Screenhead

So Lions Gate, probably figuring that it’s picked up the rights to a whole lot of movies in its days of acquisition, picking up studios like Artisan and such, and thus realized they had a LOT of old movies in their vaults.  Thus, they’ve released several of them into what they call The Lost Collection, a block of films featuring currently big-name actors in roles before they were A-listers.

They’ll start coming out on DVD this Tuesday, so keep your eyes front for stuff like Homer and Eddie, which we’re talking about today.

Homer And Eddie puts James Belushi (otherwise known as John’s brother) together with Whoopi Goldberg (otherwise known as Used To Have A Career) and puts them on a cross-country drive across America.  Homer, a baseball fanatic who took a fastball to the head as a boy, is off to visit his father in Oregon before his father dies of cancer.  Robbed of his last eighty-seven dollars on his way to Oregon, he runs into Eddie, a crazy lady who’s been told she’s only got a month to live.  Eddie, deciding to take advantage of Homer’s slow mind and trusting nature, decides to take Homer off to recover his eighty-seven dollars. As was the standard with movies like this, there’ll be plenty of laughs and growth opportunities along the way.

This is where I’d normally say how derivative movies like this are, and how you’ve probably already seen a few dozen like this, but this was originally released back in 1989.  This IS “one of those movies like this”. It’s downright difficult to accuse Homer and Eddie of being derivative when they were there first.  In fact, movies like this serve a greater purpose.  Most of these kinds of movie were long since removed from video stores, and they’re hard to find.  So a DVD re-release like this actually does us a service, as it allows us to get a look at movies long since forgotten, or worse, forced off video store shelves by sheer necessity and lack of space.

I’ve got to admit, Whoopi Goldberg really knew how to play a lunatic like no one else I’ve ever seen.  Seriously, even when Vince Vaughn took over for Anthony Perkins in the Norman Bates role, neither one of them put such sheer breathless abandon into smashing their heads into a mirror.  And James Belushi was also surprisingly confident—these two do shockingly well in a buddy comedy with a little bit of a dark edge.

While it made—or helped make—a lot of the conventions that we’ve come to know and expect today, it also had a lot of its own   Sure, there are plenty of parts where it’s schmaltzy and plenty of times where it’s a bit tiresome, and even plenty of places where it lays EVERYTHING it’s got on WAY too thick, but this all adds up to the charm.  It has that strange sort of appeal that can only come from a heartwarming buddy comedy, one of the first of its kind.

This is one of those strange sort of movies where you’ll feel all upbeat and happy for a while, and then something dark will happen and you’ll almost feel BAD for feeling upbeat and happy in the first place.  And then it won’t take long for them to do something else that’ll get you all upbeat and happy again.  It’s tough to figure this one out, but that poses a challenge much more interesting that a lot of the movies we see these days.  Homer And Eddie make a great combination, and a combination you’ll be glad to watch.

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