Dissolve's Forgotbusters: Movie Hits That Audiences Forgot

The studios promised Stallone untold wealth (and with it, untold sandwiches) if he would give his script over to them as a star vehicle for someone audiences would actually pay money to see, someone like James Caan or Robert Redford, rather than a relative unknown who talked like he had marbles in his mouth and looked like his head was made of rocks covered in skin. This was a great role for a movie star, and everyone but Sylvester Stallone agreed that Sylvester Stallone was no movie star. He seemed like someone with a one-way ticket straight to Palookaville, population: Sylvester Stallone.

Like, I get what he's going for here, but it's just a waste of my time. First of all, the "population" joke never adds anything to a paragraph, it's just redundant, and in this case nonsensical since it starts from the premise that he was just an ordinary schmoe... meaning that we have to assume Palookaville would have a large population, right? It's also just riding on the hope that if you repeat "Sylvester Stallone" a few times, it'll give this recap of his career a joke's rhythm. Maybe he worked backwards from the "population" joke and realized it would be funnier (?) if he'd said "Sylvester Stallone" a few extra times.

The thing is, all he actually needs here, to make his points about Tango and Cash (Russell vs. Stallone, early Stallone vs. late) is "Stallone's career was originally based on his underdog appeal, which bled over from the plot of Rocky to its production. The no-name actor took on the big studios, went the distance, and audiences loved him for it. But by 1989..." Or something. But the 'joke' part plus a couple more additional sentences, not quoted, pad this little bit of groundwork out to 225.

I'm not trying to beat up on Rabin - it's just that this kind of writing is basically everywhere on the internet at this point, especially in pop culture writing, and especially in Onion-land. He's better at it than most - I think we all know how wince-inducing this stuff is in the hands of nerd amateurs scripting themselves for Youtube reviews of N64 games - but I really think it saps good writers of their powers. It renders essays flabby and without structure, just a string of samey paragraphs. It washes out tone, so that you have to read every sentence as if it might be the setup for a weak-tea joke. And it buries content, so that if he did actually have something unique to say about Tango and Cash (or, per the feature's premise, why it connected with audiences), I totally missed it.

Or, I mean, just...

At this point, I started imagining that Ray Tango had Bruce Vilanch lying in the backseat of his car, feeding him wisecracks and punching up his lines on the fly. It’s established that Ray Tango is independently wealthy, thanks to his wise investments, and is involved in law enforcement solely for the action. That’s communicated when Tango’s superior (played by Geoffrey Lewis, one of a handful of great, eccentric character actors in the cast, in addition to Michael J. Pollard, Michael Jeter, Brion James, and Jack Palance) asks Ray—whom he’s apparently known well for years—“I don’t understand you! You make a shit-ton of money. You dress like a banker. What are you doing this for?”

Making perfectly timed jokes that literally add insult to injury (in the sense that he’s insulting people he’s also physically injuring) seems to be as important to Ray as fighting crime. So why not have his own personal gag-man helping him be the sassiest cop he can possibly be? I like to think of Ray asking Vilanch for some good gags for the arrest he’s about to make, and the tiny jokesmith spitballing, “How about, ‘Metal is in this season!’ No, how about, ‘I ain’t Carmen, but these are your Miranda rights!’ No, how about, ‘Do you like jewelry?’”

Bring on the x-acto knives. If you have to go with this whole conceit at all - and I guess it could convey how Stallone's one-liners feel more bloodless or artificial than the ones in every other movie - how about just

At this point, I started imagining that Ray Tango had Bruce Vilanch lying in the backseat of his car, feeding him wisecracks and punching up his lines on the fly. It’s established that Ray Tango is independently wealthy, thanks to his wise investments, and is involved in law enforcement solely for the action. So why not hire his own personal gag-man?

okay okay i'll stop now

Perret makes an extravagant show of bringing two small rats out of an expensive wooden box, calling them mice for some reason, sniffing them inexplicably but deeply, and placing them back into that box, just so he can climactically place them in a maze to symbolize how lost Tango and Cash (the hero cops, not the rat-mice representing them) will be once they’re safely tucked away in prison.

i'm getting an education reading this, having missed out on 'spoofs' for the last 20 years.

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/665-hot-shots-helped-popularize-a-broader-dumber-sort-/

Thanks to the intertwined forces of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer and the Wayans brothers, the standards for parody have fallen so low over the past 15 years that I no longer dare expect to laugh at movies from either camp. After joining forces for the sadly precedent-setting, zeitgeist-capturing abomination that was 2000’s Scary Movie, Friedberg/Seltzer and the Wayans split apart, so as to inflict the maximum amount of harm on our culture. At this point, I’m satisfied if their movies don’t broadcast contempt for their characters, their audience, and humanity as a whole. I no longer expect spoofs to be funny; I just want them to not make the world a coarser, sadder, stupider place.

Scary Movie is great. Leagues better than anything ZAZ mustered after the second Naked Gun movie.

i actually liked zucker's scary movie 3 more than scary movie

I know humor is subjective and all but ... really? Michael Jackson jokes?

ok you can either say "really? michael jackson jokes?" OR "scary movie 1 is better than scary movie 3" you can't do both

like, the idea that 3 is when it starts to wallow in weak culture refs

Simon....Rex

marlon...wayans

(that was an arg for...not against.)

Xpost dammit

For my money they were all equally horrible movies that i loved to watch on basic cable.

yeah i mean i have my preferences based on which had more random bits i recall fondly but jesus if i did have beef with someone liking 4 more than 2 or 1 more than 3 i don't think i'd lead with "but it had a corny pop culutre joke!" or "but it had a wack actor!"

Yea it boils down to "which memetic hodgepodge do you prefer?"

Simon Rex rap battling Fat Joe wins regardless

yeah that scene was great

also totally going to rank sheen and nielsen over the wayans bros when it comes to this kind of movie, c'mon

I just realized that this was an argument I was about to enter and then I re-prioritized.

no no you entered it, now you gonna run away

I just realized that this was an argument I was about to enter and then I re-prioritized.

http://i.imgur.com/vTimL2N.gif

He one of those instigatas

http://www.mouthymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/5EInvGx.gif

most fondly recalled non-zaz zaz movie is loaded weapon 1

though i never saw carl reiner's fatal instinct

F. Murray Abraham in Loaded Weapon showed how easy Hannibal Lecter was to play.

man remember when Samuel L. Jackson played second tier Danny Glover to Emilio Estevez and Nicholas Cage

did jackson get those pre-pulp fiction comedy lead roles off of jungle fever or is there some other breakout moment i'm forgetting?

sea of love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UytZHT1ewnI

i don't know why the opening of this scene kills me but it does

weird now, seeing the picture at the top :/

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/237-with-jack-coppola-gave-robin-williams-his-sentimen/

In this moment, the film shamelessly ejaculates thick streams of undiluted sap in a 25-person gang-bang of grotesque melodrama.

Prepare to get plagiarized, Rabin. Hard and often.

Prepare to get slimed, world.

Indecent Proposal:

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/708-in-1993-indecent-proposal-made-sleazy-sex-look-bor/

In the 1990s, Demi Moore became highest-paid female movie star

http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/1993_Indecent_Proposal/993IPR_Demi_Moore_116.jpg

"me highest paid female movie star"

Crime is a disease, meet the cure

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/749-cobra-gave-the-1980s-the-dirty-harry-knockoff-it-d/

A seemingly ballsy choice, but actually quite OTM. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone mention this film.

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/877-avatars-rapid-rise-sudden-downfall-and-endless-bil/

According to Box Office Mojo, it made more than 2.7 billion dollars in theaters worldwide. Audiences loved it so much, media reports claimed, some viewers became deeply depressed or even suicidal because the film’s fantastical alien world of Pandora wasn’t real.

0_o

There has been so many clickbait articles about how forgotten AVATAR is today, they've collectively defeated their own point.

Boomerang:

Murphy entered the guilt-stricken dad/silly fantasy gimmick/fat-suit portion of his career shortly after Boomerang, but in that one film, he plays a character rarely seen in American films of the time: a black man who’s also a proudly sexual, cultivated professional. Murphy’s Marcus has money and class. He’s assured enough in his place in society that when a snooty high-end clothing store clerk treats him, and friends Gerard (David Alan Grier) and Tyler (Martin Lawrence) with racist condescension, Marcus experiences pity for the racist clerk’s ignorance rather than anger at his bigotry. It’s worth noting that the exchange is also the only scene in the film that suggests the existence of racism. Otherwise, Boomerang occupies a post-Cosby Show realm full of rich, upper-middle-class African-Americans who rarely acknowledge race.

Was inspired enough by this to actually give the film a fresh look tonight, and this is OTM. The film's vision of an affluent, professional world populated entirely by African-Americans, and its remarkably sex-positive attitude both remain striking. I still wish the romance was a little less boring, though.

oh fuck Monster in Law:

Monster-In-Law, 2005’s 23rd highest-grossing film, is a particularly egregious case, because it marks the cinematic return of Jane Fonda, one of the preeminent feminist voices of the past century, following a big-screen absence of 15 years. A fierce force like Fonda starring in a movie with gender politics this regressive, particularly after such a long absence, is like Gloria Steinem starting her own Lingerie Football League, in collaboration with Hooters.

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/544-the-agonizing-dullness-of-alan-aldas-the-four-seas/

The still at the top could not shout 1981 any louder.

btw that review a classic example of the criticism Rabin deserves. An editor could've mad tightened those two opening grafs.

lol @ at this comment:

There's this peculiar aesthetic blandness to much of the studio filmmaking from the very late 70s and the very early 80s, which in itself is also a difficult period to delineate culturally with any distinction. For the life of me I've never been able to get any real insight into what sort of sensibility would flock to the theater to sit through Oh God!, with George Burns AND John Denver for Christ's sake, or glue themselves to the television set for another installment of Mama's Family. I mean when was that thing ever not a rerun on TBS, where much of the mass cultural detritus from 1981 ended up in the 1990s. Who were these people? What had the 60s taught them, or perhaps what were they reeling from in their insipid pop cultural decisions?

Add Same Time Next Year, Making Love, All Night Long, heaps of other Neil Simon plays, Ambrosia on the radio, and you've got the hangover before the eighties begin in 1983.

Holy shit, Nathan Rabin got axed!! Somebody hire this man immediately!!!

haven't seen Oh God! in 25+ years, but it WAS written by Larry Gelbart and directed by Carl Reiner.

tho likely not their finest hours

I have childhood memories of my mom really liking that movie. I'm afraid to watch it now.

Rabin got axed?