Friday Snapshot - January 31
Big-hearted immigrant stories, Pee-Wee memories, and badass Blake Lively
It’s Friday, January 31, 2020, and here’s where we are…
We’re about a month into this, and I’m getting ready to turn on the paid subscription option. I’m not entirely sure what will be offered for free, but I’m sure that this Friday Snapshot and the other regular features I’ve introduced, including Adventures on the Plex Server and Reading the Weather, will be part of the paid subscription model. Every Saturday, I’ll still put up a Free-For-All where anyone can comment and participate, but only subscribers will be able to comment under my other pieces.
I think the plan is that I’ll rotate through some of the regular features, making them free occasionally, since I hope I’ll continue to bring new subscribers aboard. Part of that is going to depend on you guys sharing the word about what you’re reading if you enjoy it.
This week, I was not given the chance to screen Gretel & Hansel. That’s a shame. I like Oz Perkins. I think he’s a smart, serious horror filmmaker. I’ll look forward to his take on dark fairy tales and I’ll definitely see it at some point. Still, there’s been plenty to watch in the meantime.
Pee-Wee’s Anniversary Show
A couple of months ago, my girlfriend sent me an e-mail announcing ticket sales for an event where Paul Reubens would be screening Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure as part of its 35th anniversary. Most of the time, I look at an announcement like that and think, “That would be fun,” and then I don’t go.
This time, though, I made the effort. I know how much Pee-Wee means to her, and I feel much the same way about the character. We raised both of the boys on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and Big Adventure was a big hit with both of them when we watched it as part of Film Nerd 2.0. For Toshi, one of his earliest memories was getting to see Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Live when it toured. We went to the opening night here in LA, and afterward, we went to a small Q&A, where Toshi got to talk directly to Pee-Wee. It was amazing, and he talked about it for months and months after it happened. These days, it’s more of an “I know about this because you tell me it happened” thing for him, so I thought it would be great to go and see Reubens live again.
I didn’t know when I got the tickets that it was part of a larger tour, or that we were seeing the opening night, a sort of out-of-town preview. It turned out to be a very special evening, and while I originally thought we were going to see Reubens in character, I prefer the evening we ended up having instead. Before the film, they screened the MTV coverage of the premiere of the film, and it was incredible to watch what can only be described as a non-stop barrage of mid-level quasi-celebrities we have almost completely forgotten at this point, along with a few really familiar faces. I loved seeing Eddie Murphy’s arrival as much as I loved watching Fee Waybill struggle to make sense of Pee-Wee handing him popcorn while he’s still behind the wheel of his car. It was all hilarious. Seeing the actual film for the first time in a while and seeing it in a theater with a crowd was delightful, and a reminder of just how well that movie plays. Unlike a lot of comedies, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is throwing new ideas at you all the way through, and it does it with charm and style to spare.
After the film ended, there was a fifteen-minute break, and they set up a single chair, a coffee table, and a microphone. Then, finally, Paul Reubens walked out in a lovely purple suit, carrying a thick stack of paper. After a long standing ovation, we finally settled in and he proceeded to speak for a full hour and forty minutes. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s a precise measurement. Well, okay, he spoke for an hour thirty-five, and then he came back out for a very special encore I won’t describe because you really should just see him do it live. But still… the movie’s only 90 minutes. So the after-show was a full second half to the evening, and it was absolutely amazing. I have always been fascinated by the history of Pee-Wee as a character, and by Paul Reubens as a member of the Groundlings and a stand-up performer in Los Angeles. I love his appearances in the early Cheech & Chong films, and I love the way so many of the Groundlings from that era created these characters that they fully inhabited. He spoke about those early days, and about his collaborators like John Paragon, Edie McClurg, the great Lynne Marie Stewart, and, of course, Phil Hartman, and he talked about how the opportunity came together for the Pee-Wee Herman movie. At that point, The Pee-Wee Herman Show had already been a huge hit in Los Angeles for a while, and it had aired on HBO, which is where I remember seeing it. They convinced him to tour, just to prove that he could sell tickets in more than one city, and as soon as he did that, Warner Bros. made a deal with him to make the film.
It’s not appropriate for me to transcribe all of his stories here. After all, he’s taking this on the road, and you have plenty of opportunities to see him do this live. He also mentioned that he’s been working on a book about his life as Pee-Wee Herman, and so those stories should belong to him. They’re great, and many of them directly contradict the versions of the stories that are out there on places like the IMDb and Wikipedia. If you didn’t live through the height of Pee-Wee mania, it’s hard to grasp just how big it was. But there was a point where he was a huge celebrity, the kind that other celebrities wanted to meet simply because he was so singular, so instantly recognizable, and that really did all come together perfectly in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. As much as the film depends on Paul Reubens giving the performance of his lifetime, there are some other key puzzle pieces. That script by Phil Hartman, Reubens, and Michael Varhol, is rock-solid in terms of structure but profoundly weird in every other way. It’s such a beautifully-realized world, and every character just automatically understands the rules of it and their place in it, and no one questions Pee-Wee at all, or any of the other wonderful weird characters, which only makes the world funnier. None of it would work if they hadn’t found Tim Burton, and that was kind of a last-minute Hail Mary for Reubens. Warner Bros. hired a different director (who Reubens was polite enough not to name) and Reubens had to do a gut check when he decided it wasn’t the right guy. He didn’t have someone else in mind yet, but he knew that guy wasn’t the right guy, and he had to tell the studio no. They gave him a week to find a replacement, and he ended up talking to Shelly Duvall, who put him together with Burton, who was at that point still known for his short films and for his steadfast refusal of anything the studios sent to him. Warner was convinced Burton wouldn’t even read the script, but somehow, Reubens was the one who finally got through to him. It was also Reubens who insisted, even before he wrote a script, that whatever film he made had to have a score by Danny Elfman, who really had only done Forbidden Zone at that point. He knew what he had in his head, and he had faith that he knew exactly who could execute that very particular vision, and god bless him, look how right he was. That combination of Burton and Elfman and Reubens is magic, all three of them executing perfectly, one big shared brain created out of three very strange ones.
Again… if you can go to this, you should go to this. If not, it sounds like he’s going to find a way to get some sort of anniversary celebration out there for people, and like he’s in a reflective place these days. There were rumors today that the Safdies are going to make The Pee-Wee Herman Story, a project he’s been talking about and developing since at least 1999, but I’m hearing that is not the case. He’s talked to a lot of filmmakers about the project over the years, and he’ll keep talking it up until the right person ends up jumping on it. He has always described it as the “dark and grown-up” Pee-Wee Herman film, constantly mentioning Valley of the Dolls. It’s a smart comparison, but the script’s less insane than you might think from that description. It certainly doesn’t feel like it’s going to destroy the character or ruin the brand at all. Whoever finally makes it, it feels very much on the page like it’s another trip into that world that Paul Reubens has been sharing with us now for over 35 years, and I hope it does happen. If not… well, this live event was a gorgeous coda to all the other joy I’ve gotten from him over the years, and he seemed quite moved by the experience. He got emotional several times, and I’m sure he’ll only get more engaged and excited as the tour progresses.
I’ll share one small thing I never knew: the bike on the poster for the film, an image I’ve seen a million times, which you can see here…
… is not the bike in the film. Instead, that’s the bike that Warner Bros gave to Paul while he was working on the lot, originally writing an entirely different version of the film that was based on Pollyanna. Paul started riding his bike around the lot, and that’s where Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was born. He was photographed on his personal bike before they ever started production, and they ended up using that photo for the poster, figuring no one would notice. I never did. There are a ton of details on the bike in the film that are missing from the one you see on the poster, and considering how much I love the film, how many times I’ve seen this poster, and how iconic the bike itself is, I feel like a total dolt for never noticing.
Man, that was a great night.
Little America
I can draw a very clean line in the way I process art using the moment my first son was born. Before that, I was much more analytical about the way things affected me, and after that, I have basically become a big blubbery mess. I was always the king of the Iron Eyes Cody single tear before my son was born. I would watch something, I would be greatly moved, and I would let that one tear sneak out. Now when a movie connects to me in the right way, I can get full-on weepy. It was like a switch got thrown, and now I don’t really have a way to turn it off.
What moves me most, and what gets me to cry the most readily, is kindness. When I see something that is about recognizing someone else’s humanity, something that is powered by people being kind to other people or showing empathy to other people, it gets me. It gets me because I think I spent so much of my young life being unkind. I have a cutting wit, and I can a quick-tempered shit about it. That’s something that is wired into me, and it’s something I spent many, many years unlearning. You don’t have to say the mean thing that you think just because you think it, and you don’t have to say it just because it’s funny, and funny doesn’t excuse mean, even if it’s really, really funny. So much of our pop culture is reflexively mean, and uses that mean as a way of keeping an emotional distance from things. Irony makes it easy to not feel things.
Little America has a number of proud parents, and they have every reason to be proud. It is an anthology series that is brimming over with kindness and empathy and beauty, and it is episode-for-episode one of the strongest anthology shows I’ve ever seen. It is so common for a show like this to have a few good episodes, a few bad episodes, and then some filler, but in the eight-episode first season that is currently streaming on Apple TV+, there are no weak episodes. Every single one is a stand-alone gem, and I find that the whole damn thing gets me weepy, and not just at the punchlines. There’s a huge-hearted decency to the premise of the entire enterprise that kind of slays me.
Kumail Nanjiani, Alan Yang, Lee Eisenberg, Emily V. Gordon, Joshuah Bearman and Joshua Davis have created a place for immigrants to tell stories about their American experiences, and each episode has a different perspective on the place where all of our cultures meet. My ex-wife worked in immigration law the entire time we were together, and during that time, she not only became a citizen, but so did her mother and her sister. So for over a decade, I got a very close look at the way the system does and doesn’t work. I met families from around the world at various points in their own process, and I heard wild stories about what people were running from, what people were running to, and what they thought America was. This show feels like all of those conversations, but perfectly captured, perfectly presented. I don’t want to leave anyone out here. Every one of the filmmakers involved this season deserves to be saluted. Deepa Mehta, Aurora Guerrero, Bharat Nalluri, Sian Heder, Chioke Nassor, Tze Chun, Nima Nourizadeh, and Stephen Dunn all bring personal touches to their episodes, and the scripts by Rajiv Joseph, Dan LeFranc, Janicza Bravo & Brian Salveson and Mfoniso Udofia, Sian Heder, Casallina Kisakye, Tze Chun, Lee Eisenberg & Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani and Amrou Al-Kadhi & Stephen Dunn are all models of economy and empathy, packing massive punches in very short time spans.
I particularly loved “The Silence,” starring Melanie Laurent, and the way it uses language so carefully, but episode after episode left me wrung out. “The Jaguar” had me smiling ear-to-ear, “The Grand Expo Winners” left me itching because I realize how close my own kids are to pulling away from me as they become full-blown teenagers, and “The Son” just plain broke my heart. I recognize myself in the father in “The Rock,” and in the lead character in “The Cowboy” and in the determination of Kabir in “The Manager.” That’s the real beauty of the writing and the directing and the sheer gorgeous craft of the whole thing. This Apple TV+ show about Syrians and Chinese people and Indians and Nigerians is as slick and as polished as anything on any streaming channel, but it’s not in service of some giant self-important pomp. These are tiny stories, full of tiny triumphs and simple moments of recognizable humanity. I don’t feel like this is the kind of inspiration porn that I was dreading. Instead, what is so moving here is the way our differences and our similarities, taken as a whole, are the things that define who we are. I’ve never really liked the term “melting pot,” because it implies that we all become a homogenous whole when that’s not the case. Our culture doesn’t absorb every single culture and then destroy it. It absorbs it and then expands to make room for it. We are at our best when people bring their full humanity to the table, and these stories express that. These aren’t vague symbols just designed to make you recognize these people are human; the show assumes you’re at least starting from that place, and instead, it is about seeing the individuals in these groups, the personal stories that make up the larger fabric that is the immigrant story.
The Rhythm Section
One of the things that has always confounded me about EON Productions is how little work they produce outside of the James Bond series. They’ve got this amazing production machine they’ve built in order to be able to make the James Bond films happen, but they don’t really do anything else with it. That seems mad to me, so I’m happy to see them take a swing with this week’s bruised, stripped-down story of the blowback from random violence. The film has fairly modest ambitions. It’s not trying to kick off a new James Bond franchise. This is more focused and personal than that, and it offers up a showcase for Blake Lively, who makes her performance feel dangerous, shaky, like she’s constantly on the verge of losing control of all of it.
Appropriate, since her entire family was blown up in a plane, seemingly because of stupid random fate. Stephanie breaks, and she falls down a hole of despair that lasts her three years until a reporter shows up asking questions that cause her to snap out of her self-destructive spiral. She is led to believe that the explosion wasn’t an accident at all, but rather a targeted terrorist attack. When the journalist is murdered, she finds herself with two choices: crawl back into her hole and resume her attempts to destroy herself, or do something about this new information she has. Eventually finding her way to a former MI-6 agent who trains her for fieldwork (Jude Law, showing us what his James Bond might have looked like), Stephanie sets out to get revenge. This isn’t Kill Bill, though. This isn’t the big pulpy adventure movie version. Instead, everything’s played stripped-down, abrasive, like the movie itself is as raw and blasted as Stephanie.
Maybe my favorite choice about the film is how they play the action. Stephanie doesn’t suddenly become a godlike super-hero just because she’s grieving. Her pain doesn’t make her suddenly amazing at everything. She’s a human being stumbling her way through all of this, and there’s one car chase in particular that does a great job of feeling like this out-of-control mayhem, barely controlled, where she is in over her head and as much a victim of momentum as she is a willing participant in the chase. Sterling K. Brown might as well play a character named Redd Herring, but he gives good attitude, just like Lively does, and they have some good heat in their scenes together. It’s not a great movie, but Reed Morano has a strong sense of how to make all of the action both concussive and personal, and I find myself more and more impressed by Lively as a lead. She was terrific in A Simple Favor, and she’s great here. While I don’t really need to see a franchise of this character, it’s clear that Lively has the chops to carry whatever it is they give her to carry. At this point, it’s up to Hollywood to figure it out, because she’s clearly ready to play.
NEXT WEEK
If I have any problem so far with the format here, it’s that I wish I had three of me, because there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to get published. This week was spent writing on various things, and I think you’ll get the benefit of that next week. Tomorrow, I’ll have the Free-For-All like normal, but I’m also posting the first edition of the Formerly Dangerous Movie Club. We’ll have another Reading the Weather this week as well because there’s plenty worth talking about. Overall, it’s going to be busy, and I am enjoying that feeling. Hope you’re getting plenty to read.
Here’s my own media diet for the week. As always, anything in bold was particularly enjoyed.
THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This: True Stories From A Life In The Screen Trade by Bruce Beresford; On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony; Dark Pattern by Andrew Mayne; Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky; The Drive-In by Joe Lansdale
THIS WEEK’S COMICS: High-Level Vol. 1; The Immortal Hulk #30; Star Wars #2; Action Comics #1019; Detective Comics Annual #3; Deadpool: The End #1; Suicide Squad #2; Amazing Spider-Man: Daily Bugle #1; Conan The Barbarian #12; Doctor Strange: The End #1; Captain Marvel: The End #1;
THIS WEEK’S TV: Review S2E5; Harley Quinn S1 E9; Avenue 5 S1E2; Little America S1 E3 - E8; Curb Your Enthusiasm S10 E2; Married At First Sight S10 E4 and E5; Ozark S1E1; Picard S1 E1; This Is Us S4 E12;
THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure; The Wave (2019); The North Avenue Irregulars; Secret Ceremony; A Life Less Ordinary; Zero Effect; Outrageous Fortune; Double Team; Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn; Tammy and the T-Rex; The Rhythm Section; Cotton Comes To Harlem; Foxes; Green Lantern; Predestination; Roujin Z; The Three Stooges In Orbit; Heat (1986); X-Files: I Want To Believe; Dragonheart; Johnny Handsome; Salute of the Jugger
Image courtesy Paramount Pictures
I’ve had so many amazing adventures since Drew came into my life almost 5 years ago now ( WOW!) Living in LA my whole life I have several friends in the industry, but had not experienced the movie industry from inside the movie bubble to this degree. We’ve gone to some amazing events over the last few years, but seeing Pee Wee on the big screen with an eclectic group of fans was really a highlight for me. Pee Wee’s playhouse was the first “kids” show that I shared with my son Jake ( he’s now 26!) that delighted me as much, if not more, then him. For that, Paul Rubens has always held a very special place in my heart. Seeing him in person, listening to some amazing stories, and seeing his genuine shock and joy at all the people that showed for his first tour date, was one of the most enjoyable experience I have shared with Drew and the boys. A truly perfect night that shouldn’t be missed!
As for Little America, this is a show made for me. I’m such a big mush in general, but this series, seriously! I have cried at every singe viewing so far. So touching and full of love. With the immigrant client we’re in these last few years, these are the stories that need to be told and shared. ❤️