SUNDANCE 2015: Capone reviews the great docs DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON and PERVERT PARK!!!

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago. I still have a few titles left to review from the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Here are a couple of great docs that I caught while I was in Park City…

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON
It’s rare that you can ever zero in on the turning point of any cultural upheaval, but it seems like a fairly straight line connecting today’s R-rated comedy landscape and improv-heavy moviemaking and the parody antics of the National Lampoon magazine and later live shows and movies. And while there’s probably a longer and more in-depth version of this story still left to be told, director Douglas (HEY BARTENDER) Tirola’s DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD hits most of the key moments in the National Lampoon legacy, from its Harvard birthplace to its Hollywood-bound talent like John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and even John Hughes (one of his first writing gigs was NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION).

The film primarily focuses on the magazine’s lifespan and all that it spawned and those that it influenced. The all-star roster of new interviews is impressive—Judd Apatow, John Goodman, Ivan Reitman, even Billy Bob Thornton—and all give compelling testimonial about the impact the print edition of Lampoon had on their younger lives. And the movie certainly has fun connecting the comedy dots, as the National Lampoon branched out into records and live shows (essentially pillaging talent like Belushi, Harold Ramis, Gilda Radner, Christopher Guest and Bill Murray from Chicago’s Second City. In a perfect act of karma years later, “Saturday Night Live” did the same thing to the Lampoon improv troupe when creating its first cast.

But any comedy nerd knows these facts already. More purely informative is the behind-the-scenes look at the history of the magazine, which started as visual nightmare of articles and comedy writing before editors Doug Kenney and Henry Beard fired their art directing team and listened to Michael Gross, who advised the inexperienced team that for the parodies to be funny they had to look and feel as much like the actual ads, articles and cartoons found in the magazines they were next to on the newsstand. It was a bold, unchartered turn that worked. They also discovered early on that featuring a whole lot of T&A on the cover and in the publication created a windfall of loyal readers.

I’m sure the interviews with former Lampoon staffers only scratches the surface on just how chaotic and psychotic things must have been on a daily basis in those offices. Writers like P.J. O’Rourke, later “SNL” head writer Michael O’Donoghue, Mike Reiss, and key writer on “The Simpsons” Al Jean all made key contributions to the success of the magazine, and I literally could have watched hours of just page stills from classic issues. Above all else, the film is funny from top to bottom, from the utterly inappropriate content of issue after issue to the song parodies and improve work of the Lampoon stage show, to the incredible stories of the work that went into the first films (the movie primarily focuses on ANIMAL HOUSE, VACATION and CADDYSHACK, which is no technically a Lampoon movie, but it was produced by Doug Kenney, as were the other films, so it counts).

People may not realize just what an absolute brand “National Lampoon” was in the ’70s and early ’80s, but there was a time that anything that brandished that name was a license to print money. But like all things that top their respective worlds, Lampoon stretched its talent and resources too thin, egos began to inflate, money made people greedy and feel under appreciated, and the whole empire collapsed unceremoniously. Director Tirola doesn’t focus as much on the downfall years of National Lampoon, and it might have made for a telling and necessary cautionary tale if he had. Certainly the demise of Kenney serves that purpose, and when we get to that point in the film, Chevy Chase contributes one of the most moving tributes to his friend that you can imagine.

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD makes its point and its case that National Lampoon wasn’t just a beloved publication; it was the center and launching point of a new, post-Vietnam War style of comedy that was cynical, perverted, aware, edgy, observant, and critical of anyone in power. It saw the way journalism and advertising manipulated people, and it used the same tools to make them laugh. The film is an endless parade of some of the funniest writing and creativity you’ll likely ever be exposed to, and if you don’t spend most of the time watching it laughing your backside off, you’re probably allergic to smiling.


PERVERT PARK
Documentaries are always an important part of any film festival, and it seems that this year at Sundance, docs were among the most controversial and talked about films of the fest. Chief among these often-disturbing works was the Swedish-Danish co-production PERVERT PARK, which profiles the residents of a St. Petersburg, Fla., trailer park occupied entirely by men (and at least one woman), all of whom are registered sex offenders.

Co-directors Frida and Lasse Barkfors attempt what some might think is the impossible: to dig deep into the lives of these people are discover not only what lead to their specific crimes, but what in their childhood and early adulthoods lead them down the path that led up to the committing of said crimes. Not surprisingly, tales of childhood violence, sexual abuse, and humiliation abound, and while we certainly get a clearer understanding of their pre-trailer park lives, the filmmakers don’t attempt to excuse or forgive the perpetrators’ crimes. Instead, it simply adopts the sound idea that there are no monsters in our world that are born monsters. They are shaped, molded, corrupted, and broken until we get the people we see in this film.

The film makes a fairly strong case that a few of the younger residents were entrapped by flimsy internet police stings where the police badger someone seeking a sexual encounter via the internet, are tricked by a cop posing as an of-age woman to include her underage daughter in the mix. Simply agreeing to this is apparently enough to arrest someone, even if the young man had no intention (according to him, admittedly) of including the daughter. It’s PERVERT PARK’s trickiest segment, one I’m sure many will bristle to, but it’s certainly opening up the conversation, and that’s what’s most important.

PERVERT PARK is no easy viewing experience. It’s one abhorrent story after another. In many cases, the convicted criminal gives the details of their arrest, and in the next breath, give us the story of being horribly abused before the age of 10. Your emotions and sense of right will undoubtedly be challenged. Although there is no real commentary by the filmmakers, we are essentially asked to take some amount of pity on many of the residents, and it’s up to the audience to decide whether they deserve that.

The park was founded and built by the mother of a convicted sex offender, whose son found it difficult to find a place to live with his record, and we see it in the eyes of the residents that the fact that someone took a chance on them by giving them a place to live has made a huge, positive difference in their lives. By not judging its subjects and simply allowing them the opportunity to give us a glimpse into their day-to-day existence and convey to us the darkest days of their lives, PERVERT PARK is that rare doc that challenges everything we believe about crime, justice and rehabilitation. There are no right answers; there is simple testimony. The rest is for us to decide, but at least we’ll do so after knowing a bit more than we did going in. This one is not for all, but I promise if you make it to the end, this is a film that you won’t soon forget.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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