North (1994)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Elijah Wood, Jon Lovitz, Jason Alexander, Alan Arkin*

Have I Seen It Before: No. Sufficiently (perhaps justifiably) torpedoed upon release, the film simply didn’t have the ubiquity for we elder millennials to be watched, despite what Siskel and Ebert had to tell us.

I have seen the episode of Siskel & Ebert where they reviewed the film a handful of times.

Did I Like It: There’s a hope about the truly reviled films that if I were to view them, I would find the correct way to view it. I’d be the one that finally got what Reiner et. al were trying to do.

No such luck.

A story about a ten year old boy who—in the long line of films released in the period that I suspect Macaulay Culkin’s people turned down—masters something with which even adults struggle would, on spec, have at least some kind of charm.

It almost reaches that minimal point of joy, but never quite gets running. Unfortunately, Reiner and author/screenwriter Alan Zweibel have no ear for being a kid in the 1990s. Everything about this reads as someone in their 40s living in Brentwood trying to imitate the noises of a kid in the 1990s.

That would have yielded a movie with a discordant note about it, but unfortunately most of what isn’t North’s (Wood) inner life plays like the wheezing desperation of a Borscht Belt comic fifteen seconds away from the end of his career. Eskimos, Hawaiians, and a brief hit with the cast of Witness (1985). No one is safe from the most basic of potshots.

If those potshots were funny, then maybe I could take it all in as a guilty pleasure. Unfortunately, the only effective laugh is when one of the telephone operators answering questions about North says, without any additional context, “Don’t even get him started on the Warren Commission.”

All right, maybe Zweibel and and Reiner had one insight into the interior life of this ten-old-boy in 1994. Not enough to support an entire film, but they definitely got me there.

*Truly one of the more difficult movies to come up with a top cast. Willis should probably be in that top 4, right? It does make for a good hub to play variations of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)

Director: Gene Quintano

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Lovitz, William Shatner

Have I Seen it Before: I’m reasonably sure I did. It was a PG-13 release at that time when I would watch almost anything I could get my hands on.

I must not have thought that much of it then, becuase it wasn’t exactly like it got into regular rotation.

Did I Like It: And I think I laughed significantly maybe twice during the entire runtime, and both of those times it was at something Jon Lovitz said, which Is as surprising as anything else.

As Estevez is interrogating Lovitz, in obvious, thin satire of Mel Gibson and Joe Pesci*:

ESTEVEZ: Give me a name.

LOVITZ: (uncertain) Shouldn’t your parents have done that for you?

Ha. Good times.

The other chuckle I had was when Lovitz brought into relief an issue I had with most of the film to begin with, when he asks if Estevez has seen Hot Shots! (1991). I might trust Estevez to pick me up from the airport or do anything else that might be considered responsible**, it’s entirely possible that Charlie is just a bit—more than a bit, actually—funnier than his brother. I keep trying to put that out of my head and have a nice time with the film, but then Lovitz hangs a lampshade on the problem, and that’s afte rthe film went a step further and had Sheen cameo. As a valet attendant, the most troubled of all the Sheen/Estevez clan can make a flavorful comedy meal out of nothing lines, where Estevez appears to struggle throughout the film to remember why he agreed to do this in the first place.

I know for a fact that Charlie Sheen is funnier than Kathy Ireland. Everyone might be funnier than Kathy Ireland.

*I’m not looking up the character names. That’s how much of an impact the film had. Most of them are puns.

**While I’d trust their father to be President of the United States, but that’s a different issue.