Bachelor Party (1984)

A MAN'S TRADITION EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

There are few movie concepts that have as much free reign for anarchy as the ‘bachelor party’ story. By contrast, bridal showers tend to be demure, reserved and elegant affairs; whereas the bachelor parties are wild and riotous shindigs, replete with insane amounts of drink, strippers, gambling and escapades with some sort of animal. In fact, two of the most successful comedies of the past 10 years have been The Hangover and The Hangover Part II, which build themselves around three guys trying to figure out happened over the course of their friends’ bachelor parties. Well, early on in the career of Tom Hanks, he was in a picture on this very subject. For love, for friendship, for donkey shows - it’s Bachelor Party.

Rick Gassko (Tom Hanks) and Debbie Thompson (Tawny Kitaen) are set to marry in just over a week. Unfortunately, her parents hate him because he’s a wildly immature party animal, with a bunch of friends just like him. To celebrate, these friends decide to throw him a bachelor party with booze and hookers in a huge hotel suite. Debbie’s father wants to stop the marriage, so he enlists Debbie’s ex, Cole (Robert Prescott), to sabotage the party and split the couple up. However, this proves especially difficult with this group.

So the story goes, the seed of the idea for Bachelor Party came from an actual bachelor party, thrown by producer Ron Moler for his friend and colleague Bob Israel. Obviously, this was attended also by Bob’s brother, Neal. From the wild shenanigans of that night came the idea to make a film that echoed the spirit of unbridled hedonism and craziness, and likely try to take the party torch from National Lampoon’s Animal House. The premise, as you would expect, is very simple: Guys throw wild party, where a series of pranks, temptations and misunderstandings occur and someone learns something. Pretty straightforward stuff. However, the very conscious attempt to make things more outrageous and hilarious often works against it, mainly because simple logic stops it from actually being funny. For example, one of the guys hires two hookers to attend the party and put on a show of sorts. However, owing to some small, but nonsensical shift, they hookers wind up at the bridal shower instead. Logic would dictate that the pair would look at the party, realise it’s a mistake and leave. However, they look at the party, full of women drinking tea and eating biscuits off of doilies, and decide that this is the place. They then strip off, plug things in and start about their business. The fact that the whole room has gone slack-jawed and silent, punctuated with the occasional appalled gasp, seems to mean nothing. This then kicks off a bizarre sequence of events that sees the girls go to a strip-club (featuring another rather unfunny moment with the bride’s mother and a waiter’s penis), and then they all decide to dress like hookers and crash the bachelor party, although they get temporarily re-routed to another slightly creepier get-together on another floor… what? How does any of this come off as funny? It all smacks of that ‘what can we throw in to make things funnier?’ kind of thinking that results in someone eating catfood from the clearly marked bowl because, you know, that’s funny… right?

There are problems with a few of the characters, too. For the most part, they’re okay, but a couple are really quite irritating. Such as Rick’s mechanic buddy Rudy, who spends most of the film screaming about women, and I mean SCREAMING! When they’re there, when they’re not there, all he does is drink beer and scream about women and laying pipe and seeing tits and getting some. Rick’s other friend Ryko, played by American Ninja's Michael Dudikoff, is dumb… and that’s it. There’s nothing else to him except to show up and say things that are pointless and none too bright. He does nothing besides that. Another of Rick’s friends, Brad, is a strangely tragic one. He’s a manic-depressive, out of his face on drugs, but utterly suicidal. He spends most of the film crying about his bitch wife and trying to kill himself. Weirdly, he actually has some moments that are funny, such as when he tries to slit his wrists with an electric razor because he couldn’t find any real ones. Rick quips, “Well, at least your wrist will be smooth and kissable.”

And that Debbie’s father wants Cole to break up her and Rick seems so bizarre, because while Rick may be zany and immature, Cole is a scumbag and borderline rapist. It hardly seems like the decision a father would make, I don’t care how much you dislike the other guy. I’d take the one who jokes around too much over the one who tries kidnap the girl after he literally tries to buy her. I know that films like these rely on the dynamic of the father preferring the rich douche instead of the poor, but lovable clown, but they’ve gone too far with it. Cole is a genuinely dangerous individual who tries to commit murder more than once, and it’s all played like he’s just a dick.

Some of the performances don’t really help, but this is mostly due to poor direction from Neal Israel. In an attempt to keep the energy high, actors will often yell or jump on each other or generally overact to the point of aneurysm. There’s nothing wrong with amping things up (it is a party after all), but it’s clearly here to cover up the fact that nothing is actually happening yet. Craziness will arrive soon, but it’s still currently a zany-free zone. And Adrian Zmed just looks incredibly smug throughout.

And there’s a further discomfort to this film that is almost identical to that of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. In both films, when a character discovers that the woman he’s just made out with is actually a man, he becomes almost hysterically disgusted, leaping into the shower to scrub his junk and brush his teeth. Later, when he finds himself handcuffed to that same person, he starts screaming bloody murder. Okay, I get this was 10 years before Ace Ventura and attitudes were less progressive. Also, no harm or malice is meant. Plus, the reality of it is that the guy feels cheated and humiliated, and reacts in a way that some would… but come on, really? Isn’t this a bit of an over-reaction? I know it’s all meant as fun and games, but I’m not sure it’s healthy to try and make fun of something purely out of sheer ignorance. A fairly simple removal of that scene would have done much to both pick up the pace of the film and spare us all an unnecessary moment of discomfort disguised as comedy.

You may think that because I’ve just spent a little over 800 words talking about the many flaws of the film that it’s not really worth your time, but that’s not quite true. There actually are some enjoyable things to be had in this film. Tom Hanks has always been a great comedy actor, and this is no exception. He’s got the lovable charm of someone who just wants to have fun, and finds great pleasure in having that fun at the expense of people who don’t like him, like Debbie’s father. The film also has a pretty good pace, so you’re unlikely to find it dragging. The party itself looks like a lot of fun, and does have an infectious atmosphere to it. And the end features a very well staged and funny scene in a 3D movie theatre, where two characters have a fistfight that exactly mirrors the one being projected behind them. Naturally, the audience think this is just great 3D. A man says to the woman next to him that the 3D effect is amazing, to which she responds that she’s seen better. That’s a weak laugh at best, but when a ducked punch cracks her right in the nose, it’s superb timing. Not only is her reaction perfect, but the fact that it comes as a surprise on the back of pretty generic joke just makes it funnier.

Bachelor Party is a sporadically funny, though often rather irritating film. It’s got some good lines, semi-decent pacing and it genuinely seems to be a party that a lot people would love to attend. However, there’s a lot that doesn’t make much sense, it shows its own ignorance on more than one occasion, and some of the characters are grating as all hell. It certainly doesn’t bear up to much scrutiny, but that was never the intention. It’s amusing enough for a night with a bunch of friends and little concentration, so approach it with the right frame of mind and you’ll enjoy.

Apollo 13 (1995)

"HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM."

There was a time when the whole world looked to the skies in the spirit of adventure and hope, not for reasons of religion, but because mankind had shaken off the bonds of Earth and travelled beyond the limits of our atmosphere – space exploration had begun. Though this spawned the rather paranoia-tainted Space Race between the US and Russia, both trying to conquer the outer limits first, the advances of humanity were of greater import. In 1969, this led to one of the truly great achievements of the 20^th Century (or any Century) as the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon. There, astronaut Neil Armstrong produced one of the most famous quotes in history: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” In 1970, the world would receive another now famous quote from another Apollo space mission: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Less than a year after man first walked on the Moon, Apollo 13 was sent back on another lunar-landing mission. However, before the craft even got there, a catastrophic technical malfunction effectively crippled them. Stranded hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth, the Apollo 13 flight crew, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), and the NASA technicians fight desperately to bring the craft back to life and bring the astronauts home safely.

Before we even begin to look at the mission at the heart of this story, we are told of a previous mission that went horribly wrong, Apollo 1, which killed its three crew members. The point is being made very clearly – tragedy can happen at anytime, even to those who prepare for it. If there’s one thing that the film of Apollo 13 wants to do in the first forty-five minutes or so, it’s build up a sense of foreboding, a sense of sinister premonition, a sense that this mission was doomed from the start. It’s something that some of the superstitious folk among us have often said about the Apollo 13 mission itself. There’s the fact that it was the 13^th mission in the Apollo program, that it launched at 19:13pm (13:13 by North American Central Standard Time), that the rupture of the oxygen tanks occurred on the 13^th of April (again, Central Standard Time), that there was a change in the crew a week before blast-off. The film itself builds on this by highlighting other things, too. Crew Commander Lovell’s wife lost her wedding ring down the shower drain before the launch date. Lovell’s car had been having some technical difficulties recently and stalling without warning. These ominous concerns were not lost on the crew, who joked about breaking mirrors and black cats and walking under ladders in preparation for the flight. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re a superstitious person or not (I’m certainly not), because the film does makes its point that some of these characters may be somewhat superstitious themselves, even if it’s merely a case of not wanting to tempt fate. For example, Gene Kranz, the no-nonsense flight director, maintains a simple ritual of wearing a crisp white waistcoat with mission patch on the lapel for the duration of the assignment.

Although these nods towards less rational sensibilities are important, they take up only a little bit of time in the build up to the film’s central crisis. Much more attention is paid towards the establishment of the characters who must deal with it when it comes. Working from a script by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert, director Ron Howard develops a fine array of individuals for us to follow along this perilous journey. Jim Lovell was part of the Apollo 8 mission, the first to orbit the moon, though never got a chance to actually walk on its surface. We feel his awe of such a feat, his sense of mild disappointment that he got so close before without touching it, his humble joy at finally being given the chance to achieve his goal. His wife, Marilyn, is so loving and supportive of her husband and his dreams. She’s a veteran of watching her husband go off into space, so she also remains a firm support for other wives who are new to the whole experience, although she is still uneasy about it herself. Fred Haise is a family man and southern country boy, a fun guy of simple tastes, a little rough around the edges, but a fine pilot. Ken Mattingly is a straight arrow and a driven perfectionist, always pushing himself to get it right. Jack Swigert is a ladies man, a slight outsider as the late addition to the crew, and also with great flight skills and instinct. Gene Kranz is a man who commands respect, but through an understated resolve and calm under pressure. The film builds these characters, and their families (or lack of), so well that when things start to go wrong, you are completely invested and feel genuinely taken by their plight. As things progress, the characters are treated with a great dignity and respect, their actions developed with tight and utterly believable motivations. Even better is that no one is ever given to the overly dramatic bouts of hysteria, with someone eventually cracking up, screaming and crying that they don’t want to die up here. It’s made very clear that these people are who they are and where they are precisely because of their heroic levels of self-control, that they know their best chance to survive is to remain composed and work together. We should all be so controlled as these people.

Howard is also well aware that the greatest dramatic draw is the crisis itself. Of course, how could it not be? A less assured director would have perhaps tried to cram in more subplots and storylines underneath the main one in order to add even greater weight and complexity to the piece. It speaks greatly that Howard did not do such a thing. The film is complex enough, built out of a tight sense the technical issues that must be tackled on Earth, and the delicate relationship of the three men on board the ship. The level of technical detail itself is enough to create a heavy sense of realism, making it all so absorbing. The script is full of technical jargon and astro-speak, but it never overwhelms the audience, still remaining somehow accessible, even if just in a basic sense. It’s from this kind of realism and adherence to detail that we get some moments of drama and concern in the film. When the crew have to turn off most of their equipment in the hope of conserving battery life and fuel, the possibility for the condensation build-up to short out the electrical instruments becomes another concern to deal with. It’s really a case of one thing leading to another, and it makes for really great drama.

And it’s not even just in the technical side of things that there’s a great sense of detail. The period is evoked so well, with the fashions, the music, the cars. Lovell’s eldest daughter initially doesn’t want to watch her father’s flight broadcasts (all before the disaster strikes, of course) because she’s so upset that The Beatles have broken up. That actually happened, the day before Apollo 13 launched. It’s the small details throughout the film that make it all so immersive and wonderful to watch.

The cast do a superb job throughout. Tom Hanks is able to bring his typical Everyman-ness to Lovell, but yet still make him someone of great poise and character. Ed Harris’ Gene Kranz is a performance of superb control and reserve, delivering lines like “Failure is not an option” with great solid conviction. Kathleen Quinlan also gives a great show, steering clear of the weepy astronaut’s wife thing, showing a core of strength and restraint. She’s not above letting the tears come, but she knows better than to let them take over. Paxton, Bacon and Sinise provide great support, too.

Apollo 13 is a genuinely thrilling, tense and really rather emotional experience, which remains unaffected by whether or not you know how it all turns out. The direction is firmly controlled and incredibly well detailed, with solid performances from everyone involved. It’s often overlooked or forgotten about today, but this is an exhilarating experience and a fine tribute to those involved in a great pursuit of exploration.