Mish Mash 28 (Flying Down to Rio, Movie Body Counts, K-9, Goodbye Hooper?)

Flying Down to Rio

This picture’s famous for showcasing the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  They play supporting characters though and are bandmates/friends meant for comic relief.  Of course the one big number they have is a showstopper revolving around a Brazilian dance called the carioca.

Putting all that aside the real reason I’m bringing the movie up is because of the finale.  Don’t worry about spoilers, they show what happens on the damn poster.  Anyway, the whole thing involves tying a bunch of dancers to the wings of planes and having them do a choreographed routine in the sky.  They didn’t actually do this by the way.  It’s movie magic.  Unsurprisingly they look pretty awkward trying to swing their arms or kick their legs while someone off camera blows wind in their faces and jostles the fake plane around.  Some are dressed in silly looking costumes too with propellers on their heads or airplane wings jutting out of their necks.

I’m fine with all this.  The part that’s kinda dumb in my opinion is that the entire sequence is meant to wow the tourists staying at Rio’s fancy hotels but it’s like really obvious the people on the ground can’t see any of this shit.  And these ladies are risking their lives by agreeing to tether themselves to bi-planes that were hastily and spontaneously outfitted with hooks, ropes and screws just moments before.  There’s even a part where a woman falls from one of the wings and miraculously lands on another plane below her.  This wasn’t planned.  The filmmakers wanted you to think for a moment this broad was going to plunge to her death.  I guess within the film the grounded audience does see the dazzling air show so it was probably all worth it.  The scene’s still fuckin’ odd man.

 

Movie Body Counts

Ok, we’re definitely gonna be in spoiler territory this time.  So I was watching Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and towards the end the military drops a nuclear bomb on the town that gets taken over by the battling creatures and that particular move probably ticks this guy way up the list in terms of body count.  Again, a whole regular ass town gets obliterated with the people still living there.  No evac.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is often cited as having either the highest or nearly the highest body count in a single installment…on screen.  That caveat’s tricky and AVP: Requiem got me thinking.  What about The Day After Tomorrow?  With all the global shenanigans of devastating monster storms covering every inch of Erath’s surface billions had to have died during that.  There’s a lot of flooding and stuff but since it’s all shot from very wide angles showing more the destruction of cities, famous landmarks and landscapes as opposed to focusing in on millions and millions of individuals being decimated.

The Day After Tomorrow's storms are the size
of continents

And what about Star Wars: A New Hope?  The evil empire blows up an entire planet of innocent people in that.  Maybe that one gets a pass because technically they’re all aliens and not human beings?  Even though we all think of them as human beings?  I guess similar to The Day After Tomorrow since we only see the planet burst into bits from a distance and don’t see the suffering up close it doesn’t register nearly as much as say Halloween Kills where you witness the innocents die up close and in particularly gruesome ways.

K-9

Pairing up a human cop with a dog cop is fine.  No problem there.  Anthropomorphizing the dog, eeh, always kinda bizarre but ok.  In typical fashion the two don’t get along at first because they cramp each other’s style but learn to love and respect one another through harrowing escapades on the job.  All acceptable.  The part I’m not on board with is how much of a goddamn psycho Jim Belushi’s (K-911, K-9: P.I.) character is.

Normally in an action cop movie the protagonist is a hard boiled sonuvabitch who plays by his own rules.  He’s constantly in hot water with his boss and doesn’t want a partner because all the other cops are too by the book and/or inexperienced.  That’s all here except Belushi’s Michael Dooley pushes these tropes to the limit.  Here’s one example of how crazy he is.  In order to secure a drug sniffing German Shepard named Jerry Lee Lewis (“the killer”) to help take down the villain he makes a deal with the man in charge of such decisions (not his captain by the way, some other random cop played by Ed O’Neill (Blue Chips)).  If Dooley can resolve the current shootout at an apartment building teeming with bad guys then the dog is his.  Yes, this arrangement makes absolutely no sense.  Anyhow, Dooley proceeds to go to the car rental place next door, get a convertible (the only kind he drives), max out the insurance, drive over to where the standoff is and then rams that sucker right through the fuckin’ wall.  He pops out from the car with his gun completely unscathed and saves the day.  And of course, he gets his dog.

I mean that’s pretty over the top.  But that’s just one incident.  Dooley also tortures suspects, raids a bustling warehouse in broad daylight without a warrant or backup where he suspects the drugs are being held, disrespects his superior, disobeys orders, destroys private property, bursts into the villain’s dinner party waving a gun around scaring the shit out of the innocent guests, sexually assaults a woman, mistreats the dog all throughout the film including wrestling with him, leaving him in a closet overnight, running him through a car wash fully exposed to bathe him and encourages him to have sex with a stranger’s dog without anyone’s consent.  And that’s not to mention he takes on a police dog solo when he has no training in that area or has ever worked with one before.  Aside from something like the Bad Lieutenants this asshole is in the mix for most reckless cop I’ve ever seen on film.

Look, I understand this is supposed to be a comedy but fuck, this guy’s a lunatic.  And not a fun lunatic.  The whole movie’s weird bad.

 

Goodbye Hooper?

So I’m checking out The Goodbye Girl starring Richard Dreyfuss (What About Bob?) and Marsha Mason (Nick of Time) which is just ok.  It’s a meet cute love story with a mildly wacky premise and snappy dialogue.  You know, something that would’ve been made in like the 50’s or earlier but they’re doing it in the mid 70’s and it doesn’t exactly translate in my opinion, at least the way they did it here.  The leads don’t have any chemistry which is the whole enchilada.  Dreyfuss’ energetic, screwball, extremely idiosyncratic character is pretty damn annoying too (he beat out John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for the Oscar!).

Well, in one very quick scene Dreyfuss looks exactly like he did in Jaws.  He’s got the jean jacket, some gray/tan shirt underneath, the black beanie, the glasses, the beard, it’s all there.  He never dresses like this again at any other point in the film either.  Actually, in a separate scene earlier Dreyfuss is wearing a solid gray sweater that also resembles the one he wears throughout Jaws, except now it’s splattered with white paint or something.

I know this is stupidly nerdy shit to point out but I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.  Girl was only two years after Jaws so it’s possible he really did recycle some of the same wardrobe.  It’s a similar situation with Bruce Willis’ brown jacket in Pulp Fiction and Color of Night except those movies came out the same year.

The Goodbye Girl

Jaws

The Goodbye Girl

Jaws