FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / October 2020 / Gabriel Ricard
Image © Sony Pictures Classics
One of my favorite things about movies, which I’ve mentioned in this column before, is the fact that I don’t actually know everything. My friends suspect I do, because I can name a lot of movies, actors, and other points of trivia with relative ease. I tell them that I really don’t know as much about film analysis and history as they seem to think I do. Because I don’t.
This is not self-deprecation talking. While I have plenty of trivia and opinion stored in certain parts of my brain—the areas which have not been run ragged by 20 years of saying things like “Whiskey for breakfast? Brilliant!”—the truth of the matter is that there are massive gulfs of knowledge on my end, as well.
Silent film is a category along the lines of what I’m talking about. Cinematic outputs from specific countries would be another. For example, I’ve only seen, maybe, a half-dozen movies from Iran. Almost all of those have been over the past couple of years.
Back to silent film, I’ve been really enjoying everything Fritzi Kramer has to say on the subject. Kramer knows more about silent film history, political and social context, and the people who worked in this earliest cinematic medium than I could ever learn about any other facet of film. She’s funny, insightful, and has been showing me through her posts just how much I’ve missed in this particular area. And you know what? That’s fine by me.
It’s not a contest for knowledge or insight, but I am often completely blown away by how much other film enthusiasts/conversationalists/historians/critics (whatever you want to call yourself) seem to know casually. If I felt the need to keep the pace with any of these people, such as Zena, I would probably just as soon give up.
What I don’t get are people who are intimidated, or just made angry, by the existence of someone who has seen more movies. It brings out the weirdest breed of defensiveness in others when they are faced with someone who disagrees with them, and seemingly has more in the way of receipts to back up whatever they’re saying. Why does it bother you? Why would it ever bother anyone?
For me personally, one of the few things I enjoy about Twitter is the sheer mass of films I have yet to see. It isn’t just silent, or the best Iranian movies, but a wide range of subjects, subgenres, cult categories, and oddities that simply shouldn’t be.
I’ve seen, roughly, a few thousand movies at this point. I haven’t even scratched the surface. I haven’t even covered a 10th of the movies I’d like to watch for a second or even third time either. How can anyone not think that’s great?
Life is decidedly a mixed bag. The movies you watch don’t have to be. Especially when you’re willing to admit that you don’t know or have seen everything.
And if you have, it’s actually a good chance on your end to impart, rather than make chide comments about someone who only watches superhero movies, or thinks only Scorsese and Coppola have made gangster movies. That’s probably a rant for another time.
You Cannot Kill David Arquette (2020): B+
Image © Super LTD
While I don’t keep up with pro wrestling quite as fervently as I used to, I was aware of David Arquette’s genuinely surprising return to pro wrestling in 2018. While the news took me a bit aback, as it did everyone, it was oddly compelling to me right from the start. It is no secret that Arquette loved, and still seems to love, wrestling. What surprised me was that he was going to attempt a comeback that would essentially reset the perception held by fans through the years.
That would be the perception that Arquette, an arrogant Hollywood actor, swooped in, enjoyed a spectacular run as WCW World Heavyweight Champion at the expense of the championship and WCW itself, took a nice payday, and got on with his life. Over the course of Arquette’s efforts to train for a return to wrestling, covered by fascinating interviews with family and friends, we see that this perception is just not true. The paychecks were donated to the families of recently-deceased wrestlers.
The title win itself was questioned by Arquette, which is easy to believe, but was ultimately accepted after assurances that it would go over well with WCW’s diminishing fanbase.
As wrestler and friend Diamond Dallas Page notes during You Cannot Kill David Arquette, it’s difficult to imagine a die-hard wrestling fan turning down the opportunity to do what Arquette ultimately signed off on.
All in the name of promoting a movie which featured WCW talent. A film, by the way, which falls nicely into the so-bad-it’s-fun category.
Nonetheless, it is easy to believe the decision to participate in the 199, and the subsequent fallout, impacted Arquette on a profound level. You Cannot Kill David Arquette is keenly fixed on the notion of redemption, and of perhaps finally moving on. Setting up this concept nicely, the documentary, well-directed by David Darg and Price James shifts to Arquette’s experiences, misadventures, and potent obstacles while training, and then eventually returning to pro wrestling with an ambition to perform that will perhaps win over the last of his most enduring critics.
Does it pay off? I think so. This is one of those “eye of the beholder” things. In the eyes of Arquette, seemingly, it did.
Son of the Mask (2005): F+
Image © New Line Cinema
I don’t want to brag, but I think my COVID-themed dedication to watching some of the worst movies released in my lifetime, shit even I have been putting off, is damn near heroic. These are perilious times, so we may as well spend it doing the things that really matter.
Like watching a 15-year-old sequel to a 26-year-old Jim Carey vehicle that very few actually asked for.
Son of the Mask is less of a movie, connected to the first film only by the magic-imbued wooden mask, and more of a series of decisions. It has a huge budget, a cast that seems game to do their best, and visuals that are at least, at times, interesting on the design side of things. People committed to these things and ideas. You just can’t shake the feeling that people were forced to change the terms of those commitments over and over again.
Son of the Mask is an interesting bad movie simply for the way it was assembled. It has plenty of weirdness and cringe, which are vital organs for an interesting bad movie. What I can’t quite get over is that someone clearly thought it might all work out somehow.
After all, when you’ve already spent $40-million, what else can you do but spend $40-million more? At best, that’s insane.
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020): B+
Image © Orion Pictures | United Artists Releasing
I like that Bill & Ted Face the Music is being appreciated as a blast of the better things about humanity, as we toss and tussle merrily down the darkest timeline’s depiction of the highway to hell. The only thing I like more about the movie, which sees Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves gleefully reprise two of the most enduringly lovable characters of the 1980s, is the way it is being enjoyed as more than just a reunion.
That is the real joy of the movie for me. While very much in the vein of its predecessors (never mind how different those two are from one another), Face the Music has a gentle willingness to mess with its characters, ideas about time travel and destiny, and more.
The film also has more new things to add and say than most of us probably suspected. The standout there being Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Bill and Ted’s respective daughters. In what could have been an obvious way to lean into certain jokes and tropes, the movie instead allows both Lundy-Paine and Weaving to create unique-yet-familiar characters. It is the best example of the movie resisting the urge to simply charm. Instead, Bill & Ted Face the Music opted to be something quite special on its own.
Beyond musical sequences and concepts that occasionally fall flat, which is particularly noticeable in a film series about the power of music to change hearts and shape souls, I’m willing to call Bill & Ted Face the Music one of the best films of 2020.
Sometimes Always Never (2018): B+
Image © Blue Fox Entertainment | Goldfinch Studios
An aging tailor (Bill Nighy) searches fruitlessly for the son who ran away years ago. This is carried at the expense, to a certain extent, of the son who stayed behind (Sam Riley, one of the more underrated actors working today). A simple story of family is given soft brushes of weirdness, which is then combined with a loneliness that follows everything. Even the moments in which the family of the tailor manages to come together.
While there is a minimal offbeat tone here, the final product isn’t as whimsical as a story of a man using Scrabble to find his estranged child might suggest. That isn’t particularly a problem, as the film still gives us a story which bites hard into familiar veins in surprising ways, without suffering from the issue of characters who only serve the eccentricities of how the plot is carried out. This is fairly under-the-radar, if you ask me. I’d love to see more people letting me know how they liked yet another example of Bill Nighy’s status as a thoroughly underappreciated leading man.
The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020): D+
Image © Transmission Films
On the other end of the spectrum of nostalgia, far from Bill & Ted Face the Music, we have Paul Hogan resurfacing with the shockingly inept The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee. That isn’t to say the movies are terribly similar to each other (they aren’t). Both do feature beloved faces at the epicenter of what hopes to be a new and enjoyable story. That is the main and pretty much only similarity. On at least half of that front, the new and enjoyable story part, The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee is as disappointing as it gets.
What does work is simply putting Paul Hogan in a starring role for the first time in a long time. At one time, Hogan’s charisma, comedic range, and popularity were substantial enough in the 1980s to help drive a tourism boon to Australia, land Hogan an Oscar cohost gig, and even get him a nomination for his seminal work Crocodile Dundee. It’s a great movie, but the fact that Hogan was nominated for an Oscar at all for a fairly standard fish-out-of-water story is a testament to just how big a deal he was.
Still is, in some circles. At the very least, he is regarded as a legend. That legend is in better-than-you-might-think form in a dismal, painfully unfunny meta-comedy. Playing a version of himself, the film is a series of misadventures of a man who has mined considerable gold from elaborate misunderstandings. On paper, it is a simple premise that can work fine enough for the circumstances and expectations.
The execution of The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee is something else altogether. Even with appearances from such names as John Cleese, Olivia Newton-John, Reginald VelJohnson (genuinely good to see him), and Chevy Chase (who impressively provides one of the movie’s few humorous moments), the movie is still an ugly mess of forced material, slightly uncomfortable performances, and setups that clearly rely too much on Hogan to carry them through.
He doesn’t, but he tries, and that’s really the only thing to recommend here. Dundee fans will be happy to see the man in action, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else will be. That’s too bad.
Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His books Love and Quarters and Bondage Night are available through Moran Press, in addition to A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press) and Clouds of Hungry Dogs (Kleft Jaw Press). He is also a writer, performer, and producer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions. He lives on a horrible place called Long Island.
