I Wake Up Streaming: July 2022
Movies
Our regular “I Wake Up Streaming” columnist William Boyle is taking the month of July off. Please welcome back 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.
Hubie Halloween (Netflix)
Has Bill recommended this one before? He made a passing mention of it in this column just last month, as part of a great tribute to his beloved Ray Liotta, who died in May. My attachment to Hubie Halloween has different roots. You see, Theresa and I made a lot of grand, romantic plans for our twenty-fifth anniversary, which happened to occur in 2020, so we ended up watching Hubie Halloween instead. It premiered on the very date, as if Adam Sandler himself were blessing our union from above. There’s a part near the beginning that makes Theresa laugh every time. No spoilers, but it involves Sandler pretending to be an automaton, and it goes on way longer than it should, like a Jerry Lewis gag. Nor is that the only Lewisian aspect of Hubie Halloween. It adheres to the template of a particular kind of Lewis picture, in which a sexphobic man-child is abused and berated for the first 88 minutes and tearfully worshipped by groveling sycophants for the last two. Just the way I like it!
Hello Again (Hulu)
I guess I watched this in 2011, when, according to my blog, it confused and upset me. But a lot of things used to confuse and upset me. Almost everything! Now, Shelley Long does a lot of the things I like, such as sitting in a plate of food and setting a large fish on fire. She shows a real—I’ll use the word again—Lewisian knack for knocking things over and trying to fix them and making them worse. Let us call it unconsciously masochistic public shame of an escalating physical variety, or UMPSEPV. Watching it again, I can’t figure out why I was so baffled, though certainly something is askew. The premise isn’t justified by the story. As predicted by Job and many a Southern Baptist, Shelley Long (who dies early in the plot) hops out of the grave as good as new, not a scratch on her. “And though after my skin worms devour this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” I believe that was on the movie poster. Long exhibits no ability to walk through walls, no compulsion to eat brains, not even an improvement in her coordination—she may as well be back from a long weekend in Maine. Austin Pendleton is the only cast member who knows how to properly scream, “YOU’RE DEAD!” when he sees the deceased stumbling around like Jerry Lewis. A curiosity in the already curious Frank Perry oeuvre. Look him up!
Just Like Heaven (Netflix)
I feel bad for telling you about Hello Again, so I’m going to give you a rec for a more conventionally enjoyable necro-centric romantic comedy. The lore is solid. All your favorite tropes come to bear. Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo are topnotch professionals and they give their work here warmth and commitment. But now I’ve wrecked my theme, which was “movies that start with H.” Ace Atkins once told me that in the eponymous adaptation, Paul Newman changed the name of Ross MacDonald’s famous private eye from Archer to Harper because he, Newman, had a couple of big hits in a row that started with H (Hud and Hombre, I assume) and wanted to keep the ball rolling.
The Happiest Millionaire (Disney+)
I went to Disney World when I was twelve and bought a giant coffee table book by Leonard Maltin about every Disney film. Maltin is persnickety and doesn’t give just any old thing a pass. I was like, “Wow, this Leonard Maltin character doesn’t care who he pisses off! And kudos to the courage of the Walt Disney corporation for allowing this to be sold in their gift shops.” I didn’t say “piss” at the time. But I did say “kudos.” Even then I was fascinated by the film maudit and other aberrations. I still have the book and double checked to make sure that Maltin despised The Happiest Millionaire as much as I recalled. He didn’t. It was something called Bon Voyage that he really tore a new one. I guess I was mixed up because they both starred Fred MacMurray. I poked around, but Disney seems to have buried Bon Voyage good and deep. I had a record of one of the songs from The Happiest Millionaire when I was a kid, though I had never seen it. That song taught me to mispronounce the word “fortuitous,” which I still do in important meetings from time to time. I know how musicals work, and I love them, but these people sing about any damn thing, which makes The Happiest Millionaire longer than a Marvel movie. One guy wants to move to Detroit, so he sings a long song about Detroit. Another guy is Irish, so he sings about that. Everyone in earshot comes capering and grinning to dance an interminable jig. MacMurray plays Elon Musk, I guess. He has big, angry alligators in a room full of bathtubs, his own militia, and a sideline teaching Christians how to box. Leslie Ann Warren really pops. It’s her first movie, but she’s not taking any shit from Elon Musk. She glows. Glows! Some guy who looks like a Sears catalog model in the best way comes in and starts negging her at a ball, and I’m like, wow, they had negging back then. He sings a song, of course. The greatest thing in the movie is the horrible roaring of the alligators. If you’d heard it in a movie theater in 1967, I bet you would have shat your pants. Geraldine Page swans through like, “I’m doing Tennessee Williams!” Fred MacMurray doesn’t give a fuck.
Secret Honor (Criterion Channel)
There’s one H here, but it’s silent. Still, I know Bill would want me to do a Philip Baker Hall movie. Mr. Hall died in June, and his impact on William Boyle’s movie watching was enormous. If Bill were here, he would definitely write about Hard Eight, which starts with an H, but that’s what he gets for going on vacation. Let me begin by stating the obvious: for five years, I spoke into a digital recorder and transcribed the results in a 2500-page book to be published after my death. In it, I had this to say about Philip Baker Hall’s breathtaking solo performance as Richard Nixon: I watched Secret Honor… earlier this evening. And, uh, that’s the Robert Altman movie in which Philip Baker Hall talks into a tape recorder for . . . ninety minutes, so it really struck a chord with me! Uh, and of course he talks about . . . well, I was impressed that Philip Baker Hall starts off by saying, “Uh… uh!” A lot of “Uh.” And I thought, “You nailed it, Robert Altman! That’s how people really talk into a tape recorder!” [Throat clearing. Lip smack.] And of course Nixon is very concerned with matters of, uh, you know, he’s prickly about other people’s wealth. And I thought, “Mm. Am I Richard Nixon?” Uhm… He talks about growing up poor out in the country. But who doesn’t talk about growing up poor out in the country? [Brief beard scratching. Deep breathing.] Philip Baker Hall, he blew a couple of raspberries and I thought, “Yeah, he really knows what it’s like to talk into a tape recorder.” And I comforted myself by creating an aphorism in my head that uhhh… I think I… [unintelligible] did I say it out loud? If so, that’s particularly sad. But I said, uhm . . . “Everybody who talks into a tape recorder becomes Richard Nixon.”
Jack Pendarvis’s novel Sour Blueberries is currently being serialized on Substack. His new chapbook of poetry, Weird Sky, is available now.
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