Harry and the Hendersons. Amblin Entertainment 1987.
Before watching the movie:
I get a sense this movie was conceived as a response to the success of E.T. Instead of an alien hiding in a suburban family’s home, it’s a sasquatch. This time around the entire family is in on the secret (and the dad seems to be the one taking point on how to handle hiding him), but there’s still government people looking for him and he can’t stay forever. Not a total knockoff like Mac and Me, and produced by the same companies, this might be more of a spiritual sequel.
I know nothing about what any of the family does other than John Lithgow, but I assume the kids play with Harry, do cute kid stuff with him, and are generally the main catalyst for sasquatch antics.
I honestly didn’t know this movie existed five minutes before selecting it. It’s a Richard Pryor vehicle in which he apparently gets mistaken for a doctor while trying to escape the psych ward he faked a plea of insanity to get into.
It’s exciting going into a movie blind. I have generally a good impression of Richard Pryor, though I can only come up with two or three movies I’ve seen him in, and one was Superman III. I can’t think of another one that I’ve seen that didn’t show up here.
I was entirely unaware of this movie until it came up in algorithmic recommendations. Surprisingly, it has no relation to the Archie Comics series “Sabrina the Teeenage Witch”, which I know as the 90s sitcom of the same name. It really looks like the same setup, with the dreamy, unattainable boy and everything. I guess that’s just the story writers want to tell about teenaged girls. According to the summary on Wikipedia, it started life as a female twist on Teen Wolf, which… okay. Not exactly as weird and desperate as Teen Wolf 2 telling the same story again with the first werewolf’s cousin in college.
This is probably the best place to comment on how bad the theatrical posters are. I always try to use a poster from the original theatrical release, and sometimes that results in using things like this one, where who cares about the title character, there is a cute boy who is the most important part of the movie probably.More recent box art, as seen on IMDB, has just the girl on a broom, which at least gets the priorities straight. Also the German poster is very nice, but not in English and the only pictures I can find are folded.
I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised a movie known for one sequence (slow-motion astronauts) is over three hours long. After all, Lawrence of Arabia is mainly known for the desert montage. I am surprised to learn the scope of the movie. I always understood it to chronicle the Mercury program, and possibly Gemini leading to Apollo. But I’m now seeing it described as starting with breaking the sound barrier. On reflection, supersonic speed would have come from the same test programs that produced the Space Race astronauts, but I never connect aeronautics and astronautics.
I should address that I somehow got the idea the film was made in the 60s, which is ridiculous, since it chronicles the 60s. But on the rare occasions I thought about that, I considered it kind of a propaganda film doing a victory lap after a successful moon landing. Which would still probably make it early 70s, but that’s quibbling.
Movies of my Yesterdays is an irregular series where instead of writing about a movie I’ve never seen, I choose a movie important to my past and discuss why that is.
I clearly remember that the first time I saw this movie, it was on a New Year’s Eve at home. It was one of the rare movies we had on hand that wasn’t made for children, didn’t even look like it was for kids, and wasn’t Star Trek (The only other one that comes to mind is Trading Places, which is very not for kids.) I don’t remember how old I was at the time, but I must have been in middle school or close to it, because I was staying up for midnight and my parents put this on for us. It must have been on the basis of how much I enjoyed the movie that first time, because I remember nothing else about that particular New Year’s, but watching the movie was so formative for me that I recall it every New Year’s Eve, and I’m always pleased when I have a chance to include the movie or the game in a New Year’s now.
A few months or years later I developed an obsession with Back to the Future, and the fact that Christopher Lloyd has a prominent role here deepened my appreciation of this movie. I also think this is most of the reason Martin Mull makes me happy whenever I see him pop up in something. Tim Curry is of course, simply a legend. I can probably make a list of all the movies he makes better, but that would be a needless digression (and it’s probably “everything he’s been in except Rocky Horror” anyway).
As anyone who’s seen the movie probably knows, what makes Clue particularly unique is the multiple-choice ending. I never got to experience the buzz when it was released, where different theaters got different endings and I don’t think it was announced there would be differences, but home releases on tape include all three endings and releases on disc have the option to play one at random. I do have a favorite, but I find it interesting that the linear version declares only one of them to be “the real one”. I think I’ve heard that it’s the only one that actually lines up with all the details, but I’m not sure if that’s true. There are too many subtle moments to keep track of. Regardless, it’s a fascinatingly unorthodox approach to storytelling.
I’m not sure if I’ve played this movie since college, but it’s never been one I got tired of. By now I can recognize that, in concert with the amazing wit in the dialogue, one of the biggest strengths on display is that the script supports a large ensemble with fantastic characterization for everyone involved without giving too much focus to any one of them. It’s like an English high society detective novel without the high society or the detective, just a bunch of people being nasty to each other while trying to solve a puzzle. Lovely mansion though.
Over thirty years later, this continues to be the paragon of game to film adaptations. Clue is a fairly simple game but with a lot of data points, and while every single one of them are included here, none of them feel forced. There are even half a dozen extra characters added (mostly as cannon fodder) and it still somehow doesn’t feel unwieldy. I don’t think this movie will ever get old.
I understand that this has reenactments. Originally, I was thinking of the technique of historical documentaries putting actors in appropriate dress and marching across a battlefield, sitting at a desk writing, or talking in a group, basically silent illustrations for a narration to play over. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s more like a traditional dramatization, just mixed in with the documentary.
I find the idea of the latter an interesting mix, but kind of disappointing to think that half of my doc selections are more fabricated than a documentary should be.
Penn and Teller Get Killed. Lorimar Film Entertainment 1989.
Before watching the movie:
I’m not entirely sure when I first encountered Penn and Teller. I clearly remember that my seventh grade science teacher, who was a magician himself, showed us some tapes of televised magic acts, and there was at least one Penn and Teller illusion in the bunch. They appeared on an episode of Home Improvement, though I don’t know if I recognized them when I was regularly watching that show. I knew them well enough when they released “Off The Deep End” in 2005 I made an effort to tape it myself. So I would conservatively say I knew of them by the early 2000s and had seen their work from as early as the mid-90s.
But when I discovered “Fool Us!”, I went looking for a list of their old specials and series, and discovered one that was pretty different from the others. Magic isn’t exactly unscripted, and it may tell a story, but here, among all these magic shows, was, nearly at the beginning of their career, a theatrical, scripted/narrative film where they play themselves. It’s perfect for them, but how did this even happen?
I always thought this had something to do with a Bill Cosby book that doesn’t seem to actually exist. I’m probably thinking of a section of Himself, but I thought he wrote a triptych of books on growing up (I couldn’t give a title for this), raising a family (the nonexistent “Parenthood”), and getting old (Time Flies). If one of his books of comedic anecdotes were filmed, he’d probably have been cast as the star anyway.
It sure seems like I’ve reviewed this before. It seems to be a sibling to Father of the Bride, and the synopsis sounds an awful lot like Cheaper By The Dozen, which not only has a “suggested by” not-remake with Steve Martin, but also, as I discussed, seems to have been made many times as many different movies. So, here we go again?
Here’s something lighter after the last couple of weeks. Jeff Daniels plays an office drone who gets kidnapped into an adventure by a woman with his polar opposite personality.
This was an automatic suggestion I’d never heard of before. Sometime I ought to just rifle through Jeff Daniels’ filmography, since I keep finding interesting stuff I never knew he was in.
The poster style makes me think it’s from earlier in the 80s than it is, but everything I can point to as to why could also apply to the early 90s.
Similar to how the Batman franchise spun off Catwoman, after three Christopher Reeve movies, the Superman franchise spun off Supergirl. However, while Catwoman was basically made because the next proper Batman movie was in development hell, my understanding is that Supergirl was a pure spinoff attempt riding on the success of Superman. While Catwoman is generally considered awful, it was followed by the acclaimed Dark Knight Trilogy, and I get the sense Supergirl is considered okay but forgettable, and it was followed by Superman IV.
I know exactly what to expect from the plot because this is the introductory movie of a superhero, which has been required to be the rote origin story for around 40 years, if not longer. As for a villain to slot in, I’m not sure what to expect, since I don’t know of Supergirl having any villains that are “hers”. I’m really not that familiar with her at all besides the basics of her relationship with Superman, so maybe I won’t have lore bogging down my enjoyment.
Yesterday's Movies 
