April 30, 2004

If you love your domain name, set it free. If it comes back to you (after five hours of insane scrambling to make sure that some Asian company that is just looking to hold you up for some quick cash doesn't get it before you can renew your ownership), it belongs to you. If not, it never did (despite for those couple of years when you found a day to drives tens of thousands of people to bookmark you and visit each day)…

The internet bust visited our sleepy Hot Button village again yesterday, as the friend who was kind enough to help set up the URL a few years back - but whose internet business went bust - left the e-mail reminding us to pay for more years of URL ownership to float into the ether of former e-mail addresses that no longer exist. Fortunately, Ms. Rooney, parnter and managing editor of both sites, got the problem resolved in a flash and here we are.

I'm writing the column from my airline seat, as I travel to Troy, New York, which is actually in Manhattan, on Central Park South this weekend. It's a junket for one of the summer's biggest movies, Troy. Oh to travel cross-country for a little chatter! Traveling up in first class is Paul Bloch, one of the few people in the world whose job makes his name a pun. He is Brad Pitt's publicist, amongst many other high flyers who need someone with a lot of experience saying, "No comment."

Fortunately, among my many activities this weekend, I'll also be checking out DreamWorks' SharkTale preview and Disney's Raising Helen premiere at the TriBeCa film festival. If lucky, I'll get to see Melissa Leo live on stage off-Broadway as she follows up her 21 Grams of fame with what is sure to be another great performance. And if really lucky, I'll get to The Bronx to see The Bombers and catch a foul ball.

Meanwhile, Ben Affleck and Paul Giammati are on the screen, working for a Paycheck. That's why I have endless time to write the column. How much do you think Mr. Affleck would pay to have this last couple of years erased from his memory and still be able to keep the paycheck?

MEAN GIRLS is a mean-tiocrity. For me, it lives in the land of movies that disappoint increasingly as the reels change. (Yes, platters… I know… what's a meta phor if not for this?)

I am reminded of an article about Harold Ramis written by Tad Friend in last week's New Yorker in which Mr. Friend, perhaps in ignorance, perhaps intentionally, all buch sucked the skin of Harold's comedic penis. Thing is, Harold Ramis is an overlooked genius in the long history of film comedy. On the other hand, Friend's utter unwillingness to appreciate the period of comedy in which Ramis worked… the very real give and take of his co-writers, who are essentially written off… the collective nature of Second City, which Ramis learned how to play and the New York National Lampoon reviews, where the true unsung genius belonged to Chris Guest far more so than Ramis… and the general mode of comedy in wartime, which is not something that Ramis created.

Don't get me wrong, Harold Ramis is one of my favorite filmmakers - regardless of the misses - and one of my favorite Hollywood types in general. Good old "HR44" was part of an AOL clique that I was once party to, along with Mark Ebner (who writes briefly about it in "Hollywood, Interrupted") and a wide array of still-should-be-unnamed writers, directors, editors, producers, assistants, etc, etc that was eventually invaded by an uninvited crowd of wannabes. He was a good guy in that room. Gentle, funny and accessible. But he still didn't invent the 60s.

But I digress…

The difference between the comedies that Ramis always seemed to be around, from Animal House to Stripes to Caddyshack to Ghostbusters - and the "raunchy" comedies today is that today's comedies just don't have the balls to go for it anymore. When they do accept the idea of being R-rated, the humor is rarely based on being funny first and feeling free to push it to the wall second, but rather, trying to be the grossest comedy on the block. Perhaps we should blame the Farrellys, who made true 70's style comedies like There's Something About Mary, Kingpin and Dumb and Dumber (not in that order) before succumbing to the allure of maintaining their huge early popularity and being emasculated in the process. Another article in that New Yorker is about the possible Three Stooges movie, which seems like a vehicle to really get them back to their roots. (By the way, Peter Farrelly's The Comedy Writer is one on the great comedic novels I have ever read, albeit so within my personal range of experience, every thought expressed felt like home. It's not Nabakov. But still, well worth a read.)

The trouble with Mean Girls is three-pronged. Tina Fey doesn't know a whit about story structure. She is a fine joke and sketch writer. But the muscles are different and it shows here. Secondly, director Mark Waters was out of his depth. And finally, the film just doesn't quite go for it enough.

All of this is incredibly frustrating since the casting was quite good, the idea was solid as mahogany (if you are willing to accept the genre) and every once in a while, they found their key and were not, as Randy Jackson might say, pitchy in the least.

Also, it is a kind of cool notion that there can be, in this new era, movies that answer the male mindset of the 70s Lampooner-led movies with a female mindset. Lindsay Lohan couldn't work her 17year-old cleavage any harder if she were Jayne Mansfield sitting next to Sophia Loren. The camera is never very far from the possibility of letting the audience know not only what kind of undergarments the young women choose to wear, but what their preferences in pubic hair design might be.

But why this is all more than a turn-on for Dirty Uncle Dave is that the girls own this self-exploitation… very much as the women of The Sweetest Thing owned theirs. (Once again, a movie that could have been wonderful were it not for the tendency to go too far without much cause other than the urge to push the envelope.) It is very much the same thing as Bill Murray or John Belushi owning their slovenliness in those early 70s films. Or Rodney Dangerfield owning his in Back To School, which is very much from that canon.

All the conceptual ideas are there. Central story… strong secondary characters who contribute both big laughs and the moments of poignant insight… and out and out rage at the system.

So what's missing? Tina Fey's breasts.

Okay, settle down! It's not her specific breasts. It is the real threat of breasts. It is the difference between Chevy Chase drinking a really big glass of scotch in Caddyshack versus snorting lines of cocaine with Ted Knight's naked niece before they go skinny-dipping. One thing was and is for sure. I don't want to see Chevy Chase's penis. But the threat added to the dangerousness of that film. PJ Soles didn't have to be topless after getting the spatula treatment from Bill Murray in Stripes… but it helped. And not just because she was a sexy girl. There was threat.

In Mean Girls, one of the first gags is Tina Fey, as a teacher, getting soaked as she goes into her classroom. As she tries to take off her sweater or sweatshirt or whatever, she also pulls up the now-wet t-shirt that was meant to maintain her modesty… just as the principal walks in.

So the gag is that her bra is exposed. Then, the topper is that her shirt, once pulled back down, is wet and thus, see-through. How much bigger a joke is it if she, once wet, goes into the empty hallway to deal with her top… sees the principal, frustrated… pulls off her sweatshirt and the undershirt, completely exposing her breasts to him and him alone, perhaps without knowing and without him ever acknowledging it, other to leer at her a she struggles with the sweatshirt, not really helping. Somehow, her t-shirt gets readjusted, he walks away, still denying he saw anything and she re-enters her classroom, confident that she has averted disaster, unaware that her t-shirt is now completely see-through and that her class is catching an eyeful. Even Tina Fey's "damn it, I'm a nerd, regardless of my $300 haircut!" attitude could play as she realizes that they are seeing everything and decides to just keep going. In fact, it could be played as an asset for this teacher who has low self-esteem, now getting acknowledged as being a woman in her student's eyes.

A boob joke, you object? Ok. But when Bill Murray's Peter Venkman is shocking the nerd and flirting with the blonde, you know that it's not just flirting, but a step on the road to something really dirty.

The other example of this phenomenon that I recently encountered was on the set of New Line's upcoming The Wedding Crashers, with Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn and Chris Walken. There is an old lady, the matriarch of a conservative family, who says extreme things, including saying to her caretaking butler, "Get your hands off of me, asshole." The butler is in his late 50s and black and responds by saying something like, "It's okay… I think of her calling me that and just laugh and laugh."

The point is, the joke really should be that she says, "Get your hands off of me, nigger," just as someone from her generation would have grown up saying. That word, to which so many have become so sensitive, was standard issue insult just a couple of generations ago. So much so that it was casual. And this woman who comes out and calls her grandson a few variations of "faggot," blaming his sexual status for family troubles, is far more likely to be comfortable with "nigger" than "asshole." In fact, I didn't really believe that she thought this man was an asshole. "Get your hands off me, asshole" strikes me as something you say to a stranger. And the butler's reaction… it also seems to be time-worn and more intimate than "asshole" would support. All which is my way of saying that the truth of that vulgar usage is what makes it funnier. And you can feel it.

The Phoebe Cates bikini removal scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High could have been okay without her taking her top off. After all, Judge Reinhiold's character was masturbating to his idea of her, not reality. But the reality of what he would imagine, combined with the harshness of acknowledging his need to masturbate in a nearby bathroom a few seconds after he walks past his sister's bikini-clad friend… that is why the scene is a classic. It may be dirty… but it is true.

These days, the gag would not involve her going topless, but some suntan oil rubbing. And the boy's embarrassment would be an erection he was trying to cover, not an aggressive act of onaism during which he is caught by the object of his lust.

Of course, there are movies that go grosser. But even that is not as good as the "great old days" because those gags ring false.

There was a relatively subtle gag in Animal House in which the guys, completely off-screen, masturbate or pee into some frat house punch. The joke is when one of the evil kids says something like, "This punch has a zing… what is it…. It tastes familiar…." Honestly, I don't remember whether it was a woman or man who had the line. That gag has since been repeated many times. But when Van Wilder - not to be confused with Van Helsing, in which Hugh Jackman fights a wolfman with enormous testicles - does a gag about masturbating a dog and using the semen as crème filling for éclairs and having endless amounts of the filling….

Well, it is overly gross, but more importantly, it is unbelievable. It got a shock laugh in theaters and surely it does on DVD at colleges around America still. But only a bull produces that much semen. And maybe the same gag, with bumpers about the dean's prize bull and the $5000 expense of that "lost" semen which left the bull unable to perform stud duties… I don't know what might have made that extreme joke more real. But Harold Ramis and his brethren would have built the joke into more than the simple grotesquery it is.

Mean Girls, in the end, just isn't mean enough. The nerds are not nerdy enough. The teachers are not screwed up enough. The parents, with the exception of Amy Pohler's stand out insane "I'm one of the girls" mother - one of whose riffs, ironically, is a breast implant joke that manages to go too far and not far enough - are neither grounded or crazy enough.

As I recall, Heathers, one of the prototypes of this film, didn't actually have any nudity. But it sure felt dangerous. The skirts weren't as short and the tops weren't as tight, but you really believed that the Heathers were smoking, drinking and sexing at their whim. In Mean Girls, there is a joke about one girl who "gave everything" to one boy… but if the joke was supposed to be that she agreed to anal sex in an effort to be cool, we didn't get it or believe it. While in Election, we knew… KNEW… that Reese Witherspoon's character not only had sex with her teacher, but left him begging her for more of whatever she delivered above and beyond young flesh.

And the joke can be crude without being at all obvious. One of my favorite gags in Animal House is Blutarsky peeping in the sorority window. It is completely unreal. The slamming of the ladder against the side of the house would have given him away. But we go with the spirit of the gag. And when he sees the girl of his dreams, not only does she take off her top, the relationship is "deepened" by the recognition that this perfect sorority automaton masturbates after an unsatisfying date with Greg "Can't Get It Up Even With The Surgical Gloves" Marmalard. Some don't agree, but the topper, it seems to me, is that Blutarsky and his ladder fall away, pushed back by his raging erection, which he barely notices in his lustful trance.

You won't find a dirtier scene in any movie, short of graphic imagery. But it is right out of Harold Lloyd by way of Harpo Marx.

It's much like The Girl Next Door and Elisha Cuthbert, who played the most chaste and clothed porn star in R-rated movie history. (Didn't anyone at Fox see the sex scene on the El in Risky Business?) And again, I maintain that it is not so much the seeing of breasts… as Judge Reinhold and Cameron Crowe can tell you, guys can strip a woman in their heads without her assistance… it is the truth that the relaxed reality brings to the film. You see very little in, for instance, No Way Out or Body Heat. But a glimpse here of there, establishing the threat, made every sex scene seem like it was graphic and unrestrained.

The flip side is also equally dangerous. As a red-blooded male, I am interested in watching Bijou Phillips get naked and perform sex acts on film. She is one of the sexier actresses working today. But her willingness to bare it all and to assume virtually any position has never been enough to make any film she has made worth watching. I worry a bit for Anne Hathaway… not because she is choosing to do nudity, but because it is in a Bijou Phillips movie… the mark of a pervy middle-aged man at the helm.

Like the éclair gag, nudity is not a solution. It is only an element. And when it fits the drama, even in a comedy, if it is hidden, the false note is trouble. You don't need anything like it in a movie, say, like Raising Helen, which stars Kate Hudson as a randy young modeling agent wannabe. We buy her flakiness without it becoming overtly sexual. (And please note also… there is no overt nudity in Pretty Woman at all… yet, we take the ride and buy the whole thing. It is a case where is really wasn't necessary. But in that case, if we really saw Julia Roberts as a prostitute… really a prostitute… the film, as it was, would have fallen apart. It was a fairy tale, not Mona Lisa.)

There is one gag in Mean Girls that comes close to some sort of insane magic. The dumb girl - I don't have the notes or imdb access on this plane - thinks she can forecast the weather based on touching her own breasts. The gag, done twice, gets laughs. But without ever taking this girl's shirt off, there is a home run there that could have been mined. One of the popular girls, dumb as a rock, is unrelentingly obsessed with her own breasts… maybe the rest of her body as well. She just loves touching herself. Maybe she doesn't like guys touching her. They don't do it right. They don't appreciate just how hot she is. But she knows. It's a variation on the "embarrassing friend you still keep around because they are so funny" gag. She's so hot that she needs to be in the "Plastics," but she really embarrasses them with her self-obsession. In fact, the third girl, the Jewish beauty, hates herself. Ah, balance. But she isn't fully exploited in the film either. What does a girl who doesn't think she is as beautiful as she is do for attention from boys?

Sigh…

Comedy is undervalued. And it is harder to do well than drama. Because we give drama some license for exaggeration and, well, drama. But a laugh… you can't force a laugh. And a memorable laugh… well… the absurdity of Python… it's still about truth. Arguing over a dead parrot may seem silly, but one guys wants a refund and the other wants to keep the money, and that is real. Every sperm is sacred! Lumberjacks do seem butch and gay sometimes. Fights in movies do seem to go on even when the participants are too injured, limb after severed limb. There were a lot of sects of varying religious beliefs at the time of Jesus… and Brian. Etc, etc, etc.

Paramount didn't need to spend $100 million to make Mean Girls better. They just needed to get to the heart of the matter. Tina Fey's breasts. Maybe next time.

E ME: The Weekend Is Here!!! What you gonna do about it?