Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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I'm not sure this comes through in the piece itself but I REALLY did not care for this motion picture.
I found it to be in questionable taste.
Wired (1989)
For many unknown actors getting cast as a legendary icon in a controversial biopic would be the break of a lifetime. For Michael Chiklis, playing John Belushi in 1989’s Wired was a disaster he was lucky to survive. In a rare, uncharacteristic fit of good judgment Hollywood turned its back on the seedy, sensationalistic and cruel feature-film adaptation of Bob Woodward’s money-grubbing best-seller for moral as well as creative reasons. Director Larry Peerce never directed another feature film. This was similarly screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s final credit. Yet Wired would have flopped even if the entirety of the film business was behind it. It’s not just as bad as its abysmal reputation suggests; it’s worse.
Wired at least deserves credit for being egregiously awful in a novel fashion. Rauch’s screenplay piles on pointless post-modern wankery with a tasteless framing device in which Belushi’s confused and horrified ghost is led through a surreal journey through his life by a cab-driving guardian angel played by Ray Sharkey.
Wired portrays its subject as a drug addict first and foremost, a fatal overdose second, a monster of id and ego third and a comic performer of rare ability and distinction a distant third. Wired depicts Belushi as someone whose adult life was one long drug binge littered with intermittent moments of comic greatness.
Wired never lets audiences forget for a moment that John Belushi was a drug addict who died young of a fatal drug overdose. The film is morbidly obsessed with the condition of Belushi’s corpse and the mechanics of injecting speedballs.
The rightly notorious, reviled biopic features recreations of Belushi’s performances on Saturday Night Live and Animal House that aren’t just unfunny: they’re anti-funny. The filmmakers don’t understand the comic mind, at all, yet they feel obligated to unsuccessfully attempt comedy all the same.
Wired's unfortunate existence is a giant glob of spit in the face of Belushi, Belushi’s memory and everyone who loved him because he was a comic genius and a great man and not the grotesque, hateful caricature of a junky he is here.
The Remake (2016)
When famous people lend their time and energy to micro-budgeted independent films it can feel more like an act of charity than a sign of genuine enthusiasm. Sure enough, when Larry King, Sally Kellerman and June Lockhart, in tragically will probably be her last onscreen appearance, show up in the surreally awful 2016 vanity project The Remake it comes off as an act of excessive kindness towards a well-intentioned but hopeless amateur. Then again, The Remake is so inept that everyone’s participation other than writer-director-star Lynne Alana Delaney and her real-life and onscreen husband Ruben Roberto Gomez seems like a gift.
In addition to writing and directing Delaney stars as movie Sheridan O’Connor. The veteran actress starred in a hit romance when just starting out with her offscreen and onscreen leading man Riccardo Rossi (Gomez) but when he left her at the altar for unknown reasons their personal and professional relationship ended dramatically. Thirty years later the director of their debut film wants them to reunite for a remake. But will they be able to put their differences aside for the sake of art?
The squabbling lovers are ostensibly making an eagerly awaited remake of one of the most popular films of the last fifty years yet the film-within-a-film’s production values are more in line with homemade pornography. The Remake is like The Room without the non-stop unintentional laughter. Before The Remake most of its writer-director-star’s film credits were for uncredited bit parts. With The Remake she gave herself a big, unearned promotion despite possessing a talent level commensurate with being an extra, and not a particularly successful one either. The Remake proves that you’re never too old or too obscure to make an unwatchable movie.