I really gotta see College Confidential now, don't I?
10 minutes into this and I have to give if 5 stars by default. Not simply because I know this is a tremendous epic effort of a singular, incisive American pop-culture satirical force, but because this is basically the movie equivalent of looking around my father-in-law's workroom. And... his workroom is friggin' fab!
So, I know (thanks to an intro from a friendly rep from AGFA before the screening that Joe Dante has said that he just sees this as a bunch of "stuff;" but editing and flow matters, pacing matters, and as an editor, taking himself as well as a college audience raised on some/much of this, Dante knew what he was doing here - at least to get a laugh whenever possible.
Examples: like when he has the clip of the kids coming in to the clubhouse or whatever to watch something and then it cuts to a nudie movie with two ladies taking off their clothes by the rocks. Or the kid in the one Western show saying "and rmthis here dog" and it cuts right to a close-up of Lassie in another show. Or in a Bible program and the line "as the hour of the lord drew near" and it it cuts to a killer Gorilla movie. There's a plethora of examples like that.
It's Free Association cutting, but often it isnt; it's madness and there's a method, as sometimes Dante and Davison let a set piece play out longer than you expect because, hey, who doesnt want to see Elisha Cook Jr in College Confidential. Other times, the Movie Orgy is what it may be most easily pegged as: flipping through channels - at a time when kids or anyone couldn't do that so easily. It works like the brain does to make connections between references... only this has 10,000 of them. And sometimes, well, what else are you going to cut to when Jimminy Cricket is in a Pinocchio commercial than... Elsa Martinelli?! Sure! And the Abbot and Costello scene is legit a laugh Riot.
It's a crazy, uproariously funny, surreal, abstract, proto-Keyboard-Cat cameoing cornucopia-smorgasbord of mid 20th century Escapism, advertising, propaganda (both nuclear and political purposes, from cops to the first televangelists to of course why giving bonds to Vietnam is important, you listen to Ann Margaret now) and shtick. When you are watching things on TV, you almost don't know how maddening as well as entertaining (and, indeed, crap) it all is until its presented as such. Or maybe we always knew.
I understand all the better how the Boomers, who were glued to TVs, fed ads for cigarettes, peanut butter and fear, and oh right those nice youngsters the Beatles (or that one cringe bit with Elvis and the hound dog), got attitudes about certain parts of life, the opposite sex, and living they may not have been conscious of (how could they be). It's a Boob Tube but a Dream Machine and Magic Store. And it would be the most staggering coincidence to me that the makers of The Atomic Cafe didn't seen it at some point. The whole thing feels like a miracle. And a cacophony. It's what Advertisers and Schlockmeisters and Hacks and the Government have wanted us to see from the start.
Unique. Look out for giant grasshoppers and Nixon reading the Checkers speech!
