National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

Merry Christmas, world!

Today my sister introduced me to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989). I'd seen the previous two (Vacation and European Vacation), but never this one somehow. 

Like all the Vacation movies, your appreciation really depends on how much you like Chevy Chase. I happen to not like him EXCEPT for these movies, so I'm in luck. But your mileage may differ - I know plenty of people who can't stand his well-meaning-but-oh-so-dumb persona. 

Here he yet again plays the head of the Griswald clan, and yet again the kids are played by two new kids - Juliette Lewis (!) and Johnny Galecki (!!). And the wife is the lovely Beverly D'Angelo who is pretty fun here. 

In this iteration of the formula, the Griswold family and in-laws (including a very funny Randy Quaid) assemble while various crazy antics play out: Griswald puts up a too-big tree in his living room. Griswald gets stuck in the attic. Griswald puts up an insane Christmas light display. Griswald (sort of) kidnaps his boss. Griswald Griswald Griswald. 

I especially like how he inadvertently tortures his yuppie neighbors (Julie Louis-Dreyfus and Nicholas Guest). 

This movie has a few very funny moments - his speech when he receives his "bonus" ... a few great facial expressions and reaction shots ... and a few total dud moments too (the entire opening I find almost unbearable). 

It's difficult to really describe or review a gag movie like this, so I won't try too hard. It made good money back in 1989, costing $27 mil to make and bringing back $71. The script is another gem by John Hughes, and the director is veteran TV director Jeremiah Chechik, who is probably best known for Benny & Joon. 

Nice piece of '80s trivia: the truck he races in the opening scene is Kurt Russell's work truck from Overboard (1987 and a particular favorite of your blogger, being the first movie my family saw on our VHS player). 

And sad to say, the tremendous Lindsay Buckingham song "Holiday Road" is not featured anywhere in this movie. A real loss. 

The Natural (1984)

The Natural (1984) is in the running for the Best Baseball Novel of all time; the book, by Bernard Malamud, is significantly different than the movie in various ways which I won't get into here - or else this blog will double in size as every Stephen King movie etc. will need a book review attached as well. The movie, of course, was a major hit in the early 80s - it cost around $28 million to make and brought back $47 million - almost doubling its cost. It cycled constantly on Fox when I was a kid, and I can't tell you how many times I saw it. 

The movie opens with a kid playing casual baseball with his dad, and being told he "has a gift." Then the father dies, and a giant storm knocks down a tree. The son takes the wood and fashions ... WONDERBOY. The most famous baseball bat in cinema! Probably the only named one, too. 

As a kid playing baseball in the '80s, WONDERBOY (yes, it always must be spelled in all caps) was mythic in the extreme. I knew several kids who earned their woodburning badge in Boy Scouts carving some similar name into their own store-bought Louisville Sluggers. Don Mattingly edition bat? Hell, no. Those bats were "Slaughterbat" or "Home Runn" or just a bunch of lightning bolts and crosses and stuff. 

Sadly, as The Natural makes clear, if you name a bat something special it better be made from a damned supertree downed by superlightning in a superstorm right after someone superdies. Anything less and you just got a bat from Dick's Sporting Goods with some charring on it. 

Roy Hobbs, our hero, is played by Robert Redford in one of his more/less iconic roles. The movie proper begins when he is challenged to strike out The Whammer - a major league star modeled clearly after Babe Ruth - at a country fair. The Whammer is portrayed by Joe Don Baker, who is perfect for the role. Witness to the whole event is Robert Duvall, who is actually pretty poorly cast as sportswriter Max Mercy. 

Hobbs makes his way to the big leagues ... but not before he is shot and almost killed by Barbara Hersey, in an incident sadly modeled on the real life shooting of baseball player Eddie Waitkus by obsessed fan Ruth Ann Steinhagen in 1949. Once in the big leagues, he experiences some doldrums before finally earning his true fate as a megahero in the final moments. The ending of the book is ... significantly different, and much better. 

The movie is long, too long, at 137 minutes. Yet it's not because it throws everything into the pot - on the contrary, many scenes just drag on and on. Poorly directed is our conclusion here, by Barry Levinson. Levinson is very well known for Diner, Young Sherlock Holmes, Tin Men, Good Morning Vietnam, Rain Man, Avalon, Bugsy, Toys (!), Sleepers, Wag the Dog, and a few others. Needless to say, he is capable of making good movies ... but this one somehow just doesn't mesh well. 

It has its moments - Hobbs hits the hide right off the ball; Hobbs knocks out the scoreboard; Hobbs' tryout where every ball seems to go 600 feet; etc. But all in all, there is FAR too much slow motion footage of strikeouts or homeruns or strikes or swings etc. You can really tell that Redford doesn't know the first thing about baseball and they are desperately trying to cover this up with clever cuts which come across as sad and stupid. 

Most intriguing is that the story is pretty closely based on the legends of King Arthur, and specifically Sir Percival. The broken bat = broken sword, Pop Fisher = Fisher King, the team is called The Knights, etc etc etc. (thanks to IMDB for the aforementioned examples). But the movie plays this a little too heavily and in-your-face, and the movie doesn't need it. 

Instead, the movie does best when it has Big Moments. Hobbs impressing Pop to get on the team. Hobbs and any of his various famous home runs. Etc. I wonder if maybe the 137 minutes are due to so much damned slow motion to accentuate all the Big Sports Moments. 

Great tidbit - during the moments when they show Hobbs making the headlines, the copy beneath the headlines isn't about baseball but, instead, bass fishing, a religious service, and a New York Giant fan (thanks again to IMBC trivia). 

But despite my complaints, it's still regarded as a pretty good movie, and I guess it is, in a way. I was ruined after reading the book, which treats things much differently and more realistically. The film embiggens everything, but at great cost. 

I recommend The Natural, and it's one of the better non-comedy baseball movies out there, but it's no Eight Men Out (next to be reviewed) or Bull Durham (also coming soon). 

Mr. Mom (1983)

From the production office of Aaron Spelling, circa 1983, comes ...  Mr. Mom (1983)!

This is one of a few gender role reversal movies from the 80s - 3 Men and a Baby (1987), Baby Boom (1987), Tootsie (1982, and the best of them), Victor/Victoria (1982), and probably Yentl (1983). In this one a fresh-faced Michael Keaton - in his first top-billed role - is furloughed as a car plant exec and forced to stay home and take care of the kids while his rising corporate exec wife - Teri Garr, who I always like in everything she does - goes off to the office and succeeds massively. 

The rest of the plot kind of writes itself - he struggles in the grocery store, she struggles with sexist coworkers, he struggles with crazy kids, she struggles with the glass ceiling, etc etc etc. Not much to really report here, not worth rehashing in any detail. 

Keaton is good, naturally funny and easygoing and really lives in the role. You totally believe he's just learning to do this "kid" thing. The movie was written by John Hughes - his second screenplay after National Lampoon's Class Reunion - and so it's filled with a lot of the usual John Hughesian hallmarks - families in turbulence, a cynical look at corporate America, the inevitable conflicts between work and home, parents and kids, husband and wife, etc. And, as usual, he finds a boatload of humor in it and brings it out sharply. 

The supporting cast is incredible - Martin Mull, Jeffrey Tambor, Ann Jillian, Christopher Lloyd, Fred Koehler, Edie McClurg, every corner of the movie is inhabited by some familiar face you know and, sometimes, love. 

One downside is the music. Not having seen this in many years, when the opening credits came on to a late-70s sit-com flutey little tune I was sorely disappointed. The music is - no offense to the composer - strictly TV quality. 

The movie was a huge, huge hit - according to Wikipedia it brought home $64,000,000 domestic, which was enough for studio execs to wisely say "That John Hughes... let's sign him, BUT QUICK." Which they did, to a three movie deal, and those three movies turned out to be Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science - three films in the upper upper pantheon of '80s film. 

The director is Stan Dragoti, who made only six pictures in twenty years, or roughly one every three years. Besides Mr. Mom, his other well known movie is The Man With One Red Shoe (1985), which is a great farce starring Michael Keaton's arch-nemesis Tom Hanks. Bill Simmons of Grantland.com has a great thesis that certain actors end up competing for the same roles, with the inevitable result that only one can succeed. He claims Keaton and Hanks were two that competed for the same positions until ultimately Hanks turned on the turbo and "won." 

However, the two movies Dragoti made last are the ones I knew best after this one - She's Out of Control (1989) and Necessary Roughness (1991). We'll get to the former in the course of this blog. 

I was surprised that Mr. Mom only gets a ~6/10 on IMDB. When I was a kid it was a movie pretty much everyone knew and liked and nobody would have said it was less than average. I would have guessed 7/10 at least. Very strange. 

Either way, if you haven't seen it it's worth a watch for the John Hughes script alone. There are hints of Home Alone and Uncle Buck and other later movies strewn throughout, which is a real joy for an '80s/'90s movie fan. Check it out.