MY MOVIE SHELF: Animal House

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #18: Animal House

First off, I’m not going to be talking about John Belushi in this movie. That is well-covered territory — so much so that fetuses are doing the “I’m a zit” bit in utero. No, what I’m going to talk about is everything else.

Let’s start with the cast. Yes, there was John Belushi in his first feature film, becoming an international comedy icon and symbol of the slacker dorm room poster industry right before our eyes. There were also two future Oscar nominees (Tom Hulce in Amadeus and Peter Riegert for a live action short film), perpetual That Guy Bruce McGill (as D-Day, his perhaps only truly badass role, though my favorite remains the bartender Al in the Quantum Leap series finale), Karen Allen before she became love interest of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, current villain of the blockbuster Hunger Games movies and Hollywood patriarch Donald Sutherland, and some guy named Kevin Bacon who has literally appeared in so many things there’s a game named after him based on the idea that no actor ever in history is more than six degrees separated from him. That’s one hell of a pedigree for a tiny little comedy made by a bunch of no-names.

Oh, and those behind-the-scenes no-names? John Landis directed Animal House — it was his third film — and would go on to give us The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, The Three Amigos, Coming to America, and more, just in the ’80s. Harold Ramis wrote the script for Animal House with two collaborators; it was his first. He went on to write Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Back to School, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, among others, plus act in and direct some of the funniest movies of his time. And when Animal House came out in 1978, producer Ivan Reitman was still a relatively new name, but he would become one of the biggest and most respected men in the business.

The movie’s soundtrack is also historically great, featuring indelible songs of the ’60s like “Louie, Louie,” “Wonderful World” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” The most memorable song from the movie, however, is “Shout” by The Isley Brothers. Originally released in 1959, “Shout” became the signature song for a movie based in 1962 that was filmed in 1978. But that’s not where the story ends. I graduated from high school in 1993, fifteen years after Animal House came out in theaters (more than thirty years since the song’s original release), and that song was still being played at my school dances. Every time, without fail. They still play it at weddings today. It’s a staple of the portable DJ business. Not only that, but the entire way people dance to that song, to this day (arms in the air, crouching down at the “softer now” parts, jumping at the “louder now” parts), comes from this movie that featured it. If you catch an old episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos on cable some night, and somebody’s grandmother falls on her backside while trying to squat as low as she can during this song, it is because of Animal House. That is monumental cultural influence, and it doesn’t stop there.

Animal House isn’t just a movie, it’s a landmark. If it had been made this century, it would have no fewer than two sequels that would have likely diluted its cultural significance,  but as a standalone film-cum-global phenomenon, it wields massive influence over our collective idea of what college is like, of what young adulthood is like, and it has seeped into all manner of things in our society.

When I was a freshman at Syracuse University my best friend came to visit me for a weekend and as we were wandering around the party houses just off-campus, we stumbled into a toga party. Why a toga party? Because of Animal House.

If you went to a college in the last thirty years that had any kind of fraternity/sorority presence, it was because of this movie. Animal House single-handedly revitalized the Greek system on college campuses, for good or for ill. They wouldn’t be here today if not its popularity. (And weird fraternity brother nicknames? This movie.)

The bizarre and completely played-out myth/idea that girls are constantly having pillow fights in their underwear (or less, if a director is looking for an easy path to gratuitous nudity) features prominently into this movie.

Veronica Mars seasons 2 and 3 featured a fraternity jerkwad named Chip Diller. Chip Diller just so happens to be the name of Kevin Bacon’s character in Animal House.

If you’ve ever been able to correctly use sensuous and sensual in sentences because “vegetables are sensual, people are sensuous,” if you’ve ever shouted “food fight” and expected everyone to respond by flinging things, if you’ve ever said “Thank you sir, may I have another,” it is because of this movie.

Oh, and it’s pretty much accepted as the quintessential college party movie. (I saw one list that put Old School at the top, but there would be no Old School without Animal House.) I’m not saying Animal House invented these things necessarily, but it’s undeniable that Animal House made them mainstream and unforgettable. Just as all sci-fi changed after Star Wars, just as all summer movies changed after Jaws, all adolescent/young adult party comedies changed after Animal House.

And yes, John Belushi was a key player in the movie’s overall impact, but for the record my favorite part is when Kevin Bacon gets literally flattened by a stampeding mob of townspeople. Now that’s funny.

Michael Ian Black: National Treasure

If you’re not aware of Michael Ian Black, then obviously you’re a troglodyte with no real appreciation of American Culture and Comedy.

Ever since his birth back in 1971, and even a few years before, Black has been revolutionizing the cultural landscape of this country. Having lived and worked in every time zone of the continental U.S., as well as some others, probably, he’s firmly established himself as an accurate representative of all Americans of all backgrounds, races, religions, sexual orientations and genders. He is, literally, an Everyman.

In the entertainment industry, he has over 100 credits to his name as either an actor, writer, producer, director or appearing as himself, which we all know is basically the most anyone has ever had or ever will have. He was the star of the NBC show Ed, despite Tom Cavanagh playing the title character, and years later gave Cavanagh another break by inviting him to co-host Black’s podcast, Mike and Tom Eat Snacks (MATES). Black starred in many other shows and movies as well, such as VH1’s I Love The … series, Wet Hot American Summer, Trust Me I’m a Game Show Host, and Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, where he was almost always The Smartest Guy in the Room. He even won over $100,000 for charity playing Celebrity Poker Showdown, proving Black is a great philanthropist.

These days you can catch Michael Ian Black working as a cultural touchstone and educator, writing books for young and old alike, exploring the world of philosophy and intellectualism with long-time hanger-on Michael Showalter in the podcast TOPICS, and on Twitter, where he edifies his millions of followers by showcasing the life of an iconic celebrity, from what it’s like to fly first class, to the lavish VIP meals he’s treated to, to how it feels to walk the streets of London, where the paparazzi are respectful of his celebrity status and leave him alone.

Indeed, Michael Ian Black is a national treasure. We owe him a debt of gratitude for gracing us with his presence all this time, and for the promise of a utopian future once he finally does take over the world.

(This piece is obviously totally serious and in no way should be taken as a joke.)

How I Learned to Love a Website — Saying Goodbye to Television Without Pity

It’s hard for me to explain how unhappy I was in 2004. Hard because I easily get embarrassed talking about myself, exposing my vulnerabilities to others. Hard because I often feel misunderstood in general, but particularly when sharing something not everyone has experienced. Hard because as time and circumstance have distanced me from it, the memories have faded so I myself have difficulty grasping them again. But for those who have known that kind of unhappiness — the fierce, cloying depression of a suffocating relationship, of feeling utterly alone, of dreams squandered and diminished and belittled by a life that just seems to have gone … wrong, somehow — those people will know how I felt, and how hopeless everything seemed to be.

And things got worse before they got better. That first marriage of mine imploded, as all intensely stifling relationships must at some point. And I was left on my own, with my son, pushing 30 and starting over from scratch. It was around this time that I was pointed toward Television Without Pity.

You might think a silly, snarky website full of TV recaps would not be the thing to save a person, but you would be wrong. In those pages I found people who cared — really CARED — about TV shows and their characters and their plot lines as much as I did. And they WROTE about them. Not just making jokes about them, either, though they did make jokes (so many great ones, I would choke on my own laughter and dissolve into pitiful gasping tears of joy on at least a daily basis), but critically discussing them (I defy you to find more worthwhile, eye-opening analysis of strategic game play than in Miss Alli’s (Linda Holmes’s) Survivor and Amazing Race recaps). Nobody else in my life was like this. Save two high school friends who lived states away and who I had little contact with at the time, nobody I knew wrote, or loved stories and narrative arcs, or loved writing well and reading well-written things. And nobody I knew cried (to my knowledge) when Chandler and Monica got engaged, or could list all the times Rocket Romano got bested by a helicopter while also referencing his decades-prior melting via toxic waste in Robocop. And nobody I knew even REMOTELY took reality television seriously while also skewering it for being stupid or mean or ill-conceived. But Television Without Pity (TWoP) had dozens of those people writing for the site, and thousands more in the comments. These were my people, and I instantly fell in love with them and felt grateful to them for giving me hope that somewhere I fit in, somewhere I could discuss the uselessness of Randy Jackson or examine the symbolism of Mad Men, somewhere I could nurture my long-lost dream of writing professionally — a dream I’ve since recaptured and am still working to make real.

Over the years my contact with TWoP faded, but my gratitude and love for the site has not. My two favorite contributors, Linda Holmes and Joe Reid, moved on to great success elsewhere (though I would, as recently as last season, pop in to see Joe’s periodic recaps of So You Think You Can Dance), as have many others who worked there. I still keep up with a few of them on Twitter or through the work they publish now. Stories about TWoP have been popping up all over since NBC Universal announced its shuttering at the end of this week and the (tragically wrong, incredibly stupid) decision to take down the archives. In all these TWoP eulogies, the refrain is nearly identical in that sense. I am but one of many who loved the site and will mourn its passing.

I was not essential to TWoP, but it was essential to me. As ridiculous as it may seem to some, I will always cherish it for giving me hope and making me happy again. In no small way, Television Without Pity saved me.

Confession: I Didn’t Really Like “The Sopranos”

James Gandolfini’s sudden death this summer prompted me to do something I’d long put off: watching The Sopranos. I didn’t have HBO back when it aired originally and (full disclosure) it had never interested me enough to really commit to seeking it out and watching it in the years since. Turns out I know my own tastes, because while The Sopranos had some great storylines and some phenomenal performances in its six-season run, I didn’t really like it all that much.

Part of my distaste likely comes from the fact that I did wait so long to consume it. Visually, and in some ways thematically, The Sopranos did not age well. Everything is extremely dated, from obvious things like technology and fashion, to intangibles like the overall style and demeanor of the show, to broader, more pervasive cultural trends like the attitudes toward therapy and medication, not to mention homosexuality and, of all things, cunnilingus. No doubt the show is still reflective of attitudes that persist in this country, especially in entrenched, insular communities like the one Tony Soprano lives in, but the country as a whole — particularly the country as reflected by television — is a lot more accepting of these changes in our society.

Another side of that same coin is that, while I can see how this show was very new and different in its time, at this point in the television landscape it is neither new nor all that interesting to meet another family man with a dark side, despite him being the first. Indeed, by the time I got around to seeing what everyone else had already seen and referenced and drawn inspiration from, it was largely tiresome. As renowned TV critic Alan Sepinwall says in his book The Revolution Was Televised, “That’s the danger with coming to a classic late: if a work is good enough, the rest of the entertainment industry will strip-mine it until the original work somehow seems derivative of the others that blatantly copied it.” Despite the fact that my perspective has been skewed by the subsequent fifteen years, however, I’m still not sure I would’ve liked The Sopranos even if I’d seen the first run.

There’s been a lot of talk around the Internet, and in books like Sepinwall’s, about this rise in television of the anti-hero: Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Don Draper, Walter White — angry, complicated men with loose morals and outrageous anger issues. They are charismatic and compelling and utterly calculating, but to me they’re just awful. Vic and Walt are corrupt, egomaniacal murders with no real concern for anyone or anything except their own selfish motives, no matter what their excuses and justifications may be. And Don is a scoundrel, misogynistic and self-involved, concerned with absolutely nothing except his own interests, but Don is the character I find least interesting in Mad Men. He’s tired and old and boring, doing the same crappy things year after year after year, with no end in sight. What keeps me coming back, then, are the others. I care about Peggy Olsen and Sally Draper and Joan Harris. I care enormously about the fate of Jesse Pinkman, despite his role in Walter White’s illegal enterprise. But I didn’t really care about the supporting characters on The Sopranos. To be fair, most of them are violent criminals, and while the show went to great lengths to show Tony’s caring and charismatic side, it didn’t really delve into the members of his crew. Paulie, Ralph and Christopher are sociopathic, cruel and sadistic. Any family life they’re shown to have (not a lot for Paulie, some for Ralph, and a great deal for Christopher) is filtered through the prism of their own egos. With Big Pussy and Silvio, the effect of family is so little in the show, I didn’t even realize either of them were married until well into the series.

As for Tony’s actual family, they’re also incredibly self-involved and not a little vindictive and cruel in their own right. Livia Soprano is mean and awful; Janice is a manipulative disaster; Meadow is selfish and whiny; AJ is a useless jerk; and Carmela likes to think she’s the moral center of the clan, but really she is complicit in every single thing that Tony does because she likes the lifestyle it affords her, and when she has her brief affair with AJ’s teacher (David Strathairn), she lashes out with threats after he ends it. As parents, Tony and Carmela are indulgent of their spoiled, ungrateful children, and despite Tony’s ruthlessness in business, he and Carmela are largely impotent when it comes to disciplining the kids. And while character likability is not necessary to make a quality show — as I said, there was some top-notch storytelling and performing on display from time to time throughout the series’s run — it does make it lot harder for me to be personally invested. Why should I care about these horrible people and their privileged, criminal lives?

The only really redeemable character of the lot is Dr. Jennifer Melfi, but it takes her the entire six seasons to realize that Tony is neither interested in nor capable of self-improvement and that cutting ties with him is the only way to go, making me honestly question her abilities as a therapist. Couple that with the fact that a big portion of her sessions with Tony, interpreting his dreams, was yet another aspect of the show that feels dated now, in addition to being an extremely lazy narrative device that the show relied on far too often. The effect is a lack of any true connection, or interest, or investment,  in the lives of these characters. It’s six seasons where a lot of things happen, but nothing really changes, no one moves forward or grows, and nothing is learned. That might be the point of the whole thing, that people don’t change, but it can be extremely frustrating to watch.

The Sopranos was undeniably groundbreaking. It brought a style and an aesthetic to television that never existed before, and characters such as Don Draper and Walter White would probably not exist without Tony blazing the trail. In addition, it offered up some amazing, groundbreaking performances by Gandolfini, by Drea de Matteo (as Adriana La Cerva), by Nancy Marchand (as Livia Soprano), and especially by Edie Falco (as Carmela). Ultimately my personal opinion about the show is irrelevant, when the show itself was intentionally not trying to appeal to everyone. According to Sepinwall, “[Creator David] Chase not only never worried about having a likable main character, he didn’t need a likable series,” and that’s certainly true. But in July writer Emily Nussbaum wrote in the New Yorker that Sex and the City, the other flagship, groundbreaking show of HBO’s lineup in the late 90s and early 00s, had lost some of its acclaim over the years due to the increasingly perpetuated and largely false perception that its only asset was its raciness. It was, as Nussbaum says, “downgraded to a guilty pleasure,” and that, “even as The Sopranos has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of Sex and the City has shrunk and faded.” Her point, obviously, is that Sex and the City was so much more than it’s remembered as now. Isn’t it possible that the inverse is true of The Sopranos, that despite being groundbreaking, it wasn’t quite as great as its current reputation would suggest? I say yes.

 

/jessica