ROAD GAMESPlot in a Nutshell
Richard Franklin’s 1981 thriller about a trucker (Stacy Keach) who becomes convinced that the driver of a green van he keeps crossing paths with as he travels down the empty Australian highway is killing female hitchhikers and dismembering their bodies.
Thoughts
I originally conceived of these “Moviegoer Diary” entries as short, snappy assessments of whatever random movies I happened to watch on TV or DVD—and I’ve watched in horror as they gradually started running several hundred words longer than my regular posts.
In that sense, I’m a little like Patrick Quid, the hero of Road Games, who fills the lonely hours he spends behind the wheel by talking, talking, talking to himself, saying whatever damn thing pops into his head. Okay, he’s technically talking to his pet dingo Boswell, but I don’t think Boswell understands half of what he’s saying.
In fact, Quid spends so much of Road Games alone and talking to himself that the film becomes as much of a character study as it does a thriller. This is the second film I’ve watched from Anchor Bay’s recent “Cult Fiction” series of DVD reissues—the first was Class of 1984—and it’s the second pleasant surprise in a row: well-made, well-structured, with a great sense of place. It’s the rare slasher movie that genuinely seems to like people, and which has more on its mind than merely setting up the next grisly kill.
I don’t know if director Richard Franklin planned the movie this way from the outset, but it’s almost as if he was so won over by Stacy Keach’s unexpectedly winning performance and his easygoing chemistry with Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a runaway heiress turned hitchhiker—this may be the only slasher movie that will make you think of It Happened One Night!—that there are stretches in the film where he kind of forgets about the serial-killer plot and just sits back and watches Keach and Curtis getting to know each other.
I’ve never been a big Stacy Keach fan, but now I’m wondering if I just haven’t seen him in the right movies. He always scared me a little, to be honest. He reminded me of the kind of dad who drinks a little too much and beats you up if you don’t do well at the Little League softball game. But he’s fantastic in The Ninth Configuration, which I finally caught up with a few months ago, and he really won me over very early on in Road Games with his reaction to a station wagon whose back seat is stuffed absolutely full of beachballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He watches the car drive past him and then somberly tells Boswell, “Now there goes a man with a lot of balls.”
Not that Road Games doesn’t have good scares in it. There’s a tense standoff between Keach and the man who he thinks is the killer in the men’s room of a roadside gas station, a giddily effective final shock, and you know how bad horror movies will try and goose you with a phony “cat scare”? Road Games delivers a “kangaroo scare” that just about propelled me through the ceiling of my apartment.
And there are enough strange directorial indulgences to make this into a proper cult film worthy of the term. I’m thinking, for instance, of the way Franklin shoots the first death scene, with white light absolutely flooding from the bathroom doorway in this tiny motel room—I swear, it’s like the portal to the other dimension from Poltergeist. And there’s a memorably bizarre semi-dream sequence as a sleep-starved Keach tails the killer’s van down the highway while trying to shake off the hallucinations his mind keeps conjuring up. I mean, just look at this crazy image Franklin put into this scene: he’s got the van’s rear windows sprouting a pair of eyes! It’s the rare horror director who’d try for an effect this surreal. What can I say? Now there goes a man with balls.
RATING: 4/5
FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALLPlot in a Nutshell
Jason Segel breaks up with his TV actress girlfriend (Kristen Bell) and goes on a Hawaiian vacation in hopes of forgetting her, only to find she’s staying at the same hotel with her new boyfriend, playboy British rocker Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).
Thoughts
Yeah, I laughed plenty. Jason Segel doesn’t quite reach the extremes of pathetic heartbreak that he made his specialty on Freaks and Geeks and especially on Undeclared, where his recurring role as the clingy lost-distance boyfriend of a cute college freshman remains one of the most breathtakingly go-for-broke comic performances I’ve ever seen. I mean, just check out this hilarious/disturbing clip...
So it’s neat to see how Segel (who wrote the script to Forgetting Sarah Marshall himself) has been able to turn himself into a comic leading man without entirely losing the sense that he could burst into uncontrollable sobs at any given moment. And like all the films from the Judd Apatow factory, it’s unusually generous towards its supporting cast. Jonah Hill’s (as a starstruck Aldous Snow fan) doesn’t quite connect, but Paul Rudd gets laughs as a blissfully stoned surfing instructor (“Do less! Do less!”). Maria Thayer (Tammi Littlenut from Strangers With Candy!) shows up as one half as a honeymooning couple, and delivers what for me might have been the film’s biggest laugh in the scene where she experiences her first orgasm and starts yelling, “Sex! Sex!”
But then, all the women in the film get to play funny, well-rounded, sympathetic characters—a rare thing in modern romantic comedies. Even Carlo Gallo, Segel’s ex-girlfriend from Undeclared, shows up in a funny scene as a one-night stand who ruins the mood by compulsively saying “Hi!” over and over again as Segel pumps away on top of her.
Two other quick observations:
(1) Like Knocked Up, the least interesting parts of Forgetting Sarah Marshall have to do with the characters’ travails in the entertainment industry. (Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up was an on-air personality on E!, while in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Kristen Bell plays the star of a CSI-style TV crime show, while Segel plays the show’s composer.) Sarah Marshall gets off some good laughs from William Baldwin’s sendup of David Caruso (“She won’t be winning anymore beauty pageants... not without a face!”), but all this showbiz stuff feels too rarefied and insidery—especially when much of Segel’s appeal comes from what a regular-looking schlub he is.
(2) Was I the only person who was a little bit disappointed by Segel’s much-publicized full-frontal nude scene? Or at least surprised by how briefly his penis was visible, given all the hype? All the advance discussion led me to expect the male equivalent of Julianne Moore’s bottomless scene from Short Cuts—an extended, unblinking moment of exquisite comic awkwardness, with Segel’s penis just hanging there, as sad as he is, after his girlfriend dumps him. We get a few shots of Segel’s junk, but the camera cuts away from the sight of it so quickly, I actually found it more distracting than a long, unflinching nude shot would have been. It’s almost as if the editor, William Kerr (who also edited Superbad and Tommy Boy) thought audiences honestly could not handle the sight of it for more than a fraction of a second. It’s bizarre.
Could the MPAA be the culprit. According to an interview with Segel in Entertainment Weekly, the MPAA automatically gives an R rating to any movie that shows male nudity “as long as it’s flaccid. But it was very important to me that it not be completely flaccid.” Could Segel’s insistence on non-total flaccidity have gotten the film in dutch with the MPAA? Are all those awkward, lightning-fast cutaways a compromise with the censors? If Segel had been just a little less excited to be sharing the screen with Kristen Bell, would the editing of the film be entirely different?
I want answers, dammit!
RATING: 4/5
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