James L. Brooks doesn’t make movies too often, so when he does, it’s something of an occasion. Thanks to his role as the co-creator or executive producer of “Taxi,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and “The Simpsons,” the man has more money than God, who probably comes to James L. Brooks for a loan when he’s a little light on the green. In other words, the man can afford to be choosy with his projects, which is why he only makes about two movies a decade (as writer/director/producer). My favorite Brooks film is the hilarious and honest BROADCAST NEWS.

Holly Hunter plays the lead, a feisty but overly emotional network news producer named Jane Craig. She doesn’t love her job; she is her job. Things are working well in her world alongside her coworker Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) until a dumb, inexperienced, but highly attractive new reporter named Tom Grunick (William Hurt) is hired. Before we meet them as adults, each gets a brief prologue where youthful counterparts act out key moments from their childhood: dimwitted but hardworking Tom gives his dad another bad report card but vows to keep trying. Aaron gets beaten up by bullies after giving the speech at his high school graduation (He vows to see the world while they’ll never make more than $19,000 a year). Jane refuses to sleep while she’s on a deadline, mailing letters to a legion of pen pals. The introductions are cute, but more importantly they serve as mental placeholders: throughout the film we keep the child versions of Tom, Aaron, and Jane in mind, and Brooks seems to suggest, through the trio’s impressive work ethic but immaturity about relationships, how as far as we may think we come, we inevitably remain emotional children (A theme that’s also present in his AS GOOD AS IT GETS).

NEWS is a mixture of comedy and surprisingly insightful social commentary. Several characters, particularly the high-minded Aaron, bemoan the death of true hard journalism in favor of the softer version practiced by “salesmen” like Tom. After watching documentaries like OUTFOXED, it’s becoming painfully clear that some of what Aaron (and, by extension, James L. Brooks) feared has come to pass: and even though there are numerous 24 hour news networks, with an unlimited amount of time with which to share rich, detailed news stories, they all speak in tiny quick bits of information that make the fake ones shown in BROADCAST NEWS seem like epics (Fox isn’t the only culprit here either, though they get most of the blame).

At the same time BROADCAST NEWS carries the double-whammy of an involving love story and the light comedy of Brooks’ script. In the most famous sequence, Aaron finally gets his shot at anchoring a weekend newscast, but finds himself struck with the worst case of flop sweat ever. As he reads the articles, beads of sweat form on his brow and begin to slide down his cheeks. When the broadcast cuts to prerecorded pieces they try to blow-dry his shirt or change it altogether but it’s no use. The chemistry between Hurt, Brooks, and Hunter is perfect, even though Hunter was a last minute replacement for the originally cast Debra Winger, who dropped out because of a surprise pregnancy. Jane is left with a difficult choice: the good-looking guy who doesn’t stimulate her intellectually, or the average looking guy who is too honest for his own good.

I won’t spoil what happens but I will say it’s clear that Jane, the true hero of BROADCAST NEWS, made the right choice. It isn’t an easy one for the movie or for the character: a straighter, happier ending would have pleased more audience members and studio executives in the short run, but Brooks’ decision was proven right in the final accounting. His film has aged better than most of its contemporaries from the romantic comedy genre.

IF YOU LIKED BROADCAST NEWS, CHECK OUT: THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940), Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Katherine Hepburn in another classic romantic comedy with lots of odd angles and fuzzy math.

THE BAD

If you believe director Steven Spielberg and writers Bob Gale, Robert Zemeckis, and John Milius, 1941 is a misunderstood classic. Europeans, Spielberg notes, remain the only people who “get” the movie and praise him for it. But European women don’t shave their armpits, so what do they know?

1941 was far ahead of its time in tone and content, they say. That’s a load of bull, says I, and when these guys are really being honest, they know it. “I didn’t really know what I was doing on this movie,” Spielberg admits in a more revealing moment, and watching this disaster of a picture makes it abundantly clear. 1941 has individual bits of humor, of excitement, even of emotional honesty, but over the course of the nearly two and a half hours of its directors cut (the original theatrical version was thirty minutes shorter) nothing adds up to anything resembling a coherent whole.

Zemeckis and Gale’s script was originally a black comedy about Los Angeles paranoia in the days after Pearl Harbor entitled “The Night the Japs Attacked.” Spielberg chose to go in a different direction, turning the project into a slapstick orgy of explosions and cartoon violence. Judging from the finished product, explosions were a big selling point in the cinema of the late 1970s. 1941 contains a couple dozen of them, and that doesn’t include the house that collapses, or the ferris wheel that rolls off its supports into the sea, or the plane that crashes, or the riot that breaks out on Hollywood Boulevard, or the other plane that also crashes. The trailers talked the movie up as “The most explosive comedy spectacular ever filmed!” This is an indisputable fact; 1941 contains more explosions than a accident in a fireworks factory. But it is telling that they choose to play up its combustibility, rather than, say, the quality of the humor.

Ironically, all the best stuff in the picture is quiet, character humor. The single funniest joke is so quiet it’s hard to notice (The Japanese Captain and his Nazi advisor talk so fluently to one another in their own language it’s several scenes before you realize they shouldn’t be able to understand each other). Slim Pickens plays Hollis P. Wood, a farmer who is captured by the Japanese and ordered to direct them to America. “Right here!” he responds when Toshiro Mifune as the sub captain asks “WHERE IS HOLLYWOOD?” Pickens’ tiny part was expanded after he was cast; this whole hilarious exchange wasn’t even included in the original script (a document whose most frequently uttered line is “AAAAAAAA!”). Interestingly, though the film contains more shrapnel than John Kerry’s rear, only a single character is killed, and he’s the evil Nazi. Apparently guns really don’t kill people and war is not hell, more of an annoyance along the line of a really bad traffic jam.

There are about two dozen important characters in 1941 and most of them are unappealing. ANIMAL HOUSE’s Tim Matheson plays an Army officer desperate to get laid, and Nancy Allen is the reporter with an airplane fetish he tries to con into the cockpit. Their journey in an unidentified, radioless airplane is crucial to the plot but adds little in the way of comedy. Dan Aykroyd plays an Army mechanic who provides the comedian plenty of his favorite kind of material: lengthy monologues of procedural minutia (One imagines that Aykroyd is the kind of person who really enjoys reading the instructions to program a VCR). He and the rest of platoon (which also includes a wasted John Candy) get loads of scenes but, again, little in the way of legitimate humor or story relevance. John Belushi - who would team with Aykroyd a year later in one of the greatest musical comedies ever, THE BLUES BROTHERS - plays Wild Bill Kelso, a crazed national guard pilot who chases phantom Japanese planes across the American West, screaming continuously throughout (Presumably the scene where Kelso’s superiors in Alabama wonder where he’s disappeared to was cut from the script). Let’s not even discuss the complete embarrassment that is the obscure twist of fate that provides ample screentime to a gun-toting nerd and his ventriloquist dummy. The only performers who rise above the queasy material are a delightful Robert Stack as General Stilwell, a real-life figure who provides the only voice of reason in this cinematic sea of insanity, and Bobby Di Cicco as a amoral kid trying to win back a girl he’s lost. His battle for her affections in a USA dance contest provide some much welcomed relief from people unnecessary blowing crap up

1941 wants to be an homage to big classic Hollywood comedies, but it’s too messy without charm, too silly without genuine comedy. An explosion is not funny unless there is a reason why it should be so, and 1941 offers no explanations for itself. Though the director’s cut is an interesting study in excess and chaos, it should have been packaged alongside the original version to allow for comparison. It is possible that the trimmed 1941 is more focused and effective, and that this version is the one that Europeans love, and perhaps with good reason. Or, perhaps not.

INSTEAD OF 1941, CHECK OUT: AIRPLANE! (1980), a far funnier contemporary of 1941, with far funnier things to say about aviation. The best actor in both films is Robert Stack.

THE UGLY

Musicals tend to be a little campy; you need just the right tone to pull off a movie where the characters sing to one another, and when your talent, or your direction, or your music isn’t up to snuff, things can get awfully dicey. Such is the case with the monumentally silly 1980 musical THE APPLE. When half your actors can’t sing and your music is cheesier than Foreigner, maybe you’d be better off not making a musical in the first place.

THE APPLE is the story of a world in chaos. In the far-flung futuristic year of 1994, the BIM, or Boogalow International Music, controls the world. Its fiendish leader, a shrunken-head of a man named Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal - yes THAT Vladek Sheybal!) rules over all the world with a sequin-clad iron fist. If you want to play a game, you must play BIMball. If you’re sick, you get BIMmuinzed. As ordered by BIM, everyone must dress in BIM paraphernalia, mostly lots of glittery robes and eye shadow for the women, lots of hideous suits and eye shadow for the men. Yes, the horrific world-gone-made of THE APPLE is totally corrupt, devoutly corporate, and dressed like it’s Saturday night at Studio 54.

Everyday at 4:00 PM, the world stops for mandatory exercise set to the shrill, disco-lite sounds of the BIM. Firefighters put their hoses down and bust a move. Surgeons relinquish their scalpels and get loose, followed immediately by a brisk rotation of getting funky. Health-conscious citizens already in a gym adhering to their own regiment of light cardio must cease their exercises and join in with the BIM’s preferred step aerobics technique.

The political dissent against the jiggling totalitarianism of the BIM regime are two earnest and talented folk singers from Moose Jaw, Canada named Alphie and Bibi. As far as I could tell, their only “talent” was in coaxing bass and drum sounds from an acoustic guitar. Otherwise they’re just as annoying and dumb as all the other musicians in THE APPLE. Anyway, their treacly song “Love, the Universal Melody” nearly steals the 1994 Worldvision Song Competition from the BIM’s Dandi and Pandi, so Mr. Boogalow tries to seduce them into joining his heinous alliance. In one of the worst musical numbers in cinema history, Dandi (Alan Love), a tone-deaf Brit with an impressive afro, seduces Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart) into eating “The Apple,” and signing a BIM contract. The line that convinced me that BIM was the tops was, “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire! / Meet an actual, actual, actual vampire!” What the hell does a vampire have to do with eating apples and signing record contracts? And why is Alan Love costumed in a tiny golden thong when he says it? The entire situation is baffling: why did the producers hire an unattractive guy who can’t sing to play a rock musician who busts a move with his unshapely ass cheeks hanging out?

Bibi is transformed into a rock star by BIM (curiously, she ends up looking and sounding a lot like Pink) and heads off on tour, while Alphie mopes around in his apartment and feels up his fat, stereotypically Jewish landlord. You can’t make this stuff up, folks!

THE APPLE’s final hour is a nonstop parade of tragically bad music, including an earnest ode to the drug use, and, in particular, methamphetamine (“America the land of the free, is shooting up with coke energy / Pumping power, by the hour: SPEED!”) and a sex jam that would have made Marvin Gaye and Barry White write their congressperson and demand a ban on offensive music. I’d share a little, but I’m already in enough trouble with the FCC. (It is recommended you watch the DVD with the subtitles on so you can appreciate the rampant dirtiness of these words).

THE APPLE is, in a nutshell, a nonstop barrage of terrible music set to adequate dancing performed by an army of gay stereotypes. By the time half the cast is ascending to heaven led by a ghostly white Cadillac, you have to admit it to yourself that there never has been, and potentially never will again be, a movie as absurd and pathetic yet compelling and entertaining as THE APPLE. If this isn’t the greatest camp musical of all time, it should be; anything more absurd than this would probably give me a stroke.

Oh look at the time; 4:00. You know what that means:

HEY HEY HEY!
BIM’S ALL THE WAY!

HEY HEY HEY!
BIM’S ALL THE WAY!
HEY HEY HEY!
BIM’S ALL THE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

We love you Poop Shoot goodnight!!

IF YOU LIKED THE APPLE, CHECK OUT: FAME (1980), for we are all going to live forever.