30 Days of Crazy Blog-a-thon: Crazy People

This is part of Blog Cabins 30 Days of Crazy.  Check them all out here.

Crazy People is not a complicated movie, just charming and funny.  It's about telling the truth, and crazy people do it better than most.  Dudley Moore plays Emory, an ad man who has had it with making his living by telling lies.  He no longer sees advertising as spinning the truth or talking up a product.  His partner, Stephen (Paul Reiser - whatever happened to him?) is pretty sure Emory has gone off the deep end when he presents an ad for Jaguar with a tagline that says "For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know."   He wants to say what everyone's already thinking. 
Emory is admitted to a fancy psychiatric facility, where the patients (inmates?) are playing volleyball, without the ball.  The cast of patients is what makes this movie - David Paymer (That Guy from dozens of movies, my fav being one of the brothers from City Slickers) plays George who has only said "hello" for the past 20 years.  Daryl Hannah is Kathy, whose mental disorder is never made clear except that she has been there a long time for depression.  She hits on Emory and they become friends.  The rest of the patients aren't actors I recognized, though their individual IMDB pages say that most of them are still working in various projects.  Emory fits right in, but meanwhile, his crazy truth telling ads were accidentally published ("Metamucil - it helps you go to the toilet.  If you don't use it, you'll get cancer and die") and cause huge returns.  His boss (the late J.T. Walsh in all his evil glory) decides they have to go get Emory to keep it up for all their clients.  Emory doesn't want to leave, and the other patients rally around him to help get the ads out. 

This leads to the ad business starting up in the psych center.  They create lots of ads, for all kinds of things, telling the truth, or a different creative view of the truth.  Unfortunately, Walsh assumes his company can do it too, and they show off their stupidity and satirize the advertising (and Hollywood machine) as a different kind of crazy who cannot figure out how to be honest.  The big climax comes when the head doctor makes a deal with Walsh to keep churning out crazy ads by keeping the crazy people locked up, but only if they get rid of Emory.  However, the patients are crazy, not dumb, and sabotage the whole thing.

You know from the beginning it will have a happy ending, and glossing over variations of crazy is part of the charm.  If they had more of a Gothika or Shutter Island set of crazy people, it just wouldn't work.  Actually dealing with mental illness isn't part of this movie, rather comparing soulless business men with heartfelt lay people is where all the humor and charm comes from.  Dudley Moore is terrific throughout.   Darryl Hannah is more bland than annoying, but as the only character who might actually be mentally ill, she brings a lot of credibility to the psych center aspect.  Overall, the ads are the stars of this movie - you can't actually believe any of them would make it into a magazine, but you know they're all correct in what they're saying.  Good movie, check it out on itunes.

30 dAyS oF CRAzY Blog-a-thon: The Dream Team

For part of the 30 dAyS oF cRAzY Blog-a-thon over at Blog Cabins, this movie represents some clinically crazy people.  And for a twist, the movie does a good job of representing actual insanity.  The year an actor makes it big - a new franchise, an Oscar, whatever - they also tend to make some totally out there movie.   Last year Sandra Bullock made All About Steve in addition to The Blind Side.  Back in 1989, Michael Keaton was the first big-screen Batman, creating the beginning of the comic book franchise phenomena.  However, the same year, he also made a comedy with Christopher Lloyd (post-Back to the Future), Peter Boyle (pre-"Everybody Loves Raymond"), and Stephen Furst.   The Dream Team is the story of 4 mental patients (schizophrenic, delusional, christ-fixation, and mute) who are taken to Yankee Stadium for a game, but during a pee-break in an alley, witness 2 dirty cops killing another cop.  Their doctor is beaten up, and they're left unattended.

At first, they realize they can do whatever they want - ignoring the fact that they're crazy.  Keaton, the delusional one, goes to find his old girlfriend, Lorraine Bracco, and realizes his life hasn't stood still while he was in the hospital.  Boyle (christ-fixation) ends up naked in a Baptist church preaching before being rescued by Lloyd (schizophrenic - thinks he's a doctor).  Then they realize they'll do better if they work together.  However, they don't really like each other - they fight, their issues get in the way of making a plan to save their doctor from the crooked cops (Phillip Bosco and James Remar) who want to finish the job.
One of the funniest scenes is the four of them under an old refrigerator box running across the street in the rain to the music of "Everybody walk the dinosaur".  With a little help from Bracco, the four of them manage to manipulate their problems and save the day.  The whole thing ends well, but the movie has a darker edge when each character bumps up against the limits of their own mental issues.  Overall funny, but is pretty dated now, though it's fun to see all of these actors from an earlier time.

The Alphabet Meme

I was tagged by Fletch at Blog Cabins and Rachel at Rachel's Reel Reviews to participate in the Alphabet Meme. Here are the rules:
1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post, cause he made up the rules.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people. (I'm not going to tag anyone, though if you do decide to do it, please link back to me!).

American President, The
Becoming Jane
Cold Mountain
Dogma
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fifty First Dates
Gone With the Wind
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Incredibles, The
Just Like Heaven
Knight's Tale, A
Little Mermaid, The
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Notting Hill
Out of Africa
Princess Bride, The
Quiz Show
Regarding Henry
Sense and Sensibility
Top Gun
Under the Tuscan Sun
V for Vendetta
When Harry Met Sally
X-Men 2
You've Got Mail
Zoolander

These are my favorites under each letter, but some are definitely better than others. Since I'm that nerdy, I actually alphabetize my own collection of several hundred DVDs, so this was pretty easy.

The Hulk, meh.

I'm not too far behind in seeing The Incredible Hulk, and the reviews I've read seem far and wide in their opinions of the movie. The LAMB averaged just 3.5 lambs in their various opinions. I'm afraid I concur with the average. It was nothing poorly done, but it felt more like a 30 minute episode of The Hulk stretched into 2+ hours with lots of chase and fight scenes. One of my fellow LAMB bloggers mentioned that the only reason to have the first act set in Rio de Janeiro was to have all the rooftops for Edward Norton to run across through the favelas. (Side note - if you want a great movie about the favelas, rent "Favela Rising"). Anyway, Norton has escaped to Rio to try to find an antidote, with the help of Mr. Blue, to the Hulkification of his cells. He gets chased, becomes the Hulk, fights for a while, and then returns to D.C. to get help from his love, Liv Tyler (who does a really good job, a little like her part in LOTR), they get chased, he becomes the Hulk, they escape to find Mr. Blue. Mr. Blue has a crazy Frankenstein kind of lab in Manhattan, he attempts to fix Norton, the bad guys find them, he becomes the Hulk in order to chase down the anti-Hulk, they fight, the Hulk escapes to fight another day. Considering I can sum up the entire movie in 3 sentences, there was too much fighting and not enough plot for my tastes. Plus, LOTS and LOTS of unbelievable elements. Fletch and company documented them, so I won't list them here. I liked it, but wasn't particularly entertained or infuriated. Meh. 3 LAMBS/stars