The Projector #43: Odd Obsessions* (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

* Tip of the hat to the beloved, recently shuttered Chicago video store Odd Obsession. You can read tributes from former employees here and here.

Anyone who follows our friend and ScreenCrush mastermind Matt Singer knows he’ll drop references to Gymkata with little provocation. A true oddity, the low-budget 1985 film tried to make an action star of gymnast Kurt Thomas. Promising viewers “The skill of gymnastics… the kill of karate!” it’s a truly odd film that at one point pits Thomas against an entire village that, for reasons never explained, has put a pommel horse in the middle of town. Matt’s not the only Gymkata fan, but he’s certainly the most vocal. Which got me thinking about the odd movies we sometimes latch onto, so I asked my co-hosts for theirs:

Scott Tobias

I suppose I should write about some embarrassing movie that I’ve seen umpteen times, like the Michael J. Fox comedy The Secret of My Success, which slakes my peculiar thirst for Wall Street stories, or one of the first three Rocky sequels, which have an irresistible crassness that’s truer to the heart of the franchise than anything in the Oscar-nominated original film. But the one movie I’ve watched as a grown-up more often than any other—whether on the Blu-ray I own or Netflix, where it’s frequently streaming—is the poker movie Rounders, which I think is a genuinely good movie, with a fine script and strong noir atmosphere, but which probably isn’t the most obvious choice for endless rewatching. I approach it more like a highlight package than a film. I usually skip straight to the poker scenes: Matt Damon’s two showdowns with John Malkovich’s Teddy KGB, he and his sleazy buddy Ed Norton shaking down frat guys and cops for cash, him reading everyone’s hands in a judges’ game. I love poker and the film actually knows the game inside and out, from what can happen on the felt to how different players manage their rolls and their lives. The poker boom is long gone—I myself haven’t played in years, after obsessing about it in the early-to-mid 2000s—but it lives on in my heart, and on my screen.

Genevieve Koski

Anyone who has ever conversed with me about animation knows it’s only a matter of time before I bring up 1987’s The Chipmunk Adventure, a movie I genuinely love to this day despite its flaws. (Chief among them some very uncomfortable cultural stereotypes, but that’s honestly going to be a given for most animated films made during the last century.) The Chipmunk Adventure has been subsumed in the cultural imagination by the CGI Chipmunk franchise entries that began appearing, unbidden, in the early 2000s, but it’s a very different sort of movie. The plot centers on a charming race around the world between the Chipmunks and Chipettes — in gendered hot air balloons, no less! — with a diamond-smuggling subplot baked in, because it was the ’80s, I guess. It’s a gloriously convoluted, Saturday-morning-cartoon-indebted excuse for the Chipmunks and Chipettes to do musical numbers in front of various geographical landmarks. Your appreciation of those songs will likely vary based on your tolerance for the Chipmunk vocal stylings (as the owner of this film’s soundtrack on vinyl, I am clearly inured), but I will go to my grave maintaining that the film’s signature song, “The Girls of Rock ’n’ Roll,” and its accompanying musical sequence both slap. About that sequence: It was animated by Glen Keane, a now-legendary Disney character animator who worked on Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and other Disney Renaissance classics, but in the mid-1980s he was one of several animators Disney laid off in the wake of The Black Cauldron’s box-office failure, and who Chipmunk impresario Ross Bagdasarian Jr. snapped up to work on The Chipmunk Adventure. As a result, the movie looks, to use a technical term, fucking gorgeous, even to this day — I semi-recently inflicted this movie on... er, showed this movie to the monthly movie club I used to attend, and everyone was blown away by the visuals (and rightfully uncomfortable during the extremely tone-deaf “Wooly Bully” sequence). That’s an experience I’ve had a handful of times with this film, which I’ve rewatched countless times in an attempt to expose others to its strange magic, and I’m happy to say that almost everyone I’ve shown it to has fallen under its weird, high-pitched spell.

Tasha Robinson

Longtime A.V. Club / Dissolve / Next Picture Show fans know what I'm going to say here: I am so bad at re-watching films. I don't do comfort viewing, and I often get an ADD-style sense of trapped anxiety if I have to watch something for work (or sometimes for this podcast!) that I've seen too recently. But there's one film I've repeatedly made excuses to re-watch for work purposes, or so I can show it to other people: David Mamet's 2000 film State and Main, starring the ever-excellent William H. Macy as a beleaguered director trying to pull together a struggling film in spite of his skanky underage-skirt-chasing star (Alec Baldwin), his writer's-blocked screenwriter (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and an endless series of pushbacks and setbacks, particularly from the locals in the small town where he's shooting. The film features a lot of cringey sexual-politics humor that hasn't dated well, especially around Baldwin's character and a local teenager (Julia Stiles) who sees him as an opportunity, and around Macy's needy leading lady (Sarah Jessica Parker), who's angling for a hefty extra payout in exchange for onscreen nudity. But I feel such an attachment to it, maybe because my entire professional career has felt like what we see Macy doing here, perpetually dealing with shifting challenges and goals while trying to create something that resembles art. His cynicism and frustration are palpable, as he's called on to provide an endless series of solutions and decisions in a chaotic environment, and his situation is heightened enough to be funny, but not enough to feel unrealistic. The dialogue is Mamet's usual snappy fast-talking conversation, but it's less ridiculously arch and repetitive than usual, and for once his characters sound like people instead of story functions. The cast is just an embarrassment of riches: in addition to everyone above, it includes David Paymer, Rebecca Pidgeon, Charles Durning, Patti LuPone, Clark Gregg, Ricky Jay, Michael Higgins, Jonathan Katz, and John Krasinski. And above all, State and Main is just funny — it's an absurdist look at the art of filmmaking, crafted by someone who both knows the industry's downfalls, and doesn't necessarily take the people navigating them all that seriously.

As for my entry, I’m kind of the opposite of Tasha: I wish I had more time to rewatch favorite movies. In high school we’d revisit favorites — especially cult items — over and over again, but the height of my rewatching tendencies probably came when I worked as a video store clerk, enjoyed unlimited rentals, and had to have movies playing constantly in the store. Sometimes I’d put on movies out of perversity. For a good stretch I’d end every shift by putting on the 1981 Tony Danza / Danny DeVito comedy Going Ape! But the one I kept coming back to was Murders in the Zoo, a bizarre pre-Code horror film that opens with a man having his mouth sewn shut and just gets grimmer from there. It contains, as the title promises, zoo murders, but also a comical drunk played by Charlie Ruggles and some astonishing scenes of animal chaos that, honestly, should never have been filmed in the first place. I hate seeing animals misused in film, but this almost seems like a historical document of the bad old days or a fever dream. It’s such a bizarre but compelling collection of mismatched elements that if you put Guy Maddin’s name in front of it few would blink an eye. If I put it on as the store opened, it sometimes felt like I was still dreaming.

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We hope you’re enjoying this week’s episode dedicated to Almost Famous. If you want to catch up with next week’s subject ahead of time, How to Build a Girl is on VOD. We all had different reactions it.

In the meantime, here are some items you might want to read:

• The death of Lynn Shelton prompted an outpouring of tributes; among them, Vulture's Jen Chaney offered an appreciation of her television work, while Jason Bailey talked to some past Shelton collaborators, like Emily Blunt and Alison Brie.

• Fans of the great MacGruber had their choice of not one but two oral histories of the film, one from The Ringer, the other from Vanity Fair. But why not read both?

• For The Guardian, Scott Tobias looked back at the 40-year-old (!) film The Empire Strikes Back.