¡Three Amigos! - 1986

"¡Three Amigos!" - 1986
Dir. by John Landis - 1 hr. 44 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

There's a million reasons why I should love "Three Amigos" more than I do (and I'll be damned if I'm going to do the upside-down exclamation mark every time I mention the title).  I generally like Steve Martin and Chevy Chase, and the idea is a pretty good one.  But aside from my generally not liking Martin Short, I'm not sure why the whole thing doesn't click perfectly for me.  It's a good movie, but pretty far from my first choice to watch for anyone involved.  But it's not terrible.  It's just not "The Jerk."  Or "Spies Like Us."  or "The Blues Brothers."

During the Studio System years, three haughty actors, Lucky Day (Steve Martin), Dusty Bottoms (Chevy Chase), and Ned Nederlander (Martin Short) have a successful franchise, and want raises.  Boss Harry Flugleman (Joe Mantegna) fires them and throws them out of the studio, without even the suits they were wearing.  At the same time, a village in Mexico called Santo Poco is being tormented by El Guapo (Alfonso Arau) and his gang of bandits.  Carmen (Patrice Martinez) sees one of the Three Amigos films and mistakes it for a documentary, and writes a letter to the Amigos promising 100,000 pesos if they will come down to Mexico and deal with El Guapo.  Not having anything else to do, the Amigos steal back some clothes and head south.

Good stuff first: this is from the time when Steve Martin was doing straight comedy, as opposed to characters with a bit more angst mixed in.  He's 100% into comedy here, and there's a lot of charm to Martin's comedy.  Chevy Chase is pretty good here, too.  And this is the film in which I least mind having to deal with Martin Short (backhanded compliments are still compliments).  "Three Amigos" also, at times, feels like a love letter to the old way of making movies, shot on a studio lot, with the same band of character actors popping up to round out film after film, in sets that seem fairly familiar.  On the whole, an action/adventure/comedy without needlessly troubled characters is a pretty easy meal to digest, even if you're hungry again pretty quickly.

It feels like picking on the pedigree of these actors to say that one of the problems with "Three Amigos" is that it feels more like a series of sketches at times than a cohesive movie.  I think that most of us would have gotten as much out of this if the Amigos were a set of recurring characters on Saturday Night Live than as a full-length movie.  For me, probably the biggest laugh I got during the whole thing was that Chevy Chase played a character called Dusty Bottoms, which is so good that I kind of want that to be my alias from now on.  There's also a pretty good physical comedy scene where Lucky Day is chained up in a jail.  But those scenes (and really, most of the scenes), would work just as well independently of one another.  The characters aren't complicated, the set-up is very broad, and none of the humor comes from character development.  

"Three Amigos" works better in my memory than as an actual film-viewing experience for me.  Broadly, there are things that I really enjoyed (like the Three Amigos Salute, or their fancy faux-Nudie suits, or a dude named Dusty Bottoms), and it's pleasant enough, but I wanted, and expected more out of the people involved.  I didn't think that anything in the film (aside from the Steve Martin jail bit) pushed the concept into new territory, or delivered anything unexpected.  "Three Amigos" is pretty much the film that, if you watched the trailer, you would imagine that you would get.  That's not upsetting, it's still pretty decent (and rewatchable), and not everyone knocks every project out of the park every time.  

3 / 5 - TV (HD)

Leap of Faith - 1992

"Leap of Faith" - 1992
Dir. by Richard Pearce - 1 hr. 48 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

"Leap of Faith" is maybe not the best film Steve Martin has ever done, but I find it endlessly fascinating, moreso than some of his better and better-known movies.  There's a pile of talent in the cast, the central idea is a fairly rough one to digest (I mean that as a compliment), and I've always viewed it as a very sad movie.  At this point, Steve Martin was much better known as a comedian than as a dramatic actor, and this film is an odd hybrid of drama and comedy.  Even though this isn't an even film, there are moments that resound, and justify the rest of the run-time.

Martin plays Jonas Nightengale, who runs a roadshow big-tent ministry, which he explains is better than having a church, which you'd know if you'd ever been to a church.  It's immediately clear that Jonas is more of a showman (and a conman) than a holy roller.  So when his convoy breaks down in a small fictional town called Rustwater, Kansas, Jonas decides to put on his show right there instead of letting everyone cool their heels until the part one of their trucks needs can arrive.  The local sheriff, Will (Liam Neeson), is wary of the entire enterprise, but can't find any legal reason to block them from putting on their event.  Plus, he develops a quick crush on Jonas' assistant, Jane (Debra Winger).  The problem is, of course, that Rustwater is a town down on its' heels, with high unemployment and a desperate need for rain, lest the seasons' crops dry up and blow away.

As you might expect, one of the major themes of a film about a flamboyant preacher (witness Jonas' sparkly jacket!) is going to be redemption.  Despite the message Jonas and company provide, they're more like carnival hawkers or performers (depending on whom you're talking about), talking about "rubes" and about making their daily nut.  This leads to one of the many points that might be uncomfortable to watch; when you're dealing with big productions (religious or otherwise), it's always going to be more about the show than about the content of the message.  The Nightengale roadshow is no different than an arena concert tour; it costs a certain amount to keep the show on the road, and that's fulfilled by selling merchandise and asking for donations (instead of selling tickets).  Certainly, this is an insight gleaned by the problems suffered by well-known televangelists from the 80's (which would have been recent history at the time this film was made).

The idea of redemption comes in the stories of Jonas and Jane.  Jonas immediately sets his sights on a waitress, Marva (Lolita Davidovich), who is referred to as "the holy grail of road pussy" by Jane, chiefly because she doesn't immediately succumb to Jonas' charms.  Marva's younger brother, Boyd (Lukas Haas), is what gets Jonas to back off: he has real problems, and they're ones that can't be solved by prayer or by snake oil.  It's a complicated situation, and when Boyd starts buying into Jonas' act, Jonas is forced to try to deflect Boyd's real needs, and yet not reveal that his entire enterprise is dubious.  For Jane, she comes off as someone who would succeed at anything she set her sights upon, and unfortunately, she's chosen evil.  Will sees through her, and finds someone who isn't as dishonest as Jonas appears to be, and tries to offer her a different choice.

One of the other aspects I found interesting about "Leap of Faith" is that there is a kind of bait-and-switch happening here.  That might be a strong way to put it, perhaps it's more of an element of anger being taken out on the audience.  Maybe you didn't know this, but Steve Martin was kind of a big deal as a stand-up comedian.  The long version can be found in Martin's excellent book, "Born Standing Up," but the short version is that his stand-up career spun out of his control until he found himself playing the Astrodome.

So, just for a minute, imagine going to see a stand-up show in a football stadium.  That's how big he got.  Martin quit doing stand-up, shortly after that, not seeing where he could take things after that.  Years later (like fifteen years later), Martin finally returns to a stage here, and instead of being straight comedy, it's in the guise of a conman preaching about morality, all while dipping his hand into every wallet he can reach, in a movie that seems hell-bent on stressing how everyone is either conning or being conned.  Maybe it's a matter of mere coincidence, maybe the scenario was relevant because this film is actively antagonistic towards what people want out of others, presenting it as open-season for those who were willing to tell people what they want to hear.  I'm not sure that anyone other than Martin could answer that, but I can't help but see "Leap of Faith" as some kind of oblique comment on his own career.

There is, as you would expect from a movie about religion, a feel-good ending for pretty much everyone involved.  I didn't mind that, but found it fascinating (in a meta sense, once again regarding Martin's career) that the ultimate answer for Jonas Nightengale is that he must quit his ministry and disappear for Boyd, Marva, Will, and Jane to have happiness in their lives.  Even Jonas seems relieved when he slips away.  He has been running a profitable roadshow for an indeterminate amount of time, but the path he's been on leads nowhere for everyone involved.  Or, at least, it doesn't lead anywhere near happiness.  He can continue on his path, even more profitably once a genuine miracle has occurred, but it would require corrupting that miracle to do so.  If I ever met Steve Martin, probably the biggest thing I'd want to know about is whether or not this was intended to be commentary on his own career.  But then again, the Wikipedia entry for this film says that Michael Keaton was the original lead, and quit.  So all of this could just be nonsense that I'm reading into the material presented.  This film could be an important look at Martin's career through his own lens, or it could just be something he did because the opportunity was there, and was quickly forgotten.

"Leap of Faith" is an okay movie.  No, it's a little better than that.  It's not "The Jerk" or anything, but it's real.    And it's a movie about someone gaining something valuable through artifice.  It's also probably a movie that a viewer would interpret wildly differently depending on what stage in life they might find themselves.  That, in itself, is a rarer trait than you might think.  But that's something that you'll have to figure out for yourself, when you watch it.

3 / 5  - TV

The Big Year - 2011

"The Big Year" - 2011
Dir. by David Frankel - 1 hr. 40 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

It's not that anything I saw regarding "The Big Year" looked like it would add up to a decent film, but I secretly held out hope that the stars could add up to something worthwhile, even if that didn't mean a good movie.  But I was wrong.  Not only was I wrong, but this movie gave me a nosebleed that took the last half-hour of the film to stop (true story).  While it's true that I might have looked upon the last third of "The Big Year" a little less favorably because I was watching it with a wad of toilet paper jammed up one of my nostrils, but it's not as if this was an all-time great film up to that point, either.

I don't know if this is based on reality or not (a little Google-fu reveals there is a book of the same name that focuses on this subject in 1998), but in this film, birders can engage in a competition to see who can spot the most species of birds (which runs on the honor system).  Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson) is the current record holder, but feels like his record is beatable, so he decides to engage in another Big Year in order to protect his legacy.  This comes much to the chagrin of his wife, Jesse (Rosamund Pike), who is going through fertility treatments so that they can have a child.  Also engaging in a Big Year are Brad Harris (Jack Black), who is a divorced thirty-something office-bound slacker, and Stu Preissler (Steve Martin), who is retiring from the company that he founded and has made him wealthy so that he can finally do a Big Year, something he's wanted to do for his entire life.  And then they go look at birds.

Let's assume that the source material is, in fact, engaging enough to make a movie based on it.  What ends up on the screen ends up mirroring the goal of a Big Year, in that it's a hard-to-explain, pointless-to-many pursuit.  Except instead of bird-watching, what the filmmakers seem to have done is taken on the challenge of screwing up the story in the most banal, Hollywood way possible.  The characters' names are changed, which has the effect of turning the three leads into generic versions of the characters they usually play.  And these generic characters have only the most general conflicts.  Owen Wilson's character is the bad guy, but only because he's been the most successful person in this particular pursuit.  His villainy comes not through how he treats Brad or Stu (the worst he does is psych-out Stu into sea sickness, and later gives the pair bad directions, sort of), but because he doesn't place his wife first and foremost in his life at all times.  This character is bizarre, in the sense that clearly we're all expected to resent success and hate a guy because his first goal isn't putting a baby in his wife right when she demands it.  There's even a tearful scene where Jesse gets to throw Kenny's non-family pursuits in his face, because she understands that "no one remembers who comes in second place."  Her, of course.

Secondly, we're supposed to accept a CEO as an underdog in this story.  It's sort of in tandem with Brad (they end up teaming up), who is the truer underdog because he doesn't have the resources to pursue this endeavor, but what we end up with is Stu bankrolling Brad to go against Kenny.  The dynamics of this story are very off, not just because of how Kenny is painted (basically, there's a lot of resentment towards him, but not really because of anything that he does.  It's all tell and no show), but also because of how the story treats the pursuit of excellence.  It would seem that anything that doesn't result in a man (and this is a mostly male pursuit - the only women involved in birding here are Ellie (Rashida Jones), who is largely there to give a cute falling in love story to offset the story's ugliness between Kenny and his wife, and a freshly-wed bride who is honeymooning with her birder-husband, which seems only to be there to provide a fish-out-of-water character who also is supposed to serve as proof that these guys are tough for roughing it, and instead comes off as a tone-deaf "silly girl" who can't handle anything in the out-of-doors) being a constant 9-to-5er is nothing but strain and heartbreak for the women in their lives (Kenny and Brad are both divorcees, and Stu's wife has to give "I'll miss you dearly, but..." speech to show her sacrifice).

This is a shaky foundation to build a story upon.  If you're not going to treat the pursuit itself with some kind of respect (the best explanation that anyone gives as to why they do this is that it's "hard to explain"), and I don't consider having women constantly opposing what the men in their lives have chosen to do (sometimes tearfully), as treating the pursuit with respect, why even do the story in the first place?  Whatever comedic possibilities bird-watching offers is completely wasted here.  There's no real tension in the script between any of the characters, partially because Owen Wilson's character doesn't function as a villain unless you're a baby-crazed woman, so no one has any motivation for what they do, other than the people involved are good at what they do.  But rather than stress that Kenny is dogged in his pursuit (and make that a positive trait instead of focusing on his abandoned wife), and that Brad is some kind of savant in being able to recognize bird-calls, and that Stu is looking to open a new chapter in his life, even the importance these characters place on birding is treated as trivial.  And if nothing at all matters in the world depicted except getting your wife knocked up, why devote so much attention to the birds?

I just don't understand the point of "The Big Year."  It seems alienating to both men (in that their pursuits are regarded as completely trivial, and any success any of the characters might achieve is deeply resented and comes at a huge cost, which seems to be a persuasive argument of mediocrity as a lifestyle) and women (in that the only two paths here is being ignored by your men in favor of birds or to be Rashida Jones, who falls for Jack Black's generic slacktastic character).  It's a complete waste of a lot of comedic talent, and even the birds aren't well-explained enough to be fascinating (other than when Brad finally gets his dad (Brian Dennehy) interested in a small bird, which is the sort of thing that would have gone a long way towards making the subject matter more fascinating - and this is another problem: when your three main characters are experts in their field, and there's no noob involved, there's simply not enough explanation of why what we're looking at is interesting if you're not also an expert in the field of birding, which 99% of us fall into that category).

And then there's the matter of my nosebleed.  I'm not saying that "The Big Year" caused my nosebleed, but I was watching it, and then that happened.  There may not be a causal relationship, but there's no way that those two events are entirely unrelated, either.

1 / 5 - TV