Matinee (1993)

Good concept, poorly executed.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

All or most of director Joe Dante's films can be considered fun popcorn movies, something that is for both the kids and the adults, for genre fans and for fans of film in general. Dante gained recognition with the huge hit Gremlins, which Steven Spielberg produced. But in 1993, Dante decided to make a rather personal film, a pseudo-biography of filmmaker and 'shock-expert,' William Castle, renamed in the film 'Matinee' as Lawrence Woolsey (played with the perfect amount of schlock by John Goodman). John Goodman has never bettered his performance from this movie. Best thing about this story is Goodman's b&w movie, Mant! It's loaded with bad puns like, (Bill's wife:) "Oh, why can't they see Bill as a man and just put the insect aside?" Bill, who's been transformed into a giant ant panics and says, "Insecticide??!!??" Goodman uses two minor fright film actors to stir up trouble (and publicity) in town by bad mouthing Mant.Although a point can be made that "Matinee" is just a kid's movie, it's also for us older folks who can remember being a youngster in 1962, the music, culture and movies that enriched our lives but also events like the Missile Crisis, which so vividly reminded us in the words of John Kennedy, "that we are all mortal." Dante is not stupid, so he just does not pay a tribute to the old time gone, but to the old time spirit. That of dreamers, sometimes even naif, like John Goodman's characters. That of a certain cinema that still relied on simple effects and a straightforward way to engage people. That of an audience that still believed in what they saw on the big screen. As usual, Dante's movie manage to be instant-classic, innovative but with an eye looking back to the tradition and a pure independent and movie-fan spirit.Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

When a light-hearted, nostalgic comedy opens with a nuclear explosion, you know you're onto something weird and original. Yet it's also comfortingly familiar. Matinée was made seven years after Back to the Future and is set (in 1962) seven years afterwards. In its style and tone it echoes Robert Zemeckis's blockbuster, but it wasn't embraced nearly so warmly by audiences.Maybe it's because the backdrop is the harder sell of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gene (Simon Fenton) is a young teen who lives on a naval base, and he's coming to terms with an absent military father who may never return. Some solace is arriving, however, as the B-movie tycoon Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) is coming to town to show off his new half-man/half-ant opus… "Mant".The film establishes a broad cast of characters to populate Key West, including Gene's buddy Stan (Omri Katz), who's obsessed with the flirty Sherry (Kellie Martin). Gene himself, meanwhile, is courting the CND-conscious Sandra (Mrs Doubtfire's Lisa Jakub). While the parents panic about the impending nuclear annihilation, the schoolboys bicker and talk about girls.The first half of the movie focuses on establishing the many characters, while the second half is dominated by the premiere of Mant itself and the (mostly) orchestrated chaos surrounding it. Suffice to say, the build-up – which does suffer slightly from minor character overload – is justified by the pay-off. The kids must sign a waiver before entering the theatre, and with good reason. "This crowd is turning into a mob," the producer yells at Woolsey – "congratulations!"Writer Charles S. Haas has a brilliant ear for taut, funny dialogue that doesn't rely on punchlines, and the teenage dynamics are brilliantly observed. (The boys, anyway – the girls are more thinly sketched.) At the core of the film is Woolsey, whom we first see in Hitchcock-style silhouette, warning the audience about "atomic mutation". Goodman absolutely relishes his role, gleefully feeding his "AtomoVision!" and "Rumble-Rama!" to an audience hungry for event movie gimmicks.Woolsey sees a business opportunity in the lightning-in-a-bottle moment of the Missile Crisis, keen to capitalise on the heightened national anxiety. Yet rather than making him the monster, the film skilfully presents Woolsey as a hero. Through him the film puts forth its paen to cinema as entertainment, and also a philosophical argument for the cathartic value of movie monsters as a way of exorcising a society's demons.As with Tim Burton's masterpiece Ed Wood, director Joe Dante displays total affection for his subject matter, namely the monster flicks of the 1950s and '60s. Every period movie you can think of is referenced, but particularly Kurt Neumann's The Fly. We see plenty of footage of Mant and it is entirely convincing (by which I mean appropriately unconvincing), and avoids mocking its myriad sources."Put the insect aside!" one character begs the half-man/half-ant, to which he replies, "Insecticide? Where?!" Meanwhile, in the world of Dante's film, Woolsey is hurling special effects around the auditorium, spilling smoke and rumbling seats, literally bringing the house down. When the Mant cast start directly referencing the Matinée audience, who are in turn being watched by us, it feels like Amblin's answer to Inception.For those who enjoy the smart satire of The 'Burbs and the frenetic farce of Gremlins, this is a similarly genre-dodging yet relatively overlooked Dante classic. It's a film about films they don't make anymore – and, in our less kind-spirited age of comedy archness, they really don't make them like this anymore.

I felt that the advertising for this movie was somewhat misleading. I expected to see a film about John Goodman portraying a loose characterization of showman William Castle. Instead, the main focus of the film is a young boy, Gene Loomis, whose father is a soldier who is dispatched to active duty during the Cuban missile crisis, which is the time period in which this film is set. You have your typical coming-of-age themes revolving around Gene and his friends as they discover their own emerging adolescence, and this consists largely of tired material that has been done to death.Somewhat in the background we have John Goodman as old-fashioned showman Lawrence Woolsey, a vaudevillian stuck in the age of cinema who wants to put the show back in picture shows. He is tied into the film because Gene enjoys Woolsey's showmanship as a way to forget about the world around him which seems to be on the brink of self-destruction. Woolsey pulls such stunts as having his girlfriend (Cathy Moriarty) dress a a nurse and ask patrons to sign a waiver releasing Goodman's character from liability in case they die of fright during the movie. This is based on a similar stunt by William Castle and his movie "Macabre". Woolsey also wires the seats to produce a mild electric shock during a key moment in a film, which he labels "Atomo-Vision." That antic is based on what William Castle did during the showing of "The Tingler". Then he rigs still another device to shake things up as buildings on the screen are tumbling and calls it "Rumble-Rama." Again, these are all very similar to the showman-like stunts of William Castle during the 50's and 60's.The best part of the movie is when Woolsey comes up with an atomic-age monster movie entitled "Mant" that is a composite of cheesy 50's horror films such as "The Fly," and "Them!". "Mant" is about a mutant that is half-man and half-ant and is a total riot. Woolsey's schlock merchant displays just the right mix of con-man materialism and childlike glee at his own bogus movie magic. It's too bad that Goodman's character and his showmanship weren't the main focus of the movie - Goodman was truly born to play the part of Lawrence Woolsey.Watching this movie really made me happy that some of William Castle's films have finally been coming out on DVD in the last couple of years, through both traditional DVD releases and through the Warner Archive manufacture on demand program. At any rate, enjoy.

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 ****