Man on the Moon (1999)

Director: Miloš Morman

Cast: Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, my. This, along with Three Kings (1999), My Dog Skip (1999) (my sister was and is crazy for anything with dogs in it), and, naturally, Batman (1989) were the first four DVDs I ever owned. It seems like a long time ago, but also at times feels like it was just yesterday.

Did I Like It: Those first few dozen times I watched the film, I couldn’t help but become a little obsessed with Kaufman (Carrey). Not quite to the degree that Carrey became obsessed. Who could? It is a fairly apt primer into the ethos Kaufman strove for in his all-too-brief career. If you are getting ready to watch the film for the first time, it will bother you, it will annoy you, and it will occasionally be very funny. At no time will there be a moment where any of this is done by accident. At it’s very best, and if you’re with Kaufman in what he was trying to do, you’ll start to re-think what entertainment can actually be.

And yet, a movie hits differently after you have not seen it in quite a while, but saw so many times at a particular time in your life. The flaws creep up. I now realize that there was no way Kaufman was playing Ms. Pac-Man when George Shapiro (DeVito) tells him that he closed the deal to get him to star in Taxi. That show premiered in 1978, and didn’t start popping up in arcades until 1982. That’s a nitpicky thing, and the kind of thing I only pick up on in movies after I went past the age of 16, but now that we’re on the topic of DeVito, Taxi, and George Shapiro: the movie does go to great lengths to re-create scenes of that show, but has to bend over backwards to be a world that includes George Shapiro, Andy Kaufman, and Taxi, but doesn’t also include Danny DeVito or Louie De Palma.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, Alfonso Arau

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure, but it’s probably been twenty years or more. Before motion capture carried the day, I was a Zemeckis completist.

Did I Like It: There’s a unique pleasure in not keeping a movie generally beloved—and, indeed, I remember liking—in regular rotation. I would give almost anything to see something like Back to the Future (1985)* with new eyes. Thankfully, I took to this film with only the dimmest of memories, and it was essentially like I was taking it in for the first time.

The story unfurls with such a breathless confidence that I’m surprised it isn’t taught as an example in screenwriting books, and it’s a real bummer that more work from Diane Thomas—including a supposedly lost draft of a haunted house-centric third Indiana Jones film—didn’t see the light of day before her untimely death.

The screenplay could blow away in the wind if the chemistry between Douglas and Turner wasn’t enough to sell entire movies on their own. There are few pairings on screen who are more fun to kind of/sort of hate each other. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at The War of the Roses (1989).

The film is probably a little less ageless than Zemeckis’ other epics of the 80s, and I can’t understand why/how Alan Silvestri was talked into a sax and synth-heavy score. Honest to God, the whole film sounds like the opening titles for an episode of Siskel & Ebert. I’m not even opposed to that in these circumstances, I just know that a different approach might have moved the film from merely charming to truly timeless. I know all the principals involved can ultimately do better.

That is a minor complaint, when so much of the film works so thoroughly, but it might just keep me from re-watching it too soon. Maybe in twenty years or so I can take it the movie in again as if it was almost new.

*Which would not exist without this film, as Zemeckis’ main claim to fame prior to ‘84 was being at least partly responsible for the only flops with which Steven Spielberg was associated.

Hercules (1997)

Director: Ron Clements, Jon Musker

Cast: Tate Donovan, Danny DeVito, James Woods, Susan Egan

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. After right about The Lion King (1994), the degree of my familiarity with Disney feature animation becomes spotty at best. Why now? I accidentally scratched my wife’s car, and watching this on Disney+ is my penance.

Did I like it?: And it wasn’t that much of a penance at all. Even in their relative nadir, Walt Disney Feature Animation would never let something out of the lab that was not designed within an inch of its life to entertain as many people as possible. So what’s not to like about the movie? I mean, I think there isn’t a warm-blooded creature still living who could use less James Woods in their lives, but how about those muses? Danny DeVito is always terrific, and you can’t help but smile when you hear Michael Bolton crooning over the end credits (although that might be a bit of historically revisionist criticism, I’ll admit).

There’s an element of Disney animated films that never work too well for me. The cell animation in this film is pretty great, and each character is designed as if they are the relief art on a Greek vase. Cell animation is great. I wish they continued to make more movies like this. But this is an interesting post-Toy Story (1995) era where the Mouse House (and to be fair, any other feature animation of the era) felt the need to fuse computer generated images with their cell-animated characters. It most often happens in action sequences, and it never looks quite right. I am not sure if it was a cost-saving measure, or if there was a sensibility that merging these two styles would be the cutting edge of artistry, but twenty-plus years later, the seams will always show.

Batman Returns (1992)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael “Greatest of All Time” Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher “Yeah, But Imagine If I Had Been Playing The Scarecrow” Walken 

Have I Seen it Before: So, so many times.

Did I Like It: I’ll do you one further. Not only is it a great movie—even if it intentionally plays fast and loose with the core of Batman—it may be damn psychic.

But before I get to the film’s prescience, let’s talk a little bit about the movie in the context of the time it was released. One supposes that Warner Bros. wanted to reassemble as much of the team responsible for Batman (1989) as possible, and were willing to just about anything to get Michael Keaton and Tim Burton to acquiesce where they might have otherwise been disinterested in the prospect of returning to the batcave. 

So Warner Bros. decided to let them do whatever the hell they wanted as long as it featured the Penguin, an action set piece with the Batmobile, and was ready for summer 1992.

They delivered on all of those promises, and went completely nuts with everything else. In a movie essentially meant to entertain children, there sure is a lot of filicide, borderline S&M, and biting of Republican noses*. I can almost see why McDonalds got all bet out of shape in the summer of ’92. Maybe that means I’m getting older, but we’re treated to an unashamedly idiosyncratic movie in place of what could have been a throughly bland summer blockbuster. The Schumacher of it all that was to follow proves pretty conclusively that this movie was a special treat that is unlikely to come 

But in the twenty-five years since the film’s release, it has taken on a new life.

Now, I don’t want to say that there is some modern parable in the story of a woman beset by a crushing degree of sexual violence and harassment, while the rest of society is slowly burning under the caprice of a malevolent homunculi trying to grab all the political power he can before laying siege to everything in sight…

But I could.   

*Watch that movie again and tell me that each and every person supporting The Penguin (DeVito) in his bid for Mayor of Gotham isn’t a Republican, and I’ll be able to tell you haven’t been paying attention. Oswald Means Order, indeed.