write of the original French play - both of which had been substantially successful from what I can gather - but the movie project had turned into an abortive disaster, and somehow Blake Edwards got hired to perform a salvage job, and decided the only thing to do with it was insert Inspector Clouseau and turn it effectively into the sequel to The Pink Panther. Whether or not this is actually true I have no idea, but it would go a fair way to explaining the profound disinterest flouted throughout the movie in a plot that was part of a pre-existing property that someone had thought enough of to buy in the first place. One can only imagine the sheer delight of the original French playwrights when they found out that (a) The people who bought it for movie adaptation were so thrilled with the original that they basically ignored it as much as possible, and (b) That the new version was chock to the brim with depictions of idiotic Frenchmen.)