O.C. and Stiggs

I really wanted to like this movie, mainly because I laughed my ass off reading the 36-page odessey of O.C. & Stiggs in National Lampoon. Naively, I thought that an otherwise great director like Robert Altman could show us the wickedly funny side of hard-core juvenile delinquency. Instead, he lets us down by stripping away almost all of the mean-spiritedness that made the story so hilarious. All that's left are some wishy-washy hijinks from a couple of kids trying to look cute. Perhaps Danny Boyle, the director of "Trainspotting", could have done more justice to the story.

The movie is not entirely worthless, though. Occasional gems from the story survive in Altman's adaptation, and Altman's trademarked style is as evident as ever. Each scene is almost littered with celebrities, and there are plenty of layers of dialogue that no other contemporary director pulls off as well as Altman.

Phoenicians can entertain themselves during lulls in the movie by spotting local landmarks. Overall, you could do worse on a dollar rental, but you really should read the story to appreciate the little bits that survived in the film.

No, it's not a failure. It's not good either. It's simply one of the oddest ducks of 80's comedies - trying to be both an actual National Lampoon movie (it's based on one of the stories from the magazine, which I'm not sure), and a satire of them and teen comedies. Trouble is, I couldn't really tell. It felt more like Altman reaching further than he did with MASH to make a completely anarchic, tasteless comedy about a couple of guys (in this case Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry are FAR from the talents of Eliot Gould and Donald Sutherland) who just want to stir up the sh*t in middle-upper class Arizona and have some fun. Only this time there's no war going on or people to fix up in a hospital. What is there to do? Uh...

I was glad it wasn't just some assembly-line thing. It is an Altman movie, to the bone, so loose and free that you have to watch moment to moment because there isn't anything CLOSE to a plot here. It's just a semblance of vignettes around what OC and Stiggs did on their summer break (not their real names, and as OC says, one of my big laughs, is that "Call me OC, it sounds more ridiculous"). Make a wild car that is $100 off the lot and can be decked out to look like a monster-truck- Studebaker? Check. Bring a machine gun as a wedding present for a very unsatisfactory wedding? Check. Make friends and give out t-shirts from the Schwab insurance company to Melvin Van Peebles? Oh hell yeah a check. How about a trip to Mexico to snag an African band to later crash a theater production on its opening night? Uh... hey, it IS a National Lampoon movie.... sorta, not really, whatever.

I was fascinated by OC and Stiggs, no question there. Sometimes I was laughing, more for the little beats of oddball behavior that Altman was always known for sprinkling in. Ray Walston as the grandfather, while no more or less one note than any of the other supporting (or lead?) characters, is maybe the funniest most consistently, rambling about extreme acts of violence in stories and making outrageous omelette's and drink concoctions that he correctly predicts make one more prone to sex. And while he's not as funny as I'd hoped, Dennis Hopper also has a fun appearance playing his Photo-Journalist from Apocalypse Now - that is, if the Photo-Journalist ended up having lots of guns, ammo, and marijuana to grow out in the fields, uh, somewhere.

The whole project, from some of the casting (hey, Jane Curtain and, uh, future stars Cynthia Nixon and Jon Cryer) to how bizarre some of the set pieces get (skinny dipping again in the Schwab's pool? Hey, there's a tiki backyard next door!), is like a big stunt on Altman's part. And why not? His career was full of them, from doing a shaggy-dog take on the Long Goodbye to his madcap take on Popeye. But the main characters are so obnoxious that the power of the satire just became lost, and I wasn't sure if the line not simply got blurred between doing an actual teen comedy and a satire of it but that the line was screwed altogether. Over time the film seems to have gotten a small cult - maybe apologists, maybe people who genuinely like it after it unfortunately (or maybe rightfully) bombed after being shelved for two years - but it still doesn't make it top shelf work from this director. The style is just so all over the place that maybe, at best, it could work as a wild-card party movie, like throw it on, dip in and out, get laughs where they suddenly, outrageously, pop up, and skip over some of the lesser points. C+

Definitely one of Altman's worst, though perhaps not quite as bad as some may lead you to believe. The producer wanted Altman to make a teen comedy in the vein of Porky's or something. Altman hated those kinds of movies, and decided to make a parody of one instead. Unfortunately, you just can't make a parody of a comedic genre. It never works. O.C. and Stiggs comes off as just a wacky teen comedy as directed by Altman; the only difference is that the characters are slightly more obnoxious and, instead of being fun anti-heroes, they're detestable. Which makes for a rather unpleasant movie. The script (or Altman's alterations – he apparently hated the script as written, so who knows how much he changed it) is extremely sloppy as well, especially as it nears the end. There are some amusing moments along the way, so it's not a total bust. It does contain one of the funniest dialogue exchanges I've ever heard: "How would you like to have more fun than you've ever had in your life?" "I don't know. I've had a lot of fun. I have Legos, you know."

Like many of Robert Altman's smaller movies, O.C. and Stiggs is under-appreciated. Most of the teenage movies that clogged up the mid-80's consisted of nothing more than stupid sex jokes and gross-out shots designed to humiliate straw men villains. O.C. and Stiggs is a movie where you feel that all sorts of things are possible. It's humorous in the best sense.

It remains a mystery why some of Altman's films are overrated (e.g. The Player and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), while others are immediately forgotten.

Perhaps it's because I came in with bottom-of-the-barrel expectations for a movie I've heard absolutely nothing good about, but I found myself enjoying "O.C. and Stiggs" quite a lot. I know from experience how bad bad Altman can be, so I expected the worst. But if you share Altman's smart-ass sense of humor, as I do, I can't help but think that you'll find this movie pretty funny.

The very nominal plot has something to do with two adolescents (the O.C. and Stiggs of the title) spending one summer terrorizing an affluent, middle class family because the patriarch (played with just the right amount of buffoonery by Paul Dooley), head of an insurance company, has denied insurance for O.C.'s grandfather (played uproariously by Ray Walston). But let me stress the word "nominal." This narrative loosely holds together what can otherwise only be described as controlled chaos. In typical Altman fashion, the film is an assemblage of barely choreographed scenes in which actors wander around ad-libbing to their hearts' content. This is not an insult. This style has resulted in some dreadful bombs for Altman, but it's also been responsible for some of his inspired classics. "O.C. and Stiggs" is nowhere near the latter, but it's certainly not the former either.

Altman said in interviews that he intended "O.C. and Stiggs" as a satire of all of those naughty "boys behaving badly" comedies popular in the 1980s. I don't know that it's so much a satire of those films as it is on people in general. It's full of a sneering disdain for a sort of vapid, bourgeois lifestyle that rears its head in much of Altman's work. Scottsdale, Arizona is depicted as a bland land of lawn ornaments, plastic furniture and man-made nature. We don't learn much about O.C. and Stiggs, and they're not even necessarily that likable, but neither are the Schwabbs, the family they torment, and anyway Altman doesn't really ask us to root for anyone but rather just enjoy the silliness. The funniest thing about the film is that the Schwabbs seem to be completely unaware that they're being tormented and instead wander around in a self-absorbed daze.

The rest of the cast includes Jane Curtin, as the boozy matriarch; Martin Mull, as a designer of African fashions; Cynthia Nixon, as a love interest; Jon Cryer, as a dweeb; and best of all, Dennis Hopper, reprising his role from "Apocalypse Now," and who features significantly in the film's climax, a shootout in the Schwabbs' bomb shelter.

It would appear that time has been kind to this utterly dismissed film from the mid-1980s, and you could do much worse from Robert Altman's canon alone, let alone from other films in the same genre.

Grade: B