Category: Jon Heder

TAPAWINGO

By Marc S. Sanders

It’s amusing to say that Jon Heder (Napolean Dynamite) becomes a bodyguard in Tapawingo.  He plays a weirdo who headlines a cast of familiar faces, who also portray weirdos.  Yet, come what may, he is in fact a bodyguard named Nate Skoog (a weirdo with a weirdo’s name) who lives with his mom (Amanda Bearse) and her boyfriend (John Ratzenberger).  By day, he works in the mailroom for Amalgamated Insurance.  Nate has not hit the ranks of earning a shirt that bears the company name.  His boss gives him hope though as he assigns Nate the lofty responsibility of picking up his nerdy son, Oswalt (Sawyer Williams), from school.  Nate uses his dune buggy to handle the task.

The city of Tapawingo is notorious for its family of bullies known as the Tarwaters.  Nate is given a warning.  He’s to stop giving Oswalt rides to his tutoring sessions for their sister Gretchen (Kim Matula).  Let me be clear.  Young teen Oswalt tutors Gretchen, a twenty-something tough chick, dressed in black who moves with an attitude and a strut.  When Nate witnesses two Tarwater heavies beating up on Oswalt, he runs into action with his own technique of martial arts. Suddenly, he becomes protective of the kid.  It doesn’t help that Nate’s dune buggy runs over Gretchen’s Doberman.  Well, the Tarwaters move up the food chain and bring in their bruiser brother Stoney (Billy Zane) to make sure their policy stays in line.

Tapawingo is proudly oddball, strange, stupid, silly, slapsticky and really, really, out there.  Following the surprise response of the cult hit Napolean Dynamite Jon Heder moved into more mainstream fair and became a marquee name of sorts.  It’s fortunate he returns to his roots.  He’s on a very short list of comedians who could pull off this material.  Tapawingo is funny.  Very funny at times.  The blessing is that it does not overstay its welcome because of the stupidity of it all; how the actors portray the characters, how writer/director Dylan K Narang shoots his setups and close ups and how the absurdity of the script never stops to think.  Comedy like this only has so much fuel to drive a certain distance.  This gonzo kind of writing that lacks any kind of insight or symbolism operates like another kind of Abbott & Costello routine.  Eventually, you’ll want to move on.  In the moment, it’s a lot of fun though.

Jon Heder invents his own kind of character brand with a stoned kind of look on his face.  Nate Skoog doesn’t so much move.  Rather, the world around this nincompoop circulates around him.  With his buddy Will Luna (Jay Pichardo, playing a different flavor of weird with a Rambo wardrobe on his bearded scrawny physique) these dorks spend their time answering ads to serve as hired mercenaries.  They are marksmen at launching firework sparklers from a distance. Believe me when I say though that Nate and Will are the poster boys for gun prevention.  Maybe even butter knife prevention if there is such a thing.  Otherwise, they are playing bingo at the rec center or maybe wrestling by way of whatever they think wrestling should be.  A pair of overweight, goateed twins (George and Paul Psarras) demonstrate what the contact sport should look like in the foreground. 

Even Gina Gershon invests herself by hiding her signature glamour.  Caked in colorful makeup with a hairsprayed zig zag formation of dirty blond locks, I did not even recognize the actress who made big splashes in movies like Bound, Face/Off and Showgirls.  Her character’s name is Dot and I’d love to know if she took inspiration from Pee Wee Herman’s girlfriend, Dottie, in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.  Dot resides in the background of Nate’s meandering life.  She’s seductive…I guess.  It’s another oddball within Nate’s world where stimuli is not so much a priority.  Nevertheless, Gershon is hysterical in a clownish, buffoon like role.

Billy Zane is the villain of this silly picture.  Bald, clean shaven, husky and dressed in black, I don’t think the guy has more than ten lines.  It’s his presence that says it all as he sits behind the wheel of an emerald, green Mustang.  I’m glad he’s here.  He headlined Waltzing With Brando (which I loved), while Heder played the supporting role.  Now the pair switch positions.  Newman and Redford, Lemmon and Matthau, Zane and Heder.  It works.  By appearance, method, and physique, these guys are so unlikely to work together, and yet that generates inventive comedy.

Tapawingo operates like one of those B-movie 1980s comedies (Better Off Dead, Real Genius) that you’d rent when The Goonies or Gremlins was checked out at the video store.  It carries no charm.  No sensitivity.  No romance.  The adventure is pratfallish and deliberately lethargic.  It’s strength comes from its characters that leap out of a comic book or a Saturday morning cartoon.  Jon Heder’s approach to live action animation is a winner.  He’ll make you bust a gut.  He doesn’t have to say a word.  Simply a close up of him staring into a void will generate the laughs. 

The brains lie in the bravery to do something as zany as Tapawingo.  Go into it with an open mind.  Better yet, take your thinking cap off and just observe.  It’s a lot of fun.

Oh yeah.  The soundtrack is killer with the help of Pat Benatar and Quiet Riot.

WALTZING WITH BRANDO

By Marc S. Sanders

You think you know someone, but then you learn a whole other side about the person.

I only know Marlon Brando from his achievements in The Godfather, Superman, A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront.  There’s also his final picture, The Score, with his Vito Corleone counterpart, Robert DeNiro.  I’ve seen him spoofed on Saturday Night Live and know that he’s even poked fun at himself in a film like The Freshman.  He was notoriously and proudly quirky.  I guess Brando was so content to appear odd to everyone else beyond the island of Tahiti, which became his escape to paradise, away from autograph hounds, environmental abuse and Hollywood barbarianism.  Brando simply endured his greatness as one of the most incredible movie actors ever to subsidize how he really wanted to live in utopian isolation.

Billy Zane seamlessly inhabits the persona and physical appearance of Marlon Brando in Waltzing With Brando.  The film presents a slice of the actor’s uncompromised efforts to build an ecological home, and maybe a hotel, on an uninhabited island next to Tahiti.  To bring this idea to fruition, Brando recruits a young, undaring Los Angeles architect named Bernie Judge (Jon Heder) to helm the project.  This will be an undertaking that Bernie could never expect and can hardly circumvent around impossible challenges in the face of proven scientific engineering, chemistry, and physics.  Brando seems to have an answer for everything though.

By breaking the fourth wall to speak to the viewer along with voiceover narration, Heder is charming about his unexpected adventures.  The white-collar shirt and necktie of city life is abandoned for shorts and conch shell necklaces.  Actually, as Brando demonstrates its better and less inhibited to just be nude like the rest of the cheerful islanders.  Despite his reservations, Bernie gets more and more accustomed to Brando’s perceptions but still he has to find ways to be practical to complete this unconscionable project.

Drinking water is needed.  Marlon’s answer is to filter it from his own urine.  Electricity needs to be installed on the island.  Though, is Marlon truly serious when he suggests that energy stem from a power source like electric eels?  Bernie soon learns that there will never be a client as unpredictable as Marlon Brando.  Money is not an obstacle he cares about.  Oscar trophies serve a menial, floor level purpose that is only a little more useful than resting on a mantle.  An upcoming gangster movie is not really his thing.  A paradise devoid of man-made contamination and pesky societal intrusions is where his focus lies.

Watching Bernie Judge struggle with being away from his wife and daughter, while working with islanders to start at the basics like building an airplane landing strip first, I was reminded of The Brutalist, the fictional period piece that centered on building a grand, outrageously expensive structure within a mountaintop.  That film watched its architect wither away into haunting madness.  The Mosquito Coast with Harrison Ford also came to mind.  Thankfully, Waltzing With Brando does not take these directions.  I know nothing about architecture or engineering or practically any kind of science.  Yet, I know that whatever Marlon Brando conjures up seems unheard of and impossible.  Brando’s friend, Bernie Judge, did not allow these considerations to stop him though.  Why shouldn’t we explore our ideal paradise no matter how exuberant it seems? (Mosquitos are also a problem to deal with and Brando frowns on using pesticides.  Hmm. What can be done?)

Still, we have to be realistic.  Richard Dreyfuss plays Brando’s money manager and represents the challenge of making resources obtainable.  Brando has to go back to work.  Judge needs more and more funds for material and labor.  He takes daring personal risks.  Even the banker does.  Utopia is expensive and never merciful. 

Director Bill Fishman wrote and adapted Bernard Judge’s biographical tales of his encounters with Marlon Brando.  His film is lighthearted, hardly stressful in any kind of dramatic weight.  Perhaps that is because Bernie Judge did not respond to Brando’s ideas with frustration like The Brutalist would have you believe.  While I was not entirely fond of the voiceover narration because I did not recognize its necessity, Jon Heder is magnetically likable.  He’s a cheerful friend telling a bedtime story that took place in a small corner of the world.  Most people never explored these crystal waters and white sands traversed only by Marlon Brando and the native islanders.  This is a civilization unaware of the burden of conflict and pressure. 

Billy Zane does not go over the top with his portrayal of Marlon Brando.  The more subtle and aloof he is in each scene, the more convinced and accustomed I became to his peculiarities.  With Fishman’s script, Zane delivers a handful of dynamics to Brando.  Early in the film, Brando tells Judge that his desire is to live in this Tahitian paradise forever.  He knows however that he must continue to make movies to eventually fund this lifestyle permanently.  Later in the film, it is easy to surmise why Brando feels that way.  While filming The Last Tango In Paradise, he is trapped in a phone booth where his fan base recognizes him.  It’s one of the few times when Billy Zane performs on Marlon Brando’s genuine discomfort, and it is terribly unsettling.  It’s awkwardly ironic that the most famous actor in the world is out of his element among a worldwide community of followers and devotees begging for pictures and autographs.

Like Marlon Brando and an eventual Bernie Judge, Waltzing With Brando wants you to leave the theater with a smirk on your face.  An attempt at achieving the impossible with absolute content does not have to be a miserable journey.  An effort to find ways to overcome challenges can deliver lifelong friendships and personal experiences that belong only to you.  Bernie Judge learned this through his friendship with Marlon Brando.

Waltzing With Brando is a thankfully rewarding experience, a brush with perfect happiness.

NOTE: Stay through the end credits because this “Marlon Brando” has a few treats in store for you.