Fraser Munden was asked to make a short about himself. In the process he reenacted a scene from Kingpin (1996), and had Donald Trump sign his hat. Although it was clearly made to promote the internet release of his short The Chaperone (2013), it’s coherent enough to be a short of its own, and incoherent enough to be shared here.
Tag Archives: Comedy
255. RUBIN & ED (1991)
“People try to make me sound a lot… weird… and just, strong, you know, I’m strong!”–Crispin Glover on “Late Night with David Letterman”
“Talk about el weirdo.”–Ed, on Rubin
DIRECTED BY: Trent Harris
FEATURING: Howard Hessman, Crispin Glover, Karen Black, Michael Greene
PLOT: Ed is a recently-separated loser who joins “the Organization,” a cult-like real estate pyramid scheme. Rubin is a shut-in nerd whose mother takes away his boom box and refuses to return it until he makes a single friend. When Ed tries to recruit Rubin to attend an Organization seminar, Rubin agrees to go, on the condition that Ed helps him find a place to bury his dead pet cat.
BACKGROUND:
- Rubin & Ed was Utah-based director Trent Harris’ first feature film after making the three documentary/narrative hybrid shorts known as “The Beaver Trilogy” (the first installment is a documentary featuring an oddball kid who performs in drag as Olivia Newton-John, while the next two recreate the first using actors Sean Penn and Crispin Glover, respectively).
- Glover created Rubin Farr for another role that never materialized. He convinced Harris, who was looking for a project for his feature film debut, to write a script around the character.
- In 1987, three years before Rubin & Ed began filming, a stuttering, awkward Crispin Glover appeared in character as Rubin on “Late Night with David Letterman.” Letterman thought Glover was there to promote River’s Edge, and walked off his own set when Glover almost kicked him in the head while wearing Rubin’s giant platform shoes. The segment only lasted a little over four minutes. Many Americans who saw it live assumed Glover was wasted on psychedelic drugs.
- Although it had a reasonable degree of star power and was produced by major independent Working Title Films (who released the Palme d’Or winning Barton Fink the same year), Rubin & Ed initially received terrible reviews made a mere $15,000 in its original theatrical run. The film flopped so badly that the studio pulled funding for another Trent Harris project that had already been greenlit. Rubin & Ed later found a small cult following on VHS.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Rubin’s happy hallucination, which features his previously-dead cat alive and waterskiing while its owner relaxes in a floating inner-tube wearing shoes with two foot heels, on which the bikini babe motoring the speedboat compliments him.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Weaponized platform shoes; waterskiing cat; insole slurping
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though structured as a quirky comedy, not too different from the usual Coen Brothers outing of the period, Rubin and Ed has a gaggle of weird points in its favor, including a hallucination scene with a water skiing cat and a lunatic Crispin Glover playing something very near the Crispin Glover-iest character ever written. Its sense of humor is so eccentric that it’s been forced off-road to become strictly a cult curiosity.
Trailer for Rubin & Ed
COMMENTS: “It’s going to get weird now, isn’t it?,” frets Ed, after Continue reading 255. RUBIN & ED (1991)
251. PLAYTIME (1967)
(G. Smalley contributed additional commentary and background to this article.)
Play Time
“Playtime is a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently.”–attributed to Francois Truffaut
DIRECTED BY: Jacques Tati
FEATURING: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek
PLOT: A nearly plotless “day in the life” of 1967 Paris: a group of American tourists arrive in the city, but instead of visiting the monuments they are taken to a complex of skyscrapers to shop. Meanwhile, Monsieur Hulot is trying to keep an appointment, but gets lost in a mazelike building in the same downtown complex. After business hours, everyone converges on a restaurant on its opening night for a chaotic celebration as the building falls apart around them.
BACKGROUND:
- The third of four features in which Jacques Tati played the affable, bumbling Monsieur Hulot.
- Playtime was in production for three years; the downtown sets were constructed by hundreds of workers and were nicknamed “Tativille” among the crew.
- The film was incredibly expensive to make and Tati took out personal loans to finance it; it was a disappointment at the box office and he went into bankruptcy, giving away Playtime‘s rights in the process.
- Tati shot the film in 70mm (which was capable of a 2.20:1 aspect ratio, one of the widest formats), and initially insisted the film be screened only in that format in venues with stereophonic sound, despite the fact that very few theaters could meet these specifications. (Partially for this reason, the movie was not screened at all in the United States until 1972). He later relented and allowed 35mm prints to be struck.
- Humorist and newspaper columnist Art Buchwald wrote the English dialogue for Tati.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many people will best remember Hulot’s view from the second-floor view of a factory-like job site composed of a maze of cubicles—a workplace prophecy that’s come true. We chose a scene—one of three in the film—where straggling Barbara opens a door to one of her tour’s commercialized sightseeing destinations, only to see the Eiffel Tower (or the Arc de Triomphe, or the Sacré Coeur) perfectly reflected in the plate glass. These shots express Tati’s theme of the disappearance of culture under the ugliness of modernity, while retaining the wistful hopefulness that is characteristic of his work.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Faux Hulots; cubicle labyrinth; doorman with no door
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Playtime is about the alienating, isolating influence technology has on human beings. It’s not the standard elements of plot, narrative, character development or dialogue that pulls an equally alienated audience into this unfurling drama, but the careful choreography of hapless humans navigating a barely recognizable hypermodern Paris. Play Time is a sort of anti-Brazil.
Short Clip from Playtime
COMMENTS: Do you remember when watching “Tom and Jerry” on Continue reading 251. PLAYTIME (1967)
SATURDAY SHORT: LOOP SOUP (2016)
Connie gets a little too animated over receiving an old cooking tape in the mail.
SATURDAY SHORT: JIM BAKKER’S BUCKETS (2015)
Vic Berger has made a name for himself by taking television segments, and editing them to obscurity. In this short Jim Bakker offers his viewers twenty-eight buckets of food to survive the impending apocalypse that started last year. If you didn’t spend $2,500 plus shipping to prepare, don’t worry. A review of the cement-flavored potato soup encouraged starvation as an alternative.