Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Classic or Dud

'runway' btw is all-time

^^ yes x1000

The bit where Steve Martin realising they're fucked and trying to get the word "truck...truck" out as they're going the wrong way is one of the funniest things I've ever seen

That whole extended sequence is brilliant. Candy playing piano on the dashboard!

I was home sick with the flu all weekend and yesterday too (had to at least get a weekday off work) and so naturally I stayed in bed and ate a lot of soup and watched a lot of forgettable, not very good movies on Netflix that I hadn't seen before and didn't really enjoy.

The best of these not very good movies was probably Heavyweights (1995). I liked Heavyweights. Did you know that Christopher Meloni's Gene the vietnam vet camp cook from Wet Hot American Summer was totally probably based on a super brief, uncredited cameo by Peter Berg as the scruffy camp cook? It's so weird, it's the only time this guy's in the movie, and he only says this one line after Josh goes mysteriously missing after talking back to evil Ben Stiller. You can't ignore the costume similarities, look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfdVtzn9gNU

But this post isn't about Heavyweights (1995), it's about Dutch (1991). You know, Dutch, it's got Ed O'Neill in it. Working class guy escorts his girlfriend's snotty boarding school son home for Thanksgiving. I'd never seen Dutch before. Apparently it was a huge flop, and for the last 25 years I've associated it with the memory of being annoyed at having to constantly see it on the shelves at the Video Discount for years after I initially decided it didn't seem interesting or funny enough to want to see. Seemed like it took Video Discount half my adolescence to finally move it from the New Releases section to the back of the store. I'm not sure why I rejected it unseen. Maybe because Ed O'Neill seemed like such an appropriately familiar TV face that it was off-putting to visualize him in a movie, or maybe the hockey stick on the cover made me think it had something to do with hockey, which I don't care for. It was probably a combination of the two.

So yeah, I never bothered with it and I'm glad I didn't, because this movie is a complete rip-off of my favorite movie of all time: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)!!!! And the weird thing is, it was written by John Hughes! I couldn't believe it. It has to be some reworked early draft of PT&A that John and director Peter Faiman (of Crocodile Dundee fame, and nothing else) thought they could fool people with for some quick cash. Pretty inexcusable if you ask me.

Here is a list of similarities between Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Dutch that proves that Dutch is a rip-off of Planes, Trains and Automobiles:

• story involves two guys on a roadtrip (main diff of course is that one guy is a boy guy in Dutch, both guys are adult guys in PT&A)
• character dynamics are predicated on the class differences between them
• the roadtrip is through the Midwest, with Illinois as the destination
• the roadtrip occurs prior to Thanksgiving, with plenty of snow on the ground
• electronic car seat positional adjustment knob humor
• pivotal argument scene occurs at a sketchy roadside motel
• vehicle ultimately exits sketchy roadside motel by peeling out in the snow and causing property damage
• automobile wreck involving a big-rig (though technically there's two in PT&A's, just one in Dutch's)
• stolen wallet (by the way, the whore that steals Dutch's wallet is Dottie from Pee Wee's Big Adventure! I recognized her and am proud)
• one of the final legs of Dutch & Doyle's journey involves resorting to riding inside large concrete pipe segments on a flatbed truck, similar to how Neal & Del rode with the meat in the refrigerated trailer of the truck of the skittish truckdriver guy

• No planes or trains in Dutch. Just automobiles
• PT&A doesn't have a Ziggy Marley song in the end credits
• PT&A is a good movie (best movie, actually)

Used to get Curly Sue confused with Dutch, mostly because they were both on the Blockbuster shelves together long past their prime.

Curly Sue's the one where Jodie Foster's retarded, right?

i didn't understand the "those are pillows" joke for way too long. once i finally did i felt ready for adulthood

areN'T pillows

I went back and watched the ending again, after reading all about this:

Originally, Martin escapes his accidental travel companion Candy, hops a train, goes home to Chicago for Thanksgiving – and finds Candy has followed him home in a cab, a relentless pest. “I realized I don’t like this guy at the end…He just went from being a pain in the ass to a tragic pain in the ass.” Hughes decided to make Candy “a noble person” who catches the hint, lets Martin go back to his family, and goes off to suffer alone – until Martin realizes Candy’s a tragically lonesome noble person, and invites him back for Thanksgiving.

The whole Martin-reminisces-fondly-about-their-escapade scene on the train was just an outtake of Martin sitting in the car, going over his lines in his head between takes.

I haven't been home in years,,,,, in years,,,,,IN YEARS,,,,,....

As originally written, Candy follows Martin home to Chicago in a cab, and then asks him to pay the fare, which is $84,688

Fantastic review of the 30th anniversary blu:

I don't know how much the subjective storytelling in Planes, Trains & Automobiles reflects Hughes's identification with Neal, but his auteur idiosyncrasies are all over the film, from this distrust of slumber to the short-spanning narrative (Tuesday-Thursday); from the eclectic yet cohesive soundtrack (Ira Newborn's score alone incorporates blues harp, Vangelis-style synth riffs, and an insanely catchy computerized rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In") to the closing freeze-frame; from the devastation of an automobile to the Leone-style close-ups during Martin's opening showdown with Bacon. (When Hughes samples from pop-culture, it's a tonal cue (i.e., the use of the "Dragnet" and "Twilight Zone" themes in Sixteen Candles), not a riff on what's being referenced.) And of course there are the surreal beats, which, owing to the picture's focus on Neal, feel more anchored in the realm of expressionism than usual, and pull us deeper into the emotional reality of the character. (See: Del briefly turning into the Devil when Neal realizes they're driving against the flow of traffic on the highway.) My favourite of these is when Neal recognizes Del's face at the airport: Instead of flashing back to Del's surprised reaction in the back of the cab, Hughes recreates the moment inside the airport, complete with the door to the taxi! It's difficult to imagine any of the filmmakers currently working in Hughes's shadow going this extra mile, let alone being so inspired or audacious in the first place.