July 26, 1996
I talked earlier in this series about HARRIET THE SPY and how it was a Nickelodeon production that sort of had its roots in an interstitial-turned-special-turned show made by quirky, creative people with vision. A major cable network farm-teaming artists and giving them opportunities. Now we have JOE’S APARTMENT, the first theatrical film from Nick’s older-sister network MTV, expanded from a CableACE Award-winning 2-minute short they’d used as filler. Writer/director John Payson had worked on the animated intros to MTV shows including Remote Control, The Big Picture and Just Say Julie, plus been a producer on Liquid Television and the Henry Selick short Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. That’s great work and an incredibly cool world to come out of, but does it translate to knowing how to write and direct a mostly live action feature film?
In this case no. Maybe yes in other cases, I don’t know.
In the feature version the titular Joe is played by Jerry O’Connell (STAND BY ME) in only his fifth movie, even including “uncredited kid at beach” in POLICE ACADEMY 5: ASSIGNMENT MIAMI BEACH. He’s a hapless dork who takes the bus from Iowa to New York City and has kind of the “Living For the City” experience.There’s a joke that he’s narrating his trip as a letter to his mother but he gets interrupted by three different muggings.
The movie is premised not only on the city’s reputation as a crime-ridden hellscape, but also as a refuge for art weirdos thanks to rent control. Joe meets a guy named Walter Shit (Randee of the Redwoods himself, Jim Turner) of the band Shit by being the only person to check on him laying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood (as an art project). It’s Walter who finds Joe the titular apartment because they happen to be walking by when an old lady is thrown to her death out of her window and Walter pushes Joe to pretend he’s her son. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE PEANUTS MOVIE is a 95% respectful and pure tribute to the American institution that is the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz and its animated adaptations by director Bill Melendez (especially 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1966’s It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown). With surprisingly little compromise or update it brings all the characters back to the screen in recognizable form. It doesn’t add new characters or celebrity voices or make them talk like smartass sitcom shitheads, or try to make some kind of meta commentary about what Peanuts represents, or give some origin story about how Charlie Brown got his dog or the first time he tried to kick a football, or some joke pointing out that it’s weird that he seems to only have one hair on the front of his head and two on the back… basically, it doesn’t do any of the one hundred dumbass things that you can guarantee almost any asshole who would make this movie would think was a good idea. Luckily, those assholes were busy trying to ruin The Muppets or something when this was made. 
