Caddyshack – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Caddyshack – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Yes, everyone in Western civilization can hear the word “Caddyshack and immediately think of a few lines. But has anyone ever thought about what a strange film it is?

For one thing, it’s clear from reading the Wiki entry here — which is well-sourced with a few things available elsewhere — that the movie they envisioned on the first day of filming was nothing like the film they ended up with. Bits of that original concept exist. But Rodney Dangerfield, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray essentially took over, starting doing improv, and there you have it.

The result is almost a train wreck, a strange collection of sketches in which characters seem to be in two movies at once — one about caddies, one about a nasty conflict of snobs and slobs. They share a couple of characters but are otherwise disjointed, like the scenes in Pulp Fiction that intertwine but do little more.

The parts, thankfully, are far greater than the sum. A film about the caddies — Maggie of the wavering accent, the dude who says “Noonan,” Brian Doyle-Murray’s character — surely wouldn’t have been as well-remembered as the final product.

But the funny thing is that you have to root for the obnoxious people for any of this to succeed. In the film, you root for Dangerfield, though you wouldn’t want him behind you on an actual golf course. Behind the scenes, you’re also rooting for Dangerfield and the other comic geniuses who took over Harold Ramis’ film.

AMC often pairs this film with Blazing Saddles for some reason. Sure, they’re both packed with semi-relevant gags like a Family Guy episode (as I type, Sheriff Bart is greeting Count Basie for reasons that probably made sense to Richard Pryor when he was working on the screenplay). But Blazing Saddles is a well-crafted satire in which most of the events are related somehow.

To me, Caddyshack is a good collection of gags. Blazing Saddles is a work of art. Seriously.

 

Firefox and punctuation

Anyone else wonder if the reason this movie is getting so much play on cable these days is that people might think, “Hey, someone made a movie about a Web browser!”?

That sentence leads me to a grammar point. I have trouble with quotation marks because I studied a considerable amount of logic in college, and the rules on quotation marks ain’t logical.

Problem 1:

“The comma goes before the quotation mark,” he said, realizing that the rule makes no sense from a logical standpoint. The quotation is a complete expression. The comma separates it from a descriptive clause.

Problem 2:

Eric said, “My team will be ready to play Saturday.” The comma is grammatically correct and logically unsound. The quotation is the object. Eric said X. Imagine other sentences with an object.

Mark threw the ball.

Not:

Mark threw, the ball.

So take note, English majors. This is why philosophy majors are laughing at you.

“But there are plenty of reasons to laugh at philosophy majors” is a perfectly valid response.

 

Wars not make one great

So says Yoda, but in some perusal of the Star Wars “expanded universe,” I’m finding wars are just about all we find.

Just read what Luke and company had to deal with after a few decades of mopping up the remnants of the Empire: “The Yuuzhan Vong war was possibly the most devastating crisis the galaxy had faced. The cost in lives were staggering; the number of deaths over the known galaxy were estimated at about 365 trillion sentients.”

Wow! Can Lucas make that movie?

The theme that makes the Star Wars saga more than a bunch of cool light sabers, funny droids and bad-shooting stormtroopers is the complex struggle between good and evil. Lucas realized that this struggle takes place internally just as easily as it takes place between governments and armies. I don’t buy the notion that Episode III was an allegory of the Bush administration, but I think Lucas’ vision would necessarily expand our notions of good and evil into something a little more complex than the typical neocon would allow.

Which is why the only part of the “expanded universe” I’ve found compelling is a somewhat recent comic book series on the life of a Skywalker several generations down the line — Cade Skywalker, who trains as a Jedi but turns to drug addiction and wonders, reasonably, what’s the bloody point.

From a panel in which he confronts the ghost of Luke: “I’ve read the histories! Time and again, the galaxy — which we served — turned against us! And we keep coming back for more! That’s real clever of us, isn’t it?!”

Now that’s a movie I’d want to see.

 

Star Wars: Behind the blasters

VH1 interviews the gang:

C3PO: “Well, we started to have our doubts about Kenobi when we investigated the Jawa transport. He said the blast marks were too precise for the local sand people and could only have been made by Imperial stormtroopers. Excuse me? Imperial stormtroopers? Those guys couldn’t hit the Jawa transport if it were just on the other side of the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port. I walked right through a firefight before we landed on this dump, and I’m not known for my bravery, sir.”

SAND PEOPLE: “Yeah, we actually attacked the Jawa transport. Instead of riding single-file to hide our numbers, we rode side-by-side to make them think Imperial stormtroopers did it. Can’t believe Kenobi bought it.”

SCANNER CREW, DEATH STAR: “Wait a minute. You mean we can scan a escape pod that took off from Leia’s ship and determine instantly that it has no life forms, but a ship winds up in our tractor beam bay, and we actually have to go into the freaking thing to see if anyone’s there? And we’re not even wearing body armor. What if someone’s in there? Good thing they forgot about me and I was able to stow away on the ship and join the rebellion. I’m on Hoth now — I just signed up as a rear gunner on Luke’s speeder.”

TIE FIGHTER DISPATCHER: “When the Millennium Falcon took off from the Death Star, I radioed four fighters to intercept. Well, no one told ME Lord Vader had put a freaking tracking device on the ship. If those guys could shoot worth squat, rest their souls, we’d STILL be looking for the rebel fortress. So they canned me, tossed me on a Tie fighter and told me to take off for the nearest planet. Turned out to be a big break for me, since the Death Star got blown up and all, but I’m still a little pissed. You think they could’ve used four more Tie fighters in that battle? I bet the guy who forgot to tell me about the tracking device feels pretty stupid right now.”

X-WING FIGHTER DESIGNER: “You know, I wanted to install a rear-facing blaster on that ship, but noooo. They all laughed. ‘As if a Tie fighter is ever going to be chasing us down a trench in which we can’t maneuver,’ they said. Dumbasses.”

PORKINS (appearing as hologram from the netherworld): “In retrospect, do you think maybe the second team of X-Wings should’ve flown into the trench behind the Tie fighters and shot ‘em down from behind rather than just flying around and watching us get blown up here?”

HAN: “So we show up at the medal ceremony, and I’m thinking it’s just going to be four or five of us since no one came back from the battle except me, Luke and that Wedge guy. But then they have hundreds of pilots in formation. Why were they giving me such a hard time about attacking the Death Star? Did these guys have notes from their doctor? What are they going to do back at base, fling themselves in front of a planet-destroying beam from the Death Star?”

LEIA: “Well, as it turned out, we couldn’t pay Han much of a reward. We checked my father’s will, and all he left me was a bunch of real estate on Alderaan, so …”

WEDGE: “Not to complain or anything, but when did R2D2 and 3PO become Luke’s droids. 3PO clearly said he belonged to Captain Wedge Antilles. They were a gift to my father from Senator Organa when he was taking one of these two twins to Alderaan while Obi-Wan Kenobi was going to Tatooine with the other … hey, wait a minute …”

 

Song du semaine: Tom Jones, "You Can Leave Your Hat On"

Great song, but you know I’m just picking it this week to have an excuse to show the Full Monty finale (warning: partial nudity shown, full frontal implied):

One of the best movie endings ever. The simple act of stripping isn’t a surprise — no director or screenwriter would let down an audience by having them chicken out at the last minute. But the scene captures the change in mood that evolves through the film. This is no longer an act of desperation to get a few bucks. This is a celebration.

It’s not that everything is magically resolved. We see just enough to know that these guys are bouncing back. Dave’s wife gives him a vote of confidence. They all have career prospects at last.

Gaz’s son is the key here. Gaz was driven to desperation in the first place because he wanted to stay in his son’s life, which wasn’t going to happen unless he scraped up some money for child support. But in the end, his son gives him a little kick to get out and revel in what he created.

Beautiful stuff. Well-choreographed, too.

The song was already an oldie when the film was made. Randy Newman wrote it and recorded it for his 1972 album Sail Away. Three Dog Night apparently did a cover. Joe Cocker did the version our local rock station plays on occasion.

But seriously … a rollicking bawdy song like this is tailor-made for Tom Jones, isn’t it?

Happy New Year to all.

 

The days of kung fu theater and independent TV

Did anyone else grow up with local independent channels showing really terrible kung fu films? Apparently so.

Not so much these days. For one thing, we don’t really have independent channels today. Now they’re all affiliates of CW or whatever’s passing for the sixth and seventh TV networks these days. The typical former independent station shows syndicated daytime shows, sitcom reruns and so forth. Not so quirky.

Independent TV also brought us the show Almost Live! from Seattle — briefly national in the good old days of Comedy Central. And that brought us kung fu parodies like this:

 

Boba Fett obsession

What’s the deal with Boba Fett? Is it the suit? The name? Why do people think he’s so cool? Isn’t he kind of an intergalactic jackass?

 

Two of the 300 reasons I won’t be seeing ‘300′

I made a rare trip to the theater over the weekend. How rare? I can’t recall seeing a film on the big screen since Phantom Menace. So that’s, what, almost eight years?

(It was Reno 911: Miami, by the way, and I’d give it a B+. But that’s not the point here.)

One reason I don’t go to theaters — I don’t like being imprisoned in a dark room having my senses assaulted by ads for freaking horror movies, brainless action flicks and whatever else Hollywood has cooked up. I liked one preview — Knocked Up, from the people who brought you the lamentably short-lived TV show Undeclared.

One preview I saw was for 300. It’s based on a “graphic novel,” which is already a sign that this is going to be poor entertainment. And the preview makes it quite clear that the film is indeed quite “graphic.”

Film critics haven’t seemed to notice that movie violence has gone off the scale. If you check in with the big screen every few years, it’s like visiting another planet. It’s sick, in every sense of the word.

When Mrs. MMM had Starship Troopers on TV a couple of years ago, I could watch only a few minutes before feeling physically ill. For historical comparison, I found The Towering Inferno disturbing, but not nauseating.

300 is stylized violence to such a ludicrous degree that I found myself laughing rather than nauseous. One scene had a few men emoting in front of a CGI-created stack of bodies roughly eight feet high and many feet wide. I found myself wondering how a small band of warriors, recovering from a battle of epic mortality, could find the strength to stack so many bodies so neatly.

I know it’s going to be a huge hit, and that’s just going to make me feel even more like a tight-assed old fart. So be it. But I was happy to see Slate’s reviewer shred this thing like a jazz critic taking down Kenny G. The notion that the 300 are heroic defenders of freedom is ripped open and shown to be completely hollow — the Spartans of this film kill anyone who doesn’t fit their conceptions of a perfect society. The homophobic aspects remind me of Braveheart, a film I happened to see start to finish and truly despise.

Slate’s Dana Stevens isn’t out on a limb here. The reviews are mixed, and some of the thumbs-down are hysterical. Many agree that making a movie look like a video game is not an artistic triumph. But my favorite is probably “Ode to a Grecian Ab.” Well played, Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune).

So if you must see 300, please do me a favor. Root for the Persians.