Robert Altman’s Popeye
Holy shit, have I
ever just watched a ridiculous movie.
It’s Robert Altman’s Popeye.
Robin Williams gives the best performance of his career as the berserk
title character, Popeye. This guy shows
up in town, beats the shit out of a bar full of assholes Seagal style, steals
the toughest guy in town’s lady, wins at an illegal boxing match, takes down
the government, and punches a giant squid several times in face. This is one crazy motherfucker we’re dealing
with here! All this builds to a valuable
lesson about eating one’s spinach, making it the best nutritional film I’ve
ever seen.
The lead
character is shrouded in mystery. We
assume he’s a sailor since his last name is The Sailor Man and he wears a
sailor outfit, but this whole movie takes place on land. When I rented it I was somewhat expecting
some sort of Das Boot rehash, but was pleasantly surprised when it
turned out to be about a muscle-bound anarchist decking octopuses. The tone is also really different from Das
Boot. There’s
more kazoo sounds and a more upbeat ending.
Popeye has come to the island city of Sweethaven to find his estranged
father, that’s all we really know about him.
The scene where he finally finds his father blew me away. It was actually funnier than the scene where
Britney Spears finds her long lost mother (played by Kim Catrall) in the film Crossroads. I didn’t think that was possible.
Popeye is also an
anarchist and becomes a revolutionary when he punches the city’s one taxman
into the sea and the crowd cheers for him.
I think this is a much more streamlined approach to depicting this sort
of thing than that V for Vendetta movie I saw once. No fancy masks or wordy poems or British
people, just an old school sock in the jaw to The Man.
If there’s
anybody Popeye reminds me of it’s probably Marv from Sin City, which is
interesting since both these films were adapted from comic books. I think this film’s director, Robert Altman,
actually blazed the trail for other movies that would try and do a live action
movie based on a comic that still looked and felt like a comic book. Sin City is probably more the film for
me. Obviously it wins hands down in the
ass department. But Popeye has a
rusty can of spinach that I think is a better actor than Josh Hartnett, so both
films have their perks.
I know Robert
Altman is considered a trail blazer more for his other films. Altman made MASH, which paved the way
for other movies that take war, which is implicitly exciting, and show the most
boring aspects so I guess it led to other movies where men fought boredom first
and wars second, such as Jarhead.
No points from me there. He also
made Short Cuts, which helped establish the compound tragedy genre I
hate. I used to blame him for
popularizing a genre that spawned Crash, Magnolia, Bobby, Babel,
and other movies about a bunch of losers and perverts played by recognizable
actors whose main connection is that their lives are all emotional
slapstick. But with this Popeye
movie I think I he kinda makes up for it.
It doesn’t cancel out Crash or anything, but at least now I can
imagine Popeye showing up that movie and beating the shit out those racist
motherfuckers. I’d like to see Ludacris
try to steal Popeye’s car. POW! Altman was also the first director to cast
Malcolm McDowell as a non-rapist in The Company, but obviously what Rob
Zombie did with him in Rob Zombie’s Halloween was the zeitgeist of
Malcolm McDowell non-rapist performances.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I always acknowledged how innovative
this Altman guy is in general, but Popeye is the only film of his that
blazed a trail I actually appreciate.
Thanks, Bob.
How he goes about
achieving a live action cartoon is also pretty old school. It wouldn’t even surprise me if all the times
it makes a kazoo noise when somebody punches somebody were actually
accomplished by a guy standing off scene with a kazoo and that the punches were
real. Popeye’s squinty eye is
accomplished through Robin Williams squinting one eye. These days they’d probably bring in Doug
Jones to dress up like a giant squinted eye with motion capture bobbles all
over him, get him to do some squinty motions in a giant expensive Robert
Zemekis laboratory, and then digitally put the squinted eye performance onto
Robin Williams’s face in post production and then take it out because somebody
in a test screening didn’t get it and then when the movie got bad reviews
release a Popeye: Squinty Edition Blu-Ray HD-DVD with the squinting put
back in and a special introduction from a drunken mumbling Ridley Scott saying
this is the main clue that Popeye is a replicant.
The squid that
gets punched in the face at the end is a puppet, and I’m on a bit of kick with
movies that involve puppets of sea life lately. I also like a part where Bluto punches Popeye
down a hill and they paint a tire to look like a Popeye and roll it down the
hill. Totally old school. I even watched this movie old school on VHS
because my video store guy only had it in that format. I felt a mild sense of superiority in being
able to adjust the tracking, kinda like being able to drive stick these
days. I was kind and rewound if you must
know.
The only thing
that slows this movie down is some of the singing. The songs were written by Harry Nilsson and I
know this guy is capable of better. I
think it was supposed to be part of the gag that the songs were really
repetitive with lyrics such as when Bluto sings “I’m mean, you know what I
mean” and then they’d repeat that line several times. There’s one part where Popeye is
commiserating in song with some prostitutes and I thought we were going to get
some good STD sailor jokes, but they kinda let the opportunity slip by (I’ll
bet you like that I didn’t say “they missed the boat”, yeah, I’m proud
of dodging that nautical reference too, you can buy me a pint next time you see
me). It’s mostly near the end that there
are a few too many songs, but you also see a squid getting punched multiple
times in the face by Popeye, so bare with ‘em.
I guess I should
add the reason I was interested in this in this film. I am currently reading the memoirs of
This movie sets
up some The Ring type stuff when Popeye adopts a psychic baby named
Sweet Pea. Sweet Pea can pick winning
horses and predict the future and find buried treasure. Luc Besson kept threatening to do a spin off
of his movie Leon: The Professional and make something like Matilda:
The Amateur focussing on Natalie Portman’s character as an adult (who still
looks like a child). I think they also
did a movie like that with Sweat Pea now as an adult starring Nicholas Cage, it
was called Next. He did a pretty
good job playing Sweet Pea all and all.
But I’d also like
them to go the Stallone route like when he made the bookend film in the Rocky
series and called it Rocky Babloa, you could make a follow up to Popeye called Popeye
The Sailor Man. I’m sure Robin
Williams would do it, but not Robert Altman because he’s dead. I’d go with Spike Jonze as a replacement
director. It would be interesting to see
a movie where Popeye is old and sees a world with rampant obesity that just
won’t eat its spinach; where he is disillusioned by there no longer being big
enemies like Bluto who sing that they are mean if you know what they mean, but
rather now the Blutos are small, inconspicuous and within ourselves.
Anyway, now that
I’ve seen a couple of good comic book adaptations that really work for me as
movies and keep their comic book style, I have hope for a good Spy Versus Spy movie with Adrian Brody
and Casey Affleck.
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As in the movie
is titled ‘Next’, not that Cage is next for something or this is his next
something.
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