Low Cinema and "Dirtier Work"

My neighborhood, Ridgewood, Queens, NYC once again has a movie theater. The last one closed circa 2008 and was subsequently converted into a Blink Fitness gym circa 2018. This is not a commercial movie theater, more like one man’s hobby. It has about forty seats for one screen, which is more like the size of a large private screening room. There is a small concession stand, which sells popcorn and beer (good idea) at a reasonable price. There is only one bathroom, which I think is probably an oversight. The outside of the building doesn’t look like a theater at all. You would have to know it is one from a cursory review of online articles about the place or a knowledge of the cinema’s instagram page. So it feels like a secret, which has its own sort of appeal.

At this moment, it is hard to predict what types of movies the theater will choose to present, but I would think it will be a rare sighting for there to be any first run movies on their first weekend here. The movie I saw was a special edition of Norm MacDonald’s 1998 film “Dirty Work”, more on that below, and the screenings for that have all been sold out. The other movies on the calendar are even more obscure. Indeed, the whole thing is the brainchild of HBO’s John Wilson, creator of the documentary series “How To”, so I expect it will be mainly niche obscure films, or maybe even more of his documentaries that never made it to HBO. Still, the neighborhood is so starved for a movie theater, and the size of it is so small, that I think they could show almost anything and the place would be packed. And since the space has not been rented out from movie studios months in advance like first-run movie theaters are, an astute owner could even decide to rent it out as an event space. Want to get a somewhat large group of people to watch something, Low Cinema could be cool for that.

I was 12 years old when Norm MacDonald’s “Dirty Work” came out. I couldn’t see it in the theaters, but I have some sort of pride in my good taste remembering that I really wanted to see it based solely on the advertisements. The premise is exceedingly simple. Two losers open a “revenge-for-hire” business. Essentially, they are hired by nice(?) people to go around pranking the neighborhood jerks. That’s a good setup for lots of jokes and situational comedy. When I started buying DVDs about a year or two later, “Dirty Work” was one of the first ones I purchased. I have seen it plenty of times since then, but not lately. It has probably been a decade since I saw it at Low Cinema.

This is the “Dirtier” version of the movie. Apparently, in order to secure a PG-13 movie rating, the creators cut about five minutes of the randiest jokes, and in one notable scene set in the county jail, express out loud what in the regular version is only whispered. (Hint: it rhymes with Anal Rape.) The good thing is that the changes are minimal and the jokes inserted are funny enough to the point where the overall merit of the movie is hardly impacted. I could take or leave any one of them, except for the added lines for the sweet grandma that wants to hire the boys not to stop the demolition of her house (like in the original version) but to enact a gruesome form of revenge on the perpetrators. That scene I wish was in the original. I enjoyed seeing this movie in a movie theater with strangers, where I can attest, based on the laughter in the room, that it is still funny.

When someone restores a movie and adds five minutes just to show it to about 40 people in a niche theater in Ridgewood, Queens, it is because they really really like the film. Norm MacDonald’s comedic style has fallen into disrepute with the changing of the times in the past 10 years, more about that below. But beyond that, I feel his humor is generally underrated because most people are uncomfortable admitting that jokes that seem so dumb and simple made them laugh so much.

One of the best audiobooks I have ever listened to is Norm MacDonald’s reading of his autobiography. The vast majority of this book is bullshit, but he does kind of frame the subject matter loosely based on the vague geography of where he was in his life. In that portion of the book in which he flagrantly lies about his time at Saturday Night Live, he also gives a studious account of his idea of the perfect joke: it is one where the funny is so purely distilled that the setup and the punchline are almost identical. Here is the example of this “perfect joke” that the book cites from his time at the Weekly Update desk at SNL:

“Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage with Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment she said came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts and that she was married to Lyle Lovett.”

In Dirty Work, there is another example of this type of joke, which is uttered with perfect delivery by the antagonist of the story, multimillionaire real estate developer Travis Cole (played by Chistopher MacDonald coming off of Happy Gilmore and at the peak of his 1990s douchiness). Speaking to a reporter outside of the restored Chelsea Opera House, Travis Cole boosts the opening performance of Don Giovanni and then makes a silver-tongued remark about its non-profit purpose:

“As you know, all the proceeds will be for the benefit of the homeless. And you know how I feel about homeless people. They are people. And they have no homes.”

Since then, we have coined a word for that sort of pretentious bullshit. It’s called “virtue-signalling”, and it comes about when people express an undue amount of pity or outrage on behalf of the lower elements of our society in order to, I guess, look good for and/or score points against the other bitches at the yacht party. Meanwhile, like U2’s Bono, they have no compunction with directing their accountants to cheat on their taxes as much as legally possible.

There are plenty of jokes here that could not be made so easily today because the tides of taboo have shifted dramatically since the 1990s. Take for instance the many jokes about gay sex. In the 1990s, those jokes would have been directed at the overall societal taboo against expressing the ideas at all. That is the, the target of the joke would have been the upright censors, and the audience would have felt a roguish thrill from watching something they shouldn’t have been watching. But now, given that the homesexuals have won a dramatic and unambiguous victory, one might watch the “movie theater” scene (which features a surprise screening of “Men in Black…Who Like to Have Sex With One Another”) and feel that it is not okay to refer to gay sex as anything but normal, and isn’t that stampede out of the theater offensive to the gays. The Director of Dirty Work, Bob Saget, whose live performances were extraordinarily raunchy, was also affected by the cultural shift.

Sure, I think that is mainly right. But I suggest one recognizes that Norm MacDonald seemed to think that all lust was funny, hence all the prostitutes in this movie. Indeed, he got a lot of funny mileage in needling people about areas in which they felt shame. And why he was especially good at doing that was, well, because Norm MacDonald seemed to be entirely non-judgmental about it himself. Norm was needling you because he thought it was funny that you would feel shame about it, not because he thought you were doing something shameful. The only person Norm MacDonald thought was guilty was O.J. Simpson, and even him, he didn’t really have strong feelings towards. Instead, he seemed to think it was funny that race politics could be so heightened that half the country was willing to acquit a murderer as a sacrifice for them. And the more backlash he received from this heightened political atmosphere, the funnier he thought it was, which eventually led to his firing at SNL, and even that he seemed to think was funny.

What accounts for this personality? You’ll never know for sure because he was an extraordinarily private person. But the context of his death provides a hint. In the late 1980s, he was diagnosed with cancer for the first time. This was a total secret. I heard about it for the first time in a posthumous documentary. A few years ago he died of that cancer. He didn’t tell anyone about it. But he wrote his “autobiography” knowing that he had a death sentence. And in that book, he talks about it in a very deep way. (Actually, maybe not, the words come from the context of a fictional make-a-wish child with cancer. That child wants Norm to realize his dream of clubbing a baby seal. This is accomplished and the child, covered in the blood of victory, is miraculously cured of cancer.) Norm also had a large gambling problem and in one interview he stated that he had lost everything at least three times. You do all that, and you just might be a little more zen then the rest of us.

Death hangs over this film. There is Chris Farley, at his best in a small role, bloated and about to die. There is Jack Warden, an accomplished actor that once played the President (see Being There) in one of his last roles, giving much needed veteran weight to a cast of young clowns. Then Bob Saget died too soon. Then Don Rickles died too late. And now Norm is dead. Somehow Artie Lange is still alive. That’s like John Belushi surviving the original cast of Saturday Night Live.

And the acting, it is terrible, (besides Jack Warden). Norm MacDonald of course is awful, even playing a character as much like himself as possible. The acting is so bad that Chevy Chase’s performance becomes impressive if only by contrast.

But none of it matters because the movie is wall-to-wall jokes that come fast and in a movie that has no other purpose but to amuse you. Whether you are in the right frame of reference for this movie may be judged by one particular scene. Norm and Artie have been hired by a movie theater in which the manager is played by Don Rickles, a famous insult comic. The script has no lines for Mr. Rickles, all the direction it contains is that he should insult Artie Lange in his style. So, Mr. Rickles insults Artie, focusing particularly on his weight. ("Look at you, you baby gorilla.") Should you laugh at jokes made at the expense of a fat person? What if I told you that Artie Lange considered it to be one of the best days of his life because he got to see one of his comedy idols at work close up. You want to enjoy Dirty Work, you’ll have to come down to our level. Otherwise, there is always Don Giovanni.

Hot Tub Time Machine (4/5 Stars) March 31, 2010

“Am I going to be the asshole that suggests we got into this thing and went back in time?”
- Clark Duke

I subscribe to the philosophy that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a movie. It all depends on how you deliver it. I will concede however that some ideas are generally easier to screw up than others. A movie based on a Hot Tub Time Machine is one of those. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the subject matter. It’s just that when the creators of a movie named “Hot Tub Time Machine” hit a rough patch in the production process whether it be in writing, acting, or editing, there is always the temptation to be all like, “Well, only people with absolutely no standards would go see a movie with a title like this anyway, so why on earth are we trying to make it good? Let’s just half-ass it and hopefully these morons will think it’s a so-bad-it’s-good movie.” I’m glad to say that somehow that didn’t happen here. This movie could have easily gone down the tempting road to comedy hell known as “so-bad-it’s-good” but instead followed through on the noble ambition of actually being funny. It all has to do with delivery.

The movie starts off by introducing four losers played by John Cusack, Craig Robinson (The Office), Rob Corddry (The Daily Show), and Clark Duke (ubiquitous dude in the background of the party in Superbad). John Cusack just got recently divorced. Craig Robinson works in a degrading animal related job. Clark Duke, John’s nephew, spends his days in the basement, playing a much more athletic version of himself in a second-life computer game. That might be somewhat redeeming if his character wasn’t currently in prison. Clark spends all of his time telling himself* to do more simulated pushups. Rob Corddry is the worst of all of them. He’s a raging alcoholic, friendless, clueless, and apparently very stupid when drunk. He accidentally almost kills himself by gunning his car to Motley Crue in his closed-off garage. Confronted with the sobering idea that their old friend just tried to kill himself (which he vehemently denies), the gang gets back together in an effort to get their mojo back: They go to the ski resort they frequented when young to have a nostalgic weekend of drunken debauchery. Here they find the aforementioned hot tub, jump in, get blackout drunk, hallucinate about Reagan and Aids, and are transported back to a pivotal weekend in their lives in 1986.

The movie assumes you know all about the paradoxes of time travel, so there isn’t much time wasted with the ground already covered by ‘Back to the Future.’ The huge conflict is Clark Duke’s neurotic fear that if the old guys change anything they did that weekend, then a bunch of butterflies are going to attack and he will cease to exist. Problem is that this weekend wasn’t very good for the guys. Cusack got stabbed in the eye with a fork while dumping his then girlfriend. Craig had a very mediocre performance with his band that ended his musical career. Rob got his ass kicked twice by an asshole ski-instructor. After one night, there is no telling whether any of them will actually go through with the humiliation. Rob Corddry in particular is not prone to giving a shit about any undue influence on the time-space continuum.

The movie is directed by a young director named Steve Pink and written by a trio of writers. The story idea belongs to Josh Heald. It is his first. The two others, Sean Anders and John Morris, have been involved in other Cusack pictures like Gross Pointe Blank and High Fidelity. The movie’s humor is very broad, raucous, and scatological. But it treats it well. I have always felt that the best way to treat a throw-up joke is to tell it without buildup so it is a surprise and then go straight into something else. You don’t want to linger there. There’s a particularly good one involving a cute squirrel and Rob Corddry’s hangover reaction to it. The “punch-line” lasts about half-a-second. That’s a good time period. It doesn’t take the audience any longer than that to get the joke. These guys know what they’re doing. The entire movie is very fast paced. When there is a scene that doesn’t work entirely or isn’t incredibly funny, Pink moves onto something else fairly quickly. Hot Tub Time Machine never rises to the heights of something like “The Hangover,” but it does the best with what it has and when it notices that it might be losing the audience, it pumps out the volume, ramps up the pace, and gives the actors free rein to act as broadly and loudly as possible. 

The one revelation this movie has is Rob Corddry’s performance. I would liken it to Ed Helms’ performance in “The Hangover” last year. The guy has been funny forever on The Daily Show and in bit parts in other movies, but this is the first time that he has been given a substantial role that is custom tailored to his testorone-fueled sociopathic persona. He gives it his all and knocks it out of the park. This is the best work he has ever done. I’ve watched the guy for so long now that I felt kind of proud watching this movie. The ending of this movie is over-the-top, balls-to-the-walls, unjust, and uncalled for. But it works because it fits his performance perfectly. 

What I don’t really understand is what the hell John Cusack is doing in this movie. Lately he seems to be telling his agent to look for the craziest ridiculous movies he can possibly be in, like say 2012. Cusack has always been somewhat funny but has never been a comedian. His persona is too earnest and dare I say, normal. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. He was inexplicably also in such movies as Being John Malkovich, Con Air, and Bullets Over Broadway. I didn’t particularly think he fit into any of those movies either. I’m not saying he did a bad job in this one. It was just a little distracting. What the hell is John Cusack, who at one time used to be A-list, doing in a Hot Tub Time Machine? 

There are plenty of jokes and references to the 80s. Besides the parts where the characters point out Jerri Curls, leg warmers, and a black Michael Jackson, most are subtle like the iconic Sixteen Candles romantic framing, A Christmas Story inspired fight, and a direct homage to Back to the Future when Craig Robinson decides to bust out the Black Eyed Peas during his concert. Then there are supporting roles by such 80s stars like Crispin Glover and Chevy Chase as the comfortably unhelpful hot tub mechanic. The movie however doesn’t depend entirely on these references to make us laugh. It realizes that comedy requires more than just pointing them out and builds actual jokes off of the references. That’s the difference between a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie and an actually good one. The former requires an input of ironic awareness from the audience to make the jokes work. An actually good movie stands alone like say, this one.