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TOM SERVO AT THE MOVIES
Unlike Mike Nelson's very funny published collections "Movie Megacheese" and "Mind Over Matters," "A Year at the Movies" is a real book: all-new essays on virtually every aspect of film (including several important ones that have eluded "real" critics), with built-in mysteries (what movie did he see on Sept. 11th?) and suspense (will he make it to Dec. 31st without cracking?).
Like a Phileas Fogg planning to go around the movie world in 365 days, Murphy mapped out a 52-week, 52-chapter itinerary that would take him to Sundance, Cannes and four other film festivals, to the world's smallest movie house (in Tenonee, New South Wales, Australia) and the only one made entirely of ice (in way-northern Quebec). He monitored the pulse of cinema past (silent films) and future (IMAX movies). He went on movie rides at theme parks. He attended, in black drag, the singalong "Sound of Music" show in London and copped the Best of Nun prize. One week he tried taking seven different women, including his wife, on dates to the same movie. He watched a bunch of big-screen movies from the front row. He lived for a week on nothing but movie-theater food. Murphy's idea was "to immerse myself in the moviegoing experience and report back that there's still hope and talent and energy out there."
This is a capacious, optimistic, essentially serious vision — the corollary to MST3K's canny cynicism. To make jokes for ten years about cheesy movies is to stare down grim reality and throw up on its hairshirt; to hope for good movies is to seek a Platonic ideal. Inside the mocking clown is the preacher who paints pictures of Hell to give parishioners a glimpse of Paradise, even if it's Paradise (or Paradiso) lost. When Murphy and the gang excoriate the awful, they are implicitly arguing for its reverse: something out there worth watching, worth falling in love with, worth getting passionate about.
But there are also a lot of movies worth making fun of. In "A Year at the Movies" the Tom Servo in Murphy surfaces frequently and funnily. Here's a taste of barbs directed at A-level targets: "'Pulp Fiction' tells us that life is a planet-sized copper kettle full of bubbling feces, in which we stand, knee-deep, until the coffee break's over and we all have to stand on our heads again." ... Merchant-Ivory films, in their suffocating stuporousness, "remind me of a dream I once had, of dying in my grandmother's house, being suffocated by her giant long-haired cat, and eventually rotting and decaying right into one of her doilies." ... Warren Beatty, in the universally reviled "Town & Country" (so no extra points to Murphy for getting het up about it) "looks like one of those old, tired, bewildered, golf-loving bastards who clog up the freeways with Range Rovers on the weekend and expect valet parking at the supermarket."
He's no gentler to the laff-riot comedies from "Saturday Night Live" refugees. Like a summer snoozer who wakes to find a cockroach on his leg, he flicks off "the excrementally offensive Rob Schneider delivery system The Animal'" before spraying a vat of Raid at "Corky Romano": "Chris Kattan is no funnier than a televised colostomy." (What? Your cable provider doesn't carry the Colostomy Channel?) And Chris Penn has "gained at least eight hundred pounds, all of it in his head. He has become a Macy's balloon animal version of himself, straining the skin of his face to the point where it might burst, sending subcutaneous fat spraying over unwitting press members or premiere party guests." Seeing the movie in the company of his pal Nelson, Murphy observes that " 'Corky' is different, and the crowd knows it. I watch the kids look at each other, as if there is something wrong with the projector instead of the movie."
REVIEWING THE AUDIENCE
Murphy looks around a lot too. Like the late Pauline Kael, he reviews the audience as well as the movie. (At screenings, especially the all-media ones with big audiences, the other critics used to whisper, "Pauline, the movie's over there.") This is the populist in Murphy — the one who declares that Hollywood movies are so bad because "they are made by rich people who don't care about anything other than being rich and successful and being among other rich and successful people."
He hates film festivals that exclude the public, like Cannes and Sundance. Since Cannes has been the Lourdes of my moviegoing life for the past 30 years, I'll move right to Murphy's searingly acute remarks about the Utah festival (which I've never been to, so what do I care?): "For ten days in January, Park City becomes a freak show crammed with thousands of vain idiots who believe that their jobs are the most important things in the world. These aren't filmmakers, they're studio executives. Every other man I saw was short, balding, and looked either anxious or annoyed; it was like a city full of MBA's. Every other woman I saw looked like she wanted to beat me up, probably because she kept slipping on the snow in her ridiculously dysfunctional boots, causing her too-tight jeans to ride up so high in the crotch as to become a denim tampon."
Not for him the cinematic poseurs and Pharisees. Kevin prefers the "real people" at the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankyla, Lapland: "We had a grand old time, and as we passed into Lapland the bus had to stop for a herd of reindeer crossing the highway." In the Land of the Midnight Sun or the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Murphy will bond with the movie groundlings and thus get insights into his own moviegoing pleasures and prejudices. Like the Hollywood director in Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" — hitting the road to see what real people like, and are like — Murphy figures that by spending part of every day with the consuming public, he can learn as much about moviegoers as about movies.
At least once, he has a Sullivan-like experience: joining an audience in the privileged moment of comic surrender. In Pomona, Queensland, Australia, he's at the Majestic Theatre, a room "hot as a wrestler's crotch," watching Laurel and Hardy in "Their Purple Moment." And, he says, "I don't think I've ever heard an audience laugh as hard." (I have: at Best Brains' riff on "This Island Earth" at the 1994 MST3K Conventio-Con Expo Fest-a-Rama in Minneapolis. But Kevin was working that night. Maybe he didn't hear the laughter, the way I did in the audience, or see invalid MSTies rolled up the aisles on gurneys, their sides literally split with mirth. Anyway, as he was saying:) "The laughter was in turns explosive, anticipatory, cathartic, joyous. It became part of the score as the organ lilted on at a quick pace. [I] left that day with cramped smile muscles."
But Murphy can be analytical as well as rhapsodic. At the Boston Faith in Film Festival, he's part of an audience that grows consecutively impatient, angry and giddy with aesthetic rebellion while watching Carl Dreyer's dauntingly austere "Ordet": "Remember these are theologians, Harvard folk, film scholars. And still we laughed and heckled what had been called one of the greatest films on faith ever made." (It may interest Murphy to hear that theirs was not a unique reaction to a Dreyer masterwork. At the end of a showing of "Gertrud" at the 1964 New York Film Festival, Dreyer stood up in the director's box and was pelted with a chorus of catcalls.)