Mystery Men - 1999

"Mystery Men" - 1999
Dir. by Kinka Usher - 2 hrs. 1 min.

Theatrical Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I remembered really liking "Mystery Men" when it came out.  Part of it was probably just the dearth of comic book adaptations, which was quickly rectified in the passing decade.  Part of it was my crush on Janeane Garofalo, part was the sheer improbability of a Hollywood film being made on a Bob Burden comic.  "Mystery Men" has a more than solid cast and is pretty funny, so what's the problem here?

First, recap.  Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), Shoveler (William H. Macy) and the Blue Raja (Hank Azaria) are a super-hero team, sort of.  They're not any good at it, and end up trying to save senior citizens from a gang of thieves, but are quickly eclipsed when Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear) shows up and routs the baddies.  Turns out Cap is so good at fighting crime that people, and therefore his sponsors, are losing interest.  To rekindle interest, Cap decides to get his old nemesis, Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush), sprung from Arkham Asyl...  I mean, the looney bin, so that they can renew their rivalry and Cap can continue to rake in the sweet sponsorship moolah.  Casanova has learned a few new tricks in his time away, and that leaves Furious & company as the last heroes standing between him and tragedy.

So lets start with the good.  All of the actors, and I mean all of them, do a great job.  Stiller and Garofalo (playing "The Bowler," she has a super-powered bowling ball with her deceased father's head in it, which she talks back to) bicker like you want them to, Macy plays things straight, Azaria's strange and puts on a fake British accent for much of the film.  If I recall, this was also one of the first movies that Paul Reubens (playing The Spleen, a lisping, bezitted dork armed with super-powered farts) made after his legal run-in at a theater of a different kind, and he does a great job here, too.  Pretty much all of the good stuff in "Mystery Men" (and there is plenty of good comedy and acting here) is due to the cast going above and beyond.

I have two essential problems with "Mystery Men" at this point, nearly fifteen years after its release.  The first concerns the direction; director Kinka Usher (this is his one and only feature film, he's returned to directing TV ads since) is obsessed with jamming people's faces right into the camera.  And when faces aren't approaching the camera, maybe it's a car driving right up to the camera.  I feel like I've just spent two hours looking up actor's noses and staring at people through a door's peephole.  It's unbelievably repetitive (I was aware of this quickly, and completely sick of it half an hour in); it's the sort of approach that might work in thirty-second commercials, but is unsustainable over the course of two hours.  Also, it forces an awareness of the camera that distracts from the pure storytelling aspect of "Mystery Men."

I didn't mind the story (even though it's basically a mash-up of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's "Arkham Asylum" graphic novel and "The Warriors", which offers up little of creator Bob Burden's surrealist appeal), but the approach to making this film is hard to grasp.  I'm not a purist; I don't believe for a second that a film has to match up to it's source material at all.  They're two separate entities, and I'm more than willing to give the creators of each room to make their art work in the format that they're using.  But if you look at the source material in this case, which were throw-away characters in Burden's main comic book creation, "Flaming Carrot," I can't begin to figure out how anyone saw a film budgeted at $68 million.  "Mystery Men" is a movie based on a forgotten drunken bar joke (literally - Burden had to be reminded of a joke he'd made at a bar about a nonsensical superhero one night and then promptly forgot about), and Burden's work is surreal and crude (I don't mean that as a slight - his work's appeal lies in it's humor and approach, and not in his draftsmanship).  So how does that translate into a film that cops it's neon/greased plastic look directly from "Batman & Robin," one of the most critically reviled comic-book adaptations ever committed to film?

The entire approach is misguided and overblown; "Mystery Men" should have been an ragged indie comedy to have any chance to succeed.  Instead, we get chestnuts like the entire team walking seven-across in slow-motion through fog.  Another problem; while "Mystery Men" is set in the future, no one has a cell phone.  1999 would have been on the cusp of when people really started carrying them around, but it seems implausible to have a future world where people don't have any electronic means of communication.  I'm willing to chalk that one up to bad timing, but there's a big dividing line in film on this issue, and "Mystery Men" is on the wrong side of that line.

"Mystery Men" isn't a bad movie, it's a mixed bag.  It's funny, it's jammed full of funny characters, the cast does everything they can with what they've got to work with.  But the visual approach is infuriating and frustrating at every turn, and burns up a lot of the good will I have towards the film.  I guess all I can say is that it's fun to watch if you're not paying attention, and you'd have to file it among the comic-book movies that were made before Hollywood got even a decent grasp of how to approach this sort of material.

2 / 5 - Streaming

Romy & Michele's High School Reunion - 1997

"Romy & Michele's High School Reunion" - 1997
Dir. by David Mirkin - 1 hr. 32 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Here we have the other high school reunion movie from 1997, "Romy & Michele's High School Reunion."  While "Grosse Pointe Blank" was a sly, aggressive, cool comedic take on the whole situation, "Romy" is the bonkers little sister of this family.  It's colorful, fun, a little flighty, and just wants people to like her (and to have some fun, as well).  And the journey of the main characters of this film has them learning that they have to learn to appreciate themselves first, and then other people will fall in line.

Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) are in their twenties, have moved to Los Angeles from the desert, and enjoy clubbing.  You might say it's their natural habitat.  When Romy meets a surly former classmate, Heather (Janeane Garofalo) at her customer service job at a Jaguar dealership, she finds out that their ten-year reunion is imminent.  This sets off a self-improvement plan: diet, new boyfriends, better jobs.  And when that fails, they decided to pretend they're successful instead, claiming to have invented Post-Its, all in service of trying to woo the boys they had crushes on back in high school.

"Romy & Michele" is such a bizarre film, for about a million different reasons.  I guess it's a testament to the power of "Friends" in the 90's that a comedy got made then that starred two (well, three) women, and didn't really have any male actors that were names at that point (Alan Cumming and Justin Theroux have roles here, but that didn't mean much in 1997).  I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that even a decade plus later, it's still a rarity.  But even more than that, what we've got here is a 1980's film made in the 1990's, and it's not really an exercise in nostalgia.  In a fairly drably-colored decade, this is a cotton-candy colored confection, filled with bubbly, light-hearted charm from the leads.  This is offset by some degree by the single best use of Janeane Garofalo in her film career, as a very grumpy lady.  She's described late in the film by Michele as "a big giant girl who smokes and says 'shit' a lot," which is a pretty perky way of putting it.

But even more than that, this is one of those films that exists in it's own bubble.  The quickest comparison I can come up with is "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," where the two lead characters' most important relationship is their friendship with each other, and their mutual ignorance of the weirdness of their surroundings somehow multiplies the weirdness itself.  But there's also an odd internal logic that works, even if the film seems all over the place.  There's a long dream sequence in the middle, a staple of these kinds of films, but it also serves to illustrate the point that even if both Romy and Michele end up with the men of their dreams, if they can't also remain friends, it's not worth the sacrifice.  In that respect, it very well represents the logic of early teenage girls, where friendships are intense and can go straight to hell once boys start to factor in (which is also sort of the Bill & Ted dynamic, observed from the other gender).

And this is a riotously funny movie, as well.  Even though Romy and Michele aren't very bright (or at least are amazingly superficial, but not in a malicious way), they are likable and not easily discouraged.  Everyone can understand their motivations and weaknesses; they want people to like them and think well of them, but they're completely befuddled by typical teenage pettiness and social-standing jockeying, which doesn't seem to cease even when people are out of their teens).  So when they decide that they need better jobs and some boyfriends in time for the reunion, them divvying up the duties makes sense to them.  Of course they need to show up in a better car than the Nova they normally drive (which leads to possibly the best exchange of dialogue in the film, where Romy jokingly tells Michele that she gave handjobs to the entire Jaguar service crew in exchange for the car, which Michele takes at face value, much to Romy's consternation), of course they decided to pretend to be businesswomen (although they don't actually know what they're supposed to be pretending to do, as illustrated by a great quick scene in a diner on the way to the reunion).  They're not con-men here, they're just trying to escape getting crushed by the A-list girls when they have to explain what they've been up to for the last ten years.

Both Sorvino and Kudrow are really good here, and this is my favorite role for Janeane Garofalo.  She's abrasive, but comically so, and it is set off by Sorvino and Kudrow's perkiness.  There's no end of great exchanges throughout the film; you could talk about the the dream sequence, the actual reunion, Michele going through job interviews and ending up at an outlet mall, or maybe the three-person dance set to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time."  But there's a bit near the end that's almost as messed up as the all-time most messed-up moment of happiness in "Bad Santa."  Garofalo's character is bemoaning the fact that everyone made her miserable throughout high school, and that she never had the opportunity to make anyone else miserable, and that doesn't seem fair.  When she finds out that her constant, casual curse-filled telling off of Toby (Camryn Manheim) actually hurt her feelings, Heather is ecstatic, and her entire high school existence is redeemed.

"Romy & Michele's High School Reunion" is a bizarre, funny, awesome, strange movie.  The fact that it's tone and visual approach was so out of left-field contemporarily works in it's favor: those quirks that date a film (particularly comedies, where the visual approach is sometimes delivered on auto-pilot) are much less noticeable.  It's got a good concept, great execution, and the actresses that hold up most of the screen time really deliver.  They're all super-committed to what they're doing, and that holds up over time.  I remember enjoying this film from before, and actually might have liked it more this time around than the last time I watched it years ago.

3.5 / 5 - TV

Janeane Garofalo: If You Will - Live in Seattle - 2010

"Janeane Garofalo: If You Will - Live in Seattle" - 2010
Dir. by Michael Petok - 59 minutes

"Ghosts" - clip

by Clayton Hollifield

Even if you used to have a fearsome crush on Ms. Garofalo like me, this isn't the greatest stand-up special ever made.  I guess it's positives are about the same as the negatives - it's an accurate document of where she's at as a comedian right now.  I'm sure your political bent might have a lot to do with how you view her and her work, but ignoring that, what you've got is a seasoned, funny comedian putting on a good show.  I wasn't blown away here, but I'm a little baffled that it's taken this long to get one of her shows on the market.  In that respect, I'm happy that finally happened.

There's a bit in this show where she talks about her manager being upset that she doesn't have any "internet presence."  It almost feels like this DVD is result of the same complaint - she didn't have any comedy product on the market, and this does at least fill that gap.  But I wouldn't recommend it beyond that - if you haven't seen her perform before, this is sufficient (but not excellent).

3 / 5 - Streaming