No, it's not a failure. It's not good either. It's simply one of the oddest ducks of 80's comedies - trying to be both an actual National Lampoon movie (it's based on one of the stories from the magazine, which I'm not sure), and a satire of them and teen comedies. Trouble is, I couldn't really tell. It felt more like Altman reaching further than he did with MASH to make a completely anarchic, tasteless comedy about a couple of guys (in this case Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry are FAR from the talents of Eliot Gould and Donald Sutherland) who just want to stir up the sh*t in middle-upper class Arizona and have some fun. Only this time there's no war going on or people to fix up in a hospital. What is there to do? Uh...
I was glad it wasn't just some assembly-line thing. It is an Altman movie, to the bone, so loose and free that you have to watch moment to moment because there isn't anything CLOSE to a plot here. It's just a semblance of vignettes around what OC and Stiggs did on their summer break (not their real names, and as OC says, one of my big laughs, is that "Call me OC, it sounds more ridiculous"). Make a wild car that is $100 off the lot and can be decked out to look like a monster-truck- Studebaker? Check. Bring a machine gun as a wedding present for a very unsatisfactory wedding? Check. Make friends and give out t-shirts from the Schwab insurance company to Melvin Van Peebles? Oh hell yeah a check. How about a trip to Mexico to snag an African band to later crash a theater production on its opening night? Uh... hey, it IS a National Lampoon movie.... sorta, not really, whatever.
I was fascinated by OC and Stiggs, no question there. Sometimes I was laughing, more for the little beats of oddball behavior that Altman was always known for sprinkling in. Ray Walston as the grandfather, while no more or less one note than any of the other supporting (or lead?) characters, is maybe the funniest most consistently, rambling about extreme acts of violence in stories and making outrageous omelette's and drink concoctions that he correctly predicts make one more prone to sex. And while he's not as funny as I'd hoped, Dennis Hopper also has a fun appearance playing his Photo-Journalist from Apocalypse Now - that is, if the Photo-Journalist ended up having lots of guns, ammo, and marijuana to grow out in the fields, uh, somewhere.
The whole project, from some of the casting (hey, Jane Curtain and, uh, future stars Cynthia Nixon and Jon Cryer) to how bizarre some of the set pieces get (skinny dipping again in the Schwab's pool? Hey, there's a tiki backyard next door!), is like a big stunt on Altman's part. And why not? His career was full of them, from doing a shaggy-dog take on the Long Goodbye to his madcap take on Popeye. But the main characters are so obnoxious that the power of the satire just became lost, and I wasn't sure if the line not simply got blurred between doing an actual teen comedy and a satire of it but that the line was screwed altogether. Over time the film seems to have gotten a small cult - maybe apologists, maybe people who genuinely like it after it unfortunately (or maybe rightfully) bombed after being shelved for two years - but it still doesn't make it top shelf work from this director. The style is just so all over the place that maybe, at best, it could work as a wild-card party movie, like throw it on, dip in and out, get laughs where they suddenly, outrageously, pop up, and skip over some of the lesser points. C+
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