Thoughts on The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Stargate, Dick Johnson is Dead, and Coming 2 America

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek: a 1944 film by Preston Sturges that had to have been controversial when it came out. Betty Hutton plays a teen girl named Trudy Kockenlocker who goes to a goodbye dance for soldiers off to fight in WWII, and has a crazy drunken night going off to different parties, and the next day, is married and pregnant and can’t remember what happened or who it was with. (This can also have darker implications, but I’m just going to keep it light and assume it was all consensual). She used a fake name on the marriage certificate that she can’t remember, and has this loud oaf of a constable father that she’s afraid to confront, while her 14-year old sister seems a lot wiser beyond her years. Enter Eddie Bracken as Norval Jones, a sort of Mickey Rooney knockoff but dorkier and stuttering a lot, who looks both old and young at the same time, who has wanted Betty Hutton for ages and wants to help her save face by marrying her to avoid scandal. I was surprised at how good he was at physical comedy and pratfalls, and was pretty likable despite his weird impish face, which he outright calls homely. This was a pretty hilarious movie with some more daring post-Hayes Code humor for the time, and what would now seem like hacky comedy came off as funnier and more fresh back then. Betty Hutton was really cute and endearing in playing up her guilt and confusion over the lost night, and I especially liked Diana Lynn as her smartass sister who kept narrowly missing a kick in the rear by their dad, who just slips and falls with each kick attempt.

Stargate: the 1994 sci-fi blockbuster by Roland Emmerich, that I was amazed by when I was 11, but have mixed reactions to now. I love the buildup to it, the slow and nervous walk to the Stargate, the contrast in performances by James Spader as a science nerd and Kurt Russell as a military leader, and the setting of an ancient Egyptian culture on a faraway planet. All of that was creative and interesting. But I lost interest in the villain backstory and his role, where I just didn’t care. The god Ra possesses a young boy and steals the life force of humans to stay alive. But he arrives nearly 90 minutes into the movie, and I just couldn’t care about the villain’s plan, it felt stock and boring. I know the TV show did a much better job elaborating his story and giving him more of a character, the movie just made him more into a dull villain added way too late into the film.

Though when watching it, I kept thinking this movie felt like an out of character choice for Spader, since at that time, most of his films were either psychosexual thrillers or playing twisted villains, and seeing his play a more ordinary nerdy professor felt like less of a challenge. Well, the trivia I learned confirmed that, as he was apparently difficult to work with because he didn’t like science fiction, and kept asking what his character’s motivation and reasoning was. I half-expected Emmerich to just throw up his hands and be like “If we give your character a weird sexual fetish, would that make you happy?!” I think Spader just needs to play someone with quirks to be interesting, but more like unnerving weirdos, not full-on Johnny Depp quirk antics.

Dick Johnson is Dead: a 2020 documentary by Kirsten Johnson, in which she copes with the near-imminent losing of her octogenarian father by staging humorous death scenes with her father’s consent, complete with a whole film crew, fake blood effects, and stuntmen. She’s struggling with her father’s mortality, a funny and gregarious man who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s several years prior, and has been struggling with his own memory loss issues. This film has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards, and I really liked how it mixed the darkly comic sequences of his “deaths” with the more touching scenes of them and her kids, bonding more as a family and sharing old stories. It was a really unique and interesting film that I enjoyed watching a lot. I also lost my grandmother last year, so I likely had some subconscious resonance with it.

Coming 2 America: a 2021 sequel by Craig Brewer to the 1988 film. I thought it was just OK, but felt like a PG-13 sanitized version of the original, it felt too safe. I liked the callbacks to the first movie, but I mostly found Akeem’s son, who Akeem finds out about thirty years after he came to Queens, to be boring and not very interesting, he was just “there.” It tries to do the same story beats as the original, but didn’t have the same cult appeal that made it quotable or funny in the first place, it just felt like a very average but unmemorable sequel.