#58 Death of a Childhood Hero [in progress]

Smilin' Ed McConnell died right in front of me ... sort of. He was right there on the television machine one minute, and then he wasn't ... because he was dead, I was alive and only eleven,  What's happening? He was right over there on the screen last week. It's gotta be that old Froggy playin' tricks again. But there seemed no amount of  plunking on his magic twanger could get Ed back.

I.didn't know him "face-to-face" till his transition from radio to TV, which sadly was a short 2 or 3 years. And it took me at least that long to get over it. Here's the deal ... I loved the guy.  I got to know Smilin' Ed before I could see his smile/ Ed was in my head.

[ A "partial post"  related to DMW #233. More to come, but here it is for now.]

#18 Hughes, Candy, Death III--"Uncle Buck"

Pity that Martin-Candy never teamed-up again after Planes, but John Hughes knew that John Candy alone could carry a film, as he did--with great support, however, from such as the little guy at right before his Home Alone juggernaut got cranked up--with Uncle Buck (1989). Candy was to play only one more notable lead-role, and do it well, in Only the Lonely, mentioned earlier.

Writer-director Hughes borrowed a lot from his characterization of Del Griffith in the earlier movie, and here makes Buck Russell The Compleat Slacker for the ages. Del was at least minimally employed as an itinerant shower-ring (!) salesman. The unemployed Buck Russell hangs out at bowling alleys trolling for tips on the latest "fix-is-in" horse-race (he doesn't actually cheat--that's important for Hughes, I think--he just plays the cheaters). We are to believe that his shoo-in bets pay the rent on his shabby apartment and his shabbier life-style.

Uncle Buck Griffith is also borderline INSANE. Candy's trademark laugh can thus carry overtones of real menace here, which comes in handy when "parenting" his brother's kids for a week. Here's the hook: it turns out that his character has a strong sense of "family values" in spite of all this. One clue Hughes plants early on is actress Amy Madigan. Loyal, loving, level-headed owner of a tire-store, her character has been trying to wed/hire and legitimately spawn with the ne'er-do-well Buck without success for the past eight years! There's gotta be some good in him.

And he proves it when he is called upon in an emergency--all other candidates having been exhausted--to nanny a sullen/surly teenage niece who hates him at first sight, and her bright/cute single-digit brother and sister who fall in love with him immediately. These two are not your typical movie brats. They are among the best written and acted that I've ever seen. The little-girl-actress speaks the language of six-year-old cuddly-love to perfection, and Macaulay Culkin is great as the eight-year-old-who-never-stops-asking-questions. Here's the finale' of about 50 lines of Q & A:

--Are your my Dad's brother?
--What's your record for consecutive questions asked?
--Thirty-eight.
--I'm your Dad's brother all right.
--You have much more hair in your nose than my Dad.
--How nice of you to notice.
--I'm a kid. That's my job.

How right-on-key is that bit of Hughesian dialogue? "Thirty-eight" is just terrific ... and then the punchline. Another exchange involving the hormone-driven, fifteen-year-old niece and her predatory boyfriend provides us with Buck's secret child-control strategy:

--Are you crazy?
--I can be.
--You could have taken his head off!
--Yeah, but would he notice?

This impinges on the central plot-line of the movie. Whereas Planes was basically episodic, this film has a pretty-well-defined story-arc, an old-fashioned one at that: saving this young girl's virtue. Uncle Buck loves these kids, even the wayward niece, Tia, and somehow finds in his slacker-self an iron core of responsibility to keep them safe and on schedule, even if he has to get "crazy" to do it. (Can you think of anyone but Candy to play this role?) "I have my orders," he says to Tia after she refuses to be picked up from school (she'll get a ride from "friends"). Well, this is how he'll enforce those orders: "Stand me up today, and tomorrow I'll drive you to school in my robe and pajamas and WALK you to your first class ... four o'clock okay?" She doesn't stand him up.

It matters to us, though, that these threats remain just that. We can't really allow Uncle Buck to use his hatchet that "can circumcise a gnat" on "Bug" the boyfriend. Unbeknownst to Buck, his prophetic words alone, matched with Bug's subsequent behavior, are what saves the maiden in distress before the fact. Here was his brand of "moral suasion" before she sneaks out to, and abruptly out of, what was meant to become a "bed-and-breakfast" party:

--The guy's a predator and you're his prey.
--And how would you know?
--When I was his age I was zooming girls like you. Pretty face, good chip on your shoulder.
--I recommend you stay out of my personal life.
--Do your parents stay out of your personal life?
--They don't know of my personal life.
--Have they met twiddle-dink?
--His name is Bug.
--First or last?

The words stick, and she sees through the real Bug just in time to avoid infestation. But Buck doesn't know that, and so he careers his flatulent Mercury across town to the party-site as soon as he sees that Tia is unaccounted for. This allows Hughes to give us some Candy-style craziness after all. He arrives at the party armed with a huge power-drill and his maniacal laugh ... bedroom keyhole demolished (you see this through Bug's terrified POV) ... mis-identifies new girl under the covers ... picks up authentic Tia on road walking home ... Bug hog-tied in trunk ... released humiliated. Great fun.

Happy ending. But as much or more for Candy's character than it is for the niece and her family. There's more bildungsroman here than in any other of Hughes' efforts. Along with his wards, who are already getting along better at the end, Buck grows up. He's ready now for Amy Madigan and kids and a steady job installing tires to support them. He's proved his true worth as a family guy. We know it's a Hughes film, and we've come to expect a happy ending. But when first-time viewed, and our disbelief properly suspended, the movie is not that predictable. Neither is Planes. Unlike his earlier strictly teen-fare, these two offerings give us some urgent, life-altering situations that could end up very badly indeed.

I've spent so much time on Uncle Buck because I feel I'm writing somewhat "uphill." Critics loved Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, but HATED Uncle Buck ... almost unanimously (some just didn't like it). A bad rap. There are some flaws: the horny widow next door, for example. She's important for a plot-turn, but her extravagant sexual displays seem to come from some other planet entirely, and come off more disgusting than funny. Hughes blinked on that one. The movie overall though--casting, story-arc, dialogue--represents some of his finest work, in my opinion. And a fine legacy for John Candy, too, at his comic best. (more)
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#17 Hughes, Candy, Death II--"Planes, Trains, and Automobiles"

Before Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, John Hughes was King of Teen-Screen Comedy. He's at right, barely post-teen himself, but this photo, among very few since his Salinger-like seclusion before his death, is fairly "official"--Wikipediawise--as if he wanted to preserve a lost iconic era. Starting with Sixteen Candles (1984), he auteur-ed (and was writer-only on several others not so good) The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Teen-agers suffering terminal teen-angst abound in these films--worked through in well-staged productions, coherent structure, and fairly realistic dialogue (even in the enjoyable Weird Science, where the hormonal angst is purged through pure fantasy and Kelly Le Brock).

These are one-time, thoroughly watchable movies, but they barely go beyond stereotype in both plot and character--the jock, the geek, the rich kid, etc.--or predictability. You'd have to be a teenager to give them a second viewing. Not in the same class as, for instance, Cameron Crowe's teen-oriented movies, roughly contemporaneous, like the seminal Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982), from which I think Hughes borrowed a bit, and the magical John Cusack vehicle, Say Anything (1989). Deeper, and therefore more fully comic. Crowe's teenagers actually strive to grow up, struggle to deal with some very adult issues, and to take responsibility or not for their success or failure. Hughes' characters simply come to terms with their teen stereotypes, or not. Good fun, though.

With Planes Hughes had himself a truly adult comedy. There's plenty of Ferris Bueller in John Candy's free-wheeling salesman Del Griffith, and a whole lot of stereotypical geek in Steve Martin's fastidious adman Neal Page. A connection to Hughes' earlier work. These perfectly-cast characters are grown-ups all right, but they have to grow out of some of their self-destructive, almost adolescent "hang-ups" to become more fully-realized adults. And in the the end they take what they need from each other to do just that. Thrown together by chance, then necessity, they find themselves in an "Odd Couple" road-trip kind of story. Pretty simple, really--thus, profound. Through the power of friendship they grow together and become greater than the sum of their parts.

Meanwhile, we're treated to enjoyable doses of slapstick--"Fat man fall on face ... funny"--of comedic misdirection and discomfiture, as they endure their ill-starred odyssey across the Midwest in various, somehow-always-unreliable modes of transportation. It's an on-the-road, "buddy-picture" in this way--complete with raucous car-chase and crash--with roots all the way back to Cervantes and anywhere up to the movie it most reminds me of: the estimable Midnight Run (1988), co-starring Grodin and DeNiro in a similar love-hate partnership. Like them, Candy and Martin become friends in spite of themselves.

That's because underneath it all they're both good-hearted guys. However, Candy is "too eager to please" (his late wife had told him), giving way too much of himself to make friends, so that he really can't. Especially not with someone as rigidly punctilious and outwardly self-reliant as Martin--always "under-eager" to give anything of himself. That's his problem. But by the end of their tribulations, betwixt the two of them they have rubbed off those rough edges and reached a happy compromise. It's very important to this unfolding theme that Martin learn of the death of Candy's wife only AFTER he decides to return to the train station and invite Candy to his home for Thanksgiving ... literally and figuratively. Martin must unconditionally give; Candy, unashamedly take. (more)
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#16 John Hughes, John Candy, and Sudden Death

John Candy could look funny even when scowling. Such was his natural-born talent, under-utilized by Hollywood, alas, even up his heart-attack at only 43 while filming the unwatchable Wagons East (1994). He had the classically-round, clown-face, prominent nose and lips, and of course he was always pudgy, going on morbidly obese. Chris Farley, who had a similar but even shorter trajectory, once summed it up: "Fat man fall on face ... funny." But Candy could also rely on his always protracted, truly inimitable, near-maniacal, mountain-peak-sized laughter--oh, that laugh, like nobody else's, ever--and, paradoxically, could call on a somewhat darker side of his comic persona to pull in his audience completely. The name didn't hurt, either.

John Hughes died of a heart-attack a couple of weeks ago at 59, but after all of those wildly successful "teen-films" of the early- and mid-80s, he had been sort of out of commission as a prominent auteur about as long as Candy's posthumous career. His last writer/director effort, in fact, was Uncle Buck (1989), which, along with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987) comprise his best work, in my opinion. With credit due to Steve Martin in the latter, these two films featured John Candy doing his very best work. Third on my list would be writer-only Hughes' Home Alone (1990--none of the sequels), buoyed up, yes, by John Candy's cameo spot as Polka King of the Midwest, a reprise of an earlier character on the breakthrough and still-watchable SCTV series.

The Hughes/Candy collaborations outshone anything else they ever did. Candy consistently stole the spotlight in supporting or cameo roles, from Splash to Blues Brothers to the quirky Southern lawyer in JFK. But his starring efforts were maddeningly compromised by bad scripts and low production values, with the exception of Only the Lonely (1991), which was produced by none other than John Hughes, but written and directed by frequent collaborator Chris Columbus. Not a great film--none mentioned here would come near the top 100, frankly--but the interactions of the three lead actors speaking some pretty good lines make the film. Candy is in his sweet-shy-but-maybe-manic mode as a lonely Chicago cop of Irish extraction; out-of-retirement Maureen O'Hara is the bigoted, overbearing, first-generation-extractor mother; Allie Sheedy reprises her neurotic Breakfast Club role (Hughes again), but in an adult, Italian-ancestry, would-be-fiancee' guise. "She's a Guinea; please don't tell me she's Sicilian, too?"--asks/demands O'Hara. "Yes Ma, she is"--Candy proudly responds, signaling her son's first baby-steps toward independence.

Candy's sweet/crazy persona--that raucous laugh could erupt anytime--is perfect for the perpetual loser matched with Steve Martin's up-tight "winner" in Hughes's Planes. It marks a new departure for all three: Hughes would get off his teen-angst-movie hobblety-horse and make a truly adult film; Candy would finally be offered a lead worthy of his talents; and Steve Martin would move from the strictly-for-laughs roles--never straying too far from The Jerk--of past movies. But my goodness, did he not do them well?--1984's All of Me will always be my favorite. He went on, though, soon after Planes, to portray more fully-rounded comic characters in such films as Parenthood and L.A. Story, and to take them into much darker territory than before, like those in My Blue Heaven and Leap of Faith (1992)--the latter my second-favorite Steve Martin movie, still underrated, where he turns in the best acting job of his life. (more)
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#14 Stephen Colbert and the Double-Reverse Zeitgeist

I can't leave Jon Stewart's (MM #12) partner in crime at right, out of our discussion of late-night TV journalistic satire. How come we're so lucky, lo these politically-fraught last five years or so, to have these two guys back-to-back, four hours a week? (Need to do a little DVR-ing to get the mandatory "Letterman-fix," however.) Both shows are based in media satire, both are on the side of current moral/social/civil consensus ... if not the angels. But here's the difference: Monsieur Colbert pretends to be on the OTHER side. The irony is thus double-edged, and about twice as funny for it. This is all best illustrated in their divergent takes on the "Birthers," which I'll get to in a minute.

Colbert models his persona on Bill O'Reilly, in fact, whom he defers to as "Papa Bear," but it could be any other self -righteous, opinionated, wing-nut pundit like Hannity or Beck (not the rocker). He assumes a parodic character: you might call him UberConservativeMensch--who satirizes himself at the same time he's taking right-wing ideas over the top ... reductio ad absurdum style... while not once breaking character, or revealing the true liberal bent of the show.

(Even his name is invention: it pretends to somehow connect with the Huguenots of his Charleston SC upbringing and hence the Frenchified pronunciation of "coal-BEAR," when in actuality the man himself is of Irish-Catholic stock born in the nation's capital, no less; and the rest of the family pronounces the name as spelled. In a funny but revealing moment on a recent show, Colbert asks his guest, none other than younger brother Ed, how he pronounces his surname. Answer: "COAL-burt." "See you in hell," responds "coal-BEAR"--not dropping his mask for a moment)

We can clearly see the difference in satirical mode between Stewart and Colbert in the treatment of the Birther movement this week. His boss had the easier task: as mentioned in that earlier post, Stewart can for the most part let the video clips speak for themselves and expose the Birthers for the fools they are--punctuated with a few incredulous grins and disapproving grunts. On the other hand, when Colbert took up the topic yesterday, he became one of them. Perfect irony. His guest was Orly Taites, a Russian emigree' and so-called "mother" of the faux Obama-birth-certificate movement. As introduction he played a clip where she declaims that "You have to have two parents who are citizens; Obama's father was not a citizen of the US." Colbert "agrees"--"Yes, everybody knows both parents must be citizens. It may not be in the constitution, but it's a basic fact taught to every school-child growing up with Ms. Taites in the Soviet Union."

When she enters and sits for the interview, Stephen assures her that he's on her side; that Obama is a bad President; and we need to get him out of office "by any weird loophole we can make up." She proceeds to make her case, which is weird enough to allow Colbert to sit back and let her self-immolate for a time. After her inevitable comparisons to Stalin and Hitler, which he declares to be "fresh and new," he takes her point into woo-woo land. "We wouldn't want another Chester A. Arthur [whom she'd never heard of--perfect again] would we? Mutton-chops [as he gestures along his face] and all that. His father was not a naturalized citizen when he was born. He was a terrible President. Do we really want a return to mutton-chops."

The Zeitgeist will out-- no matter the guest or subject: Colbert will hyperbolically OVER-agree on the right, and illogically DIS-agree on the left. Case in point for the latter--Arianna Huffington, who was his very next guest after Orly Taites. The HuffPost lady-in-chief was on to plump the newly updated re-issue of her 2003 Pigs at the Trough, which chronicled corporate greed and political corruption in and around the Enron era--this edition uncovering even "more bacon" in and around the Washington DC beltway today.

"We can't let these guys go back and do business as usual and ruin the country," says she.

"Yes," says he, "but it was working so well ... for awhile. I made so much MONEY ... for awhile. Why can't we just let them go back to what they were doing and then everybody just jump out before it all goes to hell? A red flag or something."

When asked earlier about her own citizenship status (since she, like Orly Taites, has an "unbelievable, ridiculous accent," according to Colbert), the Greek-born Ms. HuffPost captures the essence of Colbertian Irony in appropriately ironic form. She claims that

"Actually, I was born in the United States and cultivated this accent to give the air of a minority, which is very, very big now."

"Well, wait a minute, how do you really talk?"

"No, no, I never break character. Just like you, I never stray from character.

"You never break character ... that must be hard."

"I learned from the best, Stephen."
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#12 Jon Stewart and the Zeitgeist

Speaking of the late great Walter Cronkite over at the Daily Mosteller ... his popularity was pitted posthumously the other day (sort of) against the proportional popularity of present pretenders to his pedestal of premier presenter (somebody stop me) of the news on our TV machines. Jon Stewart won. The Time magazine poll gave him a 44% plurality over Couric, Gibson, Williams, et al. A poor showing, really--Cronkite in his heyday would have scored in the 90's, I'm sure.

The criterion was "most trusted newscaster," inspired no doubt by the death of the "most trusted MAN in America." You see the difference. Never could Stewart aspire to the "Uncle" honorific attached to Walter, nor could he hope to have the the kind of moral authority to sway a nation, as Cronkite assuredly did over Vietnam and Watergate. Nonetheless, Huffpost pictured them side by side under the headline.

Their methodology of influence was/is very different, though. Cronkite was a journalist; Stewart, a satirist. The former was so trusted because he was perceived to be scrupulously impartial. In deference to that, for the very few times he lowered his personal boom on a controversial issue (honestly, I can't think of any but the two above), he was careful to label it an "editorial"--and boy-o-boy was he believed. Stewart, on the other hand, has never been accused of impartiality. He always hedges his bets by calling the Daily Show a "fake news" program, grounded in comedy and entertainment. Fair enough, but it's so often so very earnest in its satire, and always on the right side of the popular Zeitgeist--the moral/social/political consensus of thinking people. And that's where the "most trusted" business really comes from.

For instance: yesterday's show. The first segment lampooned the "Birthers"--that wingnut cabal (supported even by some southern congressmen!) which believes against all evidence that Obama is somehow a Kenyan. As Jon ran the clips, hardly any sarcastic commentary was needed: res ipsa loquitur. These folk are so far behind the "curve" that they make fools of themselves. In one, Liz Cheney is seen exploiting the so-called "controversy" to impugn Obama's overseas posture as "appeasement"--an unwillingness to properly defend the country against foreign threats. Because, after all, he's a foreigner.

The second segment was typical, and as usual salutary, as Stewart took off on his own medium, television journalism--this time for its coverage of Michael Jackson's death, and its aftermath. Of course it was over-covered. But here the satire gets sweet and subversive: he showed a montage of clips wherein mainstream reporters report on themselves reporting too much on Michael Jackson! This included soul-searching Q&A's about how they might be short-shrifting more important news, while at the same time interviewing the groundskeeper at the Jackson gravesite. Very funny.

Today he went after Fox News for misrepresenting Health Care Reform in "Candyland" maps that would confuse anybody. The bias was obvious: scrap reform. Waaay askew from the current Zeitgeist curvature. The American people, to their credit, overwhelmingly favor universal health care in one form or another. Polls reflect it, and so does Jon Stewart. Otherwise, Q.E.D., he wouldn't be the most trusted.
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