I finally saw: Last Flag Flying

Whoa! Two days in a row!

Like Sharknado, which I wrote about yesterday, this was also one of the three films I watched on Friday when I was sick. The other one, the Kevin Hart vehicle Die Hart, I will not write about -- and not because I liked it so much that I just couldn't think of anything to say about it. (Plus, I can't have "finally seen" it because it only came out this year.)

The reasons the 2017 film Last Flag Flying qualifies as an "I finally saw" are:

1) I think of myself as a Richard Linklater completist, or at least a late-career Linklater completist. I still haven't managed to get myself in front of The Newton Boys, The Bad News Bears or Me and Orson Welles, but I'd seen everything since 2008 -- everything except this. Yes, even Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

2) It has a personal connection for me that goes back to college.

You probably heard, since it seemed to be pretty talked about to the extent that this film was talked about at all, but Last Flag Flying was envisioned as a "spiritual sequel" to the 1973 Hal Ashby film The Last Detail. Actually, I suppose it was called an "unofficial sequel," because the book it was based on, written by co-screenwriter Darryl Ponsican, was a sequel to the book Ashby adapted for his film. Except, the characters don't have quite the same names. One character who was called Larry Meadows is now called Larry Shepherd, a second character once called Richard Mulhall is now Richard Mueller, and then the third character has a new name entirely: Sal Nealon instead of Billy Buddusky. The reason for these seemingly unimportant yet slightly confusing changes may be known to someone, but not to me.

Those characters were played by Randy Quaid and Steve Carell, Otis Young and Laurence Fishburne, and Jack Nicholson and Bryan Cranston, respectively. Their races, their fundamental personality types and the dynamic between them are all intact between the two movies, so the slight name changes just cause us to scratch our heads more than anything else.

The personal significance of The Last Detail is not that it was made in the year I was born, but thanks for reminding me I'm turning 50 in four months. 

No, the significance of The Last Detail to me personally is that I saw it in college, shown in a lecture hall as an evening activity that tried to prevent students from going out and getting plastered. We did go out and get plastered much of the time, but on this occasion, two friends and I saw the Ashby movie.

And because we'd been a trio of guys going to see it -- a trio who lived together our sophomore year, though I think this was freshman year -- we ended up mapping our personalities on to the characters in the film as a bit of a joke that stayed with us throughout our four years, mentioned only infrequently but still good for a laugh amongst us. 

It was obvious Bryan was the Nicholson character, a guy with attitude and chutzpah and good at charming the ladies. (I can't actually remember if that character charmed the ladies because I haven't seen The Last Detail since then, but Nicholson certainly had that reputation in general.) The character who became Sal Nealon is not particularly successful with the ladies in Last Flag Flying, but this is 30 years later and he's not the young buck he once was. But Bryan did have a bit of a physical resemblance to Nicholson, less so to Cranston, though they do share the same first name.

Nico was Mulhall/Mueller, who in both cases was nicknamed Mule. Nico was white just like Bryan and me -- still is -- but there was something about his personality that made him seem like a good match for Mule. There may have been an actual reason -- was Nico dating a Black girl or something? -- or it may have just been that I was such an obvious match for the other character that Mule was the one left over for him. 

Yep, I was the obvious match for the Randy Quaid character, the virgin, who loses his virginity to a prostitute in the movie, and has a comically premature ejaculation. 

I'm not going to comment on any of the other similarities -- though it's probably worth clarifying that I did not lose my virginity to a prostitute. However, the reality is, I looked almost exactly like Randy Quaid looked in this film.

I'm not going to put up a picture of myself either from the time or now, but if you want to know what I looked like in 1992, which is probably when this viewing occurred, here is a pretty good idea:

I'm the one on the left.

In the movie, Mule and Billy -- whose own nickname is Badass, which Bryan loved -- are escorting Larry from Norfolk, Virginia to the military prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. (Did I mention these guys were military?) It seems that Larry was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years in military prison for stealing $40 from a charitable fund. I guess 50 years ago, $40 would be more like $250 today. So yes, a capital crime indeed.

(Incidentally, Portsmouth was another personal connection for me, since I worked in the summers on an island off Portsmouth, and Portsmouth was where we spent our one day off per week.)

Since I have zero instances of theft on my record, the similarities between me and Larry Meadows ended at that point. But to my credit, I willingly accepted the Larry assignation. By 19 perhaps I had already lost any of my illusions that I could ever be Jack Nicholson.

So in the six years since Last Flag Flying was released, curiosity alone should have gotten me in the door even if Richard Linklater hadn't. But I'd heard this was a quizzical choice by Linklater to say the least, and perhaps by the time I'd seen Bernadette in 2019, it felt unwise to go back and dig up other quizzical Linklater choices.

Well, I really liked this movie.

For starters, the actors are great. Cranston isn't Nicholson but he really captures the guy's rough and rascally edges. He puts all his skills and technique into this one, and instead of that looking like a lot of work, it looks effortless. Fishburne's character undergoes the most changes of any of the three, as he's now a pastor instead of a rascal like his cohort, but he indulges in some moments that remind us of the old Mule, artfully dropping the word "motherfucker" when the occasion calls for it.

Carell also captures the mousy quintessence of Larry. I don't think of myself at all like Steve Carell, but he's definitely got the spirit of that virgin thief down pat. But he's also a figure of great tragedy in terms of the particulars of this story -- fresh off the death of his wife, he's also just lost his son in Iraq, and it's their transport of the body that makes up this film's eastern seaboard road trip. Carell probably has the least acting to do of any of the three, but his internalized quality really serves the material well and becomes emotionally potent.

But then I also really just liked Linklater's dialogue. I think Linklater's writing is sometimes accused of trying too hard, the way people accuse Kevin Smith of trying too hard. But I really think they both can be natural and sharp when they want to be, replicating the way people really talk more often than they are given credit for. The script is also clever about the era in which it is supposed to take place, 2003, as the characters each buy cell phones for the first time, and try to make sense of Eminem on the radio. 

And the story just worked for me. A road trip is always a sturdy armature for a script, and when you combine it with the reunion of a motley crew of friends, that armature only strengthens. However, this movie wouldn't be what it is without an undercurrent of deep melancholy, not only in terms of the tragedies that have befallen Larry, but in terms of the changes in personality and -- in a way, yes -- the tragedies that have befallen the others as they've aged. 

As it was for those characters, encountering each other again for the first time in three decades since their first adventures, it's just more than 30 years since I watched that movie with my own two cohorts back in college. I saw them both at Nico's wedding in I want to say 1998, and then I saw Nico again sometime in the early 2000s in Los Angeles. I haven't seen Bryan in those 25 years since 1998 and I haven't been in touch with either of them in nearly that long.

Last Flag Flying made me think how nice it would be to meet up with both of them on a road trip, and make sense of where our lives have taken us. 

Forget Date Night. Stick to Thursday night.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey are two of our most beloved sitcom stars. Each is the central component of one the most critically acclaimed television comedies of this era (saying "sitcom" twice seemed mean), if not always the most popular.

But what do I think of them as movie actors?

Not much, unfortunately.

I used to like Carell pretty well. After all, this is the guy who did really funny work in Bruce Almighty, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and very capable dramatic work in Little Miss Sunshine. Since then, however, it's been a non-stop stinkfest for Mr. Carell, most notably Evan Almighty, Dan in Real Life and Get Smart.

I always had a problem with Fey's movie work. To put it more accurately, she may not have been the problem herself, but I never adored one of her movies. The word "never" sounds kind of funny when you are talking about essentially two movies, with only bit parts in others. Fey the performer may have been the best thing in Mean Girls, but I thought Mean Girls was only so-so, and for that she should be blamed, because Fey the writer wrote the script. And Baby Mama was an unmitigated disaster from the start, including and perhaps especially her performance. Though at least she bore no responsibility for writing that one.

Naturally, this leaves me without very much hope for Date Night. And the advertising has done a good job eradicating the remainder of my hope.

Let's start with that poster. The physical appearance of Fey and Carell conveys what their characters have in store, but it also sort of telegraphs the entire plot, doesn't it? That's a strange thing to say about a single image, even if it does speak a thousand words. But even if I didn't know that Fey and Carell would be chased by criminals in this movie, I think this poster would give it away. Plus, I really hate the font they chose for the title. It's bold and loud and artless. It kind of looks like a temporary font they jammed on there before settling on the real one. The whole thing is very stark, including the staged gray background. Which may be what they were going for, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

And then there are the TV ads. "He's holding the gun sideways, that's the kill shot!" Maybe it's funny to someone, but not to me. And the scene where they're running along with a canoe on their heads? Oy. (Plus, I'm really surprised that Fey is allowed to say "whacking off" in a mainstream TV ad.)

It was an obvious pitch for a movie -- take the two biggest stars of NBC's Thursday night lineup and send them through a series of wacky misadventures. When Amy Poehler and Joel McHale weren't available, they went with Fey and Carell. (Ha ha.)

Seriously, though, it should have been a good idea, or at least it seems like it should. If, that is, you don't consider the comfort realms of these actors, and whether that allows them to do the things we love about them. Whether we love someone on television doesn't always translate to whether we love them in the movies. In fact, it's possible to love and hate different versions of the same performer. Unfortunately, Carell has been so awful in the movies lately that I've started to like him less on TV. I still love the TV Tina, but I distrust the movie one.

And there's nothing wrong with this. Not everyone is cut out to be a movie star. If you asked Tina Fey if she thought she were cut out to be a movie star, she would tell you "Hell no." In fact, everything about her persona gives you the impression she never really wanted anything more than to be a writer on Saturday Night Live. Of course, everyone realized she had on-screen talent, and more important, likeability, so that's been a good choice for her. But it seems like she'd be fine just being the star of 30 Rock. It almost feels like these movie choices were someone else's idea, maybe her agent's. Not hers.

There's nothing wrong with just being a TV star. David Caruso finally figured that out, and has managed to rehabilitate his career by becoming a mainstay on the popular CSI: Miami (which may be just about my least favorite show on television, but that's beside the point). And even if you didn't originate on television, you may find a more welcoming home there than in the movies. Take Fey's co-star Alec Baldwin.

So is Date Night definitely going to be terrible? No, not definitely. Is it probably going to be terrible? Yes.

Should Carell and Fey be happy with their day jobs?

Definitely, yes. Oh please, yes.

Fake life. Real entertainment.

I can't remember the last time I've gotten so much enjoyment from watching a movie I hated so much.

But first a little history.

Dan in Real Life had been on our radar since its first advertising campaign. In the fall of 2007, when it was released, my humorous talking point was that the "button" from the TV ads -- the last line of dialogue they leave you with, which is usually supposed to be funny -- was ridiculous. You may remember it: Steve Carell, playing advice columnist Dan, gets pulled over for at least the second time by a Rhode Island state cop. Making a self-deprecating reference to his previous dalliances with the law, Dan tells the cop, "Put it on my tab." That alone might have been funny, but then the cop says "Excuse me?" And Dan repeats, in a voice like he's doing a character, "Put it on my tab." I thought the superfluous (and in fact counterproductive) repetition of that line was a gas -- it was the surest sign a movie will give you that you are not going to get anything funny here, so might as well stay clear.

And maybe we would have, but the movie came into my wife's possession by accident. As one of the organizers of a non-profit that holds screenwriting workshops a couple times a year, she came home one weekend with a copy of Dan in Real Life in one of the boxes of materials from the workshop. But it wasn't a store-bought copy -- the title was on a sticker from a label maker stuck to the DVD. When we finally inserted it last night, having had it for six months or longer, we discovered that it had been burned from Starz on a "premiere Saturday." It fit the bill for what we were looking for last night -- something unchallenging that might actually turn out to be good, the whole "put it on my tab, put it on my tab" thing notwithstanding. (And even if it was in fact terrible, we'd built up that moment from the ad so much that we just had to see it.)

I don't really know where to start.

Okay, how about the title. If you are going to talk about something being "in real life," you better do your damnedest to make the life you present believable. In fact, the life in Dan in Real Life is some of the fakest life I have ever seen on film. And why don't I stop now to give you the obligatory spoilers warning: Dagnabbit, I will spoil as much of Dan in Real Life as I can in this post.

But first let me say a thing or two about Steve Carell. I love Steve Carell, but he should really stick to TV. Having made a favorable impression in movies the first few times out -- I'm thinking Bruce Almighty, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Little Miss Sunshine and The 40 Year Old Virgin -- he's really started to stink it up in recent years. Evan Almighty was a box office disaster, though Carell was okay in it. I thought Get Smart was absolutely awful -- I mean, not a single redeeming moment -- and that Carell was in fact one of the main reasons it was so bad. Now that I've seen Dan in Real Life, I'm convinced it's a trend, and I'm not looking forward to Date Night, which puts him opposite another great TV star who should stay out of the movies -- Tina Fey, whose Baby Mama still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't know if someone other than Carell would have made Dan The Advice Columnist any more tolerable, but in Carell's hands, he's shamelessly self-absorbed and needlessly short-tempered. His character's wife died four years earlier, which is supposed to excuse his every failure to be a good human being. But the film's real problem is, it actually thinks he's a pretty good one, at his core. From Carell's performance, the verdict is quite the opposite. He's capricious with his three children. He's quick to show frustration with his extended family, although they are indeed quite tiresome (more on that in a minute). He's nearly stalkerish in his newfound interest in his brother's girlfriend (Juliette Binoche), though to his credit, he falls for her (in a contrived meet-cute) before he realizes her identity. He not only wallows in sorrow, but it's a spotlight-hogging sorrow -- the kind he puts on display for everyone to see, rather than addressing it quietly and privately. What's worst is, it's hard to imagine this man giving advice to anyone -- which is just as well, because his career doesn't come into play almost at all. That's inexcusable when the job is supposed to be so metaphorically significant to his character's journey.

All of this might be okay if this were a dark independent drama, but it's trying to be frivolous and sunny, starting with the cloying guitar score by singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche and continuing on through the behavior of Dan's family. The movie takes place almost entirely in a summer house in Rhode Island where Dan's family is gathering for a family reunion, and no less than 27 insufferable idiots are involved in every activity that goes on there, like some kind of cross between the Kennedys and the Waltons. Those activities? How about competitive crossword that pits the boys against the girls? How about a synchronized morning jazzercise routine? How about touch football? How about boating? How about charades? How about a family talent show? Yes, each and every one of these things occurs in the film, most of them in one day. In fact, director Peter Hedges is so interested in displaying the participatory enthusiasm of these people, he crams as many of them as he can into each shot. That's right, no matter what time of day or night it is, these people all gather within a ten-foot-radius of each other, sitting on the floor or on the arms of chairs if it will get them into camera range. You know it's a bad movie when you start fixating on the blocking, and I did, more than once. And as cheery as these people are portrayed to be, they're also insidious, as even the matriarch and patriarch (Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney) get involved in a sing-along involving the uncharitable nickname ("Pig Face") for the girl Dan's about to go out with on a blind date. The first person he wants to date since his wife died, and they sing a "Pig Face" song about her?

And then there's the relationship with his daughters. The middle one, around 14 years old, keeps clashing with him over the guy she's dating. When he makes the kid go home after he crashes the family reunion -- a long weekend, mind you, when she's supposed to be spending time with her family -- she breaks into hysterical tears and calls him a "murderer of love." Then there's the older daughter, whose main conflict with her dad is that he won't let her drive the car. So when he gets his two traffic tickets, that's supposed to be his big hypocrisy that creates a conflict with that daughter.

Other things that bothered me:

1) The dialogue. It was so terrible that I laughed out loud numerous times.

2) As the only single adult present, Dan must sleep in the laundry room, where someone is always running a dryer load full of banging sneakers at bedtime. Who does laundry on a long weekend, anyway?

3) During one particular scene in that laundry room, when his parents start an intervention with him and are naturally joined by a dozen others within 30 seconds, all of whom supposedly have laundry business to transact, one brother advises Dan to "unclog the pipes" every once in awhile. What male ever needed another male to prescribe masturbation to him?

At this point I'm starting to realize I can't explain to you every bad little detail of this movie. However, I can tell you -- the "put it on my tab, put it on my tab" moment was just as "so bad it's good" as I was hoping.

So why was watching Dan in Real Life so entertaining?

Sometimes, as we all know, it's just great to watch something gloriously bad. My wife and I had such a fun time watching this movie, laughing and making jokes. We had both had a bit of a tough week, and even a half-hour before the movie I was just feeling blah. But once it started, I felt a giddy joy overtake me, one that quite obviously had nothing to do with the movie being good.

I'm sure part of that was ending my self-imposed moratorium on watching movies, which had lasted three days since the final 2009 movie I watched before my deadline. I just wanted to watch something. But the fact is, this movie was more than just something -- it was the perfect thing.

On this week's Community, the characters watched a fictitious B-movie called Kickpuncher just to make fun of it. But watching a movie that you know is going to be bad is a bit different than being delightfully surprised by how bad something is. When it's a movie that's supposed to be good, a movie at least some people think is good, it's all the more exciting when it turns out to be absolutely terrible. In a way, it's as amazing an epiphany about the possibility of movies as you get when you see something really great -- except in this case, instead of marveling at the creativity on display, you marvel at the succession of bad decisions that enabled someone to decide this was the best they were going to get.

You see, one of the most dispiriting things about most bad movies these days is that they really aren't that bad -- they are just unforgivably mainstream and uninspired. So we change our definition of what constitutes a "bad movie." The modern "bad movie" is bad because it represents the most obvious final product that a committee of play-it-safe decision-makers could possibly greenlight. Most bad movies, therefore, have a basic competence simply because these people wouldn't let it go out without reaching that minimum level of acceptability. When there are that many people involved, someone's going to see the bad things that really stick out. And fix them enough so that they are at least boring and tolerable.

Well, not with Dan in Real Life. And for that reason alone it demands to be seen, especially if unintentionally funny is as funny to you as it is to me.