My Favorite Piece of Movie Trivia Ever. Ever.

Posted on June 13th, 2011 by Adam-Troy Castro

A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro

My love for Laurel and Hardy is well-known, which is why it’s so wonderful, really, that I once, sort, of, got to meet the characters they played.

If you love Laurel and Hardy too, enough to treasure their shorts, you will know that neither character really bullied the other. Sometimes they fought, in those remarkably gentlemanly slow-motion fights where one would pour maple syrup down the other’s pants and the other would lead him over to a circular saw and dismember his hat, but once the point was made and the scales were evened, neither kept the abuse up. (The humor came from neither one being satisfied with letting the other have the last word.)

Still, Hardy was always YELLING at Laurel.

And if you love their short films, you will be baffled by one that doesn’t fit the usual pattern: One Good Turn, where Laurel gets so exasperated at Hardy that he throws a violent fit, throwing stuff at Hardy until Hardy seeks cover in a shed that collapses on top of him.

Not at all what they usually did. More Three Stooges than Laurel and Hardy.

Why would they depart from their formula so dramatically?

Well, there is a home movie that exists, that I have seen, of Stan and Babe at Stan’s home, where Babe affectionately picks up Stan’s pre-school daughter and places her on his lap. The little girl starts screaming and squirming. Babe Hardy laughs indulgently and puts her back down. Even in the five second clip, he is visibly confused over what he did to upset her. This is an actual clip. It is included as a DVD extra in some of their compilations.

As it happens, the little girl grew up, became a woman, and still remembered that very day. She remembered being very conflicted about her Uncle Babe, even though she knew, knew, that he loved her.

The explanation is that she couldn’t reconcile that nice man who adored her with the fuming, mean man who she had seen, on film, yelling at and slapping around her father.

In real life, the little girl’s ambivalence toward her Uncle Babe went on for months, breaking Babe’s heart, until somebody in one of the two families twigged to what was upsetting her.

So that short where Stan acts out of character and wallops the hell out of Ollie?

That was them, tailoring the story as a gift to Stan’s daughter.

And from then on, everything was okay.

Tags: Laurel and Hardy | Category Uncategorized

How To Avoid Assholes At the Movies

Posted on June 7th, 2011 by Adam-Troy Castro

A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro

(Written in response to a guy who says he never goes to movies anymore, because all the audiences are so disruptive).

One way to avoid assholes: see smarter movies.

I am 100% serious about this.

See a movie about a muscle-bound thug on a mission of vengeance, slitting the throats of Mafiosi, and you will encounter assholes.

See a movie about a bunch of guys who suffer a drunken blackout in a strange city and have a series of adventures related to bodily fluids, and you will encounter assholes.

See a movie about a guy with a sword cutting up CGI monsters, and you will encounter assholes.

See a movie with more than five explosions in it, and you will encounter assholes.

See a movie about a superhero, and you will encounter assholes.

Please note: good movies of all these kinds can be made…but even in those cases, that which makes them good movies for the rest of us is also what makes them attractive movies to assholes.

Assholes of the particular type we’re talking about do not go to sensitive dramas, or period films, or foreign films; assholes of a different kind can certainly be found there, but the kind I’m talking about? If they somehow do wonder into a movie of substance that requires intelligence and nuance, they usually wander out.

There honestly weren’t many people cat-calling, texting, fighting, throwing popcorn, and in general acting like total subhumans, at THE KING’S SPEECH, WINTER’S BONE, FAIR GAME, MICHAEL CLAYTON, THE LIVES OF OTHERS, PAN’S LABYRINTH, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD, and TRUE GRIT. The actual sense that the movies in question might require some humanity in the audience served as sufficient filter to keep out those who do not live with humanity in their actual lives.
 
I do not fear the prospect of encountering loud and disruptive audiences at Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE. Just a hunch…!

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Meet The Hollowheads (1989)

Posted on June 6th, 2011 by Adam-Troy Castro

A Remake Chronicles Extra by Adam-Troy Castro

I have encountered a strange movie, 1989’s Meet the Hollowheads, which is actually pretty goddamned bad but which for sheer weirdness of conception everybody seeing these words needs to investigate and watch, if only the first twenty minutes or so. I couldn’t turn the fuckin’ thing off, despite its awfulness; it’s one of those movies where the fascination is that got made at all.

Meet the Hollowheads  is a strange parody of a 1950s sitcom, except that the family lives in a nightmare environment at the center of the Earth, and the family’s idea of comforting normalcy is downright grotesque to our eyes. For instance, the after-school snack Mom makes for her son and his best friend consists of a squirming kind of mutant cockroach that she cuts into fourths, wraps in a kind of bready substance that unspools from a toilet paper roll, and smears with a plegmy white paste. The kids are delighted to get it. The dinner she prepares is a kind of horrifically grasping tentacle that emerges from a tube on the wall and tries to grab her before she amputates it and cuts it into slices.

There’s more: telephones are corrugated tubing. The family “dog” is a hideous canine parody so infested with ticks that the kids delight in pulling them off and using them as slingshot ammunition. All food staples are pumped into the house through pipes from an industrial facility ruled by Throw Momma From The Train’s Anne Ramsey. Another family pet, unremarked-upon by anybody, is an eyeball that pops out of what looks like a mound of intestines and reacts to react to every momentary development. On an errand “outside,” we learn that the family dwells in absolute darkness and that much is made of the dangers of “falling over the edge.” Nor is the movie content to show us a few manifestations of the strangeness and then move on; no, a new incredibly bizarre wrinkle must occur every thirty seconds or so.

The plot has something to do with family Dad John Glover bringing his typically stern Mr. Slate-like boss home for dinner, and Mom struggling to get everything ready in time, while daughter Juliette Lewis prepares for a big date. The boss is a leering sexual predator in a purple suit, whose every movement is accompanied by a lion’s roar. In the end, they strap him in a chair in the basement, for the rest of his life, and feed him with green glop from a hypodermic.

I repeat, it ain’t a good movie. A sequence where the Lewis character primps for her date, trying on weirder and weirder outfits while the editing goes into montage mode, is particularly awful. But it is not a dull bad movie, either. Anything that makes my jaw drop that much in the first forty minutes (before the lateness of the hour intruded and I had to go to bed), just because I could not believe the small industrial enterprise that went into making it, cannot POSSIBLY be all bad.

Recommended? Well, not quite. But it is the kind of movie you need to watch with your strangest and wittiest friends.

Tags: Anne Ramsey, Juliette Lewis, Meet the Hollowheads, Throw Momma From The Train | Category Uncategorized