T/S: John Hughes vs. Judd Apatow

does that include the pain of me having to watch ben stiller mug through his annoying self-help character on freaks & geeks?

Ben Stiller played a Secret Service agent. Did you actually see this show?

lol, xxp

I was one in 1980 but shit was meaningful then.

uncle buck is great!

ferris is a smarmy asshole--that's why the movie is so fun. we get to identify with a smarmy asshole...it's cathartic. no one is supposed to go out and BE LIKE ferris.

Thank you ryan. See the rest of you? You know what I'm going to say.

i mean, film morality != real world morality.

High school was '87-'91 for me, and trust me no one was driving around listening to Alice Cooper and Cheap Trick.

1988: Cheap Trick, Lap of Luxury
1989: Alice Cooper, Trash

Both on endless repeat in my high school ("The Flame", "Poison")

ryan otm re: Ferris Bueller

well okay nobody I knew

you never watched mtv, apparently

that's true, I didn't have MTV. When I did see it we watched Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes.

ferris bueller's the one i like/relate to most because i pretended to be sick for like 40% of my entire school career

I didn't have MTV, either; I had the entire hesher nation infesting my high school like roaches.

See, now that high school nostalgia movie I would watch.

(In that the Dan-equivalent character at the end kills them all or something equally satisfying.)

Hahaha I was starting to worry about you!

(Also you've kind of described "Massacre at Central High".)

Massacre at Central High is a GREAT very strange and creepy movie

wish I could find a decent copy of it, the one I saw was a really badly deteriorating VHS copy

I saw that movie around age 8 and it fucked me up for WEEKS.

so are we done here? sounds like the winner is Apatow by a wide margin... maybe I shoulda made this a poll...

I didn't have MTV, either; I had the entire hesher nation infesting my high school like roaches.

-- HI DERE, Tuesday, August 21, 2007 10:44 PM (Yesterday)

TRU DAT.

I think Harold And Kumar should have ended with Doogie coming home, going upstairs, and typing a nice little journal entry on what he did that day and what he learned.

-- kenan, Tuesday, August 21, 2007 6:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

this would've been v v v awesome actually for real

The funniest part about the Apatow/Brazill e-mails is that, if you've actually seen the Ben Stiller Show sketch the dude is all fired up about, it was just a grunge parody of The Monkees (called "The Grungees," natch) that this guy maintains ruined the chances of success for some horrible-sounding scripted show about a band living together that he did a pilot for. That said, Brazill does have a point that Apatow seems to get way too much credit for F&G considering that Paul Feig was the one who actually created the show and wrote most of it.

This whole thread's bullshit about how John Hughes should've made all his characters good liberal role models is ridic.

But this is a good, liberal place Alex.

I never actually saw "Freaks and Geeks" because the ad campaigns made it seem like the new standard bearer of the self-satisfied Joss Whedon template of storytelling without any of the fantasy elements that make the Whedon stories bearable/enjoyable.

-- HI DERE, Tuesday, August 21, 2007 10:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

I don't know what this means exactly, but I don't see much, if any, similarity between F&G and Whedon stuff.

When I first heard about Superbad earlier this year, I thought it was an adaptation of a memoir by Paul Feig, but now I'm realizing that the memoir is called Superstud. Still, it didn't seem outlandish for Seth Rogen to be starring in a movie written by Feig.

"Do you wanna be a stud? Or a SUPERstud?"

"Go for SuperStud Sam!"

lookin good

"I guess we should all be proud to be homos."

no one is supposed to go out and BE LIKE ferris.

Oh, so now you tell the children of the 1990s this important information.

This whole thread's bullshit about how John Hughes should've made all his characters good liberal role models is ridic.

this is kinda missing the point, film characters are not role models and criticism isn't centered around some silly paternalistic "oh think of the children, save them from this evil they may imitate" kind of bullshit.

But why is criticizing a film's politics not legitimate? Do you just watch films without thinking at all about what kind of viewpoint they're espousing? Are you cool with a film being completely fascist (300), or racist (Birth of a Nation), or mysognistic, or whatever...? Not saying "this film should have been made THIS way", just that I don't agree with the positions some films take, and it impedes my enjoyment of them.

I mean on a basic level, for example, I disagree vehemently with Mel Gibson's politics and I'm not going to give him any money to see his movies because I don't want to financially support an asshole I disagree with.

"Teen comedies" have never done much for me. The teen age is a wretched and somber time of life.

As for the Hughes movies, their POV is the same as the main characters', which is never very stimulating.

I'm skeptical about calling Bueller on being a manipulative trickster, since the wish-fulfilling all-powerful trickster kid was such a mid-80s archetype -- Bueller is surely a heavy influence, since he predates a lot of them (say, early Mike Seaver), but is he really the first of this type? I'm guessing it descends from the college-aged pranksters in early-80s slobs vs. snobs movies -- and then it trickles down the age bracket until every show about kids or teenagers from like 1983 to 1992 is all about the smug wily omnipotent kid.

Sure, this does seem fairly tied to and representative of the Reagan era. But more than that, it seems to about the idea that kids are stuck working within a defined, bureaucratic system -- parental authority, educational authority, social authority, etc. -- and they like the idea of being the ultimate insider, basically another popular 80s genre: the spy, a secret agent who can manipulate the entire system. It's basically the only way they can claim authority themselves: subterfuge. Half of Bueller is built on his doing comical cloak-and-dagger stuff -- he's got voice processors and odometer rollback plans, he hacks into the school computer system, and he comes to pick up sloan in a trenchoat and fedora.

I'd be wary of reading the kid-as-spy thing as particularly Reaganite -- it may have had big currency around then, but it'd seem to still be hanging around as a basic staple of kid fantasy.

Ha, what's also weird is that the whole movie has Bueller tricking his way into shit that characters in teen movies today would just DO: the kids in 00s teen movies would just go eat at the fancy-ass restaurant with no static, they'd have the awesome cars for themselves from the beginning, and instead of sneaking onto floats in parades, they'd just have some giant expensive party of their own to go to (token black male character will be DJing).

Yeah, there's a lot of distinctly 80's movie/TV tropes that reflect the era's politics in sketchy ways, no doubt, but I feel like we can talk about that without using it as a stick to beat John Hughes movies with. Am I "cool with a film being completely fascist (300), or racist (Birth of a Nation), or mysognistic, or whatever"? Uh, sure! I'm cool with people making them, I'm cool with people criticizing them on those grounds, and I'm cool with watching them if they're entertaining in ways completely seperate from their politics, as 300 is. Why shouldn't I be?

That said, Brazill does have a point that Apatow seems to get way too much credit for F&G considering that Paul Feig was the one who actually created the show and wrote most of it.

That is a fair point, but since F&G, Apatow's been making great movies, while Feig has been making crappy movies. (Although I didn't see Unaccompanied Minors, maybe it was great.)

i wonder if feig was the one who knew how to write interesting chix

I am sort of beginning to suspect that, A B C.

S'true, 'cuz the 40 Year Old Virgin was fucking god-awful from that standpoint.

Well, obviously Apatow's pre- and post-F&G career's been more distinguished, which again, is probably why his name gets mentioned in relation to it more often than Feig's. But that doesn't change who created the show, based on his personal experiences, and did the lion's share of the writing. (xpost good points also)

i know unaccompanied minors wasnt very well recieved but i am gonna check it out from the grocery store rental box, i bet it's worth a dollar if it's good enough for fez and little chris rock to appear in it

Apatow's view of women seems to actually still be that of his youngest characters -- i.e., "I have no idea what they're thinking or why they want to be around us at all, but god bless them for it." It really would be a giant improvement if he could keep his characters thinking this way (which is perfectly true-to-life and interesting) while actually, you know, answering those questions from the other side.

Pitch to Apatow: comedy about serial dater who breaks up with woman after woman because he can't figure out why they like him and is therefore suspicious of intimacy; is forced to eventually figure out how women work as humans in order to maintain relationship; starring Paul Rudd's ass

I really like Apatow, but I think he might only be capable of bromance. Rudd + Rogan = nu-Hepburn + Tracy.

I would really enjoy seeing a full-on bromantic comedy about how two adult men become friends!

that's pretty much the central romance of Knocked Up, I think!

"I have no idea what they're thinking or why they want to be around us at all, but god bless them for it." It really would be a giant improvement if he could keep his characters thinking this way (which is perfectly true-to-life and interesting) while actually, you know, answering those questions from the other side.

Denby beat Apatow about this in his hysterical why contemporary romcoms suck.

yeah, but Denby's article was riddled with problematic, "if we could only go back to when women were really 2nd class citizens, then we'd get spunky female characters back"-nostalgia. he was right about the problems with female characterization in Apatow's work, though.

I really like Apatow, but I think he might only be capable of bromance. Rudd + Rogan = nu-Hepburn + Tracy.

And these days since art is more comfortable with homoerotics or suppressed same-sex feelings, he may be able to make something interesting out of them. What he delineates is strong enough to incorporate the disapproval of his female characters; that's why Denby's remarks were true only in the most glib way.

oh, I see what you're saying. I thought you were a fan of Denby's article. I hate that fucking guy.

I don't always mind Denby, and this particular article was somewhat enjoyable to read (even if I didn't agree with him), but I'm getting pretty tired of the "oh, will nothing ever match the golden age of cinema?" crap.