Category: Michael J Fox

THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS

By Marc S. Sanders

Reader, it has been a hard week.  Hard because my flat screen has been on the fritz.  Finally, today at last, the Best Buy Geek Squad will be paying me a visit and working on a repair. In the meantime, I have had to relegate myself to one of the smaller flat screens within the household.  I feel dirty.  Cheap.  I can’t even look at myself.  Just look away!!!!  Considering the dire circumstances, I could never look at my next big film to review during the absence of my 9.0 sound system and 65 inches of viewing pleasure.  It would be a sin to watch a Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg piece anywhere else (unless it’s in the cinema).  Therefore, I settled, and I hit rock bottom.  I opted to for Netflix meh! 

All I have, all I can give you, all I can offer, all I can claim for you during this dark, sad time is Herbert Ross’ attempt at shaping a Michael J Fox thirty second MTV style 1980’s music video into a film.  The “film” is The Secret Of My Success. 

I recall seeing this movie at age 14 during a field trip to Washington DC with my eighth grade Yeshiva class.  Every time the dimply cute yuppie Canadian sensation from Family Ties and Back To The Future graced the screen, the girls in my class screamed with puppy love glee.  I liked Fox at that time.  I still do.  He was a bright guy and while not an actor like Brando or Olivier, he had a unique charm that defined the clean cut 1980s with knit ties and Benneton sweaters.  His unforgettable Alex P Keaton was the fictional cheerleader for the era of Ronald Reagan, and no one protested.

I recall the promise of The Secret Of My Success as being the vehicle that would elevate his tv persona to the big screen since he already had luck with Marty McFly and a healthy B-movie following with HBO airings of Teen Wolf (a much better movie than it ever deserves to be). Regrettably, this film never landed.  It’s most glaring failure is that it never even lives up to its title.

The assembly of Herbert Ross’ romantic, New York, yuppie comedy occupies itself so much with music montages.  It’s as guilty of its own indulgence as Rocky IV.  How many times must we see a grinning Michael J Fox hustle through the concrete jungle of the city and then through skyscraper cubicle hallways within a white collared business world?  Night Ranger is the ‘80s hair band who provides most of the movie soundtrack and they owe much to Michael J Fox as the face that accompanies their work with trinkling keyboards and electric guitars with the raspy roar of their lead singer.  If Michael J Fox is not walking down streets where apparently supermodels live to turn their heads (I saw you Cindy Crawford), he’s got a pen wedged between his teeth and he’s pulling huge three ring binders off of shelves while doing an all nighter.  This is oh so boring.  In 1987 however, it is all a couple of Teen Beat readers needed in their lives.  I can watch Meryl Streep or Gary Oldman read a three-ring binder.  Michael J Fox just doesn’t have a knack for this skill.

Fox plays Kansas farm boy Brantley Foster.  Now that he has earned a business degree, he has enormous aspirations to climb the top of the New York corporate ladder and make a success of himself with a “beautiful secretary.”  Because, you know, you can’t make it without a secretary, much less a beautiful secretary. 

Upon relocating into a roach infested apartment, Brantley’s plans fall through, and he has to beg his super rich Uncle Howard (Richard Jordan) into giving him a job in the mail room of his building.  Brantley encounters a beautiful blond executive named Christy (Helen Slater) amid a sea of uptight middle-aged men.  The depth of this attraction only goes so far as fantasizing about her walking towards him in a cheesy, glittery pink evening gown with a keyboard and saxophone chiming in.  On the side is Howard’s bored trophy wife Vera (Margaret Whitton) crowding young Brantley in an illicit Mrs. Robinson kind of affair.  Let me clarify.  Vera is married to Brantley’s Uncle Howard.  So, Brantley is being terrorized by Aunt Vera.

For the purposes of ridiculous farce, that might be funny for a moment.  However, The Secret Of My Success takes forever to arrive at the farce it could have hinged on.  Instead, Brantley has to discover a way into the white-collar world when he comes upon an empty office and bears the fictional name of Carlton Whitfield to justify his suits and his motivation to work in the heart of the corporate world.

I noted that the film does not live up to the title.  When Brantley is working the persona of Whitfield, we never get an idea of his brilliant ideas for business success and operations.  We never learn what turned Uncle Howard’s high-rise building into the towering reputation it apparently stands upon.  We never understand the threat of a shareholder’s takeover that Howard and his team fear is imminent.  Where’s the value in anything that Brantley is doing to be that corporate hero and what is he trying to improve or salvage?

Instead, we are left with a very poor chemistry pairing between Helen Slater and Michael J Fox.  Slater is flat out boring with no dynamic to her.  If you want to see how to deliver any variation of a line in a flat, monotone way, then observe what she has to offer.  Fox is on another level of energy that Slater cannot match and Herbert Ross and the script from Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr (Top Gun, Legal Eagles) chooses to occupy itself more with this romance than the corporate world at play.

The following two years after this film’s release would do better for this hustle and bustle setting with Oliver Stone’s cynical Wall Street and Mike Nichols romantic comedy Working Girl.  The latter film follows a near exact blueprint of The Secret Of My Success.  Yet, it wins because we actually see the main character, portrayed by Melanie Griffith, actually demonstrate her prowess for the cutthroat world of business power and politics.  By comparison, Michael J Fox just wants to play hooky and make out in the back of a limousine.

A last-ditch effort is made though when the big wigs assemble for a weekend getaway. What seems like an attempt at bedroom farce barely gets started with the players climbing staircases and tip toing behind doors and hopping into bed together and blah blah blah.  It doesn’t serve, however, because the idiot plot intrudes where everyone has to act as if they have no idea of who is sleeping with who and who is Brantley and who is Whitfield amid the fast-talking dialogue edited within.  You want to scream at the screen and tell everyone to shut up because this can all be explained in sixty seconds.

Again, as Mike Nichols’ Oscar nominated film eventually proved, there was a better film to be made here for Michael J Fox.  It could have included all of the cynical realities that go with the natures of a corporate American beast.  Instead, The Secret Of My Success relies on music video montages with the teardrop keyboards and the yearning saxophone that seemed like a requisite for the adoring Michael J Fox of the 1980s. 

Enough already!!!!  I need to cleanse my palette.  GEEK SQUAD, WHERE ARE YOU????? 

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III

By Marc S. Sanders

I think Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis forgot one thing about Back To The Future Part III. It was supposed to be a time travel movie. Sure, Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) travels back to the Hill Valley of the Old West in the year 1885, but once he gets there, there is not a lot of material for the beloved DeLorean.

The film picks up immediately where the last film cliff hanged. Marty is left trapped in 1955, and he receives a letter sent to him 70 years earlier from his present day Doc Brown companion (Christopher Lloyd) originally from 1985. You still with me? When Marty realizes that Doc gets shot in the back by Mad Dog Tannen (character actor great, Thomas F Wilson), he arranges with the 1955 Doc to send him back to the Old West and prevent that from ever happening.

From there, the film turns into a staple Western. There’s the calvary, Indians on horseback, quick draw duels in the street, a saloon, stage coach and wagons. Most importantly, there’s a steam engine to push the DeLorean to the necessary 88 miles per hour to send our heroes back to the future. That dilemma is solved quickly and early on. They now just have to wait for the train to arrive.

So the film calms down to allow a charming Mary Steenburgen as Clara Clayton, a schoolteacher, to capture the affection of the good ol’ Doc. When the romance seems impossible though, we get a depressed Doc. A depressed Doc Brown is never good for a movie. Consider this. It’d be so easy to just wait for the moment to travel back in time. However, obstacles get in the way, right? In the fantastic first film, Marty has to play guitar at the school dance to get the necessary first kiss between his parents thereby solidifying his existence. That’s fun…and then he kills it while performing “Johnnie B. Goode.” Here, the moment to time travel is approaching, but it can’t happen because Doc is depressed. What’s so fun about that?

Like Part II, Part III is watchable. It’s not terrible by any means. It’s just a little stale. The best gag, however, is Marty taking on the name of “Clint Eastwood” to build his status in the town. This allows a lot of inside jokes. What would’ve sent this film into the stratosphere is if they got the legend himself to make at least a cameo. Alas…. I can dream and wonder.

Back To Future Part III ends the film on a sweet message similar to what you get from other fantasies like The Wizard Of Oz or Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. It reminds me that despite its shortcomings, the entire Future trilogy is great to share with the whole family. No doubt, there’s always something to look at and focus on.

Still, some movies that require focus specifically, takes work. The first film allowed me to wonder. Wonder if all of this could be true one day. Wonder how they thought all this up. Wonder how Marty is actually going to get back to the future.

If I have to choose, I’d rather not focus. I’d rather just wonder.

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II

By Marc S. Sanders

Back To The Future Part II is a paint by numbers or recipe film more than just a film. This has to be done, so that that can be done, cook on high for just over two hours and all will be wrapped up. Because it is so focused on covering all bases it forgets the wonder and fun of the original film, and just gets down to business. Watching this film makes you feel like dad just won’t throw the football around with you in the front yard. He’s got work to do.

The sequel picks up immediately where the first film ended with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) taking Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and his girlfriend Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) to a very zany looking future in the year 2015, complete with flying cars, Jaws 19, the abolition of lawyers, and opportunities to get a redesign of your body complete with a replacement of your spleen and colon just like Doc explains. When an elderly Biff Tannen gets a hold of a sports encyclopedia, he travels back in time to 1955 to tell his younger self to make bets he can’t lose. Now the future is entirely changed, riddled with crime, and Biff in absolute power. Worst of all, the brute is married to Lorraine, Marty’s mom (Lea Thompson, regrettably not given much to do this time around). So, Doc and Marty need to travel to 1955 to set things right all over again.

Look, if you were gonna make a sequel to Back To The Future, this is likely what the script was going to spit out. It’s a watchable film. However, it’s lost the soul of the original installment. It feels like an office project. The comedy is absent. A long sequence shows a middle age Marty in 2015 talking on video phone remotely with his bullying boss, and getting fired, with fax machines all over the house spitting out the message as well. This is supposed to leave me in awe? This is funny?

The second half of the film in 1955 has Marty pursuing Biff the bully while trying to get the sports book back. Biff, played by Thomas F Wilson, is more or less doing the same thing as the first film. Only he’s not the dumb buffoon we laughed at the first time. He doesn’t have George to bully around this time. You realize Biff and George made a perfect comedic pair. That’s missing here. So he bullies some little kids and with extreme harshness and tries to kill Marty on several occasions. It’s not so funny this time. It’s cruel.

A fun motif (that also carries forward in Part III) is that the actors are playing their characters at different ages 30-60 years apart from one another. Fox, Wilson and Shue also play their kids or grandkids. A nerdy Marty Jr is nerdy, but not quite funny. Fox is not doing the fantastic humor that Crispin Glover did as George in the first film. He’s just wearing an oversize jacket with his jeans inside out and squeaking his voice. Meh…not funny, just there.

Robert Zemeckis’ sequel is just okay. It’s disappointing because he and his collaborator Bob Gale worked so inventively on the first film. The construction is solid. I still love the various transformations of Hill Valley, California. If the film were made today that’d all be done with CGI. I appreciate the texture in the construction of the town’s past, present and future. Each time period allows me to look around and see what’s replaced what and so on. So, I’m truly grateful for that.

All and all though, Zemeckis and Gale had all the right ideas. They just didn’t have the best execution in mind.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

By Marc S. Sanders

One of the best fantasy films of all time is Robert Zemeckis’ Back To The Future. No matter how many times I see it I’m astounded by the imagination and attention to detail that is invested in its script penned by Zemeckis and Bob Gale.

First, there is the set that stands in for the town of Hill Valley, California. To set up the film which took place in the film’s present shooting period of 1985, everything appears modern from Pepsi Free soda to Huey Lewis and the News and Marty McFly’s (Michael J Fox) parka vest.

Through a set of circumstances, when Marty travels back in time to November 5, 1955, suddenly the hit song is “Mr. Sandman” and his vest is mistaken as a life preserver. But look at Hill Valley!!!! Twin Pines Mall is now Twin Pines Ranch belonging to a farmer. A exercise workout locale is the corner diner where the future mayor is a waiter, and Marty’s domestic subdivision isn’t even built yet. Zemeckis and his crew are religiously faithful to observing the “science” of time travel.

His minister so to speak is Doctor Emmett Brown (a should have been Oscar nominated Christopher Lloyd; absolutely brilliant in his bug eyed, crazy hair, fun loving role). Doc’s time machine comes by means of a DeLorean automobile – perfectly sci fi like. Marty recruits the younger version of Doc to get him back to his present day, or Doc’s future.

Complications occur when Marty interferes with how his parents originally met thereby causing his mother, (Lea Thompson also superb and maybe should’ve been nominated as well) a teen at the time, into falling in love with Marty. Now Marty is at risk of being erased from existence, while his mother has the hots for him.

Complications are compounded endlessly in Back To The Future, and it’s easy to learn all that is at stake. That’s only the skeleton of the nominated screenplay. The dialogue works beautifully as well. Imagine telling someone living in 1955 that Ronald Reagan is President in 1985, and see how he’ll respond. The conservative culture of 1955 vs the free liberal lifestyle 1985 clash so well in the film’s comedy.

Outstanding performances make up one of the greatest casts of all time. It’s difficult to believe that Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty. Michael J Fox is so perfectly natural in his hysteria and cool, yet panicky, swagger. Crispin Glover is hilarious as Marty’s ultra-nerd dad, George McFly, and Thomas F Wilson is one of the top ten on- screen bullies of all times as the towering buffoon Biff Tannen.

Without question, Back To The Future is one of the most imaginative films ever made. It has wonder, comedy, suspense, song (yes…we even learn how Chuck Berry came to play “Johnny B Goode”), and brilliant characterizations. It is wholly original in its creativity. It’s fast moving, and it’s great fun.

Credit also goes to Alan Silvestri’s catchy orchestral soundtrack. It is magnificent in accompanying the adventure and misunderstandings that occur. You see the film once, and you never forget Silvestri’s music.

Back To The Future is a magnificent film that every kid should eventually see.