PhantomKnight Goes Spielbergian

The last time I watched Close Encounters was a couple years ago during the 40th anniversary re-release. I watched it at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and if that sounds familiar it's because it's a favorite movie spot of Quentin Tarantino's, he cuts to it a couple times in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. It's also the chain that along with Disney fucked him over during the Hateful Eight release.



Anyways, I got to the theater and I don't know what happened but I think the A/C broke and the entire theater felt like it was 110 degrees.  I turned around and saw the guy behind me had unbuttoned his entire shirt and I could see the sweat pouring down his face and chest.  Sexy indeed.  I ended up having to go out of the theater into the street to cool down.  Keep in mind this was in August and I had to go out to the street in Hollywood to cool off, that should tell you how miserable it was in the theater.  

Because I had a shitty time at the theater I bought the new blu-ray that was released.  When I redeemed the digital code though I noticed that there were three editions included; theatrical, special edition and director's cut.  Maybe Drac or Coop knows the differences between those cuts but I'm rather curious, I haven't burned through them all yet.

That's about it. The special edition came out not too long after the theatrical cut so this isn't some kind of years after the fact tinkering and the director's cut basically just keeps the parts of it that Spielberg actually wanted and discards the parts he didn't. The Director's Cut is the one to watch, they basically only include the other ones for posterity.

Didn’t know you were spending after hours with the boss.

Some of us whore our way to the top.

I was talking about you, fool. 

I always get Duel mixed up with Maximum Overdrive.

This week on Drunk Deexan Posts...

You Brits and your weird terminology.

This is one of those movies featuring a large ensemble cast -- from Dan Aykroyd to Ned Beatty, John Belushi to John Candy, Tim Matheson to Treat Williams, even Christopher Lee to Toshiro Mifune -- and follows these various characters (all related in some way to the military) over the course of one day in Los Angeles as the possibility of another Japanese attack looms over them all. So we've got a huge cast, a high-profile director like Steven Spielberg, and even a script co-written by Back To The Future masterminds Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. On paper, this seems like a sure-fire recipe for success, so where could this movie possibly go wrong? Well, the answer is in nearly every department.

There's a laundry list of problems when it comes to this movie, but let's start with the tone. 1941 is meant to be a comical farce about WWII, but that description right there is already problematic. Maybe -- maybe -- if one were to come at it from the right angle, such a thing could successfully be made, but this isn't the right angle. This is instead the work of a director clearly out of his element, even at such an early point in his career. It feels like Spielberg was trying to overcompensate, because 1941 just ends up feeling messy and chaotic without much of a rhyme or reason to the humor other than "look how loony it all is!" It's like he's relying on simply the craziness of these situations in and of themselves to be funny, instead of taking the time to try to mold them better. As a result, the movie throws out so much random and just plain stupid comedy out at you, that the whole thing becomes tiring well before the halfway mark.

Credit where credit is due, the movie DOES have one sequence that successfully mines laughs from its brand of insanity, and that's a sequence set in a night/dance club where a huge fight breaks out. It's here where the movie is able to tap into the tone it's going for in the first place, because the choreography and physicality -- not to mention the timing -- on display during this fight is honestly pretty damn good, and the scene is legitimately entertaining as a result. The problem with that, however, is that it occurs about 45 minutes in and after it's over, there's still about an hour of the movie left to slog through.

I'll also give credit to the actors for trying their best, but even then, they're playing caricatures rather than actual characters. Just like the situations themselves, these characters are all written so broadly, that they become pretty grating; John Belushi's in particular. This is also the type of movie where, when action is going on and characters are either stuck in out of control vehicles or they're in the path of one, they make a goofy face and go, "Whooooooooooooooooooooooah!" before diving for cover or ducking out of the way. There's a lot of that in the last 45 minutes or so, which is an extended action scene cutting back and forth between a city street and the yard of a house. The craftsmanship of the action scenes and whatnot are still good -- this is Spielberg we're talking about here -- but they're in service of some truly dumb comedy.

Not only is the comedy dumb, though, it can also get pretty tasteless from time to time. For instance, there's a running gag about the Tim Matheson character trying to bang a woman who only gets turned on while in a flying aircraft. The Treat Williams character continually tries to pretty much rape a woman he's on a date with. There's even a blackface joke. Again, I just have to marvel at the Spielberg, Zemeckis and Gale credits on here. What were they thinking?

The movie was kind of part of a larger trend with Heaven's Gate, New York New York, Sorcerer, and to some extent Apocalypse Now given it's crazed production where it seemed like the hitmakers of the 70s were being over-indulged and were making overly extravagant bombs, so it wasn't exactly a shock to the system.  Probably not a huge surprise that Spielberg went to his buddy George Lucas for the next project as he was possibly seen as the most untainted success story of the late 70s.

Spielberg himself has said that he now views 1941 as a humbling experience and that its negative reception kind of brought him back down to earth.

I mean, it's kind of too bad, because I would've still liked to have seen Spielberg tackle another comedy, but one with a better script.

I disagree. No one associates these people with this type of movie. It’s like when the Coen Bros made that weird romantic comedy with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.



I’d argue that Always is worse than 1941 since it’s totally forgettable whereas 1941 is a memorable disaster.