Matinee

Matinee

Matinee

Matinee

source: Matinee

"This is Lawrence Woolsey and ...." starts this movie in great style as a 1960's style of movie promo. The movie starts starts very well and only gets bogged down late in the film when a couple of kids get shut into a bomb shelter by mistake. This film portrait of the 1960's schlock entertainer Woolsey (as portrayed by John Goodman) continues to be his best film role. Goodman who is now one of the spokes people for Duncan Donuts (quickly putting Starbucks out of business), is perfect for the role of Woolsey. He is surrounded by a lot of old time talent & some younger folks who manage to put over an active film story. Two coups of this are the film within a film setting which is employed successfully with the cutting between them being made smoothly without losing the plot line and the melding of some old timers into the film in support. William Schallert is used very effectively in the MANT film within the film. Jesse White is just as effective as the guy who is trying to evaluate Woolsey's show. The film is a send up of lots of themes from Civil Defense, to the Missile Crisis, to movies in general, to sci-fi 1950's films, to spoofing life itself. There are even spoofs of characters within the film including a broad send-up of two Liberal Parents and their attitude towards raising their daughter. This film is loaded with everything including the theater sign which has now failed, "Fight Pay TV". If you like John Goodman, this is his best role to date outside of Dan on Roseanne, a must see film for the Goodman fan.

Not really a horror movie, per se, but a family comedy that revolves around B-horror movies. John Goodman plays a William Castle-like horror filmmaker who is premiering his new movie Mant (half-man, half-ant!) in Key West during the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Goodman has imagined Mant as a very interactive experience, with rumbling seats that can give the audience light shocks, pyrotechnics and a man wearing a Mant suit who wanders into the audience at certain points. The movie mostly revolves around the children who are going to see the movie. The film has a lot of problems. The kid characters are all pretty uninteresting, and the main plot of the film, which is about Simon Fenton, a horror fan, missing his father, who is in the military on a boat outside of Cuba, reeks of grade C Spielberg. And the screenwriters figure that they can't have a movie where people are just sitting around watching another movie, so there are a whole bunch of subplots where the kids wander off during the movie to do other stuff. Ironically, the parts where we're watching Mant are by far the best part of the movie. I've heard so much about how good this was for years, and been wanting to see it forever (it was out of print on DVD for years), so I have to say it's a pretty big disappointment. Still, I think it's an okay movie.

Certainly John Goodman portraying Lawrence Woolsey as a film director bent on all kinds of creative devices to lure audiences in to see his sci-fi/horror movies is a homage to the King of Gimmicks himself, William Castle. This movie is not great by any standards, but it sure is a lot of fun. It is a trip down memory lane for many. Although I am not old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis nor William Castle movies premiering, I am given a pretty accurate feel of the times through Matinee. The best part of the movie, however, is the movie within a movie....MANT...the story of a man that is half-man and half-ant. The scenes of this film alone are good enough reason to see Matinee. The one scene where the Mant character throws an ant farm to the ground and yells "You're free, You're free" is hilarious. The movie characters are also made up of old sci-fi stars Kevin McCarthy(Invasion of the Body Snatchers), William Shallert(Hundreds of films it seems), and Robert Cornwaithe(The Thing). Also look for John Sayles and Dick Miller in smaller roles hamming it up. Goodman is larger than life in his portrayal, much the same way that Castle was. And certainly, we in the audience that are great genre fans dream what it would have been like to help William Castle...I mean Lawrence Woolsey...make a picture.

Well, this movie isn't really bad but it's not also great. On the positive side, this movie offers a new idea in movies about movies. Usually, it's about Hollywood and I rate them as the lowest level in storytelling: it's like writing a book about a writer (isn't-it Mr King?), it's very complacent. Here, we left producers for the audience and how people receive movies, what they bring to them and how they shape and feed their imagination. Indeed, the movie offers a short but amazing scene about this magic of the theater! In addition, the background is interesting because it could have been the biopic of Mr. King (again!). Like the kids here, he was totally addicted to these matinée and in 1957, one was interrupted by the manager to told the audience that Russians were in space! Here, we got this same kind of red panic! On the negative side, the movie just never takes off and it's really strange as it's Dante behind the camera: he is such a nervous, corrosive, dynamic director but here, he delivers nothing. It was cool to see his buddies (Miller, Goldsmith) but nothing happens even with this funny Z-movie of the ant-man! His sixties are faraway from the best ("American graffiti", "BTF", "Ed Wood"). So, maybe it's only a movie just for the morning when we are still half sleepy and half aware!

Director Joe Dante's homage/movie-valentine to William Castle, featuring John Goodman as a B-movie filmmaker and theatrical showman in 1962 Florida working tirelessly to get the kids of Key West into the neighborhood theater for his latest monster masterpiece, "Mant!" Elements of real-life history (with President Kennedy warning the country about the crisis with Cuba), teen-time romance, and shameless self-promotion doesn't jell, and Goodman is amiable but uncommitted. The black-and-white scenes from "Mant!", in Rumble-Rama sound, are funny but--as if we need to be clued-in this just a satire--are far more ridiculous than need be. The teenage actors are alternately bored and boring, while one boy's mother--her husband away in the Navy--cries while watching home-movies in the middle of the night (for that extra sentimental punch). One is never sure when Dante is joshing or when he wants to be taken seriously. Portions of "Matinee" are nostalgic and funny, and the final shots are sweet, but the timing is always two-beats off, and the scenes in the brightly-lit movie theater are never convincing. *1/2 from ****

Gene Loomis is a teenager living on a naval base in Key West in 1962, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis occurs and worldwide tension mounts. At the same time, Lawrence Woolsey, a schlock moviemaker, is premiering his new monster movie, Mant!, at the local theatre. Gene meets Woolsey, who teaches him some tricks of the trade, and Gene and his friend Stan go to the premiere which involves, amongst other things, a mad beatnik in a giant ant costume, Gene getting locked in a nuclear fallout shelter, and Woolsey destroying the entire theatre. This is a lovely nostalgic movie brimming with funny dialogue and movie in-jokes, brilliantly written by Charlie Haas and featuring wonderfully offbeat characters. It was clearly a great labour of love for the filmmakers and it celebrates not only a bygone age of innocence before the great social upheavals of the sixties but also an unqualified love for the imaginatively nutty fantasy movies of the time. Goodman is simply terrific as Woolsey (loosely based on producer William Castle) - a big kid whose greatest joy is to entertain people but who also has an astute business sense. At one point when he receives a letter threatening legal action over an unpaid bill he says, "Boy this business has changed. These things used to be settled with violence.". Everybody in this movie is tremendous though; all the kids are great, particularly Fenton and Jakub, who make a lovely chalk'n'cheese pair of misfits. Moriarty is a scream as a long-suffering starlet and the great John Sayles (who wrote two of Dante's early movies) has a wonderful little role as a blacklisted writer turned phony morality campaigner. All of Dante's regular stock company have funny bits (Picardo, Miller, Balaski, Hahn), as does writer Haas as a school teacher. Schallert, McCarthy and Cornthwaite are all hilarious and feature unbilled in Mant! (Half-Man, Half-Ant, All-Terror !!), the movie-within-a-movie, which is a lovable and gentle pastiche of the giant ant movie Them. The film also features a wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith and beautiful Florida location photography by John Hora. There are lots of reasons to like this movie very much, and it's beautifully made, but most of all it simply entertains from start to finish.