I Wake Up Streaming: July 2021
Movies
Our usual “I Wake Up Streaming” columnist William Boyle is on vacation this month. Please welcome guest columnist Jack Pendarvis. The column’s name is a play on the 1941 film I Wake Up Screaming, starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, and Carole Landis. While the film’s title hits a pleasing note of terror and despair, changing that one letter speaks to the joy of discovering new films and rediscovering old favorites, as well as the panic that comes with being overwhelmed by options.
Hi, it’s my birthday, and what better present than to take over Bill Boyle’s great column for a month and ruin it? I’m going to stick to comedies. Before we get started, I should mention that I work for the streaming service HBO Max. The most recent show I wrote for, Adventure Time: Distant Lands, is a “Max Original.” But I swear they don’t give me a kickback if you stream my first selection.
On Moonlight Bay (HBO Max)
It’s the nation’s birthday month as well as mine, and I’m pretty old, so how about some of that fake white-people nostalgia for a time that never was? ‘Tis the season! At least On Moonlight Bay has fun with it, to a point bordering on the surreal. The pink-and-green Technicolor credits put your eyes out right away, and the subsequent movie doesn’t have the burden of being overly classy, unlike its obvious antecedent, Meet Me in St. Louis, so you’re never worried you might have to sob your eyes out or, worse, discuss matters with a cinephile, even though both films feature Leon Ames as basically the same idiot father. In the very first scene, he says something nice to a kid on the street and the kid just chews on a toothpick and stares at him like he wants to kill him. On Moonlight Bay is filled with similarly bizarre choices and real laughs that come out of nowhere, laughs that sneak up on you so stealthily they’re almost like jump scares. In conclusion, Gordon MacRae meets his love interest Doris Day while he’s spanking her, which is an ambitious narrative trick. It’s okay, because he thinks she’s a neighborhood boy. Yes, those were the simpler times in America, when guys went around spanking strange teenage boys who turned out to be Doris Day.
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (Criterion Channel)
Family time again. I would say this is a laugh-free comedy, which is a weirdly soothing subgenre if you’re in the right mood. It’s nice to know you’re not going to be roused to laughter, which can take a lot of energy. Jimmy Stewart’s grandkid is supposed to call him “Boompah” in this one. Anyway, my friend M*****l’s daughter is having a baby and he plans to make that baby call him “Boompah” in honor of this film, which used to come on broadcast TV all the time when he and I were kids. Nowadays, you have to be some rich intellectual with a subscription to the Criterion Channel for the privilege of grimacing politely at its curdled antics, which carry a distressing undertone of barely repressed mortal panic. Everything in this movie is the color of those pastel mints you used to see around. You suck on them and they dissolve into nothing, just like this movie. Unlike those pastel mints, however, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation has a bitter aftertaste. Also, a bitter foretaste. Jimmy Stewart always seems a couple of steps from going over the edge, like he’s in Rope.
The Four Seasons (Netflix)
I went to the movies to see this a bunch of times when I was a senior in high school. It answered the question everyone was asking in 1981: “What if Alan Alda were married to Carol Burnett?” We were pinching ourselves at the thought! From The Four Seasons, I learned what it would mean to be an adult: you would hang out exclusively with lawyers, dentists, estate planners, professional artists, and people in the publishing industry. You got married and met two other nice couples, in the company of whom you had four elaborate themed vacations every single year. Yes, in those days, everyone had four vacations a year and listened to their friends having sex through the wall of a boat. It was just normal! And they all spoke in phrases that sounded like Alan Alda had stayed up all night writing them out on a yellow legal pad. I believe this is the film comedy where people laugh the most—not the audience, the characters. Now, characters don’t usually laugh in a comedy. That’s a generalization, but I’ll stick by it. Algernon’s not going to hit the pause button on The Importance of Being Earnest so he can slap his knees and cackle every time Lady Bracknell fires off a good one. Chico Marx doesn’t double over in a wild burst of glee and say, “Stop it, Groucho! You’re too funny!” But everyone in The Four Seasons is constantly shrieking with laughter. I can imagine Alan Alda (who wrote and directed) saying, “Come on, people! In real life, you laugh at hilarious jokes such as the ones I have written. Let’s all really put our backs into it!” Is this movie good? I can’t tell. But it provides some clues about whatever’s wrong with me. Pros Jack Weston and Rita Moreno give the couple they play a lived-in feeling.
The Ladies Man (Prime)
I was watching this Jerry Lewis movie (not to be confused with the Tim Meadows movie of the same name) with a friend, who became enraged, as people often do when I force them to watch Jerry Lewis movies. He was like, “Why is he flashing back to a scene we saw just a few minutes ago?” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t know, he didn’t fall down in the editing room and accidentally splice it in.” OR DID HE? Because that’s a Jerry Lewis thing to do. Ha ha! Anyway, watching Jerry Lewis is like listening to Sun Ra. Sometimes you have to open yourself to the experience a bunch of times before you understand that every bang and squeak goes where it goes. The Ladies Man is enjoyable on a sheer technical level. The incredible set impressed some of my young coworkers not very long ago. They actually gasped when they saw it! My filmmaker friend said it encapsulated her fantasy of someone just handing her a wad of money and saying, “Build what you want.” Jerry’s encounter with the spider lady, in an infinitely expanding room where every single object is painted white, is one of my favorite sequences in movie history. He uses space like nobody else. You could say the same for his utterly original approach to sound. If you want to read up on either of those aspects of Jerry Lewis, I suggest Chris Fujiwari’s monograph, published by the University of Illinois Press in their Contemporary Film Directors series. You’ll see the term “Lewisian space” a lot. And you’ll grow to love it!
Blast from the Past (Hulu)
I wanted to include a romantic comedy, a marginalized genre (within a marginalized genre) that I love. In particular, I wanted to talk about The Holiday (2006), an entirely stress-free viewing experience. Despite the unpleasantly macho overtones of the term “hangout movies” (which I understand are exclusively supposed to be about cowboys hanging out with stuntmen), The Holiday is an actual hangout movie, with none of the baggage. Cameron Diaz tries to figure out where the tea cups are. Kate Winslet decides which DVD to watch. That’s all I ask. And you should see how genuinely happy Kate Winslet is to help out a pitiful old man! Maybe that’s why I like it. The Holiday, however, is not streaming on any basic subscription service in July, not that I can tell with my limited intelligence. Another comedy—not romantic—that I thought about covering was Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh’s exuberant character study, starring Sally Hawkins in a radiant, risky performance that led The New Yorker’s Richard Brody to rightly compare Hawkins to Jerry Lewis. But Happy-Go-Lucky is streaming on HBO Max, and I don’t want to seem like a shill. So I thumped around on Hulu and came up with Blast from the Past, which seemed like a good fit for the July 4 fake nostalgia theme we low-key have going.
Blast from the Past would make an interesting double feature with Brigsby Bear, a movie which, while entirely sweet-natured, doesn’t shy away from the darker tones implicit in the old boy-raised-in-a-bomb-shelter story. When I had the opportunity to meet John Waters, I asked him what he thought of Jerry Lewis. “He was probably a monster!” John Waters exclaimed. I know I mention Jerry Lewis a lot, but this is going somewhere. Next, Waters praised Jerry’s exquisite clothing in the old Martin and Lewis pictures. Although his outfits were meant to mark him as a goofball, they looked, to John Waters’s keen eye, like something a contemporary “Brooklyn hipster” (his words, not mine, Bill!) would wear. That’s Blast from the Past in a nutshell. A 1950s white man comes out of the ground looking like the strapping, milk-fed Brendan Fraser in a shimmering vintage suit. We are led to believe that his courtly manners and limpid-eyed stupidity are a refreshing change of pace in the degenerate times of 1999, what with all its helicopters, rap music, and prostitutes. The structure is somewhat anomalous for a romantic comedy, in that the high-concept setup occupies the first 42 minutes. Only then can a buoyant, prickly Alicia Silverstone enter the picture to embody the real, non-idealized world in all its beauty and complexity.
Blast from the Past, like Catch Me if You Can, is about a lonely kid who gets dreamy-eyed and inspired watching his lithe dad Christopher Walken sexily dance with his (the kid’s) mom. Sissy Spacek, like the mom in the Spielberg movie, grows disillusioned with her charming husband Christopher Walken, but—unlike her French counterpart—she’s literally trapped and buried in a nightmare of nostalgic American domesticity from which there is no escape. So maybe I take back what I said about Brigsby Bear. Even so, Blast from the Past is not the best comedy that uses the Cuban Missile Crisis as its instigating incident. That would be Joe Dante’s Matinee, which is probably streaming somewhere, for all I know. That’s it for comedy. Goodbye forever! From me and the debased genre for which I speak.
Jack Pendarvis’s new novel Sweet Bananas is available in a limited edition from Hingston & Olsen.
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