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Column: ‘Home Alone’ A Holiday Classic? Don’t Make Me Laugh

Column: ‘Home Alone’ A Holiday Classic? Don’t Make Me Laugh

By Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Pardon me, but Home Alone has made enough hundreds of millions of dollars by now and solidified enough of a multigenerational fan base to survive the following review: to hell with it.

This is not a popular or festive sentiment. People are crazy for Home Alone. Macaulay Culkin’s blase comic authority killed, and helped make it one of the most popular comedies ever made. For millions of preteen children (and plenty of others), its final 30 minutes is the definition of rousing slapstick comedy.

This breaks my heart.

Seriously. It breaks my heart. The movie’s slapstick sensibility is harsh enough to invite comparisons to slasher movies. You think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding. I’m heartbroken, and I’m not kidding.

This month an intriguing array of articles have appeared online and in print, exploring this notion of “Home Alone” as an insidious gateway drug, acclimating children the world over to the next level of related thrills and methodical kills found in the slasher genre. Rhett Jones, writing for Hopes&Fears, lays out the argument: “The best reason to watch slasher films is for the well-designed kill, always. The same goes for Home Alone, which is actually a pretty (messed) up movie.”

Let’s back up a moment. Verifiably, screenwriter John Hughes’ massively successful mashup of sadism and sentiment made Home Alone the biggest hit of 1990. This was thanks largely to the wily deadpan elan of the key performance: Macaulay Culkin as young, privileged but put-upon 8-year-old Kevin, left behind in a five-bedroom mansion (in Winnetka) while his busy, distracted family jets off to France for the holidays.

The coolly accomplished boy defends his turf against a pair of invading burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Kevin does so by going commando, rigging a series of booby traps inflicting grievous, skull-crushing bodily harm using hot tar, hot wires, nails to the foot, paint cans to the skull and a blowtorch. Everything but cluster bombs.

Director Chris Columbus went for broke, and for bizarrely realistic levels of brutality. Gruesome sight gags were filmed, and many people working on the movie assumed they’d never make the final cut. They did. All of them.

In 1990, reviewing it for the San Diego Union (now the Union-Tribune), I felt like a fringe dweller. “None of the hyper-violent gags in the climax — with Pesci and Stern getting irons in the face and blowtorches in the hair — are staged or performed with any wit; none of them are tailored to the individual actors’ styles … this is just second-shelf Three Stooges wrapped in treacle.” Grumble, grumble. Twenty-five years later, “Home Alone” remains one of the most profitable comedies ever made in America, and its silver anniversary is being celebrated with a return to theaters Dec. 9, for a limited theatrical rerelease.

Who could possibly work up a line of hate against such a familiar, entrenched, officially sanctioned Cute Picture?

A lot of people, it turns out. On Thrillist recently, Dan Jackson wrote of Home Alone and the even more violent Home Alone 2 as more disturbing, in their deceptive all-ages way, than Straw Dogs.

Jackson: “There’s surely a defense to be made of the series’ absurd violence by saying that it’s merely a live-action cartoon, a Wile E. Coyote-style explosion of kinetic action. As a child, it’s easy to be sucked in by the violent fantasies peddled by these movies … but at a certain point, the film’s constant violence starts to wear you down and you leave these movies behind. And when that happens, Straw Dogs will be waiting for you.” The writer refers to an instructive, blow-by-blow Slate piece by Alan Siegel, in which Home Alone is compared to Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 revenge thriller, very rough for the time and seething with bloodthirsty comeuppances meted out to the home invaders.

“To my 7-year-old self,” Siegel writes of Home Alone, “the mayhem (in Home Alone’s) final 30 minutes was almost pornographic.” Sure enough, Siegel’s interview with Home Alone production designer John Muto has Muto admitting that, 25 years earlier, during filming, he “kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”

Interestingly (and this was true of another widely loved Hughes screenplay, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), the hometown reviews of Home Alone were tougher than many on the coasts. Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune: “The pleasures here are entirely cruel, with an unhealthy concentration on the suffering of the victims, on the thudding impact of various objects against their heads, on their howls of agony.” Regarding Home Alone 2, Kehr shrewdly notes that “the slapstick violence — already astonishingly intense in the first film — (grew) even more graphic and sadistic” in the second. Roger Ebert, who gave Home Alone a nonclassic 2.5 stars, compared its climax to that of Last House on the Left. Elsewhere, Time Out London: “It mistakes the pain threshold for hilarity.” TV Guide? “Full of unanticipated sadism … a close-up of Stern’s bare foot slipping slowly down on a six-inch nail is the film’s most ghastly image.”

That’s my problem with Home Alone. Its appeal is closer to bear-baiting than prime visual comedy. It jerks you around, from an improbable (but effective) child’s nightmare of abandonment to a liberating vision of a child’s premature adulthood, capping it off with a coldblooded vanquishing of the enemy. It’s the biggest bait-and-switch holiday movie of all time.

Maybe that’s why people love it; after one too many rounds with A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life, maybe the skull-cracking came as a relief.

©2015 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Macaulay Culkin and Joe Pesci in “Home Alone.” (Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox/TNS)

‘Back To The Future’ Is Back! How Much Did It Get Right?

‘Back To The Future’ Is Back! How Much Did It Get Right?

By Rich Heldenfels, Akron Beacon Journal (TNS)

It’s not quite the future imagined.

When Back to the Future Part II hit theaters in 1989, it included what the world might look like in 2015.

Among the things it got wrong:

We don’t navigate aerial highways in flying cars.

There’s no Jaws 19. That series of movies sputtered to an end after four films.

We still have lawyers.

Princess Diana never became queen. The record in the mile run is not 3 minutes. We don’t have a woman president yet.

The movie did anticipate some things – including an easily used digital camera and Vietnam as a surfing attraction – and inspired real-life hoverboards. And the Cubs are still in the hunt for the World Series.

But regardless of its visions, the trilogy of films from 1985, 1989 and 1990 as a whole still appeals to many fans across generations. And not only because we have reached the 30th anniversary of the first film.

While that anniversary was in July, greater celebrations have been set for Wednesday – among them theatrical replays of the movies and other events, new home-viewing offerings and the release of limited-edition Pepsi modeled after the second movie’s drink. There has also been constant speculation that Nike will release a replica of its futuristic shoe in the second film. All that is happening because when the second film leaps into the future, it hits Oct. 21, 2015.

But what is this all about?

INSTANT CLASSIC

The series began with young Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) going from 1985 to 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean developed by inventor Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Marty inadvertently stalled the relationship between his future parents and had to fix it to ensure his own existence.

Well, that and give Chuck Berry a musical inspiration.

Marty actually improved his 1985 life by his 1955 deeds. But in the second film, Marty and Doc had to go to the future, 2015, to deal with another family crisis – and Marty again causes havoc, this time for 1985. The third movie – shot back-to-back with the second – sent Marty and Doc to the Old West, and to a resolution of the entire story.

The first film was the biggest hit of 1985. Fox, who had become a TV star thanks to “Family Ties,” showed he could carry a theatrical movie. Director Robert Zemeckis had the first of what would prove to be a string of blockbusters such as “Forrest Gump.”

The first film “was popular because it combined the best of old-school and new-school storytelling,” said film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz. “The old-school part was the clockwork plot – literally clockwork, in the end – and the strong, simple characterizations.

“The movie had a sense of craft that was often lacking in 1980s Hollywood films, which could sometimes feel rather slapped-together,” said Seitz, the editor-in-chief of Rogerebert.com, via email. “The new-school part was the special effects, which were innovative both technically and in terms of images – stuff like the flaming tire tracks were as iconic as the way the stars in Star Wars turned into streaks when the Millennium Falcon jumped into hyperspace.”

Seitz saw it for the first time when in high school, and then kept going back that summer.

“I probably saw it six times,” he said. “I didn’t realize who Robert Zemeckis was, even though I had seen some of his other movies. This was the one that made me pay attention to him.”

TEST OF TIME

And it still can have that effect.

“It holds up really well,” said Seitz. “The most fascinating thing about its durability to me is that now, 30 years later, we are as far away from Marty’s time as Marty was from his parents’ time. Back in the ’80s, we watched this movie and laughed at how primitive the past seemed. Now we laugh at how primitive the ’80s seem. It’s a double time-capsule now, because it shows us how 1980s Americans viewed the 1950s.”

But what about the second and third film? Neither did as well as the first at the box office, and the second one can feel overcomplicated as it moves around in time and characters overlap with themselves along the timeline.

“The second film doesn’t have the emotional pull of the first one, but as a conceptual feat it’s dazzling, especially when Marty sees Marty in that replay of the finale,” said Seitz. “The third one is quite sweet and has some marvelous Western parody elements, and the final chase is great.”

Some theaters will show all three together on Wednesday, and “it’s kind of fun to watch all three of them close together and see how they comment on each other, and also how they create this sense of history repeating itself, almost as a preemptive joke against complaints that the sequels repeat themselves,” said Seitz. “The same actors play themselves at different ages, or they play their own ancestors or descendants.”

And the moviemakers may have gotten another prediction very right.

“The thing I find most interesting about (the second movie) is the vision of capitalism,” Seitz said. “The mentality of a guy like Biff, who’s in control in the nightmare future, is basically that of Donald Trump or some other belligerent rich man with no conscience, a guy who only cares about power and being told how great he is.

“Without meaning to, the filmmakers really predicted the way rich people’s attitudes about this country would change, or maybe I should say change back, to something like what we had before regulation.”

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘The Great Movies’

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘The Great Movies’

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will hold its annual self-congratulatory gala this weekend, forever enshrining in the annals of cinema the performances and films it elects to recognize this year. We can reasonably expect that history will not be entirely kind to those choices. Movies widely recognized as classics today often had no, or at best scant, Oscar recognition in their own time. Roger Ebert, in his Great Movies series of humorous, insightful essays, looked back at the films that — for one reason or another — have endured as masterpieces, and had a profound impact on the industry and the art. Some of them are even Oscar winners.

You can purchase the first book in the series here.

Five Satirical Films That Hit Too Close To Home

Five Satirical Films That Hit Too Close To Home

“It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film.”

So begins Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, that bleak, blistering film from 1964, in which a demented general launches a full-scale nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, leading to global annihilation. As for that disclaimer? We now know that nothing could be further from the truth.

In a declassified memo, dated a year before Dr. Strangelove’s release, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara expressed concern that delegating nuclear strike capability to military commanders increased the probability of an accidental nuclear explosion. He referred to a 1961 incident in which two armed nuclear bombs fell out of a B-52 and landed in North Carolina, undetonated only “by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross.”

Just in case you thought anything had improved, last year, Major General Michael Carey — the Air Force general who was in charge of the nation’s nuclear arsenal — traveled to Moscow, insulted the Russian delegation, drunkenly caroused and bragged that he saved the world every day, and then tried to force a band at a Mexican restaurant to let him perform with them. (The band declined, and Carey subsequently was relieved of duty.)

As we settle in for the holiday season, trying not to think about who has their finger on the big red button, you might take a look at these five satirical films that hit a little too close to home.

Wag the Dog (1997)

“Life imitates art,” they say, but rarely as quickly as it did with Wag the Dog. When the president gets ensnared in a sex scandal, a Washington spin maverick and Hollywood producer team up to manufacture a fake war with Albania to distract the public. Audiences and pundits were quick to draw comparisons with the Lewinsky affair, which broke in the mainstream press one month after the movie opened. Then, in August of 1998, Clinton ordered military strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan, further cementing the film’s resemblance to unfolding events. Defense Secretary William Cohen was actually asked about the apparent similarities between the military action and the film. He asserted that the campaign was to protect Americans from terrorist activities and not to draw attention away from a sex scandal. That he even had to say so speaks to the film’s deft and troubling wit.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

For years, when The Manchurian Candidate was out of print, a story persisted that its star and producer Frank Sinatra had taken it out of distribution and buried it for over two decades because its plot about a political assassination too closely resembled John F. Kennedy’s death.

This isn’t true. But the film does carry echoes of not only that day in Dallas, but the patchwork of conspiracy theories that arose after, the shaken confidence of a nation, and the restless sense that we don’t have the first clue what’s going on. A sickening current of dread runs through The Manchurian Candidate, which still feels strikingly modern, with the villains planning to exploit an act of terrorism in order to grant the White House “powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”

That fear of losing control of our country to powerful, unseen forces, is so pervasive that Jonathan Demme’s jittery 2004 remake, a fine film in its own right, transposed the conspirators from communists to corporations with no great loss to the story. And the film’s influence can be felt in the lunatic fringe theories of today: Just four months ago, Breibart.com called Obama a “real-life ‘Manchurian Candidate.'” There will always be a “Manchurian Candidate” — a cipher for whatever we dread most, a sleeper agent in our midst infiltrating the highest office, waiting for its trigger.

The Great Dictator (1940)

In the anxious period between Munich and Pearl Harbor, when appeasement was still the byword, Hollywood moguls scrubbed anti-fascist sentiment from their films for fear of harming German grosses. It was during this time that Charlie Chaplin embarked on a project to make an unsparing excoriation of the absurdities, cruelties, and madness of fascism. When it arrived in theaters, history had caught up to him, and The Great Dictator became Chaplin’s highest-grossing film.

In the movie, a lowly Jewish barber (not unlike Chaplin’s iconic Tramp) switches places with Adenoid Hynkel, a ruthless, deranged dictator (not unlike Adolf Hitler.) The result is a deadly serious farce, or a wickedly funny horror film, about war and tyranny. Years later, when the world had reckoned the full evil of the forces he was satirizing, Chaplin conceded that there were limits to his craft. “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps,” he said, “I could not have made The Great Dictator. I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”

Network (1976)

“An outrageous motion picture!” proclaimed the trailer to Network. But any notion that the movie is fantastical or outlandish in the slightest has evaporated in the last few decades. Aaron Sorkin observed that no writer predicted the future with as much accuracy as Network screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky. In fact, one could argue that the film is remembered now more for its prognostications than its laughs. Which is a shame, because every scene is scattered with bruising, diamond-cut wit.

When anchorman Howard Beale loses his mind on live TV, rather than pull him off the air, his ratings-starved network spins an entire programming lineup from his unfolding mental disintegration. You can draw a line from The Howard Beale Show to Honey Boo-Boo, and somewhere in that continuum find just about every inane, amoral, exploitative minute of television aired since this prophetic film came out. We’re still living in Network’s shadow. Outrageous, indeed.

The Interview (2014)

This action-comedy (set for a Christmas release) follows two celebrity journalists as they are recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong Un. It’s not the first time the leader of North Korea has been fictionalized in American comedy (Team America: World Police and 30 Rock covered similar ground.) Still, let’s take a moment to puzzle over the fact that a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned that the film’s release would be an “act of war,” and that North Korea would pursue “merciless countermeasures.”

To paraphrase Ralph Ellison: A nuclear strike is a rather harsh review.