Meet Wally Sparks (1997, directed by Peter Baldwin)

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Jedadiah Leland

Wally Sparks (Rodney Dangerfield) is a talk show host with a program that is so raunchy that even Jerry Springer says, “At least this isn’t The Wally Sparks Show!”

Despite being a huge hit amongst teens and college students, the show is on the verge of being canceled by the head of the network, Mr. Spencer (Burt Reynolds, wearing a fearsome toupee). He is tired of Wally’s antics and he tells Wally and his producer, Sandy Gallo (Debi Mazar), that they have a week to make the show respectable.

Wally doesn’t know what to do. Wally Sparks act respectable? Wally’s a guy who don’t get no respect, no respect at all. Then Sandy finds a letter inviting Wally to attend a party at the home of Georgia Governor Floyd Patterson (David Ogden Stiers), a noted critic of the show. Hoping to get the interview that will save the show, Wally and Sandy head down south.

At the party, Wally acts like Wally and scandalizes all of the politicians and socialites. He also shares a bottle of whiskey with a horse and then rides the horse through the mansion. The party is a disaster but, after Wally claims that he can’t walk because of a spinal injury he suffered when he fell off the horse, the Governor allows him to recuperate in the mansion. Wally causes more chaos while also teaching the Governor’s wife (Cindy Williams) how to play strip poker and eventually exposing a scheme to blackmail the Governor into building a Confederate-themed amusement park.

Rodney Dangerfield playing a talk show host sounds like a great idea and there are a lot of talented people to be found in Meet Wally Sparks. Debi Mazar is an actress who should have appeared in a lot more movies and she and Rodney Dangerfield make a good team. The movie actually gets off to a funny start, with a montage of actual talk show hosts talking about how much they hate Wally Sparks and his show. Gilbert Gottfried has a cameo as a manic guest and Wally repeats some of Rodney Dangerfield’s classic jokes.

Unfortunately, the movie starts to fall apart as soon as Burt Reynolds threatens to cancel the show for being too lowbrow. No network executive has ever threatened to cancel a show that’s bringing in the ratings, regardless of how lowbrow it might be. Things get even worse after Wally goes to Atlanta and ends up staying there. The movie tries to recreate the Snobs vs. the Slobs dynamic of previous Dangerfield films but the Governor comes across as being such a decent man that there’s no joy to be found in watching his life get turned upside down. The movie has a surprisingly large number of subplots, including one about Wally’s son (Michael Weatherly) falling for the Governor’s daughter (Lisa Thornhill), but most of them go nowhere and just distract from the man who should have been the film’s main attraction, Rodney Dangerfield. By the end of the movie, even the usually irrepressible Dangerfield seems to have been neutered.

Rodney Dangerfield was a national treasure but Meet Wally Sparks was not the best showcase for his persona or his style of humor. Fortunately, Caddyshack and Back To The School are available to watch anytime that we need a good laugh and we want to show Rodney Dangerfield a little respect.

Horror(-ish) Film Review: Hubie Halloween (dir by Steven Brill)

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Oh my God!” I said as I looked at what was new on Netflix, “A Halloween movie starring the guy from Uncut Gems!? THIS IS GOING TO BE INTENSE!”

Of course, as I’m sure you already guessed, Hubie Halloween might as well be taking place in a totally different universe from Uncut Gems. Uncut Gems was an intense drama that starred Adam Sandler as a man so self-destructive that he literally seems to spend the entire movie just daring death to reach out and take him. Hubie Halloween, on the other hand, is fairly laid back comedy featuring Adam Sandler playing yet another well-meaning manchild. The film features supporting performances from all the usual Happy Madison suspects, like Kevin James, Rob Schneider, Steve Buscemi, Tim Meadows, Ben Stiller, Maya Rudolph, Keenan Thompson, and Colin Quinn. It’s sentimental and it’s about thirty minute too long and the humor is often juvenile but also frequently funny.

Adam Sandler plays Hubie, who lives in Salem, Massachusetts with his mother (June Squibb). Hubie is the town eccentric, the type of guy who thinks that he’s protecting the entire town but who mostly just gets on everyone’s nerves. A lot of people make fun of Hubie (who they call Pubie). Pete Landolfa (Ray Liotta) may be mourning the recent death of his father but he still finds time to toss Hubie into an open grave. Not even Father Dave (Michael Chiklis) has much sympathy for Hubie. Hubie is the type of guy who goes down to the local school to give a speech on Halloween safety, just for the students (and teachers) to respond by throwing all of their food at him.

One of the few people who is nice to Hubie is his new neighbor, Walter Lambert (Steve Buscemi). However, Hubie suspects that Walter might be a werewolf and when people start to disappear over the course of Halloween, Hubie suspects that Walter’s responsible. Meanwhile, the police (represented by a heavily bearded Kevin James) thinks that it might be Hubie, seeing as how everyone who has disappeared is also someone who has bullied him.

Then again, Richie Hartman (Rob Schneider) has just escaped from the local mental institution. Could he possibly have something to do with the mysterious happenings in Salem!?

When Adam Sandler won his Indie Spirit Award for Uncut Gems, he infamously announced that, if he didn’t get an Oscar nomination, he would get back at the Academy by making the worst film of all time. Well, Sandler was snubbed the Academy. (Though Sandler deserved that nomination — and probably nominations for The Meyerowtiz Stories, Funny People, and Punch-Drunk Love as well — it’s pretty obvious that the Academy is never going to nominate the star of That’s My Boy and Jack and Jill.) However, Hubie Halloween is certainly not the worst film ever made. It’s actually a rather likable and sweet-natured comedy, one in which the humor is definitely juvenile but, in contrast to some of the other Happy Madison comedies, never really mean-spirited. In many ways, it’s a perfect Netflix film. It’s good enough to keep you entertained while, at the same time, you don’t necessarily have to really pay attention to every minute of the film to get it. It’s the epitome of the type of film that you can watch while doing something else.

One of the main complaints that’s always lodged against Sandler is that he primarily just makes movies so that he can hang out with his friends and get paid for it. There’s a certain amount of truth to that statement and that, more than anything, explains why Sandler’s filmography tends to be so frustratingly uneven. The cast of Hubie Halloween looks like they had a lot of fun making it. Fortunately, in this case, that sense of fun actually translates onto the screen. Steve Buscemi, June Squibb, and particularly Ray Liotta all seem to be having a ball getting to parody their own dramatic images.

Admittedly, Hubie Halloween is not a film that sticks with you. It won’t make you laugh as much as Happy Gilmore and it won’t leave you stunned like Uncut Gems. But, for what it is, it’s just likable enough to be entertaining.

Insomnia File No. 15: George Wallace (dir by John Frankenheimer)

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If, after watching Promise last night, you discovered that you were still suffering from insomnia, you could have watched the very next film that premiered on TCM. That film was the 1997 biopic, George Wallace.

Like Promise, George Wallace was originally made for television. Also, much like Promise, George Wallace is a character study of a conflicted man who makes many people uncomfortable and it’s also well-acted by a cast of veteran performers. That, however, is where the similarities end. Whereas Promise was ultimately a rather low-key and human drama, George Wallace is an epic. Clocking in at nearly 3 hours and telling a story that spans decades, George Wallace attempts to use one man’s life story as a way to tell the entire story of the civil rights movement.

That’s a tremendously ambitious undertaking, especially for a film that had to conform to the demands of 1990s television. Therefore, it’s probably not surprising that the movie, as a whole, is uneven. It’s not a bad movie but, at the same time, it doesn’t quite work.

First off, we need to talk about who the historical George Wallace was.

(Here’s where I get to show off my amazing history nerd powers. Yay!)

George Wallace served a total of four terms as governor of Alabama. A protegé of a populist known as “Big Jim” Folsom, Wallace first ran for governor in 1958. He campaigned as a moderate who supported integration and, as a result, he was defeated by the KKK’s endorsed candidate, John Patterson. (Oddly enough, a fictionalized version of Patterson was the hero of the classic and racially progressive 1955 film, The Phenix City Story.) When Wallace ran again in 1962, he ran as an outspoken segregationist and defeated his former mentor, Jim Folsom. Infamously, Wallace is the governor who stood in the schoolhouse door and announced that Alabama would never accept integration. Unable to succeed himself, Wallace arranged for his wife, Lurleen, to be elected as governor. Lurleen subsequently died in office, succumbing to cancer while Wallace was running for President as the candidate of the American Independent Party. (As of this writing, Wallace is the last third party presidential candidate to carry any states.) Reelected governor in 1970, Wallace married Folsom’s niece and made another presidential run. However, after a string of primary victories, that campaign was cut short when Wallace was shot and crippled by Arthur Bremer. (Bremer would serve as the inspiration for Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.) Confined to a wheelchair, Wallace served as governor until 1978 and, in 1976, ran for President one final time. After being out of office for four years, he was elected Governor for one final term in 1982. Late in life (and, it should be pointed out, long after integration had been generally accepted as the law of the land), Wallace renounced his segregationist past and publicly apologized for standing in the schoolhouse door. During his final campaign for governor, he won a majority of the black vote and he proceeded to appoint more blacks to state positions than any governor before him.

George Wallace lived a long, dramatic, and interesting life and he’s still a very controversial figure. Who was the real George Wallace? Was he a political opportunist who used racism to further his career? Was he truly a racist who saw the error of his ways and repented or did he only pretend to renounce his former beliefs once they were no longer popular? And, even if Wallace was sincere in his regret, did he deserve to be forgiven or should he always be remembered as the villainous caricature that Tim Roth portrayed in Selma? If we forgive or make excuses for the actions of a George Wallace, do we run the risk of diminishing the success and importance of the civil rights movement?

And I, honestly, have no answers to those questions. Unfortunately, neither does George Wallace. But before we get into that, let’s consider what does work about this film.

George Wallace opens in 1972 with Wallace campaigning in Maryland. Wallace is played by Gary Sinise and his second wife, Cornelia, is played by a very young Angelina Jolie. Sinise and Jolie both give brilliant performances, perhaps the best of their respective careers. Sinise plays Wallace as a calculating and charismatic politician who is also a very angry man. Throughout every second of his performance, we are aware of Wallace’s resentment that his political success in Alabama has potentially made him unelectable in the rest of the country. Watching Sinise as Wallace, you see a man who believes in himself but doesn’t necessarily like the person that he’s become. Meanwhile, Jolie plays Cornelia like a Southern Lady MacBeth and watching her, I remembered how, at one time, Angelina Jolie really did seem like a force of nature. The Angelina Jolie of George Wallace is the wild and uninhibited Jolie of the past (the one who once said, “You’re in bed, you’ve got a knife, shit happens.”), as opposed to the safe and conventional Jolie of the present, the one who is currently directing rather stodgy movies like Unbroken and By The Sea.

After Wallace is shot, the film goes into flashback mode. We watch as Wallace goes from being a liberal judge to being the segregationist governor of Alabama. Mare Winningham plays Lurleen Wallace while Joe Don Baker plays Big Jim Folsom. They all do a pretty good job but the flashback structure is so conventional (and so typical of a made-for-tv biopic) that it makes the film a bit less interesting.

There’s also a character named Archie. Played by Clarence Williams III, Archie is literally the only major black character in the entire film. He is portrayed as being a former convict who has been hired to serve as Wallace’s valet. While Wallace plots to thwart the civil rights movement, Archie stands in the background glowering. At one point, he’s even tempted to kill Wallace. However, after Wallace is shot, Archie helps to take care of him. The film suggests that being shot and subsequently cared for by Archie is what led to Wallace renouncing his racist views. (The film also suggests that Wallace was never that much of a racist to begin with and, instead, was just so seduced by power that he would say whatever he had to say to win an election in Alabama.)

At the end of the film, we’re informed that almost everyone in the film was real but that Archie was fictional. The problem, of course, is that the film is suggesting that the fictional Archie is responsible for the real-life Wallace both rejecting racism and apologizing for the all-too real consequences of racism. The film ends with the realization that the filmmakers were so convinced that audiences would not be able to accept an ambiguous portrait of a public figure that they created a fictional character so that Wallace could have a moment of redemption.

(It also doesn’t help that a film about civil rights only features one major black character and that character is a fictional valet who doesn’t get to say much.)

In the end, the film doesn’t seem to be certain what it’s trying to say about Wallace and the meaning of his dramatic life. That said, I enjoyed watching George Wallace because of the acting and because, as a history nerd, I always enjoy seeing historical figures portrayed on-screen, even if the filmmakers don’t seem to be quite sure what they’re tying to say about them.

George Wallace was directed by John Frankenheimer, a good director who, it appears, was constrained by the demands of 1990s television. If George Wallace were made today, it would probably air on HBO and would probably be allowed to take more of a firm stand one way or the other on Wallace’s character. That said, it would probably also be directed by Jay Roach who, to put it lightly, is no John Frankenheimer.

Anyway, George Wallace doesn’t quite work but it’s definitely interesting. Watch it for Gary and Angelina!

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