Year: 2006

Sullivan’s Travels, 1941. Directed and written by the inimitable Preston Sturges. Starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake (who’s on the take), the great curmudgeon William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Robert Greig, Eric Blore, Porter Hall, Charles R. Moore, and Jimmy Conlin.

Playing in Loring Park with Sengalese band Daara J; part of the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies.

You cannot, in any way, shape or form, find a better thing to do tonight than see Sullivan’s Travels in Loring Park. If the rains come, head on over to the Walker and see it. Call in sick if you work. Tell your lunkheaded boyfriend to go fly a kite if he’s against classic comedies. Skip class, call the babysitter (or better yet, take the kids), walk the dogs later. This is just about the best movie you could see this summer, on the big screen, sitting on the grass while the city pulsates behind you. There’s nothing better.

Director Preston Sturges was a weirdo of the highest order: bumped around Europe by his free-loving mother, who was a friend of Isadora Duncan; wound up in the cosmetics biz where he invented a kiss-proof lipstick; wrote a smash Broadway comedy on his first try; then, as the Depression hit, turned to movies. He made a lost classic in The Power and the Glory, no relation to the excellent Graham Greene novel, whose non-linear plot was a supposed influence on Citizen Kane. Then Preston Sturges got serious and created a string of the most madcap comedies in Hollywood history, and films that blew a raspberry in the face of rigid American mores of the early 1940s.

One of which, and perhaps his best (though I personally love the lesser-admired Hail the Conquering Hero, a movie ripe for a remake), is Sullivan’s Travels. It’s the crazy story of a director, John L. Lloyd Sullivan, a depression-era filmmaker of light comedies, such as Ants in Your Pants of 1939 and Hey Hey in the Hayloft. Like many Hollywood personalities, poor Sullivan has a notion to do something of lasting worth. So he gets it into his head to make a serious film entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou (sound familiar?), to address the crushing conditions of his day. Only he grew up with a silver spoon in his piehole and has no idea what it means to be poor. So, disguised as a hobo, he hits the road to live hand to mouth and bum rides on trains.

Well, as you would expect, he gets more than he bargained for. In Sturges’ capable hands, the guy is at first followed by a coterie of reporters, doctors and filmmakers; ends up in the bedrooms of oversexed widows; and ends up wooing the fetching Veronica Lake. There’s car chases, people falling into pools, and a whole pile of slapstick to frost the confection. But somehow, Sturges is able to have his cake and eat it too: Sullivan, like Preston’s other wonderful films (the ones from 1940-44), has both gales of laughter and soft breezes of melancholy.

A Scanner Darkly, 2006. Directed and written by Richard Linklater. Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane and Winona Ryder.

From the files of street critic Guy Fresno:

It all happened so God damn long ago. Wandering through the streets of Lansing, looking for something fun, something to score other than coke, because it wasn’t a coke kind of night. We wanted to make the Crystal Cave that much more Crystal, you know, make the walls bend like they did that one night we got hold of those shrooms. Little pot, little tequila, and some shrooms, and man, I swear to you I rewrote The Crying of Lot 49 in the last three hours of my high. Right in that living room.

See, see, I was there, man. Right in that movie. I met Linklater, once, long time ago, when he was trippin’ at the University of Austin, Texas. He read my mind. Just like that, or maybe I, you know, slipped it in-between sips of coffee? Could have, could have, could have. But, look, take Slacker, take Waking Life, take this new trip, this Scanner Darkly, and I swear, with that last one, it’s mine, my life, mine. That apartment, mine. The guy with the bugs? Me. And I had a roommate who did make a silencer out of duct tape. For sixty-nine cents. Only it worked. But Linklater made it not work because, you know, it’s a lot funnier that way.

Movie’s shit cracked me up. What happens, Bob Arctor, that dope fiend, only he’s not, he’s a cop, Fred, who hates those fat bastards at Rotary Clubs. God that was funny. Dick Linklater made it funny. That’s good, ’cause as much as I love Phil K. Dick, his shit’s serious man, it gave a friend of mine an aneurism. I’m serious. He was taking a mix of meth and Nyquil, and was reading Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and he just died. You’re surprised I can remember that title, in my condition. Well, give me coffee and a slice of this meringue pie, and I’ll remember Hitler’s shoe size. Anyway, Phil Dick’ll do that to you. Blow your mind. And if you’re blowing your mind, it’ll kill. So watch yourself.

Linklater’s a genius. He’s our Shakespeare, our Bob Flaherty. Captures our world, you know. And see, I never admitted as much to you before, but that was me, there, in those rooms, with the wood paneling and picking through the ashtrays looking for one last toke.

Anyway, it was a long time ago, like I said. A bunch of us, stoners, talking about the whole wide world, looking to score. It was a lot like this movie, this Scanner Darkly, a bunch of us going crazy, flipping out from both the drugs and the whole damn paranoid world. I wish I could tell you that one of us went on to do great things, or that one of us died and we all learned a lesson, but really, it’s just like in that movie–nothing much, just one guy fried and in rehab, clean now but a moron. Another, he was busted, and he’ll see freedom again in twenty-seven years. Serving a term down in Virginia for a crime he supposedly committed in Michigan. No one sees him. They stole some books on the Tigers I mailed him a few weeks back.

Anyway, that’s it. We were just looking to score and the one guy got busted. Walking out of a 7-11, the rest of us waiting at home, me staring at the ceiling thinking of how I’d love to kick the crap out of J. D. Salinger for his silence, Busto (the rehab idiot), taking in old videotapes of the Price Is Right he hoarded. And Big Mike, he was just gone. To jail, gone forever. Busto, two years later, goes clean in order to avoid jail. Me, I just do my thing.

Linklater got it right, though this movie made me hunger for those old days more than frighten me. And I think Phil Dick wanted it to scare you. Link’s got too much love for those days, though. It’s fine, we don’t need another Drugstore Cowboy. And the animation’s a trip. You don’t need drugs anymore, you got this interpolated rotoscoping, this painting over photography. It’s cool, better than that shit Bakshi did with the original Lord of the Rings. Hmm. That’s maybe the worst thing about the life, no matter how it rocks you, no matter what parts of your body it grinds to Spam, no matter who you lose: there’s always a bit of nostalgia for the enormous lie of it all. It was beautiful when it didn’t kill you.