Hamburger: The Motion Picture

Hamburger: The Motion Picture
January 1986
Busterburger Limited Partnership
Comedy, Sci-Fi
VHS
C+

As you might guess from the title, this movie is sometimes cheesy and often tasteless.  It is funnier than, for instance, Transylvania 6-5000, but it is chockful of politically incorrect stereotypes.  To take the most egregious example, an attractive female freedom-fighter from Guacamole comes into the room of our hero, and she's topless, carrying a machine gun, and demanding sex.  Yes, it's this, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoubleStandardRapeFemaleOnMale, of course played for comedy.  He gets out of it by pretending to be gay, it having been established in the opening scenes that women always want to have sex with him, but it keeps getting him kicked out of colleges, and he's trying to change his luck, here at Busterburger University, in order to claim an inheritance.

The jokes involving the university, and fast food in general, sometimes work.  Those playing off the stereotypes-- there's also a nerd, a nun, a fat guy, a black singer who's sort of Rick-Jamesian, and the wacky horndog roommate (Buddy Hackett's son Sandy as Fred) of our too sexy hero-- mostly don't.  The movie had only one writer but often seems schizophrenic, as if one person wrote the crude stuff and the other wrote the parody, not that these don't sometimes overlap.  (The movie actually steals the thudding "Mao Tse-Tung" joke from Americathon, but you probably won't notice because it's during the infamous Fred "eats out" scene.)  I'd probably give the movie a C, but I kind of like the various songs, all of which celebrate, yes, hamburgers.

This time Chuck McCann plays the mad Dr. Mole, and Dick Butkus is the villain Drootin.  Charles Tyner, who plays founder Lyman Vunk, was Uncle Victor in Harold and Maude.  (And he's still alive at almost 90!)  Overweight twins Betsy Lynn and Carol Gwynn Thompson were the Siamese Connection in The Gong Show Movie.  Frequent extra Helen Kelly, here a restaurant patron, had recently appeared in Girls Just Want to Have Fun as Woman at the Park.

John William Young, who's Prestopopnick here, would have an uncredited role as a banker in Soul Man.

Another '80s movie that can't live up to its poster.

Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude
December 20, 1971
Paramount
Comedy, Romance, Musical
DVD
B+

Thirty-year-old screenwriter Colin Higgins, 42-year-old director Hal Ashby, and 23-year-old Bud Cort (as almost 20-year-old Harold) and 75-year-old Ruth Gordon (as almost-80 Maude) brought their unique, quirky talents together to make this unique, quirky movie, ably supported by 40-year-old Vivian Pickles as Harold's fantastically pretentious, mostly unflappable mother.  This is a tricky film to talk about because it's become a Cult Movie, some people's favorite movie, and it's certainly meant a lot to me since I saw it at 19 on campus.  (They also showed Amarcord and a beach party movie, not all on one night.  It was a very confused film society.)  I think it's one of those not quite great movies.  I don't think everything in it works, like the way Maude keeps stealing cars, but it remains wise, sweet, sometimes joyous, and very funny.  I don't want to oversell it, because it's also in a way a quiet, little movie, with many long-distance shots and details to hunt out (like the PermaSeal on the coffin).  I think when you watch it, you have to get past its reputation and just enjoy it, because that's what Maude would want.

Ruth Gordon is just right as life-loving Maude, although I kept thinking She doesn't look 80, she barely looks 70.  Baby-faced Cort as Harold, despite his faked suicides, has a gentleness that is rare in movies, and when Maude brings him to life, he expresses it whimsically, as when he somersaults.  The script by Higgins is sharp and dry (he'd later pen Foul Play and 9 to 5, two other movies that mean a lot to me), while Ashby not only gets just the right emotions out of everyone (even the cartoony characters, like Harold's uncle), but he has some great shots, like the tombstones that look like a computer punch card from a distance.  And I must say that the Cat Stevens songs fit the movie perfectly, perhaps not as good as the Simon & Garfunkel music in The Graduate, but integrated even more effectively.

Marjorie Eaton, who was Miss Persimmon in Mary Poppins, this time plays Madame Arouet.  Michael L. Davis was Chief of Police in Skidoo and is unconfirmed as a policeman here.  Eric Christmas, who plays the priest disgusted by the idea of Harold's "firm young body" commingling with Maude's "withered" flesh, would be Senator Polk in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!  Shari Summers, who plays Edith Phern (one of Harold's computer dates) would be a nurse in Who's That Girl?