MY MOVIE SHELF: Young Guns II

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 129 Days to go: 90

Movie #311:  Young Guns II

Here’s the funny thing about timing: Young Guns came out in 1988 and was rated R. I couldn’t see it. Young Guns II came out in 1990, had EVEN MORE of my teenage crushes in it, featured an exclusive soundtrack by sexy rock god Jon Bon Jovi, and was rated PG-13. And so I became a big fan of Young Guns II without ever having seen the original Young Guns.

I saw Young Guns II a bunch. I had extended, in-depth conversations about it with a friend, who also had a penchant for movies and cowboys, when we should’ve been paying attention in math, probably. And, yes, I had a Young Guns II poster up in my room, because I had a million posters and pictures and pinups and cutouts from Bop! and Tiger Beat magazine up on my walls. But it was a personal fave.

Eventually, of course, I did see Young Guns, but I’ve always thought Young Guns II was better, and not for merely the teeny-bopper reasons you might think. So I bought Young Guns II, way back about a million years ago, and added it to my DVD collection, without ever having the slightest inclination to buy Young Guns. Such is life.

Despite being something of a completist when it came to movie franchises — especially in the early years of my fixation with buying DVDs — I’ve never felt guilty about not owning Young Guns, primarily because Young Guns II is almost like an entirely different movie from the original, only with some of the same principal characters played by the same principal actors — but not like it’s actually a sequel at all. (I apply this same sort of logic to my brother and I, who have such a wide age gap between us I’ve often said we’re like two only children who just happen to have been raised by the same parents.) Young Guns tells the straight-up tale of Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez) and his band of vigilantes-turned-criminals (or, at least, it’s as straight up as a biography that’s as much legend as it is fact can possibly be). It ends with Doc (Kiefer Sutherland) moving back to New York and getting married, Chavez (Lou Diamond Phillips) finding work in California, and Billy being shot in the back by Pat Garrett (played by Patrick Wayne in that film). Young Guns II, however, reunites the gang in a bit of literal revisionist history, by framing the tale as the memories of one “Brushy” Bill Roberts, a real man who, in 1950, claimed to be Billy the Kid.

Young Guns II, therefore, could either be a complete fabrication or a fascinating alternate history. It attempts to pick up where Young Guns leaves off, telling the travels of Billy’s gang after their time as Regulators in the Lincoln County War all the way up to Billy’s supposed death (in this film Pat Garrett is played by William Petersen). However, in this version, Doc and Chavez are still very much in the mix. There are references here and there to, for instance, Doc having gone off to New York and come back again, but the threads are never really connected all that well. It’s like the first film might as well not have existed (not a complaint, just an observation). And that seems to be an intentional feature of the film, too, because according to this one, Billy the Kid skipped out on his own funeral and stole Pat Garrett’s horse. It’s an interesting new perspective

For a hormonal teenage girl, however, the real draw was the cast of incredibly telegenic actors dressed up as scruffy cowboys. In addition to the main trio, Young Guns II also boasts Christian Slater as Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh (the greatest rhyming cowboy villain name I’ve ever heard). And if you were a fan of Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, well Alan Ruck is here too. There was also the confusing and alluring presence of Balthazar Getty as Tommy, who my friend and I had taken notice of in Lord of the Flies earlier that year (we HATED it, but there was something about him — it might’ve been the weird name). I swear, to this day I can’t decide if we thought he was cute or if we thought he was wimpy. But I know I’ve always paid attention whenever I’ve seen his name come up anywhere since. (Another fun thing about re-watching a movie from 25 years ago is finding all the actors in little roles who were nothing then but are totally noticeable now — Look at Viggo Mortensen hanging out with Pat Garrett!)

As for other merits, Young Guns II, as far as I’m concerned, does a pretty great job of looking more polished and put together than its predecessor, and that can actually go a long way in a person’s enjoyment of a film. If you need more than that, though, I also think the performances are strong and considered, with particular attention paid to the relationships of Billy’s gang, how Billy sometimes gets too capricious with the lives he takes in his hands, and how betrayed he feels by Pat. By that same token, the movie does a lot of work to make Pat Garrett a man and not just a figure — it portrays him as vain and as arrogant and as a showy, self-righteous, ultimate failure, but it rounds him out more than any other portrayal I’ve seen has ever done. And while there’s a dearth of women in the film, Jane Greathouse (Jenny Wright) conspiring with Billy and telling off Pat and riding off into the night wearing nothing but her boots certainly makes the most of her time on the screen.

Plus, have I mentioned “Blaze of Glory?” That song rocks. Young Guns never had a song. Now tell me which is the better film.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 269  Days to go: 263

Movie #108: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It seems unbelievable that I was only eleven when Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out, because it feels like it informed my entire adolescence. Then again, I had a sleepover birthday party one year (it must have been my twelfth), and we’d rented the movie from our local Mom & Pop video rental place (pretty sure this was before Blockbuster existed in my neck of the woods). All of us cracked up at the scene when the florist drops off a bouquet for Ferris with Mr. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) on Ferris’s front porch and departs with a friendly “shave and a haircut” horn honk, only to receive Rooney’s “two bits” middle finger, but my mother had her back turned so when we laughed she asked what happened. We were all frozen, except for this one girl who would of course go on to be super popular and eventually Prom Queen and definitely not friends with me anymore once we hit junior high. She just repeated the gesture for my mom like it was no big deal. I would never been that afraid and impressed in front of my mother in my later years (and like I said, that girl barely said two words to me the entire six years of school following that one — except the one time we both had detention and she was too busy being popular and hilarious on the bus home to get off at her stop, so she got off at mine and hung out with me in my room ’til her mom picked her up, all the while wondering what position, exactly, Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” was referencing), so it must’ve been when I was eleven that I first saw the film. Hell, maybe that’s why it informed my entire adolescence — at the nascent point of my transition from child to young adult, I was given a look at someone who was everything I ever could hope to be.

Between the ages of eleven and eighteen, there was no one in the world I held in higher esteem than Ferris Bueller. I honestly think that’s the truth. He got away with everything. He had all the friends in the world, a secure and loving family, a perfect girlfriend and a charmed life. He had no worries. He’s an all-around great guy. I truly believed there was nothing Ferris Bueller couldn’t do, and I wanted more than anything to be like him.

I never was as elaborate in my fake illnesses as Ferris (Matthew Broderick) was. I never could fake a fever anyway and my parents didn’t give a hoot about my clammy hands, so there was no point in licking my palms. But I did — especially by my senior year — come up with numerous and varied ways of getting out of class. My best friend and I were masters at it, and even when we didn’t cut out entirely, we still managed to take a super long lunch every day. We had that place wired. Of course there was never a dead grandmother, and we didn’t have our own phone lines so as to redirect the calls of school administrators, but we knew enough tricks to get away with a lot. I mean, really a lot. I’m pretty sure one of my friends is still angry with me for handing in a paper for ninth grade honors English over a week late with the flimsiest of excuses imaginable and still eking out a better grade than she got turning the thing in on time.

The problem is, however, that my work ethic was always more eagerly applied to planning and doing fun things than to actual, you know, work. I despised actually applying myself and hated and resented the entire bullshit experience of high school, so I consistently managed to do just enough. Just enough to get by, just enough to get grades that would keep my parents off my back and not make me feel like a dummy, just enough to skate through. I remember once hearing about a possible show or movie being developed about Ferris’s adulthood and I couldn’t help but think he’d maybe be in the position I found myself — not doing anything spectacular really, but doing just enough to pay the bills and have nice things and go on great vacations every once in a while. After all, a job is a job, but a  vacation is quality time. Then tonight I remembered that Ferris lives under some sort of lucky star, so he’s probably more like the guy who was plucked from obscurity on Twitter and given a job writing for Late Night with Seth Meyers. Actually, that guy is even from Illinois. Maybe he IS Ferris Bueller!

In addition to Ferris, I also desperately wanted to be Sloane (Mia Sara). She was beautiful and together and had an amazing boyfriend who loved and wanted to marry her. She had a great body and her own phone line and she was totally chill and “not embarrassed” when Cameron (Alan Ruck) saw her change out of her clothes to go swimming. In all my life, I have never met a teenage girl so comfortable with herself, and yet Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made me really think they existed. In truth, I was probably a lot more like Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), angry and snotty with everyone, thinking I was always getting shafted when really that’s not the case at all. I mean, if you notice, Jeanie spends no more time in class that day than Sloane does. So what’s she so pissed about? (“What a little asshole,” indeed, Grace (Edie McClurg), amirite?) But at the same time I was wearing my sarcasm like a defense shield à la Jeanie, I was also really internalizing the wisdom of Charlie Sheen’s drugged out guy (such a stretch for him): “Worry about yourself, not what your brother does.” This can be a hard lesson to learn, and I didn’t have it mastered back then at all, but as I grew older I really developed more of a “live and let live” philosophy — as long as no one’s getting hurt, it’s really none of my business how someone else chooses to live his or her life. I believe that intensely, and I try to teach my kids that you can’t control what other people do, but you can always take care of yourself and make sure you’re on the right path for you. In its own small way, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off planted that seed in me.

I loved every line of the movie (it might be the most well-produced film of John Hughes’s oeuvre), and still can recite the whole thing to this day, but it seeped into my DNA quite a bit as well. However, it wasn’t until years after I first saw it that I realized how important Cameron’s story line was as well. Cameron is the real focus of Ferris’s adventure — he states it clearly, though it can be easy to miss. He doesn’t think Cameron is a very happy guy, and he wants to bring him some happiness. He does more than that, though, he brings him strength. The Cameron that stands tall at the end of the movie, looking at the wreck of his father’s prized car, you know with certainty that whatever happens, he’s going to be okay. For as much as I got away with at school, there were many ways at home that I was not okay. It took me until I was about 21 to get the kind of strength Cameron achieves here, and I find that watching the movie now I empathize and connect much more with him than with anyone else. It’s astounding to me that throughout maybe a hundred viewings, maybe more, it never occurred to me that Cameron was the heart of the film, but he so clearly is. It makes me love the movie even more.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Ben Stein as the history teacher, because otherwise I would’ve never known what “voodoo economics” was. (Everything I know, I learned from a movie.)

“Anyone? Anyone?”