Explorers (1985) & Innerspace (1987)

Some lingering business after the Joe Dante festival at the New Beverly here in Los Angeles, I rewatched a couple more of his movies for the first time in a long time.

Explorers was Dante's follow-up to the wildly successful Gremlins, a story about three boys (including a young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix) who build their own spaceship out of plans transmitted to them in their dreams and travel to an outer-space alien encounter. The pitch had to have been simple, a scaled-down kids' version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even though it looks like the perfect mid-'80s Amblin production, it surprisingly didn't involve Steven Spielberg at all, which makes me wonder if he passed on it after reading the screenplay and getting to the third-act twist where (SPOILERS!) the boys discover that the aliens aren't the same kind of Spielbergian transcendental figures of awe but merely a couple of teenagers themselves who've stolen the family spaceship for some joyriding around our planet, and who speak mainly in pop culture gibberish they've picked up from TV and radio transmissions.

My fuzzy memories of seeing this when I was 8 are of being totally jazzed at the movie's hour-long setup, hinting at a wondrous close encounter with beings unknown to us, yet possessed of superior technology and apparently mystical abilities, and then being confused and let down when it turns out that not only are the aliens banal, but they're actually kind of annoying. It's a perverse choice for Dante to make, to take some of the hot air out of the transcendental streak of pop sci-fi, and I'm sure it hurt the movie at the box office, just as his snarky sense of humor and unwillingness to give a mass audience quite what it wanted ended up throwing viewers out of Gremlins 2 or Small Soldiers. But the movie still ends on a transcendental, mystical note, meaning that ultimately Dante's experiment was to reframe the genre, to make a film less about escapism (each of the three boys is trying to get away from divorcing parents, poverty, etc.) and more complex. The results are mixed because, sadly, the aliens really are pretty irritating, but the film as a whole stands up regardless, especially thanks to Jerry Goldsmith's score.

Innerspace turned out to be a surprise flop for Dante, which is really a shame because it has just about everything you could want in a 1980s adventure-comedy: an engaging odd-couple pairing with the alcoholic, womanizing test-pilot Dennis Quaid injected into nebbishy Martin Short after a miniaturiation experiment is sabotaged by corporate bad guys; a great supporting cast including Kevin McCarthy and Robert Picardo; fun action scenes; terrific non-digital special effects of Quaid's capsule floating around inside Short's body; and Dante's standard wry sense of humor (my favorite bit: Kenneth Tobey sees Martin Short in a men's room, seemingly talking to noone, and says to him "Play with it buddy, don't talk to it"). The screenplay is a little ungainly, especially in its first half-hour, which I ascribe to a desire to cram the movie as full as possible with extra subplots and bits of business. But any movie that has a bad guy dissolved by the protagonist's stomach acid puts a smile on my face, especially when Dante punctuates this mini-cannibalism with a burp punchline.

Explorers: 7/10
Innerspace: 8/10

The Movie Orgy (1968-ish)

I've been wrapped up in work lately so I didn't have a chance to write about the grand finale of the Joe Dante series at the New Beverly last week, his 1968 4-1/2 hour program The Movie Orgy, which is nothing less than a deep warm bath in cinephilia. Dennis Cozzalio interviewed Dante and got the best description of how The Movie Orgy came to be. He also goes into great detail about the structure and workings of the 'film'. For me, it was nothing less than pure pleasure, enlightened escapism. I don't think there's any realm of moviedom that I have more fondness for than the sci-fi and horror movies of the 1950s and early '60s, the era of atomic mutants and killer robots in cardboard suits, of Ray Harryhausen and Edward D. Wood Jr., and Dante's film was a near-perfect gratification of that part of my mindbrain. The most satisfying aspect of the whole experience is the occasional recurrence of clips from the 1959 film Speed Crazy, in which a James Dean-ish young rebel, who also happens to be something of a psychopath, constantly repeats the phrase "Don't crowd me, man" as his rallying cry against '50s conformity. Spread out over the course of the film with expert timing, Dante turns schlocky screenwriting and acting into comedy perfection.

At the same time, the whole thing isn't just an exercise in nostalgia (or for people like me, fake nostalgia, since I'm a full generation out of touch) because of Dante's satiric, distanced perspective on the more ridiculous aspects of the clips presented. For every warm embrace of a clip from The Lone Ranger or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, there's the bitter mockery of a clip from Andy's Gang, an early kids' show starring the raspy-voiced Andy Devine featuring the Lord's Prayer accompanied by the torturous, hallucinatory appearance of a cat and hamster playing a keyboard and drums; or Nixon's "Checkers" speech, bitter fruit to the 1968 generation indeed. The film gives us the kind of experience that I find really valuable: it celebrates both the best and the worst of the Baby Boomer era, giving us the schlock and the cultural detritus and fully embracing it, not with condesenscion when regarding the more problematic aspects of war, racism, sexism, and stupidity, but merely with a sort of detached amazement - this is who we were, and who we are, when showing something like a clip from Dick Clark's American Bandstand - the initial response is to laugh at these geeky white teens, awkwardly hurling their bodies across the dance floor, but Dante holds long enough for us to really look at these youngsters, today at retirement age, and think about the distance of time. I guess Joe Dante probably wasn't intending for someone to have these thoughts, forty years ago when he started putting his clips together, but I guess he didn't need to - when you've got 4-1/2 hours of footage, it's easy to find elements that speak to you.