HE'S THE SHAT

Playing Friday night only at FilmBar Phoenix, for those who might want to kick off their Independence Day weekend with a feast of Canadian ham:

  

Shatner!!! The Lost Years—From 1969, when the original Star Trek series ended, until the late ‘70s, when the first Star Trek feature film hit theatres, William Shatner was extremely…available. Divorced and broke, he lived for a time in a camper and essentially answered the phone not with “hello” but with “I’ll do it.”

To call this period in Shatner’s career “The Lost Years” is, in a sense, a misnomer, since he was rarely more visible—he racked up a staggering number of credits on episodic television, TV movies, low-budget schlock films, game shows, talk shows, commercials, anything. I myself saw him during those years, in a 1973 Kenley Players production of Arsenic and Old Lace in Warren, Ohio, with Sylvia Sidney and Peter Lupus. It was certainly one of the highlights of my eleventh year on earth.

Well, Friday at FilmBar, The Unfathomable Film Freakout presents this compilation of movies, abridged down to their Shatnerian essence. We see him at his tortured best as the lapsed priest facing druidical evil in The Horror at 37,000 Feet, alongside the likes of Chuck Connors, Buddy Ebsen, Paul Winfield, Jane Merrow, France Nuyen, Russell Johnson and Roy Thinnes, among others, besieged by angry arachnids alongside Pamela Tiffin, Woody Strode and my friend (even if he is, now, a conservative member of the Arizona legislature) Jay Lawrence in Kingdom of the Spiders, battling a demonic Ernest Borgnine in The Devil’s Rain, or pursuing David Carradine in an episode of Kung Fu. In the latter his character asserts that, after long travels, he is “Rump-sprung and callused where no man ought to be callused,” which may have described Shatner’s actual feelings about his own life at the time.

This facetiously-edited footage is enjoyable for Shatner fans, although I would like to have seen shorter clips and a wider selection—especially, Shatner clashing with a scary Andy Griffith in the 1974 wheeler Pray for the Wildcats. But the really juicy and nostalgic items are the clips which connect the movie footage, showing Shatner on the talk shows of Dinah Shore or Mike Douglas, turning songs like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” or “How Do You Handle a Woman” or Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” into overwrought spoken-word monologues, or doing commercials for Loblaws supermarkets or Promise Margarine, or competing on Celebrity Bowling with Fran Jeffries, against Hugh O’Brian and Michele Lee, or breaking boards with his fist on Circus of the Stars.

The songs are excruciating. Like, really excruciating. But everything else in Shatner!!! The Lost Years transcends the snark. Eventually, of course, Shatner got in on the joke, and like his countryman Leslie Nielsen, became an improbable comedy star. But it’s exhilarating to watch a sample of the years before that happened—to see the guy gut out a decade’s worth of paychecks, working with other vivid performers of the period, particularly since you know that wealth and Emmys and a Golden Globe are in his future.

PROFESS UP

Check out my Topless Robot list in tribute to Russell “The Professor” Johnson. Also in Johnson’s honor…

Monster-of-the-Week:…let’s give the nod to any of the title characters in Attack of the Crab Monsters…

…Roger Corman’s wonderfully nutso 1957 saga, in which Johnson was among the heroes. It’s number 9 on my list.

HART FOR HART'S SAKE

Opening this weekend:

Ride Along—The standup comedian Kevin Hart first came to my attention in a tiny role in Judd Apatow’s 2005 The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He had just three or four lines, but he had a comic intensity that popped off the screen, and I made a point of checking the end credits to catch his name—I was pretty sure I’d be seeing more from him.

Now he’s a movie star, top billed with Ice Cube in the action comedy Ride Along. The diminutive Hart’s comedy largely derives from Little Man’s Syndrome—he lives in a constantly aggrieved state of overcompensating machismo. Here he’s a video-game-addicted high school security guard and cop wannabe. When at last he makes it into the Atlanta Police Academy, he’s invited on a day-long ride along by tough-guy detective Ice Cube, the brother of his improbable girlfriend played by Tika Sumpter, a leggy creature who towers over Hart like a showhorse.

Ice Cube’s ulterior motive is to put his brother-in-law-to-be through hell and thus discourage him from joining the force—and, if possible, to break things up between him and his sister. So we get a series of wacky set pieces in which the overconfident Hart is sent barging into situations he’s not prepared for.

Almost all of these scenes are embarrassingly unfunny and overextended. There’s no real sense in which Ride Along, directed by Tim Story from a script by Greg Coolidge and others, can be called a good movie. But the leads are good—Ice Cube, always a strong, naturalistic actor, makes a solid straight man to Hart’s bristling indignation at not being recognized as a studly man of action.

In noting this, I hope nobody will suppose I’m suggesting that you should run out and see Ride Along. But feeble as the movie is, I didn’t mind it, not just because the stars are good company but also because it works through the old-school cop-movie playbook so modestly. When our heroes tangle with gangster heavy Laurence Fishburne—thus reuniting Ice Cube with “Furious Styles” from 1991’s Boyz in the Hood—and his henchman, the result is a little flurry of fistfights, shootouts and explosions, not a half-dozen Wagnerian climaxes in the earthshaking Bruckheimer tradition. It’s almost relaxing.

The Nut Job—This animated feature concerns a squirrel named Surly (voiced by Will Arnett), a renegade from the collective of food hoarders in a midcentury urban park, who organizes a heist from a nut shop. I like squirrels, and I share their passion for nuts—my inability to stop eating them (nuts, that is, not squirrels) is such that I could never, without hypocrisy, be judgmental toward a crack addict. So I’m probably the ideal audience member for this US/Canadian/South Korean co-production, and I must reluctantly report that it isn’t very good either.

If The Nut Job had stuck to being a noir/caper movie, but had replaced the humans with squirrels and the diamonds or art treasures or whatever with nuts, it might have been a riot. But the filmmakers weight it down with obligatory kidflick elements—the need for the misunderstood hero to prove himself, the romance, etc—that are inimical to the spirit of the heist picture. It’s visually pleasant, some of the characters come off well—especially an excitable pug voiced Maya Rudolph—and an animated version of the Korean pop star Psy performs the catchy “Gangnam Style” over the end credits, but overall this is, at best, a slow-afternoon desperation matinee pick when your kids have seen everything else at the multiplex.

The degree to which it’s a missed opportunity may become clear, however, if you watch the Canadian cartoon short on which it’s based, Surly Squirrel by Peter Lepeniotis. It’s hilarious, and it upholds the unsentimental cynicism of its genre.

RIP to Russell Johnson, best known as “The Professor” on Gilligan’s Island, though his long career included everything from Rancho Notorious to Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, passed on at 89. The Professor was one of my strongest childhood role models, along with Mr. Peabody. They made me want to grow up to be an insufferable pedantic know-it-all.

Speaking of Mr. Peabody, check out this Topless Robot list, in which various contributors to the site say what they’re most looking forward to in nerd culture in the coming year. My entry is number 9.