Movies You May Not Have Seen #3

[gwyn]

My normal disposition is toward the melancholy and the dramatic, and I've never had much use for people who won't watch serious or sad or dramatic movies and just dismiss them as "depressing," because I think that great art shouldn't have to be limited to a certain disposition or emotion. As much as I'm annoyed by the Academy Awards' refusal to equate comedic performances and films with quality and reward them with top honors, I'm also annoyed by much of the moviegoing public for its refusal to support really good, serious, and often tragic movies.

But of course, lately I've had the big hankering for comedy and romance, as a way to try to push back my own really tragic thoughts and try to find something, anything that will lift my spirits. I've been catching up on all my zombie movies (because... zombies!), and watching repeated showings of romantic comedies even if I don't like them that much. Just... you know, because. One movie that finally came out on DVD a while back that never fails to make me smile is I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a very early effort by Robert Zemeckis (and produced by Steven Spielberg), he of the enormous box office smashes like the Back to the Future series, Romancing the Stone, Cast Away, Forrest Gump, and of course, the gimicky things like Gump, Contact, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, Polar Express, etc. He's always been an envelope-pusher in terms of technology in filmmaking, but what a lot of people forget is that when he works small, he can create really lovely, intimate character portraits, even if the humor is broad or slapsticky (as in the way-underseen Used Cars). I Wanna Hold Your Hand is a perfect example of what he can do when he works small.

It's a charming movie about six teenagers in New Jersey who will do pretty much anything they can to see the Beatles when they come to NY for their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. If anyone watched much TV in the '80s, they would know who Wendy Jo Sperber is, and she is the most maniacal of the fans in this group of girls (though I should add, one of the six is a boy who is every bit the fan that the girls are), and she is frequently hysterical in her slapstick-manic energy. She's like a Tasmanian Devil with a scratchy girl's voice and a Jersey accent. Nancy Allen plays the least-interested girl; she is not a fan at all and is much more concerned with her upcoming wedding, but in the end, she's the one who has the close call with the Beatles, something which changes her life forever. Most of the movie is taken up with the friends running around NY trying desperately to get tickets (their methods involve everything from trying to sell fake Beatles bed sheets to winning a phone contest, my favorite Wendy Jo moment in the movie), and it runs the gamut from charming romance to physical pratfall comedy, but never really loses its way.

What I also love about this movie is that it perfectly captures a specific point in time when America was beginning to change drastically, and has all the right period pieces without ever seeming kitschy and overly nostalgic. Allen's character reflects the traditional sort of future-housewife innocence of a lot of middle-class girls of that era (and then her eyes are opened by the Beatles!), there's a much more aggressive and intelligent girl who you just know is going to end up publishing a magazine and living in a penthouse on Central Park or something, and a future hippie chick who's much more interested in folk music such as Bob Dylan's. So much about pop culture was at a crossroads in 1964, and the movie gives us a lovely slice of that within the context of this comedy about, well, fans and how fanatic they are. In the way the original Fever Pitch memoir by Nick Hornby (do NOT get me started on this American bastardization into basefuckingball) was the most cogent, funny, smart evocation of what it means to be a fan I've ever read, I Wanna Hold Your Hand captures just how fans really are, and never makes fun of them in the way almost every movie about fandoms has.

Comments

[cy-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm pretending that the American version of Fever Pitch doesn't exist. Only the version with Colin Firth will do.

I haven't seen I Wanna Hold Your Hand in ages. Thanks for reminding me of it!

[ciardhapagan.livejournal.com]

I loved that movie. And I agree, unlike other movies of that type this doesn't make fun of the fans. It actually inspired me to write a novel about a group of John Lennon and Yoko Ono fans that meet outside the Dakota on December 9, 1980. I wrote it out in long handhand in notebooks. I'm sure the writing is cringe worthy but I still have a fondness in my heart for those characters. I daydreamed about getting this novel published and a movie being made of it back then. Maybe someday I'll rewrite that novel...