Nothing in Common

I've still got a couple more movies on my DVR from when Eva Mare Saint was TCM's Star of the Month, so again I'm making a point of watching them before they expire and then putting up a post, although because of how far ahead I'm getting in terms of posting, they may expire by the time the posts go up. Anyhow, next up is a later movie from the mid-1980s, Nothing in Common.

Tom Hanks is the star here, playing David Basner. In an opening scene, he's returning home from a Caribbean vacation to his job at an advertising agency in Chicago. There's he surprised by the new that he's been given a promotion, which in part means a move from a cubicle to an office with a door and a window to the outside world. He's also a ladies' man, as he was putting the moves on one of the stewardesses on the flight home and has an on-again, off-again girlfriend in Chicago in the form drama teacher Donna (Bess Armstrong).

However, life for David is about to get turned upside-down. While he's in bed with a woman, his phone rings. Naturally he lets it go to his answering machine, since this was the 80s and people didn't really have voice mail back then. But he hears that the call is from his father Max (Jackie Gleason). He informs David that David's mom, Max's wife of 36 years Lorraine (Eva Marie Saint) up and left him, and that this clearly isn't some sort of trial separation. So the following day, David has to go see each of his parents, and deal with their complex relationship with one another as well as his own complicated relationship with each of his parents.

Meanwhile, David had been hoping to make parter in the ad agency. To do so means not only making good ads and coming up with good slogans and whatnot, but bringing in new clients, as his boss Charlie (Hector Elizondo) points out. At least there's the chance of landing a big new client, as Colonial Airlines is thinking of a new ad campaign to grow their business. David's agency is understandably hoping to get that contract, and David is the point man on the pitch.

David and the rest of the division do their research, finding that the company is run by somewhat mysterious pilot Andrew Woolridge (Barry Corbin). What is known about Andrew doesn't quite fit David's interests, as is scene in one of the comic relief scenes where David goes on a duck hunt with Andrew and some others, a scene that made me think of Libeled Lady and the remake Easy to Wed. But Nothing in Common is more of a light (for the most part) drama and not a straight-up comedy. Mixing the two is a subplot involving David's having a relationshi with Colonial Airlines bigwig Cheryl (Sela Ward) who turns out to be the daughter of Andrew -- the married daughter, no less.

But the drama really comes in David's relationship with his father. Dad is getting to the age where he should think of retirement, but that's only going to be forced on him by the fact that he's about to get fired from his job selling children's fashions. That, and his health. Max has had diabetes for some time, but never wants to see a doctor. As a result, he has a medical emergency that's going to require surgery. At the very least, there's going to be some toes amputated; at worst the surgery could go bad and Dad could die on the operating table.

I have to admit to not having heard about Nothing in Common before I saw it show up on the TCM schedule last summer. I think that's because it's the sort of movie that doesn't seem to show up much. It got mixed reviews at the time, and as a middle-brow drama doesn't have anything about it to make it especially memorable the way other genre movies might. That's a shame, because while it's not a great movie, I think it's certainly better than "mixed reviews" might lead you to believe. Everybody does a professional job, with Hanks taking a big step in moving out from just the straight comedy roles he had done to this point.

Especially if you're of the age to have elderly parents, I think you'll enjoy Nothing in Common.

The 'Burbs

One of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was The 'Burbs. It's going to be on Flix again tonight at midnight, and is on DVD and Blu-ray, so I recently watched it to do a post on here.

Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) is your typical middle-class family man, living with a wife Carol (Carrie Fisher) and son Dave in a well-manicured suburban cul-de-sac on the Universal backlot. There's a mix of neighbors such as Mark Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), a Vietnam vet who seems to want to relive his glory days in Vietnam; elderly Walter (Gale Gordon), who gets some joy in having his dog pee on Mark's lawn; and Art Weingartner (Rick Ducommun). There's also adolescent Ricky (Corey Feldman), although we never see his parents for whatver reason.

All of them have noticed that there's something odd going on in one of their neighbors' houses, these being the reclusive Klopeks. Their house is unkempt, the lawn is dead, there's an elaborate alarm system, and odd lights and noises emanate from the basement of the house. It's only natural that everybody should be curious about the place.

Unfortunately for Ray, it's the start of a week's vacation, and Carol would prefer to spend the week at their cabin up in the mountains. It's the source of some tension between them, as Ray and the other younger guys are not only getting more curious, they're beginning to get more worried about what's going on in the Klopek house.

What brings matters to a head is that one morning, Walter's beloved little dog is wandering the street alone, and when they bring him back to Walter's house, there's no answer at the door. They eventually break in out of concern, an find the place devoid of life, save for Walter's toupee. That's a big read flag for Ray, because just as Grace Kelly points out in Rear Window that no wife is going to leave the house without her wedding and engagement rings, no elderly man with a toupee is going to leave the house without it.

The guys all think that the Klopeks must be doing satanic rituals or something that otherwise puts people's lives in immediate danger down in that basement, and that Walter is probably already dead. But to find out what's really going on, they have to get into the house, so Ray and Carol along with Mark and his wife Bonnie make a visit over to the house. Dr. Werner (Henry Gibson), together with his brother Reuben (Brother Theodore) and a son/grandson Hans (Courtney Gains) are weird, to say the least, although Dr. Werner seems to be a researcher in, well, something. But why won't the Klopeks let them see the basement, and why do they have a guard dog down there?

Everything seems at least like something that can be answered, until Ray reveals that he found Walter's toupee in the basement along with his mail. In theory it's no big deal that the Klopeks might be picking up Walter's mail, but Ray deliberately left the toupee in Walter's house, and that shouldn't have been picked up. To figure things out once and for all, the guys are going to have to make a commando raid on the Klopek place, something that's just the thing for a Vietnam vet with delusions of glory.

There's the kernel of an interesting story, if nothing new, in The 'Burbs. Unfortunately, the movie is largely let down thanks to the direction, combined with some overbearing music cues. There's one scene, for example, in which director Joe Dante wants to show suspense by doing exaggerated closeups on everybody's faces (including Walter's dog). It goes on too long; it's clumsily handled; and, combined with the obvious music, it doesn't work at all. Bruce Dern's character is written as too much of a stereotype; unlike, say, Terry-Thomas in Make Mine Mink, he's not somebody you'd want to follow but someone you'd want to avoid.

Corey Feldman and his friends playing spectator for the climax are one of the high spots, but The 'Burbs is a film where the high spots are too few and far between. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Forrest Gump Builds His Dream House

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the very 1980s comedy The Money Pit. It's on DVD and is going to be on multiple times in the near future, starting with tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM on The Movie Channel (three hours later if you only have the west coast feed).

The movie starts off in Rio de Janeiro with the weddng of Walter Fielding Sr., who on being asked about his son not being at the wedding, comments that his son knows way. Cut to a scene of Watler Fielding Jr. (Tom Hanks) readnig a letter from his father revealing that Dad has been embezzling from the law firm and has taken a powder to Brazil, leaving our Walter with a seven-figure debt for the him to repay.

Walter is a lawyer in Manhattan, which has a severe housing crunch in the go-go 80s. He's married to Anna (Shelley Long), a concert violinist who is on her second marriage, having formerly been married to an extremely temperamental conductor, Max Beissart (Alexander Godunov). Apparently part of the divorce settlement let Walter and Anna stay in Max's (well, it would have been Anna's as well before the divorce) apartment while Max is in Europe. The couple think they have several months before Max returns, but he's cut his work in Europe short, so he's returning now.

With that, Walter and Anna need a place to stay. Finding one is going to be difficult, not only with the high rents, but the fact that Walter is trying to pay off all those debts. Walter has a friend who's a real estate agent, but doesn't realize that the agent has any number of properties that it's important for him to get off the books, no matter what. There are a lot of properties that are no good, until the couple gets to the one that's clearly too good to be true.

Estelle (Maureen Stapleton) and her husband were supposedly wealthy, living in a million-dollar mansion, but circumstances forced the husband to leave, leaving Estelle in the lurch and needing to sell her grand old house right now, at a pittance of its actual assessed value. This ought to set off all sorts of warning lights and sirens in a good lawyer's mind, but either Walter is so clouded by his need to find a place to live as quickly as possible, or he's just that dim, that he doesn't get a contract that would allow him to back out of the deal within 30 days if things with the house aren't up to snuff. Amazingly, the couple buys the house.

With the plot so far and a title like The Money Pit, it should be no difficulty to guess what happens next, which is that the house starts displaying all the problems that it miraculously didn't have the first time Walter and Anna were visiting. First it's the doorbell and the front door itself, then the electric, and the water, and the grand staircase, and on and on. And none of the contractors really want to help Walter; apparently he's developed a bad reputation. Finally one, Curly (Philip Bosco), and his team do. But their constant presence in the house while the couple are still trying to live there puts yet another strain on the couple's marriage.

It would be easy to see a plot synopsis of The Money Pit and immediately compare it to something like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. But that wouldn't be quite fair; after all, movies about moving out the the suburbs and a better house not being all it's cracked up to be go back to the beginning of the 20th century with a short called The Suburbanite (and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an even earlier one). But the two movies are deliberately different in tone. Blandings is more of an intelligent comedy while The Money Pit isn't intending to be anything more than a broad physical comedy displaying all of the stereotypical excesses of the 1980s.

And it's in that vein that The Money Pit largely succeeds. It's not the world's greatest movie by any means, but the comedy mostly works, and it'll certainly entertain you for the 90 minutes or so that it's on. It's easy to forget that Hanks started out with comedy before the 1990s, and he was pretty capable at it too, as The Money Pit shows. Long is OK, and Godunov is hilarious. It's a shame he died much too young.

So if you like 80s comedy, then you'll definitely love The Money Pit.