GUN AND GAMES

Opening this weekend:

The Naked Gun--It's in the trailer anyway, so allow me a spoiler: "Please, take a chair," says Detective Frank Drebin to his beautiful costar. After politely declining on the grounds that she has plenty of chairs at home, she ends up walking out with a chair.

There are better jokes in the movie, and there are worse jokes, too. But it's a fair representative.

Directed by Akiva Schaffer, this new version of the late-'80s/early-'90s-era series, derived from the short-lived 1982 TV show Police Squad! (the first feature was titled The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!) shows real allegiance to its source. There's some fine silly wordplay and elaborately constructed sight gags. Most essentially, though, the movie keeps a first-rate poker face.

Frank's adversary this time is a rich guy (Danny Huston), boss of a company that sells self-driving cars. He's also the head of a cabal of "evil billionaires" with an ambitious plot to cleanse the earth of mediocrities and rebuild it to their advantage. But the plot is little more than a clothesline on which to hang schtick. 

The old show and the first three movies were the creations of writer-director-producers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and writer Pat Proft, who in various combinations were also behind the Airplane! and Hot Shots! movies. Their seeming approach was to fling multiple dumb gags per minute at the audience, apparently on the theory that if only one of them landed, the movie would still be a laugh a minute.

But their best trick was to let old-school, stone cold serious actors like Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and George Kennedy deliver those dumb gags. And nobody benefitted from this technique more than Leslie Nielsen. Younger audiences may not remember that Nielsen had been a bland leading man who had graduated to authority figures and shady villains as he matured, until Airplane! allowed him to let out his goofy side. Before 1980, the idea that he would have become a major comedy star would have seemed funnier than most of the jokes in those movies.

Liam Neeson is probably about as close a contemporary equivalent to Nielsen as you could find. In the new film, Neeson takes his cue from Nielsen and plays it utterly, hilariously straight as Frank Drebin the Younger. If you happen to reflect that that's Oscar Schindler, or the avenging middle-aged tough guy from the Taken flicks, up there glowering and deadpanning those absurd dad jokes and acting out that slapstick and potty humor, it deepens the comedic effect.

Pamela Anderson is just as game as Neeson's leading lady, at one point knocking out a jaw-dropping scat number. She keeps her dignity through some major raunch, and through one of the strangest romantic montages ever.

It takes very smart people to craft something this artfully stupid, and while this style of comedy might not be the healthiest as a steady diet, The Naked Gun could be just what we need right at the moment. Maybe smartest of all, it's blessedly short, clocking in at under an hour and a half. Brevity is the soul of wit; it's also the soul of this movie.

TRUNK SHOW

Another Moon Mammoths update: Despite a loss on the scoreboard, the debut of the Erie Moon Mammoths appears to have been a triumph. According to John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, the Moon Mammoths, aka the Erie Seawolves (AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers), have sold four years worth of merch in just three weeks. I was one of those sales:

This shirt arrived Monday afternoon; Monday evening I wore it to a movie screening in Scottsdale, and two different people at the theater recognized it and complimented me on it. One of them, a stranger to me, said "Tusks up!"

The next day I wore it to lunch, and one of the servers recognized it. Later that day, a passing stranger grinned at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and said "Erie!" I asked him if he was from there and he said no, he was a just a John Oliver fan.

Then, as he walked away, he also said "Tusks up!"

That's four people in Arizona, in less than 24 hours. The country is in the grip of Moon Mammoth Mania!

LEHRER WITHAL

This one hurts. The great Tom Lehrer has departed us, at 97. Too soon, as far as I'm concerned.

In the late '60s, we had the album That Was the Year That Was in our house...

It's a live recording, made at the hungry i in San Francisco in 1965, of Lehrer performing topical songs he had written for the NBC comedy series That Was the Week That Was, interspersed with his commentary. At 6 or 7 years old, I of course understood very little of what he was singing about. When he said "dirty books are fun, that's all there is to it," in the intro to his marching anthem "Smut" I can remember wondering why a physically unclean book would be fun, and when, in the song itself, he refers to "...a dirty novel I can't shut," I can remember picturing a book with a broken spine that he literally couldn't close.

So you can imagine how little of the political and social material I grasped. But it didn't matter. I listened to the album endlessly. It's probably my favorite record of all time, to this day. The reason, of course, is the sensibility; the snide, snarky yet genial and affable manner. Tom Lehrer was exactly the smartass I wanted to be when I grew up. And now, at 63, I'm not sure I see much reason to revise or abandon that ambition.

Lehrer was also the first of many lyricists and poets to teach me a love of rhyme I've never gotten over. From "Smut," for instance, comes Lehrer's admirable "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense/To be smut it must be ut/Terrly without redeeming social importance..." Or, from his  splendid ballad "Alma" (about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel): "and that is the story of Alma/Who knew how to recieve and to give/The body that reached her embalm-ah/Was one that had known how to live!"

So was yours, good sir.

Also, in one of the more badass show-business gestures ever, in 2020 Lehrer, a lifelong bachelor with no children, released all of his songs to the public domain.

Back in 2000, one of the few music reviews I ever wrote at New Times (for the great Gilbert Garcia, then Music Editor) was of a Lehrer boxed set containing almost all of his recorded work, including a couple of marvelous tunes he wrote and sang for The Electric Company.

Peace and joy eternal to you great man, and as my friend Owen Kerr would rightly say, Ave, magister.

FOUR BETTER OR WORSE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

The Fantastic Four: First Steps--Week before last, in my review of the new Superman movie, I grumbled about the reliance of contemporary superhero movies on devices like interdimensional travel and parallel universes. Now comes this Marvel entry, which is set entirely in a parallel universe, "Earth 828" in the Marvel "Multiverse," the home of the famous super-team. It's a realm of snazzy midcentury modern decor and beehive hairdos and stentorian TV announcers and the like.

Partly because the whole movie takes place in this setting--no universe-hopping--and partly because I'm a sucker for this style of design, I didn't mind it in this case. Director Matt Shakman and the other filmmakers generate a fine atmosphere of nostalgia for a period that never happened, at least not in this universe. Cool as the movie looks, however, it took me a little while to get pulled into the story. 

You may remember the title quartet, created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in 1961, scientists and explorers endowed with superpowers by a trip to space. Reed Richards can literally stretch himself to ridiculous lengths; Sue Storm can make herself invisible and also commands force fields from her hands; her brother Johnny Storm, aka The Human Torch, can make himself a flying fireball at will; and Ben Grimm aka The Thing, is a super-strong and super-durable rock-man.

Despite the title, this isn't an origin story. Our heroes are well-established here, and Sue is pregnant with Reed's baby, when a threat from space turns up. The planet-gobbling giant Galactus (Ralph Ineson) is headed hungrily for Earth, scouted as a suitable snack for him by Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). Even with Sue eight months along, The Four journey to space to intercept Galactus and negotiate with him. Turns out The Big G is more than willing to make a deal, straight out of a fairy tale: He'll spare Earth, in return for Sue and Reed's baby, who he says will absorb his hunger and let him retire from planet-eating.

Or some nonsense like that. Despite the high-powered stars--Pedro Pascal as Reed, Vanessa Kirby as Sue, Joseph Quinn as Johnny and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben--the characters didn't initially pop as vividly as they do in some Marvel and other superhero flicks. Pascal is subdued as the reflective, problem-solving Reed. He and Bachrach and Quinn are all good enough company, and Garner is quite an elegant Surfer, but only Kirby zaps the earlier parts of the movie with energy when she speaks.

Eventually, though, things get lively. I think it was during a scene in which the Four are multitasking on the edge of a black hole that the actors seemed to wake up, and First Steps started to feel kind of deranged, in a good way. By the time Galactus arrives in New York, the movie takes on an agreeable kaiju flavor; the titan looks a bit like the title character of the '60s-era Japanese film Majin, Monster of Terror, and the climactic clash between him and The Four is satisfying. There's real, off-the-wall imagination here, and after an unsteady start First Steps ends up surefooted.

BEST NOT FORGOTTEN

The July/August issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...features the 2025 edition of "Best of the Valley." Your Humble Narrator was proud to once again be among the authors and officious imperious judges of what is best in this community. See if you can guess which eleven finely-crafted baubles of prose were of my painstaking and polished composition!

Moon Mammoths update: Alas, the Erie Moon Mammoths aka Erie Seawolves did not win their debut matchup against the Chesapeake Baysox of Bowie, Maryland, though it was reportedly a good, competitive game; the final was 6-5. But by most accounts a grand time was had by all, not least comedian John Oliver, mastermind of the rebrand, who scurried from job to job throughout the evening. Oliver threw out the first pitch (to scuba diver George Moon, discoverer of the Moon Mammoth), sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in the Seventh Inning Stretch, and pulled duty as bat boy, public address announcer and concession vendor, selling fans the special mammoth-themed goodies on the menu that night:

Mammoth tusks and mammoth balls for me, please! Maybe the mammoth ears, too...

IT'S A MAMMOTH OCCASION

Man oh man, is Your Humble Narrator homesick today. How I wish I could be back in my beloved hometown of Erie, Pa, at UPMC Park, for the inaugural game of the Erie Moon Mammoths...

...alter-ego of the Erie Seawolves. The team, the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, has been (temporarily) rebranded by the great John Oliver and the staff of his HBO series Last Week Tonight. The renaming is after a fossilized mammoth skeleton discovered in 1991 by a scuba diver named George Moon at the bottom of Lake Pleasant, a glacial lake in Venango Township in Erie County.

The bones were taken to my alma mater Gannon University where they were examined by Professor M. Jude Kirkpatrick.

I had Dr. Kirkpatrick for Sociology, a class he seemed to find a chore; his real interests seemed to be archaeology, anthropology and paleontology. Though a fine specimen, the skeleton was apparently deemed too fragile for reconstruction; it was publicly displayed for just one day before being socked away at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.

Anyway, Erie is set to party hard this weekend, and the game, against the Chesapeake Baysox, is now underway, so I'm being taunted by images from friends who are there:

Well, as I have written here before, I myself was once part of the pregame festivities at a Seawolves game, reading a baseball sonnet back in 2009; you can still watch it on YouTube. So I've composed a new sonnet for the Moon Mammoth; here it is:

MOON MAMMOTH

Frigid fathoms down into the depths

Where bass and sunfish breathe the brineless murk,

And algae straining sunlight intercepts

And dims the realm where grim hellbenders lurk,

Reposing in this glacier-shoveled grave

In layered silt the fleshless bones would lay,

As petrafaction form immortal gave

A trunked behemoth of another day.

Twelve thousand years elapsed, then to the light

A wetsuit-clad invader it exhumed;

A single day it basked in public sight,

Then academically was re-entombed.

But now the mammoth rises once again,

To urge our local Nine on to the win.

GO MOON MAMMOTHS!

THE FAMOUS MR. EDDINGTON

Opening today in theaters:

Eddington--Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross in this one. He's the county sheriff of the titular New Mexico town into which writer-director Ari Aster tries to stuff all the nightmarish national rage and misery of early 2020. It's all there, or a lot of it, anyway--disbelief in COVID, anti-mask anger, George Floyd protests and calls to defund the police, social distancing, rampaging social media, talk radio conspiracy rants, a quasi-religious cult figure, even a Kyle Rittenhouse type.

Joe lives in a rural house with his distant, psychologically fragile wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a 24/7 wingnut conspiracy receiver. He, too, is indignantly resentful of the mask requirement and refuses to wear one, even on the job. A wrangle over the policy in a supermarket leads Joe to impulsively announce his candidacy for mayor.

The incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is Joe's rival in town politics, and also personally; he has a history with Louise. Ted is pushing for some sort of new high tech company to locate in Eddington, despite environmental and logistical concerns.

With the exception of his deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) and a tribal cop (William Belleau) from across the county line, Joe is, initially, the most likable of the major characters. But this isn't a high bar. Eddington isn't like Mayberry or Star's Hollow, one of those fictional small towns you might find yourself wishing you could move to. It's full of shifty characters, idiots and creeps. Ted and his allies seem like phonies and business shills. The kids who organize the protests are preposterously self-flagellating. The cult weirdo (Austin Butler) worming his way into Joe's family is repulsive.

By comparison, Joe Cross seems like a decent sort, obtuse and not especially bright but well-intentioned. Phoenix gives him a plaintive, singsong voice and sad eyes, and Aster makes you feel how overwhelmed he is, both by the baffling times he's in and by his own spiritual desperation over the collapse of his libertarian illusions. It may be Phoenix's best performance. 

As the story progresses, however, Joe descends, by disturbingly believable steps, from misguided and angry to monstrous. Aster, who specializes in grueling horror films like Midsommar and Heredity, spares his protagonist here nothing in terms of defeat and humiliation, yet not in a way that allows us the pleasure of schadenfreude. This long film climaxes with a wild, extended, very bloody shootout in the streets of Eddington, as Joe Cross is stalked by a mysterious killer in black. Mysterious to me, at least--is this gunman, who we see arrive by private jet, meant to be an "ANTIFA" operative? An agent-provocateur? A corporate asset? Does Aster intend him realistically? Satirically?

I'm not sure, and in any case, I'm also not sure this frenzied gunfight doesn't drive this amazing movie off the rails a little in its homestretch. Eddington is unforgettable, but it's all too easy for me to imagine viewers who might share Joe's values seeing this persecution of him as a vindication of his despicable actions. Joe Cross is pitiable, but he's no hero.