THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #82

MEMENTO (2000)

The Writer

Christopher Nolan; based on the short story “Memento Mori” by Jonathan Nolan

Why It’s Here

My previous review for this series ended with a brief discussion of The Dark Knight, the highest grossing film of 2008 and currently second on the all-time box office list, behind only Titanic. I said in that review that if The Dark Knight holds up to repeated viewings, it could very well find itself with a place on future revisions of this list. But the writers of that film, brothers Christopher Nolan (who also directed) and Jonathan Nolan, will not have to wait to find themselves represented on this countdown, as they have already more than earned their place with 2000’s time-twisting mystery Memento, written and directed by Christopher from a then-unpublished short story by Jonathan. Memento is a film that holds important lessons for the aspiring screenwriter. It is a reminder that it’s hard to go wrong, both creatively and commercially, if you can find a unique manner in which to tell your story, some structural or temporal innovation that can inject fresh life into even the most potentially hackneyed genre material. It also illustrates that those innovations, exciting and bold though they may be, will mean next to nothing to the ultimate artistic success of your film if they’re not working in support of a strong narrative with characters we are interested in and have sympathy for. It is this latter point, which Memento is devoted to down to its bones, which elevates this picture above the fractured-chronology thrillers that glutted the market in the wake of 1994’s Pulp Fiction and into the ranks of a singular and haunting tragedy of undying love and endless loss.

Memento’s core plot could have been the stuff of a more or less standard noir-style thriller. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is an insurance investigator who wakes up one night to find his beloved wife (Jorja Fox) dying on their bathroom floor, the victim of an apparent break-in attack. The killers are still in the house, and they likewise attack Leonard, who is injured and lapses into a coma. Upon awakening from his unconscious state, Leonard realizes that he has lost his short-term memory. He can remember everything prior to the attack, but he is now incapable of creating new memories for himself. And the last thing he remembers is the face of his wife, her eyes fading as she died on the bathroom floor in front of him. Having lost the most important thing in his life and with no ability to recover emotionally from his wife’s death (as Leonard himself puts it, “How am I supposed to heal if I can’t…feel time?”), Leonard becomes a one-man investigations unit, stalking the streets of his city searching desperately for the killers who took everything from him. His only allies on his quest are Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a tough-but-tender barmaid whose sleazy criminal boyfriend may have somehow been involved in the murder, and Teddy Gammell (Joe Pantoliano), a wisecracking police detective who seems to genuinely feel for Leonard but who also, like Natalie, may have figured out ways to use Leonard’s condition to his own nefarious ends. And in Leonard’s damaged mind, like a nasty infection that refuses to heal, is Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a fellow short-term memory loss victim whose story Leonard clings to as a cautionary tale, even as the progression of the narrative reveals that Sammy’s story is almost too similar to Leonard’s own.

The murder of Leonard’s wife happens before the beginning of the film…or I should say, before the end. There are not many screenplays that could make a list like this based purely on a structural conceit, but Memento comes close because of a brilliantly utilized narrative device. The tale of Leonard Shelby is told backwards, with the latest scene in the chronology coming first in the film, and working us back through the “progress” of Leonard’s investigation until we arrive at the beginning of the events depicted onscreen. This device (apparently an innovation of Christopher’s, as Jonathan’s short story is told with straightforward chronology) has been used before by other storytellers, most notably in Harold Pinter’s breakup-to-first-kiss stage romance Betrayal, but it’s never been put to quite as many intriguing and poignant uses as it is here. Each small sequence of narrative represents a patch of Leonard’s memory, the blackouts in between serving as cutoff points in his mind. It’s almost as if those cuts represent a tape being turned off and then rewound to that dying face on the bathroom floor, that last haunting memory that Leonard cannot replace or shake off. This device allows Nolan (from here on out, when I say Nolan, I mean Christopher unless otherwise specified) to constantly throw Leonard into scenarios which he has no memory of arriving at in the first place…and thanks to the backwards chronology, we find ourselves on as perilous narrative footing as Leonard himself. It’s a magnificent usage of structure to replicate for the viewer the mental and emotional state of a character, a state which would be hard to dramatize in a story told with a straightforward narrative technique. It also serves to keep the action constantly tense and the viewer perpetually guessing. Leonard finds himself in the midst of run-and-gun footchases with people he has no memory of who nevertheless want him dead. He wakes up in a strange hotel room with an empty bottle in his hand and a battered, stripped-down man bound and gagged in the closet (a man, of course, that Leonard has never “seen” before). Mysteries pile on mysteries, and we work our way back through the events to discover the truth. Who is Dodd (Callum Keith Rennie), the mysterious lover of Natalie who gets into the running shootout with Leonard? Is Teddy really who he says he is, and if so, then why does Leonard blow his brains out in the “first” sequence of the film? Nolan finds a way in which to keep us oriented amidst the constant reversals and double-crosses by intercutting the backwards-tracking “memories” with black-and-white sequences of Leonard on the telephone in a motel room, talking to an unseen third party, explaining his situation and preparing for the film’s “final” showdown with Jimmy (Larry Holden), a local lowlife who may be the mysterious “John G.”, yet another potential lead to the identity of the murderers…or is he? As Leonard exits the motel room, the scene fades from monochrome to color, and we find ourselves “back at the beginning”, as Leonard takes Jimmy to his old abandoned house…the same house where we saw him kill Teddy, who by the way might also have been “John G.”, at the “beginning” of the story. Who knows how many bullet-riddled bodies Leonard has dumped in the basement of this place? Who knows how many bodies he will dump down there? Has Leonard’s unquenchable thirst for a vengeance he can’t even remember turned him into a serial killer?

Leonard has certainly developed a serial killer’s obsessive habits, as Nolan skillfully dramatizes both the realities of a life with no short-term memory and the curious poignance of Leonard’s agonizing predicament. Leonard has learned a lot from his memories of the Sammy Jankis case. “Sammy Jankis wrote himself endless notes, but he’d get mixed up,” Leonard says. “Sammy had no drive. No reason to make it work.” In a way, Leonard’s drive, his desire to avenge his wife’s death, is really all he has left in life, so he finds ways to make it work. He travels everywhere with a Polaroid camera and takes photographs of anything he thinks he might need to know about later (no point in using a regular camera, as Leonard would just forget that he had film that needed to be developed anyway). He, like Sammy, constantly scribbles notes for himself (such as “Don’t believe his lies” on the bottom of a Polaroid of Teddy), and it’s only as the story works its way back through the events, and we get to see Leonard actually making these notes for himself, that we discover the importance of most of these potentially cryptic bits of material. Most striking of all, whenever Leonard finds a piece of information that he absolutely cannot do without, he keeps himself from ever mistakenly discarding the note by having it tattooed on his skin; his body is crisscrossed with messages, all written backwards (like the film itself) so he can read them in the mirror. In looking at the grotesque walking case file that Leonard has turned himself into, we really contemplate what sort of unique and private hell this man has found himself in. Like a widow who wears nothing but black for the last twenty years of her solitary life, Leonard has turned his entire existence into an ongoing memorial to a woman whose death, for him, will never be a distant memory.

Nolan’s characterization of Leonard, and the portrayal of his interactions with others, reveal both the comedy and tragedy of this man’s situation. We frequently see Leonard introducing himself to people who have already known him for a while and explaining his condition to them…just as he has every single time he has met them before. This is a man incapable of making friends, of forging new relationships, because he is destined to forget you not long after you have met. The sadness of the situation is not alleviated much by Leonard’s own knowledge of it: “If we talk too long, I’ll forget how we started. Next time I see you, I’m not gonna remember this conversation. I don’t even know if I’ve met you before….I’ve told you this before, haven’t I?” (This might be counted as the one glitch in Nolan’s otherwise carefully worked-out scenario; if Leonard has no short-term memory, how does he remember that he has no short-term memory? Unless there’s a tattoo that I missed seeing…) We are also frequently reminded that Leonard is at the mercy of those who are aware of his condition and who find that he can be easily used for their own purposes, as he all the while thinks them allies helping him in his quest for vengeance. In one scene, we see Leonard drinking a beer that Natalie has served him, and after he takes his first sip, a man at the other end of the bar laughs for no reason…until we move on to the previous scene, and realize that Natalie, to test Leonard and see if his story is for real, has hocked a big loogie into the beer. And this is hardly the worst thing that she does to him. When she finally grows tired of Dodd’s abuses and criminal ways, she tries to convince Leonard to kill him for her, figuring that his conscience won’t be bothered by a murder he eventually won’t even remember. He refuses, and she taunts him about his dead wife, making him so mad that he strikes her, blackening her eye and bloodying her nose. But by the time this happens, we’ve already seen what follows…Natalie coming into the house with this beaten face, and telling Leonard that Dodd did it, the lie that finally drives him after the criminal, just like Natalie wanted all along. Teddy, too, has found his ways to manipulate Leonard. In the “last” sequence of the film, after Leonard has killed Jimmy and “finally” brought his ex-wife’s killers to justice, Teddy admits to him that Jimmy was not the real killer, that he has just been using Leonard as a means of disposing of problematic suspects by guiding Leonard, using falsified evidence, toward believing that Jimmy…and the others that we now learn Leonard has killed for Teddy…was the mysterious “John G.” It is of course the final irony that by the time we see Teddy revealing this to Leonard, we already know, due to the story’s backwards chronology, that Teddy will be the victim of his own machinations, that Leonard will convince himself that Teddy, the man who guided him to many a John G., is John G. himself. And of course, there’s Teddy’s revelation that there may be no John G. to start with, that Leonard’s damaged mind may have conflated his own story with that of Sammy Jankis. Sammy lost his own wife after she decided to test him to see if his memory loss was real. She was a diabetic, and she convinced Sammy, over and over during the course of one day, to give her doses of insulin. She of course went into shock and died, and Sammy spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Nolan gives us quick cuts of Leonard giving his own wife shots, just like Sammy with his wife’s insulin, to get us thinking that maybe Leonard is more deeply damaged, and the pain from the death of his wife even more tragically self-inflicted, than we might have previously believed. The film suggests that Leonard himself killed his wife in exactly this fashion, and that Teddy found out his circumstances and convinced him her death was not accidental manslaughter, but murder, and that the killer is still out there…the better to use Leonard for his own designs. But we don’t know if we can trust Teddy; after all, Leonard has written on his picture “Don’t believe his lies”. As much as anything, Memento is a reminder that “You make up your own truth”, that in a world where you can’t trust anything, especially if you can’t remember it, it is up to you to find the meaning in your life.

This is no truer for anyone than it is for Leonard, who is literally trapped in a world without meaning. Since he is incapable of making real friends, holding a job, or affecting any kind of forward progress, he is living the existentialist nightmare, an endless round of meaningless actions, pointless conversations, and journeys that lead ultimately nowhere. In that respect, Memento could be regarded as an essential existentialist text, but for one thing. Unlike, say, the hero of Camus’ The Stranger, who accepts and ultimately embraces the futility of both life and death, Leonard is a staunch anti-existentialist. He knows that, in many ways, his life is a never-ending spiral, that he will be forever searching for his wife’s killer, forever feeling the raw pain that her death has exploded within him, and that even if he does avenge her death (which he seemingly already has, possibly countless times), he won’t remember it, won’t get to feel the sense of satisfaction and justice that it should rightly imbue in him. But he still feels that his quest for vengeance, that indeed his very life, is valid, as long as he never stops trying to make it that way. “I have to believe that my actions still have meaning,” he says. “Even if I can’t remember them.” By continuing the quest for his wife’s killers, even if he has already found and disposed of them, even if there never was a killer and he’s murdering innocent men, Leonard has nevertheless found a means to defeat the meaninglessness that ever-threatens to overtake his cut-off, stunted mental-emotional world. And always, always Nolan reminds us of the pain of loss, the constant, nagging void that the death of Leonard’s wife has carved into his soul, and the horrific way in which his condition has rendered that pain permanent and impermeable. In one scene, we see Leonard awakened by the sound of a mysterious blonde woman, who was apparently just in bed with him, entering the bathroom of his motel room. In the “next” scene, we discover that this woman was a prostitute Leonard hired for one reason: to get up out of that bed and go into the bathroom. He’s recreating the last memory he has of his living wife, who woke him by going into the bathroom in the same way on the night she was killed. He’s even decorated the motel room with some of his dead wife’s favorite knickknacks and an old dog-eared paperback, a stash very similar to one we see him burning “later” in the story. “I’ve probably burned truck loads of your stuff before,” he thinks to himself. “I can’t remember to forget you.” In that line, Nolan encapsulates the terrifying implications of Leonard’s situation, the concept that elevates his film from being merely a satisfying if gimmicky thriller and into the realm of genuine tragedy. Leonard’s mind will never move him one iota beyond the pain of the loss of his greatest love, and this has turned Leonard himself into the walking dead, a cipher manipulated by those he comes to trust, a mass murderer killing potentially innocent victims to avenge a crime that may not have happened and if it did, that he will never find closure from anyway. It’s a character arc worthy of our tears, and it’s only Leonard’s constant determination and deathless love for his lost bride that keeps the film from being completely devastating.

In Memento’s final line, Leonard says, “Now then…where was I?” Due to Christopher Nolan’s ingenious structural gamble, we will, like Leonard, never truly know where he was. We only know where he’s going…to the same place he’s been who knows how many times before. To senseless death and endless mourning. Christopher Nolan has said in interviews that Memento was not written in straightforward chronological order and then rearranged to form its backwards timeline, but was actually written by him as it plays out onscreen. If that is indeed the case, then for that reason, as well as for the way in which the film takes the raw materials of the noir thriller and twists them into something unexpectedly harrowing and touching, I am going to say something I don’t say lightly, and mean it. Christopher Nolan? You, sir, are a genius.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (boldface indicates a win): American Film Institute Screenwriter of the Year; Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay; American Screenwriters Association, Discover Screenwriting Award; Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Best Screenplay; Bram Stoker Award, Best Screenplay; Broadcast Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; Chicago Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; Chlotrudis Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Florida Film Critics Circle Award, Best Screenplay; Golden Globe, Best Screenplay; Independent Spirit Award, Best Screenplay; Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award, Best Screenplay; London Film Critics Circle Award, British Screenwriter of the Year; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; Online Film Critics Society Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Phoenix Film Critics Society Award, Best Original Screenplay; Satellite Award, Best Original Screenplay; Sitges – Catalonian International Film Festival, Prize of the Catalan Screenwriters’s Critic and Writers Association; Southeastern Film Critics Association Award, Best Original Screenplay; Sundance Film Festival, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award; Toronto Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay

THE ACADEMY OF THE UNDERRATED: IT WATCHES "POPEYE"

In one of my favorite moments from Woody Allen's Manhattan, pretentious intellectual Diane Keaton and her married lover discuss "the Academy of the Overrated", an imaginary organization they have created for cultural and artistic heavy-hitters with reputations that they feel are on the inflated side. (Among the more heretical choices on their list: Carl Jung, Gustav Mahler, and Allen's beloved Ingmar Bergman.) I love the notion of such an Academy, and God knows that I could think of plenty of candidates for inclusion, in film and all other cultural endeavors. But the world is just as abundantly endowed with cultural works and creators who, for reasons of changing tastes or public ignorance or whatever, have never quite been given their due. Thus, I have decided to use my small corner of the internet to champion some of these works and artists, in the hopes that my words may coax even one person to take a fresh look at some overlooked and sometimes unfairly maligned, but eminently worthy, works of cinema and their progenitors. And so, the Movie Zombie declares the Academy of the Underrated (Cinema Division) hereby open for business.

My first inductee into the hallowed ranks of the Academy is Popeye (1980), Robert Altman's live-action iteration of the spinach-loving sailor man created by cartoonist E.C. Segar and featured for decades in newspaper comics, cartoon shorts and television specials. This film was a joint Paramount / Disney co-production, and the studios mounted the picture as their major holiday release of 1980. It was produced by Robert Evans, today lionized in a camp fashion as a Brylcreemed, slick-talking Hollywood throwback, but who was then fresh off a decade supervising (as studio head or independent producer) some of the greatest movies ever made, including Chinatown and the first two Godfather films. Altman himself was coming off of a decade that had seen him reach the heights of 1975's multiple Oscar-nominated Nashville and the lows of the critically reviled Quintet (1979), with several years of misunderstood and poorly received films to his credit; Popeye was viewed as a comeback vehicle for the director who had burst onto the scene so spectacularly ten years before with M*A*S*H. The film also boasted a screenplay by resident New Yorker wordsmith Jules Feiffer, original songs by iconoclastic tunesmith Harry Nilsson, and an eclectic cast of talented character actors and Altman regulars. Dustin Hoffman and Gilda Radner were the original choices for the roles of the brawling sea dog and his toothpick-thin lady love Olive Oyl, but the roles ultimately went to super-hot Mork & Mindy star Robin Williams (this was his first feature film lead role) and Altman repertory player Shelley Duvall.

So, with a pitch-perfect cast, a talented screenwriter, a visionary producer, and an admittedly mercurial but frequently brilliant director, the Popeye studios were perhaps right to expect an off-the-charts smash hit, especially in light of the monster grosses pulled in just two years earlier by another comic-book adaptation, Richard Donner's Superman. But the reviews for Altman's evocation of the squint-eyed sailor were harsh. Newsweek called the film "joyless", and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker declared Altman's live-action literalization of comic-book slapstick "dumb and oddly unpleasant". The film, produced for a then-considerable $23 million, went on to a worldwide gross of $60 million. Hardly a flop by any mathematical means, but considering the expectation of Superman-caliber numbers, it could only be called a disappointment which, combined with the generally scathing critical response, has sent Popeye to go down in history as a cinematic disaster and one of the worst films in the Altman canon. I am the first to admit that Popeye is probably not what most people would have expected to see when they bought a ticket to a holiday musical about their favorite greens-gobbling deckhand. For even though he was directing an adaptation of a beloved comic-strip favorite, that didn't stop Altman from turning his Popeye into (big surprise!) a Robert Altman film.

Granted, Popeye features many slapstick set pieces and crazy only-in-comics effects, just as one would expect from such a film. Altman and Feiffer were less inspired by the entertaining-but-formulaic Fleischer Brothers Popeye cartoon shorts (standard format: Bluto grabs Olive, Popeye eats spinach, Popeye clobbers Bluto, Popeye saves Olive; repeat ad infinitum) than by the more gonzo, anything-goes spirit of Segar's original Thimble Theatre strips, in which characters defy gravity with the greatest of ease and get their bodies crunched and mangled into abstract art only to pop back to normal again. Thus, the film features many lunatic moments where characters and settings undergo such forceful pummelings and pretzelizations. The first time Bluto clobbers Popeye, the sailor rolls down a dock like a barrel stave, and a few seconds later, he gets clunked on the head and twirls through a hole in the pier like a human corkscrew. In the Roughhouse Cafe, Popeye uses a rude sea salt's face as a speed bag, and when he starts to slip to the floor, Popeye picks him back up using just the centrifugal force of his whirling fists. When Bluto gets stood up by Olive at their engagement party, he literally tears the Oyls' house to pieces, and when Popeye finally gets his hands on some spinach to give Bluto what for, the arm he finally clocks the man-mountain with is the size of an ox. This film was made in the days before computer-generated special effects, so all of these wonders are practical effects created on the set, and while to some modern-trained eyes they may seem hokey and unconvincing, I found them utterly delightful, a note-perfect visualization of cartoon physics applied to the real world.

Amidst all this, Altman otherwise directs the picture in his characteristic style. His camera seems less interested in creating striking individual images than in roaming free through a fascinating world, and Popeye forsakes the static compositional style of the comics page for Altman's usual wide-ranging cinematographic style (the DP here is Fellini veteran Guiseppe Rotunno, a man with a strong background in filming carnivalesque grotesques). While Scott Bushnell's costumes are appropriately outsized and colorful (I smiled every time I saw the actors' bulbous shoes), the seaside town created by production designer Wolf Kroeger is a lopsided conglomeration of weather-beaten shacks that honestly wouldn't look out of place in a horror movie. Nilsson's songs are consistently tuneful and endearing, but there is nothing here that qualifies as a showstopping, blow-out-the-lights musical triumph, and Altman doesn't stage them as such. There's no acrobatic choreography, no kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley-style visuals. Indeed, Altman stages the numbers, well, pretty much like he stages things in all of his movies, with a restless camera catching action at all corners of the frame and with the key actions of a scene frequently occurring in the background of shots. As for Feiffer's dialogue, this is definitely not the aural equivalent of the isolated speech balloons you find on the comics page; Altman utilizes his trademarked style of overlapping dialogue so that the clamor of the cartoonish onscreen action is fully matched by the cacophony of the actors' lines crashing into and over each other. I believe that part of the reason that Popeye was so critically lambasted is because many of them may have been offended by the spectacle of a director so unwilling to subordinate himself to his material. This is not "Popeye, directed by Robert Altman". It's ROBERT ALTMAN'S Popeye, and he never lets you forget it.

Feiffer crafts a relatively simple narrative in which Popeye, searching for his long-lost pappy, washes up in Sweethaven, a ramshackle shore town whose chief industry seems to be tax collecting. The town is ruled over by the seldom-seen Commodore, who leaves the enforcing of his crippling everything-gets-taxed policies to the hulking, bearded Bluto (Paul L. Smith). Popeye "renks" a room at the Oyls' boarding house, strikes up a romance with Olive (much to Bluto's rage), and adopts Swee' Pea, a foundling in a basket who proves to have clairvoyant powers. It all climaxes with Bluto kidnapping the baby, hoping he will lead the bully to the Commodore's hidden treasure, while Popeye sets sail to rescue his Olive and the kid...while not getting chomped up by an angry-eyed octopus in the process. Story-wise, it's not enough to carry a 112-minute feature, but then, as is the case with most of Altman's films, the story is not really the engine driving Popeye. Altman is at his best with narratively loose pictures about disparate groups of individuals brought together by a common desire (as with the musical and political hopefuls that converge in Nashville) or uniting against common foes or stresses (like the beleagured Army doctors in M*A*S*H). Likewise, the seaside folk of Popeye are survivors, huddled together in a rough little burg and united by their disgust for the Commodore's taxes...and eventually, by their hope that Popeye will save the day. It's a little unorthodox for a family film, a form which generally thrives on strong, clear narrative design, but as an Altman picture, it works from a story standpoint about as well as his films ever do.

Really, the story isn't the attraction here, and there's honestly quite a lot to recommend the film. Nilsson's score provides some sweet and memorable moments, from the rousing anthem "Sweethaven" to Bluto's driving theme "I'm Mean" to the film's musical highlight, Olive's "He Needs Me", an actually quite touching ballad endearingly performed by Duvall (this song was later used to strong effect in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 Punch-Drunk Love). The moments of kooky comic book action are always impressive looking and come just frequently enough to keep the picture sparking along at a smart, enjoyable pace. The cast is spot-on perfect across the board, with a few notable standouts. Wesley Ivan Hurt (Altman's grandson) is a thoroughly adorable tyke as Swee' Pea. Paul Dooley, another Altman vet, nails Wimpy's slightly drowsy hamburger-grubbing manner, and Donald Moffat is amusingly stodgy as the Commodore's tax man. With no trace of his frequently off-putting improvisational flights of fancy, Wlliams proves why he became a movie star with this seamless evocation of the one-eyed sailor. He's got the raspy voice, the muttered imprecations and tangled syntax, and all the fleet-footed, almost balletic grace of the animated Popeye; it also helps that he's fitted out with utterly convincing cannonball-like Popeye forearms. And Duvall proves, if anyone doubted it, that she was born to play Olive Oyl, evoking the animated Olive's tangled-limbs clumsiness and fluty vocal intonations, but imbuing them with a very human and lovable soul.

I have to confess that I have kind of a soft spot for Popeye the Sailor Man. It has seemed, for several years, that whenever things in my life are going especially well, he shows up in some way, sort of a spinach-loving good luck talisman. I did some of the best screenwriting of my career with a Popeye action figure watching over me from my desktop, and the last time I saw Altman's movie before reviewing it for this site was on the day when I met a woman with whom I had probably the best relationship of my life. All this goodwill toward the character has made me probably more disposed to be kind to Popeye than many people would be, and indeed, the film has largely been relegated to the slag heap of failed comic-book adaptations alongside such other duds as Spawn, The Spirit and Ghost Rider. I'm sure there's a lot of people my age who aren't even aware that there was a live-action Popeye movie, let alone one directed by a major cinematic talent and starring an Academy Award winning actor. But fans of the original Popeye cartoons, admirers of Robert Altman's work, and anyone looking for a change from the usual family musical would be well advised to check this picture out. It's one-of-a-kind, oddly endearing, and it's my first inductee into the Academy of the Underrated.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #83

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

The Writers

Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson; based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkein

Why It's Here

When I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson's massive screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's seminal fantasy trilogy, my reaction was not at all what I expected based on the astonishing trailers and the rapturous reviews the film had received. Basically, I was not too impressed. I went into the theatre expecting the Star Wars of sword-and-sorcery epics, a transcendent masterwork full of blood and iron, heroism and heartbreak. Instead, I got one really top-grade action sequence set in a mine choked with orcs and trolls, surrounded by a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo and way too many scenes of Hobbits acting cutesy and blithely irresponsible while playing with fireworks. Oh, and my favorite actor in the whole film, Sean Bean (as Boromir), got killed before the closing credits rolled, leaving me stuck with the prospect of two additional films without my favorite character from the first picture. In short, after watching Fellowship, I began to suspect that the fanboys were even more out of touch and questionable in their tastes than I had originally believed. I remember speculating to a friend of mine about the potential fate of New Line Cinema if this film tanked and they found themselves stuck with two more bloated special-effects pictures that they knew the audience had no appetite for. (New Line is indeed going out of business, but for reasons that likely don't have much to do with The Lord of the Rings, which was a record-shattering success and brought the studio its first-ever Best Picture Academy Award.)

My ignorance as to what was coming was based on a very simple reality: I had never read the original Tolkein trilogy, so it was hard for me to understand that this too-leisurely setup, with its Bilbo Baggins birthday party and irritating hobbits grumbling about "second breakfast", was necessary for the trilogy to create its sweeping narrative arc. The characters and situations had to start small and seemingly inconsequential in order for Tolkein to have somewhere to go, for the author to be able to make the situation ever more dangerous, the characters constantly evolving and challenging and surprising. Would Star Wars have been nearly as impressive if Luke Skywalker had started out as a nimble-sabered Jedi instead of as the callow, oblivious farm kid who grows into a great warrior? Well, in this scenario, I was Luke. I had to grow into the epic quest of the Fellowship of the Ring as they attempt to defeat the monstrous armies of the evil Lord Sauron and destroy his enchanted / cursed ring in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged. I was finally on board by the end of the second film in the trilogy, The Two Towers, with its spectacular battle sequences and its introduction of the loathsome and pathetic Gollum, a triumph both of special effects and of complex antagonist characterization. And the third film, The Return of the King, finally delivered on the promise of the first film's hype. This is indeed cinema's seminal classic fantasy picture ("classic" meaning it contains all the elements we commonly associate with fantasy, elves and swords and the like). The fantasy fans finally had their Star Wars. The Return of the King reigned over the 2003 Academy Awards, winning all 11 of the prizes it was nominated for, tying with Ben-Hur and Titanic for most Oscars for a single film, and, like both of those movies, winning the Best Picture statue. I particularly remember applauding with delighted surprise when the film took home the one award that I figured it would most likely lose: Best Adapted Screenplay. After all, nine out of ten Oscar-nominated scripts are about nothing but estranged family members having tense confrontations in rooms. How many other films with orcs in them have ever even been nominated for writing Oscars? Granted, many folks said that the Return of the King sweep was meant more to reward co-writer / director Peter Jackson and his enormous crew for the monumental achievement of the entire trilogy rather than for this film alone. But in the case of the screenplay prize, I think that the award belongs to Return and Return only. (Ben-Hur lost the writing Oscar, incidentally, and Titanic wasn't even nominated…though you can read about it in the #95 slot on this list.)

On the surface of it, though, there's no reason why Return of the King's writing should be substantially better than that of its two predecessors. After all, it is literally a when-last-we-left-our-heroes continuation of the story begun in the first two films. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), the simple country hobbit cursed to carry Sauron's ring, continues to make his way to Mount Doom along with his faithful companion Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) as he is forced to contend both with the ring's poisonous effects on his body and soul and with Gollum (Andy Serkis), the former slave of the ring's power, who has been warped beyond repair by the ring and who will do anything to reclaim his "precious". Meanwhile, elsewhere in the magical kingdom of Middle-Earth, Sauron's armies are massing to lay siege to the mountainside city of Menas Tirith, one of the key strongholds of the forces of good. Leading the armies of honor and right are Gandalf the White (Sir Ian McKellen), the mighty wizard who knows better than most the dark power of the ring; mismatched brother warriors Legolas the elf (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli the dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), and of course, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the mysterious raider who comes to learn that he is the lost king of Gondor, and who reclaims his fallen sword and his regal command on the eve of the great battle to come. From there, the story proceeds forward in the necessarily episodic, cross-cutting fashion of the previous films, as the warriors face an army of orcs, trolls and towering six-tusked elephant creatures while Frodo and Sam encounter bloodthirsty goblins, a ravenous gigantic spider, and the craven machinations of Gollum, all while Frodo is getting sicker, and weaker, and more and more lost to the spell of the ring.

The Return of the King is a satisfying culmination of the narrative we had been following for (at that point) nearly six hours, tying up all the necessary threads and bringing the twin dramas of the story to a suitably rousing climax. But if all the film did was appropriately resolve the adventures of the Fellowship, it probably wouldn't be on this list. It is the way in which the writers strengthen and resolve the emotional journey of the trilogy's characters that elevates The Return of the King from the realm of ambitious popcorn flick and into the ranks of something truly special. The trilogy format has allowed the characters the luxury of gradual development and permits each major player to have their own arc, their own drama to be resolved, for better or worse. Because we have now spent so much time in the company of these characters and have become so invested in their struggles, we are able to sit back and watch with pleasure as Jackson, Walsh and Boyens bring each character's journey to a satisfying climax. We see Aragorn, who has grown in stature from the grim, shadowy Strider of the original picture into a square-jawed leader of men, take up his great sword and step to the head of the battle as a true king should. We see the great love of Aragorn's life, the beautiful elf-warrior Arwen (Liv Tyler), forced to choose between a life of elven immortality and one that will end in death but will bring her true love and family like she will otherwise never know. Legolas and Gimli, who bicker and banter their way through battles great and small, set aside their inter-species differences and achieve true friendship as they face Sauron's forces together. Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), the two tag-along hobbits who so annoyed me in the first film, come into their own here as warriors and true grown-up hobbits. Gollum continues to fight and lose his struggle with his addiction, and Frodo seems to shrink and darken as he follows Gollum down the path to soul-death at the hands of the ring.

Most spectacularly of all, Sam, who was my least favorite character in the original film with his doglike devotion to "Mister Frodo", emerges as the soul of the Tolkein story, as he proves himself maybe the greatest friend in all of cinema, refusing to allow Gollum to trick Frodo, battling the venomous arachnid Shelob as she threatens to devour Frodo, and generally proving himself the bravest, most capable hobbit who ever lived (by the time Sam, seeing Frodo desperately ill on the cliffs of Mount Doom, picks the sickly hobbit up on his shoulders and begins carrying him up the mountainside, I am almost in tears every time I see this film). So rich is the film in character that it even has room for an entirely new drama, as Pippin and Gandalf find themselves forced to contend with Denethor (John Noble), the steward of Menas Tirith and Boromir's father, who is so distraught with grief over his son's death that he comes to the brink of committing infanticide against his brave but "lesser" son, Faramir (David Wenham), first by sending him to his sure death in a mismatched battle and then by trying to burn his body on a funeral pyre…while he's still alive.

Every major character gets what he or she deserves, every relationship resolves on the note that suits it best, and all of this roiling emotion and conflict carries the day without being overwhelmed, as it easily could have been, by the stunning battles and tremendous special effects that surround the characters. Indeed, the primary reason that The Return of the King stands as dramatically tall as it does is because the writers never allow action and special effects to get in the way of their characters. For every jaw-dropping sight like the flight of the monstrous Nazgul over the walls of Menas Tirith, there is well-observed dialogue like Gandalf and Pippin's moving eve-of-battle conversation about death. For every bone-crunching battle like the orcs' siege of Osgiliath, there is a witty grace note like Gimli's comment upon realizing the odds facing them ("Certainty of death, small chance of success…what are we waiting for?"). For every hair's-breadth escape, there is a moment like Sam's reminiscence about enjoying the first strawberries of the season back home in the Shire. Action and special effects are fun, sure, but if they leave the filmgoer with nothing substantial to hold on to when the lights come up, the film in question will certainly fade from memory in time. The Return of the King always puts character and relationships first, and as such emerges as a masterpiece of its genre.

Of course, it also helps that the writers' work was bolstered by the quality of the source material. Since I saw the films, I have acquainted myself with Tolkein's work, and not to understate the case, but the man can write. Jackson, Walsh and Boyens are not intimidated by or uncomfortable with the archaic diction and poetic expressive style of Tolkein's dialogue, and they are willing to allow their characters to speak as Tolkein has them speak, in a grandiloquent, vaguely medieval manner that increases their mythic qualities rather than making them seem distant and alien to us. It is also to the writers' credit that every character in the picture speaks in their own very unique way. There is Gandalf's unforced, poetic dialogue (the wizard to his horse: "Ride, Shadowfax! Show us the meaning of haste!"). There is Aragorn's zealous martial speechifying ("By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, men of the West!"). There is the simple, direct speech of the hobbits, the mystical ruminations of the elves, and the good-natured sarcasm of Gimli. Most of all, there is the tortured syntax of Gollum, who always refers to himself in the first-person plural, who mangles his verbs and who emerges as a character with a dialogue pattern as distinctive and memorable as Yoda's. What's more, Jackson, Walsh and Boyens prove themselves to be true screenwriters by knowing when dialogue is not necessary, when it's best to just let the images carry the day. Most of the film's most powerful non-action moments are dialogue-free, as when Gollum gets his comeuppance and when a simple clinking of four flagons of mead does more to sum up the harrowing adventures the drinkers have faced than any hackneyed toast ever could. The intelligence of this approach helps to make TheReturn of the King a feast for the eyes, ears and heart.

Tolkeinites much more dedicated than I have written sprawling texts dissecting the complex themes of The Lord of the Rings, reading it as a religious allegory, a political fable, a war parable. I don't know the stories well enough to make any sort of grand statements such as those as to Tolkein's intentions. But as I watched the film again in preparation for this review, it occurred to me what, for me at least, is the narrative spine holding the trilogy together. The Return of the King, indeed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, is essentially a story about brotherhood. All of the characters in this film have their own dreams, their own desires, their own journeys and approaches to life, but the one thing that binds them together is the necessity of their mission to destroy the ring and defeat Sauron's armies. Hobbits can rise above their simple station in life, elves and dwarves can learn to work together in peace, fathers and sons can reconcile their grievances, and beings from different planes of existence can find love, if they all set aside what pushes them apart and concentrate their energies on what brings them together. The necessity of friendship is no better demonstrated than by the character of Sam, who cares for Frodo, gives him his food and water, literally carries his burdens and fights his battles for him…all because Frodo is his friend and because he knows that their duty is to a higher purpose than his own comfort or happiness. By the same token, one notes the infighting and hostility among the orcs and goblins of Sauron's armies, who act only out of self-interest as they fight over treasure and armor, threatening to stick each other like hogs rather than relinquish the best goods. And of course, Gollum starts the ball rolling by killing a friend rather than letting him possess the ring that causes the whole damn mess. We are currently in an age when the self-interest of opposing parties and people's unwillingness to recognize their essential sameness has led to political infighting, the loss of civility in public discourse, and the transformation of politics and war into petty squabbles over the bones of brotherhood. Perhaps The Return of the King was such a successful picture because people saw in it a vision of the way things could be, if we could all learn to set aside our differences and work for the best of all.

Two major quibbles keep The Return of the King from being a perfect screenplay. First of all, the picture lacks a clearly defined central villain. Saruman, the turncoat wizard ably embodied in the first two Rings pictures by Christopher Lee, was edited out of the theatrical release of the picture, leaving us stuck with an undifferentiated mass of trolls, orcs and monsters, and with the Eye of Sauron, which looks impressive enough, but seriously, is a big evil spotlight the best possible villain for a fantasy epic? Gollum is certainly sleazy and depraved enough to serve as a villain, but the pathos inspired by his obvious helplessness against the ring's power makes me almost reluctant to even refer to him as such. I'm not so reluctant, however, to say that the film's ending, or should I say endings, goes on for much too long. The film fades out and fades back up with new developments and resolutions for the characters so many times that many audience members at the initial screening I attended audibly grumbled every time the picture came back up (they had been sitting for almost 3 ½ hours, after all). I have done my best in this review to consider The Return of the King as a single entity separate from the other two films, but really, regarding this as the ending of a single 9 ½ hour monster rather than as one film is the only way one can really justify the foot-dragging nature of the conclusion.

Nevertheless, these faults do not ultimately detract much from The Return of the King's status as a keystone cinematic entertainment. It was fascinating last summer to listen to audiences talk enthusiastically about The Dark Knight, the exceptional superhero epic that could stand the chance, if history is kind to it, of finding its way onto future editions of this list. People were speaking about the picture, with its multi-tiered character arcs and complex, thematically rich narrative as if such things were complete novelties in the realm of big-budget popcorn cinema. They are rare, to be sure. But they're not unique. And The Return of the King is bold, exciting proof of that.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (boldface indicates a win): Academy Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films Award, Best Writing; BAFTA Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Chicago Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; Online Film Critics Society Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Phoenix Film Critics Society Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; USC Scripter Award (shared nomination with novelist J.R.R. Tolkein); Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Writers Guild of America Award, Best Adapted Screenplay

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #84

PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985)

The Writers

Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and Michael Varhol

Why It's Here

In writing this review, I run the risk of redundancy, as I am an admirer of Pee-wee's Big Adventure for many of the same reasons that I liked the previous film on my countdown, Happy Gilmore. Like Happy, this film was a profitable one upon its initial release, so much so that the actor who created and portrays Pee-wee, Paul Reubens, was able to spin the film's success off into a sequel (1988's Big Top Pee-wee, which is definitely not on my list) and a popular Saturday morning kids' series, Pee-wee's Playhouse. Unlike Happy Gilmore, however, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is a film that garnered a fair amount of critical respect upon its release, hailed by the cinematic intelligentsia as both a top-notch family comedy and a subversive goof on same. As time has gone on, though (and it sure has gone on; hard to believe, but is Pee-wee's Big Adventure is twenty-four years old), much of the credit for the film's artistic success has been retroactively awarded to its director, a then little-known former Disney animator making his first feature film...Tim Burton. Granted, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is an inarguably auspicious debut feature for Burton, and I think it still ranks among his best and most entertaining films. But even Burton, in Big Adventure's DVD commentary track, grants the lion's share of the film's success to the picture's freewheeling but surprisingly well-constructed screenplay, written by Ruebens, Michael Varhol, and the late Phil Hartman.

If you look at the picture from a certain angle, Pee-wee's Big Adventure ranks as perhaps the daffiest remake of a classic film ever committed to celluloid. Basically, this is de Sica's The Bicycle Thief filtered through a funhouse mirror. In place of the gritty, working-class milieu of the Italian film's postwar Rome, the writers give us a universe that is a quirky hybrid of '50s sitcom, creature feature and Looney Tunes surrealism (no accident that this film was released by Warner Bros., home of Bugs, Daffy and the gang). The protagonist here is not a down-at-the-heels proletarian, but a hyper-stylized, overgrown man-child in a too-tight gray suit, white bucks and red bow tie, whose days consist of nothing more ambitious than shopping for gag novelties at his favorite magic shop, downing a breakfast of pancakes and Mr. T cereal, and playing with the galaxy of toys glutting his fantastical suburban circus tent of a house (at times, the film runs the risk, liek the previously reviewed Adventures of Baron Munchausen, of being walked off with by the art direction team). But Pee-wee Herman has one reason for being: "the best bike in the whole world", a candy-colored dream machine with a flashy tiger's head adorning the handlebars and more neat gadgets that James Bond's Q could dream up. And when Pee-wee's bike is stolen and no one seems to realize that Pee-wee can't go on without his prized possession on which to zip around town, Pee-wee sets off on a cross-country adventure that takes him from the (non-existent) basement of the Alamo all the way to, what do you know, Warner Bros. Studios, where he leads the security guards on a wacky chase to rescue his beloved two-wheeler.

As you may have guessed from the plot outline above, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is basically a road picture, utilizing the genre's typically episodic structure as Pee-wee encounters a vast array of bizarre and colorful characters as he makes his way across America in search of his bike. Not an unworthy format for a story about a search for a bicycle; after all, one of the greatest of 1960s American films, Easy Rider, is a road picture about bikes. Intelligently, though, the writers do not allow the film to merely be the sum total of its individual episodes by giving Pee-wee's quest a concrete, strongly defined goal (something that Easy Rider, for all its thematic density and power, never really accomplishes) and by making all of the characters that Pee-wee encounters on his journey reflect something essential about his relationship to his bike. The folks back at home, such as lovestruck bike-shop mechanic Dottie (E.G. Daily) and loopy magic-shop owner Mario (Monte Landis), represent all the richness and friendship Pee-wee's life is full of, which is why they don't quite get how much a simple bicycle can matter to him. Escaped convict Mickey (Judd Omen), who Pee-wee hitches a ride with at the beginning of his quest, share's Pee-wee's digust with the unhelpful cops and the unfairness of life (of course, Mickey is not an innocent like Pee-wee, though he spares Pee-wee knowledge of his crimes by telling him he did time for cutting a "do not remove" tag off a mattress). The horror and uncertainty the world holds for Pee-wee without his bike is well-embodied by the ghostly truck driver Large Marge (Alice Nunn). The soulful diner waitress Simone (Diane Salinger), who shares with Pee-wee her dream of living in Paris, is the only one who perhaps understands the intensity of Pee-wee's obsession with his bike, and it's his single-minded pursuit of his dream that drives her to finally get up off her "big But" and make her dream happen. Interestingly, the few people that Pee-wee meets on the road with whom he does immediately hit it off are a gang of motorcyclists, who are none too pleased when Pee-wee knocks their bikes over like a row of dominoes. Even an obsessive hobbyist can meet his match when faced with a true gang of fanatics like these guys, and it almost looks like curtains for Pee-wee ("I say we scalp him! Then we tattoo him! Then we hang him! And then we kill him!"). But Pee-wee is able to win those folks over with his simple childlike enthusiasm, expressed in his dopey last request, a bar-top dance done in ridiculously oversized shoes, set to the Champs' classic blatty-saxed rock anthem "Tequila" (this routine became so associated with Pee-wee that he later repeated it during his Saturday Night Live hosting stint shortly following the film's release).

Pee-wee's ability to defuse a potentially deadly situation simply by being himself reminds us of one of the ways in which a successful comedy can often look much different than a successful dramatic film. The main engine of good drama is change: characters grow and learn as a result of their experiences and responses to the problems they face, and frequently emerge by the end of the film as much different individuals than those we found at the outset. Since the earliest days of Chaplin's Little Tramp, character-driven Hollywood comedy has often operated by a complete reversal of this notion. Many of cinema's greatest comic creations, from the Tramp to Buster Keaton's array of misfits to the Marx Brothers, all the way up to contemporary cinematic cut-ups like Austin Powers and Ace Ventura, do not triumph over their problems by learning to roll with the punches and grow with the experience, but by stubbornly remaining true to themselves, by forcing the world to roll with their punches, and by being unafraid of being who they are in the face of anything that life can throw their way. This tends to work more successfully with stylized characters headlining the story, and comic personae don't come much more stylized than Pee-wee Herman, the world's biggest little boy.

Fortunately, in writing this script, Reubens brought to the table a fully formed comic personality, honed through years of improv and concert performances (many shared with Hartman, his fellow alumnus of the L.A.-based Groundlings improv troupe), so all that was really necessary was to find the proper milieu to wrap him up in, turn him loose and let him do his thing. Pee-wee is indeed a singular and hilarious creation, and Pee-wee's Big Adventure is the work that most concretely codified the personality traits and characteristics that Reubens and his creative cohorts were to carry through virtually all of Pee-wee's future incarnations. Pee-wee is truly just a big overgrown kid, who wakes up in the morning and can't resist a go-round with his toys, even running over poor Mr. Potato Head with a toy fire truck, before getting started on his day. He has a weakness for toys and novelty gags, a squeaky, goobery voice, and a stuttery laugh that would be annoying if it wasn't so infectious. Bravely, the writers also allow Pee-wee Herman to embody those aspects of children's personalities that, truth be told, can be a little on the annoying side. He can be sometimes unexpectedly callous to the feelings of others, as when he deflects Dottie's attempts to ask him out on a date, and he is sometimes brutal, as only kids can be, in his verbal jousting with Francis (Mark Holton), the neighborhood creep (picture a mean, unpleasant Baby Huey). Witness this exchange, which is set off when Francis offers to buy Pee-wee's beloved bicycle:

Pee-wee: I wouldn't sell my bike for all the money in the world! Not for a hundred million billion trillion dollars!
Francis: Then you're crazy!
Pee-wee: I know you are but what am I?
Francis: You're a nerd!
Pee-wee: I know you are but what am I?
Francis: You're an idiot!
Pee-wee: I know you are but what am I?

To say nothing of Pee-wee's comment to Francis's butler when he is told the boy is having his bath ("Oh, really? Where they hosing him down?"). Indeed, the very narrative of the film, Pee-wee's obsessive continent-crossing quest for his bike, illustrates an essential quality of children's personalities: their near-lunatic latching on to concepts, ideas or objects and their single-minded devotion to them, come hell or high water. Like a shark chasing fresh chum, kids will tear a place apart in search of a lost toy, and will continue in their quest long after anyone and everyone else has lost interest. This is Pee-wee to his core. It doesn't matter that the cops have told them that finding his bike is a long shot. It doesn't matter that his best friends think he should just get on with his life. It doesn't matter that the bike might be all the way in Texas, and it doesn't matter that he has to brave wild animals, pet-shop fires, ghosts, bullriding, angry bikers, and the wrath of Warner Bros. Pictures (not to mention Simone's boyfriend, a bulldozing galoot named Andy) to find it. It's his bike, and like any self-respecting obsessive child, he's going to get it back if it kills him...or, at the very least, if it kills you. It's this commitment to the emotional integrity of a child's personality that makes Pee-wee's Big Adventure both a successful family entertainment (which allowed Pee-wee to spin off into a kids' TV show) and a fine example of a comedy that allows its hero to stubbornly refuse to change and still achieves narrative success. It is this reality, in fact, that in my mind accounts for the artistic failure of Big Top Pee-wee; by giving Pee-wee competing love interests and making it more of a romantic comedy, Reubens and his Big Top co-writer, George McGrath, shoot the Pee-wee character in the foot by giving him primarily adult concerns to deal with. Don't they realize that girls are icky?

All of this is making Pee-wee's Big Adventure sound like a doctoral thesis on theories and practices of comedy writing, when really, one of the main reasons that this film is on my list is that, over two decades down the road, it still makes me laugh like crazy. Many of Pee-wee's most beloved routines originated here, from the above-quoted back-and-forth with Francis to the big shoe dance to the silly moment where Pee-wee, stranded in darkness, is represented by a pair of glowing animated eyes (a bit that was often used to excellent effect on Pee-wee's Playhouse). Many of the film's jokes are fittingly juvenile, as when Pee-wee pranks both Francis and his father (played by venerated TV announcer Ed Herlihy) by offering them trick gum that causes black ink to spill from their mouths, and there's plenty of jokes and characters that, like many of the thinsg that we laugh at as kids, are funny for completely inexplicable reasons, as with the mohawked, leisure-suited Amazing Larry (Lou Cutell), who has the audacity to interrupt Pee-wee's extremely detailed recreation of the theft of his bike ("Is there something you'd like to share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?!?!"). But the writers obviously didn't forget that there'd be parents in the audience for this flick, and one of the reasons that Big Adventure's appeal has been so enduring is that the material is infused with a strong subversive streak that both tweaks the conventions of its comic universe and underscores the frequently scary and dark aspects of the best children's entertainment. Like Bugs Bunny, Pee-wee is forced to don drag and pose as Mickey's bubbly wife to get through a police roadblock, but unlike Bugs, Pee-wee forgets to doff his drag after they make it through, much to Mickey's discomfort. More than a few kids were traumatized by Large Marge's transformation into a goggle-eyed ghoul, the film's most surreal moment and the one that most clearly bears the fingerprints of Tim Burton behind the camera. The bikers are not cartoonish creations, but pose a genuine threat to Pee-wee, and family entertainment itself even undergoes an assault in the film's portrayal of the set of a maudlin TV show ruled by a pompous ogre of a child's TV star (played beautifully by Jason Hervey, who went on to genuine TV stardom as bullying older brother Wayne Arnold on The Wonder Years). The film even throws in a cameo by demonized glam rockers Twisted Sister, as Pee-wee, escaping through the Warners lot on his rescued bike, interrupts the shooting of their latest video, for a song with the very un-kid-friendly title "Burn in Hell".

Of course, the main reason that the humor of Pee-wee's Big Adventure works on so many levels is that, like with Happy Gilmore, the writers cared enough about their film to make it more than just a rickety framework for schtick performed in a vacuum by its star. Pee-wee Herman is funny partly because he operates within a funny universe, peopled with characters that all have their own agendas and manners of making us laugh, and part of the entertainment comes from watching Pee-wee attempt to negotiate these individuals' obsessions as he searches for his bike. There are characters who infuriate him, like Francis. There are characters who frighten him, like Large Marge. There are characters who outwit him, as with the scam-artist fortune teller Madame Ruby (Erica Yohn), who uses some signs visible outside her parlor window to convince Pee-wee that his bike is in the basement of the Alamo. There are characters who flat-out annoy him, like the foul-breathed Hobo Jack (Carmen Filpi), whose incessant warbling of classic old American tunes drives Pee-wee to leap for his sanity from a moving train. And of course, there's Tina (Jan Hooks), the perky Alamo tour guide in whom Pee-wee meets his match, his obsessive drive to recover his bike utterly flummoxed by her tunnel-visioned devotion to giving the most exhaustive survey of Alamo history imaginable, right down to detailing every single one of the thousands of uses for corn that she knows. Each of these characters is as fully developed as the narrative will allow, and each gives Pee-wee different problems and challenges to deal with. The manner in which he negotiates those challenges, all the while remaining true to his childlike self, is one of the main reasons why Pee-wee's Big Adventure endures as more than a formless collection of kiddified gags and routines.

Pee-wee's big adventure eventually winds up (where else?) on the big screen, as the at-first furious Warner Bros. execs, upon hearing Pee-wee's story, buy the rights and turn it into a movie. In the film's final great joke, the movie they make out of Pee-wee's exploits is a ridiculous grade-Z action-adventure picture, with the bike turned into a super-secret spy motorcycle and James Brolin hilariously cast as Pee-wee, red bow tie and all (Dottie, for the record, is played by Morgan Fairchild). Pee-wee himself has a cameo in his own story, as a hotel bellhop, his voice brilliantly overdubbed by a nasally, robotic monotone. It's yet another gag that works on two levels at once, as parents can enjoy the satire of schlocky Hollywood filmmaking and kids giggle over the silly voice now coming out of Pee-wee. And it is much to the enduring credit of Reubens, Varhol and Hartman that there are plenty of Big Adventure fans out there, yours truly included, who laugh just as hard at both jokes. With a little care for quality and a lot of attention to character, story and the conventions of comedy, these three scribes take what could have been an instantly forgettable, Ernest P. Worrell kind of film and transform it into what ranks, in my opinion, as a modern comedy classic.

ZOMBIE INTERNATIONALE: IT WATCHES "LE SAMOURAI"

My brother and I have been fellow cinephiles and co-writers for years, but we don't see eye to eye on everything. Our first major cinematic disagreement happened about 15 years ago, when we got into a spirited debate about whether or not a movie could succeed on style alone. My brother took the anti-Wildean position that without a strong screenplay and compelling story, a movie can be nothing more than a collection of disparate aesthetic elements, perhaps impressive on their own terms, but not enough to qualify as a truly successful film. I was on the other side of the aisle, espousing the belief that with the right mix of skilled cinematography, stylish costumes, and mood-elevating music, a film could transcend a perhaps-subpar script and become a satisfying experience in its own right. In the intervening decade and a half, my stance has shifted more or less completely over to my brother's side (at least as far as the film we were initially debating, the Alec Baldwin-starring The Shadow, is concerned). But then yesterday, I saw Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) for the first time, and I realized that I had found the film that could settle the style-vs.-story argument once and for all. Roger Ebert once wrote that what a film is about is much less important than how it it about it, and no film better exemplifies this philosophy than Melville's brooding, icy-cool crime thriller, which is quite simply one of the best-looking and most stylish films I have ever seen.

Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is a real nowhere man. He lives in a sparsely furnished room with no personal effects save for an incessantly chirping, feather-shedding bullfinch in a small cage. His wardrobe is composed entirely of sharp but anonymous suits and raincoats, always topped off with a cool fedora, the brim low over the eyes just so. And Jef's persona is as cold and blank as his living quarters and wardrobe. His voice is a deep, flat sound untouched by emotion, and his poker face and deep blue eyes seem dead to the excitement and stimulations of life. No surprise that this man kills for a living, with the icy professional detachment of an android. As the film begins, Jef goes about his bloody business. He acquires a gun and a fresh set of license plates from a chop-shop denizen with whom he exchanges not a solitary word. He pays a visit to Jane (Nathalie Delon, Alain's then-wife), a woman with whom he is obviously having an affair but with whom he stays only long enough to establish an alibi. Then, he drives to a glittery Paris nightclub and guns down the owner...but not before being sighted by Valerie (Cathy Rosier), the sexy pianist in the house jazz band. Jef is picked up by the cops and hauled into a police lineup, but Valerie's denial of his identity sets him free. He seems to be in the clear, but then he's double-crossed by the men who hired him for the nightclub job, and with the still-suspicious police on his tail, he's got to find out the reason for the betrayal, Valerie's shady motives for helping him out, and whether he has it in him to do what he's paid to do, no matter what.

The screenplay for Le Samourai (written by Melville and Georges Pellegrin) could very easily have (and in fact more or less has) provided the backdrop for a dozen humdrum noir thrillers about cold-blooded killers, their hot-blooded women, and canny cops in hot pursuit. But in this fine French film, as with fine French food, the magic is all in the presentation. First and foremost, one must acknowledge the sterling contribution of cinematographer Henri Decae, whose work here is flat-out some of the best and most incongruously beautiful I've ever seen. This is a world of ice blue, steel gray, and rich, threatening blacks, a fiercely gorgeous Parisian purgatory captured by Decae with crystal clarity and precision (the Criterion DVD transfer of this film is impeccable). Much of the film is done in measured still frames or fluid pans, but Decae occasionally mixes things up, as with a tense handheld cat-and-mouse chase through a Paris Metro station or a quick shot of violence captured as if from the window of a passing El train. Francois de Lamothe's art direction supports Decae's work with locations both seedy and sumptuous (or sometimes, like the nightclub, both at the same time), and composer Francois de Roubaix undergirds the enterprise with a tense, pulsating score inflected with '60s jazz cool.

Melville's direction here is singular in the thriller genre for its almost unparalleled quietude. When you're going to see a film about hitmen and femmes fatale, the last thing you expect is silence. But Le Samourai features no dialogue whatsoever until about ten minutes in, when a terse exchange between Jef and Jane gives way to several more minutes of silence before Jef arrives at the backroom card game that will provide the second part of his alibi. The whole film is like this: brief, brusque dialogue exchanges buffered by extended scenes of silence. The whole Paris Metro chase is dialogue-free, as is an enthralling sequence in which cops plant a bug in Jef's rented room and listen from a hotel across the street, for minutes on end, to nothing but the soft sounds of Jef moving around the room and the neverending chirping of his bird. I would guess that Jef himself speaks fewer lines of dialogue than any protagonist in cinematic history, and when he kills, it's without wisecracks or verbal preludes of any kind; we know that violence is coming not when he promises it, but when he slips on his light gray linen gloves, the better to keep gunpowder off his impeccably manicured hands. Even the violence itself, while startling, is also curiously muted, over in a flash and without the blood and chaos that frequently accompanies such occurences in both other films and real life. Moviegoers more accustomed to the constant sound and fury of contemporary thrillers will likely find Le Samourai's approach to the genre peculiar if not downright dull. But for me, it worked in much the same way that the canyons of silence functioned in 2001: A Space Odyssey (no. 96 on the Zombie's 101 Favorite Screenplays list). By withholding aural stimulation from us, Melville draws us further into his film's penetrating images, making us work with the director as we rise to meet his film rather than having it come at us from the screen. It should also be said that the film, while not a cut-a-minute blur of action, is never slow-moving; Jef's dilemma compels the viewer relentlessly forward, and the whole affair wraps up in a just-about-perfect 105 minutes.

Melville's actors are fully in the groove of their director's approach, their performances matching the visuals' tone of cool surface detachment and deep inner turmoil. Francois Perier is suitably oily as the police superindentant on Jef's trail (he has one surpremely sleazy scene where he attempts to blackmail Jane into betraying her lover), and the pixie-haired Rosier is sexy and dangerous in the way that only Frenchwomen with secrets can be. Jacques Leroy also has a few strong moments as the double-crossing gunman who figures in the film's most explosive episodes of violence (in one startling moment, his hand, holding a loaded automatic, crashes unexpectedly through a window). But naturally, if Delon doesn't work, the movie doesn't either, and the actor's work here compliments the director's style like a hand in a gray linen glove. For the bulk of the film, Delon pares his movements down to the bare essentials, his face betrays not even a flicker of emotion, and his eyes are as cold and lifeless as the frequently gray sky that glowers over his head. But as with the silences that accompany his bloody progress through Paris, Delon's becalmed sense of menace draws us into the character's predicament as we scrutinize the blank, handsome planes of his face for some semblance of humanity. It's therefore surprising and unexpectedly affecting when we find just that, as when Jef tries key after key in his latest pilfered automobile and his face grows subtly but noticeably desperate as his escape is delayed by precious and ever-increasing seconds. It's a tough balance between a seemingly blank performance that actually conceals untold depths and a portrayal that's just lifeless, and Delon gives us a zombified dealer of death whose robotic facade hides his bone-deep solitude (it's no surprise that Delon played one of literature's great nowhere-man manques, Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, in Purple Noon around the same time).

Really, the whole film exudes this sense of buried secrets, pains left umplumbed, passionate emotions forever unexpressed. From Camus and Sartre to The Professional's Leon (a more sentimental heir to Jef Costello's hitman tradition), no one does existential angst quite like the French, and Le Samourai is arguably the cinematic apotheosis of Gallic gloom and darkness. This is not a depressing film, but it's a dour and impenetrable one in many ways, and contemporary audiences who expect a little touch of the human even in their stone-cold killers (witness Jules and Vincent's extended dialogues about food in Pulp Fiction) may be put off by the utter implacability of Delon's gun for hire. But the film's unrelenting aura of impending dread and the subtle sadness of Delon's azure eyes will leave the viewer forever searching for clues to Jef's inner pain, the past anguish and present persecutions that have driven a young man of potential to dedicate his life to ending life. French gunslinging bad-asses are never just bad-asses, and Melville is not unaware of the romanticism inherent in Jef's solitary, brooding existence. It's the same thing that compels young girls to fantasize about the bloodsucking Byronic swain of the Twilight books: great physical beauty + deep reserves of inner torment + a touch of potentially lethal danger = almost overpowering allure. And of course, like many of the great existentialist narratives of the 20th century, Le Samourai culminates in a final deadly act that, once we realize its true nature, reveals itself as that most romantic of gestures...an act of self-sacrifice.

Le Samourai is a film that has perhaps meant more to other filmmakers than to general audiences. Its influence can be seen in the work of directors from Tarantino to Walter Hill, not to mention Hong Kong action impresario John Woo, who has called Melville's thriller a nearly perfect movie and who named the existential hitman in his 1989 masterpiece The Killer Jeff in the film's honor. But really, for all its impact on the action-thriller genre, Le Samourai is a singular viewing experience. I will be keeping an eye on the calendars of the repertory houses here in town, because I intend to see this film on a big screen as soon as I can. Melville's film tells a story that has been told a hundred times, and will likely be told a hundred times more. But no one's ever told it with this kind of style...and as the French themselves might say, vive la difference.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #85

HAPPY GILMORE (1996)

The Writers

Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler

Why It's Here

I have to be perfectly honest with all of you. I was dreading having to write this one. Most of the films on my list, even if they are not pictures with sterling critical reputations and mantelpieces groaning with screenwriting awards, at least have their defenders, people who will trumpet their screenplays as fine examples of the cinematic writing craft, if not out-and-out masterworks. Most of them received reviews which, if not exactly glowing, were nonetheless mostly positive, and they are films that one can espouse an appreciation for among the film world's intelligentsia without having to worry about having your taste or basic understanding of the medium brought into question. None of these claims can be made about Happy Gilmore, a rowdy golf-links comedy that was a moderate commercial success upon its initial release, but was basically dismissed by the majority of critics as an agreeably mindless diversion at best, a rock-stupid nail in the comedy coffin at worst. The film has an average score of 31 on Metacritic.com (indicating "Generally negative reviews"), and Adam Sandler, who stars in the title role and co-wrote the film's screenplay with his longtime Saturday Night Live collaborator Tim Herlihy, was a Golden Raspberry nominee for Worst Actor for his performance here. In short, this may be the first time that Happy Gilmore has found its way onto anyone's list of the best anything. Ernest Lehman, who was the most recent screenwriter honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars, gave us the screenplays for such classics as North By Northwest, Sweet Smell of Success, and West Side Story. His work does not make an appearance on my list of my 101 Favorite Screenplays. Adam Sandler's does. And that sound you just heard was the door slamming on my reputation as a film reviewer.

But honesty is indeed the best policy, and within the realm of the slapdash, star-driven "moron comedy" that made such a huge resurgence in the late '90s, there was almost no film that made me laugh harder and more often than Happy Gilmore. Sandler and Herlihy harnessed the unique nature of Sandler's dominant comic persona, a bizarre blend of milquetoasty loser, overgrown man-child, and aggressive borderline-psychopath, and paired it with the dignified serenity of the centuries-old game of golf. The result features as many laugh-out-loud moments as any film released in what was, admittedly, not a dynamite period for American film comedy. But the film is not just a disjointed collection of stand-alone jokes, as Happy's climb from the dregs of amateur hockey obscurity to the heights of professional golf fame is surprisingly compelling. We find ourselves genuinely rooting for Happy as he claws his way to the top and faces off against his nemesis in "the big match" to settle the entire story once and for all. Granted, if you didn't already know the outcome of the big match before you even started reading this review, you've apparently never seen a movie about sports. But as with all sports films, the journey is the destination, and Happy's is more entertaining and engaging than most.

The film begins with Happy failing yet again in his latest tryouts for his local amateur hockey squad. He's got a fierce slapshot and "a lot of intensity"…so much intensity, in fact, that he's the only player in the history of hockey to ever take off his skate and try to stab another player with it. He's not nearly as skilled as skating on those skates, though, and after yet another rejection, he arrives home to find that his kindergarten-teacher girlfriend is leaving him to his futile dreams and grubby apartment. Even his impromptu apartment-intercom serenade of Exile's "Till the Night Closes In" (complete with him lovingly licking the intercom speaker) doesn't win her back. The cherry on top of his turd sundae of a life plops down when he finds out that his beloved grandmother (Frances Bay), who raised him after his father was killed by a fast-flying puck, is about to lose the house he grew up in for failure to pay back taxes. The movers clearing out his grandma's old junk come across a set of golf clubs, and Happy, after being challenged to a long-ball contest by the moving men, finds out much to his surprise that his massive hockey shot translates well to the little white ball. He uses his newfound skills to hustle a few suckers at a local driving range, but hockey is still where his heart is…until Chubs Peterson (Carl Weathers), the pro at Happy's local golf club, convinces him that with a little skill, he could make the shot at the big time that Chubs never got. Not because he's black, of course, but because of the alligator that bit off his right hand, forcing him to wear a not-at-all-convincing wooden substitute. Realizing big-money golf tournament purses are his one ticket to get his grandma's house back, Happy joins the pro tour, but he's got a lot of obstacles to overcome. There's his general lack of understanding of the game of golf, from his complete inability to putt to his boorish behavior at the normally staid country clubs that host the tournaments. There's his volcanic spurts of rage, which result in him punching bystanders, screaming torrents of obscenities when putts fail to drop ("Suck my white ass, ball!"), and getting into a fistfight with game show host Bob Barker during a pro-am tournament (Barker, by the way, hands Happy's ass to him). And there's Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), the arrogant top pro on the tour, who has never won the Tour Championship, and who is not about to let his biggest chance be taken from him by some "freak sideshow clown". "You better watch out," he warns Happy, "'Cause I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast." Happy's giggly reply: "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?"

And so it goes. In case you hadn't already gathered from the very mention of Adam Sandler in this review, a good deal of the humor in Happy Gilmore is juvenile, pointlessly surreal, or flat-out disgusting. Happy's caddy is a homeless man named Otto (Allen Covert), who is prone to cleaning his nasty underwear in the course's ball-washing machine. When Chubs exhorts Happy to find his "happy place" to calm his rage on a golf course, Happy imagines a bucolic Eden with bottomless pitchers of beer, his grandma rolling in dough…and a midget dressed in a cowboy costume riding a tricycle. A montage of Happy's past odd jobs, shot in the style of home movies, includes Happy using everything from a gas-station hose to a construction traffic cone as a substitute phallus to wave around and jab in co-workers' ears. In other words, Noel Coward this ain't. Indeed, Happy Gilmore is arguably the most uneven screenplay on this entire list. For every joke that hits home, there is one that falls flat, and the duds are momentous ones. If nothing else, the film taught me that Lee Trevino is as ham-fisted a comedian as he is magical with the clubs. The nadir of the film's comedy comes from Donald (SCTV alumnus Joe Flaherty), an obnoxious, needy fan hired by Shooter to heckle Happy and throw off his game, finally resorting to hitting him with his old VW bug to try to get him out of the tour championship. Though the notion of a golfer getting run over mid-tournament (and still finishing!) is an amusing one, Donald doesn't have one funny line, and the amount of screen time he takes up and the importance he is given to the plot puts a major lag in the film's second act.

But the jokes that do hit are so effective and land frequently enough that Happy Gilmore emerges as arguably the finest comedy to come out of Sandler's SNL-era cast. Some of the funnier moments are admittedly barnside-broad, as when Happy gets into a rollicking brawl with the one-eyed alligator that stole Chubs' hand years ago. But there are also a few moments that are funny in a much subtler way, as in the scene where the director of the pro golf tour (played by the film's director, Dennis Dugan) speaks with his publicity director, Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen), about Happy's latest on-course outburst. This entire scene is underscored with the network-TV playback of Happy's tirade on a nearby television, a torrent of bleeped-out profanities that runs about a minute and a half and is capped off with Happy's bellowed "piece of monkey BEEEEEEP!" Even Happy's perhaps-inevitable-in -retrospect courting of Virginia, the first person on the tour who really believes he can make it as a golfer, is played for some good laughs. His ever-so-charming opening line? "My girlfriend's dead, you know. She fell off a cliff and was killed on impact." Later, when Happy and Virginia go ice skating together, he challenges her to nail a slapshot from center ice, and if she loses, she has to give him a kiss. It's a sweet setup…until she nails the shot dead in center net, causing Happy to exclaim, with his customary eloquence, "Holy shit!"

One of the nicest things about Herlihy and Sandler's screenplay is that it does not insist upon making Happy Gilmore the only funny character or the only element of his universe played for laughs. I cannot stand it when a comedy takes place in a recognizably real universe…except for one character who is on comedy overload, carrying the film's entire comic burden on his back and forcing the rest of his cast members to just stand around looking embarrassed while he heaves fistfuls of shtick at the audience (I wasn't a huge fan of most of Jim Carrey's early comedies for exactly this reason). Perhaps owing to Sandler's somewhat more laconic comedy style, Happy Gilmore constructs an entire comic world around Happy, with each character bringing their own personae and styles of humor to the equation. There's everything from Otto's grungy slob comedy to the mellow self-improvement sendup of Kevin Nealon as an admiring golfer who gives Happy on-course advice ("Doing the bull dance. Feeling the flow. Working it. Working it.") to the downright disturbing interludes with Happy's grandmother, who is forced into a nursing home after losing her house and who finds herself at the mercy of a sadistic orderly (a pre-megastardom Ben Stiller) who forces his elderly charges to knit black-market quilts and throws anyone who complains out onto the grounds for landscaping duty. Rather than clatter against each other and create an unwieldy comedy crazy quilt, these characters weave nicely together to create consistent humor with different pitches and modes. Herlihy and Sandler seem to understand that if you only have one way to laugh at a movie, sooner or later that kind of laugh will dry up on you, and you'll be left with nothing. They wisely don't let that happen, and it's something of a house style that has carried forward into other films they've written and produced together, all of which have an ample supply of comic characters and situations to carry the humor forward.

In one of Herlihy and Sandler's boldest strokes, they give some of the film's biggest laughs to their antagonist. The weak link of many mainstream comedies is that they do not offer a strong enough force for the hero to come into conflict against. The villains in these films are usually bland and forgettable, exceptionally generic in their evil designs against the hero, and incapable of generating a number of laughs sufficient to justify the screen time the films waste on their duplicitous machinations. That is not the case with Shooter McGavin, who is possibly the funniest character in the entire film. All of the arrogance and sense of entitlement of the modern pro athlete rolled into one smug, brilliantined package, Shooter treats everyone who comes into his orbit with the same subtle contempt. Upon first meeting Virginia, he demeaningly asks her to get him a Pepsi, then adds, with a little head cock that's apparently meant to be seductive, "Diet." He bores his fellow pro golfers with an overchewed array of cocky hand gestures and stale, repeated jokes (we twice hear him blasting a fellow golfer for spending "more time in the sand than David Hasselhoff"), and he seems to regard his soon-to-be coronation as the Tour Championship as both his birthright and a foregone conclusion. So when Happy comes along with his populist appeal and his radically long drives, Shooter sees a threat that he is helpless to defeat, and he pours hilarious invective upon both Happy ("Yeah, how'd he finish? Dead last? Yeah, he had a good day, though, thanks.") and his fans ("Damn you people! Go back to your shanties!"). In his funniest moment, he complains to the tour director about the fans Happy has brought to the golf course, particularly "two fat biker people" he saw having sex in the woods off the seventeenth hole. "How am I supposed to chip with that going on?" Shooter splutters. A lot of credit must go to Christoper McDonald, who presents a nonpareil display of put-upon bluster as Shooter, but it's Herlihy and Sandler's raw materials that allowed him to knock this character out of the park.

Of course, as with all well-told stories, it is not just the external antagonist that Happy must defeat to achieve his goals. Happy's biggest problem is not Shooter and his arrogant attempts at sabotage, but his own instances of self-sabotage, the way he lets his sometimes psychotic emotional outbursts jeopardize his career and potential happiness. We can see from just our brief glimpses of Happy on the ice at the film's outset that his furious temper has contributed to the scuttling of his hockey career, and early on, it looks like the same might happen to his burgeoning identity as a professional golfer. Golf is a world that (the antics of John Daly notwithstanding) generally prides itself on decorum, class and centuries of time-honored tradition, and from the jump, Happy does everything he can to puncture that with his explosions of aggression and violence on and off the course. He does everything from breaking sand trap rakes and throwing them into the woods (he tells Virginia he didn't break it; he was "just testing its durability") to threatening Shooter McGavin with a broken beer bottle. All of this behavior makes him a singular and popular figure within the golfing world of the film, but it also threatens to shoot down his career when he is unable to get enough control of his anger to put together a decent short game and hit a respectable putt. The breaking point comes after Happy's fight with Bob Barker gets him suspended from the pro tour. He manages to support himself off the course by signing a lucrative endorsement contract with Subway (a clever usage of the ubiquitous product placement rife in contemporary sports), but at this point, at last, money is not enough to satisfy Happy. From the start, he's been saying that he is only playing golf to make money; when he wins his first tournament, he even makes plans to remove the golfer from the top of his trophy and replace him with "a little hockey guy". But after the Barker suspension, he realizes that it's his pride on the line…his pride in his golf game. So he goes to Chubs, throws himself at the old golfer's mercy ("I was wrong, you were right. You're smart, I'm stupid. You're very good looking. I'm not attractive."), and gets to work on finding his "happy place", learning to putt, and building his game into a force to be reckoned with just in time for his Tour Championship showdown with the odious Shooter. Granted, none of this is virgin territory for sports pictures. The great raw talent who needs only technique to be "the best", the disgraced former champion pulled out of mothballs to shape his protégé, even the death of the trainer before the big match, giving the young tyro an added incentive for winning the big one…it's all been done before, and perhaps better than it's done here. But just because it's a cliché doesn't mean it can't be deployed effectively, and by playing to the strengths of the underdog sports genre, Herlihy and Sandler undergird their laughs with a solid narrative bedrock.

Many students of comedy have unfavorably compared Happy Gilmore to another links-based comedy starring former Saturday Night Live cast members, namely 1980's Caddyshack, written by Brian Doyle-Murray, Douglas Kenney, and Harold Ramis. Indeed, it would be naïve to assume that Happy Gilmore, with its raucous on-course antics and snobs-versus-slobs underdog-triumph narrative, was not influenced by the earlier film. For me, Happy is the superior picture, but this is admittedly for intensely personal reasons. You will not see many comedies from the late '70s and early '80s making their way onto my list, mainly because most of these films, which earned R ratings for their sexual content and nudity, wrap their humor in a smug, self-congratulatory smuttiness that I find intensely off-putting. For every gag in Caddyshack that hits home squarely, as with much of the Rodney Dangerfield / Ted Knight material, there's a moment where the film seems to be high-fiving the characters just because they got to see some tits. It puts us in the position of rooting for the characters to catch a glimpse of female flesh; it's dehumanizing to the female characters and, I think, a bit creepy. Granted, Caddyshack is not the worst culprit of this style of comedy (that "prize" goes easily to 1982's Porky's, arguably the worst comedy I have ever seen), but for me, it just keeps me from enjoying the material as much as I'd like to. The PG-13-rated Happy Gilmore has a few marginally smutty moments, but Herlihy and Sandler almost always undercut the crassness with something just plain silly, as when Happy autographs the breasts of a hot young blonde…then is immediately confronted by a blue-haired grandma who opens her housedress and asks him to sign her low-hanging goodies (much to the film's credit, Happy doesn't get grossed out by this, but cheerfully obliges, cementing Happy as a true golfing man of the people). It's the difference between being emotionally invested in a character and simply observing their behavior. Seriously, does anyone really give a damn about Michael O'Keefe's horndog caddy character in Caddyshack? And for anyone who wishes to make some claim that Happy Gilmore is just bargain-basement crudity and Caddyshack represents a more elevated form of comedy, I have one word for you: zootie.

It seems to me that Happy Gilmore has proven to be an unusually enduring film for its genre. The multiplexes of today are chock-full of here-today, gone-tomorrow bonehead comedies, but this is one that folks still seem to watch regularly and recall with fondness. The film is thirteen years old now, and yet you can still easily find it in the comedy section of your local video store. Can you say the same about 2006's Let's Go To Prison? Or about College, which came out around this time last year? Happy Gilmore has hung in there as a favorite that viewers still return to and laugh, and I think a tip of the Callaway cap goes to Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler for giving their throwaway comedy surprising staying power. I don't know if people will still be watching it a hundred years from now, but whenever I am watching it, trust me, I'm laughing a lot.

THE BARD OF SHERMER, ILLINOIS: AN APPRECIATION OF JOHN HUGHES

Though tragic, it is also strangely fitting that John Hughes died young, at the age of 59, this past Thursday in New York City. After all, one of Hughes' principal themes as a filmmaker was the perils and pressures of youth. More than any filmmaker before or since, Hughes has been credited with giving a sharp, witty voice to the average American teenager. So often depicted prior to his ascendancy as either impossibly Beaver Cleaverized goody-goodies or sex-crazed delinquents (or, in the slasher-movie boom that preceeded his career, as fodder for a madman's machete), teenagers were instead portrayed by Hughes as smart, articulate, and fully feeling, if not quite comprehending, the full weight of the massive changes they were experiencing as they lived, loved and struggled their way toward adulthood. The result was a collection of motion pictures that became signal texts for an entire generation.

Born in Lansing, Michigan in 1950, Hughes was forged as a writer in the fire of the National Lampoon. His first produced writing credit was five episodes of the TV series Delta House, an ill-starred spinoff of the smash hit film Animal House, followed by the Lampoon feature film Class Reunion. Several big hits followed, including Mr. Mom (1983) and another picture written for the Lampoon, Vacation (also 1983), directed by the great Harold Ramis. Already, Hughes's signature themes as a writer were beginning to emerge: the complicated dance of family relations, the horrors and pleasures of American middle-class life, and a marriage of hard-nosed interpersonal reality with a high-concept commercial sensibility perhaps unavoidable in a member of the first true TV generation.

The following year saw the release of Sixteen Candles, Hughes's first effort as a director and the film that began America's love affair with Molly Ringwald, whose enshrinement as America's Sweetheart even saw her face on the cover of both Time and Life. What's remarkable about Hughes's film is that, even though it is populated with characters who are, to put it charitably, broad comic types (such as the horny foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong, memorably played by Gedde Watanabe), it is not afraid to puncture the hard carapace of comedy to reveal the confused, frustrated person struggling to be heard underneath. Anthony Michael Hall's "Geek", scheming throughout the film to acquire a pair of Ringwald's panties as evidence of his (unachieved) sexual conquest of her, may be sleazy and annoying, but he's also deep down, just a kid trying to figure out his place in the world as much as Ringwald's Samantha is. What's more, he's fully aware of his geek status, his identity as "king of the dipshits", and of his own near-helplessness to transcend a role that he himself has so thoroughly cultivated. It is also noteworthy that Samantha herself does not really fall into any of the usual "types" associated with teen flicks prior to Sixteen Candles's release. She is not a sporty girl, a preppy girl, a punky girl, or a prom queen. She's just a girl with an embarassing family and a mad, helpless crush on the most popular guy in school...a girl just like many who were in the audience and who helped to make Sixteen Candles a zeitgeist-capturing hit.

Hughes' subsequent teen films continued his trend of exploding stereotypes with uncommon eloquence and sympathy. Weird Science (1985), his first foray into unabashedly fantastical territory, concerned two science nerds who use their home computer, augmented with a little boost from NASA, to bring a Barbie doll to life and, hopefully, to usher them into full sexual maturity. But Lisa (played, in a deft comic performance, by model Kelly LeBrock) has other things in mind. Her mission, as she sees it, is to transform Gary (Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) from stunted, immature dorks into the strong, capable men she knows they can become...indeed, the men that most high-school nerds can blossom into if they'll only emerge from the basement and taste a little life once in a while. Granted, most teens' coming of age doesn't involve a nuclear bomb in their parents' kitchen, a hilarous outing to a black nightclub ("EVERY damn NIGHT?"), or their bullying older brother Chet (a gut-busting Bill Paxton) transformed into a slime-spewing toad creature. But none of this sci-fi material would play if Hughes didn't root it in Gary and Wyatt's very real desire for acceptance and understanding of their unique gifts. Lisa may not pop these boys' cherries (how could she, when they insist on showering with her in their jeans?), but she pops the cork on the champagne bottle of their lives, and teaches them to at last drink deeply.

1986's Pretty in Pink, written and produced by Hughes (Howard Deutch directs, as he would for the following year's Some Kind of Wonderful), brings class into the mix of strains threatening the psychic health of the teenager. Andie (Ringwald) is a sweet, sincere girl from the wrong side of the tracks, saddled with an unemployed father (the great Harry Dean Stanton) and a wardrobe of slapped-together oddments she makes herself. Though she has an undyingly devoted acolyte in the self-consciously hip Duckie (Jon Cryer), she pines for Blane (Andrew McCarthy), a slick rich kid who faces a dilemma: hang onto his flawless image of preppy cool, or explore his real feelings for Andie and risk the ostracism of his peers? It's a very real problem that many kids have faced; high shcool is, after all, a time in life when image matters above perhaps all else, and it often seems a fate worse than death to be caught dating the "wrong" person. I myself never struggled with this problem in high school. I was, you see, the guy who never got the girl, so when I watch the film, I don't identify with either Andie or Blane, but with Duckie, who (despite the subtly homosexual coding of his mannerisms and wardrobe) is obviously in love with Andie and who finds himself in the agonizing position of having to help her win another guy. Granted, I never had to help my best girl friend get with somebody else, but I watched plenty of girls I had crushes on going out with "lesser" dudes, and so a small part of me still hasn't forgiven Hughes for the kiss that ends the film, my pick for the most frustrating and unsatisfying movie conclusion of the '80s. I mean, I know it's what Andie wanted, but still...

The same year's Ferris Bueller's Day Off, directed as well as written and produced by Hughes, is fantasy material of another sort. Ferris (Matthew Broderick) is a feckless wunderkind armed with an arsenal of clever lies (abetted by a sophisticated home computer setup) enabling him to dupe his family and the entire city of Chicago into believing he is home sick with a near-fatal disease. In reality, he has decided to give himself, his girlfriend Sloan (Mia Sara) and his sad-sack buddy Cameron (Alan Ruck) the hooky-playing adventure of a lifetime, complete with lunch at the Gold Coast, a ballgame at Wrigley, and an impromptu parade performance of "Twist and Shout." This is Hughes's broadest teen comedy of the period, with the slapstick comeuppance of Principal Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) presaging the brutal physical humiliations of Hughes's 1990s output. Ferris himself is perhaps Hughes's least realistic film hero, a Teflon sharpie with a penchant for speaking to the camera and a throwaway manner of relating to the world that scarcely reflects the down-to-the-bone realism of Hughes's previous onscreen teens. That realism is still there, though, in Ruck's Cameron, a hypochondriacal neurotic ground down by his parents' perfectionism, and in Jennifer Grey's Jeanie, Ferris's older sister, whose hostility to her brother is most likely just the blowback of her own unrequited love for her Ferris-worshipping folks. Even in a world with a watertower emblazoned with "Save Ferris", Hughes can't help but get a little truth into the mix.

Truth is the entire recipe in The Breakfast Club, a film that, to me, defines its era as succinctly as Saturday Night Fever does for the previous decade...which is odd when you consider that, at its base, The Breakfast Club is a film that could take place any place at any time. Five kids from various social strata come to Shermer High School in suburban Illinois for a Saturday-afternoon all-day detention, during which they are each charged with writing an essay answering a simple question: "Who do you think you are?" These kids would at first appear to have nothing in common, but as they spend the afternoon arguing, goofing off and finally opening up, they realize that they were all brought to this juncture by very similar pressures and tensions placed upon them by the images they have chosen to cultivate. Andrew (Emilio Estevez), a star of the wrestling team, is in detention for taping a nerdy kid's buttocks together, playing out the alpha-male jock fantasies of his domineering father...a dad who, in the effect he has on his son, doesn't sound all that dissimilar from that of John Bender (Judd Nelson), a pot-smoking, switchblade-wielding petty hood with unexpected sensitivities beneath his gruff, teacher-baiting facade. Claire (Ringwald), the prom-queen princess who got busted ditching class to go shopping, tearfully admits that she hates much of what peer pressure has made her become...even though she also admits, reluctantly, that she would blow off the geeky Brian (Hall) if he said hello to her in the hall the following week. Brian himself (a friend of the nerd that Andrew tormented with tape) brought a flare gun to school, a desperate plan to rescue himself from a scholarship-jeopardizing failing grade in a shop class he was forced to take. And Allison (Ally Sheedy), the self-conscious weirdo of this group? Well, she may like to put Pixie Stix and potato chips on her sandwich, but there's apparently nothing wrong with her that a makeover couldn't fix (incidentally, she's the only one of this group who seems to be there by choice; on a Saturday morning, she just has nowhere else to go). Hughes' brilliance here is in revealing that these kids are not inflexible, hemmed-in collections of traits and social signifiers, but that they are all, at the core, the same: confused, frustrated, witty, bright and fighting against all odds to make themselves heard. As Brian sums up in the essay he composes on their behalf: "Each of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal." And the same applies for all of us out there, in some way, which is why The Breakfast Club cuts so close and has left such a deep impression on many of us. The richness of the roles, the sharp perception of the writing and the film's one-set aesthetic (except for a few brief forays into the school hall and the principal's office, the entire film takes place in the library) has made me surprised that no one has ever attempted to adapt The Breakfast Club for the stage. I think these would be wonderful roles for young actors to cut their teeth on...provided they could work the miracles that Hughes's young cast does here. And of course, the film's main title song, Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me", has become, for me, the one song that I think of when I hear the words "the Eighties".

In the late 1980s, Hughes's films began to address more adult concerns. 1987's Planes, Trains and Automobiles chronicles the misadventures of a mismatched duo as they attempt to get home for Thanksgiving, and in its own broad sitcom way, it's as profound an examination of modern loneliness and alienation as Waiting for Godot. Steve Martin's Neal Page, an uptight, anal-retentive businessman, has so stuffed himself into his social role as husband and breadwinner that he is no longer able to get his nose into the real dirty business of living. He meets his match in John Candy's Del Griffith, a jovial lug whose status as "everybody's friend" masks the fact that he has no real friends, and indeed no home; he has been aimlessly drifting from city to city selling his shower curtain rings ever since his wife died. Amidst all the film's blustering slapstick and casually surreal gags (such as a lighting-quick flash of Neal and Del as goggle-eyed skeletons as their rented car crashes) is a very touching parable about two guys locked in various modes of self-imposed isolation who learn, just a little bit, to really open themselves up to the world, and to each other. The following year's She's Having a Baby, my pick for Hughes's most underrated film, presents the Hughes teenager growing up and tentatively facing adult responsibilities for the first time (Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern are an effective pair as the young couple struggling to hold on to their adolescent dreams in the face of impending parenthood), while a similar issue faces the titular character of 1989's Uncle Buck, in which John Candy's shambling ne'er-do-well (John Bender in early middle age, perhaps?) is forced to grow up fast when a family tragedy puts him in charge of his sister's kids for the week.

And then came 1990's Home Alone (Hughes wrote and produced, Chris Columbus directed), one of the most financially successful comedies of all time and the film that was to essentially define the rest of Hughes's filmmaking career. The film starts out as a whimsical fable about precocious eight-year-old Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin, who basically ruled the world for a short period after this film's release) who, through a series of mixups, is left home alone when his well-off family jets off to Paris for the Christmas holidays. Kevin engages in some typical kids-off-the-leash craziness, scarfing junk food and running around the house screaming, not to mention befriending the lonely old man (Roberts Blossom) who the other neighborhood kids have branded a Boo Radley-type boogeyman. But then Kevin comes into conflict with the two bumbling crooks (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) casing the neighborhood for a little holiday heisting, and he lays comic waste to them with a series of elaborate booby traps that leave them burned, bruised, and covered with glue and feathers. This bruising slapstick set piece, which takes up a good chunk of the film's final third, had me roaring when I was twelve, but when I watched the film recently, I was surprised how those sequences kind of left me cold while the more sentimental material, such as Kevin's low-key conversation with the old man in a darkened church (a choral version of my father's favorite Christmas carol, "O Holy Night", provides the backdrop to this scene), reached out and embraced me from the screen. Even amidst pummeling sight gags and insult humor, Hughes's best moments always came when he allowed his characters to simply relate to one another, and Home Alone provides perhaps the most polarizing example of that truth.

Home Alone's success resulted in an increasingly tiresome string of films (most directed by surrogates; Hughes's last directing credit was 1991's Curly Sue) in which stickily sentimental plots were wedded, ever more awkwardly, to brutally cartoonish slapstick finales. A slobbery St. Bernard was the purveyor of the punishment in 1992's Beethoven (written by Hughes under his Dumasesque pseudonym of "Edmond Dantes"), while a whole herd of dogs provided the robber-ravaging services in 1996's 101 Dalmatians. Another beloved kids' classic was given the Hughes sentiment-followed-by-brutality treatment in 1993's Dennis the Menace, which nevertheless benefits from some real chemistry between Mason Gamble's Dennis and Walter Matthau's terrific Mr. Wilson. The kids just kept getting younger and younger, until it was a baby in 1994's Baby's Day Out (picture a live-action Road Runner cartoon with an oblivious infant as the Road Runner and three, you guessed it, stupid crooks as Wile E. Coyote) and then just some primordial ooze brutalizing bad guys in 1997's Flubber. It's hard to say if the success of Home Alone poisoned the creative well or if Hughes simply stopped caring, but by the time Flubber splattered off the assembly line, the words "Written by John Hughes" in the credits of a film were no longer such a harbinger of a good time at the movies. Following 1998's Reach the Rock, a barely-released melodrama he wrote and produced, Hughes largely went into reclusion, with "Edmond Dantes" receiving an occasional writing credit (his final credit was as co-scenarist on last year's Owen Wilson farce Drillbit Taylor).

Nevertheless, at his best, Hughes tapped into the heart of the mainstream audience as few American filmmakers have since. Very few contemporary screenwriters can rival Hughes for the sheer volume of quotable dialogue in his films. Lines like "Demented and sad, but social" (The Breakfast Club) and "Fred, she's gotten her boobies" (Sixteen Candles) have passed into the vernacular of my generation. Just two days before Hughes' death, at my day job, I addressed a long cash-register line thusly: "I can help someone right here? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?" And I don't think I had to explain to anyone in the place where that was coming from. When thinking about Hughes yesterday, I remembered that I had even gotten to briefly play one of his characters, as I portrayed none other than Ferris Bueller for a friend's Directing for Film class project. It was a great treat getting to deliver Hughes' dialogue and talking directly to the camera (I had particular fun with some hand gestures during Ferris's immortal "lump of coal" dialogue about Cameron). And it was Ferris that provided a line that showed up on the Facebook status quotes of many of my friends, including myself, yesterday, as a tribute to Mr. Hughes: "Life moves by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it."

Sound advice, sir. And don't worry. We won't forget about you.