Busy Summer

Things are going to be hectic around here for the next couple of months, so I might not post a heck of a lot. First, there's the big move, which will take up most of the first half of May, what with all the painting and floor refinishing and organizing. We close on the new place on May 1, and the sale of the old place is final on May 14. In between is craziness (and a short trip to NYC).

Then, probably in June, my favorite art historian and I will be submitting our relationship to the state for official registration. Perhaps you can tell from that description that we're not being very traditional about it: no lace, no church, no dance-till-dawn, no speeches, no annoying tapping of spoons on champagne glasses (which I discover is a mostly Midwestern thing anyway). MFAH's family is planning a series of events in Maine in August, and sometime before then we'll probably have a housewarming/celebrate our new tax status party at the new place. And my mother wants to plan something for the homestead, too.

Somewhere in there, I'm legally changing my name to Michael Justman-Phillips. Justman is my mother's maiden name, and growing up my Grandpa Justman was probably my favorite person in the world. I've always thought it's sad that there aren't any Justmans from his side of things wandering around, and since my teens I've wanted to do this, but laziness and poverty tended to get in the way. I'm still trying to figure out how exactly it works (do men get the same easy out that women do when they take their husband's name?), but it's gonna happen this summer.

Finally, I've decided that I don't want to be Goatdog anymore. I've been frustrated for a while by feeling embarrassed when I tell people what my review site is called; right or wrong, a lot of people think it's silly and don't take it seriously. Plus, I feel like it's time for a change. I might lose some traffic for a while, but I'm past obsessing about that. The problem now is trying to find a good name that isn't already taken. If you have any ideas, please share them.

I guess that's it. What are you doing this summer?

Caveat

Don't ever live in a self-managed condo building.

Rocks That Movie

I can't believe I've failed to link to this already, but my good friend Shane at Rocks That Move has been blogging his 50 favorite films. He and I sort of discovered good film together, renting everything that looked worth watching (and a bunch that didn't) from every video store within driving distance of Manistee, Michigan. In a way, he was my gateway drug: he insisted that I watch this great film called Howards End, and I never looked back. Together, we started the quest to watch every film ever nominated for Best Picture, but Shane realized that there are more important things in life (I'm still not convinced!). Anyway, here's his list: Introduction, 46-50, 41-45, 36-40, 31-35, 26-30, 21-25, 16-20, 11-15, 6-10. Now he's counting down his top five individually: 5, 4, 3, 2 (new!), and now his #1 movie is up.

Along the way he posted a highly amusing alternate list for 21-25, reacting to grumblings in the comments that he hadn't included any crappy movies yet. He's still got two slots to fill, so it's not too late.

Making the Grade: Gimme an F

This is my contribution to the White Elephant Blog-a-Thon hosted by Lucid Screening. Each participant sent in the title of a particularly bad movie (or so I thought, although other participants are reviewing Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Purple Rain, and Forbidden Games), and in return receives a random title. I suggested William Holden and his bare-chested antics in Picnic, which Hedwig reviews over at As Cool as a Fruitstand.

I was nine years old in 1984, when Making the Grade was released. In schoolyard conversations, my friends and I sometimes discussed the social divisions in "big kids" and "grownups." We were reasonably certain that they were divided into "preppies" and "burnouts"; some kids with older siblings could report, with that nine-year-old solemnity brought on by superior wisdom, on the brands of clothing that signified true preppiehood. So I was struck with a peculiar kind of nostalgia during a scene in Making the Grade when one character gives another a lesson in how to dress preppy: peculiar because I was too young to experience the preppy years firsthand, so the nostalgia was for a time when such things as alligators on polo shirts and rolled-up pantlegs were the mysteries of distant adulthood.

Of course, the mystery is still there, but in a different form: why on earth did anyone ever think that layering pink and green polo shirts was a good idea?

But on to the movie. Slovenly rich boy Palmer Woodrow (Dana Olsen), desperate to figure out how to avoid having to go to prep school (he's apparently a seventh-year senior, although he looks more like a fifteenth-year senior, what with his big head emphasized by his receding hairline), stumbles upon the brilliant idea of hiring a poor person to impersonate him at school. But where could he find a poor person in his world of luxury cars and private country clubs? Enter Eddie Keaton (Judd Nelson in his film debut), a street kid from Jersey who's on the run from his faux-eloquent bookie Dice Man (Andrew Clay). The two strike a deal, and it's off to posh Hanover Academy for Eddie's fish-out-of-water story.

At the prep school are bullies named Biff (Scott McGinnis) and Skip (John Dye), mysterious sports like field hockey, and, most importantly, preppy clothes. The film's best scene is when the real Palmer's friend Rand (Carey Scott) takes Eddie clothes shopping and explains to him the code of the preppy, which is likely lifted verbatim from Lisa Birnbach's Official Preppy Handbook, which had been published as a satire but quickly became a bible. "A tie's knot should never be bigger than your head," Rand explains to a mystified Eddie. "Socks: wear them only to weddings, and then only if it's your own." Eddie falls for Tracy (Jonna Lee), the beautiful granddaughter of the school's founder, who loves him because he's different. However, prepdom insinuates itself into Eddie's personality, turning him into more of a Palmer Woodrow than the real Palmer was. Will there be a big speech where he learns his lesson and explains it to an unlikely audience? I wouldn't dream of telling you.

There's another kind of nostalgia here: for that particular brand of early- to mid-eighties filmmaking. I loved the aforementioned shopping scene, which is in a long line of "training" sequences, such as the scenes in Footloose when Kevin Bacon teaches Chris Penn to dance. There's a scene in which Eddie shows off his breakdancing skills, although the person dancing is clearly not Judd Nelson, who gets intermittent closeups striking poses and doing an awkward Robot. There's a song score of particularly bad synth-pop, a sort of sub-Giorgio Moroder collection of songs that sound like rejects from Scarface and Flashdance (indeed, one of the performers, Shandi, wrote and performed "He's a Dream" from the latter film). And there's not one, but two spontaneous dance numbers: I'm cheating a little here, because the first one, during the opening credits, has Eddie semi-dancing to the film's theme song, "Living on the Edge," which he's playing on his large silver boombox; and the second one does take place at a school dance, albeit the kind of dance that has never seen breakdancing before. Walter Olkewicz appears as Coach Wordman, a third-rate approximation of John Belushi; and an uncredited Dan Schneider appears as "Blimp," the obligatory picked-on fat kid (you might remember him from a string of 1980s films and TV shows, such as "Head of the Class").

And, of course, there's Andrew Clay, a standup comedian approached by the producers in the parking lot of a Los Angeles comedy club. He apparently loved his John Travolta-meets-Mean Streets character Dice Man so much that he started calling himself Andrew Dice Clay. In that same parking lot, the producers approached another comedian about starring in this film, but Jim Carrey turn them down, giving Judd Nelson his first starring role. A similar "what might have been" involves the soundtrack: the film had little money to spend on the composer, and they gave it all to a relative newcomer named Danny Elfman. However, the producers then rejected him, which might have had something to do with the rather confused state of the music rights (see the film's trivia page at IMDB).

The film is not, by any measure, any good. There are a few laughs, and the first kiss between Eddie and Tracy was unexpectedly sweet and poignant, but that was one of the few times when the film gave the impression of really knowing anything at all about high-school kids. The filmmakers had studied other teen comedies, but not closely enough to pick up any real feeling for their subjects. Making the Grade was released the same month as Sixteen Candles, and whatever you think about John Hughes, his films showed that he had an ear for how teenagers express themselves. Here, screenwriters Gene Quintano (Police Academy 3, Operation Dumbo Drop) and Charles Gale (Ernest Scared Stupid)... well, there's nothing more to say after typing Ernest Scared Stupid. Making the Grade has to go to summer school. (In fact, a return trip was planned: the closing credits promise a sequel, Tourista, which never materialized. Ah, the 1980s.)

Top 10 of 2006: #4-#3

4. Drawing Restraint 9. A European couple (director Matthew Barney and his wife Björk) hitch a ride on a Japanese whaling ship. They're served tea in an elaborate ceremony. On deck, the crew builds an enormous whale-shaped sculpture out of petroleum jelly, into which they insert a large piece of ambergis, which becomes the focus of a ceremony. Belowdecks, post-ceremony, the European couple disembowel each other and turn into whales. I was seldom absolutely sure what any of this meant—it seems I'm reduced to plot synopsis—but I was never less than entranced: sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney achived something resembling a Lynchian nirvana, where not a lot makes sense but it doesn't matter because the enigmatic visuals are so welcoming yet opaque, and because the actors seem so willing to go along with Barney, no matter what he asks them to do. Throw in the first music by Björk that I really liked, and you have the makings of a unique cinematic experience that I really, really need to see again.

3. Dave Chapelle's Block Party. Carried along by Michel Gondry's direction, Ellen Kuras's instinctive camera work, and the crackerjack editing, Dave Chappelle's Block Party flits about in time, following the planning and execution of a New York block party hosted by Dave Chappelle. Several of the segues between rehearsals and live performances gave me pleasant shivers, while the film's forays into Chappelle's home turf in Ohio and its exploration of the very different Bed-Stuy setting for the concert are sometimes giddy, sometimes surprisingly introspective. A friend said it felt like Dave Chappelle was running for office, and I suppose that's correct, but that office is "nice and approachable guy who hasn't been changed by his huge $50 million contract," a motivation for the block party that the film digs into without calling undue attention to it. And then there's the music. I've already discussed Kanye West's fabulous entry and the magnificent rush of the reunited Fugees, but everybody, from Mos Def and Talib Kweli (not sure if they were performing as Black Star or not, but they were on fire) to Erykah Badu, gave inspired performances. (Previously: Best Documentary, Best Musical Moment.)