What About Bob?

Almost 25 years later, What About Bob? stirs up debate in some quarters: Who is the villain of the movie? Is it Bob Wiley (Bill Murray), a bottomlessly needy and boundary-disregarding phobic? Or is it Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss), an arrogant psychoanalyst, publicity hound, and author of a bestselling pop-psych book? From where I sit, they’re both pretty awful, and they make a natural match. Bob is palmed off onto Leo by another shrink, and even when Leo goes on vacation with his family, Bob shows up at the door of their lakeside summer house. Bob gloms onto Leo as his only road out of fear. Leo just wants to be left in peace.

And so begins a classic battle of wills based on how each man relates to the world. Introduced to Leo’s somewhat intimidated family, Bob almost immediately drops most of his neuroses and snuggles into their good graces, befriending Leo’s son (Charlie Korsmo) — unfortunately named Sigmund — in particular. Leo’s wife (Julie Hagerty) and daughter (Kathryn Erbe) likewise love Bob, while Leo fumes in solitary fury. All Leo wants is to be able to prepare for his upcoming interview with Good Morning America; he obsesses about it so much that fans of the film could get a decent drinking game going by slamming a shot every time someone says Good Morning America.

Bob represents a true challenge to a boastful man who prides himself on helping people. For a while, the movie plays like Frasier Meets the Devil, with Murray as the nightmare patient whose depredations nobody but Leo can perceive. But Leo has his own demons, and Bob functions as brute therapy for Leo (and gentler, fun therapy for his family). What About Bob? isn’t perfect; its script is a bit sloppy at times, or perhaps interfered-with at the studio level. For instance, it sends Leo around the bend that Bob seems to have ingratiated himself with Leo’s sister, a character we’ve only seen in a photo before; we are asked to take Leo’s closeness to his sister on faith, but we don’t feel it or see it, which relieves the plot’s final twist of some of its intended sting. And the director, Frank Oz, enjoys his actors but treats them like Muppets, and doesn’t much care about anything else in front of the camera: there’s an exterior shot with a thunderstorm that’s so blatantly faked by a rain machine it’s a little embarrassing.

Still, this is essentially a two-man comedy riff, of the sort we see less and less at the movies, and as much as I love Bill Murray and admired the skittish technique of his performance, it was Richard Dreyfuss — grinning viciously and ironically becoming the Wile E. Coyote that Bob seems at first to be named after — who got more laughs out of me. Partly it’s the fun of seeing a stuffed shirt spattered with mud and finally becoming homicidally insane, but partly it’s the palpable glee Dreyfuss takes in his middle-period second career as a cartoonish farceur. By both men’s accounts, there was no love lost between Murray and Dreyfuss on the set, and this sharpens Leo’s rage, gives it roots in something real.

This is not to ignore Murray, whose Bob begins as exasperating but develops into something more complicated and mysterious, and perhaps darker. Does Bob only wedge himself into Leo’s family as a way to punish Leo for rejecting him? How much of what Bob says or does is well-meant as opposed to passive-aggressive and only incidentally therapeutic? Murray kind of keeps it ambiguous, at least as much as a mainstream comedy (with yet another terrible generic-comedy music score by Miles Goodman) will allow, while Dreyfuss certainly plays it as though he considered Leo the hero. It could very well be that the Dude’s words to Walter in The Big Lebowski apply equally to Leo: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.” Leo thinks Bob is a monster and a pain and potentially dangerous, and maybe he’s not wrong, but…

Quick Change

Quick Change finds Bill Murray paddling into the uncharted waters of sincerity. To be fair, Murray had dipped his toe in earlier, at the end of Scrooged and in some parts of Ghostbusters II, and of course in his early dramatic attempt that was greeted with bafflement, The Razor’s Edge. But in Quick Change Murray gives a fresh performance, one that dials down the jaded snark while still cashing laughs. He plays Grimm, a New York city planner turned bank robber. Grimm is sick of the city and wants to get out, taking as much of its money with him as possible. Here, Murray doesn’t seem as though he’s critiquing the movie from its margins. Grimm cares about his goals, cares about getting the hell out of Dodge.

The movie, adapted by Howard Franklin from a Jay Conley novel, and co-directed by Franklin and Murray, begins as a farcical take on Dog Day Afternoon and eventually rolls into a variation on After Hours or The Warriors. After the bank robbery — which attracts the expected volume of police and media buzz — Grimm and his accomplices Phyllis (Geena Davis) and Loomis (Randy Quaid) fumble around the city, trying to get to JFK Airport. But New York throws all its snarls and roadblocks and crazies in their path; Grimm wants to escape the city, but it doesn’t seem to want to let him go. New York becomes a major character the way it did in the aforementioned three films.

Grimm and Phyllis aren’t just partners in crime; they’re lovers, and Phyllis spends much of the movie figuring out how to tell Grimm she’s going to have his baby. The sadness in Geena Davis’ eyes when Grimm says he feels “complete” — and presumably not welcoming a child — is one of her great moments as an actress, and it colors everything else she does in the role. Likewise, the eager, somewhat doltish Loomis has been friends with Grimm since grade school, but somehow fears his anger, specifically being hit by him. These two have a strange, complex emotional bond to Grimm that might have been unthinkable in an earlier Bill Murray comedy.

Quick Change is smarter, even more literate, than it needs to be — I remember back in 1990 being surprised that the movie’s commercials included a joke about Thor Heyerdahl (maybe part of the reason it wasn’t a big hit). It’s full of great New York faces and personalities: Tony Shalhoub, Stanley Tucci, Victor Argo, Kurtwood Smith, Philip Bosco, as well as comedians old (Bob Elliott) and then-young (Phil Hartman). There isn’t much filmmaking excitement in it; the two rookie directors (Murray has never directed again) essentially just point a camera at funny people, which turns out to be just enough. There’s enough breathing room in its anecdotal structure for absurdist throwaways like the jousters on bicycles, whom our protagonists — and seemingly the movie itself — pause to watch in wonderment. About the only true aesthetic bummer is Randy Edelman’s cheesy score, interchangeable with that of a dozen generic ’80s comedies.

At the movie’s genially chaotic center is a funnyman (he literally starts off as a clown) who seems to yearn for something different. Groundhog Day was only three years away, and that mystical repetition trip sealed the deal: Bill Murray still wanted to make people laugh, but no longer at the expense of squares, of people who dared to care. In an interview with Roger Ebert promoting the film, Murray said that people were calling the movie “gentle,” which didn’t sit well with him because he considered it “weird and funny,” which it is, but it is also gentle. It’s gentle not only because it has no violence but because almost nobody in it is held up for ridicule; even the chief of police (Jason Robards, and I can’t get over how he went from running around looking robust in this film to being a wheezing husk in Magnolia in just nine years) is allowed to be smart and funny. The two exceptions are a mobster who goes out of his way to be mean to an airport clerk, and a yuppie who insists on being the first hostage to be let free. Grimm uses each man’s aggression against him; it’s comedy aikido.

Twice Upon a Time

Something was in the air in the late ’70s — a small, weird, but welcome animation renaissance that popped up in the void left by Disney in their dreary pre-Mermaid days. Ralph Bakshi hadn’t yet packed it in, Don Bluth was getting started, and not-for-kids toons like Heavy Metal and Rock and Rule were actually financed and put in theaters. Of course, given the lead time of cel animation back then, most of these didn’t hit theaters until the early ’80s, coinciding with a rise in sci-fi/fantasy films. Many of these experiments found little box-office traction but gathered cults that persist even now.

The cultiest of them all might well be 1983’s Twice Upon a Time, bankrolled by none other than Lucasfilm. It was released in a grand total of one theater, then banished to HBO for a handful of showings, which is how most of its fans caught it. Due to a foofarah over which version was being shown — there were two, one seasoned with lots of PG profanity, one largely clean — the film has been unavailable for decades. The cleaner version was the preferred version of its co-director, John Korty, but viewers erroneously considered the more profane version the “uncut, uncensored” one and thus the more attractive one. Now, finally, Warner Archives has made available a burn-on-demand DVD containing both versions.

What the new viewer (as well as the longtime fan who has never seen it in its proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio) will get here is a visually sumptuous experience tied to a fairly simple story given convolutions by Korty, his co-director Charles Swenson, and cowriters Suella Kennedy and Bill Couterie. In the black-and-white land of Din (Earth) live the Rushers (us), who receive sweet dreams from Greensleeves and the Figmen of Imagination. Not-so-sweet dreams arrive courtesy of the nefarious Synonamess Botch, who kidnaps Greensleeves and seeks to entrap us Rushers in waking nightmares forever. Our heroes are Ralph the All-Purpose Animal and Mumford the mime, who must keep Botch from procuring the main spring from the Cosmic Clock, which … well, you see what I mean about convolutions.

You could very well just let Twice Upon a Time babble and rave in front of you (most of the dialogue was improvised) and care nothing about its plot, because every frame looks as though it were engineered by the Figmen of Imagination. The animation style, which for all I know was limited to this one film, was called “Lumage,” in which plastic cut-out figures were filmed atop a light table, resulting in a lively and unique world of subtle hues. It reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s madcap creations for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, as well as the trippy, quippy wooziness of Yellow Submarine; but its sarcastic, visually fecund spirit is all its own. Animation fans, and admirers of pure cinema in general, owe it to themselves to see this at least once.

I watched Korty’s preferred version, which still packs a couple of PG-rated swears (so neither version is altogether school-viewing-safe). The movie is essentially a comedy, satirizing such tropes as the Fairy Godmother (who here wants to be called FGM) and the superhero (goofed on via a Viking-helmeted idiot called Rod Rescueman) and paying homage to its executive patron when a television-headed creature named Ibor plays footage of Darth Vader and Indiana Jones on its face. The biggest name in the voice cast is the late Lorenzo Music, who voiced Garfield for years and does Ralph’s voice in the same jaded deadpan. But as I say, you could almost turn the sound off (a good way to avoid the lame, much-derided songs on the soundtrack) and still groove on the colors and the weirdness and the dreams and nightmares and the killer Scotch tape dispensers and so on.

Flesh for the Inferno

Flesh for the Inferno is a menacing and evocative title for a film that works hard to earn it. The twentieth feature by Rhode Island filmmaker Richard Griffin, this is a bit of a break from his frequent focus on tongue-in-bloody-cheek grindhouse throwbacks. It gestures at vintage grindhouse, all right — specifically the sacrilegious splatterthons of Italian maestros like Lucio Fulci — but it takes its premise more seriously than Griffin usually allows. Four nuns confront a child-rapist priest; he shoots one and bricks the other three up behind a wall in their Catholic school. Sixteen years later, the nuns, fueled by rage and revenge, wreak supernatural havoc on a group who’ve arrived to clean up the school.

Indebted though it is to the tone of Fulci and Mario Bava, Flesh doesn’t go in for the bizarre incoherence that Italian horror is notorious for. Griffin doesn’t bring everything to a standstill so he can show off some visual effects or his own twisted imagination; the script, by Michael Varrati, keeps things lean and mean, though not very clean. True to its title, Flesh can’t get enough of gore and ruined meat. The victims, mostly young people in keeping with horror-film tradition, die choking and messy. Some of the movie is gross in a way that will please gorehounds and put off most others, but who else would go to a movie called Flesh for the Inferno? It’s pretty obviously not whimsical and light in the Wes Anderson style.

“This is … brutal,” says a character, and some of Flesh is as self-aware as that line indicates. (Later, someone else comments on how anticlimactic the events are, but that turns out to be misdirection.) Despite that, Griffin and Varrati take a side door into the serious subject of predatory priests. This isn’t Griffin’s first time at the rodeo of blasphemy, of course — he helmed 2009’s zesty grindhouse goof Nun of That, starring Sarah Nicklin, who appears here as an amusingly cynical prostitute. I imagine some Catholics would rather do anything else than indulge Griffin’s church-bashing, while other Catholics, especially lapsed ones, will eat it up.

Griffin’s body of work, which kicked off in 2000 with a criminally obscure adaptation of Titus Andronicus, expresses a love of cinema, particularly disreputable cinema. (After all, he adapted Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s goriest and least prestigious play, not King Lear.) That’s why, as bloody and rage-filled as Flesh for the Inferno is, you can still almost hear Griffin cackling behind the camera. He relishes working in this lurid, sanguinary Italian style, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Personality peeks through, no matter how grotesque or how unpleasant the scenario is, and that’s a rare commodity that links Griffin’s work with the movies and moviemakers he loves.