11
Jul
By Max Univers | Posted on: July 11, 2010 |

One of the first movies I have a memory of my parents renting on VHS and watching is “Arthur”, and when I was that age, I remember being mildly amused by the short, goofy guy with the funny accent. None of the jokes made sense to my six-year old mind, and the plot didn’t do much for me, either. But I remembered it because I was amused by the goofy guy with the funny accent. I’d seen bits and pieces of it on cable years later — usually a heavily-edited version on the local Fox affiliate on a Saturday afternoon, always parts of the second half of the movie — and from those bits, I determined it was a romantic “comedy” and thus, should be avoided at all costs. The theme song by King of Yacht Rock Christopher Cross didn’t do anything to convince me otherwise.

I’ve since taken on an admiration for the work of Dudley Moore, and decided to cue up “Arthur” on Netflix to watch it, beginning to end, for the first time as an adult. The result was a revelation, for the first 45 minutes of the movie are among the funniest I’ve seen in a movie. Seriously, its a virtuoso performance, with one liners coming so fast, so furiously, you’re still laughing as the next one is delivered and occasionally you miss it.

Arthur spends virtually all of those first 45 minutes in some state of drunken stupor, but unlike annoying drunks that you encounter when you’re sober at a party in real life, trying to tell you stories they believe to be funny but are actually anything but, because this is a movie, those stories are funny. And Arthur is funny. So is his butler, Hobson, who reacts to all of this with gruff matter-of-fact insults that while different in tone from Arthur, are no less hilarious, as when he says to a hooker Arthur has picked up and who says very little, “You have a wonderful economy with words. I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness.”

One of my favorite scenes happens early in the film, where Arthur invites that hooker to join him for dinner at the Plaza, but once they’re seated, he struggles to remember who she is, or why she is there, so he drunkenly — and loudly — questions her. She tells him that her mother died when she was six, to which Arthur yells out while banging on the table, “Son of a bitch! Don’t they know what that does to kids?” She calmly replies, “And my father raped me when I was 12.” Arthur inquisitively, innocently, answers “So you had six relatively good years?” All while the patrons at the Plaza look on with classic glances of annoyance.

The plot, roughly, is that Arthur is the heir to a $750 Million fortune if he marries the upper-class woman his parents have chosen for him. He detests her, but his family, believing she will force him to grow up, push for the arranged marriage anyway. His days consist of hungover baths in the mornings where he drinks martinis in the bath tub, followed by being driven around in a limo by his butler, in a two-pronged quest to both find true love and to stay drunk.

Of course, as I can attest full well, its tough to find love when you’re drunk. So its a vicious circle that Arthur is blissfully unaware of. The entire dynamic between the characters in the movie can be summed up in this one exchange:

Executive: “He gets all that money. Pays his family back by…by…by bein’ a stinkin’ drunk. It’s enough ta make ya sick.”
Hobson: “I really wouldn’t know, sir. I’m just a servant.”
Executive: “Yeah.”
Hobson: “On the other hand, go screw yourself.”

Hobson lobs insult after insult at both Arthur and his series of lady friends, yet whenever anyone else does the same, he turns his poison tongue their direction. He’s exactly what I always wished Alfred in the 1990s Batman movies was, just once: a sharp-witted comedian who realizes how ridiculous things around him are, and isn’t afraid to say so.

The movie shifts tone when Arthur meets a waitress, Linda, who he has just witnessed stealing a tie from a department store. Of course, he falls in love with her, much to the consternation of his family and to the woman he is about to marry. Linda is played by Liza Minelli, who for people like me that know her only from the reality-TV tabloid stories in recent years, brings a surprising grittiness to the role. Her decidedly working-class father, who spends the entire movie in a tank top, is played by Barney Miller…better known now as the actor who played Seinfeld’s dad, Morty. Here he steals a scene by crying uncontrollably when he learns his daughter has turned down Arthur’s $100,000 gift in lieu of a relationship.

Leading up to that scene is the one part of the movie that is terribly dated — a stumbling drunk Arthur not only climbing behind the wheel of his car, but continuing to drink while driving. The tone is supposed to be endearing, as the odyssey leads to him nearly wrecking his car, parking the car on the lawn of Linda’s apartment, and ultimately, stumbling up the stairs to her door. This was no doubt intended to be funny, and in 1981 it probably was to a great many folks. It doesn’t quite come across that way in 2010.

Most of the latter half of the movie is fairly standard romantic-comedy fare, with some funny gags and some poignant moments as the characters weave their way to the (inevitable) ending. In that way its a terrific date movie, because you get both an uproarious comedy and a nice love story all in one package. Its much more than a story about a short, goofy guy with a funny accent. Its a damn funny movie that left me humming the lyrics to “Best That You Can Do”, cursing Christopher Cross while saluting Dudley Moore for a comedic masterpiece.

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28
Jun
By Max Univers | Posted on: June 28, 2010 |

In 1986, I was eight years old and the perfect age when MTV resuscitated the Monkees career by showing a marathon of their old TV show. Dubbed “Pleasant Valley Sunday” after their song of the same name, and shown on a Sunday (how clever) the show found a new audience. Along with millions of others, I loved it, much to the surprise and delight of parents everywhere, who had grown up with the Pre-Fab Four. The appeal of the early Monkees records is unmistakable; remove the stigma that critics have attached to them, and there’s dozens of amazing pop songs in their catalog. It could be argued that they were the first American boy band. And if you buy that argument, then their late-60s rebellion against the very pop sound that made them famous makes a lot more sense. They were hoping to age with their audience, to grow musically while maintaining their current fans and simultaneously earning new ones. Nearly every boy band since has attempted this transformation, either as a group or as solo artists, with varying levels of success.

The notion that they were a fake band always was a bogus claim — the same session musicians who contributed music to the Monkees provided music to early Byrds and Beach Boys records, too, with no criticism from the rock press — but once that ball started rolling downhill in 1967, it was impossible to stop. The mature audience they coveted thought they were a joke, and solid albums like “Headquarters” and “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd.” were not as commercially successful as their first two blockbusters. Their TV show was canceled in the winter of 1968, and when their fifth album was released that spring, it became their first to not hit #1.

Though it had been just two years since their massive debut, the country was such a vastly different place in 1968 that it might as well have been twenty years later. The counterculture had taken over pop music, and it was hard to imagine a band less hip than the Monkees.

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27
Jun
By Max Univers | Posted on: June 27, 2010 |

Confession: until I watched it last weekend, the only Marlon Brando movie I’d seen EVER was Superman. I’m dead serious. This is a disgrace for a 32-old, and its something I’m attempting to rectify through my Netflix Adventures that will be chronicled here.

I can’t explain why I had not watched The Godfather prior to college. I can, however, explain why I didn’t see it once I got there, and for many years after.

When I was about 12, a movie starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfus came out called “What About Bob?” My brother and I both thought it was hilarious; our mom didn’t agree. Not for the usual generational gap reasons, either; she worked with a relentlessly needy co-worker whose eerie similarity to “Bob” made the movie unwatchable. Totally understandable, right? That’s how The Godfather became for me in college and for many years afterward.

When I was in college, I knew a guy who liked to pretend he was a Godfather. He was Italian and really, truly believed he was some mutant hybrid of all the Corleone men from the movies. He’d lecture people about respect — not Aretha Franklin respect, but kiss the ring respect — and about never taking a stand against the family. I suppose a bunch of college guys all interested in beer and ladies could loosely be called a family, but whatever. When he shared a house with me and three other guys for two years, it got worse because I was around him all the time. I heard him actually tell people when he was drunk that he was a “Don” and that without him, all of his friends would struggle to get by; they needed his protection and advice. It was pathetic and ridiculous then; its even moreso as I write it now, a decade later.

I had never seen The Godfather or its two sequels, but when I was around him I lied and pretended I had whenever the movie came up, then quickly changed the subject. It wasn’t terribly difficult; so many scenes and storylines are pop culture staples that even people like me, who hadn’t seen the movies, were familiar with them. I knew some dude winds up with a horse’s head in his bed, that Brando talks like he has cotton in his mouth, that one of the sons gets blown away at a toll booth, and that Fredo betrays the family. These are things I think everyone knows, whether they’ve watched the movies or not.

My patience for 3-1/2 hour movies is pretty marginal; even less so when the prospect of someone adding “expert” commentary to it is highly probable, explaining the Sicilian culture and the Catholic symbols, etc. He watched the movies frequently, and I never joined in. After college, when I was glad to lose contact with him, I was in no hurry to watch the movies either.

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27
Jun
By Max Univers | Posted on: June 27, 2010 |

For years, I listened to my friends expound on the virtues of Netflix. I laughed and talked instead about how I bought every movie I wanted to watch at home, because if I was going to pay for a DVD, I wanted to own it — not just rent it. I never, ever had a Blockbuster card for this very reason. And the vast shelves of DVDs in my basement are a testament to this line of thinking. Streaming movies via an Xbox? Surely the quality is sub-par and not worth my time.

I’m here to tell you I was foolhardy, nay, wrong. When streaming came to the Wii, I decided to give it a one-month free trial and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t hooked in half that time. It wasn’t that I could instantly stream entire seasons of great shows I refused to buy on DVD like Magnum PI or the A-Team, either. I was suddenly compiling a list of movies dozens deep of movies I’d always wanted to watch, but never wanted to buy — and which were never on the plethora of movie channels I get on cable at a convenient time.

Many of these movies are bonafide classics, and yet here I was, watching them for the first time. That’s how we arrive at today, the relaunch of a former internet sensation in a new format. Polyfro.com, the blog, returns to document my reactions and reviews of the movies I watch on Netflix, to capture my thoughts as I watch flicks I’d (mostly) never seen. The reviews will usually weave stories from my own life into them, because that’s what I do. And hopefully you will enjoy them. I hope to.

You bet.

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13
Oct
By Max Univers | Posted on: October 13, 2008 |

Saturday night, I was getting ready to go out and I was brushing my teeth. Just as I was molar-deep in foam, the doorbell rang. I was kind of busy, so I ignored it. If it was an emergency — say, if my house was on fire and the neighbors were ringing to warn me of impending doom — they’d ring again. If it was just something annoying, like someone asking to borrow flour for a cake, well, I was brushing my teeth, and dental hygiene is important stuff.

The doorbell rang again. Hmm. I didn’t smell smoke, but nonetheless, two doorbell rings are two doorbell rings. So with toothbrush in hand, I sauntered over to the window in my bedroom and looked out to see who was ringing the doorbell twice.
Ooh! It was my crazy neighbor with the handmade craft “W” sign in her garden, her personal tribute to our greatest (sic) President ever. When I bought the house, the sign was accompanied by a secondary one that had “STILL President!!” painted on it. So it was a conceptual piece, really. You had the red white and blue “W”, with each leg of the W a different color, and the message banner next to it. W…STILL President!! Take that, you silly people who voted for him by accident! Ahahahaha!
Ahem.

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