Chillin' and Killin'

Once in a while comes a film that crosses the bad-good continuum in reverse, a film so terrible that somehow it becomes good. For many, Starship Troopers comes to mind, but the movie I have in mind had a far lower budget and an exponentially lower profile. To a great many who have seen it, Jack Frost (not the Michael Keaton family film, of course, but the 1996 B-movie that can be found in the horror section of most video stores) serves as the quintessential film in the so-bad-it’s-good genre.

Some of the readership of this blog might recall the first time I saw Jack Frost. Out at Joe’s ancestral manse in what has come to be known as the BP, a group of us rented it over some kind of holiday break with no idea what a surprise we were in for. I mean, this is a movie in which a random serial killer, while being transported to a different prison or something, gets genetically altered in an accident with a truck carrying some kind of scientific waste and becomes a mutant, killer snowman who can melt and re-freeze at will while he lays waste to the townsfolk of a small, snowy mountain hamlet. Of course, we should have known what was coming because, on the rental covers, there used to be a hologram designed so that, depending on how the light hit the cover, you might see the head of a normal snowman or the head of an evil snowman with menacingly green eyes and humungous fangs. To that original group, I think that the aforementioned ludicrous plot and horrendous, low-budget special effects (imagine a white oven mit being used as the killer snowman’s murdering hand) provided the most important comedic element.

But when I watched Jack Frost back at college, my friends there liked it for a different reason: the ridiculous puns. My roommate of three years, a man often referred to simply as “The Sex,” demonstrated a particular fondness for the following pun. When the killer snowman refreezes in the back yard of one of his early victims, the poor guy comes out of his house to smoke a cigarette when he hears a mysterious voice first ask to bum a smoke and then begin to taunt him. The guy runs around with an axe looking for the other person he can hear. How he could have been clueless to the fact the enormous, looming snowman, which must have come from nowhere from his point of view and which must have stood at least six feet tall, was the dangerous taunter is beyond me, but that only adds to the scene’s humor. Suddenly, the snowman takes the axe from the man’s hand and literally shoves it down the man’s throat, handle first so that the clean blade is sticking out of the victim’s mouth. The snowman says, “I only axed you for a smoke.” I can see people cringing now…but it’s so bad it’s good.

And of course, the most famous scene, the scene which inspired me to write this blog when Sean and I saw most of Jack Frost last night, has to be the one in which the snowman rapes Shannon Elizabeth’s character, Jill, in the bathtub. Now, Jack Frost was Shannon Elizabeth’s film debut, and I always have to wonder how she ever got any work afterward, but I digress. At any rate, she takes off her clothes and gets into a mysteriously drawn warm bath. After some gratuitous, mock-sensual shots of her legs, feet, and neck as she bathes, the water becomes mysteriously cold, and the snowman refreezes as Jill screams. It then bangs her against the tile wall, its carrot nose prominently absent. When the rape is over, the snowman utters “Looks like Christmas came a little early this year.” It then puts its literally steaming carrot nose back on. Who couldn’t find the humor in something like that? I tell you, Jack Frost is one for the ages.

"Hard deck my ass...we nailed that son of a bitch!"

If I were to list a few of the films I think to be great, I’m sure that many would shoot me an are-you-out-of-your-mind facial expression. This, of course, since I’m terribly arrogant and always right, means that these people simply don’t understand those particular films’ claims to greatness. Top Gun immediately comes to mind. If a person in his/her mid twenties were to watch Top Gun now, having never seen it before, surely this person would think it a terrible movie. I mean, the whole thing essentially consists of a bunch of ass-slapping, ex-fratboy types flying fighter jets for the Navy, playing beach volleyball, and trying to pick up women. In this case, the greatness seems to come, at least initially, not from Top Gun’s actual merits, but from what some of us have made of it.

As many of you might know, this all began at some point in high school with Joe’s famous impression of the locker room scene in which Tom “Iceman” Kazanski (Val Kilmer) tries to console Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) after Goose’s death. Joe’s impression selects for particularly ridiculous mocking those tense facial expressions that Val Kilmer suffers through as he says, “Mitchell…I’m sorry about Goose…Everybody liked him…I’m sorry.” In the impression, those four short lines might take a full minute to articulate what with all the tongue flicking and lip movements involved in those ellipses and the requisite nose-high-in-the-air nasal deep breath before some of the lines. I suppose that the humor in this comes not only from our not being said ass-slapping, ex-fratboy types, but from those sorts of characters trying to be serious and consoling, a big stretch after all the flipping-the-bird-to-a-mig, beach volleyball, and carnal knowledge bets in bars that come before the locker room consolation scene.

But even beyond “the impression,” some of us have become far too skilled in carrying on conversations which consist primarily of Top Gun lines. JJ and I, for instance, have made extensive use of the “I hate it when she does that” and “That’s the way he flies—ice cold—no mistakes” lines. Both of these come from the bar scene in which Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood (Kelly McGinnis) makes her first appearance. The ability to use these lines in conversation stems from a rather extensive understanding of, or at least familiarity with, their context in the film. For example, if someone is rather arrogant, but still good at something, the “That’s the way he flies” line might be appropriate. And the “I hate it when she does that” line, well, the possibilities are endless.

So I’m wondering…does all of this actually affect my perception of Top Gun’s quality as a film? Is there some inherent aspect that makes it especially useful for the sort of appropriation we’ve done and that therefore increases its quality? Or is all of that a load of crap and our appropriation a highly successful attempt at making something out of a particularly bad movie? There’s a cliché I’ve heard that might apply here, one that goes something like, “It’s so bad it’s good.” Does this apply here? I’m just dying to hear what some of you have to say about this classic movie from the era of our childhood.

The Disappearance of Home

During the middle weeks of August 1997, I lived well. My friends had copious amounts of fun simply by sitting around someone's house and, in the parlance of those times, "enjoying each other's company." This might have involved capture the flag in Carolyn's back yard, listening to Joe narrate the muted Discovery Channel documentary on the wildebeest, or even deciding to go out and get the "weggie patch pizza" at Applebee's. And I had Janelle, that girl I loved madly and could just look at for hours without ever becoming bored. So things were pretty good in those last days of my seventeenth year, but then everything essentially vanished. It's that period of change that I'm interested in right now, that period which takes place many times over the course of an average American's life. Everyone moves, meets different people, loses touch with some, acquires entirely new sensibilities with which to relate to the world, and can never go back on any of these changes. In Anywhere But Here, Natalie Portman does a tremendous job of capturing that period in her role as Ann August. Although many people don't like that film because of the liberties it takes with the adaptation of Mona Simpson's fabulous novel, I think it's a pretty decent movie.

Ann's mother Adele (Susan Sarandon) decides that the two of them need to move to California to escape the "nothing town" of Bay City, Wisconsin. Of course, the irony is that Bay City, in an early flashback where Adele buys the Mercedes to take to California, is portrayed as something of a lush, green dreamland while Adele and Ann drive through dry, uninhabited scrubland in Utah. In Bay City, the original owner walks out of his cozy-looking home and over his soft lawn with a beer in his hand to show the car to Adele and Ann. A sprinkler is audible in the background. One thinks, during that flashback, of the so-called "American Dream," and Natalie Portman does dejection extraordinarily well to convey how upset she is over her mother's constant ramblings about leaving town. In Utah, Ann says to Adele, "This is like being kidnapped; you don't understand that, do you?" She's left her entire life behind in Bay City. She has friends, family, and familiar surroundings there, but is forced to leave.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I wasn't forced to leave Bethel Park or the Pittsburgh area as Ann was forced to leave Bay City, but I chose to go to school nearly 2100 miles from home in part because I wanted to save the image I had of that place and that time. I knew that if I stuck around, others would move away, and everything would change around me and leave me behind. By leaving for Missoula, an entirely new place in which I knew no one, I could maintain that home in my head. That's the quintessential part of the period of change I'm talking about: preservation of the image of home. While that image was inevitably depressing in my new location because of its inaccessibility, I felt as though I'd die without it. Similarly, Ann tries to maintain the image in her head on numerous occasions in Anywhere But Here, and is quite upset at her failure.

In the California diner where Adele fortuitously meets her real estate agent friend, Ann calls her grandmother's house in Bay City, but Adele interrupts her before anyone picks up. Ann leaves the diner for the impersonal, uncaring street outside and can't prevent herself from crying. Later in the film, she makes an illicit phone call to her cousin from a house she visits with her mother as a potential homebuyer. These types of incidents lead to an increasingly successful image of home in Ann's head, though inevitably that fight for preservation is a no-win kind of deal. Those incidents do remind me of the ridiculous phone bills I ran up calling Janelle in her Michigan Tech dorm room and the crazy amount of time I spent emailing everyone else, but like the movie suggests, no one can ever really "go home" after this kind of period of change.

Ann's cousin Benny dies late in the film, so Ann and Adele head back to Bay City for the funeral. In those scenes, the houses in Bay City don't look cozy; they look cramped and dull. The lighting isn't as bright, and it's raining. Ann's extended family is fighting. Nothing is the same. Similarly, when I go back to the South Hills these days, the place just doesn't look like it used to. Now, instead of the sprinklers and the nice-looking lawns, I notice all the Republican campaign signs in the yards, the gratuitous SUVs in every driveway, and the complete lack of sidewalks so that no one can safely walk anywhere. And just like Benny vanishes from Ann's Bay City, if you Google Janelle, you won't find anything, and no one I know has heard from her in years.