Tired of New Year's Resolutions? How About Excuses Instead?I am overdue for listing my 2005 works here. I was sick for much of December, and haven't gathered up the notebooks, nor files, relating to the past year. I'll try to get it up shortly.
Dick at the Doors of DeathI watched the 40 mins. or so of "New Year's Rockin' Eve" last night. I heard a Hilary Duff song that sounded like an out-take from a Jane Wiedlen album. She looks good with her cap tipped just so to the left, although the white dress with the big wide buckle looked like it contained, rather than flattered, her figure. The three black guys dancing behind her were awful; I couldn't tell you what they were doing. The song was forgettable -- see? I've already forgotten it.
Dick Clark's commentary was badly garbled and he is obviously stroke-damaged. They don't use that "world's oldest teenager" moniker for Dick anymore. Ryan Seacrest was getting a lot of airtime and a lot of love. The bits with Dick were sad -- not quite the train wreck that Bert Parks ended up being, but just as embarrassing.
Speaking of embarrassing things, the following is the movie Keith brought over for New Year's. I had never heard of it, although it is commonly available as a cheapie DVD at the supermarket.
The Fat Spy (1966)Although marketed as a Jayne Mansfield movie, this is really a vehicle for insult comic Jack E. Leonard (1910-1973). Standup was really Leonard's milieu - he appeared a bunch of times on Ed Sullivan, which is how I know of him; never much cared for his shtick actually. But somebody decided he would work as a lead in a movie, and so "The Fat Spy" was made.
Leonard clearly doesn't have the magnetism to pull off a whole film by himself, and was more effective as a supporting character in the few films he made. In "The Fat Spy" we get him twice, playing a dual role, although the two characters he portrays never appear in the same scene. Jayne Mansfield is actually the best thing about this movie - by this time she was quite good portraying in her usual dumb blonde mode, and she looks terrific. She was also quite pregnant, which is kind of funny as she's playing Jack E. Leonard's girfriend. There is no chemistry whatsoever between them, and part of the joke, I guess, is the unlikeliness of a fine female like Jayne even being attracted to a guy as repulsive as Leonard. It's not funny though, as the whole premise simply lacks credibility. But at least Jayne gets the best song in the movie.
Phyllis Diller does the best that she can, attempting to add characterization to a stock character not fully thought out by the scriptwriter. "The Fat Spy" was still pretty early in her career, and
one can imagine Phyllis thinking on one hand "God I'm glad to be working in a movie!" and on the other "what in hell is this damned thing supposed to be about?"
Mostly what it's about is singing and dancing - bad singing and bad dancing. Teenagers invade an island off the coast of Florida in a motorboat. The island belongs to a corporation run by Brian Donleavy and Leonard's "Herman" character, and they are concerned as the island is alleged to be the location of the lost "fountain of youth" discovered by Ponce de Leon. Jayne, whose name in the film is "Junior," has the idea of engaging the other Leonard character, "Irving," to spy on the teens. He infiltrates them briefly, and they do wonder if he's a spy. Later the Herman character arrives on the island with Diller, both scheming to seize the "fountain," which is a pair of black roses possessing special powers. They greedily eat the second rose, which turns them into toddlers, and towards the end we learn that two of the teenagers are actually Ponce de Leon and his Contessa. The movie has no ending, but it does propose titles for a number of proposed sequels to "The Fat Spy" - one is thankful none of these were ever made.
The scene where Jayne flies onto the island in a private plane, and Irving is at the island airstrip to greet her, is so badly edited that you can't tell what the hell is going on. That's endemic of the biggest problem of "The Fat Spy" -- it's put together so bass-ackwards that it doesn't play. They really needed someone to dig into the trims and find some shots that matched. It's really a heck of a lot worse than many films cited as "so bad they're good" -- "Glen or Glenda' may be sprawling, with a jumpy continuity, but it sure as hell plays - at least Ed Wood made sure to get all of the shots he needed to tell the story. "The Fat Spy" plays like someone important, possibly the star, walked out on the picture before it was really finished. So they had to turn to a bunch of second-unit stuff to fill it out to 75 minutes.
And naturally, all the second unit stuff is the stuff with the teens, the center being made up of members of the New York based rock group The Wild Ones. The movie opens with Wild Ones Jordan Christopher and Chuck Alden playing an acoustic version of one of their club hits, "People Sure Act Funny." You hear the whole number even before the opening credits roll - it's okay, but their dance tune "The Turtle" is one of the most pathetic attempts at a dance craze I think ever; they didn't record it, and for their sake I hope that they didn't write it. Jordan Christopher is paired up with actress Lauree Berger in some of the most mediocre movie love duets this side of Bollywood, and their characters are unimaginatively named "Frankie" and "Nanette," at least, of course, until they are revealed to be Ponce de Leon and his significant other. Both Christopher and Berger continued acting in minor roles for many years after "The Fat Spy."
Johnny Tillotson, who in 1966 hadn't had a hit in years, also found a place, and a couple of bad songs to sing, in "The Fat Spy." His character falls in love with a mermaid, and then follows her into the sea to drown. This bit of drama, one would think, might lead to some actual development of the plot. But it is merely dismissed with the line "What am I going to tell his mother?" The teens have a phone on the boat, but no one uses it to phone the Coast Guard and report Tillotson missing.
When the dancers "dance," they dance on their marks. Their feet do not move, which is a pretty bad habit for a dancer to develop. One senses the guiding hand of an inexperienced A.D. saying, "Okay, now dance, but don't move off your marks," and then not shooting enough insert shots of moving feet to provide the impression that these kids are supposed to be dancing.
"The Fat Spy' is a bad, bad, bad movie. Nearly four minutes are devoted to watching the motorboat depart from a slip. The sequence of the teens driving the boat as they depart from the island are taken from the same shoot used near the beginning when they first arrive, so in both instances they are travelling AWAY from the shoreline. There is an interminably long sequence where Brian Donleavy is sitting on the bow of a boat, as in impressionist does the voices of JFK, Jimmy Stewart, James Cagney and others. We are led to assume that he is having illusions of grandeur, and these voices are going off in his mind. But the correlation between the visual/sound is never established, and the whole long scene has no relevance to what little plot there was to this point.
Unless you must see everything that Jayne Mansfield was in, it is a better idea for one to spend the night in jail than it is to spend 75 minutes watching this movie.
Uncle Dave Lewis