Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made

I believe it’s okay to be a sucker for something as long as you know what you are a sucker for. I, for instance, am a sucker for babies, my wife’s cooking, bookstores, and re-runs of The Office. When it comes to documentaries, I am aware that I am a sucker for very specific things – Hollywood behind-the-scenes tales and stories of obsession. What I love is how often those two things come together. In the past on this show, I’ve reviewed Jodorowski’s Dune about a failed attempt to make the greatest sci-fi picture of all time, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Doctor Moreau about how a film was taken away from a director in the middle of production and how it all spun out of control, and now to that I list, I add Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. 

Directed by Tim Skousen and Jeremy Coon and released in 2016, Raiders tells two stories. First is the history of three eleven year old friends growing up in Ocean Springs, Mississippi who, after seeing Steven Spielberg’s 1981 classic, Raiders of the Lost Ark, decided they wanted to remake the film shot for shot and spent the next seven summers of their lives doing exactly that. The second story is about the three friends as grown adults in their mid-40s trying to get funding, resources, and time to film the one scene of the movie that they could never figure out how to do on their own – the infamous fight scene that takes place around a German flying wing in the middle of Nazi compound in the desert. 

One the one hand, both stories are bright and fun. What could be more uplifting than a story of three young boys spending their time doing something creative and ambitious that paid tribute to something they really loved? What do we as viewers love more than a story of redemption and coming back to finish the job and fulfill a lifelong dream? These aspects of the film are fun and exciting. Interspersed with clips from the actual film are interviews with the boys’ parents, spouses, and friends, many of whom appeared in their version of Raiders over the years. The footage of Chris, the director of the fan film, having the back of his shirt set on fire with gasoline so they could shoot the Nepal bar gunfight or the sequence with Eric, the kid who played Indiana Jones, holding onto the grill of a moving truck will probably make you wince a little – at least if you’re a parent – but most of it adds up to good old fashioned 1980s American teenager fun. 

But on the other hand, the story told by the documentary is also surprisingly dark. As adults, the three boys who made the film admit that it was their parents’ divorces, poverty, and unstable homes that drove them to spend every day outside away from the prying eyes of adults. The trio of friends split apart shortly after they abandoned the film, and even in the face to face interviews as adults, Jaysen, the third member of the trio, never appears on camera with Eric and Chris. As the boys grew up, there was betrayal, drug abuse, abandonment, and lies.

Even when the film becomes a cult hit thanks to an influential movie festival and the men are given a chance to seek funding to finally finish their film, the story isn’t all love and redemption. We see Chris repeatedly risk getting fired from his real job at a video game company to keep filming the final scene. As with almost every movie making story, we see weather delays, budget overages, backstage sniping, and crew members walking off set. Even though the flying wing fist fight sequence does finally get filmed, when a crew member is knocked unconscious by a malfunctioning pyrotechnic effect, you have to wonder if all the effort, sacrifice, and danger is worth it. The film does raise interesting questions about the American ideal of following one’s dreams and asks where the line is between chasing a dream and being driven by obsession.

Even though the story is somewhat ambiguous in ways, I don’t have ambiguous feelings about the documentary itself. I am a sucker for Raiders: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made and I bet if you watch it, you will be too.

Holiday Affair

Each year, I make it my quest to find alternative Christmas movies for people to watch to combat the cable marathons of the holiday big three – It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Elf. Now, don’t get me wrong. Each of those is a great movie, and I love them as much as the next person slothfully laying on the couch at four in the afternoon two days before Christmas. But I also believe in the value of variety and also in the existence of hidden treasure. Some of my most memorable, pleasurable movie watching experiences have come from encountering movies that I knew almost nothing about, that somehow had flown completely under the radar. I think there are great movies out there that can become your next holiday favorite, if only you know where to find them.

So this year’s suggestion was given to me by Q90.1’s own Jeff Scott and it’s 1949’s Holiday Affair with Robert Mitchum and a 22 year old Janet Leigh. Leigh plays Connie, a single mother whose husband died in the war and who now works as a “comparison shopper” to support her six year old son, Timmy.  She works for a department store and goes into other stores undercover to compare prices and services. She’d braved the Christmastime crowds at a department store to buy an expensive electric train set but then came back the next day to return it, having gotten the information she needed.  It’s basically corporate espionage and so when she’s identified by Steve, a clerk played by Robert Mitchum, it’s bad news. But the swaggery Steve is charmed by Connie as she pleads that he not turn her in because she’ll lose her job. He lets her go but then is immediately fired himself by his manager who sees the whole thing and is angry that he didn’t turn her in. Connie feels bad and so she accepts Steve’s bossy suggestion that she buy him lunch. The two of them eat hot dogs in Central Park and watch the seals at the zoo while Steve talks about wanting to relocate to California to build boats. Connie is obviously charmed and they spend an afternoon together with Steve helping her in her comparison shopper duties. 

 This romantic afternoon is problematic because Connie is all but engaged to Carl, the dutiful, well-off, and slightly boring attorney who has been courting her for two years. Not only is it clear that she has far more chemistry with Steve than Carl, but things get even more complicated when Steve follows Connie home to return some of her secret shopper purchases and meets Timmy, her son. Timmy immediately likes Steve more than Carl. These crossed affections are even more difficult because Steve is practically destitute and borderline homeless. White Christmas, it’s not, my friends.

But it’s all played off with a deftness and a humor that takes things like having a dead husband or being in love with the wrong guy or breaking another person’s heart and makes them into light plot points rather than heavy drama to drag viewers down. They key player in this is Robert Mitchum as Steve. In his later roles, his weapons-grade cool came across more as contempt, but in this early role, his roll-with-the-punches affability is charming. Only someone like Mitchum could play a broke drifter who proposes to an engaged woman in front of her fiancée at the Christmas dinner they kindly invited him to and still be the loveable hero of the picture. The guy was a baller before balling was a thing.

Janet Leigh had only been in pictures for two years when she filmed Holiday Affair, but it’s easy to see what enabled her to have such a long career. Her portrayal of Connie is smart, loving, and passionate. She’s complex and she makes it believable that she could fall for an unconventional guy like Steve. The shifts in her performance between how she behaves with Carl verus Steve are subtle but clear. Even at 22 years old, Leigh had the chops. 

 I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say it ends on a California-bound train packed with New Year’s Eve revelers. You can watch the movie to find out who is on the train and why. I encourage you to give Holiday Affair a try. Maybe it will be your cinematic hidden treasure this Christmas season.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

 One thing I look forward to over winter break is watching comfort food movies. I don’t mean movies about mac and cheese and beef stew, but rather those films that you can return to over and over again and they always make you happy because they’re familiar and comforting. During the long, listless days between Christmas and New Year’s when the only thing to do is a whole lotta nothing, I enjoy sitting down with my family and watching movies we’ve seen a million times but that never get old. Some of our favorites are Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, Moonrise Kingdom, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. Napoleon and Nacho were directed by Jared Hess and Moonrise and Fox were directed by Wes Anderson. Even though they seem wildly different on the surface, the four films actually have a lot in common. Each one seems absurd on the surface but isn’t; is delivered with a flat, deadpan approach; deals with outsiders desperately wishing they were someone or somewhere else; and has a warm, little heart of humanity and compassion at its core. 

  

This winter, my family is going to add a new comfort food movie to our annual list: Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Written and directed by Taika Waititi (TY-kuh WHY-tee-tee) and set in his native New Zealand, it’s the story of Ricky Baker, a sullen, overweight thirteen year old in the foster system. After getting bounced around to numerous homes, he lands at a small shack at the edge of the wilderness with Bella and Hec, an older childless couple. Ricky is a lazy brat, but Bella’s love and charm quickly win him over. Hec, played by veteran actor Sam Neill, has neither love nor charm and barely tolerates the boy. This becomes a problem when Bella dies unexpectedly and circumstances lead to Ricky and Hec on the run from the law, roughing it in the bush. This set-up makes the film sound more serious and dire than it actually is. While there are a few moments of true sentiment as when Bella dies, most of the film is played for laughs. Ricky’s mouthy, gangster-loving immaturity clashing with Hec’s grumpy, backwoods silence is funny. The various eccentrics they run into on their months-long flight from authority are quirky and amusing. The tone walks the fine line between irony and sentiment, a place not many directors can manage to stay for long. 

 Hunt for the Wilderpeople borrows Wes Anderson’s trick of dividing his movie in writerly-sounding chapters and Jared Hess’s deadpan delivery of utterly ridiculous dialogue. The sequence in which Bella kills a wild boar armed only with a knife might as well have been filmed and edited by Wes Anderson himself, and Psycho Sam, the crazy extremist recluse who assists Hec and Ricky, could be Napoleon Dynamite’s Uncle Rico a few years down the road. 

 The film shares both directors’ penchant for absurdity mingled with heart. True absurdist literature suggests that the world has no meaning and that everything we do in the world is ridiculous. Like the films of Anderson and Hess, Waititi’s movie toys with that idea, often showing how silly and ineffectual our efforts are. Bella’s funeral, Ricky’s attempts to run away, and Paula, the crazed social services worker who pursues the boy and Hec all get right up to the edge of absurdism. But thankfully, all the films I’ve mentioned back away from that edge and suggest that while, yes, life is sometimes ineffectual and ridiculous, in the end, there is love and friendship, forgiveness and beauty in the world to give all that silliness meaning. Or to at least make it bearable. Hunt for the Wilderpeople ends up being sweet and hopeful, rather than bleak and empty. Bundled up with my family on a long winter afternoon, looking at the beginning of a new year, sweet and hopeful sound comforting to me.