You know, even I have gaps in my knowledge of 1980s pop culture, i.e., movies or other media phenomena from that most awesome of decades that somehow slipped past me back in the day. And two of the biggest omissions are a pair of cult-classic films written and directed by a cat who calls himself Savage Steve Holland and starring John Cusack: Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer.

Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say they slipped past me. I’m pretty sure I actually did see both of them at some point. In fact, I’m almost positive I ran One Crazy Summer when I was working as a projectionist at the old Cameo Theater, the old-fashioned, single-screen movie house where I had my very first job. But it would seem that neither of them made much impression on me. All I recall of Better Off Dead is that it’s the source of the ubiquitous Gen-X catchphrase “I want my two dollars,” and all I remembered from One Crazy Summer was Bobcat Goldthwait in a Godzilla suit wreaking havoc at some kind of country-club party.

I was pretty content with this state of affairs, too. I’ve never felt like I was missing something for not remembering the Savage Steve canon, although I was occasionally bemused by the reactions of fellow Children of the ’80s when I told them I had no memory of Better Off Dead (apparently the more popular of the two). A couple weeks ago, however, I ran across a DVD copy of OCS at Big Lots, and I figured for only three bucks, why the hell not? Three dollars is nothing, I thought, and I like John Cusack well enough. So I bought it. And today I had the day off and I was sitting around the house, and I figured this is it, this is the perfect time to plug this particular hole in my memory. So I watched it.

To paraphrase Better Off Dead, I want my three dollars back.

OCS is often described as a romantic comedy — certainly the DVD cover art suggests that angle, far more than the original theatrical one-sheet seen above — but the truth is, it’s more like the tail end of the “slob comedy” cycle that flourished in the early-to-mid ’80s. That was the sub-genre in which a band of poor, uncouth but genial misfits finds a way to stick it to the rich bastards who’ve been giving them shit throughout the first two acts of the film. But One Crazy Summer is no Caddyshack. It isn’t even a Police Academy 3: Back in Training.

The plot is pretty thin, even by the admittedly low standards of the category, and it’s almost shockingly lazy. This is a movie in which the good guys don’t have enough money to save the love interest’s family home from the evil land developer (played by Mark Metcalf, naturally), so they decide to get even by winning the annual sailing regatta using a decrepit boat they fix up during the obligatory ’80s-flick fixing-something-up montage. But… how’d they buy a boat if they don’t have any money? And renovation supplies are fairly costly, too, where’d that dough come from? And wouldn’t the regatta organizers demand some kind of entry fee or something? Or at the very least inspect the boat beforehand and thus discover the “secret weapon?” Most slob comedies, at least the ones that have become classics, stick to their own premises and follow something resembling real-world logic. But not this one.

Of course, fans of the film would probably counter that the movie is illogical by design. Cusack’s character is an artist, you see, and he’s always drawing cartoons that comment on and inform the plot in various ways, which we of course see as animated interludes throughout the film. But in a move that I’m sure old Savage Steve thought was terribly clever, the live-action parts of the movie are like a cartoon, too, filled with ridiculous and sometimes downright bizarre gags that are obviously meant to echo the anything-goes world of the classic Looney Tunes shorts. Except the Looney Tunes were funny, and this movie isn’t. Not to me, anyhow. Monty Python notwithstanding, I don’t do absurdity.

Bottom line: One Crazy Summer is one stupid movie.

Lately, it seems like every other week is witness to one of my personal pop-cultural touchstones achieving some landmark anniversary. Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog album, the one that included his signature song “Jessie’s Girl,” had its 30th birthday on February 24. Raiders of the Lost Ark also turned 30 back in June, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off reached its silver anniversary the day before Raiders. But somehow none of those tidbits surprised me or made me feel quite as wistful — not to mention old — as the news that this past Monday, August 8, marked 25 years since the release of the film Stand by Me.

The depth of my reaction surprised me, frankly, because if you were to ask me to compile a list of my all-time favorite movies — a list very much like this one, for example — Stand by Me would definitely be included among them, but probably wouldn’t rank very highly. (In fact, it comes in at only number 41 on that list, because that’s the more or less the order in which I thought of it as I was dredging up titles. Obviously, it’s not in the forefront of my brain.) I’m not saying it’s not a great movie. It is, in my opinion, and it’s a damn shame they don’t often make films like it anymore, i.e., mainstream pictures that are modestly budgeted and appear to have small ambitions but end up saying a lot while still being immensely entertaining. For some reason, however, this film occupies a relatively smaller plot of my mental landscape than something like, say, Raiders. I haven’t watched it a hundred or more times, and I don’t have it memorized as I do so many others. I have no particular memories of the first time I saw it. In fact, I have no memory of the first time I saw it, which is kind of odd for me when it comes to these things. (By way of contrast, I can still tell you the circumstances of my first viewing of Tron. It was with my mom at the long-departed Regency Theater, near the mouth of Parley’s Canyon, and I saw one of our local TV newspeople in the restroom. I was all of 12 at the time.) My first viewing of Stand by Me was probably on home video — by which I mean those clunky, archaic videocassette things you may have heard of — and it was likely a year or two after it was in the theaters, because that’s how the release schedules used to work, kids. But I really don’t know.

It occurs to me that maybe the film’s relative lack of prominence in my memory is the reason behind my strong “oh my god, that can’t be!” reaction to its anniversary. Because I don’t have strong memories of my first experience with it, I don’t associate it with any given period in my life. Star Wars and Raiders are films from my childhood; Ferris Bueller is locked firmly to my senior year of high school. Dances with Wolves and a whole raft of others are from my college years, which overlapped the period I worked for the multiplex. But Stand by Me is timeless for me, both in the usual sense that it remains as relevant as ever, and also because it just seems to have always been around. Learning that it is, in fact, a specific number of years old, and quite a few years at that… well, it’s just driven home how advanced my own years are becoming, I guess.

Like I said, though, it’s a great movie no matter where it falls on some silly, arbitrary list. On the surface, it appears to be a simple, nostalgic little coming-of-age story set in a more innocent time. And it is that. But it also has a lot to say about friendship and courage and self-image and how people and events can alter the course of your life and stay with you even if you’re not aware they’re still there, until something happens that yanks them back into the light and floors you with the unexpected intensity of emotions you never imagined were still there. And the thing that makes Stand by Me so great is that these points are made subtly, during a story that slowly builds to a devastating conclusion (assuming you don’t already know how it ends). Just writing about it now, I find myself really wanting to go watch it again. Because I may not think of it when you ask about my favorite films, but when I do stumble across it on TV or am otherwise prompted to see it, I always rediscover just how much I really love this movie.

Wil Wheaton, who starred in the film when he was just twelve years old, has some lovely thoughts about it and especially about his late castmate River Phoenix, who’s been dead and gone for an astonishing 18 years, here. (For the record, I always liked and identified with River in his film appearances, and I still believe he would’ve become one of the all-time great actors had he lived. His death of a drug overdose back in 1993 devastated me.) Wil also gave an interview to NPR about the film’s anniversary, and that includes a number of interesting tidbits that weren’t in his blog entry. You can listen to it here. If you’re even a mild fan of Stand by Me, I recommend you check out both of those pieces.

Incidentally, what the hell is Goofy anyhow? I never have gotten an answer to that question…

The trailer for Pixar’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic Barsoom stories, John Carter, made its online debut two days ago, so probably everybody and their cat has seen it by now, but just in case you haven’t:

I’m very, very pleased and excited by what I’m seeing here. Oh, I could quibble about some of the details. I don’t remember any magic blue glowing rocks from the books (although it has been decades since I’ve read them, so maybe they’ve just slipped my mind), and the airships of Helium are far different than I imagined them (which was pretty much like Jabba’s sail barge in Return of the Jedi), and Tars Tarkas  (the green guy at about 1:09) is neither as tall nor as buff as he ought to be… but I don’t want to be another damn Comic Book Guy griping about an otherwise enjoyable movie because it doesn’t take into account the critical events of issue #327 or whatever. The fact is, this trailer is showing a lot more things that are faithful to the books than not: the opening scenes with Edgar Rice Burroughs himself as a character; John Carter’s origins as a Confederate veteran and a cowboy; Barsoom being a dying planet kept alive by great machines; Carter’s ability to make superhuman leaps (Mars has lower gravity than Earth, so his Earth-trained muscles are more powerful there); and most of all, the grandeur and brutality of an alien word populated by ancient, decadent civilizations. And even if Dejah Thoris isn’t walking around mostly naked as she was described in the books, the costumes nevertheless look right. Consider, for example, the harness and breast plate Carter is wearing in some scenes, and then look at Michael Whelan’s definitive cover art from the 1970s paperback edition of A Princess of Mars (i.e., the one that I read as a kid). Based on this trailer, at least, the people behind the movie get it. They understand what was cool in the books, what appealed to the 12-year-old boys who loved them. And if they had to change some details to match modern sensibilities — remember, A Princess of Mars was first published in 1912, a full century ago — well, I’d rather they get the overall spirit right than make a slavish but lifeless adaptation, or one that rips off a few key ideas and bears no real resemblance to the source material.

I’ve been cautiously optimistic up until now. Now I’m downright giddy… I want to see this in a way that very few movies of the past few years have appealed to me…

In a new interview for Ain’t It Cool News, Steven Spielberg goes on the record as being opposed to any further digital revision of his work:

(In the future) there’s going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I’m not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show. If 1941 comes on Blu-Ray, I’m not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-Ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Boulevard. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history.

Italics mine. He goes on to note that when he did give in to the Lucas-ian temptation to tinker with his early masterpiece, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, both versions were released on DVD so consumers could choose which version they wanted to watch (the way it should be done, in my opinion, whenever there are multiple variants of important movies… especially movies whose titles begin with the word “star” and end with the word “wars”), and then he adds, “When people ask me which E.T. they should look at, I always tell them to look at the original 1982 E.T.”

Steve, I can’t tell you how good it feels to have someone in your position vindicating my purist theories. Thank you. Sincerely. If by some miracle some assistant of your stumbles across my little blog and relays what I say here back to you, thank you.

Unfortunately, though, Steve later says he’s attempted to convince the Great Flanneled One of the wisdom of this position and he just can’t. And if Steven Spielberg can’t, probably no one can. Sigh…

Incidentally, Steve also makes an interesting comment about the 1953 War of the Worlds (another favorite of mine) that’s worth a click-through, and a longer version of the interview is supposed to be posted next week, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out over there.

Hat tip to Michael May for alerting me to this.