Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Director: Randal Kleiser

Cast: Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Tyrrell, Valeria Golino

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes. It was certainly on a less frequent rotation than Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and I think my copy was actually recorded off of HBO, but only started several minutes into the movie. I have very little memory of the film before the storm comes to blow the circus folk into town.

Did I Like It: I think we all (including the filmmakers, one would imagine) remember this as the inferior Pee-Wee movie. In all honesty I may have never felt the temptation to watch it again if it weren’t for the fact that I just got of a months-long binge of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and needed a fix to wind me down.

I’m happy to report that it isn’t terrible. There’s a goodly amount of whimsy on display, more than a few funny moments, and a concerted display of the ethos which made Pee-Wee so special in the first place:  The idea that weirdos are heroic despite themselves.

And yet, it is inferior, not only to Big Adventure, but also to my memory of the more recent Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Why? First, I think the whimsy and heroic weirdo quotient is turned strangely down. I’m willing to largely write that off to Tim Burton (he had <ghosts-with-the-most> and <batmen> to keep him busy) opting out of the proceedings in favor of Kleiser, a journeyman director if ever there was one. But it goes deeper than that. Pee-Wee is kind of a horndog in this one, where he’s usually written as something of an asexual imp. Even in the original The Pee-Wee Herman Show, he was only horny in as much as he was being a rascal. It was more performative because it was on HBO than anything else.

A brief return to horny Pee-Wee might have been okay if the story was a little tighter. The perfect MacGuffin of the best bike in the whole world is nowhere to be found. Instead, the circus comes to town and, wait for it, put on a circus. That might have worked for a quick segment on Playhouse, but it feels too slight for its own good taken to an hour and a half. I’d say that Reubens might have needed a little bit of a break from his most famous creation, but I think he probably would have agreed with me.

Blade (1998)

Director: Stephen Norrington

Cast: Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kirstofferson, N’Bushe Wright

Have I Seen it Before: I think so. If I truly have, it largely disappeared from my memory. That can’t be a good sign, right?

Did I Like It: So many people view this as an edgy vanguard of the era of superhero movies that was to follow, and all I’m left with is trying to figure out precisely why. The Daywalker (Snipes) is such an obscure character in the realm of comics, even now. It wasn’t exactly like the mere notion of seeing the character depicted on screen filled us with collective wonder.

The early CGI effects are the stuff of B movies in retrospect so much so to the point that I have a hard time imagining we weren’t watching vampires explode in polygonal eruptions of viscera and thinking that New Line wasn’t particularly interested in the film succeeded.

It’s basically a very average action movie. In fact, I might even venture to say that it is the last of the great, mindless action movies that were king in the 1980s before they inevitably started hiding out exclusively in the direct-to-video marketing.

So from where do all of these positive memories come from? It exists almost solely in Wesley Snipes’ persona. He never broods, even when another movie might be forgiven for defaulting to brooding. If anything, he seems to be of the opinion that he’s in an entirely different movie than the rest of the characters. That sounds like a criticism, but twenty-five years later the crowd with which I saw the film may have lost patience with most of the film over two hours (or at least wish that Guillermo del Toro had directed the entire series), we may have groaned with every attempt at effects (“special” doesn’t really apply), but we all laughed with every quip Snipes had to offer.

Is that enough for an entire movie? Maybe, but just by an inch.