There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
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I should say first that I am about to wholeheartedly support the world viewing Be Kind Rewind in the face of what I believe will be a lot of poopooing over this movie (it’s currently “rotten” over at Rotten Tomatoes). I will also say I am not a Michel Gondry fanboy or, even, somebody who could pass for a hipster (that segment of the population making Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Puma economically viable). I saw Be Kind Rewind at Sundance 2008 thinking it would be a pallet cleanser from long nights of editing interviews and watching the really challenging stuff. But Be Kind Rewind was the most subversive movie at Sundance this year. So much so, I question the programmers even knew it.
The premise is straight from a sub-genre of comedy that has brought us such classics as Ski Patrol and One Crazy Summer (a perfect ball of ice cream for Gondry to hide his medicine in). Two slackers who while away their days in a hole-in-the-wall hangout–owned by a kindly old proprietor–have to raise more cash than they’ve ever seen or the hangout gets the wrecking ball. Antics ensue. The antics are brought to us by Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) as they remake a library of hit Hollywood movies with a VHS camcorder when Jack Black inadvertently erases all the tapes at their neighborhood video shop (the hangout). The montages of their backyard productions are the stuff people will go to see this movie in droves for, and they are fall-down funny. However, these montages end partway through the story to make room for the proverbial “plot.”
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The rite of passage into taking responsibility of another life–having a baby–has been the topic of a lot of popular movies. We don’t see very many movies about another rite of passsage, taking responsibilty over death. Specifically, the death of a parent. Prenatal wards are fun, nursing homes are not. The death of a parent brings far more complexity and reflection. So, when I saw the logline for Tamara Jenkin’s new film, The Savages, I thought this is a movie that will either be great or awful.
Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman)–both struggling playwrites–are unexpectedly given the responsibility to care for a father (who was not much of a father) as he suffers from dementia in his last few months of life. I don’t know if it’s an easy film to connect to if you’re not somebody who has admitted a parent to a nursing home. Or if you don’t have siblings choosing divergent paths in dealing with a tragi-family. But if you fall into one of those two categories, The Savages is a really rich movie, and it’s full of dark humor you have to develop when things aren’t funny. (Linney and Hoffman have unexpectedly amazing chemistry to pull this off.)
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