Untitled Keith Phipps Project

Stray review: What We Did On Our Holiday

Didn’t make it in before The Dissolve shut down, so here it is. (Also: It’s my draft, so none of the polish Scott, Tasha, and/or Genevieve usually bring to it is there.)

What We Did On Our Holiday

Directors: Andy Hamilton, Guy Jenkin (PG-13, 95 min.)

Writers: Andy Hamilton, Guy Jenkin

Cast: David Tennant, Rosamund Pike, Billy Connolly, Celia Imrie, Ben Miller, Emilia Jones, Amelia Bullmore

Company: Lionsgate

Rating: 3 stars

by Keith Phipps

Heading into a vacation with her family Lottie (Emilia Jones) has just one request: “I need a list. Of the lies you’re going to tell.” She’s the oldest of her three siblings, so she’s got a better sense of what’s going on between her father Doug (David Tennant) and mother Abi (Rosamund Pike) now that they’re not sleeping in the same house, much less the same bed. She also understands that they value keeping up appearances, especially as they head up to the Scottish Highlands for what will most likely be the final birthday celebration for Doug’s father Gordie (Billy Connolly), whose cancer has taken a turn for the worse. If they can’t show him one last good time, complete with a show of togetherness, then can they even call themselves a family?

That question—what makes a family a family?—is at the heart of the mild-but-engaging What We Did On Our Holiday, even if some contrived storytelling occasionally gets in its way. Co-written and co-directed by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin—British TV veterans best known for their series Outnumbered—the film broadly telegraphs what’s to come, laying out details in the early scenes for no real reason than to make them pay off later, particularly young Mickey’s keen interest in vikings. When the family arrives at the home of Doug’s wealthy brother Gavin (Ben Miler), the film both indulges in familiar gags about his technology-filled “intelligent house” and sets up some future humiliation by revealing an A/V system capable of playing whatever one person’s watching on every room. Viewers could probably write their own final act after the first 20 minutes.

Phase IV in VI images

Burger Chef Memories

If you've been watching Mad Men this season you'll know that a good chunk of the plot has revolved around an attempt to secure Burger Chef as a client. It's, typical of Mad Men, been a brilliant combination of real-life details and in-show subtext, culminating in a pitch that posited the fast-food chain as a place for literal and surrogate families to escape to a welcoming, antiseptic, artificial dining room table where generational divides and the strife of the day could disappear, if only for the length of a meal. The closing shot of this season's sixth episode, in which Don Draper shares a meal with Pete and Peggy, the professional children with whom he's enjoyed a complicated relationship over the run of the show, could easily have been the last shot of the show (which featured a lovingly recreated Burger Chef). Here they were, living a pitch they were in the process of creating. Was it proof they'd found the right angle or evidence they'd fallen for their own con? If love is something guys like Don created to sell nylons, who was doing the buying and who the selling in that shot?

Adding a bit of melancholy to the whole scenario is the fact Burger Chef wasn't built to last. It was big in 1969, but limping by the time disco took its last bow.

All of which is a long way of getting around to me saying I didn't think anyone else even remembered Burger Chef, which was my fast food chain of choice as a kid grown up in a suburb of Dayton in the 1970s. (Side note: I recently found out that Donald Fagen's father owned the Dayton Burger Chefs, moving to Ohio after Donald left for Bard.) Why? First was the Funmeal, sort of the Happy Meal before there was a Happy Meal. (In fact, Burger Chef sued McDonald's when it introduced the rip-off product, to no avail.) But most of my memories are tied up in a pair of Burger Chef movie promotions, which involved  movies that obsessed me as a kid (and still kind of do), the 1976 King Kong remake:

And, one year later, Star Wars:

I can still remember my four-year-old brain trying understand how those characters from a galaxy far, far away could be at a Burger Chef in the first place.

Newspaper ad for 10 (The Milwaukee Journal, February 1, 1980)

Newspaper ad for And Now For Something Completely Different (Village Voice, September 28, 1972)

Newspaper ad for Superman III (1983)

First 3D CGI in a movie, Futureworld (1976)

In researching the next Laser Age column I came across this bit of tidbit: Futureworld, the sequel to Westworld, was the first movie to feature 3D computer animation. There's not a lot of it, but what's there is significant: The rotating hand on the monitor is from the 1972 short "A Computer Rotating Hand," which is believed to be the first 3D computer animation ever. The co-director, Ed Catmull, would go on to be one of the founders of Pixar.

Loews' Salem Avenue Theater in 1992 (formerly the Kon-Tiki)

Every once in a while I go on a sentimental Google journey looking for photos of Dayton's Kon-Tiki theater, the South Seas-themed movie theater where I saw my first movie. (Either You're A Boy Named Charlie Brown or Snow White. Accounts vary.) There aren't many. This one comes from the Dayton History Books Online site, and captures it has it appeared in 1992, about a year after I worked there. Gone are the tiki heads that gave it such character until it was sold and renamed in the mid-1980s, but you can still get a sense of the place, an odd three-screener (expanded from one when it opened in 1967) on a once-fashionable stretch of road connecting Dayton to the north suburbs that had started to fall on hard times by the '80s. 

The B-52s, "Rock Lobster (Live 1978)

I've been revisiting The B-52s a lot lately and a couple of things have occurred to me:

1) I'm hard-pressed to think of many bands that have given me more pleasure over the years. Just sheer joy, Who else? I'm drawing a blank.

2) It's easy to forget how strange, and kind of radical, the band was when it first started. No one else was combining so many disreputable elements from the cultural fringes like they did: '50s and '60s kitsch, sci-fi, thrift-store chic, surf music, punk energy, and so on. And while what they did was often funny, it's not like the band was a joke. It's all remarkably creative—Ricky Wilson's guitar work on those first two albums is some of my favorite ever—and as out there as Fred Schneider is as a frontman, there's something almost confrontational about what he does, too.

A few more words about Jodie Foster

One of the bigger pieces I've been working on for The Dissolve is this overview of Jodie Foster's career. (It was timed to coincide, more or less, with Elysium on the suspicion that it would a terrific movie in which she gave a first-rate performance. That didn't quite pan out.) Working on it was an interesting experience. For one, I decided to do it without realizing just how many Foster films I hadn't seen. So in went everything from The Hotel New Hampshire to Maverick to Nell to the queue. And since I watched roughly chronologically, it was kind of fascinating to watch her grow and age on screen. My only regret is I didn't have time to re-watch Silence Of The Lambs, but that performance is pretty burned into my brain.

One conclusion I reference a couple of times in the piece: Foster's seldom taken the easy route but she's also signed on for a lot of ambitious films that don't quite work out, from The Brave One (almost a fascinating take on the vigilante film, but then just not) to Nell (great performance, but the script around her lets her down).

Bruce, by Peter Ames Carlin, p. 199