Cultureshark Cares

Last week, a judge ruled in favor of Hulk Hogan in his continuing legal efforts to get Gawker and its properties to remove the sex tape footage it posted last year.

Gawker is defying the ruling so far, but this means if you have yet to see the Hulkster doing the wild thing, you ought to do it now in case the video is pulled.

Cultureshark Cares!

From the Hip (1987): Judd Nelson IS Stormy Weathers

No doubt it is a cliche to say that in a given movie, a certain actor IS a certain character, but believe me when I say there is no more apt summary of "From the Hip." After all, it is SO essential to the film that we know that Judd Nelson IS Stormy Weathers that we hear it over 400 times by my unofficial count during the course of the film.

"You're Stormy Weathers," people keep telling him. He knows he's Stormy Weathers. The characters addressing him are really addressing US, reminding us that he has a "cool" name. You see, this is a film where someone came up with the idea to call the main character Robin "Stormy" Weathers, and then everyone else ran with it and felt we needed it reinforced, else the movie might not amount to much.

I blame credited screenwriter David E. Kelly because it's fun to blame him and because it seems like the kind of the thing he'd do. Let's not absolve the director of "From the Hip," the late Bob Clark, who was never known for his subtlety. One scene in particular displays Clark's heavy touch, one you might well expect from a project built around a character named Stormy Weathers. Judd Nelson (who IS Stormy Weathers) is celebrating in his apartment with his best friends/colleagues, and they are all getting rowdy, when his sensible girlfriend, played by Elizabeth McGovern, reminds them of the gravity of the situation, asking them to calm down and show some dignity. Then the camera pans out so we can see McGovern plod into the room wearing giant hairy gag monster feet. Now, there may be a subtle way to execute this gag, but this ain't it.

Nelson is a hotshot young attorney who, through various machinations we won't get into here, ends up defending accused murderer John Hurt in what is thought to be an unwinnable case. He deals with the prickly Hurt, legal partners who want to see him fail, and--awwww--his own self-doubts as he pursues the case...and maybe, just maybe, the right thing.

The story has kind of an odd ebb and flow, especially outside the courtroom, but I will say the trial scenes are highly watchable, and the cast is interesting. John Hurt is compelling, but he often seems to belong in a different film. In addition, there's Darren McGavin, Nancy Marchand (who gets to remind Nelson that he's Stormy Weathers), and the late Allan Arbus (I was gonna ID him as "the guy who played the shrink on M*A*S*H*," but the man especially deserves some respect now). And in a random bit of pop culture confluence, those lawyer pals Weathers consorts with are played by Dan Monahan of "Porky's" fame and by a young David Alan Grier.

But the problem is we are supposed to think Nelson is cool, with his irreverence and his floppy hair, but it's hard to escape the reality that, well, Stormy Weathers is kind of an a-hole, which is interesting given an early showcase scene features him instigating a debate over the word "a**hole." Ray Walston as the presiding judge becomes indignant, and we are supposed to enjoy the irreverence and admire his wacky but accessible logic. In short, we're supposed to really get behind Nelson's character right from the start, much the way we supported 80s mavericks like Axel Foley.

But while Nelson IS Weathers, Weathers is no Foley, and  his wild courtroom antics look good on film, but, several citations for contempt notwithstanding, are received with a lot more tolerance than they would be in the real world. He destroys things with a hammer, he brings live animals and vibrators into the courtroom (thankfully not at the same time) and generally showboats without an iota of shame. So if you don't buy into Stormy Weathers and his shtick, you might as well not even bother adding this to your Instant Watching queue.

There is one scene that made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it (I had never seen the whole movie before catching it on Netflix) and still makes me laugh, though maybe not for the right reason: During testimony, a prosecutor throws out a lofty-sounding quote, adding, "Henry David Thoreau said that." From his table, Judd Nelson (IS Stormy Weathers) says, "Yabba Dabba Doo. Frederick Flintstone said that. So what?"

Vault of Coolness: Vintage Steve Martin, Author

I picked this up at a library used book sale for either 50 cents or a buck.

Remember when you used to be able to get cheap pocket-size paperbacks like this that weren't genre novels?

I haven't read this yet, but I like Steve Martin, and so I will. But more important at the time I bought this, I like the idea of it: A slim paperback with a cool photo cover that I could have found at K-Mart at an affordable price back in the day.

Has anyone read this?

This Week in DVD and Instant Watching

Gangster Squad: This just looked like it should have been cool: Gangsters, period setting, Sean Penn hamming it up, Emma Stone vamping it up...I don't know, that all sounds kind of cool, but this one got terrible reviews.

A Haunted House: So let me get this straight, the "Scary Movie" franchise was SO hilarious, it couldn't contain Marlon Wayans, who broke off and started his OWN franchise?

The Impossible: I can't wait to see how they did the special effects for the coil guy in this adaptation of the 1960s Hanna Barbera--Oh, wait, this is a harrowing, inspirational story about a family struggling in the face of a tsunami? Jeez, that's not funny at all.
Promised Land: It turns out movies about controversial topics like fracking aren't really all that controversial if nobody knows they exist.

Jurassic Park 3D: Forget the dinosaurs, I want to know how scary Jeff Goldblum's mannerisms are in 3-D.

Richard III: Criterion may be loading this up with extras, but I'm not impressed if it's not III-D.

The City That Never Sleeps: This Gig Young noir is perhaps the highlight of a new batch of releases from Olive Films, which is glad to put out the good stuff that Paramount can't be bothered with.

China Gate: Olive also releases this Sam Fuller early (as in before we got into it) Vietnam War flick with Angie Dickinson, Gene Barry, and Nat King Cole (!), and it sounded so good I thought I might have to try to see it. Then I found out it's already been on Netflix! O happy day!

Mr. Selfridge: I said it before and I'll say it again: When I first saw a promo for this, I figured, "Ooh, a new Masterpiece," and when I heard, "Jeremy Piven stars..." it was, "Ah, never mind."

Restless Gun Complete Series: Another forgotten Western series hits DVD thanks to the good folks at Timeless. Keep putting them out, Timeless, and I'll keep...uh, thinking maybe I should give them a try sometime but probably not necessarily buy them right away. I guess I'm really not incentivizing them much, am I?

In streaming, the big news this week is the debut of all episodes of the new original Netflix series Hemlock Grove, which features an apparent werewolf and Famke Janssen, and if there is to be any hope of me watching this, the werewolf better not be Famke Janssen.

This is generating buzz but not good critical notice, but if it drives subscriptions, then good...I guess. But personally I'd rather see Netflix spend the dough on acquiring more catalog titles. For example, is there gonna be any effort to replace/renew some of the hundreds of titles expiring in a few weeks?

We also get The Paperboy, and no matter whether Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for it, yet this still would be known as the movie in which she pees on someone. She didn't win an Oscar, as far as I know, though maybe there was a peeing Oscar given out in the technical awards ceremony.

Awesome 80's Video #1: "No Way Out" by Starship

(Full disclosure: This post springs from an e-mail I wrote to a few friends. Personal references and in-jokes may have been deleted. Awesomeness is hopefully retained)

Welcome tp yet another new recurring feature here at the blog, a periodic look at the best music videos of THE decade for music videos, the 1980s. This week, let’s look at Jefferson Starship’s "No Way Out," a song from the album that was reportedly so cheesy that Paul Kantner finally said, “I’ve had it,” and left the band, leading directly to the formation of the Starship we all know and love that Built [insert your city here] on Rock and Roll and made “Mannequin” a hit.

I will spare you a blow-by-blow of this video and will instead highlight some of the features that make you wonder how much blow was consumed during the shoot. Besides, I can’t really explain what’s going on here except in broad strokes. It’s a concept video that combines mad scientists, Catholic confessionals, geisha imagery, and Mickey Thomas’ ill-suited mustache, yet it doesn’t all come together very well. In fact, in this upload of the video I link to, the clip actually freezes for a second—surely the result of a flaw in the recording, but it seems as if the video itself is saying, “Wait a minute, let’s take a timeout and figure what the hell is going on here.”

First, let’s talk about the song, which is actually not bad and, one has to admit, is catchy as all get-out. It starts with a very 1980s-sounding keyboard hook, then goes into some funky time shifts and some guitar solos to complement that constant keyboard sound. In other words, yep, it’s the eighties.

And of course, it being Mickey Thomas, he’s gonna sing his ass off. I only wish in this case he sang his ‘stache off, because it just bugs me for some reason. Is he trying to pull off an Oates look? Because, sir, I know John Oates. I rocked out to John Oates. I recently bought a vintage Rolling Stone with John Oates featured on the cover. And you, Mickey Thomas, are no John Oates.

We start with Mickey and his gal going to the castle/lab/whatever, and we get one of those great non-musical intros that used to make videos look so pretentious—I mean, cool. They’re greeted at the door by Grace Slick, who has little to do in this entire clip except make ghastly faces. What did I say about cocaine earlier?
Then Mickey is led up to a confessional booth. See, the song is about his woman not buying the story he came up with as to where he was last night. So we get a confessional/lie detector thing going with some exaggerated effects and noises (the sound design cracks me up in this video—watch this clip and notice how ridiculously noisy all the sound effects are) and oh, yeah, SPECIAL GUEST STAR Father Guido Sarducci. Well, he is a priest, so he fits here, but really all he does is smoke and sit around with no discernible purpose...yes, pretty much like every Father Guido Sarducci appearance ever.

There is some weird stuff going down in the laboratory part, and Grace Slick is still being creepy, but the most bizarre sequences are when Sarducci starts watching some scene play out in front of him. It’s a dude who I am pretty sure is the drummer being entertained by a geisha-like woman trying to be “mysterious.” He digs it, though, so the drummer, who looks like either an eighties porn star or an eighties pro wrestler—wait, is there a difference?—watches her get out of bed and start swaying, so his reaction is to pick up a nearby dumbbell (back then, all swingin’ singles kept one on the nightstand) and start doing bicep curls while she “performs.”

Well, it’s better than watching Mickey Thomas do it. At least this guy’s moustache suits him.

From this point on, it’s more creepy bedroom scenes, more special effects, several re-used shots, footage of Mickey Thomas out on the town with a bevy of beauties, and a weird exchange of cash between Grace and Mickey’s video girlfriend that I can almost certainly assure you is not a drug deal.

I could go on, but please, experience this for yourself.

ME-TV and Antenna swap shows while I yawn

Sitcoms Online ran the best explanation of this that I saw here and here: Antenna is removing "Leave It to Beaver," "Dragnet," and "Adam-12" from its lineup, but fear not, fans of those shows, because they are merely migrating to Me-TV. If you love those shows and aren't sick of them, I guess this is a good thing, and if you're a fan who has Me-TV but NOT Antenna, it's certainly a good thing. But for the rest of us, this is kind of--excuse me for using a little industry jargon again here--lame.

When the rerun-oriented digital subchannel trend started a few years ago, I looked forward to a wide variety of programming. Wait, that's not entirely true. I hoped for a wide variety but feared we would actually get the same old stuff eventually. Now, there are still great old shows on both Me and Antenna, but this kind of swap is the thing I worried when the two "competitors" made their library deal with Universal a few years ago: Exchanging the same series instead of digging deeper and showing rarer programs.

Oh, Me-TV and Antenna accomplished something else with that deal: They effectively killed off RTV, which suffered a crippling amount of defections shortly after it lost rights to the Universal library. Personally, I could do without most of the Universal library at this point, or at least most of what we've seen lately. "Beaver" is on Netflix now, as is "Adam-12." I've seen the whole run of "Alfred Hitchcock." I love, love, love that Antenna still runs "Burns and Allen" and "The Jack Benny Program," but unless they unearth some new episodes, I don't see them as so special now that they have gone through multiple cycles of the ones they have. Let's try a little harder, folks, please, to put some different programs on the air.

I'd rather see Me-TV look elsewhere than at Antenna's leftovers. As for Antenna, here are the brand-new program acquisitions it will add to replace the 3 departing Universal shows:

...

That's right, nothing! Oh, it has shows filling the time slots. "Married With Children" and "The Nanny," both of which have had ample exposure elsewhere, but more importantly have already been on Antenna, are coming back.

Yippee.

I fear these two channels are stagnant and will remain so. I hold out more hope for Me-TV to at least sprinkle its schedule with rarities like "The Rebel," but Antenna in particular is stale, and I expect it to look more to the 80s and 90s than the 50s, 60s, and 70s for future programming additions.