Only now does it occur to me... MR. WRONG (1996)

Only now does it occur to me... could MR. WRONG, a screwball anti-romantic comedy and notorious box office bomb starring Ellen DeGeneres in her only live-action-feature leading role (to date), directed by longtime John Carpenter crony Nick Castle, and co-written by sci-fi/horror legend Richard Matheson's son Chris and THE MORNING SHOW's showrunner Kerry Ehrin... be as bad as they say? 

The answer: sort of!



This, a project of such aforementioned and bizarre pedigree, is ultimately a delivery system for a series of wacky situations and horrified expressions in the vein of Jerry Lewis (with a messy pixie cut).

 It begins with a Saul Bass-inspired credits sequence



 and ends with a gunfight in Mexico and a ride into the sunset.

In between, a number of events take place. 

Ellen's character Martha is a television producer for a local San Diego morning show

starring Robert Goulet (of Broadway and BEETLEJUICE fame), 

 
 

which seems to weirdly prefigure Ellen's own rise and fall as a daytime TV star as well as co-writer Kerry Ehrin's own involvement with Apple TV's THE MORNING SHOW.

Ellen's character, who is styled exactly as she appears on her own popular sitcom ELLEN (1994-1998), is struggling to find "Mr. Right." 

And that there is a reference to BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE inserted by co-writer Chris Matheson, who also wrote all three BILL AND TED films.


She is aided in her quest by a Best Friend™(the likeable Ellen Cleghorne, of ARMAGEDDON and COYOTE UGLY)

 

who, because it was the 1990s, is contractually obligated to eat Lite yogurt throughout and provide generic encouragement.

Despite her own assistant (John Livingstone, of THE NET and EDTV) clearly being the screenplay's idea of her "perfect match hiding in plain sight," 


Here he is, asking her out to go see Richard Burton in BLUEBEARD (1972), an ignominious film I have reviewed on this very site.

Ellen still goes on the prowl and has an accidental meet-cute with Bill Pullman (who would soon wipe his involvement with this project from the cultural memory with the near-immediate one-two punch of INDEPENDENCE DAY and LOST HIGHWAY).

 

Pullman is depicted as a suave, cowboy-poet who's the heir to an enormous fortune. He seems perfect, at least until she discovers that, wait... he's... Mr. Wrong!

  

The warning signs are not subtle, and the comedy is played as broad as a barn door. There are more understated Pepé le Pew-centric episodes of THE LOONEY TUNES. First, he takes her to a convenience store to shoplift Blatz beers, crushing the empties on his forehead and flinging them from his convertible at bystanders.

 
I fail to understand how this is a red flag tho

Next, he love-bombs her with a bounty of unwanted gifts and comes to her window in the night dressed, inexplicably, as a clown on stilts.

 

This is probably the closest the film comes to overtly referencing HALLOWEEN. As I'm sure you all know, MR. WRONG's director (Nick Castle) played behind-the-mask Michael Myers in 1978's HALLOWEEN. He was also the co-writer of Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

Just when she thinks it can't get any worse, Ellen is also stalked by Pullman's ex Inga––a zany character played by two-time Oscar nominee Joan Cusack.

 

She probably gets about ten minutes of screentime, but she acquits herself with trashy élan.

This leads Ellen to hire a private eye (fellow Oscar nominee Dean Stockwell of BLUE VELVET, QUANTUM LEAP, and DUNE fame) who uncovers that Inga was involved in a plot to assassinate Stevie Nicks

 

 

which feels like a bizarrely specific detail for this screenplay to concoct. Dean Stockwell also, mostly acquits himself. He, Cusack, and Ellen Cleghorne might be the only ones who do.

Yep, this thing is a slapstick mess. It struggles with tone, and there's zero chemistry between the leads: romantic, comedic, or otherwise. Castle does a slick enough job assembling the picture (there are a few striking Hitchcock-inspired visuals and transitions), but the entire film feels like studio execs were trying force an Ellen-sized peg into a Jim Carrey-shaped hole.

Fourteen months after the release of MR. WRONG, Ellen would go on to give her iconic "Yep, I'm gay" interview to TIME magazine. One can imagine that the ham-handed attempts to mold her into a blandly heteronormative studio asset played some role in this decision. 

Only now does it occur to me... FALLING IN LOVE (1984)

Only now does it occur to me... that I must say a few words about the romantic drama FALLING IN LOVE (1984), which, despite being generally forgotten today, seems to have maintained a small but fierce cult following. 

I could tell you that it stars Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, and that they have been occasionally celebrated for their chemistry here despite De Niro coming across as brooding and sinister even in moments like their Christmas meet-cute, whereupon they accidentally collide with heaping bags of Christmas presents including the clichéd "pair of skis with a bow on it," which, I would wager, is gifted far more often in Hallmark movies than in real life.

I could tell you that it's inspired mostly by David Lean and Noel Coward's seminal BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945),

 

which means that the two are already married, and their long-suffering spouses are played by, respectively, MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE's Jane Kaczmarek

and David Clennon ("Palmer" from John Carpenter's THE THING).

 

I could tell you that it features bit parts by Victor Argo (KING OF NEW YORK, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST), Frances Conroy (SIX FEET UNDER, THE AVIATOR), and Kenneth Welsh ("Windom Earle" on TWIN PEAKS), but in larger supporting roles, it manages to completely waste both multi-Oscar winner Dianne Wiest (HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS) 

 and Harvey Keitel (TAXI DRIVER, RESERVOIR DOGS).

They languish in rote The Best Friend™ roles, dramaturgically existing only when they're on screen, to be used as nothing more than generic sounding boards for the protagonists.

But what I want to tell you about FALLING IN LOVE is that one of Streep and De Niro's first dates takes place in Manhattan's iconic Chinatown.

And that said date leads them to a peculiar 1970s arcade, where they are able to place coins in a machine to... play tic-tac-toe against a live chicken.

 

This was clearly a real, found location (the Chinatown Fair on Mott Street), featuring this incredible bit of bizarro entertainment. I love that the chicken makes its moves from a "Thinkin' Booth."

 

 

 

 

 

I love that De Niro gets in an argument with the chicken because it keeps winning.

 

 

 

 

I love that the prize it pays out is supposedly "a large bag of fortune cookies if you beat the chicken."

 

 

I love that when the chicken defeats you, there's a light-up sign announcing, "BIRD WINS."

 

This feels like something out of Werner Herzog's STROZEK (1978), which features the absurdist closing image of a coin-operated "dancing chicken" machine. 

 

This is the unequivocal high point of FALLING IN LOVE, and on this subject, I'm afraid I cannot be swayed.

See also: my thoughts on the animatronic bar fixture "Dirty Gertie" in Robert Altman's THREE WOMEN (1977).

Only now does it occur to me... THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL (1990)

Only now does it occur to me... that there's an incredibly specific TWIN PEAKS homage secreted within the awkward makeover rom-com THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL (originally released as DON'T TELL HER IT'S ME). 

First, I must explain the premise of the film, which features Steve Guttenberg playing a heavily made-up American cancer survivor who is the cartoonist of a "Ziggy"-adjacent comic strip. 

 

Unable to find love, his sister––Shelley Long, as an over-the-top Harlequin romance novelist in the mold of her "fashion plate" character from TROOP BEVERLY HILLS––

 

makes him over as a Kiwi biker named "Lobo" with a righteous mullet, somewhere between Mel Gibson's in LETHAL WEAPON, Chuck Norris' in THE HITMAN, Brian Bosworth's in STONE COLD, and Jean-Claude Van Damme's in HARD TARGET. 

 

This, obviously, works wonders on Jami Gertz (best known perhaps as "Star" from THE LOST BOYS) who falls for The Gute as hard as a character in a (leather) bodice-ripper.

 

 Perhaps it goes without saying that all of this is completely insane.

 

(Yes, the above two photos depict a scene in which legendary character actress Beth Grant (CHILD'S PLAY 2, DONNIE DARKO, THE DARK HALF, WONDERFALLS, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) is teaching Steve Guttenberg how to "do the sex" with an anatomically-accurate dummy. Note the ZIPPY THE PINHEAD comic in the background.)

Anyway, before you become too horrified, onto the semi-obscure TWIN PEAKS reference. Now, THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL was released on September 21, 1990: nine days before the highly anticipated premiere of TWIN PEAKS Season 2. The film features a supporting role by Agent Cooper himself, Kyle MacLachlan, as "Trout," a shady journalist and Guttenberg's rival for Jami Gertz's love. When we first meet him, he is being chased by a lawyer who believes his name to be "Mr. Renault."

Any TWIN PEAKS fan is deeply familiar with the surname, as the Renault brothers play a major role throughout the saga, and in the first season's finale––which aired four months prior––Agent Cooper was running a sting operation against Jacques Renault.

MacLachlan escapes the mysterious man, who is calling out "Mr. Renault!" throughout, and demands that his secretary bring him coffee: which, along with cherry pie, is Agent Cooper's favored vice.

The man continues calling for him as he continues to hide,

when who should appear but Mädchen Amick ("Shelly Johnson" on TWIN PEAKS) to shoot MacLachlan a knowing look.

MacLachlan proceeds to give a classically strange Agent Cooper-style speech to Jami Gertz about the importance of procreation 

before the mysterious man discovers his hiding spot

prompting MacLachlan to exclaim, "Your client is blowing smoke!"

A quasi-Lynchian rejoinder involving the most Lynchian of textures. Then the scene is over and the Renault business is never mentioned again. (MacLachlan has a few more scenes of being a sleazy jerk, prompting Jami Gertz to fall ever harder for Lobo Guttenberg.) Stumbling upon this sort of strange specificity and vintage obscurity is essentially the raison d'être of Junta Juleil's Culture Shock.