The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

So, after some soul-searching, I've decided that this week's entry in the Deep Hurting Project is Rob Reiner's 1994 opus North.



It's most notorious for Roger Ebert's famous quote:

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

And, surprisingly, Ebert only glanced over why exactly this film is bad, and it would take until the movie was reviewed by the Nostalgia Critic for me to figure  out how horrible it really was. And given that it wouldn't go onto DVD until 2012, it was the best I could do except for the upload I was fairly certain was incomplete since it only worked up to a bit less than 80 minutes if the QuickLoosenHisPants upload from YouTube is the same one I saw over a decade ago. And now, we have this upload, in 720p, no less.

• 4:15: North isn't being listened to by his parents at the dinner table. And this is enough to give him a heart attack. Seriously? Maybe if their yelling was directed at him, but no, they're just complaining about their jobs.
  
• 4:58: As one Tevye-lookalike to another, this is not a good look for Elijah Wood.
  
• 6:03: "Loosen his pants?" How the fuck is that good medical advice?
  
• 8:13: This secret spot is in the middle of a furniture showcase in a mall. This secret spot is in the middle of a fucking mall.
  
• 8:31: Bruce Willis is the fucking Easter Bunny.
  
• 9:20: Why would an independently wealthy man moonlight as a holiday mascot?
  
• 10:17:  Yes, we get it, North is a Gary Stu.
  
• 11:20: He'd settle for Mozart's parents? The stage parents who most likely caused significant hardship and might have led to him being an absolute prat IRL?
  
• 14:17: What the shit kind of pants factory is this?
  
• 17:18: They won't take this lying down. Obvious joke is obvious.
  
• 17:52: Why is he pleading the fifth for a classroom question about the fucking cotton gin?
  
• 18:30: Wait, I'm confused, is this a hearing or not?
  
• 19:10: You just know that Stefan Molyneux is jizzing his pants right now.
  
• 20:20: The Little Rascals weren't orphans. They were more or less free-range kids still under the care of their parents.
  
• 21:57: The Texan parents are driving a golf cart with longhorn horns and a horn that plays "Yellow Rose of Texas." Why do I get the impression that this is going to set the tone for the entire rest of the movie?
  
• 24:00: Except for the corn, this is more or less my actual order.
  
• 24:36: So, the fuck?
  
• 25:20: FUCK THE WHAT? This has to be the most random musical number I've ever seen in one of these movies.
  
  
  
• 29:45: Do you think ElectroVoice paid to have their merch in the film?
  
• 31:42: TIME ZONES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!
  
• 33:07: The governor's wife is the only barren area on the Hawaiian Islands. That look is priceless.
  
• 35:03: Did nobody think that having the prelude to a tentacle rape on every ad for Hawaiian vacation would be a bad idea that might turn everyone but the most degenerate people off it? And this little revelation only makes it worse!
  
• 40:10: And they decided to drive the plane straight into the window only to have it bump a bit against it, in what I think is a misguided shout-out to the scene in Airplane
  
• 41:14: Kathy Bates as the Eskimo mom. Tizh would have a field day with this if he was still here.
  
  
  
• 43:32: Just so we're clear, this tradition is (for the most part) bullshit. All evidence suggests that this was practiced solely during times of famine, and only as a last resort. I suppose there's always a possible exception, since the Inuit lived in their lands for millennia before the Inuit had their first contact with Martin Frobisher in 1576, but the available evidence suggests that this is the case. And, furthermore, the last recorded case? 1939.
  
• 48:06: So, they've been in a coma for 76 days, and they've stayed in the same condition with no change, and they're now exhibits in the Smithsonian? Okay, fun fact, I went to Washington DC four years after this film was made, and went to some of the Smithsonian's museums and it looked nothing like this.
  
• 50:18: Well, at least they were merciful to the Amish. And at least that line was actually a bit funny.
  
• 50:36: Why is he the Emperor of China? Long after the 1912 abolition of the monarchy and the PRC turning the Forbidden City into a tourist trap?
  
• 51:12: I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is bullshit.
  
• 51:30: North is apparently a literal motherfucker now.
  
• 52:00: Well, with Jerry Lewis on every channel, odds are, The King of Comedy has to be on one of them.
  
• 53:08: I get the impression that that daughter's going to be going places...
  
• 54:17: North's parents are back to life?
  
• 58:00: Apparently, the only good family is this batch of surrogate Cleavers. Implications are staggering.
  
• 59:41: We don't want Hugh? And North is convinced this is about him?
  
• 60:23: Why is he leaving? Did nobody even bother to give him a reason?
  
• 64:10: What, no "And the Band Played On" for this carousel shootout? 
  
• 65:15: Who the fuck is Adam? Okay, apparently, he's Jussie Fucking Smollett. And to think that in about 25 years, he'd be making up a racist attack for sympathy, unintentionally setting back civil rights a couple decades.
  
• 69:23:  Why do I get the feeling NASA is going to sue the other NASA? And could they really not come up with a better name than National Association of Smoke Alarm People?
  
• 73:04: A vulgar joke about testicles, in this kid's film.
  
• 75:40: And it took them this long to notice that the blood on his old cap is actually borscht? Fucking Hell, I used up the video quota with the "Stupid Fucking White Man."
  
• 77:07: Being shocked at the word "Hell?" You have no room to lampshade the family-unfriendliness of such a scene, movie.
  
• 78:15: Why does the judge have his office in the same furniture store as North's secret spot?
  
• 79:56: So it was all just a dream? So all the drama that's been going for over an hour is all meaningless? And North imagined all these other cultures to be as racist as they are?
  
• 80:50: I'm not even going to comment on that coin.
  
• 86:30: What the fuck did you have to rope in the International Buddhist Progress Society for?
  

Years later, Reiner would defend this film, saying:

I loved doing it, and some of the best jokes I ever had in a movie, are in that movie. I made this little fable, and people got mad at me, because, you know, I had done When Harry Met Sally..., and Misery, and A Few Good Men, and everybody said 'Oh, it should be a more important kind of movie.' I said, 'Why? Why can't you just make a little slice of a fable or something?

And he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the objections. It's not that it's a little fable. It's that it's a little fable done executed so horribly. The first half hour of the film is contrived as shit, cloying in a way that'd probably even turn off kids. And then, it takes a turn for the shockingly stereotypical, with insulting racist stereotypes, and a moral that's completely blown open by the whole "all just a dream" twist that renders it all a pointless waste of time. Maybe if you gave everyone some sort of depth, maybe giving them flaws that aren't totally tied to racist stereotypes, it might actually work. But they didn't. Hell, even making North some sort of everyman blank slate might have been salvageable if you didn't treat him like the Second Coming or at least have him not dreaming up all these racist stereotypes that never get challenged. Kind of undermines the whole "smart, sympathetic, kid" angle. And apart from that, it's filled with lazy jokes that kids will probably find tired, especially with the shitty delivery, and meanwhile, we have vulgar jokes that wouldn't fly for a kids' movie, and as for the adults?  They're going to know how not okay all the racial stereotypes are, and they're going to stay away in droves. So, after a run of seven films, most of which could easily be regarded as great, he made an absolute bomb that was useless for any audience. And while some films that failed at the box office in their initial run end up finding an audience and eventually become regarded as masterpieces, The Wizard of Oz (which I'm going to assume was a major influence on this film) and Night of the Hunter (my third-favourite film of all time) among them, the only afterlife North has had is among masochists like me looking to cringe and educate themselves about the worst cinema has to offer. At least in this respect, it does not disappoint.

So, next week, I plan to watch If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, a fundamentalist scare film about what could happen if Communism sprouted up in Mississippi. And hopefully, if Pritzker doesn't extend the lockdown in Illinois yet again, I'll be back at the library, checking out films like I've been jonesing to do for over two months.