Raiders of the Truffle Shuffle

"Goonies never say die."

Seriously, this is the poster?

Date shown: August 19, 2010
Host: Richard
Meal: Meatloaf

Enough time has passed in my life that the movies that came out when I was a tween can now be considered classics. Exhibit A: "The Goonies."

In a lot of ways, "The Goonies" cannibalizes from its makers' filmographies. To wit:

• Screenplay by Chris Columbus, who never met a crotch injury he didn't like (seriously, I'm shocked that his two Harry Potter films didn't feature scenes where Snape takes it in the jewels). You can totally see the DNA of "Home Alone" in this story, what with the cartoon-level violence and gags and contraptions and comical, squeaky-voiced dick abuse. 
• Producer and Story by Steven Spielberg, who has essentially recreated "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for tweens. Some of the set pieces are on-the-nose similar. Mike (a cute little dewey-eyed Sean Astin) sets off a booby trap of large falling rocks that send the goonies scurrying, just like Raiders' opening scene. Also from that scene, he stole the booby trap triggered by removing something gold - instead of a statue, moving One-Eyed Willie's doubloons causes the pirate ship to set sail.
• Producer Kathleen Kennedy, who worked with Spielberg on "E.T." - and like that movie, we have a young boy (Chunk) who makes friends with an odd-looking, funny-talking creature (Sloth) and they bond over food (Baby Ruth) and pop culture ("Hey You Guuuuyyys!").
• Director Richard Donner is probably best known for directing "Superman" - and, of course, Sloth rips open his shirt to reveal a Superman T-shirt underneath when he's saving the kids.

I can't remember how old I was when I first saw this - or where, really. It know it wasn't in the theater, though. For some reason, all those experiences from childhood have strong specific memories for me (probably because we didn't go to the theater all that often). So I must have caught it on cable sometime before high school. This became one of the movies my brother and sister and I quote from, randomly and out of context - "give me a big wet lickery kiss" - it's a throwaway moment from The Feldman, but it stuck with us.

On classics

What makes a classic? It could be a high quality product, or a fundamental one. It could be traditional or definitive or enduring. Here are what I consider the elements of a classic movie, particularly for our purposes with this movie group:

• Age - the older movie (particularly the really good ones) influence current culture, so it's important to see the original and trace the roots
• Talent of the cast - again, the great old filmmakers and stars spawned the newer generation and became part of the culture
• Overall impact - on both the culture at large and on our group members as individuals
• Memories - especially for the movies we saw when we were kids
• Quality - many films (though not all) are truly works of art, and it does us good to see them

This is why I can call "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" a classic, even though it won't show up on anybody's Top 100 list. It had a huge impact on my family - on our common references, on our memories; it's a great sample of the work of a very young Sean Connery, and it's a representative slice of Disney's live-action film-making, which absolutely fills my childhood memory banks. (Seriously, if I could get my hands on a copy of "For the Love of Willadean," you guys would know the kind of movies I grew up seeing.) (Nobody is going to get that reference but my sister, which is true of so many of my references.)

I think this is why we call this Classic Movie Night instead of Great Movie Night. Look at our list - they are not all Great Movies. But we watched them (or, often, re-watched them) because each movie had a lasting effect on at least one of us. For Randy it was "Moonrunners." For me, "Darby." For Steve, "Red Dawn." For Carlo, "Little Big Man." And we wanted to share that slice of our memories with the group.

Sure, we could devote ourselves to the Important Films like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "No Country for Old Men." But they don't have the Truffle Shuffle.

Giggity moments

So, there were some naughty bits in this flick - things that zoomed right past me as a kid:

• That bit at the beginning with the naked guy statue and the broken penis - they reglued it into an erection.
• Mouth tries to hide some jewels in his mouth when they're caught by the Fertellis, and we watch a long pearl necklace being pulled out (thanks for bringing that to our attention, Rich).
• And we had no end of jokes about One-Eyed Willie.

Trivia

Chunk today

• Chunk is now an entertainment lawyer. He went to UC-Berkeley and did the Truffle Shuffle on the sidelines of football games. Like Jerry O'Connell from "Stand By Me" (We need to watch "Stand By Me"!), he is no longer a Chunk.
• This was Josh Brolin's first film. He has been in a few others.
• There's a moment when the kids all break into a run, and we could all tell that they jiggled the camera. Kind of shocked that they didn't reshoot that.
• That pirate ship was a real ship they built for the movie, and they didn't let the kids see it until it was time to shoot the scene where they discover it. They filmed their honest, no-acting first reaction, but they couldn't use the footage because they all said "holy shit" over and over.
• That ship was scrapped after filming - the producers asked if anybody wanted to keep it, but they got no takers.
• Sean Astin kept the map, but years later his mom thought it was just an old piece of paper, and she threw it away. Moms.
• The guy who played Sloth was a former Oakland Raider.
• The Other Corey (Haim, RIP) auditioned for Mouth, which went to The Feldman.

That Guy moments

We've got two pretty good That Guys:

Joe Pantoliano

Joe Pantoliano, who plays the Fertelli brother with glasses. I recognized him from "The Fugitive," in which he's one of the marshalls. I'm sure other people know him from "The Matrix" and "The Sopranos."

Robert Davi

Robert Davi, who plays the opera-singing, pockmarked-faced brother. He was in "Die Hard," "License to Kill" and the TV show "The Profiler." When I saw him in this movie, I knew I recognized him from someplace - but I'm pretty sure that "Goonies" was the place I originally saw him, so all my other sightings should date back to this movie.

The meal

Rich made a veggie-infused meatloaf and the spiciest green beans in the history of ever. Seriously, I licked my finger when some of the seasoning got on there, and I nearly exploded from the inside. Chanda brought some yummy, cinamonny homemade applesauce that made us all think of autumn. And Kandy brought her fruit pizza, of which we all had two helpings, it was that good.

And now, for fun, an illustrated schematic of Data's inventions:

From the archive: "Singin' in the Rain"

"An' I caayyn't stan' 'im."

– Lina Lamont (it's really hard to type out her awesome nasal whine)

I'm a fan of musicals, let it be known. I grew up with Mom's record collection, which consisted primarily of anything Julie Andrews was ever in - "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music," "Camelot," "Mary Poppins." We would tape musicals off the TV (aw, tapes; aw, VHS) and I'd watch them endlessly, just to get the songs right.

So it's more than a little odd that until this movie group, I had never seen "Singin' in the Rain," widely considered to be one of the greatest musicals ever. We queued this one up at Lana's place four (four!) years ago. It has resided safely in my top 10 ever since.

My favorite trivia bits

• Gene Kelly had a terrible cold the day he was scheduled to shoot the actual singing in the rain sequence - something like a 103 fever. The director was all set to send him home, but Kelly didn't want to waste the already prepared set. So he performed this joyful, incandescent, lighter-than-air tap dance when he must have felt like utter shit. And he did it in precisely one take. Then he went home. One take. A masterpiece. A-freakin-mazing.
• Fun fact: the rain in that sequence was a mix of water and milk so it would show up better.

Seriously, look how high they get off the ground!

•  Know who else was amazing? Donald O'Connor, who played the sidekick, Cosmo. Not only does he have these creepy bluer-than-blue eyes, but his bones seem to be made of rubber. He performs this gravity-defying song-and-dance bit for "Make 'em Laugh" where he literally tosses himself about the room, does back flips off walls with no wires or digital effects, and often in one looooooong take. Oh, and he was a four-pack-a-day smoker at the time. Insane. After they shot that scene, he went to bed for a week out of exhaustion. Then, naturally, the film was ruined in an accident, so he had to shoot the whole damn thing again.
• Nother fun fact: That song, "Make 'em Laugh," sounds almost exactly like Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" - in both melody and lyric. Seriously, somebody could have been sued, it was that similar.
• Cyd Charise was the amazing dancer in the Broadway Melody sequence - when she died last year, I read a story that she told about the difference between dancing with Gene Kelly and with Fred Astaire. When she danced with Kelly, she came home covered in bruises from being athletically tossed around. When she danced with Astaire, there wasn't a mark on her.
•  Gene Kelly was, by many accounts, quite the tyrannical bastard during this film - and others, as I understand. He yelled at poor little 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds all the time and made her cry. He worked her so hard during the "Good Morning" dance routine that blood vessels in her feet burst. Donald O'Connor said he was terrified of making a mistake and getting yelled at by Kelly.

The scene that caused bloody feet. Jerk.

 
Seriously, there are tons of great bits of trivia like this, particularly for this film. And now I run into a problem. A lot of the backstage info adds up to one unavoidable fact: Gene Kelly = jerk. I don't want it to be this way. I love Gene Kelly. "Brigadoon" ("It's bloody Brigadoon!") was one of the early movies we taped from TV, and, c'mon, he's this cute, athletic, super talented Irish kid from New York. I want to love him. Then I go and find out that he was a mean, demanding boss who made his co-stars cry and stuff.

This has happened to me before. In college, I was most chagrined to discover that Robert Frost was a raging, competitive, rotten-to-his-kids asshole. But he's also one of my favorite poets. I have a hard time reconciling these two facts. I want my favorite artists to be cool people. I want them to be the kind of people I would want to work with (if they weren't you know, dead and stuff). The class where I found out about Robert Frost's bastard tendencies was an American Lit survey course that I have come to refer to as the Mean Old Bastard class. Almost without fail, every one of those great writers was not someone I would want to hang out with. (Gwendolyn Brooks excepted.)

Is it too much to ask that someone with enormous talent also be a nice guy? Or are they only capable of making great art by being bastards? 

Here's the requisite exception: You know how earlier I said Gene Kelly made Debbie Reynolds cry? She went and hid under a piano to do her crying because, c'mon, she was 19! Know who found her there and cheered her up? Fred Astaire. So at least one great artist was also a nice guy. 

On knowing things

Movie trivia is kind of my thing, as I might have mentioned. And there is a lot to know about this movie - that list above ain't the half of it, folks.

Sometimes, the trivia bolsters my movie-watching pleasure. Knowing about Kelly's fever or O'Connor's exhaustion makes those scenes even more incredible - knowing the human, breakable being behind those superhuman moves. But other times - the Gene Kelly is a Bastard Times - the trivia detracts. Looking for film flubs or flimsy sets - this can pull me out of the imagined world of the movie and take me backstage to where the sausage is made. And backstage is a cool place, yes, but it's like knowing the magician's tricks.

I wish I had seen "Singin' in the Rain" when I was a kid, before I knew anything about it. I still feel some wonder, some marvel at the talent on the screen when I see it now, but I don't get lost in the movie the way I could as a kid.

Nevertheless, every time this movie shows up on the TCM schedule, I drop everything and let it play. No flipping, no distractions. Gotta dance, people.  

Oh, Watson, the needle!

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." – Sherlock Holmes

Movie: "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1939)

Date: Aug. 5, 2010

Host: Colleen

Meal: Pork chops and green beans, with Tippin's French Silk pie for dessert

This is somewhat embarrassing of me to admit, but here it is: I've never read any Sherlock Holmes story. Two degrees in English under my belt, a lifelong addiction to books and two parents who chew through mysteries like a bag of microwave popcorn - but I've never gotten into the stories. (Pause for righteous indignation and blasphemy.)

So when the group decided on "The Hound of the Baskervilles" tonight out of the collection of movies I have on the DVR (surprising me, actually. I was sure the guys would lobby for one of the westerns), I honestly didn't know how the story would end. Luckily, I didn't have to work that hard to pick up clues or red herrings or anything. "Say, his shoe is mysteriously missing from his room! Twice!" "Say, the butler is creepy; let's pan the camera down to see that he's currently barefoot!" Subtle, this was not. But, still, this was an early enough mystery that the whole "the butler did it" thing wasn't a total cliche yet, so I sort of fell for the red herring and thought that the butler might have un-ironically done it.

Some of our fearless group members have read some Holmes, and nearly everyone was aware of the basics about the character, particularly Holmes' serious drug habit. (We debated over our memory - was it heroin? morphine? opium? We just knew he was decidedly on the sauce.) We even commented on it during the movie - how this huge element of the character seemed to be missing. Then there's that last, odd line: "Oh, Watson, the needle!" It's the only acknowledgment that Holmes was a cocaine addict (not one of the drugs we were guessing), and apparently (according to the guy on Turner Classic Movies), that one line caused a stink with the censors.

This movie was released in that insanely incredible year of 1939. Although it went on to start a 14-film series of Sherlock Holmes films, it didn't place in the top 10 at all. But seriously, look what did:

The top 10 money earners for 1939:

1. Gone with the Wind
2. Babes in Arms (Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland)
3. Drums Along the Mohawk (Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert)
4. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Charles Laughton)
5. Jesse James (Tyrone Power)
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - check!
7. Stagecoach - check!
8. The Old Maid (Bette Davis, who scares Steve)
9. The Rains Came
10. The Wizard of Oz - seriously, who hasn't seen this movie yet?

And, just for fun, here are the other movies we had to choose from tonight:

• The Magnificent Seven
• The Bad and the Beautiful
• Bad Day at Black Rock
• Bye, Bye Birdie
• Executive Suite
• Becket
• The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (with Bette Davis, who scares Steve)

Basil Rathbone

This is one of those iconic roles that we, as a movie group, need to dip into so we can touch all the important bases in film. For instance, we've done a Marx brothers flick, one of the Hepburn-Tracy, a Road picture, etc. Basil Rathbone created the first hugely popular Sherlock Holmes for the movies (which, of course, went on to haunt his career in the form of vicious typecasting). He did 14 Holmes film from 1939 to 1946 - do some math there. Sometimes he did three of them a year.

• Real name: Philip St. John Basil Rathbone (note: I love knowing movie stars' real names)
• Where we've seen him before: Nowhere yet, but I hope to add Errol Flynn's "Captain Blood" to our list (caught it on TCM last week - awesome with a dash of overacting and just the right amount of Olivia de Havilland) as well as "The Court Jester" with Danny Kaye (because we are criminally lacking in Danny Kaye)

Hop in the Wayback Machine (i.e. Google)

Invariably while watching these old movies, we question the most mundane of things. Should he be using a pistol? A flashlight, really? They have flashlights but no electricity? So here's what I consulted the Wayback Machine for this time:

• Pistols: Well, this one made me feel ridiculous. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" was written in 1901, and I assume the story is set contemporary to its writing, so the question becomes, were pistols in use before 1901. Good golly Molly yes they were. Invented in the 1500s, children. 
• Flashlight: This one was a pretty new innovation for a 1901 story - it was invented in 1898. Its history is intertwined with that of the battery, naturally, which had been around in some form or other since the late 1700s, but it wasn't until 1881 that the first commercially successful dry cell battery was invented.
• Electricity: The Baskerville manor way out in the moors of England relied on candlelight, which we found odd considering Holmes was out there with his flashlight already. The electric light bulb was invented in 1879, which brought electricity into the home. But it took a lot longer to get those country manors retrofitted for the new technology.

The meal: Pork chops (no applesauce, sadly)

So, I don't usually do a lot of cooking for movie night - I'm much more a Minsky's kind of girl. But this time, I had a recipe I really needed to share with everyone. My friend Mayela had made these incredible barbecue pork chops with the best green beans I'd ever tasted, and it sounded simple enough for me to pull it off. I had to check with everyone that pork was kosher (so to speak).You never know about pork.

I couldn't have done this recipe while I was working a 9-to-5 job, though. It cooks for four hours at 225 degrees, and when it's done, the meat is so tender that the act of picking it up with tongs will cause it to fall apart and debone itself. Seriously, go get the recipe, peeps.

Chanda wanted to make some homemade applesauce (because of the Brady Bunch non-sequitur that everyone knows), but that didn't work out.

An unusual occurrence for movie group: Zero leftovers. Not of the appetizers, not of the dessert, not of the mountain of pork. Which means we either planned perfectly and brought the right amount for seven people (plus Lucy, natch), or we were starrrrrrrving.

His Girl Friday

Walter: There's been a lamp burning in the window for ya, honey.

Hildy: Oh, I jumped out that window a long time ago.

Periodically, I'll be recapping some of our memorable past experiences. I can't always promise to remember the food or recipes, but something about these movies stood out.

Host: Chanda

Date: July 22, 2010

Dinner: This awesome spaghetti with a sauce composed mostly of stealth vegetables.

Oh good golly Miss Molly I love "His Girl Friday." This was high on my list of movies that I love too much to show at Movie Night. The spectacular rat-a-tat dialogue, jokes zinging past you almost too fast to catch - this is a challenging movie to show to a bunch of hecklers.

But when Chanda hosted, she said we were going to choose from the list of Watch It Now options from Netflix that she had queued up, and "His Girl Friday" was clearly the most superior. I issued a heartfelt and stern caveat that we could only watch it if we promised not to talk too much. This truly worried me, you guys. Luckily, there were only four of us that night, so silence was easier to enforce. And it worked - laughter in all the right places, close attention to the plot, the works.

We did encounter one of the inherent problems of streaming movies online - in the middle of the farcical, extended denouement in the press room, the movie kept stopping to rebuffer, so those last 15 madcap minutes were frustratingly drawn out. But - bright side - it gave us time to talk.

Hey It's That Guy Moments

This movie had two That Guys who just drove me mad. They were two important supporting characters, and I just couldn't place them. Had to give up on one of them and turn to IMDB.

Earl Williams in "His Girl Friday," played by John Qualen

John Qualen at far right in "Casablanca" as Berger

The killer (Earl Williams) = Berger from Casablanca

It's his mousy, mewling voice and the lips - something about the lips struck me as important. Finally, I put it together: I kept seeing the lips jut out to reach a drink, and it led me to his scene at the bar in Casablanca talking to Victor Lazlo.

The sherrif = the judge in Miracle on 34th Street

This one drove me bonkers. I kept picturing this guy making a silly singsong voice with a kid, but I absolutely could not place him. Chanda pulled up his profile on IMDB, but his name (Gene Lockhart) wasn't enough of a trigger. She read through all his credits - and cripes there were a lot of them - until she hit "Miracle on 34th Street" and I shouted "YES." Such catharsis in connecting the dots. The singsongy voice I heard was the judge announcing "over-ru-uled."

Ralph Bellamy, far right, in "His Girl Friday"

Ralph Bellamy, left, in "Trading Places"

Ralph Bellamy = old guy in Pretty Woman and Trading Places

Most of us know Ralph Bellamy from "Pretty Woman" and "Trading Places," but he was a great 40s movie star. Enough so that they dropped his name in the screenplay of "Friday":

Walter (describing Bruce): He looks like that fellow in the movies, Ralph Bellamy.

Seriously, how meta is that? It's easy to think that's a post-modern, too-ironic-for-you thing that current movies do (like in "Oceans 12" when they pretend Tess - played by Julia Roberts - is actually Julia Roberts), but clearly Howard Hawkes had them beat.

Fun trivia

Cary Grant's real name was Archibald Leach, and he tried to work that name into the screenplay of many of his movies. Not 10 minutes after I announced this bit of trivia, we heard the iconic line: "The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach."

The food

Amy couldn't make it at the last minute, and she was scheduled to bring dessert. So an hour before I left, I baked a quick batch of brownies. Rich showed up as my awesome carpool to the Northland, and he's brought ice cream and berries. We get to Chanda's, and Kandy as supplied a dessert as well.

The lesson: Do not deprive us of our dessert break.

Movie Night by Proxy

You know how you have a group of friends - maybe from college or an old job - and someone says, "Hey, we should get together on a regular basis and watch a movie or something" - and how that never seems to last? 

We are not that group.

Meet the Classic Movie Group. (It's not a clever name.) We're on our sixth year of this tradition. About every other week, between four and 10 of us meet at somebody's house to watch an old movie and eat some food. Six years. I've counted - we've done 116 movies to date, if my memory and record keeping are accurate. Six years, people.

I joined the group five years ago when I moved back to Kansas City. My best friend (Amy) had been telling me about this group of people who decided to, I guess, add to their culture by watching old movies. Amy knew this was exactly the sort of thing I'd dig. I'm a certified movie nerd. I know things. Unnecessary things. Random things. 

Things like where the midgets are in "Casablanca."

Things like where have we seen that guy before? (Celeste Holm, fyi)

The "Hey It's That Guy" moments are my favorite parts. The old movies are great for finding stars in really minor roles, which is always entertaining. But more than that, I like the web of connections we're weaving every time we connect those dots. All these actors and roles exist in our collective minds, each jostling about backstage. Sometimes That Guy bumps into himself in another role, tying wildly disparate movies together in your head.


(I find this happens all the time on current TV. There seems to be a group of actors who guest star on all the major shows, and as soon as I've seen a guy twice, I start to recognize him, and then I have to scratch that IMDB itch to remind myself that the guy playing Det. Esposito on Castle played a Marine on NCIS and that's where I recognize him.)

Happily, the movie group folks don't mind that I'm compelled to share this unnecessary knowledge with them - during the movie, even.

We are hecklers. We are disrespectful. We talk during the show and miss important stuff and have to rewind. We take lengthy dessert breaks. We don't always like a beloved classic. We don't always choose classics in the first place. (I'm looking at Moonrunners, Randy.)

I love this group.

Other friends have told me they want to join this group by proxy because they can't be there in person. So, here's the proxy - recaps, reviews, recipes and totally unnecessary movie trivia.