MY MOVIE SHELF: Orange County

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: 174  Days to go: 175

Movie #203:  Orange County

Before there was a show called The O.C., there was a movie called Orange County, and while I never watched the former, I can still say with confidence that I prefer the latter. (I don’t like it enough that I ever would’ve bought it of my own volition, mind you, but I liked it before I met my husband and saw he owned it. It’s a decent flick.)

The success of the movie rests on the charm and abilities of one Colin Hanks (as Shaun Brumder), early in his career, and he doesn’t disappoint. He’s harried and charming, the sole sane person in his family, in his school, in his entire hometown. All he wants to do is get away. He wants to go to Stanford and study to be a writer under the tutelage of his idol Marcus Skinner (Kevin Kline). When his harebrained college counselor Mrs. Cobb (Lily Tomlin) sends the wrong transcript in, though, he gets rejected. So he and his girlfriend Ashley (Schuyler Fisk) look for a way to fix things.

Unfortunately, Shaun’s family is not helping matters. His divorced parents (the fabulous Catherine O’Hara and the almost-as-fabulous John Lithgow) are selfish and self-centered — mom’s a drunk who doesn’t want him to go so far away, dad’s a materialistic guy in full mid-life crisis who doesn’t want him to become a poor writer, both are more concerned with their own dramas than Shaun’s. And Shaun’s brother Lance (Jack Black) is a drugged-out wastrel looking as gross as Jack Black ever has, which says an awful lot, who ruins everything he comes near with urine or pills or fire. Even Shaun’s friends are surf-obsessed stoners who get in the way more than they help.

The obstacles and goal are somewhat trite and clichéd, but underneath there’s a sweet story here about how you don’t need to escape your family or your home in order to grow into something great — that your family, as crazy and complicated as they may be, can make you great, can make you who you are. It says a lot for being able to find your own way, and build your own successes naturally out of who you are rather than out of an idea of who you should be. Honestly, I could’ve used that kind of guidance and affirmation in my own adolescence. I certainly stumbled in trying to make my way and find my voice a lot more than Shaun did.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Nightmare Before Christmas

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: 181  Days to go: 183

Movie #196:  The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas is my son’s favorite movie. He loves everything Jack Skellington and, if I could afford it, would be a-okay with me giving him an entirely Jack Skellington bedroom and wardrobe. Not kidding.

Me, I’ve seen this movie about a dozen times, but I’ve never really paid attention to it. It’s pretty cute. Somehow I always kind of assumed it wasn’t of interest to me, but I liked it. It’s got gorgeous animation, for one. I think it’s possibly my favorite claymation work ever. It’s simply beautiful and artistic and dazzling. It also has interesting and unique voice work — actors you don’t normally see in these types of films. And it’s a fun and clever story.

Jack (Chris Sarandon, though Danny Elfman does his singing parts) is the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown. But he’s disillusioned about his life. Halloween has lost its fun and meaning for him. He wanders off and stumbles across a portal grove in a forest filled with doors to other holidays (where is my sequel, The Nightmare Before St. Patrick’s Day??) and falls in the gorgeous Christmas tree door to Christmastown. There he experiences the crazy joy of Christmas and goes back to Halloweentown a changed skeleton. He tries to explain how great Christmas is to all the zombies and witches and whatnot in his hometown, but they don’t get it. Still, he decides he wants to be Santa Claus, and who could blame him?

Of course, Jack gets a little misguided, but given his upbringing it’s no surprise. The real problems with his Christmas Eve debacle, however, (and a debacle it is) stem primarily from his townspeople totally not getting Christmas and screwing it all up by making presents of dead turtles and bat hats and shrunken heads and bullet-ridden ducks. Those just aren’t the things on a kid’s Christmas list, y’know?

Fortunately for everyone, there’s a level-headed Frankenstein’s Lady Monster named Sally (Catherine O’Hara, being great some more) who continuously poisons her evil scientist captor so she can escape him and sews herself back together any time she falls apart, proving just how resourceful a girl she is. Honestly, I’ve had to sew myself back together a time or two. It’s not as easy as Sally makes it look. She’s really a kickass (and surprisingly shapely, for a Frankenstein’s Lady Monster) role model. I can see why so many people like to dress up as her for Halloween. In fact, I might be so inclined myself next year. Anyway, she tries to stop Jack from leaving on Christmas Eve by deploying a fog bomb on the town, but she’s foiled by Zero the Red-Nosed Ghost Dog. So she goes to save Santa Claus from the Boogie Man Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) instead. (Naturally, the Boogie Man likes to boogie, which is exactly how my toddler interpreted the term “boogie man” and started shaking her little booty along with him.)

Jack is a bit discouraged when it turns out everyone hates his Christmas, but he quickly pulls himself back up, reinvigorated at the thought of Halloween and all it has to offer, and he runs off to save Santa and Sally. Yay! (But Santa still yells at him for having such a stupid idiotic plan. Double yay!)

Also, apparently Sally’s been in love with him all this time? And now he loves her too? I’m not sure where that all came from, but okay. I’ll go with it. I do like the new duck-billed lady monster the duck-billed evil scientist made for himself, at least.

Now, though, I need to go finish writing the alternate “Rudolph” lyrics to my song about Zero. That’s really where it’s at.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Home Alone

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: 236 Days to go: 241

Movie #141: Home Alone

My son really likes Home Alone. Like, really a lot. He laughs and laughs and laughs as the thieves (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) go through the House of Booby Trap Horrors and time after time get pounded with paint cans and irons, get burned with blow torches and scalding hot metal, and various other injuries by housewares. The slapstick comedy of it actually is funny, objectively, but I’ve always been the kind of person who watches this movie and decries how surely these dudes would be dead from blunt head trauma or at least have several broken bones by now.

Macaulay Culkin is pretty adorable here as precocious and incorrigible moppet Kevin McCallister. I mean, even my toddler laughed at the iconic after shave scream. But he’s also pretty much a jerk. And his mom (Catherine O’Hara — perfect as always) is kind of a jerk right back. I mean, if one of my kids called me “dummy” I probably wouldn’t be as calm as she was, but I’d also defend him a bit to older brother Buzz (Devin Ratray) and there’s no WAY I’d let Uncle Frank (Gerry Bamman) call him a “little jerk,” even if he was my husband’s (John Heard) brother.

I always kind of marvel at airport hijinks movies now, since they would never get past the current regulations for flying. The McCallisters would never even make their flight, because they would have to arrive at least two hours early for international travel. Plus, the TSA would check all their tickets, as would the flight attendant if they got that far. So these movies where people run through airports and board planes on flimsy circumstances at the last possible second are something of a time capsule for a bygone era. But current movies don’t seem to have a replacement for this type of airport frenzy either. Up In The Air deals very specifically with the tricks of getting through airport security quickly and easily, and in Veronica Mars, Logan is able to meet Veronica at the gate because he buys the cheapest available ticket. But off the top of my head, most movies today bypass the airport as a place for dramatic tension or romantic shenanigans or anything really. Going to the airport has become like going to the bathroom in the world of movies — everyone knows it happens, but almost nobody does it or talks about it.

As for this movie in particular, it’s a cheap silly gimmick among lots of them. I mean, I also don’t believe the police would just knock on the door of a home where a child is reportedly alone, not get an answer, and assume the parents must be mistaken rather than perhaps some terrible accident befell the child, but y’know, movies. I still think it’s possible to enjoy the film and its lovely Christmas music and its sweet tale of the old man neighbor (Roberts Blossom) reuniting with his family, as long as you wipe your mind of any and all nagging complaints. That’s what I do. (It helps if you have a gleefully giddy child choking on his own laughter while you watch.)

MY MOVIE SHELF: Beetlejuice

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 #26: Beetlejuice

It occurred to me today, watching this for perhaps the thirtieth time, that I didn’t really understand this movie when it came out. I was thirteen, so I got the gist, but a lot of the darker references — and a lot of a jokes, to be honest — were lost on me. I thought it was great and hilarious, of course, but I suspect that came from the off-beat nature, the frenetic score and the unrestrained performance by Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse that all combined to make it a movie that seemed great and hilarious, even if you didn’t get all of it. (And I suspect I wasn’t the only one who didn’t quite get it, considering the Beetlejuice cartoon that ran from 1989-1991, featuring characters Beetlejuice and Lydia as friends.)

Over the years, though, my appreciation for the film has deepened significantly. It’s a tight, raucous comedy — a sort of controlled chaos. Even the opening is intentionally discordant. With the camera panning across the peaceful countryside of a small northern town, it could be mistaken for a much different film if not for the score — a frantic, jarring, jumping series of notes that practically made composer Danny Elfman a household name (at least among cinephiles). The score lets you know there is something unsettling about this sleepy scenery, and that feeling is confirmed when the camera stops on a large Victorian farmhouse and a giant, hairy spider — bigger than the windows — crawls over the roof. The perspective and tone shifts again to reveal the house and the town are all part of a scale model built by homeowner Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin, almost disquietingly thin as compared to his current self). He and his wife Barbara (Geena Davis) are taking the world’s first staycation, reveling in the chance to hang wallpaper and avoid friends. They make a quick run into town for supplies from their hardware store (an innocuous dog trotting through the edges of each scenic location change), then crash their car through a covered bridge and into the river below when trying to avoid the (same) dog that crosses their path. Within a few short minutes of the opening shot, the quiet, homebody Maitlands arrive home from their crash into the river to discover they’re dead — at least the third twist against the expected and the movie’s been on for maybe ten minutes.

The movie wastes very little time on exposition or unnecessary scenes, and saves itself from having to by making the nature of death and the dead a mystery the Maitlands don’t understand any better than the audience does. They sort of fumble through their new existence and when the urbanite Deetz family (Jeffrey Jones as the jittery Charles, the never not-perfect Catherine O’Hara as the style-conscious Delia, and teenaged Winona Ryder in her breakout role as proto-goth Lydia) moves into their home, they seek to haunt the interlopers out, with no success. The nefarious Betelgeuse is actually sort of tangential to all this. He tries to insert himself into the Maitlands’ dealings with the Deetzes, and Keaton’s performance just takes over from there. It’s so dynamic, in fact, I think most people forget the movie isn’t really about him at all. Still, his draw is undeniable, and he makes something dark and ultimately quite frightening in concept a comedic tour de force. It’s easily the most iconic role of Keaton’s life, even surpassing Batman.

The two calypso numbers are also iconic and fun, and the netherworld is full of visual gags. The bulk of the movie, in fact, is joke upon joke with barely a breath in between, on top of a rather simply constructed framework. I think that’s what makes it work so well, actually. Dealing with life and death, even comically, a film can get bogged down in its own mythology. Beetlejuice doesn’t, yet it still brings heft to Lydia’s loneliness and depression, to the Maitlands’ affection for her, and to the terror of the séance and final showdown (again, masterfully scored by Elfman at a terrifying, escalating pace). I didn’t get that at thirteen.

Awesomely, this movie has sort of grown up with me, in my own mind, experience and perspective. At sixteen, I could definitely relate to and understand Lydia better than I had at thirteen. I felt her disconnect from her parents and her longing for someone to nurture her. In my early twenties, it was Delia who caught my attention because I wanted to be stylish and expressive and understood artistically, while still believing I had all the answers. A few years ago, I could’ve been like Charles, actively looking for a way to relax and get away from all the stress in my life. And now I’m more like Barbara and Adam, happy to be at home spending time with my family. In that way the movie is universal and timeless. I look forward to experiencing it many more times.