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By Patrick Keller

December 31, 2004

One Year in Review or Another

This is the time of year when critics begin compiling their “Year in Review” lists in hopes of perhaps being seated next to Shelly Long or Lil Bow Wow at the People’s Choice Awards. This is all well and good, but here at ATB, where our yearly budget has been unceremoniously slashed, forcing layoffs of both our staff researchers and all four unpaid interns, we are forced to take a much less glamorous (and, admittedly, relevant) route. Yes, we will be (sort of) proudly presenting our own “Year in Review.” However, due to illness, tonight the part of 2004 will be played by 1987.

‘87 was a banner year for everything crap. The Golden Girls and Vanna reigned on television. A singing mouse won a Grammy, Benny won an Emmy, and Cher won an Oscar. Cher. The same woman who once performed sans ass coverage for a thousand screaming sailors (and then there was that “If I Could Turn Back Time” video...), who would follow-up her Academy Award-winning work with a gut-wrenching portrayal of a woman with mildly irritating hair issues on a variety of late-night television programs. In other news, Fred Astaire, John Huston, and Andy Warhol all croak, but, that’s all right, Who’s the Boss is on.

It was a dark time, and nowhere was it darker than in movie theaters, where it was darker than usual... The kind of dark that your eyes never fully adjust to, leading to all sorts of nasty stubbings. To put it in perspective: Steve Guttenberg released not one movie, not two movies, not five movies, but... well, five. Five! Star of CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC and P.S. YOUR CAT IS DEAD had a film in theaters every 2.4 months, a record that would go unrivaled until the Baldwin glut of the mid-90s. In 1987, Guttenberg was not only responsible for the fourth entry in the epic POLICE ACADEMY series, CITIZENS ON PATROL (which most critics agree should never have attempted to follow the heart-wrenching conclusion to the original trilogy, BACK IN TRAINING), but also the year’s highest grossing film, THREE MEN AND A PLOT DEVICE. This movie’s massive take can only be accounted for by the fact that its primary competition at the box office was EARNEST GOES TO CAMP.

THREE MEN was the dramatization of the modern bachelor’s reaction to being forced to care for a babbling incontinent with a drooling problem and no motor skills to speak of. But enough about Tom Selleck, there was also an infant they had to contend with. Adapted from the French original, CROISSANT, FROMAGE ET BEBE, the film would go on to spawn a sequel, THREE MEN AND A LITTLE LADY, which would fare poorly at the box office, thus sparing us THREE RETIREES AND A PRE-MENSTRUAL TERROR.

Still, Guttenberg couldn’t be in every movie released that year, although he tried. When studio heads realized how impractical it would be to put him in everything, they instead turned to the Guttenberg-lite talents of Emilio Estevez (STAKEOUT), Jim Belushi (THE PRINCIPAL), and Andrew McCarthy, who nearly out-Guttenberged Guttenberg in MANNEQUIN, a retelling of Pinocchio, only in his version Geppetto and his wooden creation have more sex and a gayer sidekick.

There was even movement to create the next generation Guttenbergs, with the drafting of Kirk Cameron to star in LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON, 96-minutes of director Rod Daniel playing Guess Who’s Retarded? And then there’s TEEN WOLF, TOO, quite possibly the only feature-length masturbation metaphor starring Jason Bateman.

The list of celluloid corpses that litter the aisles of 1987 are staggering: OVER THE TOP. LEONARD PART 6. OVERBOARD. SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE. JAWS 4: THE REVENGE. Let’s review that list again: A growling shark, an action film wherein the world’s greatest superhero joins Greenpeace, a romantic comedy about kidnapping and extortion, Dr. Huxtable saving the world from vegetarian supervillains, and a movie about the high-intrigue world of (wait for it)... professional arm wrestling.

Clearly the drug problem in the ‘80s was far worse than we had ever imagined.

And, yet, somehow things got worse. For 1987 had further to go, down to depths that not even Guttenberg would mine. I speak, of course, of none other than ISHTAR, a film that became shorthand for overlong, overblown, overbudget, and, worse, under-good. In the intervening years, physicists have studied ISHTAR extensively, as it is their only chance to get first-hand, earthbound experience with an honest-to-goodness black hole: Screens showing the film exhibited an uncanny ability to suck joy out of the surrounding ten-mile radius. Anyone who crossed the movie’s “event horizon” found themselves overcome with an intense need to quote Nietzsche and listen to the Smiths.

As a test, scientists at MIT put a box of happy, well-adjusted puppies in a screening room and retreated to a safe distance, which happened to be Wisconsin. They were never heard from again, presumably because they were to depressed to face returning to collect the results, although employees at the theater sometimes discover curious gnaw marks on boxes of Junior Mints and hear phantom howls coming from empty projection booths. Also, the place stinks of rotting puppies.

Physicists, the remaining few able to face the task, theorized that 1987 represented such an incredibly strong concentration of suck that the year was, in fact, responsible for every bad movie ever made. It is a difficult concept to grasp, much like the idea that space is infinite and expanding, and sounds like the sort of mental acrobatics that scientists would make up to impress girls at parties, but it’s also difficult to dispute. Time, in an Einsteinian universe, eventually reverses itself, meaning that 1987 has already occurred, and will occur again.

All of which must be a big comfort to Steve Guttenberg, who could really use the work...

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