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Do you hear it?

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I thought it might be fun to watch Christmas Vacation again, but some movies are best left back in the 80s where they belong.  Netflix is bringing back a number of so-called classics from the era and it can be quite embarrassing sharing these movies with a younger generation, as I found out the hard way.  You really thought this was funny, my daughter asked me afterward?  I made up for it by introducing her to The Blues Brothers.

John Hughes was to comedy in the 1980s what Judd Apatow is today.  He's capable of a funny movie here and there but for the most part they are dull-witted scripts with actors struggling to make something funny out of them.  Sometimes, there appears to be no script at all.  Just some sketches strung together by the thinnest of storylines, as we have seen in Apatow's collaborations with Seth Rogen and Will Farrell.  

It's not easy writing comedy, as proved the case with Douglas Kenney, who had the idea of bringing National Lampoon to the movie screen in Animal House.  He couldn't match the success of the film, bitterly disappointed with the way Caddyshack turned out, and sadly killed himself.  His second movie just needed a little more time to grab hold of the public imagination.

Kenney's friend and collaborator, Chevy Chase, stuck with him through thick and thin of the early National Lampoon days, when the magazine first branched into radio comedy.  It formed the basis for Saturday Night Live, which Kenney felt Lorne Michaels stole not just the idea but the comedians from him as well.  Chase, Belushi, Radner and others had left NL for SNL while Kenney tried to regroup himself after one of his breakdowns.  National Lampoon is remembered mostly for its ribald monthly magazines.  Much of the script for Animal House was derived from the stories in the magazine, which Kenney edited and in many cases wrote himself.

You can see it all in A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which is essentially a mockumentary of an earlier Showtime documentary, Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead.  It allowed young comic actors a chance to play the legendary actors, with Martin Mull as an imagined older Kenney, had he lived.  Kenney was a genius at comedy but unfortunately he couldn't sustain it.  He wasn't content with just showing tits, he wanted something more out of the medium that he couldn't quite attain.  So, he leaped off a mountain in Hawaii after what he presumed to be the failure of Caddyshack.  I imagine Chevy felt very bad about that, as he had been with with Kenney in Kauai before flying back to the mainland.

While Chevy held his shit together and has turned out some memorable performances over the years, he also has a tendency to sleepwalk through roles.  What had been a very funny Vacation, didn't fair so well in its reprises.  Kind of like Hangover, which my daughter tuned me into.  Kenney was gone by this point. Chevy teamed with Harold Ramis again to make the first in the series.  They had worked together on Caddyshack, and the movie took full advantage of Chevy's bumbling sort of humor with Christie Brinkley's tits thrown in for good measure.  Beverly D'Angelo played the straight wife to her husband's often puerile antics.  

I hadn't realized the script was based on a John Hughes story, published in National Lampoon in 1979 when Kenney was still around.  I guess it made sense for Hughes to take a shot at the growing franchise, given Amy Heckerling's follow-up had bombed.  Unfortunately, he did no better in his Christmas telling.  They are both very good directors capable of making some hilarious comedies.  Heckerling was famous for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Hughes' The Breakfast Club is a cult classic, which my daughter greatly enjoyed.  Maybe these directors are just better at high school movies.

The problem appears to lie with producers who try to milk too much out of what was essentially a one-off movie.  The magic is gone and all you are trying to do is offer a crude facsimile to a gullible public.  We've seen this time and time and time again.  You need someone who can re-imagine the premise in a whole new way.  Probably one of the best examples of this is Little Shop of Horrors, also from the 1980s, which was based on a Roger Corman movie from the 1960s, best remembered for the cameo role by Jack Nicholson.   However, I'm kind of afraid to watch it again ; )

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